Semeia articles from January 1 2001

Semeia archives from January 1 2001

Introduction: Vanishing Mediators?
January 1, 2001... The promise of postcolonial theory seems to operate in a direct ratio to its limits. For it is remarkable how "postcolonial theory," the breakthrough enabled by Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, has spread through the disciplines...

The Book Eaters: Textuality, Modernity, and the London Missionary Society.
January 1, 2001... ABSTRACT This essay works from the nineteenth-century textual archive of the London Missionary Society (LMS) toward contemporary issues within postcolonial theory. Its historical narrative is situated in the early LMS missions to the...

Before the Second Reformation: Nineteenth-Century Aboriginal Mediations of the Bible in Van Diemen's Land.
January 1, 2001... ABSTRACT Adapting theories of dialogism developed by Russian theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and V. N. Volosinov, this paper points to an analogy between pre-Reformation and early colonial structures of power and knowledge. In both cases,...

Explorer Hermeneutics, or Fat Damper and Sweetened Tea. (1).
January 1, 2001... ABSTRACT Following the texts of the so-called "explorers" of Australia--Mitchell, Sturt, Stuart, Eyre, Grey, and Giles-I show how their constructions of Australia were determined in large measure by the Bible and Christianity. Apart from...

Surveying the Promised Land: Elizabeth Jolley's Milk and Honey.
January 1, 2001... ABSTRACT The Bible proved a significant resource for European imperialism both in aiding colonisers to impose their own culture on those they conquered and in justifying their annexation and administration of other peoples' territory....

Which Good Book? Missionary Education and Conversion in Colonial India.
January 1, 2001... ABSTRACT The following essay in postcolonial criticism narrates the tale of how an attempt to accommodate to colonial "difference" led to a slippage of meaning, which in turn produced an outcome altogether different from that which had...

A Pisgah Sight of Ireland: Religious Embodiment and Colonialism in Ulysses.
January 1, 2001... ABSTRACT This paper explores Joyce's use of biblical allegory in a postcolonial vein. Through a dense array of biblical citations in Ulysses, Joyce uses the ancient image of Jews in Egypt as a figure for colonial Ireland. At the broadest...

In Praise of Polytheism.
January 1, 2001... ABSTRACT How much is Western intellectual work, in philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, inspired and energised by creation stories? In this essay, I explore Freud's famously idiosyncratic Moses and Monotheism, where the great...

The Word Set in Blood and Stone: The Book of God From Tribes to Kingdoms and Nations.
January 1, 2001... ABSTRACT Evocation of the Bible has always played a role in nation formation and continues even in these late-modern secular times. On the return of the Stone of Destiny to postcolonial Scotland on St. Andrew's Day, 1996, a ceremony was...

A Real Presence, Subsumed by Others: The Bible in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts. (Response).
January 1, 2001... IN THE BEGINNING: THE BIBLE AND THE BATLHAPING The bible being on the table gave occasion to explain the nature and use of a book, particularly of that book--how it informed us of God, who made all things; and of the beginning of all...