Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom

Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries

Mara Brecht, Reid B Locklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317512493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

This volume explores the twenty-first century classroom as a uniquely intergenerational space of religious disaffiliation, and questions about how our work in the classroom can be, and is being, re-imagined for the new generation. The culturally hybrid identity of Millennials shapes their engagement with religious "others" on campus and in the classroom, pushing educators of comparative theology to develop new pedagogical strategies that leverage ways of seeing and interacting with their teachers and classmates. Reflecting on religious traditions such as Islam, Judaism, African Traditional Religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and agnosticism/atheism, this volume theorizes the theological outcomes of current pedagogies and the shifting contours of comparative theological discourse.

Part I Comparative Theology in a Millennial Classroom

Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin

1 (Un)Silencing Hybridity A Postcolonial Critique of Comparative Theology

Judith Gruber

DOI: 10.4324/9781315718279-1

Asked to use Peter Berger’s “Heretical Imperative” (1980) as a hermeneutical frame to analyze the formation of religious identity in a globalizing world, a student in my introductory survey course “Religions of the World” wrote: “Postmodernists are surrounded by such religious and cultural diversities that they are able to choose from a diversity of religions.”¹ Another student noted, “They are not born into it but choose to be a part of what ever faith they desire and to uphold those ideas.” One particularly articulate student elaborated:

Peter Berger’s “heretical imperative” explains that people in the post-modern world are heretics, or people who can choose their religious identity instead of being born into it… People may look objectively now at several different religions and make their own choice and form their own opinions. The study of world religions is another way to help people form their own views and opinions as well as understand others’ view of the world. Other people’s religions cannot be so easily cast aside or prejudiced in the post-modern outlook. Everyone is everyone else’s neighbor with a rich diversity in religions. This option of choice can create peace between different religions and also people who choose not to believe in a specific institutionalized religion. There is an opportunity for a larger appreciation of all religions and what we all share since we are heretics who can choose and look at everything collectively.

In their statements, my students expressed an acute awareness of shifting, even vanishing, boundaries between traditional religious identities. Affiliation to a religious community is not simply a given, but in a diversified society, it is perceived to be a matter of choice. This pertains not only to religious identity but also other identity markers, such as ethnicity and gender.

This glimpse into my classroom, then, seems to confirm what has become commonplace in the description of the millennial generation: They are “hybrids” (Thistlethwaite 2014, 196). It is said that, in contrast to previous generations, they cannot be compartmentalized into clear and easily distinguishable categories of sex, gender, ethnicity, and class. Rather, it has become an identity marker of this generation that it blends and blurs the borders of these categories and thereby creates new, destabilized forms of identities. Implied by the description “hybrid generation” is a concept of identity that assumes internal homogeneity within—and clear borders between—identities. Hybridity, then, is conceived as the blending and mixing of previously stable entities that creates something new: a new entity that destabilizes essentially given identities. Hybridity is seen as the liberating and confusing loss of fixed identities, creating a dazzle of opportunities for my students to find their place in this world.

And yet, some of my students’ statements reveal a more precarious moment implied in Berger’s terminology. Today, students do not just have the chance to make a choice but, as one of them put it, they “must make a choice.” Hidden in the celebratory rhetoric of the hybridization of identity, one can sense a desire for—and the necessity of—a stable and strong identity. Feeling old boundaries crumble away does not free millennials from the concerns of stability, but—on the contrary—imbues their question of “Who are we?” with imminent urgency. The reemergence of grand founding myths in popular culture such as Game of Thrones, the strong acceptance of conservative parties whose popularist rhetoric offers clear and clearly defendable “Us”-and-“Them”-constructions among a young electorate in Europe,² the growing numbers of young members in religious communities that can be labeled traditionalist (Dugan 2014)—all these are indicators of this search for a stable and reliable identity, and they point to the political implications of this desire. It is in the interest of all identity politics to create “strong” identities, which appear internally unified and delineated by clearly marked borders. Shifting boundaries tend to make for the building of stronger walls.

One well-trodden path for guaranteeing stability is to trace identity back to an authentic and reliable origin. To know where you come from offers a sense of belonging to an identifiable group. Yet the more closely millennials scrutinize the past in search of their provenance, the more conflicting stories arise.³ The search for an origin does not provide them with a basis of a safe identity but instead reveals that previous generations have been just as conflictive and negotiative in their identity. Millennials never quite find the “roots” of their identity but can only track the “routes” of its construction (Clifford 1997). What the millennial generation in search of their lost identity makes visible is that identities have never been quite pure but have always already been negotiated. Their hybridity, then, does not destabilize previously stable identities; it undermines the very idea of an essential, unchangeable identity. Hybridity is not a descriptive category for depicting a new generation but a critical-analytical category for deconstructing identity discourses.

This chapter, in a first step, offers a postcolonial theorization of this concept of hybridity “turned upside-down” from other, widespread interpretations. It argues that identities emerge from processes of mutual delineation. Identities are created by creating an other. Therefore, they remain intricately intertwined with those others that have been excluded but that also allowed the emergence of identity in the first place. Based on this (re-)definition of identity, the chapter then offers a critique of Francis Clooney’s approach to comparative theology. It traces Clooney’s implicit conceptualization of identity, analyzes how these silent assumptions shape his project, and asks how hybridity as a critical-analytical category impacts the epistemological, methodological, and theological parameters of doing theology comparatively.

Hybridity

In his study of interpretations of religion in Asian American communities, Julius-Kei Kato draws on the concept of hybridity to analyze their “diasporic” existence and its hermeneutical implications for theology (2012). He locates his understanding of hybridity in a postcolonial framework: following Homi Bhabha, he sketches hybridity as the “third space of enunciation” (Bhabha 1994, 37, quoted in Kato 2012, 26), in which the identities of colonizers and colonized are negotiated. Marked by asymmetrical power relations and their repressive political ramifications, this space is, “at the same time, a very fertile one because it is actually where most cultural statements and systems take form and are constructed… It is this ‘in-between’ space that holds the burden and meaning of culture” (Kato 2012, 26–27). Identities, in fact, emerge “in this ambivalent vortex,” and, for Bhabha, this makes “the idea long held by hegemonic powers that there exists a ‘pure’ culture… practically untenable” (Kato 2012, 27).

Kato subscribes to Bhabha’s argument that identities are constitutively hybrid and stresses that he “operate[s] on the premise that the idea that there is a pure culture, race, ethnicity, tradition, or religion is basically a myth” (2012, 26). And yet, in his own definition of hybridity, Kato seems unable to escape this myth: “I take hybridity to mean… the mixture of phenomena… that have been hitherto commonly considered self-contained, monolithic and distinct from others. The mixture occurs to such an extent that a tertium quid (a third entity distinct from its parent substances) often results” (25). Despite the qualifier “considered” and the caveat that “in reality, only very rarely can we find things that are self-contained in the true sense” (26), his rendering of hybridity still is caught up in the “delusions of a nonexistent purity” (Keller 2004, 227, quoted in Kato 2012, 27). An essentialist concept of identity, then, is based on the idea that identities can be established independently from each other; it implies the notion of clearly given delineations between identities and of their internal homogeneity and stability.

It is precisely this essentialism that has been identified by postcolonial studies as a powerful tool for the foundation and legitimization of hegemonial identity politics. In his seminal study Orientalism (1978), Edward Said argues that the representation of identity as an essentialist, holistic, clearly defined entity is neither naturally given nor politically innocent but heavily involved in the acquisition and maintenance of colonial power. His reading of Orientalism as a discourse exposes the intricate interplay of power and the creation of knowledge about the other: colonial power does not rely on brute military force but emerges in a complex process of representing the Orient in such a way that it allows the West to rule over it.⁴ This multilayered colonial discourse operates on clear delineations between the West and the Orient. It represents the Orient as everything the West is not, and vice versa, by constructing a binary opposition of West versus East and associating other, hierarchically structured binaries with it: civilized versus savage, masculine versus feminine, strong versus weak, colonizer versus colonized. Everything the West is not is, by way of exclusion, written onto the Orient.

In terms of identity politics, the drawing of these clear borders serves a double—an entangled—function: not only does it allow the interpreter to (re)present the Orient in a way that perpetuates colonial power, it also, and simultaneously, creates a negative foil through which only the West can identify and define itself. Defining, literally, means border-drawing. Constructing the other in clear delineations as a stable, monolithic, and hence manageable and controllable entity is constitutive to the foundation of one’s own identity, and it is shaped by and shapes asymmetrical power relations. Said’s deconstruction of essentialist identity politics thus exposes the discursivity of identity: identities are not simply, naturally, essentially given but emerge from powerful definitions. It is precisely these clear boundaries produced in the discourses of identity politics that reveal the always powerfully “entangled histories” of identities.

Homi Bhabha develops his understanding of hybridity from these entangled histories, and he pushes his point even further than Said. If, Bhabha argues, it is true that identity is not simply “there” and essentially given, then it “is always marked and informed by the ambivalence of the process of emergence itself” (Bhabha 1994, 22). If clear boundaries are not simply given, but self and other emerge from practices of delineation, then these discriminatory processes inscribe themselves deeply into each identity. If the other, created by practices of exclusion, allows the formation of the self, then the other remains, by way of exclusion, a constitutive part within the self. Each identity, then, keeps being haunted by what it has excluded as other. Differences can no longer be located between self and other, but they are found in the very core of each identity. Identity is not simply the static opposite of difference; it remains deeply marked and marred by differentiations. It is never fully “there” but always already informed by its excluded others.

Bhabha’s tracing of the other within has a dramatic impact on his mapping of hybridity. It shifts from a “space between” identities to a space within each identity. Exposing the hybridity within each identity undermines the clear borders and unsettles the internal homogeneity such borders have constructed by excluding others. It exposes an irresolvable and constitutive ambivalence at the core of each identity. For Bhabha, hybridity is not a “tertium” emerging from the merging of two distinct entities. It is not “a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures… in a dialectical play of ‘recognition’” (Bhabha 1994, 113). Rather, he points to those ambivalences within identities that provoke clear delineations. Hybridity is not the end product but the starting point of identity negotiations. It is the “‘Third Space’, which enables other positions to emerge” (Bhabha 19940, 211).

Yet, in exposing the fundamental instability of identity and undermining the notion of clear boundaries, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, unlike Kato’s utopian vision of the hybrid, does not simply do away with the idea of strong, homogeneous identities or aim at an Aufhebung or sublation of the powerfully produced differences between them. Pointing to the hybrid character of all identity does not make identity politics redundant. Quite to the contrary. By sketching hybridity as the starting point of all identity negotiations, Bhabha conceives a much more complex relationship between hybridity and the politics of essentialism: identities are forged out of the ambivalence of hybridity. The clearer an identity’s boundaries are, the more thoroughly it has excluded its others; the more internally stable it appears, the more effectively it has eliminated its others within; the more definite its origins are, the more radically it has erased the routes of its construction; the stronger an identity appears, the more forcefully it has worked on suppressing its constitutive ambivalence. In short, the formation of identity via the politics of essentialism relies on the silencing of hybridity.

Unsilencing hybridity, then, is a critical deconstruction of hegemonial identity discourses. Because silenced hybridity is at the core of identity politics, its unsilencing poses an extreme threat to the constructions of essentialism—both between and within supposedly clearly delineated identities. Silencing hybridity produces an essential and stable difference between self and other, whereas unsilencing hybridity exposes the powerful exclusions that have forged this boundary from the ambivalence of identity negotiations. It traces practices of differentiation instead of essential differences. It undermines the strong borders between self and other and thereby uncovers those others within who have been excluded from the hegemonic representation of identity. By revealing the fundamental instability in each identity, the critical activity of unsilencing hybridity works toward the subversive deconstruction of hegemonic identity politics within each identity. In Bhabha’s formulation, the very term “hybridity” includes such a practice of unsilencing. It is “the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority)” (Bhabha 1994, 159).

Comparative Theology in a Hybrid Space

Bhabha’s deconstruction of identity maps dangerous grounds for doing theology comparatively. After all, a conception of the religious other is at the core of the project of comparative theology, insofar as it understands itself as the “reading of the other.” Most commonly, it is portrayed as moving into that space “in between” religious traditions, as crossing borders to others—a crossing which bears the promise of having a potential impact on the understanding of one’s own tradition. From a deconstructive postcolonial perspective, comparative theology’s readings of others can no longer be understood to construct a hybrid space between clearly separated traditions; the religious other is not simply “there” for comparative theology to read and learn from but emerges from powerful exclusions in which the identities of self and other are negotiated.⁵ What’s more, in these entangled lineages, the construction of the other serves the establishment of a hegemonic narrative of identity within a traditio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Approaches to History
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Comparative Theology in a Millennial Classroom
• 1 (Un)Silencing Hybridity A Postcolonial Critique of Comparative Theology
• 2 Newman, Millennials, and Teaching Comparative Theology
• 3 Teaching and Learning Comparative Theology with Millennial Students
• 4 The Religion Classroom as a Site for Justice
• Part II Interrogating Identity
• 5 Comparative Theology at the Intersections of (Multi)Racial and (Multi)Religious Identities
• 6 Soteriological Privilege
• 7 Teaching Tawhid Unity through Diversity
• 8 Feeling Comparative Theology Millennial Affect and Reparative Learning
• 9 Constructing Boundaries by Crossing Them Contemporary Comparative Theology as a Practice of Community Self-Definition
• Part III Getting (Comparatively) Theological
• 10 Among the Nones Questing for God in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
• 11 What Muslims Can Teach Catholics about Christianity
• 12 Recognizing the Place of African Traditional Religions in the Comparative Theological Discourse Mediating Classroom Encounters through Storytelling
• 13 Dharma and Moksha, Works and Faith Comparatively Engaging the Tension between Ethics and Spirituality
• 14 Knowing Their Rites The Formation of “Textual Confidence” among Jewish and Muslim Women in Academic and Community-Based Settings1
• 15 Teaching World Theologies through Film
• Afterword Some Reflections in Response to Teaching Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom
• List of Contributors
• Index