Footnotes

1 Howard Zinn,
Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice
(
New York
:
Perennial
,
2003
),
7
.
2 Cain Hope Felder, ed.,
Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation
(
Minneapolis
:
Fortress
,
1991
).
3 Felder,
“Introduction,”
in Felder,
Stony the Road
,
1
14
, here
1
2
.
4 Renita J. Weems,
“Reading Her Way through the Struggle: African American Women and the Bible,”
and Clarice J. Martin,
“The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in African American Biblical Interpretation: ‘Free Slaves’ and ‘Subordinate Women,’”
in Felder,
Stony the Road
,
57
77
and
206
31
, respectively. In addition to race and gender, both Weems and Martin also mention class as an important identity factor that functions to marginalize African American Women (Weems,
“Reading Her Way,”
58
,
59
; Martin,
“Haustafeln,”
208
9
,
218
n.
55
). I will return to the question of class in biblical interpretation later. For early articulations of intersectional analysis, see Kimberlé Crenshaw,
“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,”
University of Chicago Legal Forum
140
(
1989
):
139
67
; and Crenshaw,
“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,”
Stanford Law Review
43
(
1991
):
1241–99
.
5 Weems,
“Reading Her Way,”
58
.
6
Ibid.
,
59
.
7
Ibid.
,
62
.
8 In the published version of my dissertation, my explicit engagement with my reading contexts as an Asian American is limited to the concluding pages and only as a pointer for future explorations. See Tat-siong Benny Liew,
Politics of Parousia: Reading Mark Inter(con)textually
, BibInt 42 (
Leiden
:
Brill
,
1999
),
150
58
.
9 Tat-siong Benny Liew and Gale A. Yee, eds.,
The Bible in Asian America
, special issue, Semeia
90
91
(
2002
).
10 Vincent L. Wimbush, ed.,
African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Texture
(
New York
:
Continuum
,
2000
).
11 Tat-siong Benny Liew and Vincent L. Wimbush,
“Contact Zones and Zoning Contexts: From the Los Angeles ‘Riot’ to a New York Symposium,”
USQR
56
(
2002
):
21
40
.
12 See Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia, eds.,
They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism
, SemeiaSt 57 (
Atlanta
:
Society of Biblical Literature
,
2009
). The collaboration also resulted in the establishment of a new SBL program unit called
“Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation.”
13 Tat-siong Benny Liew,
“Queering Closets and Perverting Desires: Cross-examining John’s Engendering and Transgendering Word across Different Worlds,”
in Bailey, Liew, and Segovia,
They Were All Together
,
251
88
; in the same volume, see also Randall C. Bailey,
“‘That’s Why They Didn’t Call the Book Hadassah!’: The Interse(ct)/(x)ionality of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in the Book of Esther,”
227
50
.
14 Tat-siong Benny Liew,
“The Word of Bare Life: Workings of Death and Dream in the Fourth Gospel,”
in
Anatomies of Narrative Criticism: The Past, Present, and Futures of the Fourth Gospel as Literature
, ed. Tom Thatcher and Stephen D. Moore, RBS 55 (
Atlanta
:
Society of Biblical Literature
,
2008
),
167
93
. See Abdul R. JanMohamed,
The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death
, Post-contemporary Interventions (
Durham, NC
:
Duke University Press
,
2005
).
15 Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California
, American Crossroads 21 (
Berkeley
:
University of California Press
,
2007
),
28
. See also Dorothy Roberts,
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
(
New York
:
Vintage
,
1997
); Sharon Patricia Holland,
Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity
, New Americanists (
Durham, NC
:
Duke University Press
,
2000
); and Karla F. C. Holloway,
Passed On: African American Mourning Stories
(
Durham, NC
:
Duke University Press
,
2002
).
16 Vincent L. Wimbush,
“Preface,”
in Wimbush,
African Americans and the Bible
,
xiii
.
17 Michael Omi and Howard Winant,
Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s
, 2nd ed. (
New York
:
Routledge
,
1994
); Vincent L. Wimbush,
“Introduction: Knowing Ex-centrics/Ex-centric Knowing,”
in
Misreading America: Scriptures and Difference
, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (
New York
:
Oxford University Press
,
2013
),
1
4
.
18 Roland Barthes,
“Death of the Author,”
in
Image, Music, Text
, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, Fontana Communications Series (
London
:
Fontana
,
1977
),
142
48
.
19 See, e.g., James Clifford,
“On Ethnographic Authority,”
Representations
2
(
1983
):
118
46
; and Renato Rosaldo,
Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis
(
Boston
:
Beacon
,
1989
).
20 Tat-siong Benny Liew,
“Asian Americans, Bible Believers: An Ethnological Study,”
in Wimbush,
Misreading America
,
165
207
.
21 Gay L. Byron,
“Ancient Ethiopia and the New Testament: Ethnic (Con)texts and Racialized (Sub)texts,”
in Bailey, Liew, and Segovia,
They Were All Together
,
161
90
.
22 Vincent L. Wimbush,
White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery
(
New York
:
Oxford University Press
,
2012
),
87
.
23 Tat-siong Benny Liew,
“Journey-s to the West: (Re)Writing Scripts, Scriptures, and Scripturalization,”
in
Refractions of the Scriptural: Critical Orientation as Transgression
, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush, Routledge Studies in Religion 48 (
New York
:
Routledge
,
2016
),
121
38
.
24 Miguel A. De La Torre,
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins
, 2nd rev. ed. (
Maryknoll, NY
:
Orbis
,
2014
),
xi
.
25 Raquel Annette St. Clair,
Call and Consequences: A Womanist Reading of Mark
(
Minneapolis
:
Fortress
,
2008
).
26 Shanell T. Smith,
The Woman Babylon and the Marks of Empire: Reading Revelation with a Postcolonial Womanist Hermeneutics of Ambiveilence
, Emerging Scholars (
Minneapolis
:
Fortress
,
2014
).
27 bell hooks,
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
(
New York
:
Atria
,
2004
),
17
,
29
,
51
,
116
(emphasis added).
28 St. Clair,
Call and Consequences
,
8
9
. See also Martin,
“Haustafeln,”
221
; and Smith,
Woman Babylon
,
3
,
92
,
174
.
29 Among womanist scholars, see Hortense J. Spilers,
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”
Diacritics
17
(
1987
):
64
81
; and Sharon Patricia Holland,
The Erotic Life of Racism
(
Durham, NC
:
Duke University Press
,
2012
).
30 See, e.g., Zakiyyah Iman Jackson,
“Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human,’”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
21
(
2015
):
215
18
; and Diana Leong,
“The Mattering of Black Lives: Octavia Butler’s Hyperempathy and the Promise of the New Materialisms,”
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
2
(
2016
):
1
35
.
31 bell hooks,
Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies
(
New York
:
Routledge
,
1996
),
91
,
157
,
160
62
.
32 See, e.g., Michel Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977
, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (
New York
:
Pantheon
,
1980
); and Sandra Harding, ed.,
The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies
(
New York
:
Routledge
,
2004
).
33 W. E. B. Du Bois,
Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil
(
New York
:
Harcourt, Brace & Howe
,
1920
),
29
.
34 Since I am interested in making only a general comment and critique about the guild of biblical studies, I withhold the identity of these specific texts and their authors to prevent any misunderstandings.
35 Referencing another scholar’s work should signify, of course, real engagement rather than a polite exchange, though the lack of reference to black scholarship by non-black scholars (when the reverse is hardly the case) reminds me of the opening scene in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk regarding how a tall white female newcomer to the schoolhouse in New England refused to exchange visiting cards with him when he was a young boy, which led him to a deep sense of the “vast veil” that separated him from the white world (The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 3rd ed. [
Chicago
:
A. C. McClurg
,
1903
],
2
3
).
36 James Baldwin,
“Stranger in the Village,”
in
Notes of a Native Son
(
Boston
:
Beacon
,
1955
),
175
.
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