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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.
African Americans' unique encounter with the Bible has shaped centuries of spirituality and the social engagement of a whole continent. In The Bible and African Americans, highly respected biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush outlines different ways African Americans read the Bible. The Bible offered a language-world--a place that held the stories where they could retreat and imagine themselves as something different than they were--through which African Americans have negotiated the strange land into which they were thrust. Wimbush outlines six African American readings that correspond to different historical periods. He details the various responses to these historical situations and how they helped shape a collective self-understanding. In this important and concise book, Wimbush demonstrates how the Bible empowered African Americans with agency and social power, still true today. When their voices were taken away, the Bible offered a way to speak again.
"The unique encounter of African Americans with the Bible has shaped centuries of the spirituality and social engagement of a whole continent. Highly respected biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush here outlines five phases of African American biblical reading and shows how the language of the Bible enabled African Americans to negotiate the strange world into which they were thrust."--Jacket.
In this text the author ties the life of the Bible to the wider history of slavery and transatlantic movements by studying the encounter between the North Atlantic and Black African worlds.
Historically, religious scriptures are defined as holy texts that are considered to be beyond the abilities of the layperson to interpret. Their content is most frequently analyzed by clerics who do not question the underlying political or social implications of the text, but use the writing to convey messages to their congregations about how to live a holy existence. In Western society, moreover, what counts as scripture is generally confined to the Judeo-Christian Bible, leaving the voices of minorities, as well as the holy texts of faiths from Africa and Asia, for example, unheard. In this innovative collection of essays that aims to turn the traditional bible-study definition of scriptur...
Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models "scriptural studies" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. This critical historical and ethnographic project is focused on scriptures/scripturalization/scripturalizing as shorthand for the (psycho-cultural and socio-political) "work" we make language do for and to us. Each essay focuses on an instance of or situation involving such work, engaging with the Bible, Book of Mormon, Bhagavata Purana, and other sacred texts, artifacts, and practices in order to explore historical and ongoing constructions of the human. Contributors use the category of "scriptures"—understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language—as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis. The significance of the collection lies in the window it opens to the rich and complex view of the highs and lows of human-(un-)making as it establishes the connections between a seemingly basic and apolitical religious category and a set of larger social-cultural phenomena and dynamics.
The Bible and the American Myth challenges the academic study of the Bible to orient itself to cultural criticism. The essays model an approach to the study of the Bible that entails efforts to fathom not only the meanings of texts, but the role of texts in the construction of meaning. It is all the more fascinating and poignant that the essayists are students of theology of varied backgrounds. What they have in common is the pursuit of theological studies at the mouth of Harlem. This location at the turn of the century inspired them to think differently about the focus and agenda of theological studies, especially biblical studies. Each essayist is convinced that the study of the Bible should entail the study of cultural construction and deconstruction, the study of the making and unmaking of cultural myths that shape existence.
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.
In this text 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 centre- 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
A unique study of how the Bible "constructs" African Americans and how African Americans "construct" the bibleFrom literature and the arts to popular culture and everyday life, the Bible courses through black society and culture. Despite the enormous recent surge of interest in African American religion, scant attention has been paid to the diversity of ways in which African Americans have utilized the Bible. African Americans and the Bible is the fruit of a four-year collaborative research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush and funded by the Lilly Endowment. It brings together scholars and experts (sixty-eight in all) from a wide range of academic and artistic fields and disciplines-inc...