Review by Paul S. Chung
This book introduces a Catholic theological endeavor in articulating Liberation-Postcolonial ethics in the Philippines. The term ‘postcolonial’ refers to an umbrella discourse, but its theory is typically taken from French post-structuralism (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan) to which postcolonial theoreticians such as Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak are considerably indebted for their respective development. R.S. Sugirtharajah from India is credited by the author as a postcolonial theologian who represents postcolonial biblical hermeneutics.
Agnes M. Brazal elaborates a method of doing liberation-postcolonial theology by utilizing and appropriating Stuart Hall, a postcolonial neo-Marxist theorist. She also fosters “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” underwriting the wisdom of the local culture by opening it up to intercultural exchanges (xxxiii). A vernacular virtue like hiya (shame) is retrieved to promote the universal common good as a way of overcoming political populism or fake news in the context of social media, which plagues the social-political reality of the Philippines.
I question the term, “vernacular cosmopolitanism.” Is vernacular cosmopolitan? Rather isn’t it of cultural-linguistic character (Clifford Gertz) to be thickly described? In fact, Derrida retrieved and even misused Kant’s ideas of cosmopolitanism and hospitality for his poststructuralist direction, which postcolonial scholars in Asia are emulating.
However, Kant’s racial injustice is already unveiled as a questionable regime by social scientists such as Thomas McCarthy (see his book Race, Empire, and The Idea of Human Development, Cambridge University Press, 2010). If a postcolonial theory seeks to break through previous colonial residue, I think Brazal needs to debate critically and ethically with Bhabha’s notion of mimicry and hybridity, in connection with the anti-neo-colonialist movement in Southeast Asia.
Furthermore, one must take into consideration diverse voices of postcolonial theory and practice in dealing with religions, cultures, and politics of resistance in Asia (see Paul S. Chung, Postcolonial Imagination: Archeological Hermeneutics and Comparative Religious Ethics, Hong Kong, 2012).
What is crucial in the author’s view is a translation of vernacular ethical concepts to interpret Biblical language and shape interpretation. Brazal uses western writings or perspectives as a comparative point of reference. How would a fusion of two different horizons occur and can they be analyzed in the process of translation? Indeed, inculturating translation is a hard task, because the Judeo-Greek language of the Scripture cannot be neatly accommodated into Southeast Asian culture and language.
European Language, especially English or American English in the previous colonial context has a symbolic power and authority (Pierre Bourdieu), and such authority carries on in influencing Western style of education and its resources in Southeast Asia. Public intellectuals and elitists tend to distort and even commercialize the meaning and narrative of the subaltern to serve their own interest.
Certainly, Liberation theologians and ethicists are already aware of this complicated situation, but the author argues that Liberation theology may come to terms with the influence of Catholic social teaching on the various social democratic groups in the Philippines. Does it mean that the Catholic social teaching stands in a social democratic or socialist group in the Philippines? As a Catholic liberation ethicist, Brazal attempts to bridge Catholic social ethical teaching with her own cultural and political matrix through the postcolonial lens.
What intrigues this reviewer is Brazal’s preference for Stuart Hall’s method and theory of articulation when it comes to treating the relations of the multiple spheres or fields (political, social, economic, cultural or ideological) characterizing the complexities and contradictions of late capitalist society (41). Brazal accepts and values Hall’s approach to the outline of commodity production in Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital.
However, in my view, Marx undertakes an analysis of commodity production in his own terms of commodity fetishism or reification, which has little to do with Hall’s method of articulation. A discursive form of fetishism is disseminated in and through networking of relations; it is specialized, differentiated, and stratified in the social system to benefit the dominating class, finally leading to the colonization of the life of the dominated. Such a reading of Marx would facilitate Brazal in taking up liberation ethics in solidarity with the subaltern in late capitalist society.
If the innocent victim or the subaltern cannot speak (Derrida and Spivak), Brazal makes progress in an ethical sense, facilitating them to speak of and for themselves. Hence, she maintains that ethics or moral theory needs an epistemological stance to listen to the voice of the marginalized or victimized (184).
It is necessary, however, also to undertake a social scientific analysis of a given society and its structured systems of injustice through a critical, emancipatory form of discourse ethics. By making use of Foucault’s discourse ethics of parrhesia (speaking the truth audaciously) and his method of bio-political inquiry, one could better articulate and enhance the horizon of Catholic virtue ethics and its commitment to the poor, the culturally marginalized, and the gendered minority in the faith community.
The author regards the church’s stance toward LGBTQ+ persons as an important issue, yet she does not engage it at length. If Foucault continues to serve as a reliable source for postcolonial-liberation theology in the Philippines, his study of the history of sexuality and bio-political analysis of human body, gender, and sexuality may find an application in helping theology and the church in the Philippines to engage with the long standing Southeast Asian cultural tradition;in this society gender difference is a more fluid category, and sexuality is not as rigid in terms of its binary opposition.
Furthermore, what is missing in the book is no critical analysis of historical legacy of racism in the Philiipines. A ideological discourse of “the white man’s burden” was fabricated to justify Anglo-Saxon world domination against its orientalist colonialism. The social Darwinist worldview reinforces the European competition for the benefit of the whole of humankind, by propagating civilizing mission and capitalist trade system. It led to colonial wars.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English journalist, poet, and novelist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and published his poem, entitled “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). It was imbued with his British imperialism and widely reprinted in American newspapers by transposing such imperial ideology. It was a summon to the American war for carrying out colonial control over and annex the Philippines (the Philippine-American war, 1899-1902) after the Spanish-American War (1898).
As Thomas McCarthy states, “…social Darwinism became the dominant ideology in a period that saw the establishment of a racial caste system in the South, the competition of Indian removal in the West, the shift from continental expansion to internatonal imperialism in the war with Spain, and the rise of organized opposition to immigration from Southern and Estern Europe in the Northeast, and from Asia, especially China, in the West.” (McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 69).
The book is readable, challenging, and well-written. It is directed to theological professionals committed to the life of the endangered minority. Seminarians and church leaders would benefit from reading this book, which could help them to understand the church’s struggle for liberation, a local form of feminism, recognition of the Other, and ecological sustainability in Southeast Asia.