The enmeshment of British imperialism with Christianity is a truism of postcolonial studies. Theorists like Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Gauri Viswanathan as well as preeminent postcolonial writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, and Derek Walcott acknowledge and explore these connections. While the conventional postcolonial narrative paints Christianity as a predominantly oppressive force, with good reason, the authors mention above already point us to a more complicated outlook. For Bhabha, for instance, Christian conversion becomes an opportunity for subversive hybridity. In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Christianity constitutes both a mortal threat to Igbo culture and a source of meaning and opportunity for those, like Nwoye, who chafe against Igbo traditions, particularly the dominant model of masculinity. Christian faith represents both oppression and possibility for the postcolonial subject.

This panel strives to inhabit that space of ambiguity, extending the rich and difficult conversation regarding the intersections of Christianity and colonialism.

Glincy Piyus’ paper, “Children and Childhood as Instruments of Faith: Christianity in Modern Kerala,” examines the role of Christianity in oppressing/uplifting the lower caste and lower class sections of the society in Kerala in the second half of the twentieth century. The paper focuses on Aalahayude Penmakkal (Daughters of Aalaha) by Sarah Joseph and Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal (Litanies of Dutch Battery) by N S Madhavan, both of which provide micro-histories of communities marginalized both geographically and socially in Kerala, reading them light of postcolonialism, childhood studies, and Christianity. The paper unearths the close connection between children, their childhood, and Christianity during the period when Kerala was moving towards modernity, breaking away from its age-old traditions.

In “Mātauranga Māori and Matthew: Indigenous Ecologies and the Writing of the New Zealand Prayer Book,” Colin Halloran explores how Christian liturgy can be adapted to the experience of indigenous populations. In “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967). Lynn White clearly lays out the role Christianity has played in the development of the global ecological crisis. But even as White was writing this, an answer was in progress. Beginning in 1966, the Anglican Church of New Zealand implemented a series of experimental liturgies that would ultimately lead to the 1989 publication of A New Zealand Prayer Book: He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa (NZPB) which would fulfill White’s call for a rethinking of Christianity in a non-Western, non-anthropocentric, postcolonial, and ecologically conscious manner. This paper looks at the ways the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia shed its colonial history and created a worship text that is successfully inclusive of the indigenous populations of Aotearoa, a truly post-colonial Christian text.

Finally, Ann Marie Jakubowski’s paper, in “Seeds do grow”: Conversion and Resistance in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” uses the postcolonial novel to re-examine notions of conversion. Homi Bhabha’s 1994 essay “Signs Taken for Wonders” conversion is the paradigmatic event from which Bhabha derives his theory of hybridity, but the scene of conversion glimpsed is one that refuses to conform to imperial politics of submission and respectability. This paper explores the contentious and often paradoxical legacies of imperial Christianity by centering the experience of colonial conversion. Depictions of conversion proliferate across the twentieth-century literature of empire, to the point that the figure of the colonial missionary is a stock character in novels ranging from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1927) to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927), Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988). I focus here on the depiction of the mission school in Nervous Conditions, arguing that the conventions of a Christian conversion narrative scaffold Tambu’s bildungsroman such that the novel ultimately yields a model of conversion as an act of resistance. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial theorists including Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gauri Viswanathan, I read Dangarembga’s novel as a provocation to re-theorize conversion as a global phenomenon, and one that is far less predictably teleological than the canonical texts of Western Christianity often imagine it to be.

By examining the enmeshment of Christianity—both as personal faith and social force—with colonial and postcolonial culture, this panel illuminates and inhabits a central question of postcolonial studies: Is it possible to disentangle the liberating potential of Christian faith from its oppressive political history? And if so, how might we begin to do so?