Review of

Peniel Rajkumar, Dalit Theology and Dalit Liberation: Problems, Paradigms and Possibilities
(Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010)

Reviewer: James Massey, cdss@bol.net.in

The origins of Dalit Theology and Dalit Liberation: Problems, Paradigms and Possibilities lie in author Peniel Rajkumar’s “personal discontentment at Dalit theology’s failure to be effective in a practical manner” (p. 183). Here one can see the deep feeling of a young Dalit theologian and a teacher in one of the most prestigious theological colleges in India. To understand such feeling one needs to know the history of contextual or liberation theologies.

“On the one hand,” Rajkumar argues, “we have the growing academic influence of Christian Dalit theology as a form of contextual theology, whereas on the other hand we have the glaring discrimination of Dalits within Christianity as well as the continued passivity of the Church to engage in issues of Dalit liberation. This incompatibility in my opinion is symptomatic of the practical inefficacy of Dalit theology. Dalit theology does not seem to have significantly influenced the social practice of the Indian Church” (p. 1). Rajkumar’s words are particularly true of the 1980s and 1990s, when Dalit theology took its roots, but the situation has changed much today.

In most cases, acceptance of a new theology by the Church and even by some in the academic world comes very slow. In the case of Dalit theology, acceptance came in a very short period of two decades, and today it has become part of the core curriculum of the Bachelor of Divinity of the Senate of Serampore College in West Bengal, India. It is true that response from the Churches is still slow, but during the last decade it has been gaining momentum. The best example of such a response is the keen interest both Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches (included their heads) have shown in my edited work, the Dalit Bible Commentary: New Testament (Centre for Dalit/Subaltern Studies, 2008), while attending release functions in Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Vijayawada and Pune.

Besides the introductory and concluding chapters, Rajkumar has divided his work into two parts: the first consists of four chapters, in which he identifies the reasons behind the churches’ response to Dalit theology; the second part offers an alternative biblical paradigm for Dalit theology in three chapters.

In Chapter One Rajkumar makes a clear survey of the existing status of Dalit theology by posing three basic questions: “Why did Dalit theology emerge? What are its objectives? How does Dalit Theology attempt to achieve these objectives?” (p. 23). As part of the first generation of Dalit theologians, I must admit that the author has helped even me to understand the development of Dalit theology during the last two and half decades. As an answer to his first question, Rajkumar has referred to two most important pioneers of Dalit theology: M.E Prabhakar and A.P. Nirmal. He rightly quotes Prabhakar, according to whom Dalit theology emerged due to “the insensitivity of the Church and the Indian Christian theology to Dalit concerns” (Prabhakar, 1998, p. 203, cited in Rajkumar, 2010, p. 25). Building upon A.P. Nirmal’s argument, the author concludes “that no attention was paid to the oppression, suffering, aspirations and cultural expressions of Dalits as ingredients of a truly indigenous theology was an important contributory factor to the emergence of Dalit theology” (Nirmal, 1998, p. 215, 217, cited in Rajkumar, 2010, p. 36).

About the objectives of Dalit theology, Rajkumar quotes a number of earlier Dalit theologians, such as Franklyn Balasundaram, who argues that “Dalit theology should be informed by a transforming social vision based on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity” (Balasundaram, 1997, p. 89-90, cited in Rajkumar, 2010, p. 41). But how will Dalit theology achieve these objectives? His answer is based in part on my own view that solidarity among Dalits (both Christian and non-Christians) is essential for the Dalit struggle because “only through a commitment to solidarity” can Dalits “generate power among themselves to face the challenge of their opponents” (Massey, 1997, p.78, cited in Rajkumar, 2010, p. 41).

Rajkumar has also looked into the caste discrimination against the Dalits. He is right in pointing out that “One of the failure of Dalit theology is that no sufficient study has been conducted so far on the far-reaching consequences of the notions of purity and pollution and the influence they wield on the ‘caste psyche’ with regards to Indian caste system. Rather there has been simplistic ‘casual linkage’ between notions of purity and pollution and caste based discrimination” (p. 60). The main reason why Indian Churches are unable to respond to caste discrimination against the Dalits according to Rajkumar is the lack of “ethical guidelines to divert people’s response to caste” (p. 60).

In Chapter four, Rajkumar offers a model for a Christian ethical framework of action. He begins his discussion based upon a work of Robin Gill entitled Healthcare and Christian Ethics. Specifically, he uses the six features of the Synoptic healing stories identified by Gill: “passionate emotion, faith, mercy or compassion, touching, uncleanness, and reticence/restraint” (Gill, 2006, p. 81-82, cited in Rajkumar, 2010, p. 97). In his discussion the author has also made reference to the Latin American liberation theologians (like Jon Sobrino), but here one has to question if these sources can help the Dalit theologians, because they were not dealing with caste-based social order supported by religious tradition that makes the Dalit theology distinct from other contextual theologies.

Rajkumar’s own contribution is found in Chapter five, six and seven, where he examines three healing stories from the Synoptic Gospels: Jesus cleans a Leper (Mark 1: 40-45), Jesus heals the Geresene Demoniac’ (Mathew 8: 28-34; Mark 5: 1-20; Luke 8: 26-39) and the Canaanite/Syrophoenician woman (Matthew 15: 21-28; Mark 7: 24-30). From his introductory notes on “Reading for Liberation” (p. 113-114), Rajkumar’s method is clearly based upon that which he names “the liberationists” way of reading scripture (p.113). But in his detailed treatment of the healing stories in Chapters 6 and 7 he refers to only a few Indian authors and depends mainly on Western sources and scholars who do not deal directly with the caste-based Dalit context.

Rajkumar has indeed succeeded in his attempt to raise several crucial issues about the role and future of Dalit theology. His basic thesis is that Dalit theology is able to make full marks in academic circles, but has to go a long way before it will become part of the Indian Church’s inner being, energizing the Church to engage with the Dalit struggle for their full liberation. Therefore, overall, this is a book seriously recommended to the specialist and general reader in India as well as other global contexts.

References
Balasundaram, Franklyn. 1997. Dalit Struggle and its Implications for Theological Education. Bangalore Theological Forum 29 (3/4): 69-91.

Gill, Robin. 2006. Healthcare and Christian Ethics. Canterbury: University of Kent.

Massey, James. 1997. Down Trodden: the Struggle of India’s Dalits for Identity, Solidarity and Liberation. Geneva: World Council of Churches.

Nirmal, Arvind P. 1998. Towards a Christian Dalit Theology. In James Massey (Ed.), Indigenous People: Dalits, Dalit Issues in Today’s Theological Debate (pp. 215- 217), Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Prabhakar, M.E. 1998. The Search for a Dalit Theology. In James Massey (Ed.), Indigenous People: Dalits, Dalit Issues in Today’s Theological Debate (pp. 203-204), Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

James Massey is the Director of the Centre for Dalit/Subaltern Studies in New Delhi.

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Review of Heidi Safia Mirza and Cynthia Joseph, eds. Black and Postcolonial Feminisms in New Times: Researching Educational Inequalities (London: Routledge, 2010), 142 pp.
Reviewer: Elaine Graham, e.graham@chester.ac.uk

The essays found within Black and Postcolonial Feminisms in New Times emerged from a seminar held in 2006 to inaugurate the Centre for Rights Equalities and Social Justice at the Institute of Education, University of London, on the theme of Black¹ and postcolonial feminisms. The contributors are predominantly from the United Kingdom with others from the United States, Canada, and Australia. The papers address three questions: (1) ”How…[do] Black and postcolonial feminisms illuminate race and gender identity in new global times?,” (2) “How are race, gender and class inequalities reproduced and resisted in educational sites?,” and (3) “How do women of color experience race and gender differences in schools and universities?” Thus, the essays locate themselves within a tradition of research into education as a crucial site of difference and inequality, and are concerned with how such forces are negotiated by students, teachers, and other social actors who wish educational spaces to become spaces of empowerment.

Many of the contributors draw on familiar tools of qualitative research such as interviews, autoethnography, and narrative in order to examine specific instances of institutional practice. Essays range from a study of young Muslim women in Malaysia, to Asian women’s experiences of the dowry system in the United Kingdom, African-American college students, and Canadian women of color. This volume stresses the diversity and particularity of such experiences, reminding its readers that postcolonial theory resists grand or universalizing narratives in favor of perspectives that highlight difference and complexity. And the book is successful in enabling such a range of voices and situations to speak. Indeed, as Heidi Safia Mirza argues in her introductory overview, postcolonial theorizing has never been about simple, linear reasoning in which its subjects progress from an oppressive, silenced history into a liberated, uncomplicated future; rather, it is about charting the complexities of identity in the face of the intersections of race, class, and gender with attention to both macro-level effects of educational institutions and micro-level interactions and relationships.

Perhaps the most vivid example of this is Uvanney Maylor’s account of her experience as a Black, female academic living in the United Kingdom. She relates how she is both invisible to colleagues and research subjects—with painful stories of arriving at a school to conduct observational research alongside a White co-researcher, only to be ignored by the deputy head teacher—and “hyper-visible” demonstrated when she alone, amongst a group of (White) colleagues traveling to an international conference, is stopped and searched at immigration. Her reflection on these experiences—she calls them “non-recognition” and “mis-recognition”(p 55-59)—adds a genuinely new dimension to her analysis as does her strong conclusion that such naming of institutional and personal racism is only one stage within the overall process of working for change. I found her essay to be exceptional for its clarity of analysis in terms of demonstrating how and why theory is important both as a tool of critique and of transformation. While all contributors make use of standard themes in postcolonial theory (e.g., hybridity, diaspora, third space, genealogy, globalization) and cite many of the familiar names (e.g., Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Audrey Lorde, Trinh Minh-ha, Michel Foucault, Patricia Collins), some were more successful than others in integrating their qualitative material with theoretical insight. More editorializing might have brought a sense of coherence or claimed a particular significance for this volume. While Heidi Safia Mirza’s essay introduces the contributions, the book misses any kind of synthetic or concluding evaluation of whether these essays, as a whole, represent more than the volume’s individual voices.

The book also has significant omissions that may be of particular concern to readers of this journal, and these revolve around the lack of attention given to the significance of religion and religious practice for identity. Admittedly, this collection is about educational institutions and, indirectly, pedagogical practices, but—as is so often the case with social scientific feminist research—religious faith in the lives of ordinary women is comprehensively overlooked. Kalwant Bhopal’s essay on Asian women and dowries makes only a passing reference to religion in her subjects’ experiences of Islamophobic attitudes. Cynthia Joseph’s research sample is made up of Malaysian Muslim women from a range of ethnic groups; however, she does not consider how the practices or teachings of Islam might affect their identities or aspirations. If we were looking for a radical new departure in postcolonial feminist theory, we might expect it to be characterized by a greater degree of attention to religious and theological factors whereas this volume merely reproduces an outdated form of feminist secularism. Perhaps the fact that none of the contributors are currently located in the global South may have something to do with that.

Intergenerational differences are another absent theme. Heather Oesterreich’s essay deals with a young African-American woman who is labeled at school as a drop-out, obscuring her complex domestic situation in which she is the primary caregiver to her mother and nephews, holding together a delicate web of kinship relations. Addressing relationships between mothers, daughters, and grand-daughters, or between young women and older female role models and mentors, might have added valuable dimensions; especially, in contexts of migration and diaspora in which educational aspirations often figure large in one generation’s expectations for the next.

If this volume anticipates “new feminist visions for global times” (p.i), what do these look like and does it succeed in doing so? While Black and Postcolonial Feminisms in New Times is a very useful collection, it is more a demonstration of how established postcolonial theorizing might be put to work in the study of educational inequality, which has long been a site of academic and political interest. In that respect, this volume represents not so much a forging of new vision or direction as it does a reiteration of established perspectives.

[1] Racial identity terms such as “black” and “white” are capitalized throughout this review, following the style used in Mizra and Joseph’s book.

Dr. Elaine Graham is a Grosvenor Research Professor of Practical Theology at the University of Chester in the UK.

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Review of

Jione Havea and Clive Pearson, eds. (Equinox, 2011), pp. 296.

Reviewer: Jenny Plane Te Paa, jenzat@xtra.co.nz

In his deeply impassioned and profoundly eloquent foreword to Out of Place: Doing Theology on the Cross Cultural Brink, Anthony Reddie provides the reader with an irresistible foretaste of the literary banquet that the editors of this book have so lovingly and so astutely assembled. Literally cover to cover each one of the chapters provides unique, insightful and powerfully challenging perspectives on what it might mean to feel, to be forced, to be born, to be accidentally or indeed to be lovingly invited into being ‘out of place’.

Any experience of human disadvantage, indeed any subsequent even unintended injustice, cries out for theological attention and response and none more so than the harrowing experience of not belonging to someone, to some people, and/or to some place.

As a seasoned and irrefutably still way ‘out of both time and place’ theological educator, it is my measured contention, in solidarity with virtually all the authors in this text, that twentieth and twenty-first century theology has largely failed to deliver on its inherently ‘Godly’ promise that some day all would belong and none would ever again seek to unjustly dominate. As one of the world’s original and thus pre-eminent academic disciplines, theology is surely responsible for focusing public attention and for generating appropriate Christlike activism for and with those unjustly denied the right to decent human existence, to identity, to belonging, to freedom, to unconditional inclusion in any and all civil societies. However in laying itself so open, at least over the past fifty years, to North Atlantic intellectual capture, theology has, inevitably, failed to contextualize itself into the lived circumstances of those (arguably the majority of God’s people) who lack the provisions necessary for sustenance let alone the guaranteed continuation of a decent human life.

As ‘the talk of God’ and therefore theoretically as the definitive discourse of justice, mercy, kindness, advocacy for the poor, those imprisoned, those condemned to the margins of life itself, theology must begin to redeem itself and to do so with real urgency. Globalization, technological advance, radically shifting political alliances, radically shifting religious influences and allegiances, are in subtle and dramatic ways each contributing to displacement both voluntarily and involuntarily on utterly vast scales.

Out of Place: Doing Theology on the Cross Cultural Brink is thus seminal to the redemptive project. Havea, with characteristic humility in his welcoming pages, respectfully positions this book alongside its forerunner texts, those written by highly respected authors Matsuoka and Sugirtharajah. The difference however is that this new addition to the literary banquet includes a far wider array of context specific ”ingredients” and the majority of its contributors write with reassuring fearlessness indicative of their confidence in the rightness and timeliness of their work.

Namsoon Kang’s eminently readable and deeply personalized chapter makes her discussion on Asian Feminist Theology a delight to ponder. Her reminder to readers of just how deeply affective one of the most readily posed and erstwhile benign questions—Where are you from?—between strangers can be, is most opportune. How readily as an apparently simple gesture of friendship we global travellers enquire this of the stranger we encounter—the taxi driver, the waitress, the conference colleague. The answer to the question, she rightly proposes, is politically and discursively complex and is one which very often carries wittingly or unwittingly racist implications especially when being asked by those privileged by either being thought of or considering themselves as normatively belonging.

Hisako Kunikawa revisits the project for which she has long advocated with deep faith, profound sincerity and unbounded compassion. She holds my utmost respect for her unwavering determination to bring to light the ignominious history of those Japanese soldiers since found guilty by the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal 2000 of systematically raping and sexually abusing very young women from at least nine different countries. These women were intentionally and horrifically dehumanized on an unimaginably relentless basis. Their abuse is supposedly the “ultimate symbolic humiliation of the male enemy” (p. 138). This obscene proposition is utterly irreconcilable for the real victims, so incomprehensibly known as “comfort women” (p. 129). These were totally innocent young women rendered so violently and so completely ‘out of place’ by the heinous crimes committed against them.

Peter Matheson introduces Argula von Stauff, an extraordinary example of a woman most definitely out of place at a pivotal time in the history of the Church, during the early years of the Reformation. Matheson asserts that von Stauff’’s particular genius was in her recognition of the “possibility of quietly subverting a universe of repression from within” (p. 16). This particular strategy is highly contentious to those concerned with contemporary identity politics, and therefore likely readers of this book. Is it best for the systemically oppressed to be freed through the establishment of separate, culturally-bound jurisdictions to enable their future flourishing? Or is it best for the oppressive institutional mainstream—whether political, economic, educational, medical, judicial—to be transformed from within? The difference between the contemporary dilemma and that of von Stauff’ is that she fervently and unapologetically employed Scripture as her primary point of departure in her astonishing campaign to confront theologians, university and church leaders over what she saw as their unconscionable silence of issues of natural justice.

Gerald O. West’s chapter, Newsprint Theology: Bible in the Context of HIV and AIDS, is compelling in its deeply compassionate articulation of his uniquely contextualized way of enabling those unjustly destined to the underside of our societies to begin to speak and to think theologically and then ultimately to begin the journey toward living the lives God wills for all and not just for some.

While tempted to review individual chapters, suffice it to say that each of the contributors is to be congratulated for their intellectual courage and their forthrightness in writing, as Vítor Westhelle does, of “a God in the flesh who simply lived and keeps on living a dislocated existence in places and people where God is not supposed to be” (p. 63).

It is the consistent centrality of God’s preferential option for the poor, the dispossessed, and the displaced, which is so impressive in this book. This is the theology so desperately needed for our times. We need radicalized post-colonial theology, which, to borrow from Said, is “life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination and abuse” (p. 224). Out of Place: Doing Theology on the Cross Cultural Brink contributes significantly to the veritable feast one prays will some day soon grace the tables around which all deserve to gather to share God’s abundant and everlasting hospitality.

Dr. Jenny Plane Te Paa is Te Ahorangi (Dean) at St. John’s College in Auckland, New Zealand. She has written extensively on Race Politics and Theological Education.

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