Postcolonial Body Performance Narratives (PBPN) – What is it? PBPNs diversely engage postcolonial themes, theories, theologies, and realities from decidedly situated perspectives and irreducibly treat bodies and lived experiences as multidimensional sites from which to theorize postcolonial corporeality. Attention to the body is more than just a flirtation with the idea of the body as […]
The following reflections describe the experience of the authors at the protest of a columbus day parade in Denver in 2007. The American Indian Movement of Colorado, in which author Mark Freeland is a member, has engaged in protest of this parade since the late 1980s in alliance with numerous progressive social change groups. 2007 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the columbus day holiday, which originated in the state of Colorado. Author Julie Todd was among a number of students organized for the protest by Mark Freeland at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where they are both still doctoral students. Mark and Julie wrote these words in 2010. They used them as materials for a required course at the school called Identity, Power and Difference during one session of the course that deals with allyship and solidarity. The protest of the columbus day parade in Denver continues.
Dear beloved friends, I am Emilie Teresa Smith, an Argentine-Canadian Anglican priest, theologian, mother, writer, and community member of the town, Santa Cruz del Quiché, in the western highlands of Guatemala. I have been a companion of Guatemala, since 1984, though I have lived in this particular town for only two years. Here with dear […]
Consciously, I know I’m in a South Africa that is politically, but not socially, post-Apartheid. Even so, the little old white lady’s racist comments surprise me. Complaining about the incompetence of black employees in grocery stores, she proudly notes how she nevertheless carefully pronounces the names on their nametags because they like it when we do that. We use their names – treat them as human – because we love the Lord. And then she tucks her purse under her arm and totters away with a smile and a wave to the three black pastors waiting in the adjacent room for my next interview. I don’t think she knows their names.
We do not know or have never confronted Haiti’s pain. We have talked about it. Written about it incessantly. Some have actually engaged with it. Still we have never sat with it in its rawest form and let it be. It has always been smothered. Shhhhhh. Not in public and certainly not in mixed company.
It happens randomly and frequently. Sometimes in the dead of night. Sometimes by the simple fact of listening to an old tune on my iPod. Sometimes it even happens when I observe people on the park, in shopping malls, classrooms and the street. The things I touch, eat, drink, and smell also play into this. […]
dear body,
why have you always been a source of anxiety for me?
i used to be blissfully ignorant of your existence during my younger years, oblivious to the pain you would later inflict upon me.
and then i moved from a field of colored faces to become the embodiment of a blatant smear across a white canvas. […]