Postcolonial Practices of Care: A Project of Togetherness during COVID-19 and Racial Violence

By Gary Y. Okihiro and Pamela Cooper-White

This anthology seeks to theorize a method of a radical, decolonial spiritual-care paradigm that can chart a new course in defining--or reframing--what is "spiritual," what is theological, and what is "care." Postcolonial Practices of Care presents voices of educators, chaplains, students, human-rights and disability activists, and other professionals to highlight the problems of disciplinary divides and binaries--such as pastoral/spiritual or ordinary/sacred. In focusing on the practices of care during the pandemic, the editors see their book as contributing to ongoing paradigm shifts and the importance of decoloniality as a method in the field of pastoral care.

The praxis of spiritual care addresses--and interrogates--the history of spiritual violence and its imbrication with modernity/coloniality, colonialism, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and (conscious and unconscious) white Christian supremacy that constructed not only the pastoral and the spiritual but also its divide: the pastoral/spiritual. Such a framework focuses on "religious" difference without probing or critiquing how those differences have reified hierarchies of superiority or sustained ideologies of Euro-centric monocultural ethnocentrism. We want to emphasize the shared practices that bring us together as human beings on Earth rather than to prove we are better, or more unique, than one another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jul 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666725308

Gary Y. Okihiro

Gary Y. Okihiro is Professor of International and Public Affairs and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. He is the author of ten books, including his latest two, Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States (2008) and Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (2009), both from UC Press. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Studies Association, received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Ryukyus, and is a past president of the Association for Asian American Studies.

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Introduction

Postcolonial Practices of Care: A Project of Togetherness During COVID-19 & Racial Violence

Hellena Moon

Images & Practices

Gary Okihiro’s foreword is a conversation about liberation from the various forms of power that exploit and oppress us. We invite such conversations of liberation—and the meta-discourse of liberation itself—as a spiritual practice. As such, this book is also part of the ongoing conversation for liberation that Okihiro describes. To practice our agency for liberative ends, Okihiro challenges us to expand our imaginations. Our first co-edited book, Postcolonial Images of Spiritual Care, did precisely that.

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It was an anthology that was inspired by my (Hellena’s) children’s queries about images of G*d. My then seven-year-old son asked why G*d was depicted as a white man in the Sistine Chapel painting [of God and Adam]. If the first people were African, Benjamin asked, and we were made to look like God, then God should be Black. Why is God made to be white? My then nine-year-old daughter stated that it was about power. White people, she stated in her age-appropriate way, had the power and wealth to control what God looked like and whose paintings got to hang in art museums. So, they painted God to look like the white men who painted them, she told my son.

Our conversations further underscore the unsettling power of images and its impact on gender, culture, and religion. The dominant stories reveal how images have discursively controlled who is considered valuable or closer to divinity—or who even gets to be divine. These conversations with my children demonstrate the ongoing power of visuality—and the resulting discrimination and oppression—of the racialized, gendered, and sexed body. Such conversations about liberation expose the imbrication of our materiality with the spiritual care of humans, as well as underscore the power of racialized images in religion and spiritual care to reify bodily vulnerability.

The images that have produced our racist epistemologies have, in turn, instantiated the practices driven by their biases, hatred, discrimination, and fear. Images are shaped by our practices. This implies that practices—or what practices are considered legitimately spiritual— are controlled and dictated by those in power. What becomes the normative or dominant image is controlled by those in power. Images are heuristics that construct our theories, histories, and epistemologies. The stories are shaped by those who have the power to control what/who is represented. Our first book, then, has been significant in revealing the problematic meta-image of our US Protestant ethnocentric monoculturalism, but also in challenging issues of equity in pastoral care’s hegemonic white Protestant assembly. Our volume exposed, not necessarily the shortcomings of our field, but rather the field as an appendage of the white Protestant assumptions and worldviews of the dominant group in our institutions, churches, seminaries, and schools.

Despite the predominant milieu of a monocultural ethnocentrism in the field of pastoral care, there has been an intercultural community of practitioners, academics, chaplains, and others of the periphery that have had very different perspectives, experiences, and lived practices that have been critical of the images representing a monocultural ethnocentric worldview. Our book, Postcolonial Images of Spiritual Care, disturbed the collective image of a white Protestant assemblage in pastoral care, as well as unsettled the hegemonic power of those images to elide certain stories and variegated practices of care.

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The meta-image for our previous book, then, is a postcolonial paradigm of kaleidoscopic hybridity, multiplicity, and relationality that more accurately reflects the undercurrent of what was—and is—happening on the margins of pastoral care. Images tell stories, so our hope is for more images that shape practices and practices that evoke renewed images. Our Postcolonial Images book underscored the important practice of telling our story as one of the first steps of healing from complex and harmful manifestations of white supremacy in our society. We hope that more books are forthcoming that illustrate the complexity, diversity, and hybridity of who we are as scholars, practitioners, theologians, and chaplains. We desire to further refine a postcolonial methodology that addresses and engages the various societal problems in our ongoing conversations for liberation.

This volume seeks to deepen the conversation on liberation by redefining and critiquing spiritual practices of care during the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racial violence of 2020–21. Our methodology incorporates practices that help give life to the theories of postcolonialism, decoloniality, biomimicry, and Gary Okihiro’s Third World Studies curriculum. We share practices of radical spiritual care, not necessarily within a corporate or monolithic faith, but rather as part of a praxis-oriented framework that transcends/transgresses Enlightenment-era European epistemological categories of religious, cultural, political, and/or national boundaries. Our work is part of the critical interrogation of the colonial origins and meanings that constitute the sacred and secular that have validated certain practices (practices that are legible to the colonizer’s worldview), while deeming other valuable practices and rhythms of care as barbaric or primitive. Thus, a secular/sacred binary has distorted what/who/where is valued and what/who/where is not. We, the co-editors, seek to highlight practices and engage conversations of decolonializing spiritual care in our desire for liberation.

Study as an Interdependent Process of Becoming

This book project adopts the subversive praxis of study as part of the genealogy of Third World Studies that Okihiro describes in his foreword. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney see study as a discourse, a conversation that can happen at a picnic, a barbecue, walks, and so forth.

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Harney and Moten state that study is not just sitting in a library. Study is organic. Life is study. They describe study as subversive practices that are grounded in our quotidian life with others—as part of the consent not to be a single being.

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That is, we are interdependent, connected, and reliant on each other to disturb and rattle normative methods of seeing, hearing, reading, and knowing. Moten emboldens us to do similarly through study. Daily conversations constitute study. Study inhabits our work, ideas, relationships, community-building, and vision for sustaining our humanity and the planet. These practices, conversations, and dialogues are ripe with the potentiality for creating new theories and epistemologies—ideas and imaginings—for our liberation.

Study involves a Paulo Freirean method of liberation from oppression, dehumanization, and objectification. Such a method involves dialogue, not dogma; critical thinking, not memorization; relationality, not hierarchy; sharing of power, not a concentration of it. Study poses problems and inquiries of the incomplete human being as a "process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality."

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This book project is such a study of liberation. Our liberation, that is, our humanity—and our becoming—insists on the human spirit practicing study. Decolonial spiritual care requires praxis of our humanization—to continue on with the emancipatory projects initiated by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, the Third World Liberation Front, feminist and disability movements, and many others. Decolonial spiritual care also sees nature as inextricably tied to our humanization and liberation. We cannot survive without Earth; therefore, planetary care and well-being is intimately part of our praxis of study.

A starting point for our practices of liberation, then, is to address the admonition of Du Bois regarding the color line. He states, The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

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Du Bois later acknowledged that the problem of the color-line—as he initially observed in the United States—did not manifest itself identically across the world. Though discrimination existed everywhere, Du Bois expanded this challenge to include discrimination beyond that of Black versus white. While the color line was used by many as a reference to the racial problem in the United States, he saw oppression and violence as crises cutting across much of the world in Asia(s), Africa, and the islands of the sea.

Du Bois lamented the deaths of Jews, the oppression of the disabled, the young, and widows. In a letter to his friend, Gabriel D’Arboussier, Du Bois urged him to encourage others to reassess and reformulate the problems of such interwoven oppressions that continue to uphold forms of white supremacy. He later revised his understanding of the color line following his visit to Poland in 1952 when he realized the imbrication of religion, liberalism, imperialism, and power within discourses of race that helped him to complexify his earlier understanding of racism and colonialism.

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Du Bois engaged in a more thorough observation to articulate oppression and violence from a sociological lens of racial formation that involved culture, class, liberalism and bodily autonomy, and its coeval materialization with religion.

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We argue for a deeper critique of religious discourse as a process of racial formation, as it was elided in the original vision of the 1960s Third World Liberation Front and Third World Studies. This very important analysis of religion and racial formation continues to be left out in emancipatory work (discursive or activist) or treated additively.

The color line reveals that the spiritual was and is political (that people’s spirits—our practices and ways of practicing care—have been politicized, manipulated, and altered from its socio-historical contexts). It also necessitates a relational way of seeing—of using a critical lens that helps us build our own nodes of relationalities that subvert imbricated power structures that continue to use colonial epistemologies.

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Decoloniality & Studies as Praxis

A central idea of this volume sees decoloniality as a framework for understanding practices of care. This book situates itself within the meta-project of decoloniality, which refers to the undoing and the undisciplining of the epistemological devastation of colonialism.

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It refers to Aníbal Quijano’s proposal of epistemic reconstitution which explores the rich sources of native epistemologies and ways of knowing that were deemed superstitious or barbaric.

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Decoloniality means discursively building a new world on top of the colonial ruins, centered on radical theories—epistemologies that are grounded in native cultures—and practices that repurpose the tools that were used to colonize the Third World/Global South. It requires re-examining the relationalities and relationships that helped build colonialism(s), such as epistemologies, structures of oppression and privilege, class and spiritual hierarchies, and power structures.

Extending our critique of the theories, epistemologies, and practices of pastoral care; we argue that the term, spiritual care is not without its problems. The term has become a substitute for pastoral care. Or, it is used as a demarcation—a division—between the pastoral and spiritual. We articulate a method of decoloniality as a project for spiritual care, which engages renewed ways of thinking radically about the coeval development of Christianity, pastoral care, and colonialism. It was precisely because of the resistance to the oppressions of colonial rule that such creative practices of decoloniality and repurposing strategies of care emerged. In that sense, we seek to interrogate and rehabilitate the term, pastoral care, as certainly not oppressive or colonialist in and of itself. While Christian colonial tools of cultural obliterations have been critiqued and excavated in postcolonial theory, the pastoral practices of decoloniality and the ongoing work of subversive care that have been an important narrative have not been explored to its fullest. This project delves deeper into subversive spiritual practices of care that were—and are—avenues of liberation. What we problematize is the monocultural ethnocentrism within the work of pastoral care. We invite practitioners to support and practice the interculturality, inter-religious practices, and innovative disruptions of white cultural superiority and unconscious white supremacy within dominant Christian narratives of pastoral care.

Aligned within Okihiro’s Third World Studies method, our vision of spiritual care practices articulates the importance of critiquing how colonialism and imperialism brought about the devastation and destruction of individual lives and communities. It also highlights the turmoil that such forms of oppression continue to wreak on a global and systemic level—epistemic violence, destruction and demoralization of people’s daily practices, abuse of animals, and lands. Part of the ongoing racism against the Black, brown, and Asian communities is a denigration of indigenous roots of cultural beliefs and practices. It is the continued disavowal of the decolonial roots of religion and the colonizing discourses that privilege white European cultural Christianity that prevent our liberation from the harms of epistemic and psychic