Politization of Bibles and Biblization of Politics: Brotherhood[s]/Fraternity, Sisterhood[s]/Fraternity.In recent years we have focused on various ways and means used by communities for adapting “their” bibles for political ends, in the widest signification of “political”, the past as well as the present. Continuing our project of investigating how bibles are conceived today, and how they are defined and enlisted for shaping societies and for remembering the future, be those societies religious or secular, last year we examined notions and methodologies employed for reading biblical “families”. Concluding that biblical “families” are largely defined by scholars as well as “ordinary” readers according to their contemporaneous needs and wishes, we now extend our inquiry into one aspect of familial reality and metaphor: that of fraternity, sorority, brotherhood and sisterhood. Our goal in this session is to trace how, why, when and by whom kinship terms get abstracted into other social and ideological realities, already in the Jewish and Christian bibles and beyond them.
Paper proposals are invited on and around these topics, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. When papers are in dialogue with postcolonial discourse, queer studies, empire studies, international relations studies, subaltern studies, and related methodological-theoretical approaches, they will be particularly welcome. Drafts of papers will be posted about a month before the conference on Athalya’s homepage, http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/a.brenner/page3.html. During the session, papers will be summarized in panel fashion in order to leave ample time for a general discussion.