Enduring Empire: Theologies of Violence and Postcolonial Poetics

Trauma is frequently framed as an individual psychological event, obscuring its collective, historical, and political dimensions. Focusing on the legacies of Japanese colonization and the Korean War, this paper theorizes collective trauma as a communal and postcolonial formation that exceeds individual models such as PTSD. Drawing on sociological accounts of social and cultural trauma, I argue that collective memory is politically curated yet also persists in more fluid, unsettled forms. To describe these dynamics, I integrate the concepts of spectrality and fractality. Spectrality names the haunting return of unresolved pasts that demand ethical response, while fractality provides a probabilistic model for understanding how such hauntings recur across generations without determinism. Grounded in phenomenological interviews with two intergenerational cohorts of Korean and Korean American Christians, this study demonstrates how historical trauma resurfaces within diasporic and reconstruction-era contexts, generating both disruption and the possibility of renewed theological imagination.

This paper explores the relationships between law, liberty, and security in the context of United States governance and its self-articulation. By reading the Declaration of Independence through the lenses of political theology, legal theory, Black Studies, and Indigenous Studies, this paper interrogates the “givenness” of the law in national discourse and what this default way of organizing thought and social life might have to do with questions of empire and/as faith.

This project brings into focus the inheritance of the Book of Revelation in the narrative structuring of Western military imperialism. I weave genealogies of apocalyptic imaginaries— from Christopher Columbus’ Book of Prophecies into the nuclear age—to contextualize the end times imaginary of the present. As state leaders, military officials, and venture capitalists speak the terms of the Euro-Christian apocalypse to justify war, genocide, and settler-colonialism, they also fortell redemption through a technologically perfected future. I argue that the Book of Revelations and its interpreters provide a formula out of which the national security doctrine makes and withholds personhood; this redemptive campaign characterizes the longue durée Euro-Christian empire, resulting in a necropolitical, technologically driven scheme framed through both moral and divine purposes. 

This paper uses Wael Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism to radically restate David Arnold’s concept of tropicality i.e. the application of Saidian Orientalism to ecologies through a tropic-temperate binary. Much as Hallaq examines the secular-modern-scientific epistemological roots underlying Saidian Orientalism, I propose a deconstruction of tropicality in the hopes of creating the foundations for a deep critique of tropicality discourse and a novel path to healing our damaged planet in the Anthropocene; I envision tropicality as a means of rediscovering an older, ethical-ecological way of life, a tool for the cultivators of tropical landscapes to educate the modern temperate individual. I problematize modern scientific ecology as inadequate, and call for an ethical cosmology of repair in what I term the Temperate-ocene. I suggest an approach that combines the re-ethicization of ecology with degrowth political economy, using geopoetics to transform geographies and geopolitics, as a means of transcending the modern Temperate-ocene in toto.

This paper, will contrast the use of apocalyptic and its relation to imperialism between recent Christian theological works on the one hand and writing from Indigenous and

majority world thinkers on the other—the latter being those most adversely affected by

colonial modernity and Christian mission. By turning to post-colonial science fiction, I will show the apocalyptic position of western theory and religion to be ongoing colonial standpoint, an ongoing failure to analyze the complex, global conditions we face. Furthe, I will show that post-colonial science fiction can help us face the loss of our mythical totality, or the god’s eye-view of the world.  Turning to such literature can in fact animate religions discourse  and offer the genuine possibility of a radical break in thinking, a new theological language for the apocalypse, an apocalypse that has abandoned the colonial project and the discourse that has travelled with it.