Michael Nausner
Reutlingen School of Theology
michael.nausner@gmx.de
Abstract
This article attempts to shed light on the colonial legacy in German society today and to highlight instances of the arrival of postcolonial theory and theology in German academia. The invisibility of the colonial past in Germany is slowly coming to an end at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as demonstrated in the first part of the article. The new awareness is reflected in a growing number of activities highlighting Germany’s participation in the establishment of a colonial world order in the nineteenth century and the remaining effects of this participation. Critical cultural analysis from the Anglophone world is reflected in German academia and literature, which is explored with the help of two examples. In the second part of the article the focus is on the arrival of cultural studies in general and postcolonial theory in particular in German religious studies and theology as well. A recurring issue in this reception is complexity and hybridity of cultural boundary dynamics and their significance for religious and theological discourse. Especially in the emerging and contested field of intercultural theology in Germany the hybrid character of all (religious) culture is reflected upon in new ways.
Michael Nausner, a native of Austria, studied theology in Germany, Sweden, and the USA. He earned his M.Div. at Uppsala University in Sweden and his PhD at Drew University in Madison, NJ. Since 2005 he has been professor of systematic theology at Reutlingen School of Theology, Germany. He is teaching theology with a special interest in (inter)cultural issues in general and postcolonial theory in particular. In 2004, he edited together with Catherine Keller and Mayra Rivera Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire.
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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.
