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. Because it is based on the particularities of Equiano's narrative, Wimbush's theoretical work is not only grounded but inductive, and 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.

About the Author
Vincent L. Wimbush is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures at Claremont Graduate University.

Reviews
White Men's Magic profoundly transforms studies of the encounters between the North Atlantic and Black African worlds. In challenging the canonical reading of scriptures, Wimbush invents a new word. 'Scripturalization' is his inspired term to explicate the normalization of constructed meanings, veiling the social and political forces that control their interpretation. Wimbush's innovative method ties the life of the Bible irrevocably to the wider history of slavery and transatlantic movements. The black slave Equiano's autobiography will never be read in the same way again. * Gauri Viswanathan, author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199344390
Author Vincent L. Wimbush
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 231mm * 152mm * 23mm