A Postcolonial Woman’s Encounter with Moses and Miriam by Angeline M. G. Song

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Postcolonial Woman’s Encounter with Moses and Miriam by Angeline M. G. Song Michael Ufok Udoekpo angeline m. g. song, A Postcolonial Woman’s Encounter with Moses and Miriam (Postcolonialism and Religions; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pp. x + 262. $100. In this revised doctoral work originally submitted by Angeline M. G. Song to the University of Otago, New Zealand, under the supervision of Judith McKinlay, S. reinterprets Exodus 2 using a tripartite hermeneutical perspective of empathy, postcolonialism, [End Page 129] and focalization optics. She introduces herself as a Peranakan of mixed Malay-Chinese ancestry, a female adoptee from Singapore, a former British colony. She employs this identity as an interpretative point of departure (p. 2). In six readable chapters with extensive endnotes and bibliography advantageous to biblical scholars, S. relates her personal colonial and postcolonial Singaporean experiences to those of the biblical Moses and Miriam in the cultural context of ancient Egypt, which resonates with me, as a Nigerian-American biblical scholar. Song proceeds to review in detail her life story as a female adoptee growing up in a patriarchal, postcolonial Southeast Asian society. As an immigrant in New Zealand, she was faced with many challenges, including identity crises, nervousness, anxiety, the trauma of abandonment, the dilemma of loss of origins, and racial abuse. It was also there that “a white Caucasian female neighbor mocked” and mimicked her Singaporean accent and taught her two young children to make piggy noises at S. each time they saw her walking up her driveway (pp. 29–36). In chap. 2, S. explains her empathic hermeneutical strategies, starting with the popular understanding of “empathy” as “feeling with” (p. 39). S. further notes the urgency of this method and how contemporary neuroscientists have made several important discoveries about the phenomenon of empathy. In biblical exegesis, the term is found in Thomas B. Dozeman’s glossary in Methods for Exodus (Methods in Biblical Interpretation; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 235–40. Historically, however, empathy (empatheia in Greek, and Einfühlung in German) is largely traceable to the field of German aesthetics, basically pointing to self-projection, or putting oneself in another’s shoes (p. 41). Therefore, empathic reading, S. stresses, “is always self-conscious and self-reflexive in nature . . . being able to empathize with a certain literary character”—in this case, Moses and Miriam. (p. 63). In chap. 3, S. defines postcolonial criticism as a “reading posture”; there is no single definition of postcolonial criticism because of its diverse usage among practitioners of various disciplines. S. rather masterfully establishes her distinctive postcolonial optic by drawing on the insights of early anticolonial or postcolonial writers such as Robert J. C. Young (Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction [London: Blackwell, 2001] 266), Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart [Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1958]), Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth [trans. Constance Farrington; New York: Grove Press, 1963]), Aimé Césaire (Discourse on Colonialism [trans. Joan Pinkham; New York; Monthly Review Press, 1972]), Homi K. Bhabha (The Location of Culture [New York: Routledge, 1994]), Edward W. Said (Orientalism [ New York: Vintage Books, 1978]), Said (Culture and Imperialism [New York: Vintage Books, 1993]), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics [New York: Routledge, 1988]), Fernando F. Segovia (“Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora: A Hermeneutics of Otherness and Engagement,” in Reading from This Place, vol. 1, Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States [ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995] 57–73), R. S. Sugirtharajah (The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001]) and many others. S. formulates her distinctive “Sang Kancil postcolonial optic” with interpretative energy from “a clever mouse-deer character in a Malay classical folk tale” (pp. 67–94). [End Page 130] In addition to empathic and postcolonial optics, in chap. 4, S. discusses her focalization methodology, which also foregrounds her reading of Exodus 2. While an empathic reading focuses on the reader’s perspective of critiquing the text, an integrated interpretive strategy concerned with the perspective inherent within the text can assist the reader in identifying from whose point of view the narrative scene (Exodus 2) is...