Religious Studies News

As a Latino biblical critic of the United States-Mexico Borderlands, I avail myself of the wide methodological repertoire at work in the diverse ideology-critical approaches, variously adapting such methods from the standpoint of and toward the ends of Latino/a reality and experience. Nevertheless, what remains absent for me in dominant scholarship is a collective complicity in the invention, celebration, and dissemination of hegemonic discourses that deploy mechanisms of “otherness,” alterity, and exclusion. I am encouraged, however, that this ideological ruse has not gone unnoticed by other marginalized people of color in the guild of biblical studies within the United States and abroad. Indeed, those contributing to a joint counter-space in which the objective is to interrogate dominant concepts and those rummaging around the site of interpretation in search of constructions of “otherness” are the racialized ethnic writers of the book They Were All Together in One Place?: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Bailey, Randall C., et. al., eds. Society of Biblical Literature, 2009). Beyond just blurring the boundaries of hegemonic categories of race, this emerging interracial-ethnic coalition gives us a vigorous critic of the methodological limitations that result from the insularity of the scientific ethos of academic biblical studies.

An interracial ethnic disciplinary alliance not only provides different ways of reading biblical texts, but also creates a site of resistance wherein meaning is collaboratively negotiated, so as to avoid falling prey to dominant mythology. A coalition focused on generating comparative studies of “migration, exile, and diaspora; border and borderlands between (nation-) states; minority and dominant groups; othering via ethnicization and racialization; the political economy of globalization” (Bailey, 30) can help move us to a stronger position from which to counteract the rhetorical and material attacks on scholars and students of color in the academy.

Helpful to our joint task of criticism is what Juan Flores calls a “grassroots, vernacular, ‘from below’ approach.” For Flores, reading texts “from below” renders visible “the many diaspora experiences that diverge from those of the relatively privileged, entrepreneurial, or professional transnational connections that have tended to carry the greatest appeal in scholarly and journalistic coverage” (Flores, 25). Guiding this approach, adds Flores, is an irrevocable commitment to the subaltern and daily struggles of the poor and disenfranchised people, which, in turn, “allows for special insights into ongoing issues of racial identity and gender inequalities that are so often ignored or minimized in the grand narratives of transnational hegemony.” (Ibid). To dismiss texts “from below” conversely empowers texts “from above,” whereby the prevailing structure of cultural imposition and domination are reinforced (153).  
 
Listening to the voice of the “Other,” however, represents only one of many vantage points needed to reconfigure the epistemic apparatus of biblical studies. I agree with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza that our attention must also turn to “the genealogy of modern scientific biblical studies since disciplinary genealogy shapes disciplinary identity” (242). This involves, for Bailey, Liew, and Segovia, “an intensive critical gazing on dominant criticism…searching around and ferreting out the submerged context and perspective of dominant criticism” (Bailey, 27). By contextualizing the discipline of biblical criticism, attempts can be made to interrogate the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline that reinforce non-Western “otherness.” This tedious line-by-line sieving of dominant texts, discourses, and modes of interpretation requires expanding the area of studies to include not only cultural and ideology-critical approaches, but also archival studies. 

The interethnic alliance of the field is not, finally, without dangers. How do we listen to the voices of the racialized “Other” amid the risks of enacting symbolic and epistemic violence? How do we resist tendencies towards the development of orthodoxies and codified vocabulary? How might we avoid contributing to a form of intellectual imperialism in which superficial understandings of other cultures define debates about identity and politics?