Musa Dube’s contributions to Theo-ethics

JOURNAL ARTICLE

“Hanging out a Red Ribbon: Listening to Musa Dube’s Postcolonial Feminist Theology,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, Volume 2, Issue 13, December 2011.

ABSTRACT

Musa Dube, a feminist theologian from Botswana and a member of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, has made a tremendous impact on global feminist/womanist theologies and on the HIV and AIDS theological discourse through her writing and research. In the summer of 2007 at the annual meeting of the African Association for the Study of Religion in Botswana, Musa Dube challenged her colleagues by asking another question: "Does HIV and AIDS necessitate a new liberation theology?" This article takes up this question by analyzing Dube’s methodological approach with reference to its place within liberation theologies, and by examining Dube’s writing on HIV and AIDS to argue that HIV and AIDS is not only a new space for liberation theology, but is a space where liberation theologies must intersect to create change for those who are oppressed on multiple levels. Dube’s method of approaching cultural hermeneutics and biblical hermeneutics through an African feminist postcolonial lens provides a model of a liberation theology that takes on global oppression without neglecting a specific social location. In her theology, she invites both the former colonized and the former colonizer to the table, asking that we all take seriously the way oppression functions within the contexts of poverty, inequality, racism, ethnocentrism, religiocentrism, globalism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and gender injustice.

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