In this issue of the journal Semeia, readers will find essays less concerned with what the Bible says about Asian American lives than by how Asian Americans read biblical texts. Pulling together Asian American historians, rhetoricians, sociologists, biblical scholars, and theologians, the collection questions assumed understandings and challenges accepted practices of established disciplines in ways that are both transgressive and transformative. Essays in the first section deal with the Bible’s role in constructing Asian American identity. The second section delves into how the Bible is read and interpreted in Asian American literature and churches. The third section includes a response. Contributors include Antony W. Alumkal, Rachel A. R. Bundang, Patrick S. Cheng, Peter Yuichi Clark, Eleazar S. Fernandez, Mary F. Foskett, Jane Naomi Iwamura, Russell M. Jeung, Eunjoo Mary Kim, Jung Ha Kim, Uriah (Yong-Hwan) Kim, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Leng Leroy Lim, Fumitaka Matsuoka, Russell G. Moy, Henry W. Rietz, Roy I. Sano, and Timothy Tseng.

The first sustained conversation between Marxism, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis in biblical studies

This volume pursues critical readings of the Bible that put psychoanalysis into conversation with Marxist and postcolonial criticism. In these essays psychoanalysis provides a way to mediate between Marxism's materialist groundings and postcolonialism's resistance against empire. The essays in the volume illuminate the way empire has shaped the biblical text by looking at the biblical texts' silences, ruptures, oversights, over-emphases, and inexplicable elements. These details are read as symptoms of a set of oppressive material relations that shaped and continue to haunt the text in the ascendancy of the text in the name of the West.

Features:

• Essays and responses from multiple perspectives and geographical locations, including Africa, Australia, Oceania, Latin America, and North America
• Psychoanalysis that considers how the traumas of colonialism manifest both materially and psychically
• Close readings of biblical texts

Critics from three major racial/ethnic minority communities in the United States—African American, Asian American, and Latino/a American—focus on the problematic of race and ethnicity in the Bible and in contemporary biblical interpretation. With keen eyes on both ancient text and contemporary context, contributors pay close attention to how racial/ethnic dynamics intersect with other differential relations of power such as gender, class, sexuality, and colonialism. In groundbreaking interaction, they also consider their readings alongside those of other racial/ethnic minority communities. The volume includes an introduction pointing out the crucial role of this work within minority criticism by looking at its historical trajectory, critical findings, and future directions. The contributors are Cheryl B. Anderson, Francisco O. García-Treto, Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Frank M. Yamada, Gale A. Yee, Jae-Won Lee, Gay L. Byron, Fernando F. Segovia, Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Demetrius K. Williams, Mayra Rivera Rivera, Evelyn L. Parker, and James Kyung-Jin Lee.