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| author | Sarah Emanuel |
| title | Roasting Rome: Humor, Resistance, and Jewish Cultural Persistence in the Book of Revelation |
| abstract |
This dissertation argues that Revelation is a Jewish postcolonial text that uses humor as a mode of opposition and repair in the face of imperial trauma.
In order to demonstrate this, I argue that Revelation is, first and foremost, best read historically as a Jewish text. While Revelation scholarship typically
situates the Apocalypse within a Christian conversation--contending, for instance, that it is a Christian text or, at best, a Jewish-Christian text--I illustrate
how and why it is Jewish from beginning to end. Utilizing a postcolonial dialogical framework, I also argue that Revelation relies on a dialogical use of Jewish
and Greco-Roman comic scripts to "write back" to Empire and make its anti-imperial claims. I suggest that the Apocalypse is postcolonial in the performative
sense: It bears witness to the history of colonial oppression that subtends its cultural and psychological existence while bringing into being imaginatively a
postcolonial form of community. This postcolonial reimagining, I further suggest, is evidenced not only in its claims of trauma and the value of a Jewish
cultural self in the face of that trauma--integral parts of postcolonial-posttraumatic repair--but also in its erosion of the imperial transcript(s) that
have deemed Jews "Other than." This erosion is performed through Revelation's use of humor. By "roasting" past/present Empires packaged into a Roman reality,
Revelation creates a comic counterworld in which implied Jewish audiences overcome past/present Empires, particularly Rome. However, just as a "roastmaster"
today often mirrors her/his subjects in mocking them, and just as a survivor of imperial trauma often risks introjection in her/his recovery process, so too
does the vitriolic humor directed against Rome risk attaching itself to Revelation's messiah and God's empire, which goes against the grain of the text's
ostensible intentions and has the effect of turning the joke back onto the Apocalypse.
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| school | The Theological School, Drew University |
| degree | Ph.D. (2016) |
| advisors | Stephen D Moore
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre |
| committee | Danna Nolan Fewell |
| full text | SEmanuel.pdf |
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