African Biblical Studies: Unmasking Embedded Racism and Colonialism in Biblical Studies

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Andrew M. Mbuvi makes the case for African biblical studies as a vibrant and important emerging distinct discipline, while also using its postcolonial optic to critique biblical studies for its continued underlying racially and imperialistically motivated tendencies. Mbuvi argues that the emergence of biblical studies as a discipline in the West coincides with, and benefits from, the establishment of the colonial project that included African colonization. At the heart of the colonial project was the Bible, not only as ferried by missionaries, who often espoused racialized views, to convert heathens in the distant lands, but as the text used in the racialized justification of the colonial violence. Interpretive approaches established within these racist and colonialist matrices continue to dominate the discipline, perpetuating racialized interpretive methodology and frameworks. On these grounds, Mbuvi makes the case that the continued marginalization of non-western approaches is a reflection of the continuing colonialist structure and presuppositions in the discipline of biblical studies. African Biblical Studies not only exposes and critiques these persistent oppressive and subjugating tendencies but showcases how African postcolonial methodologies and studies, that prioritize readings from the perspective of the marginalized and oppressed, offer an alternative framework for the discipline. These readings, while destabilizing and undermining the predominantly white Euro-American approaches and their ingrained prejudices, and problematizing the biblical text itself, posit the need for biblical interpretation that is anti-colonial and anti-racist.

Reviews

After outlining some of the connections between the emergence of the discipline of biblical studies and European colonialism, Andrew Mbuvi offers a wide-ranging and richly informed survey of key approaches in African biblical studies. In doing so, he not only presents a challenge to the field, to move beyond the models of biblical studies that are shaped by their colonial origins, but also illustrates some of the ways in which this decolonising of biblical studies might proceed. As such, the volume should be of interest and value to all who practise biblical studies today. * David G. Horrell, University of Exeter, UK *
In African Biblical Studies, Andrew Mbuvi offers an engaging diachronic and synchronic analysis of theoretical, methodological, exegetical, and hermeneutical questions at the intersection of colonialism, modern biblical studies, and African hermeneutics. While unmasking racist and colonial ideologies and methodological assumptions of universal standards, which functioned to marginalize or discredit Africans interpretive agency and presence in the field of biblical studies, Mbuvis generative work is most evident in his sustained engagement with the works of African theologians, literary critics, ritual theorists, biblical scholars, and ordinary readers to theorize and describe African Biblical Studies as emerging from, and geared towards, multiple centers of interpretive inquiry, analyses, methodologies, and meaning-making; the antidote and alternative to the colonial and racist binary of center-periphery. African Biblical Studies is not about the application of the Bible to African realities; it is a lucid description and demonstration of what happens when African cultures, histories, theologies, rituals, biblical interpretations, genders and patriarchal systems are critically engaged in the service of decolonizing biblical studies and decolonizing Africa. * Kenneth Ngwa, Drew University, USA *
The claimed normativity and universality of Euro-American centric biblical interpretations together with Biblical studies as a discipline with colonialist, imperialist and racist structural underpinnings are exposed, resisted and challenged by Andrew Mutua Mbuvi in this exciting volume. He very ably presents African Biblical Studies(ABS) as a postcolonial enterprise aiming at decolonizing colonial structures, colonized peoples and colonized texts by elevating African cultures, peoples, languages, histories/herstories and traditions as subjects and optics of interpretation with a view to giving an alternative vision of Biblical studies as a discipline, arguing, If all interpretations are contextual, the unacknowledged myth of universal biblical studies in the West should cease to exist A must read for all biblical scholars, students and theologians keen at reclaiming the discipline of Biblical Studies for the historically marginalized non-Western readers and practitioners, especially those of African descent. * Madipoane Masenya (Ngwana Mphahlele), University of South Africa, South Africa *
Decolonizing and exorcising the demon of racism in academic biblical studies is imperative, Andrew Mbuvi demonstrates. Mbuvis African Biblical Studies volume takes the reader along a devastating journey into the roots and many folds of academic biblical studies, demonstrating its entanglement with modern colonialism and its racist roots. Enlightenment thought, its philosophers and Bible translators, who were fully baptized into colonial and racist thought, were/are the foundation of modern academic biblical studies. The volume thus calls academic biblical studies into self-interrogationa self-investigation into its methods of reading, translation, teaching and relationship with our cultures, religions, capitalism, neo-liberalism, and other global structures of oppression. This volume is a must-read for all academic scholars and students! * Musa W. Dube, Emory University, USA *
Simultaneously a sharp academic critique and a visionary proposal from living Global South communities, African Biblical Studies is an extraordinary epistemological proposal. Andrew Mutua Mbvui shows not only the deep entanglement of the field of biblical studies with ongoing coloniality but also the well-documented sources of its resistance through a deep and creative creolization of knowledge. Intellectually erudite, rhetorically insightful, and politically committed, this book should become a landmark in contemporary postcolonial struggles, even beyond biblical studies. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Biblical Studies, African Biblical Hermeneutics, Postcolonial Studies, Christianity in the Global South, and Race, Religion and Globalization. * Santiago Slabodsky, Hofstra University, USA *

Author Bio

Andrew M. Mbuvi is Visiting NEH Chair in Humanities and Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Albright College, Pennsylvania, USA.