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Liberation Theology and Latin America's Testimonio And LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND LATIN AMERICA’S TESTIMONIO AND NEW HISTORICAL NOVEL: A DECOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE by Javier Valiente Núñez A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland March, 2016 ©2016 Javier Valiente Núñez All Rights Reserved With all my love and affection: To my parents, to Cristina María, to Mariano and to Cristina To Mari Carmen Núñez Sánchez, in memoriam ii 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. iii 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). iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Sara Castro-Klarén, for her comments and suggestions on the chapters of this dissertation as well as for our many and fruitful conversations on liberation theology’s use of Marxism as well as on José Carlos Mariátegui, the ayllu structure and the emergence of a specifically Latin American Marxist thinking. I would also like to thank my parents for their support and encouragement throughout the long process of writing this dissertation and for believing and having faith in me. v Contents Introduction …………………………………………………...................... 1 Chapter One: “Liberation Theology: The Genealogy of a Concept” …………………………………………………………………... 28 Chapter Two: “The Formation and Reception of Liberation Theology” …………………………………………………………………. 121 Chapter Three: “Liberation Theology’s Decoloniality and Epistemological Evolution” ………………………………………………. 227 Chapter Four: “Liberation Theology’s Latin American Epistemologies in the Twenty-First Century” ……………………………………………... 309 Chapter Five: “Liberation Theology and Latin America’s Testimonio and New Historical Novel: Decolonial Indigeneity vs. Imperialist Indianness …................................................................................................. 396 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………… 505 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………….. 512 Curriculum Vitae ………………………………………………………….. 574 vi Introduction Born in the late 1960s in Peru, liberation theology is a line of theological reflection that interprets the Christian teachings in terms of the liberation of the poor from the oppressive socio-economic and political structures of the capitalist system. Although its origins can be found in the base ecclesial communities of Brazil in the 1950s and 60s and in the Second Conference of the Latin American Bishops, which was held in Medellín in 1968, it was Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez that first articulated a liberation theology for Latin America in his paper “Toward a Theology of Liberation” (1968), and, especially, in his classical work A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (originally published in Spanish in 1971 and in English translation in 1973). Many other theologians like Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, Ignacio Ellacuría, Ernesto Cardenal, Enrique Dussel, Giulio Girardi, José Comblin, Hugo Assman and Pablo Richard among others continued this fruitful line of theological reflection over the next decades to such an extent that it is still frequently practiced in Latin America today. Using the contributions of Marxist thinking, liberation theology pays special attention to the key issue of “orthopraxis,” that is, the significance of action in Christian life, which has always defined its eminently economic-political discourse centered on the cause of the poor. Hence its interest in supporting the alternative Latin American political projects of the 1970s and 80s to transform society into a more just world. The influence of liberation theology and its preferential option for the poor soon began to be felt in the different spheres of Latin American intellectual activity. The consequence of this was the 1 emergence of a Latin American philosophy, pedagogy and psychology of liberation, as can be appreciated in fundamental works in their field of study like Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation (originally published in Spanish in 1977 and in English translation in 1985), Giulio Girardi’s Por una pedagogía revolucionaria (1977), Ignacio Martín Baró’s Psicología de la liberación para América Latina (1990) and Raúl Fornet- Betancourt’s Transformación intercultural de la filosofía (2001). Even Paulo Freire, whose conscientiҫazão method had been made known since the early 1960s, published his influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Portuguese one year before Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation was published in Spanish. It is therefore necessary to coin the term “liberation thinking” in order to refer to the different Latin American fields of knowledge that use the fundamental category of liberation as their basis for critical reflection on the Latin American reality in order to denounce the empoverishment of the popular and subaltern sectors by the logic of global capital. This dissertation studies liberation theology and its dialogical interaction with contemporary Latin American testimonial and historical narrative from a cultural studies approach paying attention to its emergence in the late 1960s as the pioneering school of decolonial thinking in Latin America. It was Chicana critic Emma Pérez and Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith that coined the terms “decolonial” and “decoloniality” in the late 1990s due to temporal-historical reasons to emphasize that we are not past colonialism and that only the active agency of the colonized will put an end to the perverse legacies of the colonial and neocolonial eras.1 Therefore, it is not historically or chronologically accurate to speak of “postcolonialism,” “postcoloniality” or 1 See The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999), by Emma Pérez, and Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), by Linda Tuhiwai Smith. 2 “postcolonial” when Latin America is still colonized by the West today. Some Latin American intellectuals like Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres also began to use both terms in the late 90s and to develop a very productive, coherent and consistent line of “decolonial thinking” for Latin America in recent years.2 Latin American decoloniality, however, does not begin at the dawn of the twenty-first century but in 1968 with Father Gustavo Gutiérrez’s articulation of a theology of liberation. Chapter one, “Liberation Theology: The Genealogy of a Concept,” studies the origins of decoloniality in Latin America in connection with the key issue of the reception of European Marxism. A critical analysis of the origins of Marxist thinking in Latin America shows how classical
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