This notebook contains some of the ideas, ambitions, hopes, anxieties, interrogations, and fears that randomly or expectingly came to punctuate the writing of the previous chapters.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

This chapter explores the history of anticolonial sociology in Latin America between 1950 and 1970 with two case studies from the region: (a) the nationalist sociology promoted by Afro-Brazilian scholar Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (1915–1982) and (b) the critique of scientific colonialism advanced by Colombian Orlando Fals Borda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which led to a new form of social science methodology called Participatory-Action Research (PAR). Despite their differences, Ramos and Fals Borda shared a diagnosis of colonialism as a cultural and economic phenomenon that jeopardized the autonomous development of peripheral societies. While most postcolonial and decolonial scholars are skeptical about the democratizing potential of sociology, Fals Borda and Ramos demonstrate that it is possible to integrate a radical political position against colonialism into a rigorous form of sociology that does not reject the common heritage of the discipline.

This chapter engages with the philosophy of liberation of the Algerian philosopher and anticolonial thinker Malek Bennabi (1905–1973). It argues that Bennabi’s decolonization theory aims at transforming the structural conditions of the colonized that made colonization even possible. The chapter lays out some of the significant aspects of Bennabi’s theory, focusing on how Bennabi conceived the problem of colonialism/colonizability and what answers he attempted to offer to overcome it. The chapter also examines Bennabi’s theory of society and its elementary aspects before explicating Bennabi’s politics of liberation that aims at transforming (and perfecting) both the means of transformation and the humans as its agents. Bennabi’s philosophy of liberation is not predicated on changing the political system or institutions but on the transformation of their sociopsychological infrastructures in which the behaviors of the individuals can be molded, making their social actions engender a different kind of politics.

The introduction outlines the geographies of slavery and black freedom in eighteenth-century Colombia, the significance of region and race in Colombian history, and the importance of the mobilities of black people, their labour, and their culture in traversing and connecting New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific worlds. Fisk argues for the centrality of geography, in particular place and mobilities, for shaping black religious knowledge and practice in a period (1690–1790) rarely studied by historians of African diasporic cultural history. After a historiographical and theoretical examination of how African diasporic religious formation has been studied, Fisk explores the variety of regimes of slavery and sites in which people of African descent resided in colonial Colombia – from cities, haciendas, and mines to maroon communities. She argues that place fundamentally shaped how people of African descent engaged with Catholicism. She conceptualises black Catholic practice in eighteenth-century New Granada as an “interstitial religion,” born of the physical and metaphorical interstices in a colonial society governed through slavery and introduces a methodology of religious geographies for the study of black religious knowledge where there is no written canon.

Joyce’s life spans a period when material conditions, political structures, and intellectual life throughout the world were profoundly shaped by the growth and decline of European empires and the flourishing of various nationalisms, both imperialist and anti-imperialist. When Joyce was born in 1882 the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the era that one influential historian has called the ‘age of empire’ had just begun. When he died in 1941 the world was engulfed in WWII, a conflict that would fundamentally alter the balance of global power, and the age of decolonization was under way. A good deal of influential Joyce scholarship has explored Joyce’s relation to this historical trajectory. Much of it has been informed by postcolonial studies, committed to examining the complex set of issues and questions we can group under the general headings of ‘colonialism’ and ‘nationalism’. Ireland’s double status as both centre and periphery, agent and victim of colonialism is important to any investigation of how Joyce’s works engage with such issues and questions.

Chapter 3 presents the case of Cameroon, a long-standing electoral autocracy in Central Africa. It provides a political history of the country, focused on the foundation, organization, and operations of Cameroon’s many political parties. It also elucidates the nature of Cameroon’s political geography, concluding with a section on the ways in which Cameroon may or may not be considered a “typical” case of electoral authoritarianism.

Over thirty years ago, Benedict Anderson asked students of Southeast Asia: Why did French Indochina eventually splinter into three political units, while the Dutch East Indies emerged as a single national polity? This chapter takes up Anderson's challenge to evaluate the central claim of this book: That variation in the institutions governing colonial-era bureaucratic selection proved influential in either forging or undermining the horizontal camaraderie constitutive of multi-ethnic nations. This chapter shows that where colonial rulers introduced the meritocratic selection of local civil servants – as the French did in Indochina – privileged groups tended to outstrip marginalized groups in the competition for coveted government jobs. Meanwhile, where colonial regimes relied on indigenous elites to select local staff – as the Dutch did in the East Indies – there was little inter-group competition for government jobs, as elites tended to dole out jobs to members of their ethnic in-group, with the consequence of siloing grievances.

Popular discourses on conflicts in the Great Lakes region argue that many of these conflicts have been caused by “erroneous” borders that cut up communities for European interests. This chapter argues that rather than with where these borders were drawn, the problem is what they did and do. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the Lake Kivu region, communities could not be neatly delineated and matched to clearly circumscribed territory, as relations between territory and identity were different. The divergence between how political communities were perceived was not just between “European” and “African” conceptions but also between those of a centralizing state – the Nyiginya kingdom – and those societies in the “frontier” that had other forms of sociopolitical organization.

Starting from a discussion of the tumultuous context at the turn of the twentieth century, the chapter addresses the imperial conflict between Germany and the Congo Free State, who both claimed Lake Kivu and its hinterland as their imperial possession, in what became known as the “Kivu-Bufumbiro conflict.” The chapter traces the different perspectives over how to understand the sociopolitical context and unsettled spatial organization that emerge from the debates between imperial powers in the context of this conflict The chapter concludes with an examination of the early impact of European border making on local populations, and the ways in which they tried to use the colonial border for their own survival.

Two of the most striking developments in the modern history of global Christianity have been the respective strengths of Catholic Christianity in Central and Latin America and of Protestant and Pentecostal Christianity in mostly sub-Saharan Africa. The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on these important stories by focusing on two early modern, imperial case studies, one from the Spanish conquest of New Spain and another from the British colonial project in West Africa, specifically Sierra Leone. Moreover, to what extent does the theoretical model of nuclei (the inner core of religious traditions), nodes (points of connection and exchange), and networks (transnational flows of people, ideas, and artifacts) help us understand better the various processes that produced such significant consequences for the global transmission of Christianity in the early modern and modern world?

Chapter 8 considers the politics and poetics of alterity or otherness. Others confront us with experiences that may be radically unfamiliar, strange, and unsettling. This may be compounded by illness, trauma, and cultural difference. With empathy and imagination, we can gain an understanding of another’s experience, see their perspective, and build a picture of their predicament. The imaginative spaces and places in their stories offer us a way into another’s lifeworld—even when that world is profoundly different from our own. Narrative medicine provides a pedagogy of empathic understanding through literature. While much of this work employs story, lyric poetry offers another mode of articulating illness experience that may be closer to patients’ emotionally charged, confused efforts to make sense of experiences that do not fit cultural models or templates. The work of the poets Paul Celan and Edouard Glissant sheds light on the power of language to bridge disparate worlds and on the ethical stance needed when empathy fails. A poetics of alterity has implications for efforts to understand individuals’ illness experience and grounding an ethics of care.