Ghost ship: institutional racism and the Church of England

Abstract

ing point (decolonial for me) or approach have helped the author to move beyond protesting coloniality and changing a doctrine or two, to the more radical work of shifting the terms of engagement, dumping colonial theological framework(s), and unearthing what is hidden and ignored by extending and inventing a new imaginary? On the matter of the proposed “hermeneutic of embrace” [152] the question remains: for whom would such a hermeneutic work: church, Junkanoo or people, and on whose terms? Would such an embrace result in other forms of “negation”? Who has asked the spirit of the ancestors and that of Junkanoo about wishing to embrace? Has anything Christianity embraced and appropriated thrived or flourished? How can liturgical integration of Junkanoo and Church avoid appropriation or, as one of the religious leaders interviewed, trying to get Junkanoo “baptised” in order to signal acceptance? This is important to explore further since, as the author points out, the relationship between the two is largely seen as one (Christianity) being a corrective to the other (Junkanoo), meaning that the latter is seen as in need of exorcism of sins associated with African inherited cultural practices. Will Turner’s “hermeneutic of embrace” engender cathartic delinking of the Bahamian Being from the whole Christian superstructure of sin, conversion, salvation, eschatology and much more which continue to reinforce Self-Negation? All these doctrines are linked to a particular understanding of who or what is human, which has been equated to white and western (as superior) and towards which the Others (as inferior) must aspire. This is what the Caribbean and its Churches have inherited and still continue to perpetuate. This inheritance (more like an imposition) needs to be decolonised. Overcoming Self-Negation, a welcomed addition to Caribbean theological discourse, points us to the long journey ahead.