Our Mission

Postcolonial Networks brings together scholars, activists, and leaders with the urgency of a movement to foster decolonized relationships, innovative scholarship, and social transformation.

Postcolonial Networks Board

Jason Craige Harris

About Jason Craige Harris

Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master's candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. He earned a bachelor’s in religion and African-American studies from Wesleyan University and received the Giffin Prize for excellence in the Study of Religion, Spurrier Award for ethics, and an official citation for academic excellence issued by the 2009 Connecticut General Assembly. As a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Harris wrote a senior honors thesis analyzing theological anthropologies along political and racial fault lines in U.S. Evangelical history. His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics particularly inform his inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework, he probes the systems of values that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, and religious forms to determine to what extent, if at all, they conduce to robust conceptions of justice. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, he considers the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation. He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies. As a Christian minister and budding public intellectual, Harris seeks and invites others into more holistic and attuned, less violent and constrained, ways of narrating the self and the divine. Areas of Interest and Research:

 African American Religious Studies
 Africana Philosophy African American Moral, Social, and Political Thought African American Intellectual History Liberation and Postcolonial (Christian) Thought
 Philosophies of Liberation Contemporary Religious Thought Race, Gender, and American Christianities
 Evangelicalisms and Pentecostalisms Histories of Race Discourse in the Americas (Christian) Social Ethics
 Critical Social Theory/Social Philosophy Theories of Race, Gender, and Power Method and Theory in the Study of Religion He is deeply committed to a praxis in which dualities of mind/heart, mind/body, and emotions/thought are consistently challenged and replaced with integrated models of selfhood that cherish self-multiplicity - the point at which the postcolonial becomes self-consciously embodied. He also enjoy taking walks in the coolness of the day, singing, laughing, and writing poetically and theoretically on his lived experience, whatever helps to bring more beauty and justice into the world.

Fruitvale Station: A Review

September 18th, 2013|

"How many times must we say enough is enough? How do we continue to mobilize information, resources, and outreach efforts to fight and raise awareness over these injustices?"

WebEx Configuration

September 17th, 2013|

"At Postcolonial Networks, we use WebEx, a video-conferencing technology, to host conversations with partners from around the world."

On the Continuing Significance of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to Postcolonial Theorizing by Asian Women

August 18th, 2013|

"The great goddesses confined as they are in temples then do not speak for subaltern Indian women; their representations speak so much of the elitest status of the upper-middle-class, upper-caste women."

Part 2: Armida: Bel canto’s Big and Tenor-Heavy Love Affair with Crusade and the Ever-Luring Trope of Oriental(ist) Exotic

August 18th, 2013|

"A truly imaginative production would have made a conscious effort to question at least some of the cultural stereotypes while this one dressed them all up with abandon."

A discussion on liberation theology from the Postcolonial Theology Network

August 12th, 2013|

What are the origins of liberation theology? What are the politics of discussing origins? How does racism shape our understanding of intellectual contributions and legacies?

Black and Anabaptist?: A Radical Ecclesiology and Prophetic Witness in the Empire

August 12th, 2013|

"I began to see America not as the innocent hand of God in the world but as one aligned with the portrayals, offered by Israelite witnesses, of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Rome at the peaks of their oppressive empires."

The Colonized Mind in Isolation Diminishes the Non-Violent Life of the Heart

July 30th, 2013|

"It is easy to write about postcolonial ideas, but far more challenging to engage differences that thrust us out of our comfortable privileges in the academy and/or church."