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1 Introduction TEXTureS, Gestures, Power: Orientation to Radical Excavation Vincent L. Wimbush I aim in this essay to press the case for our reconsideration of a complex phenomenon —what in freighted, masking English shorthand is often called “scriptures.” It is a call for a re-consideration if not rejection of the conventional academicintellectual -political and socio-religious-political orientations and practices long associated with “scriptures.” It is a challenge to take up “scriptures” and with such to engage in a different type of social-cultural-critical-interpretive practice—a fathoming , an “excavation.” This differently oriented interpretive practice has as its focus not the exegesis of texts but the fathoming of human striving and behaviors and orientations, with their fears, aspirations, low points and high marks, as they are represented in relationships to “scriptures.”1 It has to do with excavating the work—and the consequences of such—that we make “scriptures” do for us. Not merely as a courtesy to the reader, but as a necessary part of my pressing of the case for the excavation of (the phenomenon of ) “scriptures” (far beyond but also in relationship to texts), I should like to introduce myself: I am now a mid-career professional working in a small college town located in one of the world’s largest and most diverse population centers. I am a male, but further and more poignantly defined by being called (in this era, at any rate) an “African American”/“black” male. I am a teacher-scholar of religion, more particularly, a teacher-scholar of (a particular representation of ) “scriptures.”2 The last two listed aspects of my identity—African American male, scholar of the “New Testament” as representation of “scriptures”—are rather highly charged. The latter category has to do with a phenomenon that has over the centuries clearly been overdetermined in terms of a type of investigation (exegesis), but oddly and curiously rather under-determined in terms of phenomenology, anthropology, and political and psycho-social criticism of origins, ongoing usages, functions, and effects. The former category—“African American/black male”—has been frighteningly overdetermined as a particular symbol in U.S. and Western culture, but barely recognized as that in which one can encounter the authentically complex, free, singular (even if flawed) thinking-speaking-acting subject. The persistent freightedness of my identity reminds me of the black male character Big Jim Todd in the poem “Pondy Woods” written by Tennessee-native- Vincent L. Wimbush 2 turned–New Critic Robert Penn Warren. Written in the 1940s, the entire poem was constructed around Jim Todd’s frantic run through the woods outside a small Southern town, for reasons that on the surface of the letters of the poem remain unclear. As Warren’s Jim Todd runs, he is hovered over and tortured by a clacking , talking buzzard. Jim Todd was, shall we say, very well-defined by the talking buzzard as the Western cultural standard bearer—“. . . nigger your breed ain’t metaphysical . . .”3 Jim Todd was silent and on the run—the way most of U.S. society, certainly the way Robert Penn Warren’s small-town Tennessee of the early twentieth century, assumed or wanted him to be. How is it that the buzzard could speak—using that violent epithet that haunts us even today!—as though it knew Jim Todd? Knew who he was, what he was about? How could the silent Jim Todd in any significant sense be said or be assumed to be known? How was it possible for him to know himself? How can it be that certain things and peoples are assumed to be so clearly defined and located in the cultural imaginary and discourse, so much talked about, so much gazed upon, engaged, scripted, exegeted, yet remain unknown? The confusion of the two major categories that are pressed into (significant parts of, even if surely not the totality of ) my identity can hardly be without relevance to the agenda that I should like to advance in this essay: I think I am beginning to understand more clearly what are my interests and their stakes: I want and need to know how certain things—a collection of texts here, a particular social demographic there—are invented, are made to work, come to be authorized, come to be determined . And being associated with some of those peoples who have been hyperdetermined , hyper-textualized, and hyper-exegeted, I seem now to need to excavate in directions and to depths that would afford me...

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