Author: Vincent L. Wimbush
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190670282
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
In this book ,Vincent Wimbush seeks to problematize what we call "scriptures," a word first used to refer simply to "things written," the registration of basic information. In the modern world the word came to be associated almost exclusively with the center- and power-defining "sacred" texts of "world religions." Wimbush argues that this narrowing of the valence of the term was a decisive development for western culture. His purpose is to reconsider the initially broad and politically charged use of the term. "Scriptures" are excavated not merely as texts to be read but understood as discourse: as mimetic rituals and practices, as ideologically-charged orientations to and prescribed behaviors in the world, as structures of relationships and social formations, as forms of communication. Wimbush is naming and constructing a new transdisciplinary critical project, which uses the historical and modern experiences of the Black Atlantic as resources for framing, categorization, and analysis. Using Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart as a touchstone, each chapter offers a close reading and analysis of a representative moment in the formation of the Black Atlantic, regarded as part of a history of modern human consciousness and conscientization. Such a history, Wimbush says, is reflected in the major turns in what he calls scripturalectics, part of the construction of the modern world, defined as efforts to manage or control knowledge and meaning.
Author: Vincent L. Wimbush
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1978715137
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Continuing his project of critical analysis of the scriptural formation of culture, Vincent L. Wimbush has gathered in this book essays by scholars of various backgrounds and orientations who focus in different registers on the theme of masquerade as the “play-element” in modern culture. Masquerade functions as a window onto the mimetic performances, dynamics, arrangements, psycho-logics, and politics (“scripturalizing”) by which the “made-up” becomes fixed or one among our realities (scripturalization). Modern-world racialization (and its attendant explosions into racialisms and racisms) as the hyper-scripturalization of difference in human flesh (registered in psychosocial relations as a type of “scripture”) is argued in this book to be one of the most consequential examples and reflections of masquerade and thereby one of the primary impetuses behind, and determinants of, the shape of the realities of modernities. The open window onto these realities is facilitated by touchstone references to—not exhaustive treatment of—a now famous eighteenth-century life story, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). This story, told by a complexly positioned Black-fleshed self-acknowledged ex-slave/“stranger,” is itself a “mask-ing” that throws light on the predominantly white Anglophone world as masking (as scriptural formation). Equiano/Vassa’s story as masking helps makes a compelling case for analyzing through Black flesh the ongoing shaping of the modern and the perduring mixed if not also devastating consequences.
Author: Vincent L. Wimbush
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190664703
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
In this book, Vincent Wimbush seeks to problematize what we call "scriptures," a word first used to refer simply to "things written," the registration of basic information. In the modern world the word came to be associated almost exclusively with the center- and power-defining "sacred" texts of "world religions." Wimbush argues that this narrowing of the valence of the term was a decisive development for western culture. His purpose is to reconsider the initially broad and politically charged use of the term. "Scriptures" are excavated not merely as texts to be read but understood as discourse: as mimetic rituals and practices, as ideologically-charged orientations to and prescribed behaviors in the world, as structures of relationships and social formations, as forms of communication. Wimbush is naming and constructing a new transdisciplinary critical project, which uses the historical and modern experiences of the Black Atlantic as resources for framing, categorization, and analysis. Using Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart as a touchstone, each chapter offers a close reading and analysis of a representative moment in the formation of the Black Atlantic, regarded as part of a history of modern human consciousness and conscientization. Such a history, Wimbush says, is reflected in the major turns in what he calls scripturalectics, part of the construction of the modern world, defined as efforts to manage or control knowledge and meaning.
Author: Vincent L. Wimbush
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1978712707
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 421
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Book Description
These essays, written over more than thirty years of Vincent L. Wimbush’s career as a scholar, provide a response to the nearly universal, persistent, and sedimented modern-world hyper-signification of Black flesh, always needing to be framed, humiliated, policed, and dirtied. Because Wimbush is a scholar of religion as culture—having to do with social practices and their psycho-politics as regimes of knowledge, discourse, formation, and power relations—his ex-centric transdisciplinary interest in scriptures has been viewed, in some circles, as controversial. Yet it is Wimbush’s linkage of the modern hyper-signification of Black flesh—leading to racialization and racism, especially anti-Black racism—to the scriptural as shorthand for discourse and relations of power that makes this work compelling.
Author: R. S. Sugirtharajah
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190888458
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 793
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism is a comprehensive treatment of a relatively new form of scholarship-one of the most compelling and contested theories to emerge in recent times, and a topic that actively seeks to expand the ways in which the Bible can be studied, interpreted, and applied. Generally speaking, postcolonialism aims to critique and dismantle hegemonic worldviews and power structures, while giving voice to previously marginalized peoples and systems of thought. This approach, often varied in form, has inevitably engaged with the text and reception of the Bible, a scripture that Western colonizers introduced to-and often imposed upon-their colonial subjects. With a globally diverse list of contributors, the Handbook aims to cover the perspective and context of the authors of the Bible, as well as the modern experiences of imperialism, resistance, decolonization, and nationalism. Moreover, the volume includes both a theoretical overview and an exploration of how the field intersects with related areas, such as gender studies, race, postmodernism, and liberation theology.
Author: Cavan W. Concannon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022681565X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
"Paul's epistles are central to nearly every variation of Christianity, and there are as many different readings of Paul as there are sects of Christianity. Paul has also been co-opted by influential contemporary thinkers such as Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek. Religious scholar Cavan Concannon, however, has other plans. Taking as his starting point the language of excrement, refuse, and waste in Paul's letters, he reads these passages to think about the textual and material uses of garbage and excrement, and, ultimately, whether Paul's writings can be redeemed. Concannon presses on the tension between the evils that have been wrought through Paul's letters and the sacralizing effects of his place in the Christian canon. He drills down into the attempted redemption of Paul within radical European philosophical circles, but he reads these appropriations of Paul alongside professional biblical scholars who have sought to enlist Paul into their own liberal political projects. Concannon's book intervenes in the history of biblical studies, the use of Paul's letters by contemporary philosophers, and the political potential of feminist, African American, and queer biblical scholarship. Can Paul be redeemed, ultimately? Concannon insists the answer is no, but he argues that by paying attention both to why Paul can't be redeemed and what happens to interpreters who try, we can open up a space for Paul's archive to participate in the struggle for a more just future"--
Author: Aaron W. Hughes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190064978
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Controversies over how to define the word religion have persisted for decades. It is a term of art and of academic study, but also one of governance, technologies, and of networks; it is a concept whose diversity is often its own worst enemy. Religion is as much a fuzzy set of conceptualizations and generalizations about a range of human activities as it is an authorizing system of persons, ideas, and practices. What is Religion?: Debating the Academic Study of Religion invites readers to eavesdrop on scholarly debates over the limits of, and uses for, a word commonly used but infrequently defined in a precise manner. This volume takes the temperature of the modern field of Religious Studies by inviting a diverse group of scholars to offer their own substantive contribution that builds on the shared opening prompt, Religion is.... Their essays document the current state of the field and its various sub-fields, assess the progress that has been made over the past generation, and propose new directions for future work. Seventeen of the international field's leading scholars show how they work with each other's definition, or, sometimes, the lack of a definition. Of interest to students, scholars, and general readers alike, What is Religion? will provoke debate and provide insights into the state of the field.
Author: Vincent L. Wimbush
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199344396
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Characterizing Olaudah Equiano's eighteenth-century narrative of his life as a type of "scriptural story" that connects the Bible with identity formation, Vincent L. Wimbush's White Men's Magic probes not only how the Bible and its reading played a crucial role in the first colonial contacts between black and white persons in the North Atlantic but also the process and meaning of what he terms "scripturalization." By this term, Wimbush means a social-psychological-political discursive structure or "semiosphere" that creates a reality and organizes a society in terms of relations and communications. Because it is based on the particularities of Equiano's narrative, Wimbush's theoretical work is not only grounded but inductive, and shows that scripturalization is bigger than either the historical or the literary Equiano. Scripturalization was not invented by Equiano, he says, but it is not quite the same after Equiano.
Author: Ernest Wilson Nicholson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780199257836
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
But the Documentary Hypothesis should remain our primary point of reference, and it alone provides the most dependable perspective from which to approach this most difficult of areas in the study of the Old Testament.
Author: Bart D. Ehrman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195182502
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
Lost Scriptures offers an anthology of up-to-date and readable translations of many non-canonical writings from the centuries after Christ--texts that have for the most part been neglected or lost for nearly two millennia. Here is an array of remarkably varied writings from early Christian groups whose visions of Jesus differ dramatically from our contemporary understanding. Ehrman has included a general introduction, plus brief introductions to each piece. Lost Scriptures gives readers a vivid picture of the range of beliefs that battled each other in the first centuries of the Christian era. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in the Bible or the early Church.
