Liberation Theology and Latin America's Testimonio and New Historical Novel: A Decolonial Perspective
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Date
2016-03-10
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This dissertation studies liberation theology and its dialogical interaction with Latin America’s testimonio and new historical novel from a cultural studies approach that pays special attention to the key issue of decoloniality. Chapter one proposes the idea that Latin American decolonial thinking begins with Father Gustavo Gutiérrez’s liberation theology in Peru establishing the connection with José Carlos Mariátegui’s precursive experience of articulating a decolonial indigenista socialism as early as in the 1920s. The genealogy of liberation theology as a concept is critically discussed in detail by paying attention to its success and problems from a socioanalytical, hermeneutic and praxical point of view that especially takes into account the crucial role played by Marxism.
Chapter two focuses on the origins, historical evolution and reception of liberation theology in the twentieth century as a part of the social, political and intellectual history of the Catholic Church in Latin America. This not only shows how liberation theology was repressed by the hierarchical Catholic sectors of Latin America and Europe from the start but also reveals how it is still alive and kicking today in connection with the figure of Pope Francis.
Chapter three offers an in-depth analysis of liberation theology’s epistemological evolution and also discusses how decoloniality was always an integral part of it by critically examining the famous controversy between Argentinian Evangelist liberation theologian José Míguez Bonino and German Evangelist theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who accused liberation theology of being a Eurocentric theological reflection that just imitated European political theologies and Western Marxism.
Chapter four shows how the fact that the deepest layer of liberation theology’s thought has to do with questions of race, gender, ecology, economics and globalization from a new interdisciplinary approach demands the discussion of liberation theology’s new epistemological discourses in the twenty-first century, which specifically focus on indigenous and African Latin American cultures, the environment, (eco)feminism and global economy.
Chapter five studies the relationship between liberation theology and Latin America’s testimonio and new historical novel by paying attention to the indigenous question through the key notion of “indigeneity” understood as Native agency and self-representation against the abuses committed upon the indigenous peoples in our globalized world. From the perspective of the theology of liberation, I analyze Ernesto Cardenal’s The Gospel in Solentiname, Elisabeth Burgos’s I, Rigoberta Menchú and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World. The study of these works allows for a discussion of a decolonial reconceptualization of indigeneity in Cardenal’s and Burgos’s case as well as Vargas Llosa’s questioning of it.
Advisor: Professor Sara Castro-Klarén.
Readers: Professor William Egginton (JHU), Professor Derek Schilling (Chair, JHU), Professor Thomas Ward (Loyola University Maryland) and Professor Juan Obarrio (JHU).
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Keywords
Liberation Theology, Testimonial Literature, New Historical Novel, Decoloniality, Latin America