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| author | Dong Hyeon Jeong |
| title | With the Wild Beasts, Learning from the Trees: Animality, Vegetality, and (Colonized) Ethnicity in the Gospel of Mark |
| abstract |
Could we imagine a bestial messiah and a vegetal empire of God? Reading the Bible, including the Gospel of Mark, with nonhumans studies has been dismantling
anthropocentric interpretations of Jesus and the Empire of God by blurring the Cartesian human-animal divide. Emulating ecological consciousness manifested by
ecofeminists, ecowomanists, postcolonial ecocritics, and continental philosophers, this dissertation seeks to further disrupt anthropocentric reading of Mark by
intersecting the optics of animality, vegetality, and animacy with the optics of (colonized) ethnicity. This intersectional reading of Mark highlights the
importance of engaging nonhuman biblical interpretation while being sensitive to the issue of racism through animalization. By doing so, this dissertation
re-imagines the Markan Jesus as the colonized messiah who struggles with the bestial logics of the empire — that is, its systems of subjugation through
animalization. Mark narrates this struggle through Jesus' ambivalent relationships with nonhumans and other colonized people. On the one hand, nonhuman reading
of Mark depicts Jesus overcoming the imperial bestial logic by preparing for his ministry under the gaze of the wild beasts (Mark 1:13). Jesus later points to
the trees as teachers of the Empire of God and the harbingers of God's reign (Mk 4:26-32; 13:28-31). On the other hand, this bestial and vegetal messiah struggles
in his solidarity with nonhumans as Jesus himself mimics the bestial logics of the Roman Empire. Jesus kills his vegetal teacher for not providing food at his
beck and call (Mk 11:12-14, 20-21). The pigs and the Sea of Galilee are relegated to the level of dispensability just to prove Jesus' imperial prowess (Mk 5:1-20).
Jesus even carnophallogocentrically re-colonizes the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mk 7:24-30) with animalization just to prove his "carnivorous virility." This
ambivalence grounds the Markan Jesus in the material, micro-practices and experiences of the colonized people and their fellow bestialized nonhumans. Such
"humanization" of the Markan Jesus participates in shifting the anthropocentric episteme of biblical interpretation by opening new vistas for a more ecological
and racially sound biblical interpretation.
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| school | The Theological School, Drew University |
| degree | Ph.D. (2018) |
| advisor | Stephen D. Moore |
| committee | Laurel Kearns
Tat-siong Benny Liew |
| full text | DHJeong.pdf - requires Drew uLogin |
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