• DOI:10.1017/S0009640709990552
• Corpus ID: 146535243

Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History

@article{Styers2009PostcolonialTA,
  title={Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History},
  author={Randall G. Styers},
  journal={Church History},
  year={2009},
  volume={78},
  pages={849 - 854}
}

• R. Styers
• Published 27 November 2009
• History
• Church History

I N the early years of the seventeenth century, as Europe pursued its conquest of new parts of the world, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, one of his final plays. The Tempest is the story of a group of European travelers who are shipwrecked on what we are told is “an uninhabited island.” But the island is actually not uninhabited—Shakespeare’s dramatis personae for the play includes a listing for “Caliban, a savage and deformed slave.” Caliban is indeed portrayed as savage, practically half animal—his name itself is an anagram for “cannibal.” The figure of Caliban is often cited as a vivid template of how early modern Europeans imagined the inhabitants of the rest of the newly discovered world (of course, they imagined many of their fellow Europeans in similar terms). The type of cultural image Shakespeare created in Caliban would be repeated over and over in European literature, and it became a staple in early European and American ethnography and anthropology. These representations were an important component of the ideology of conquest, and they circulated not only among Westerners but also among non-Westerners, particularly those living under colonial control. These representational dynamics constitute one of the key themes of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory is a central strand of the critical scholarly discourse that has gained academic prominence throughout the world since the 1960s. My purpose in this brief essay is to offer an overview of this scholarly movement and then to identify a set of basic questions relevant to assessing its value as a critical methodology. As I examine these critical questions, I will also consider some of the important resources postcolonial theory offers for the study of Christian history. Contemporary postcolonial theory emerged largely as a critical response to the enormous impact of European and American colonialism on global