Diasporic Feminist Theology: Asia and Theopolitical Imagination.

Park, Jung Eun Sophia

Diasporic Feminist Theology: Asia and Theopolitical Imagination. By Namsoon Kang. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014. Pp. xiv + 378. $39.

The author offers a diasporic feminist theology, which includes a discourse of identity politics that negates Western-centered, patriarchal, and domineering discourses. In this superb example of scholarship and poignant critique of feminism, Kang explores the third space where fluid identities and diverse discourses encounter each other and result in creating an alterity.

As a Korean feminist who resides in the United States, K. examines how dislocation and relocation affect doing theology in the context of trans-nationality and trans-ethnicities. In her geopolitical imagination, she revisits and rearticulates Asian feminist theology--including the use of myth and folktale, as well as Asian cultural values, as represented by Confucian thought.

In response to her fundamental theological question, Who is Asian?, K. frames a diasporic feminist theology that resonates with her current location, and with her multiple sociopolitical locations within the global context. She argues that very often the Asian woman's identity, or that of any non-Westerner for that matter, is essentialized and fixed. For example, as a Korean woman scholar, her identity is prescribed as "the Han ridden" one, who undergoes a variety of suffering and poverty. Western scholarship expects, and thereby limits, the discourse of Asian women within victimization.

This discourse is not new. Kwok Pui Lan, in her seminal work, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (2005), articulated the identity construction of Asian women in the postcolonial context. Wai Ching Angela Wong, in The Poor Woman: A Critical Analysis of Asian Theology and Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Women (2002), also dealt with the Asian woman's image of being poor. Here, Kang extends these discourses to diasporic and global discourses. Her research thus helps readers map postcolonial and postmodern discourses in the context of diasporic theopolitics.

Given that this book is a collection of the essays of this author, who writes from various contexts and times, it is not fair to expect systematic arguments or a progression of argument. Rather, it is perhaps best to read each chapter independently. K.'s scope and interests vary, so that she covers a gamut of discourses from postmodernism, Asian feminism, and postcolonialism, to those of transnational feminism, borderlands, and diasporic feminist theology.

The author does not seem to explicitly address explicitly the task of creating an innovate approach to diasporic feminist theology. For example, she articulates the problem or weakness of Asian feminist theology, which makes women the eternal victims of patriarchy and colonialism, along with a critique of Western theological discourse, which has selecting power and limits Asian women's theopolitical talk. However, the author does not offer definite methods for doing this theology of diasporic feminist discourse. Rather, she emphasizes that we must avoid representation and negate the binary system which distinguishes Westem/non-Western, men/ women, citing postcolonial theorists. As the subtitle Asia and Geopolitic Imagination suggests, K. envisions various aspects of contemporary life and that of Asian women, including her vision of religion from the perspective of alterity or differance. According to K., religion should move into being grassroots, community-based, nonhierarchical, intersubjective, and small-scaled, based on the principle of holistic thinking (162). She offers a very insightful vision of religion, and of Christianity in particular, one which stimulates readers to further discussion regarding methods for actualizing this vision.

The author advocates doing feminist theology with a diasporic consciousness--that is, doing a diasporic feminist theology, although she only vaguely defines diasporic feminist theology as "defending, representing, articulating the need to work together in multiple and interstitial gatherings of living together for the justice and peace of each and every individual human being who is marginal and who cannot find a home in the world" (39). She thus implicitly situates her diasporic feminist theology in the context of doing a theology that aims at transformative action.

K.'s explanation of diasporic feminist theology extends the object of Asian/postcolonial feminist theology to every human being at the margins. As a border thinker, K. creates an in-between space which invites, affirms, and challenges readers to inquire about multiple crossroads and heterotopic spaces for doing theology, or perhaps interchangeably, doing a diasporic feminist theology.

DOI: 10.1177/0040563915620187

Jung Eun Sophia Park, S.N.J.M.

Holy Names University, Oakland, CA.