Purifying Memory and Dispossessing the Self: Spiritual Strategies in the Postcolonial Classroom

Our contemporary classrooms do not present as monolithic spaces where any one language of religiosity or spirituality can be presumed. I teach in a secular university’s Divinity School, where the decentering of Christianity and Christian language has led to a reenergized multireligious and multicultural curriculum. I also taught previously at a denominational (Catholic) liberal arts university, in rural Western New York, where the faculty, even in the theology department, could be named as “secularized.”¹ Both contexts challenge the notion that a common Christian grammar can be presumed in the contemporary classroom or academic institution. Students in both venues run the gamut of plural identities: some are rigidly Catholic or Protestant or Evangelical Christian, others “post-Christian,” some dabble in this or that tradition, others are agnostic and still others decidedly atheist.

Consequently, the radical plurality of the theological or study of religion classroom presents a conundrum. On the one hand, the exclusive language of Christianity and categories such as “theology,” “spirituality,” and “mysticism” limit the potential of the categories in the “secular” multireligious and pluralist academic context. Does this mean that these words and ideas have no currency whatsoever in a pluralist classroom? On the other, the resurgent interest in theology, religion and spirituality often reinforces a particular contemporary and secular notion of the Self, which follows from the Christian and Western emphasis on religion and spirituality as located in individual experience.² That is, while exclusive Christian language is reigned in, the secularized form of religion still relies on certain unquestioned Christian and Western assumptions of the nature of Self and individual experience.³ For example, “Spirituality,” in most liberal contexts refers to an individualized experience made of one’s choosing and reflects a form of engagement with transcendence unmediated by institutional constraints, a notion that arises in the (Christian and Western) religion/secular divide.

“Untitled” © Norbert Heyers

Such self-centered and covertly triumphalist notions of Christianity or the Self have little to contribute to postcolonial ethics and politics. Early manifestations of postcolonial ethics and politics drew their moral and rhetorical strength from religious and spiritual practices of self-dispossession. For example, the anti-colonial and multi-religious practices of non-violent unselving by Gandhi in India or Pashtun leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (the Frontier Gandhi) in Afghanistan were borrowed from multiple religious sources, including Christianity. Of course, their use of Christianity was political and turned it on itself to challenge its colonial triumphalism. Moreover, in a multireligious or non-religious context, it is also important to show how “languages of transcendence”⁴ can travel between disciplines to complicate academic discussions on the relationship between religion and politics. Languages of transcendence that can travel between disciplines and academic orientations can lead to “purifying memory and dispossessing the Self.”⁵ These languages will often employ the particularity of religious traditions, but in a way that is open to pluralism. Other practical and political spiritual strategies in the classroom consist in answering non-theological questions such as: Who reads? Who Writes? Both of these questions contextualize experiences in the classroom. These questions, articulated by postcolonial feminist deconstruction, aim to decolonize knowledge and unlearn privilege: political goals that are not inimical to practical spiritual goals of unselving. The objective of such a practical and political spirituality is the radical transformation of human lives, using grammars that do not ignore the particularity of any tradition, including Christianity. Hence, spiritual strategies emphasizing noetic and ontic transformation disavowing Western individualism and religious triumphalism are learned through reading and writing feminist postcolonial texts.

Consequently, I do not present a programmatic vision of unselving in reading and writing in this essay. My argument traces conceptual and theoretical interventions by feminist theologians and postcolonial thinkers, to describe what it might mean to begin to do so. My reflections on the contemporary classroom here arise in the framework of the false distinction often made in many secular academic contexts, which deem that matters of faith are deemed irrelevant to the academic pursuit of knowledge, including religious knowledge, or...