Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity: Intersectional Approaches to Constructed Identity and Early Christian Texts

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Description

Nonwhite women primarily appear as marginalized voices, if at all, in volumes that address constructions of race/ethnicity and early Christian texts. Employing an intersectional approach, the contributors analyze historical, cultural, literary, and ideological constructions of racial/ethnic identities, which intersect with gender/sexuality class, religion, slavery, and/or power. Given their small numbers in academic biblical studies, this book represents a critical mass of nonwhite women scholars and offers a critique of dominant knowledge production. Filling a significant epistemological gap, this seminal text provides provocative, innovative, and critical insights into constructions of race/ethnicity in ancient and modern texts and contexts.

Reviews

This volume is an urgently needed intervention into New Testament scholarship. First, it highlights the work of women of color within New Testament Studies, despite the structural racism that has produced a guild that is by vast majority male and white. Second, it acknowledges the recent surge of scholarship on ethnicity and race in the Classics and in the study of early Christianity, and exceeds them, offering historical ideas of race or ethnicity, and also intersectional analyses that balance past texts and present realities. These essays take seriously the experiences and critical scholarly analyses of women of color and open up new ways of understanding New Testament texts. -- Laura Nasrallah, Yale Divinity School
Wow. Six womenAfrican American, Asian American, and Asiancollaborate to produce essays on key New Testament texts sensitive to the intersections of race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality. The work is unapologetically ideological, theoretically sophisticated, focused on the materiality of bodies, embodied voices, performance, and the relevance of both ancient and modern contexts. A milestone. -- Shelly Matthews, Brite Divinity School

Employing disparate methodologies with great sophistication, the volume offers unique perspectives that are deeply disruptive and profoundly formative. Contributors read the texts astutely and engage issues of race and ethnicity in powerful ways. A must-read in this political context.

Author Bio

Mitzi J. Smith is the J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. and author of Toward Decentering the New Testament: A Reintroduction.

Jin Young Choi is professor of New Testament and Christian Origins and the Baptist Missionary Training School Professorial Chair for Biblical Studies at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and author of Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark.