“Ain’t Nobody Gone Take It from You!”

Dance, in both its historical formulations during the slave trade and its contemporary manifestations in carnival celebrations, has enormous significance for numerous Caribbean cultures. Using some biblical texts to think with (2 Sam 6: 14; Song 6: 13), this paper explores the historical and contemporary event of Junkanoo as a reflection of Bahamian culture and its interaction with colonialism and contemporary tourism. Junkanoo is not explicitly biblical or religious, though it does show the marks and tussles of colonization and hence Christianization. The biblical moments of movement and resistance considered here frame dance in various and interesting ways—as the vehicle for emotional expression, as liberation, as licensed revolt, as the tool of empire—allowing for exploration of dance as a multi-valent, political act, as much as a powerful reflection of affect.

Ehud, Stigma, and the Management of Spoiled Identity

The story of Ehud, and his assassination of the Moabite King Eglon (Judges 3: 12–30), continues to entertain readers and hearers alike. The story also perplexes, largely on moral grounds. This paper utilises the sociology of Erving Goffman and insights from disability studies to re-tell the story of Ehud as someone who is doubly stigmatised. That is, Ehud not only carriers the stigma of left-handedness but is also disabled; moreover, the Moabite King is also disabled/immobile because of his obesity. I take the biblical text as conveying that Ehud is left-handed by necessity given the impairment in his right hand/arm. Adopting a social model of disability, I apply Goffman’s account of the management of spoiled identity developed in his book Stigma (1963) to explore how the narrative depicts various dimensions of social stigma and Ehud’s moral career as he attempts to manage his spoiled identity and the degrees of societal acceptance and rejection he experiences in different contexts. The key arguments of Goffman are summarised before I apply central concepts from Goffman to the biblical story. Concepts include “moral career,” the distinction between social, personal and ego (self-) identity, and the key distinction between a person with a stigma being discredited (because the impairment is obvious and seen by all), on the one hand, or bearing a stigma that is discreditable (that is, it would discredit them if found out), on the other.

An Ass in a Lion’s Skin

The book of Genesis gives two opposing portraits of Judah’s masculinity. On the one hand, he is shown as the leader of Jacob’s sons, and on the other he is ridiculed by his daughter-in-law. Is Judah an ass in a lion’s skin? This article explores Judah’s antithetical masculinities as examples of the inherently unstable nature of gender construction. Although Judah is only the fourth son of Jacob, he is expressly depicted in Genesis as assuming a leadership role in relation to his brothers, including speaking up against killing Joseph, negotiating with his father regarding Joseph’s demand that Benjamin be brought down to Egypt, and pleading with Joseph for Benjamin’s life. In Genesis 49: 8–12, Judah receives the most favourable treatment of all Jacob’s sons. The blessing of Jacob from his deathbed portrays Judah’s hegemonic masculinity at its finest. However, in Genesis 38, Judah’s masculine performance far from ideal biblical masculinity. Not only does Judah lack persuasiveness when he accuses Tamar, but she is able to persuade him that his own actions were wrong. Judah is deceived, specifically deceived by a woman. The shame he wants to attribute to Tamar rebounds on himself. In the end, he acknowledges himself to be less righteous than Tamar (Gen 38: 26). The episode as a whole reveals that Judah does not have control of his family. Genesis 38 clearly subverts Judah’s hegemonic masculinity. What are the rhetorical effects of this subversion of Judah’s hegemonic gender construction? Jacob speaks of Judah as a lion, but in Genesis 38 he seems to have been portrayed in the role of the ass.

Mobilizing the Social Power of Iconic and Performative Texts for Justice and Reform

In the ten years of its existence, SCRIPT has succeeded in promoting and publishing an increasing variety of scholarship on iconic and performative texts. Culturally specific studies have provided the basis for comparative theorizing about the phenomena. This body of scholarship has put us in a better position to analyze current events involving iconic books and performative texts. It can also enable us to make creative suggestions for strengthening movements for justice and social reform by ritualizing iconic and performative texts. Here, I provide three examples of how to employ SCRIPT research to strengthen contemporary movements for social and environmental justice: a short-term episodic intervention, a medium-term structural rectification, and a long-term cultural innovation.

Eve as Cyborg

The essay argues that the figure of the female cyborg introduced by Donna Haraway has yet to live up to its post-gender emancipatory promise. Both Haraway and Jack Halberstam contrast the female cyborg with the biblical Eve and her mythic origins in the garden of Eden. I argue that the figure of Eve is actually an ancient precursor to the female cyborg. Even more than the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the Eden myth shares common elements with later stories of man-made women. Like them, Eve was made to satisfy male desire, but then followed her own desires. Like later stories of female cyborgs, the representation of Eve reflects both male desire and male fear. After analyzing both Ovid’s Pygmalion and Genesis 2-3, I trace common elements through the nineteenth century science fiction novel L’Eve future and the twenty-first century film Ex Machina. Like Eve, the female cyborgs in these works are built in a garden and their “emancipation” occurs only within the confines of androcentric heteronormative gender patterns.

Guru Granth Sahib in the Writings of Western Women

The Guru Granth Sahib is, in Sikh belief, the scripture that embodies their living Guru. Although major anthologists of western writers on Sikhs and their religious tradition have hardly noticed many European and North American women’s observations and comments, Sikhs and their scripture have featured in the travelogues and novels, journals, memoirs and monographs written by western women who were neither converts to Sikhism nor academics in the modern sense. Many of these women described the prominence and honouring of the Sikhs’ scripture, Guru Granth Sahib in the gurdwaras that they visited, some mentioned its role in life cycle rites, and some wrote about the content of Sikh scripture. For this they relied on (male) translators. In the context of their own Christian religious background and intellectual journeys, this paper examines the responses of western women to both the physical presence and the content of the Guru Granth Sahib, including Annie Besant’s understanding of Guru Nanak as a populariser of Vedanta.

The “Last Word” in Pictures: Enhanced Visual Interpretation of Revelation in Luther’s High German Bible (1534)

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Martin Luther and his associates were active in Bible translation, publishing first the New Testament, from 1522 onwards, and by 1534—at roughly the mid-point of these endeavours—the whole Bible in German. Across this entire period, until his death, Luther continuously offered reader-viewers of the final New Testament book, Revelation, not only verbal commentary—in a preface (1522), or replacement preface with accompanying marginal notes (1530)—but visual exegesis, in the form of successive series of woodcut engravings designed to illustrate the text. A set of images commissioned for Luther’s 1534 German Bible was the crowning achievement of this visual interpretation: the 1534 Bible even extended pictorial illustration and adornment to the Gospels and Epistles, as well as Old Testament texts. From the perspective of art history, to regard these acclaimed illustrations as “the last word in pictures” represents no novelty, for the 1534 Luther Bible has long been counted among “the finest things that the art of printing produced in the Reformation period” (Schramm 1923, 22–23; my translation). However, to make the same assertion about the Revelation illustrations specifically, from an explicitly exegetical standpoint—and in English—is new and requires substantiation through supporting evidence. I will provide this through close analysis and evaluation of the interpretative moves that the 1534 images make, in conjunction with Luther’s translation and comment, over and against the visual exegesis of their predecessors created, from 1522 onwards, for Luther’s German New Testament.

Redefining the Boundaries of the Sacred

This essay considers three recent Jewish graphic novels that synthesize biblical and Rabbinic texts with exegetical illustrations. Designating these works as sacred graphic novels provides an opportunity for considering the boundaries of the genres of, and interrelationship between, sacred Jewish literature and graphic novels. The concept of sacred graphic novels is explored by analyzing J.T. Waldman’s Megillat Esther, Jessica Tamar Deutsch’s Pirkei Avot and Jordan Gorfinkel and Erez Zadok’s The Passover Haggadah. While all three texts involve exegesis, what distinguishes these works is the integration of the actual text of the sacred writings in question. This integration changes the ways that the graphic novels are used as religious texts and religious texts as graphic novels and leads to a broader understanding of sacred Jewish literature.