Pathways to Anticolonial Criticism through Biblical Literature

contributions from African and Caribbean theorists

Abstract

 This article sets out to discuss, tension and dissertate on the possible contributions of Caribbean and African theorists of anti-colonial thought to the construction of an anti-colonial bias in the use of biblical narratives and their affections for the direct confrontation of Imperialism. Discussing the concepts of Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Maldonado-Torres, Aimé Césaire and Desmond Tutu, it outlines proposals for exegetical confrontation through texts from the Christian and Jewish Bible against understandings associated with coloniality. The text starts from a geopolitical diagnosis of the emergence of new fronts of fascism and neoliberalism that articulate necropolitics and the maintenance of the mechanism of coloniality. After an opening conceptualizing conceptions such as the genealogy of the hegemony of whiteness, and the relevance of the utopian spiritual aspect for revolution and revolutionaries, there is a differentiation of the concepts of post-coloniality and decoloniality, to conceive a definition that will be given to the terminology of anti-colonial in the discussion. Its approximations and distances from other theological currents are explained, and a quick exercise in methodological application is demonstrated. Finally, we discuss the contributions that the principles of the theorists cited here, such as “afrocentrality”, “books of wandering”, “condemned of the earth”, “supreme barbarism”, etc., make to hermeneutic keys for a way of thinking about the biblical text as a space of ideological dispute against imperialism.