{"title":"Vincent L Wimbush","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"masquerade-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781978715127","title":"Masquerade","description":"Continuing his project of critical analysis of the scriptural formation of culture, Vincent L. Wimbush has gathered in this book essays by scholars of various backgrounds and orientations that focus in different registers on the theme of masquerade as the “play-element” in modern culture. Masquerade functions as window onto the mimetic performances, dynamics, arrangements, psycho-logics, and politics (“scripturalizing”) by which the “made-up” becomes fixed or realities or (“scripturalization”). Modern-world racialization (and its attendant explosions into racialisms and racisms) as the hyper-scripturalization of difference in human flesh (registered in psycho-social relations as a type of “scripture”) is argued in this book to be one of the most consequential examples and reflections of masquerade and thereby one of the primary impetuses behind and determinants of the shape of the realities of modernities. The open window onto these realities is facilitated by touchstone references to—not exhaustive treatment of—a now famous eighteenth-century life story, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). This story told by a complexly positioned Black-fleshed self-acknowledged ex-slave\/“stranger” is itself a “mask-ing” that throws light on the predominantly white Anglophone world as masking (as scriptural formation). Equiano\/Vassa’s story as masking helps makes a compelling case for analyzing through Black flesh the ongoing shaping of the modern and the perduring mixed when not also devastating consequences.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49751914807569,"sku":"NGR9781978715127","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52688824467729,"sku":"NLS9781978715127","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52879284994321,"sku":"CIN1978715129LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1978715129.jpg?v=1751188438"},{"product_id":"bible-and-the-american-myth-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9780865546509","title":"Bible and the American Myth","description":"Endorsements:  T]he problem which this collection of essays addresses is rooted in the fact that no other society in the world is so imbued both with the aura and aroma of the Bible, while simultaneously subjecting it to such parasitic cultural captivity . . . This little book reflects the power of what can happen when bright, passionate minds embrace the problem of the American myth . . . No other American biblical scholar until now has responded more courageously to the issues of deconstructing the American myth . . . What finally matters  here] is that a theologian finally loves the Bible enough, and finally loves his culture enough, to question how both are being used in our time and place for the gain of the few, at the expense of the many. --Charles Mabee, StABH series editor About the Contributor(s): Vincent L. Wimbush, PhD, Harvard University, is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures at the Claremont Graduate University.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49809449255185,"sku":"CIN0865546509VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0865546509.jpg?v=1751076889"},{"product_id":"asceticism-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9780195151381","title":"Asceticism","description":"From meditation and fasting to celibacy and anchoritism, the ascetic impulse has been an enduring and complex phenomenon throughout history. Offering a sweeping view of this elusive and controversial aspect of religious life and culture, Asceticism looks at the ascetic impulse from a unique vantage point. Cross-cultural, cross-religious, and multidisciplinary in nature, these essays provide a broad historical and comparative perspective on asceticism--a subject rarely studied outside the context of individual religious traditions. The work represents the input of more than forty preeminent scholars in a wide range of fields and disciplines, and analyzes asceticism from antiquity to the present in European, Near Eastern, African, Asian, and North American settings.  Asceticism is organized around four major themes that cut across religious traditions: origins and meanings of asceticism, which explores the motivations and impulses behind ascetic behaviors; hermeneutics of asceticism, which looks at texts and rhetorics and their presuppositions; aesthetics of asceticism, which documents responses evoked by ascetic impulses and practices, as well as the arts of ascetic practices themselves; and politics of asceticism, which analyzes the power dynamics of asceticism, especially as regards gender, cultural, and ethnic differences. Critical responses to the major papers ensure the focus upon the themes and unify the discussion. Two general addresses on broad philosophical and historical-interpretive issues suggest the importance of the subject of asceticism for wide-ranging but serious cultural-critical discussions. An Appendix, Ascetica Miscellanea, includes six short papers on provocative topics not related to the four major themes, and a panel discussion on the practices and meanings of asceticism in contemporary religious life and culture. A selected bibliography and an index are also included.  The only comprehensive reference work on asceticism with a multicultural, multireligious, and multidisciplinary perspective, Asceticism offers a model not only for an understanding of a most important dimension of religious life, but also for future interdisciplinary study in general.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346185687313,"sku":"CIN0195151380A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50627442475281,"sku":"CIN0195151380G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52127149523217,"sku":"NLS9780195151381","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53505341096209,"sku":"GOR014950831","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195151380.jpg?v=1751037650"},{"product_id":"african-americans-and-the-bible-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9780826412935","title":"African Americans and the Bible","description":"This work is the result of a research project directed by the author which brings together 68 scholars and experts from academic and artistic fields and disciplines. The focus is on the interaction between African Americans and the Bible.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50364123742481,"sku":"CIN0826412939VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368960069905,"sku":"CIN0826412939G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0826412939.jpg?v=1751170420"},{"product_id":"african-americans-and-the-bible-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781610979641","title":"African Americans and the Bible","description":"\u003cp\u003ePerhaps no other group of people has been as much formed by biblical texts and tropes as African Americans. From literature and the arts to popular culture and everyday life, the Bible courses through black society and culture like blood through veins. Despite the enormous recent interest in African American religion, relatively little attention has been paid to the diversity of ways in which African Americans have utilized the Bible.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfrican Americans and the Bible is the fruit of a four-year collaborative research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush and funded by the Lilly Endowment. It brings together scholars and experts (sixty-eight in all) from a wide range of academic and artistic fields and disciplines--including ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies as well as art, music, film, dance, drama, and literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe focus is on the interaction between the people known as African Americans and that complex of visions, rhetorics, and ideologies known as the Bible. As such, the book is less about the meaning(s) of the Bible than about the Bible and meaning(s), less about the world(s) of the Bible than about how worlds and the Bible interact--in short, about how a text constructs a people and a people constructs a text. It is about a particular sociocultural formation but also about the dynamics that obtain in the interrelation between any group of people and sacred texts in general. Thus African Americans and the Bible provides an exemplum of sociocultural formation and a critical lens through which the process of sociocultural formation can be viewed.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50396144763153,"sku":"CIN1610979648G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52134676660497,"sku":"NLS9781610979641","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52752751198481,"sku":"NIN9781610979641","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1610979648.jpg?v=1751151361"},{"product_id":"scripturalectics-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9780190664701","title":"Scripturalectics","description":"In this book Vincent Wimbush seeks to problematize what we call \"scriptures,\" a word first used to refer simply to \"things written,\" the registration of basic information. In the modern world the word came to be associated almost exclusively with the center- and power-defining \"sacred\" texts of \"world religions.\" Wimbush argues that this narrowing of the valence of the term was a decisive development for western culture.   His purpose is to reconsider the initially broad and politically charged use of the term: \"scriptures\" are excavated not merely as texts to be read but understood as discourse: as mimetic rituals and practices; as ideologically-charged orientations to and prescribed behaviors in the world; as structures of relationships and social formations; as forms of communication. Wimbush is naming and constructing a new transdisciplinary critical project, which uses the historical and modern experiences of the Black Atlantic as resources for framing, categorization, and analysis.   Using Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart as a touchstone, each chapter offers a close reading and analysis of a representative moment in the formation of the Black Atlantic, regarded as part of a history of modern human consciousness and conscientization. Such a history, he says, is reflected in the major turns in what he calls scripturalectics, part of the construction of the modern world, defined as efforts to manage or control knowledge and meaning.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51079063208209,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51079063568657,"sku":"CIN0190664703VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52488682373393,"sku":"NLS9780190664701","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0190664703.jpg?v=1751100883"},{"product_id":"semeia-57-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781589835306","title":"Semeia 57","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51089846206737,"sku":"NIN9781589835306","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52455233945873,"sku":"NLS9781589835306","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1589835301.jpg?v=1750719470"},{"product_id":"semeia-58-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781589835313","title":"Semeia 58","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51089864458513,"sku":"NIN9781589835313","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52453424627985,"sku":"NLS9781589835313","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/158983531X.jpg?v=1751309411"},{"product_id":"black-flesh-matters-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781978712713","title":"Black Flesh Matters","description":"These essays, written over more than thirty years of Vincent L. Wimbush's career as a scholar, provide a response to the nearly universal, persistent, and sedimented modern-world hyper-signification of Black flesh, always needing to be framed, humiliated, policed, and dirtied. Because Wimbush is a scholar of religion as culture--having to do with social practices and their psycho-politics as regimes of knowledge, discourse, formation, and power relations--his ex-centric transdisciplinary interest in scriptures has been viewed, in some circles, as controversial. Yet it is Wimbush's linkage of the modern hyper-signification of Black flesh--leading to racialization and racism, especially anti-Black racism--to the scriptural as shorthand for discourse and relations of power that makes this work compelling.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51504346398993,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51504346824977,"sku":"NIN9781978712713","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52593195188497,"sku":"NLS9781978712713","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1978712715.jpg?v=1750805057"},{"product_id":"white-men-s-magic-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9780199873579","title":"White Men's Magic","description":"The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in England in 1789, was one of the earliest and remains to this day one of the best-known English language slave narratives. Characterizing Olaudah Equiano's eighteenth-century narrative of his life as a type of ''scriptural story'' that connects the Bible with identity formation, Vincent L. Wimbush's White Men's Magic probes not only how the Bible and its reading played a crucial role in the first colonial contacts between black and white persons in the North Atlantic but also the process and meaning of what he terms ''scripturalization.'' By this term, Wimbush means ''a social-psychological-political discursive structure'' or ''semiosphere'' that creates a reality and organizes a society in terms of relations and communications. This scripturalization, achieved by the British to establish a colonial and racialized society in and through the promotion of literacy and the Bible as a ''fetishized center-object,'' was also performed by an abject outsider or stranger like Equiano through his reading of the Bible as well as his own writing with the goal of imagining and promoting a more inclusive society. It is for this reason that Wimbush calls Equiano's narrative a ''scriptural story,'' and he argues that this is why the talking book trope appears repeatedly in writings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century black Atlantic writers. He identifies three different types of scripturalization: (1) scripturalization as social-cultural matrix and comparative magic; (2) scripturalization in the service of nationalization and for the purpose of naturalization; and (3) scripturalization in negotiation and for resistance. Because it is based on the particularities of Equiano's narrative, Wimbush's theoretical work is not only grounded but inductive. Wimbush shows that scripturalization is bigger than either the historical or the literary Equiano. Scripturalization was not invented by Equiano, he says, but it is not quite the same after Equiano.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52349737763089,"sku":"NLS9780199873579","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780199873579.jpg?v=1758179556"},{"product_id":"misreading-america-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9780199975419","title":"MisReading America","description":"MisReading America presents original research on and conversation about reading formations in American communities of color, using the phenomenon of the reading of scriptures--''scripturalizing''--as an analytical wedge. Scriptures here are understood as shorthand for complex social phenomena, practices, and dynamics. The authors take up scripturalizing as a window onto the self-understandings, politics, practices, and orientations of marginalized communities. These communities have in common the context that is the United States, with the challenges it holds for all regarding: pressure to conform to conventional-canonical forms of communication, representation, and embodiment (mimicry); opportunities to speak back to and confront and overturn conventionality (interruptions); and the need to experience ongoing meaningful and complex relationships (reorientation) to the centering politics, practices, and myths that define ''America.''","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52433324769553,"sku":"NLS9780199975419","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780199975419.jpg?v=1759177630"},{"product_id":"scripturalizing-the-human-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781138920002","title":"Scripturalizing the Human","description":"Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models \"scriptural studies\" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. This critical historical and ethnographic project is focused on scriptures\/scripturalization\/scripturalizing as shorthand for the (psycho-cultural and socio-political) \"work\" we make language do for and to us. Each essay focuses on an instance of or situation involving such work, engaging with the Bible, Book of Mormon, Bhagavata Purana, and other sacred texts, artifacts, and practices in order to explore historical and ongoing constructions of the human. Contributors use the category of \"scriptures\"—understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language—as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis. The significance of the collection lies in the window it opens to the rich and complex view of the highs and lows of human-(un-)making as it establishes the connections between a seemingly basic and apolitical religious category and a set of larger social-cultural phenomena and dynamics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52454312640785,"sku":"NLS9781138920002","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53014347809041,"sku":"NIN9781138920002","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781138920002.jpg?v=1759370779"},{"product_id":"refractions-of-the-scriptural-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781138643666","title":"Refractions of the Scriptural","description":"Refractions of the Scriptural is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that seeks to construct a new field of scholarly inquiry with scriptures as a fraught category, analytical wedge, and site for excavation and problematization. The book focuses on the ways in which individual and social bodies manipulate—and are manipulated by— the politics and power encoded in language and formalized canonical knowledge. Scriptures, in this sense, function as complex phenomena that are instrumental to social conservatism as well as social critique and social change. The essays in this volume, written by established and up-and-coming scholars across a wide range of disciplines, seek to locate, engage, and interpret the ways in which the scriptural shapes and reshapes people and the dynamics of identity formation. The chapters are organized around four domains or types of inquiry: the cognitive, the conscientized, the inscriptive, and the formative. It will be of interest to scholars of religion, as well as those interested more broadly in critical social and historical studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52475081818385,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52475083718929,"sku":"NLS9781138643666","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781138643666.jpg?v=1759842077"},{"product_id":"black-flesh-matters-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781978712690","title":"Black Flesh Matters","description":"These essays, written over more than thirty years of Vincent L. Wimbush's career as a scholar, provide a response to the nearly universal, persistent, and sedimented modern-world hyper-signification of Black flesh, always needing to be framed, humiliated, policed, and dirtied. Because Wimbush is a scholar of religion as culture--having to do with social practices and their psycho-politics as regimes of knowledge, discourse, formation, and power relations--his ex-centric transdisciplinary interest in scriptures has been viewed, in some circles, as controversial. Yet it is Wimbush's linkage of the modern hyper-signification of Black flesh--leading to racialization and racism, especially anti-Black racism--to the scriptural as shorthand for discourse and relations of power that makes this work compelling.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52536032166161,"sku":"NLS9781978712690","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781978712690.jpg?v=1760672895"},{"product_id":"paul-the-worldly-ascetic-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781610979634","title":"Paul, the Worldly Ascetic","description":"Description: In writing to the Corinthians, Paul was grappling with fundamental issues concerning the lifestyle of Christians, and specifically with questions about marriage, interracial marriage, and remarriage. The so-called hos me passage in I Corinthians 7 has been identified as a key passage for understanding Paul's expressed understanding of an appropriate model of Christian existence in the world. This one pastoral-counseling passage has had significant influence on the development of Western social orientation (not limited to the issues of marriage) and of Christian piety. Paul, the Worldly Ascetic is a fundamental reevaluation of a benchmark passage, I Corinthians 7, and is itself a model of historical-critical exegesis. This insightful work will be welcomed by students of Paul, early Christianity, and history of religion, by classicists, and by those who seek an understanding of how we may rightly engage the world in which we live. Endorsements: Vincent Wimbush's book represents a significant contribution to our understanding of Pauline Christianity. On the basis of Paul's teachings concerning marriage in 1 Corinthians 7, Wimbush makes an illuminating attempt to identify a characteristically Pauline response to the Greco-Roman world, a particularly Pauline form of worldly renunciation and participation, that finds linguistic expression in the hos me exhortations and practical consequence in Paul's teachings concerning marriage. This will be an important book for all persons concerned with lifestyles of the earliest Christian communities and their social world. --Darrell J. Doughty, Drew University About the Contributor(s): Vincent L. Wimbush, PhD, Harvard University, is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures at the Claremont Graduate University.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52587983372561,"sku":"NLS9781610979634","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781610979634.jpg?v=1761057321"},{"product_id":"bible-and-the-american-myth-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781610979627","title":"The Bible and the American Myth","description":"Endorsements:  T]he problem which this collection of essays addresses is rooted in the fact that no other society in the world is so imbued both with the aura and aroma of the Bible, while simultaneously subjecting it to such parasitic cultural captivity . . . This little book reflects the power of what can happen when bright, passionate minds embrace the problem of the American myth . . . No other American biblical scholar until now has responded more courageously to the issues of deconstructing the American myth . . . What finally matters  here] is that a theologian finally loves the Bible enough, and finally loves his culture enough, to question how both are being used in our time and place for the gain of the few, at the expense of the many. --Charles Mabee, StABH series editor About the Contributor(s): Vincent L. 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The significance of the collection lies in the window it opens to the rich and complex view of the highs and lows of human-(un-)making as it establishes the connections between a seemingly basic and apolitical religious category and a set of larger social-cultural phenomena and dynamics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52653552992529,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52653553385745,"sku":"NLS9781138053328","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781138053328.jpg?v=1762211409"},{"product_id":"bible-and-african-americans-book-vincent-l-wimbush-9781506488486","title":"The Bible and African Americans","description":"\u003cp\u003eAfrican Americans' unique encounter with the Bible has shaped centuries of spirituality and the social engagement of a whole continent. In \u003ci\u003eThe Bible and African Americans\u003c\/i\u003e, highly respected biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush outlines different ways African Americans read the Bible.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe Bible offered a language-world--a place that held the stories where they could retreat and imagine themselves as something different than they were--through which African Americans have negotiated the strange land into which they were thrust. Wimbush outlines six African American readings that correspond to different historical periods. He details the various responses to these historical situations and how they helped shape a collective self-understanding.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn this important and concise book, Wimbush demonstrates how the Bible empowered African Americans with agency and social power, still true today. 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