Abstract
Critical readers have their place in the task of introducing a field of studies to a new generation of students, but they also have their limitations precisely as introductory exercises. The study of the Bible read in the context of cultural studies was popular in the later decades of the last century and the majority of pieces in this book date from that time. I myself was a participant in the 1997 colloquium at Sheffield University, papers from which constitute 20 per cent of Seesengood’s reader. It feels like a long time ago and what seemed ground-breaking then does not seem to be now.
This, in itself, need not be a criticism in a survey volume, but this book does seem to present itself as dealing with contemporary material – although the five introductory essays in Part I, defining the field, all date from 1996–99. Since then, the world has moved on, in biblical studies and even more so culturally. At the very least, students today will not be so familiar with the films that preoccupied older generations, films such as Eastwood’s Unforgiven or even Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, once notorious but now, 20 years on, largely forgotten. And in our post-television age, how many of us can remember the 1960s Western series Bonanza? Yet this is not to say that many (though not all) of these essays are not excellent and were ground-breaking in their day. Cheryl Exum’s reading of the Bathsheba story and Hugh Pyper on ‘the Bible and memetics’ are minor classics, while Hannah Strommen’s more recent work on animals is rightly foregrounded. (Yet even here very few of her sources are less than ten years old and Derrida’s last writings on the subject, though important, seem already to be from a bygone era.)
A stronger editorial hand and better directions for the reader would have been helpful. Essays from older volumes are left with cross-references to their previous books still present, which is distracting. And, although there must always be omissions, important areas of cultural studies are either neglected or omitted altogether. Thus, the more substantial Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture (2006), edited by John Sawyer, has discussions also of ecology, gender, post-colonialism, politics and more, all largely omitted by Seesengood. Having said that, the most interesting section of Seesengood’s anthology is the final one on ‘posthumanism, affect and critical race theory’. It also contains some of the most contemporary essays. Maia Kotrosits’ 2020 essay on ‘ruins, diaspora, and the material unconscious’ is challenging in its suggestions about the way in which societies are built on the rubble of the past, using the examples of Rome, Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, and the image of the Temple in the Gospels. The last three essays on racial theory also take us, and the Bible, to the heart of the contemporary USA.
Despite all my criticisms, there is much to be learned from this volume as an introduction to an important field of studies relating to the Bible. But it does illustrate how much has changed in the last 20 or 30 years – or perhaps how little we have really learned.