POSTCOLONIAL BIBLICAL CRITICISM INTERDISCIPLINARY INTERSECTIONS Edited by Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia Other volumes in the series: The Postcolonial Bible, éd. R.S. Sugirtharajah Vernacular Hermeneutics, ed. R.S. Sugirtharajah Interpreting Beyond Borders, ed. Fernando F. Segovia Last Stop Before Antarctica: The Bible and Postcolonialism in Australia, Roland Boer John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power, eds. Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey L. Staley THE BIBLE AND POSTCOLONIALISM Series Editor: R.S. Sugirtharajah Editorial Board: Fernando Segovia, Kwok Pui-lan, Sharon Ringe, Ralph Broadbent and Marcella Althaus-Reid T&.T CLARK INTERNATIONAL A Continuum imprint LONDON • NEW YORK Published by T&T Clark International A Continuum imprint The Tower Building, 15 East 26th Street, 11 York Road, Suite 1703, London SEI 7NX New York, NY 10010 www.tandtclark.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Copyright © Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia, 2005 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by Tradespools, Frome, Somerset Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 0567084396 (hardback) CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi List of Contributors vii POSTCOLONIAL BIBLICAL CRITICISM. BEGINNINGS, TRAJECTORIES, INTERSECTIONS Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F, Segovia 1 MAPPING THE POSTCOLONIAL OPTIC IN BIBLICAL CRITICISM: MEANING AND SCOPE Fernando F. Segovia 23 QUESTIONS OF BIBLICAL AMBIVALENCE AND AUTHORITY UNDER A TREE OUTSIDE DELHI; OR, THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN Stephen D. Moore 79 GOSPEL HAUNTiNGS: THE POSTCOLONIAL DEMONS OF NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM Laura E. Donaldson 97 MARGINS and (CmriNG-)EDGES. ON THE (IL)LEGITIMACY AND INTERSECTIONS OF RACE, ETHNICITY, AND (POST)COLONIALISM Tat-siong Benny Liew 114 MARX, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND THE BIBLE Roland Boer 166 'VERY LIMITED IDEOLOGICAL OPTIONS': MARXISM AND BIBLICAL STUDIES IN POSTCOLONIAL SCENES David Jobling 184 Index of Authors 202 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This volume has been made possible as a result of the assistance and support of a good number of people, to whom we are deeply indebted and most thankful. First and foremost, thanks are due to all those who kindly accepted the invitation to serve as contributors to the project. Second, to Professor R.S. Sugirtharajah, General Editor of this series on 'The Bible and Postcolonialism', for his gracious invitation to submit the volume for inclusion in this distinguished series. Third, to Dean James Hudnut- Beumler of the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University for his unreserved backing of the project and much appreciated support toward editorial expenses. Fourth, to the Revd. James A. Metzger, who, as a doctoral student in New Testament and Early Christianity within the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University, served as editorial assistant for the project, for his superb editing of the project. Fifth, to Lynne S. Darden, who, as a doctoral student in New Testament and Early Christianity at Drew University, served as research assistant for the project, for ably compiling the index. Finally, to the entire staff of T&T Clark International. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Roland Boer, Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology, Monash University, Victoria, Australia Laura E. Donaldson, Department of English, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA David Jobling, St. Andrew's College, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada Tat-siong Benny Liew, Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, USA Stephen D. Moore, The Theological School, Drew University, Madison, NJ, USA Fernando F. Segovia, The Divinity School, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA This page intentionally left blank POSTCOLONIAL BIBLICAL CRITICISM: BEGINNINGS, TRAJECTORIES, INTERSECTIONS Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia The origins of the present volume go back a few years—to be precise, to the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and the months that followed. In the course of that meeting, the two of us discussed the possibility of launching a consultation that would bring together for mutual engagement and fertilization the discourses of Biblical Studies and Cultural Studies. We had both been working, in different contexts and from different perspectives, on such interaction, toward the development of a cultural biblical criticism,1 and we thought that a program unit within the context of the Annual Meetings would allow us to do so in sustained and collective fashion. This idea we pursued in earnest through the remainder of 1997 and into the early months of 1998. While agreed on the overall focus for such a consultation, a beginning exploration into the nature and parameters of a biblical criticism informed and guided by Cultural Studies, the question of a specific angle of inquiry and a proper nomenclature for it soon forced itself upon us. What had been conceived in general terms had to be narrowed down. In effect, within the Society at that time, a program unit bearing the designation 'Cultural Studies' in its title was already in existence. What had begun as a three-year consultation on Gender and Cultural Criticism (1993-1995), under the leadership of Alice Bach and J. Cheryl Exum, had petitioned, successfully, in 1996 to become a section, changing its name in the process to The Bible and Cultural Studies. While the rationale and aims of our envisioned consultation were not the same as those of this 1. In April of 1997, Moore, along with J. Cheryl Exum, had convened an international colloquium on the topic of'Biblical into Cultural Studies' at the University of Sheffield, under the auspices of the Centre for Biblical and Cultural Studies. The colloquium papers were published the following year, in a co-edited volume entitled Biblical Studies ¡Cultural Studies (Exum and Moore 1998b). For this volume Moore co-authored with Exum the introduction, by the same title, with a focus on the history of Cultural Studies and its implications for biblical criticism (Exum and Moore 1998a; see also Moore 1998). In October of 1993, Segovia, along with Mary Ann Tolbert, had organized an international conference on the theme of 'Reading from This Place' at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. The conference papers appeared in 1995, under the title of Reading from This Place. Volume 2: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective (Segovia and Tolbert 1995b). In this volume Segovia had two pieces, the introduction and a position paper, on a cultural studies approach to biblical criticism (Segovia 1995a, 1995b).