Before the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, the Federal Theatre Project (1935-9), and the American Negro Theatre and the Negro Playwrights' Company in the 1940s, where was black theatre? There were minstrel shows conceived by whites and performed by whites in black face in the early nineteenth century, such as E. P. Christy's Minstrels. Then, after the Civil War, black actors were seen on stage performing in such shows as Haverly's Colored Minstrels. Undeniably, however, these, whether performed by white or by black actors, perpetuated derogatory caricatures of African Americans. Before minstrel shows there were plays written by black playwrights, but their titles and creators are not well-known to most American theatregoers: James Brown's King Shotaway (1823), William Wells Brown's Escape, or Leap of Faith (1858) and Angelina W. Ginkle's Rachel (1916). In the 1920s Willis Richardson's The Chipwoman's Fortune (1923) and Garland Anderson's Appearances (1925) reached the Broadway stage, still the 'Great White Way' (although this was a reference to the lights on theatre marquees, it had a symbolic truth with respect to race), but these, too, were beset by ubiquitous caricatures. In the 1930s, though, Langston Hughes's play Mulatto (1935) achieved considerable success, focusing in a serious way on racial identity and establishing a record run for a black play on Broadway not beaten until Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The latter constituted a crucial moment in black theatrical history, launching the career of a number of black actors and that of a man who would go on to direct August Wilson's plays, Lloyd Richards, the first African American to direct a Broadway play.

The 1960s were always going to present August Wilson with a particular challenge in his grand scheme to create a decade-by-decade reflection on African American experience in the twentieth century. As Wilson himself remarks in the prefatory notes for his 1950s play Fences (1985), the 'hot winds of change' that began to gather in the postwar era 'would make the sixties a turbulent, racing, dangerous and provocative decade'. The civil rights movement, which began in earnest with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955 - after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man - used peaceful tactics of mass civil disobedience to challenge and shame the often brutally repressive regimes maintained by segregationist cities and states in the American South. By the early 1960s, though, Malcolm X's calls, from the pulpits of the Nation of Islam, for black self-determination 'by any means necessary' had begun to rally support for a more aggressively defiant, anti-assimilationist stance. Although Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, his spirit remained very much alive in figures such as Stokely Carmichael, who in 1966 challenged Martin Luther King for the moral high ground within his own civil rights movement, invoking the term 'Black Power': 'Power is the only thing respected in this world, and we must get it at any cost.' That same year, the first chapter of the Black Panther Party was formed in California, availing itself of the constitutional right to bear arms in presenting itself as the first fully-fledged black revolutionary organization.

The Asian context

Liberation theology differs from other theologies in that it starts with ananalysis of the context, as it wants to respond to the cries of the people arisingfrom it. As contextual theology we can distinguish it by regions - Latin American,African, Asian, European - and by social groups such as the poor, women, blacks,Dalits, indigenous peoples. However, none of these social or geographicalidentities can be understood in isolation. Contexts and identities are multipleand overlapping. The realities of class, caste, patriarchy and ethnicity, and oflocal, regional and global economy are intertwined. A Dalit girl working in afactory in an export-processing zone in India is exploited as an underpaid worker- like other workers around the globe - and suffers from a lack of protection bytrade-union rights, while as a woman she suffers from male domination and violence- as other women do - whereas she shares her plight as an 'untouchable' sufferingfrom caste oppression with other outcastes, male and female, in India.

What is specific about Asia, especially in contrast with Latin America, is thereligio-cultural context. The overwhelming majority of the poor and oppressed inAsia are non-Christians, many of whom adhere to a wide variety of popularreligious traditions which are more or less connected with the traditions of thegreat religions which have shaped dominant Asian cultures. Yet within Asia thereare again tremendous differences. Latin America is, compared to Asia, a relativelyhomogeneous continent in terms of history, language, economic and politicaldevelopments. Asia has to be subdivided into various regions with differentcultural, religious, political and economic histories.

August Wilson created a structural challenge for himself in writing Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), the story of some 'footloose wanderers', as the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka called the displaced ex-slaves who, during the early twentieth century, tried to make sense of their social and cultural problems. Critics almost uniformly praised the play but condemned its structure as 'sprawling', 'off the track', and 'confusing'. One was more graphic: 'Wilson's elemental power continues to overwhelm the basic structure of his dramas. His efforts remind you of a large man trying to squeeze into a suit two sizes too small. Every now and then, you hear the fabric ripping.' Implicit in these judgements was the idea that Wilson had wished to link episodes causally through characters, mood association or collage. A close study of the play, however, reveals that Wilson used signature elements from almost every major movement in African American theatre history, intent 'to engage in refiguration as an act of homage', to borrow a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. phrase. They came from German Expressionism, first introduced by Langston Hughes's Don't You Want to Be Free? (1938) and from the choreopoem, pioneered by Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow would be enuf (1976); from the kitchen table, in William Wells Brown's Escape; Or A Leap for Freedom (1858), to talking winds in Loften Mitchell's A Land Beyond the River (1957); and from the Non-Objectivism of black theatre in the 1960s and 1970s8 to Keith Antar Mason's performance text From Hip-Hop to Hittite and Other Poetic Healing Rituals for Young Black Men(1985).

Set in the 1980s, August Wilson's King Hedley II (1999) reveals a world in which the lives of many people are in danger. Twenty years after the passage of the Voting Right Act and its accompanying promise of social change, conditions for African Americans in the inner cities are, perhaps, worse than ever. Reaganomics has failed to trickle down, black-on-black crime is at its height, the youth of the community suffer the oppression of crack culture, and, by 1990, the unemployment rate for black men is twice as high as for white. US Department of Justice statistics for the late 1980s reveal that African Americans represented 12 per cent of the population but were responsible for 50 per cent of all homicides and 66 per cent of all robberies; 50 per cent of all urban blacks were arrested for a serious crime at least once in their lifetime. Most of the crimes occurred within dominantly or completely African American communities. The victims were rivals, neighbours, enemies, relatives. The availability of drugs and guns and the distinct lack of opportunities determined the fate of many young men and women whose isolation from community and history made them easy prey. They had lost their cultural connection; Aunt Ester was dead.

In August of 1975 the 'Theology in the Americas' conference was held in Detroit.It was an exceptional gathering that brought together major figures of theAmerican theological landscape including, among others, Gustavo Gutiérrezand James Cone, Hugo Assmann and Rosemary Radford Ruether, Juan Luis Segundo andDeotis Roberts, Enrique Dussel and Gregory Baum. To read the proceedings is to betransported to a different time, a time giddy in the hope that the theologicaltransformation brought about by liberation theology would also change society.Passion, urgency, at times anger, emerged from discussions framed around thequestion - 'What would constitute a “theology in the Americas”?'While this question and the many answers posed obviously mattered deeply toliberation theology’s founding figures, whether Latin American, Black,Feminist, Chicano, Native American or White, it is no longer asked. The purpose ofthis chapter is to ask it again.

Asking this question today, however, requires running against the grain ofdominant trends in both scholarship on liberation theology and present-dayliberation theologies themselves: the former examines liberation theologiesindividually while the latter has become a rich and growing forest of theologicalperspectives that stakes out particular claims for particular communities. Thetendency towards particularity emerges, of course, from liberationtheology’s stress on the contextual nature of the theological enterprise.While unbelievably broad by today’s parameters, the Detroit conferenceitself struggled with how to contextualise the Americas, oscillating between, onthe one hand, understanding them as the United States and Canada only, and, on theother hand, understanding them as Latin America, the United States and Canadatogether.

Dated from the Medellín Conference, liberation theology is not yet thirtyyears old. Political theology, by contrast, has many centuries behind it. Todefine a High Tradition the period 1100-1650 suggests itself: at one end theGregorian Reforms bring the conflict between papacy and secular rule to the centreof theological discussion; at the other the Moral Science of the earlyEnlightenment lifts political theory out of the purview of theology. The dates areespecially happy as they coincide with two striking contributions to the genre.From the turn of the twelfth century the anonymous York Tractates argue withtheological urgency for the sacral character of monarchy, discredited by the newpapalism. From the midpoint of the seventeenth century Hobbes' Leviathan, a work with considerably more theology in it thanphilosophy, seals the case, as early modernity understood it, for politics as anautonomous theoretical discipline. In between lie the great peaks of politicaltheology, scholastic and reformed. But the High Tradition itself did not springfrom nothing, but drew on thinkers and ideas of the patristic and Carolingianages. Augustine is rightly taken as a founding figure; but before him there wereAmbrose, Eusebius of Caesarea (notoriously), and from the pre-Constantinian periodLactantius. And why not mention the second-century Letter to Diognetus, which, inturn, was only building on ideas in 1 Peter and Philippians …?

But the relation of contemporary political theology to the High Tradition can besummed up in a single bleak word: ignorance. The feeling of invigorating newdeparture is due in considerable measure to the loss of antecedents from our view.Occasionally our contemporaries seize on moments in the tradition and identifytheir importance: Boff has written on St Francis; and the authors of the SouthAfrican Kairos Document used the doctrine of tyrannicide fromJohn of Salisbury and St Thomas.

August Wilson described the creative process that produced Seven Guitars (1995) in a 1996 interview with Jan Breslauer. Fundamentally, he said, 'the basis is character'. He suggested that the characters occurred to him first in the form of a speech, or a turn of phrase, noting that although 'they're all different aspects of my personality', they are all also 'voices of the black community.' He described his creative work as analogous to that of a collagist, piecing the voices together to make a whole. In the case of Seven Guitars, this is particularly important, for, as he told Carol Rosen, Wilson conceived of the seven characters in the play as instruments themselves: 'They are the seven guitars. They each have their individual voices and their individual characters. And if they're the guitars, then I guess I'm the orchestra.' It took Wilson some time to arrive at the design for the play. He explained later that it began its life in his imagination with four characters, none of them women, set in a turpentine camp in Georgia. Lacking any knowledge of turpentine camps, he had the idea of moving the play to Chicago, 'the natural place for a bluesman', and found that he was 'writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.'

In the play as Wilson finally wrote it, there are seven characters, the blues musician Floyd Barton, his two sidemen, or supporting musicians, drummer Red Carter and harmonica player Canewell, Canewell's girlfriend Vera, and three people who live in Vera's house: Louise, a middle-aged single woman whose beautiful young niece Ruby comes to stay with her, and King Hedley, a West Indian who lives in his dreams.

On 2 October 2005 August Wilson died at the Swedish Medical Centre in Seattle. It was just eight months after the death of another American playwright, Arthur Miller. They came out of different worlds. Miller was descended from immigrants on both sides of the family, Jews who went to America to escape persecution and seek their fortune. And if they subsequently lost the fortune they made, they nonetheless never lost belief in the system that had redeemed them from a far worse fate. To be sure, they encountered prejudice, but even so they slid with some ease into an America which swiftly bore the impress of European Jews as they emerged as entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and intellectuals surprisingly ready to interpret America to itself.

For some, particularly those in middle age at the moment of immigration, the maintenance of the old ways was a priority. For others, the trading of a previous identity was a small price to be paid for the acquisition of a new one. If Jewishness was perceived as a problem, it could be wished away, literally or symbolically. Names could be changed. Miller abandoned his grandparents' god, and though he continued to write works in which Jewish characters were confronted with the implications of their identities, this was not his subject.

Despite being a well-known film star, Danny Glover found himself being shunned by New York City's taxicab drivers in the autumn of 1999. After finally being picked up by one cab driver, Glover experienced rude treatment. 'I was so angry,' he said in recounting the event to the New York Times. The Times reported that 'several empty cabs had refused to stop for him, his college-aged daughter and her roommate. Later, when one finally did, the driver refused the 6-foot-4 “Lethal Weapon” star access to the front seat even though he had a bad hip and is entitled under taxi industry rules to stretch out in front.' Glover filed a formal complaint with New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission; the incident received attention in the press; a protest rally was held in Harlem; and even New York's former Mayor David Dinkins added that he, too, had often been refused cab rides. Despite the public outrage, refusing cab rides to African Americans is a fact of urban life and a part of its folklore. In Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, for example, the rap group compared the situation of taxicabs to police and fire fighters disregarding the black community during 9/11. The lyrics of one song report, '9/11 is a joke we don't want 'em / I call a cab 'cause a cab will come quicker.' To compensate, African Americans often use 'gypsy' cabs.

Known as jitneys, gypsy cabs constitute an underground industry in the African American community. At the beginning of the twentieth century, segregation was institutionalized; by mid-century it had become an embedded aspect of everyday life. Cut off from the mainstream socially and economically, blacks turned inwards for financial support.

Introduction

Economics - in the general sense of the critical study of production,distribution and consumption of wealth in human society - is a central theme ofliberation theology. Although liberation theologians do not address the technicalquestions that constitute modern economic theory, they are concerned with thebroader issues of the way in which economic organisation relates to the historicalexperience of humanity in general and to the 'infinite value' of the poor to Godin particular. These issues of economic organisation and social justice aresimilar to the agenda of European political economy until the end of the lastcentury, and still central to debates on sustainable development strategies inpoor countries. But a concern for life itself as the criterion for judgingeconomic institutions can be considered to be a specific contribution fromliberation theology. Further, this theology is probably unique in being locatedwithin the broader context of debates in poor countries on the origins ofunderdevelopment and the condition of poverty - mainly but not exclusively inLatin America - which themselves have a major economic dimension. In consequence,the 'economics of liberation theology' has had a considerable impact beyond churchstructures, ranging from grassroots social movements throughout the developingworld to influential non-governmental organisations in industrialisedcountries.

The persistence of poverty in Latin America is morally unacceptable by anystandard. In 1980, after a period of rapid income growth before the debt crisis,and at the outset of the decade in which most liberation theology has beenwritten, 40 per cent of the population of the region were officially classified asliving in poverty, and nearly half of these in extreme poverty - that is withincomes insufficient to purchase the food required to meet the United Nations'minimum nutritional standard for a healthy life.

In 1984 the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith publishedan Instruction on Certain Aspects of the 'Theology ofLiberation', known from the first two words of its Latin text as Libertatis Nuntius. The intention of this document was, itsays, 'limited and precise', which was

The issue, then, was Marxism, or the use of it within some versions of liberationtheology. The document is careful to point out that it offers no general criticismof liberation theology as such, at any rate insofar as liberation theology isdefined by its response to the 'preferential option for the poor'; nor, it adds,should its criticisms of liberation theology on the score of its Marxism 'serve asan excuse for those who maintain an attitude of neutrality and indifference in theface of the tragic and pressing problems of human misery and injustice'. TheApostolic See, it goes on, has a good record of denunciation, for it 'has notceased to denounce the scandal involved in the gigantic arms race', nor does itany longer tolerate 'the shocking inequality between rich and poor' the injuriesof which to the poor, it notes, are aggravated by 'the memory of crimes of acertain type of colonialism'.

Medellín and the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council

It was from a situation of dependence on Europe that liberation theologianssought to free themselves. In so doing, they could call upon original traditionworth reviving. But the awareness of the tradition grew slowly. In 1968, theconventional date for the start of 'liberation theology' in the modern sense, thestress fell on what was new. The Latin American bishops, meetingat Medellín, made the crucial move. How was the Christian doctrine of'salvation' to be presented in terms that would be intelligible to the sufferingpeoples of Latin America? 'Salvation' always implies a metaphor, whether ofrestoration to health after sickness or 'redemption' from slavery. The LatinAmerican bishops decided that the best translation of 'salvation' for theiroppressed peoples was liberation. To be meaningful, however, theywould have to stand with their oppressed peoples. The phrase 'option for thepoor', first used in a letter from Pedro Arrupe to the Jesuits of Latin America inMay 1968, expressed this truth.

'Liberation theology' came into being to expand on and explain these two insights.Its originality consisted in the fact that it was not just a theology about liberation, as the theology of 'grace' was about grace.It was for liberation, promoting and propagating it. Likewise, itwas not just a theology about the poor, it was theology for the poor. So it would be an active practical theologyintended to make a difference in the real world: the Marxist concept of praxis indicated that. The stress of liberation theology layas much on orthopraxis (right action) as on orthodoxy (right thinking). Butdespite these claims to practical effects, liberation theology could only qualifyas serious theo-logos, discourse about God, if it spokerelevantly of God.

The question of the relationship between socially engaged biblical scholars andordinary poor and marginalised readers of the Bible lies at the heart of thischapter. While it may seem strange to begin an essay on 'The Bible and the poor'with such a statement, liberation theologies in their various forms all emergefrom the interface between socially committed theologians and ordinary Christiansfrom poor and marginalised communities. The task of this chapter is to understandthe contours of the interface more clearly. As most of the readers of this volumeare probably from the First World, we must begin by making it quite clear thatliberation theologies are different from First World theology. It is not just thatliberation theologies have a different content, they are moreprofoundly different in that they have a different methodology.'The established methodology of First World theology - often regarded as auniversally valid norm - has recently been challenged. The challenge comes fromdifferent quarters in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but it also comes fromcertain groups within the First World, e.g., from Christians within the feministand labour movements.'

Elaborating on this statement, Per Frostin defines the challenge posed bytheologies of liberation with reference to five interrelated emphases: the choiceof the interlocutors of theology, the perception of God, the social analysis ofconflicts, the choice of theological tools, and the relationship between theologyand praxis. Of particular concern in this chapter is the first of these emphases,what Frostin calls 'the interlocutors of theology', because it is this emphasisthat shapes each of the others.