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| author |
Dong Sung Kim
| | title |
Deuteronomistic Unhistory: Politics of Time, Affect, and Nationhood in Judges' Narrative World
| | abstract |
In this dissertation, I discuss the affective capacity of the biblical historical narrative as it regards the audiences' and readers' embodied experiences of time, history, and nation. In contrast with the dominant disciplinary view that considers history a description or representation of the static and self-contained past, I deploy the term, "unhistory," to discuss the culturally specific ways that time, narrative, and history are felt and embodied as an experience of messy and dynamic connections among different bodies and temporalities. I suggest that the narrative of the Deuteronomistic History not only reflects but enables the temporal/historical presence of the national body of Israel, by creating and maintaining the contact between the postexilic bodies and the past political affects, including the variously felt experiences of the Exilic trauma. Rather than considering the biblical texts a trauma literature, I assert that they reflect the politics of trauma and its cultural process, in which the painful experiences of the Exile are turned into an identity and politics for social cohesion. Developing my arguments through conversations with a diverse range of theories including queer time/historiography, affect, new narratologies, haunting, and minoritized emotions, I submit that such national affect of the biblical literature is not only related to the biblical past, but it is also involved with the modern European and American nationalisms (the material contexts from which the academic discourses of the Deuteronomistic History emerge). Homing in on a posthistoricist and non-national(ist) reading of the biblical history/narrative with feminist, childist, and minoritized sensibilities, this dissertation suggests that the studies on the narratives—such as the story of Jephthah and his unnamed daughter—should interrogate the intricate and profound ways that the nation, as the origin and telos of the historical temporality, alienates and potentially causes social, physical, and narrative deaths to the populations whose experience/performance of past, present, and future do not conform to the normative national narrative of the society. The historical literature and the present context of its study requires a close(r) reading of the life, deaths, and rhythms of the sociohistorically marginalized bodies surrounding and haunting the bible and its cultures.
| | school |
The Theological School, Drew University
| | degree |
Ph.D. (2022)
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| advisor |
Danna Fewell
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| committee |
Kenneth Ngwa
Stephen D Moore
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| full text | DSKim.pdf - requires Drew uLogin |
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