La Bible est-elle un texte colonial ? Réponse ouverte à une question fermée
(2024) Les Lettres Romanes — Vol. 78, n° 1-2, p. 11-36 (2024)
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- (en) Like other disciplines in the humanities, biblical exegesis is also going through its own “postcolonial moment”, which is here to stay. In the final decades of the 20th century, as a result of major social changes, long-suppressed voices from the former colonies began to be heard, calling for the attention of the scientific community, the social community and the Church as a spiritual community. The task was immense, since it involved problematizing the role of the Bible and its interpreters in colonization, denouncing the permanence of imperialist, colonial and patriarchal biases in eurocentric readings of the Scriptures, and laying the foundations for a truly liberating biblical hermeneutic: postcolonial and decolonial biblical exegesis were born. This article, written by two scholars, invites readers to critically question the very status of the Bible from a decolonial perspective. Sacred Scriptures, which were instrumental in providing colonizers with a symbolic justification for their criminal ambitions, corrupt Scriptures, which nonetheless constitute in their very origin the corpus of texts, the library, of a people itself marginalized and colonized who told their own history sublimating it as to give themselves hope. It is this tension, in which the authors of the biblical books live and with which postcolonial and decolonial exegetes must come to terms, that the present article allows us to feel by looking at key episodes in the Old and New Testament, before focusing on the figure of Hagar, paradigmatic for thinking about the ambiguity of the biblical text and its interpretations throughout history. Finally, we propose considering the Bible a “de/colonial library”, a spelling that materializes the double identity of the biblical text: not merely anti-colonial, but inextricably both colonial and decolonial.
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Burnet, R., & Mbani, A. (2024). La Bible est-elle un texte colonial ? Réponse ouverte à une question fermée. Les Lettres Romanes, 78(1-2), 11-36. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.LLR.5.141689 (Original work published 2024)