Changing Woman: Postcolonial Reflections On Acts 16.6-40

Abstract

Most contemporary interpreters of Acts 16.6-40 describe Paul's journey in Mace donia as a 'missionary journey to Europe'. This essay challenges that designation, arguing that it is a colonialist geographic identification with no actual textual basis, and one that has helped foster the ideology of modern colonialist missionary movements. Nevertheless, the essay goes on to note that there is solid textual evi dence for arguing Acts 16.6-40 does indeed mark a change in Paul's missionary activity, one that is now more explicitly in conflict with Roman colonial power. After identifying the evidence for this, the essay takes a cue from Musa Dube Shomanah's 1997 Vanderbilt dissertation and argues that Lydia and the pythonic slave girl function as 'border women' whose presence evokes a colonialist 'land- possession type-scene' similar to those related with Rahab (Josh. 2), the Syro Phoenician woman (Mk 7), and the Samaritan woman (Jn 4). The struggle for the ideological possession of the land and women reminds the author of the border woman from his own childhood on the Navajo Indian Reserva tion in Arizona, and two novels that deal with Navajo and pueblo Native American border women (Laughing Boy, by Oliver La Farge, and Ceremony, by Leslie Mar mon Silko). While the Navajo border woman in the first novel reflects a similar ideology as Acts 16.6-40, despite the author's intention; the latter novel offers an insightful postcolonial appropriation of mythic border women which can revitalize the biblical metaphor and deconstruct its colonialist ideology.