White Men's Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery. By Vincent L. Wimbush

Abstract

Since his 2001 edited collection African Americans and the Bible, Vincent L. Wimbush has been changing the “subject” of biblical studies from the esoterica of a fixation on all things ancient and Mediterranean to a focus on the Bible as part of a contemporary, hegemonic, discursive complex that he terms “scripturalization.” For Wimbush, the term “scripturalization”: broadly refers to the ideology and power dynamics and social and cultural practices built around texts. It refers to the use of texts, textuality and literacy as a means of constructing and maintaining society, as a legitimation of authority and power. It becomes shorthand for a type of structure and arrangement of power relations and communications of society, the ultimate politics of language. It is nothing less than magic, a powerful and compelling construction, make-believe. (87, emphasis added) Wimbush names this “a semiosphere within which a structure of reality is created that produces and legitimates and maintains media of knowing and discourse and the corresponding power relations” (46). In White Men's Magic, Wimbush turns his attention to this semiosphere as a discourse of power that undergirds and supports worlds.