Defense Date

3-7-2023

Graduation Date

Spring 5-5-2023

Availability

Immediate Access

Submission Type

dissertation

Degree Name

PhD

Department

Theology

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

GERALD BOODOO

Committee Member

MARINUS IWUCHUKWU

Committee Member

SEBASTIAN MADATHUMMURIYIL

Keywords

POSCOLONIALITY, DECOLONIAL, GOEMAI, LOCALITY, REIMAGINATION, RETRIEVAL, SYMBOLIC RITUALIZATION, INTEGRATION, CULTURAL MEMORY, SOCIAL MEMORY

Abstract

Postcolonial/decolonial thinking developed in response to modernity’s colonial logic that glorified and universalized the Western locus of enunciation, subjectivity, and history. The prioritization of Western epistemology, hierarchization of being based on race, gender, and religion, and the universalization of Western Christian religion relegated all other modes of being, knowing, and accessing the Divine to the periphery. For a long time, indigenous people have accepted the Western linear worldview that makes them the exemplars of the whites (Euro-Americans) in their primordial state of Western history and development. The goal of the Western colonial matrix of power is the subsumption of indigenous cosmology into its universalized cosmogony, aligning every reality into a single mode of understanding and interpretation. It is that “point zero,” viz., the particular perspective that refuses to acknowledge that fact but assumes the “god’s-eye view” concerning everything.

The desire for self-apprehension, retrieval, relinking, and reconnection to the indigenous worldview necessitated the rejection of Western temporality for indigenous spatiality. Spatiality prioritizes experience and context over the progressive idea of time in history. While rationality defines the Western universe, relationality characterizes the indigenous world. This work takes for its context the Goemai space and experience to argue for a deconstruction of Western epistemology, mode of being, and Christianity. It posits that the search for a genuine Goemai Christianity that is fully Catholic is at the base of retrieving ancestral wisdom and experience to construct a future from the present by looking backward.

Language

English

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