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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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2017
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