Interpreting Revelation through African American Cultural Studies

Author(s):  
Thomas B. Slater

African American scholarship on Revelation makes fruitful use of cultural studies as a discipline. This approach draws on the field of sociology, social history, literature, anthropology, linguistics, and other cultural markers. As a method for biblical interpretation it values both the ancient context and the current cultural contexts of readers, and is open to multiple interpretations. This essay considers the various ways Revelation has functioned in African American congregations, the impact of Liberation theology, womanist and postcolonial perspectives, and the notion that Revelation is subversive or resistance literature. Attention is given to similarities and differences between African American scholars concerning Revelation’s political perspective, its approach to identity construction, and the way in which the book might engage current readers.

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-439
Author(s):  
Stephen Best

Walter Ong published Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in 1982, synthesizing his career-long concern with the impact of the shift from orality to literacy on various cultures. Scholars of African American literary and cultural studies were coming to redefine their field around the terms orality and literacy at around the same time that Ong published his book; but where Ong stressed historical change or the fall from orality to literacy, African Americanists tended to accent their mutual mediation. This article explores the way that African Americanists, in stressing mediation, return orality and literacy to the concerns of Ong’s ostensible field: media studies.


Author(s):  
Brynne D. Ovalle ◽  
Rahul Chakraborty

This article has two purposes: (a) to examine the relationship between intercultural power relations and the widespread practice of accent discrimination and (b) to underscore the ramifications of accent discrimination both for the individual and for global society as a whole. First, authors review social theory regarding language and group identity construction, and then go on to integrate more current studies linking accent bias to sociocultural variables. Authors discuss three examples of intercultural accent discrimination in order to illustrate how this link manifests itself in the broader context of international relations (i.e., how accent discrimination is generated in situations of unequal power) and, using a review of current research, assess the consequences of accent discrimination for the individual. Finally, the article highlights the impact that linguistic discrimination is having on linguistic diversity globally, partially using data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and partially by offering a potential context for interpreting the emergence of practices that seek to reduce or modify speaker accents.


2007 ◽  
Vol 177 (4S) ◽  
pp. 95-95
Author(s):  
Atreya Dash ◽  
Peng Lee ◽  
Qin Zhou ◽  
Aaron D. Berger ◽  
Jerome Jean-Gilles ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Ayman Abu-Shomar

This article discusses how Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and aesthetics, are developed in tandem with the discourse of diaspora and exilic consciousness leading to critical praxis. It traces the interactions between exilic consciousness and identity construction in the context of resistance literature. These interactions exhibit the author's ability to be inside and outside discourses of struggle producing a model in which exile challenges bigoted struggles, hence the evolution of critical praxis. In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Abulhawa represents another humanistic voice that resists dominant political narratives by dismantling their hegemonic power structure.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-273
Author(s):  
Katrina Daly Thompson

Through my own narrative about my relationship with my fictive father in Zanzibar and the impact of this relationship on my research, in this autoethnographic essay I explore three themes: fictiveness, fatherhood, and the field. These themes tie together different aspects of the term “patriography,” linking them to ethnography and its subgenre autoethnography. Drawing on the term “patriography” as the science or study of fathers, I use the concept of “the field” to examine the impact of narratives about fathers on not only the field as a site of ethnographic research but also on the field of African cultural studies.


NASPA Journal ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Guiffrida

The importance of connections with peers to student development and retention has been highlighted in Astin's (1984) Theory of Student Involvement and Tinto's (1993) Theory of Student Departure, which are two of the most widely referenced and validated models in student affairs literature. However, recent research has questioned the applicability of these models to African American students who attend predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Although prior research has indicated that the models should be modified to recognize the importance of students’ relationships with their families, research has failed to understand the impact of relationships with friends from home. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the conditions under which friends from home were perceived as assets or liabilities to 99 African American undergraduates who attended a PWI. The results provide a link for broadening the applicability of Astin’s and Tinto's models and offer student affairs practitioners deeper insight into African American students' experiences at PWIs.


Author(s):  
K. K. Yeo

This chapter challenges the ‘received’ view that traces the expansion of the dominant theologies of the European and North American colonial powers and their missionaries into the Majority World. When they arrived, these Westerners found ancient Christian traditions and pre-existing spiritualities, linguistic and cultural forms, which questioned their Eurocentric presumptions, and energized new approaches to interpreting the sacred texts of Christianity. The emergence of ‘creative tensions’ in global encounters are a mechanism for expressing (D)issent against attempts to close down or normalize local Bible-reading traditions. This chapter points to the elements which establish a creative tension between indigenizing Majority World approaches to the Bible and those described in the ‘orthodox’ narrative, including: self-theologizing and communal readings; concepts of the Spirit world and human flourishing; the impact of multiple contexts, vernacular languages, sociopolitical and ethno-national identities, and power/marginalization structures; and ‘framing’ public and ecological issues.


Author(s):  
Nisha P R

Jumbos and Jumping Devils is an original and pioneering exploration of not only the social history of the subcontinent but also of performance and popular culture. The domain of analysis is entirely novel and opens up a bolder approach of laying a new field of historical enquiry of South Asia. Trawling through an extraordinary set of sources such as colonial and post-colonial records, newspaper reports, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, photographs, and oral interviews, the author brings out a fascinating account of the transnational landscape of physical cultures, human and animal performers, and the circus industry. This book should be of interest to a wide range of readers from history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies to analysts of history of performance and sports in the subcontinent.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document