Empowering Memory and Movement: Thinking and Working across Borders

18. Biblicon Interview with Alice Bach

18 Biblicon Interview with Alice Bach This 1998 interview1 with my colleague Alice Bach for the journal Biblicon introduces the third part of this volume, “Memory and Theory.” In our conversation, we explore the methodological and hermeneutical questions that arise for scholars who seek to recover wo/men’s history as memory and heritage, for as Judy Chicago has stated, “Our heritage is our power!” The image of quilt and quilting is a powerful hermeneutical key for such history writing. Alice Bach (AB): In its British origins, the cultural movement tried to bridge the gap between academy and working people whose lives had rarely connected with the academy. Cultural studies have often fallen short of this goal, especially as it has developed a highly specific vocabulary that might alienate some of its original participants. In your work you have also tried to bridge gaps—between academy, church, and women’s lived realities. Could you comment on the ways you think you have been successful in this, and perhaps some of the ways that you have been less satisfied with such attempts (your own and others)? ESF: Your question implies that the task of feminist studies is similar to that of cultural studies, and that one of its goals is to bridge the gap between the academy and working people or between the academy and wo/men. However, I am hesitant to introduce such a conceptual framework. Cultural studies sought to break down either the modernist gap between high/low, serious/popular, academic/mass-mediated culture or the Marxist dichotomy between culture understood as a reflection of ruling-class interests and mass culture as a means to sedate workers. To conceive of feminist studies in analogy to cultural studies, your question suggests, would mean to construe the task of the feminist intellectual as having the function to mediate and repair the rift between common people (women) and the academy (men). 1. First published as “Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza: An Interview.” Biblicon 3 (May 1998): 27–44. 293 However, I do not think that the feminist scholar in religion should be a translator or a bridge between the language of the academy and that of the common people. Rather, in my view, the intellectual or feminist scholar in religion derives her questions and theories from feminist movements for change. She carefully listens to the questions wo/men raise and then “thinks through” or theorizes them, utilizing the language and tools of the academy so that knowledge no longer is produced in the interest of elite, white men. It is not the academy but wo/men struggling for change and recognition as full citizens in society, academy, and church who articulate knowledges that must be “translated” into academic discourses if wo/men‘s knowledge should become public knowledge. AB: So in your understanding feminist scholars have not so much the task of translating the methods and results of biblical scholarship to a wider audience, but rather they have to “cast their lot” with women struggling for survival and change as well as to translate women’s concerns into the language of the academy. ESF: Exactly! My colleague at Harvard, Cornel West, calls this the “cultural politics of difference.” He acknowledges its feminist roots, observing that the decisive push toward such a new cultural politics of difference has not come from male intellectuals of the left, but has come from black wo/men of the African diaspora: The new cultural politics of difference are neither simply oppositional in contesting the mainstream (or malestream) for inclusion, nor transgressive in the avant-gardist sense of shocking conventional bourgeois audiences. Rather, they are distinct articulations of talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized and disorganized, people in order to empower and enable social action. . . . This perspective impels these cultural critics and artists to reveal, as an integral component of their production, the very operations of power within their immediate work contexts (i.e., academy, museums, gallery, mass media).2 I would modify West’s statement somewhat. While I agree that intellectuals who understand themselves as cultural critics have the task of 2. Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in The Cultural Studies Reader (ed. Simon During; New York: Routledge, 1993), 204. 294 | Empowering Memory and Movement spelling out relations of domination and of aligning themselves in solidarity with those dehumanized by them, I do...