Keri Day
Assistant Professor of Theological & Social Ethics
Director of Black Church Studies
Brite Divinity School, TCU
Abstract
Colonialism’s economic and racial systems are often seen as relics of the past, systems that ended with formal European occupation. Postcolonial theologies disagree with this assessment. Postcolonial theologies expose and deconstruct the ways in which economic and racial colonial systems persist: through new forms of economic and racial imperialism, often referred to as neo-colonialism. This essay not only explores the effects of neocolonialism on people of color around the world but also suggests how postcolonial theological reflection can help fashion a transnational vision of economic justice in response to global economic hegemony people of color experience and endure worldwide. Scholars concerned with postcolonial subjects should not only deconstruct neo-colonial logic and practices but must also offer a vision of economic justice in response to the inequality and inequity postcolonial subjects consistently confront.
Dr. Keri Day is an Assistant Professor of Social Ethics & Director of Black Church Studies at Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University. She received her B.S. in Political Science with a minor in Economics from Tennessee State University. She earned an M.A. in Religion and Ethics from Yale University and received her Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt University. Her current work sits at the intersections of religion, political economy, and women and gender studies. Her work has been published in journals such as Princeton Theological Review Journal and The International Journal of Black Theology.
Download PDF Copy of This Post
Download Word Copy of This Post
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.
