Political Biblical Criticism

Call For Papers: For 2023 we welcome papers with two foci: first, at a disciplinary level, we invite contributions that center, both methodologically and theoretically, epistemologies from the Global South. Under this focus, we could imagine papers centered on “the Bible” within local contexts, theoretical critiques of Enlightenment/Modernist biblical studies, epistemologies attentive to the ethos of doing biblical scholarship, decolonial and postcolonial biblical pedagogies, etc. Second, at a political level, we are looking to for contributions that center Blackness and black knowledge broadly construed as well as scholarship describing the implications of such centering. Contributions could include examinations of what we even mean by “the Bible” in Black contexts, Black radical critiques of biblical studies, the place of the Bible and/or scriptures in global negotiations of Blackness and anti-Blackness, the role of biblical arguments in the marginalization of blackness or the centering of whiteness, how biblical exegesis contributed to the Apartheid, how segregation and the political struggles for liberation draw from or dismiss specific biblical events, the role of (South)Africa and its biblical interpreters in shifting discussions about peace, war, conflict in the Bible, etc.

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