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This chapter focuses on Spivak's convoluted relationship with postcolonial studies. It attempts to situate Spivak not only in relation to the academic field of postcolonial studies but also the field of literary studies in which it first coalesced. As such, it begins not with postcolonial studies but with deconstruction.

The issue of power surfaces throughout feminist theological writings, particularly in discussions of structural or social sin. There is a tendency among feminist theologians to inscribe potentially restrictive essentialisms about women as victims in relation to systems of oppressive power construed too monolithically. Michel Foucault's poststructuralist theory of the disciplinary and productive effects of power and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's postcolonial notion of strategic essentialization will be used to reconceptualize social sin in an effort to retain the ethical and political force of appeals to a subaltern oppressed standpoint, but without static essentialisms. Part two of this chapter carves out theoretical space for seeing how oppressive Christian symbols (the cross and the maleness of Jesus as the Christ) might be deployed as what Foucault calls technologies for the care of the self.

The chapter discusses the labeling and treatment of the “other women” in feminist ideology, in contrast to the strategies and ideas posited in the two previous chapters. Feminist theorists have typically cast the concept of otherness in women as a fluid movement among or transformation into various expedient molds and constructs such as colleague, maid, or Third-World woman. The chapter presents several literary texts which represent important moments in the development of Western feminism. In the first set of books, the unifying theme is the attempt to control this otherness through such techniques as displacement from the speaking subject or incorporation into sameness through the employment of mirroring tools. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to the analysis of five important texts of feminist criticism from such notable theorists as Catherine Stimpson, Jane Gallop, Julia Kristeva, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Levinasian Other and subalternity, particularly Gayatri Spivak's treatment of the gendered subaltern. It evaluates whether Emmanuel Levinas's Other is compatible with the gendered subaltern and whether the subaltern challenges Levinas' claim to have given a first philosophy of alterity. The chapter argues that Spivak's account of the subaltern exposes Levinas's failure to think about otherness in a transnational, transcultural context.

This chapter offers perspectives on love using the Korean concept of jeong. While Spivak is not writing explicitly about jeong, it suggests that jeong can be employed for philosophy, theology, and ethics in ways similar to which the French neologism différance has been employed. It is argued, first, that the dominant Western discourse on love is too limited and continues in its failure to understand love in its practices. Second, that dominant Western liberal understandings of love work often only to reinforce the civilizing mission of the West and of Christianity, thus foreclosing other practices of love. Third, that our most fruitful move toward planetary loves requires a widening and deepening of the notion of love through learning other languages of and for love. Jeong is examined as one multiplicity, an attempt at the pluralization of love.

This chapter attempts to read Spivak within the contexts of feminist and womanist theologies and theological writings of the Two-Thirds World. The aim is to show that Spivak's work provides some provocative insights into love in postcolonial feminist theology. This could be news to her, because following Derrida, she and other deconstructivists are very allergic to anything that smacks of ontotheology. But it is from Spivak that we have learned to read a text closely in order to identify the strategies of rewriting, recoding, and reframing to trace or plot another itinerary. The idea of “planetary loves” invites us to join the discussion and participate from many vantage points, because it encourages a capacious imagination that encompasses all the sentient and nonsentient forms of existence. It opens up the margins and the boundaries so that we can encounter or anticipate the unfamiliar and the unexpected. The chapter elucidates the concept of planetarity, and proceeds to discuss planetary love, love “in other worlds,” and love for the female subaltern.

This chapter focuses on reading three brief texts or stories—all of them concerning loss and translation—to talk about the complicated relations between language and money in the context of imperialism and Spivak's planetary love. Furthermore, it calls attention to the irreducible losses involved in any translation—an unavoidable effect that, however, should not lead to the abandonment of translation and language learning, but rather to their supplementation by a love that recognizes the “ethical singularity” of each and every encounter.

This chapter, informed by Spivak's planetarity and Mignolo's “critical cosmopolitanism,” constructs a theology of the transterratorial that seeks not an originary paradise or a monolithic telos. Neither Eden nor the globe contains a theopolitics of friendship. The kingdom of God envisioned as planetary cosmopolis, however, offers parables and practices of the convivial in an ever-to-come, ever-displaced universe. Through various twists and turns, including some God-talk and an open-ended account of atonement theory and cosmology, it constructs a political theology from the uncanny (in this case, ou topos) ground of a strategic utopianism. Akin to Spivak's strategic essentialism, this strategy resists universal absolutes, yet recognizes the import (and inevitability) of universals employed as bearers of irreducible rights and collective responsibilities. The chapter concludes with a parable of the divine planetary cosmopolis: Pax Terra.

Commencing with a critique of Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, “Representation’s Coup” explores the regime of representation through a reading of Marx’s I8th Brumaire. It argues that representation has historically been the means by which the intellectual has mediated the relation of subjects to the state. Where the Savage or the Negro stand at the threshold of humanity in the developmental narrative of representation, the Subaltern is radically exterior, unavailable for identification or assimilation, and troubles the ethical self-identification of the intellectual as representative figure of the human. The chapter concludes with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, seeing it as an allegory of the failure of identification with the racialized subaltern. The breakdown of novelistic representation in this modernist work correlates to a post-colonial crisis in the overarching regime of representation that frames it.

This chapter discusses the concept of postcolonial theology and the thoughts of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. A complex assortment of political influences and theoretical frameworks shapes the themes and informs the debates that characterize the nascent field of postcolonial theology. That multiplicity is mapped in terms of three primary themes: empire, identity, and the reimagining of Christian doctrines. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter advances the elaboration of the theological implications of Spivak's detranscendentalizing moves. It draws connections between a reconfiguration of the relationship between transcendence and immanence and an ethics based on planetarity rather than on identity—an ethics that affirms “the best of our human impulses, which is to be for others.” It calls for a planetary theology that detranscendentalizes theism and highlights the entanglements of the mundane and the divine.

This chapter presents a conversation between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Serene Jones, Catherine Keller, Kwok Pui-Lan, Stephen D. Moore, and audience members during the seventh Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, held at Drew Theological School in November 2007.

This chapter reimagines the Holy Ghost in its relation to memories of suppressed pasts as well as unrealized possibilities, inspired by Spivak's discussions of history, ancestors, and memory, in which she invokes the theologically provocative figure of the ghost. After a brief glance at contemporary theoretical debates about the need and viability of remembrance that characterize the cultural moment of the present exploration, the chapter turns to the Bible in search of the Holy Ghost. The Bible offers a diversity of images for the spirit(s)—some of them inspire prophetic boldness, while others are morally ambiguous, or even threatening. To focus on the relationships between the ghosts, memory, and the Holy Ghost, the chapter relies on the Gospel of John's depictions of an almost-dead Jesus in his close connection with the Holy Ghost. Tracing the unique appearances of this Ghost in John reveals the complexity and irreducible multiplicity of its origins and can help us perceive a multitude of other ghosts, ancient and current, whose appearance may teach us something about the future.

Perhaps the most important thing to grasp when reading Spivak on religion is her insistence on detranscendentalizing. She insists on it as the secular work of the humanities. This chapter explores this insistence on detranscendentalizing, as it relates to a much larger theme in her work: that is, ethical singularity. In other terms, the theory compressed into the phrase detranscendentalizing alterity helps us think about what she means by love. These ideas are considered by reading one instance of alterity—the myth of the antichrist—in order to trouble the political calculations that are made in the name of Christ. This troubling is a kind of queering.

This chapter comments on Kwok Pui-lan's discussion in Chapter 3. Kwok Pui-lan very helpfully opened the door for dialogue between theologians such as those represented in this volume and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by suggesting some points of potential overlap between Spivak's thoughts on planetarity and current possibilities for postcolonial feminist theology. She has demonstrated, as well as argued, the compatibility of some of Spivak's ideas and mode of thinking with the ideas and mode of theologizing by those of us in theology who have been influenced by Kwok. She also, of course, goes much further, sketching out some constructive directions that we might take to further the productive exchange, some of which this chapter has taken up in response.

Spivak offers two imaginaries of the earth: globalization—the disembodied everywhere of information networks in which everything is accessible, simultaneous, and subsumed into an imagined same “system of exchange”—and planetarity—which offers infinite possibilities for difference in the refusal to assume the existence of a self-same subject against which an other must be posited. To dislodge the illusion of disembodied universality, we must first examine the matter and difference that sustain such an imaginary. This chapter traces one trajectory of globalization back to the beginning of Western modernity in which Protestant ideals of a spiritualized kingdom exalted universalism, incorporeality, and unity. This imaginary has shifted terms; now we herald the promise of a disembodied network of communication and economic exchange in which democracy governs the unity of a wireless community. Under globalization's promise of the death of geography lies a religiously conceived, geographically bound system on which globalization depends. The chapter unearths a geography of cyberspace that illustrates how the disembodied sphere was built on a material network of undersea cables that follows the routes of early colonial voyages. It argues that the movement Spivak proposes from globalization to planetarity requires more than merely thinking the earth differently. Imaginaries of the earth provide a field of relationships that permits only certain social and economic realities, and these imaginaries are sustained by practices that construct such realities.

This chapter makes strong claims for identity in the context of white women seeking to become agents of social change. It argues that anti-oppression work requires learning the real force as well as the falsity of binary logics. Spivak's analysis of the soulmaking process for colonized and colonizing women is an invaluable tool to aid in the liberation of white women from their gendered oppression and addiction to unearned privilege.

This chapter focuses on the impact of globalization on human bodies as they are managed in global cities. In addition to uncovering the integration of colonial computations of the difference into the new forms of empire, it proposes a crip/topography: that is, it attempts to think “the crip” as a positionality from which to resist imperial norms.