Panel: THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DECOLONIAL PEDAGOGY IN THE ACADEMY: REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING RELIGION WITHIN DIVERSE CONTEXTS



1203.1 - THE HUMAN, JOHN WESLEY AND THE AFRICAN: A DECOLONIAL ENGAGEMENT WITH WESLEY'S CONSTRUCTION OF 'MAN'.

AUTHORS:
Matthew L. (University of KwaZulu-Natal ~ Durban ~ South Africa)
Text:
Between 2014 and 2016, across several Southern African Universities, the Fallist movements (PatriarchyMustFall/FeesMustFall/RhodesMustFall) swept across academic institutions in South Africa. This movement, called not only for free education but also the decolonization of the academy. The call to decolonize has become synonymous with the removal statues and memorials to colonialism, alongside discursive decolonial approaches within the academy that endeavor to unearth and visibilise the ways in which Western epistemological privilege cement and reproduce unequal social systems of race, gender and class persistent as intersecting co-generative logics incubating the rampant inequality characteristic of South African society. A decade on, in a world rendered increasingly volatile by these logics of inequality, the cry of the Fallist Movement is not only relevant but also urgent. Christian systematic theology has by enlarge remained untouched by the decolonial movement and has only just begun to wrestle with its own colonial underpinnings. Critical for systematic theology and it complicity in reproducing systems of inequality is the question of the human. Decolonial trajectories problematise Western hegemonic assumptions by asking: Whose humanity is considered in constructing the (hu)man? Whose humanity counts as (hu)man enough, as valid, or authoritative enough, so that their (hu)man experience becomes the standard through which knowledge can be constructed? This paper engages John Wesley's formulation of the (hu)man within two key aspects of his writings: Treatise on Original Sin and Thoughts on Slavery. Situating Wesley within his historical and philosophical contexts and by drawing on the rich heritage of decolonial thought within the Southern African context in an attempt to answer the question: How do I preach the Wesleyan tradition in Southern Africa, at a time such as this?"