If you are interested in the theme ?Pondering Practical Post Colonialism?, please join CRCS&ICRS Wednesday Forum. The discussion will be held on Wednesday, March 12, 2008, at the Graduate School of Gadjah Mada University, third floor, room 306, at 13:00 to 15.00. The key speaker will be Elaine Kay Swartzentruber, Ph.D.
Elaine Kay Swartzentruber is a lecturer at CRCS-UGM. She earned her Ph.D at Emory University, Atlanta. Her dissertation title: ?They were All Together and Had Everything in Common: Subjectivity and community in modern and Postmodern Theologies?. She was assistant professor of Religion, Theology and Culture at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC. Some of her publications are ?Response? in To Continue the Dialogue; Biblical Interpretation and Homosexuality (Pandora Press US, 2001), Re-Marking the Body of Christ: Toward a Postmodern Mennonite Ecclesiology?, in The Mennonite Quarterly Review, April 1997, etc.
The discussion is free of charge. Please invite your friends to join the discussion.
Below is the abstract which will be presented in the discussion
Abstract:
Pondering Practical Post Colonialism?
By; Elaine Kay Swartzentruber
For the past few years I have been working on a project about the religious practice of hospitality as a trope for understanding and disentangling issues of race, gender, class, and religion in American society. The impetus for this project was spending 3 years in the late 1990?s living in an intentional Christian community in inner city Atlanta comprised of white middle class American Christians like myself and (mostly) African American homeless men trying to transition back into American society. The project on hospitality took one interesting turn when my spouse and I adopted our first daughter from China in 2002 and the paradigm of International Adoption ? of Asian children by white North Americans ? became another locus of interrogation of race, gender, class and culture deeply influenced by and helped by postcolonialist theories.
Coming to live in Indonesia has inserted yet another turn in my work ? one prompted by a colleague challenging me to find a ?practical? use for the postcolonial theories that I find so helpful in trying to understand all that has come before in my scholarly pursuits and all that seems to be flying at me in this new context.
In the time allotted to me, I will attempt to lay out some of my recent thinking about these issues and covet the wisdom and interrogation of those gathered to help me sort through half formed thoughts and many questions around issues of empire, gender, race and religious studies.
