Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies

Call For Papers: The Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies Section is soliciting papers for three sessions at the 2016 Annual Meeting. (1) The first session, co-sponsored with the African Biblical Hermeneutics Section and the African Association for the Study of Religion, will address the theoretical and practical intersections between postcolonial theory, religion, and biblical studies in Africa. The session will consist of both invited papers and open submissions. Proposals are welcome on any aspect of the question as long as they focus squarely on contemporary practices in Africa. (2) The second session, co-sponsored with the Rhetoric and the New Testament Section, will focus on analyzing the connections and distinctions between the discourses, methodologies, and terminologies of "liberationist," "postcolonial," and "empire-critical" biblical scholarship." Papers that deal with these topics from the vantage point of New Testament studies are preferred, but proposals pertaining to the Hebrew Bible will also be considered. (3) The third session, co-sponsored with the Bible and Contextual Studies Section, is titled "Scriptural Colonialism: Rethinking the Conjunction of Missionary Activities, Colonialism, and the Bible." Given the location of the 2016 meeting in San Antonio and the prominent remains of Spanish colonial missions as well as the Alamo, we invite papers that examine how scriptures (iincluding specific scriptural texts) have been deployed in, taken up into, transformed by, or informed missionary activities and missionary colonialism. We are especially interested in papers that rethink scriptures in colonial religious projects around the world, including Spanish missionary colonialism and U.S. Manifest Destiny, but we also welcome papers that (a) use missionary colonial histories and practices to rethink and reinterpret Jewish and Christian biblical texts or (b) attend to colonial legacies in more recent and contemporary practices of scriptural interpretation.

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