Introduction

Scholars working at the interstices of the religious, the literary and the postcolonial have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the role and representation of Christianity. Occasionally confessional in tone, historians of various stripes have detailed the religion’s global dispersion and assessed the continental, regional and local impact of different Christian denominations, focusing upon their evangelizing agendas and missionary wings. Some accounts examine the work of individual clerics and ecclesiastical institutions, while others analyse vying forms of scriptural interpretation and understanding during and after empire and colonization, as well as the innovative Christian critiques of Europe’s overseas legacy that constitute so-called ‘liberation’ and ‘local’ theologies. A few commentators have subjected Christian scriptures, literary classics and theological categories, as well as church publications and missionary writings, to critical interrogation from decidedly nontheological perspectives and for expressly non-theological ends. And still others have explored the ways in which the Christian figures in the representation and misrepresentation of identity and power in encounters, conflicts and occasional accommodations between colonizer and colonized. In addition, drawing variously upon such resources, a handful of critics writing under the banner ‘postcolonial’ have gathered close readings of particular plays, poems, novels and instances of other literary genres into collections of scholarly essays focused upon particular theological or religious themes, tropes or topoi.