| abstract | The Bible is arguably the single most influential book in the world. And in the beginning of this book (deployed as
much for colonization as liberation) lies a narrative that is likely the most famous of all root myths of origin; which (Édóuard Glissant has
argued) betrays the fundamental framework endorsed and enforced by the West. Within the past 5 years Glissant's work has become integral to my own intellectual
enterprises, my journey and development, and particularly my interpretation of the Bible; a corpus I have related to intimately for nearly all my life. While
the excitement has at times waned, my interest in and speculation about the Bible and its hold upon us, as citizens of the postcolony and the world
becoming archipelago, has only intensified. This project, as the pursuit of a PhD in biblical studies, is a product of that captivation, curiosity and
consequent queries (particularly involving the Bible's co-optation by and collusion with Western European colonialism and capitalism). I am entirely invested
in exploring how people have been and are still moved (both literally and figuratively) by the Bible and why. What it is about this text that warrants
an entire field of academic study, more commentaries than any book ever written, and billions of devotees around the world? How could a single book, whose
authors and editors (and their number) are entirely unknown, inspire and authorize both emancipation and enslavement, socialism and capitalism, empowerment
and oppression? And just what is it about the Bible that "moves" some and not others? It indubitably draws, disgusts, and has legitimated innumerable iterations
of a "them" and an "us." In order to effectively (and affectively) engage these interests and inquiries, which cross a number of disciplinary and discursive
boundaries, however, pursuing conventional methods and established avenues within biblical studies is utterly insufficient. Our archipelagic world necessitates
new interpretive modalities, which can interrogate and violate orthodox routes, it is, therefore, with this intention at heart that I submit this dissertation
in the archipelogical other-wise. Accompanied by Édóuard Glissant and inspired by the Rastafari, then, I present my audaciously unorthodox
interdisciplinary, intertextual, creolized engagement with the Bible and its interpretation. I foreground Africana and Afro-Caribbean philosophy and enlist
orality, affect, assemblage and queer theories, and I do so to deconstruct, disrupt, and displace Western European (epistemic) convention and its authority.
Responding to the needs of our contemporary global condition, our affective ambi(val)ence as planetary assemblage, I imagine yet an-other (than Root) route
to interpret the Bible; a rhizomatic (theo)poetics of Relation re-membering other-wise. I read the Bible, with the Rastafari, as an oraliturary open canon,
and I do so with rhythm (both looking for rhythm[s] within the text and reading the text rhythmically) through an archipelagic epistemology, an archipelogical
hermeneutic, which I call bibliorality; re-membering the Bible itself as (ambi[val]ent affective) assemblage and writing so as to honor its archipelagic
onto-epistemology and our own. As I see it, in order to read and/or write with any relevance to or respect for the diversity of our world and that of the Bible,
we must immerse ourselves in and actively engage what Glissant deemed the chaos-monde, the tout-monde, of Relation, the ordered chaos of the totality
of the world and always in ways which engage and affect our very being, thinking, speaking, writing, and reading. My dissertation resists resolution and invites
the irruption of meaning in multiplicity and diversity; diasporic and archipelagic, it does not simply appeal to and enact the différance of
interpretation but its creolization. It is rhizomatic and reads as such; each chapter a node of entangled and poetic nodes. A playful and pointed (intertextual)
conversation not merely as discursive dialogue but as dynamic interpenetration, ensuring that each body involved (human and non-human alike) is transformed with/in
and by the encounter. In order to adequately, and, therefore, archipelogically, inaugurate such an engagement, I look to Africana and the Caribbean archipelago
in my insurrectionist hermeneutic. I bring Édóuard Glissant's disruptive creolized (Caribbean) discourse and/as his poetics of Relation
(in resistance to Root identity) to bear upon the Bible, I reflect upon the African biblical hermeneutics of Dorothy Akoto-Abutiate, I engage the oraliturhythmic
modalities of the Caribbean (and particularly carnival, carnivalesque-grotesque and Ceole folktale), I bring orality and affect into poetic Relation, and I appeal
to the Rastafari, that we might learn how to read an oraliturary text, such as the Bible, oraliturhythmically. My ultimate exegetical intervention is the
re-membering of Samson's story in Judges 13-16 as a heuristic for bibliorality as an archipelogical hermeneutic. Enlisting Edith Davidson's Bakhtinian analysis
of Judges as carnivalesque-grotesque folktale, I engage germane discourses within the philosophical corpus of poststructuralist theory (specifically queer and affect
theory), but ultimately foreground the literal, corporeal bodies of the Rastafari, who "cite up" the scripture. Working from the resonances between Glissant's
poetics of Relation vis-à-vis creolization and archipelogical (Africana and poststructuralist) critiques of identity, language, and history, I consider
the relevance of Samson for the Rastafari, a diverse and discrete community of political agents for whom the Bible and Samson have particular cultural and political
valence. Out of profound reverence for their respect for rhythm in/and their oraliturhythmic biblical interpretation as well as their (theo)poetic (philosophical)
Relational paradigm of I-an-Identity, I incorporate these affective elements into my own affective archipelogical, oraliturhythmic re-membering of Samson (and Bible)
through bibliorality. Re-membering biblical interpretation (in my exegetical encounters with Genesis, Proverbs, and especially Judges 13-16) through the rhizomatic
thinking of an archipelogical hermeneutic of bibliorality leads me to enact an intertextual and cross-cultural, creolized forced poetic dialogue between Glissant's
work, Africana, poststructuralist theory, and the Rastafari that defies Western Root hegemony, epistemological or otherwise. Such an interpenetrative interpretive
event holds profound possibilities not only for the way in which we understand the Bible and its interpretation, but for the ways in which we think about thinking,
writing, reading, and being in this world becoming archipelago. |
