Liturgy 34.2: Postcolonial Perspectives

This issue of Liturgy dealing with “Postcolonial Perspectives on Liturgy,” guest-edited by Stephen Burns, explores many facets of the critique of colonialist impact on religion through liturgical distortions. What follows is an excerpt from the introduction by Burns.

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Welcome to this special edition on postcolonial perspectives on liturgy. Postcolonialism can be defined in different ways, and so various approaches can be found at play in what follows. Sometimes accent falls on historical or contemporary geopolitical dynamics in the “world order,” sometimes on employment of particular forms of critical analysis—foregrounding victims, analyzing power, exposing “othering,” and so on—while other times the focus is to challenge (supposed) authorities in service of anticolonial systems, cultures, discourse, or futures. In practice all this may be at issue all at once––and sometimes to explosive effect.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, liturgical study has by and large been tardy about seeking these optics across its terrain. Reimagining manifold practices as well as notions of tradition itself follow from engaging postcolonial perspectives, and thus the high likelihood of unsettling what passes in many contexts for whatever has been the status quo.

While postcolonial perspectives on liturgy are relatively recent, its pioneers and their robust views are well represented in the essays that follow. Their contributions address a series of foci—baptism; reading, proclamation, and prayer in ministry of the word; orders; and silence. Notably, they do so in ways that make various juxtapositions: baptism and global warming, prayer and forced migration, orders and abuse, for instance. The authors are also themselves hybrid, in some cases multiple religious adherents, but in all instances crossing cultures.