The Power of a Hybrid Community: A New Look at the Gentile Women in Matthew

Postcolonial theory arose out of the break-down of empires in the 19th and 20th centuries and the emergence of independent nations. This transition created a growing awareness of the ways in which dominant empires had defined “the other,” that is, the subject peoples, in order to justify their subjugation. Postcolonial theory has made a vigorous impact on biblical scholarship by opening up a new way of reading the Bible as well as by revealing colonial assumptions that have been embedded in the biblical interpretative enterprise.1 However, most postcolonial theories have focused on European colonialism not on the multiple colonialism in East Asia, as Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Kim insightfully point out: “This elision skews our understanding of gender in the colonial and post-colonial context, centering and even privileging European colonialism as a universalized subject of intellectual inquiry.”