EAN: 9783034302890

INTRODUCING ORDINARY AFRICAN READERS HERMENEUTI...

This book introduces the concept «ordinary African readers' hermeneutics» in a study of the
reception of the Bible in postcolonial Africa. It looks beyond the scholarly and official
church-based material to the way in which the Bible  and discourses on or from the Bible  are
utilized within a wide range of diverse contexts. The author shows that «ordinary readers» can
and did engage in meaningful and liberating hermeneutics. Using the Ag k y 's encounter with
the Bible as an example  he demonstrates that what colonial discourses commonly circulated
about Africans were not always the «truth»  but mere «representations» that were hardly able to
fix African identities  as they were often characterized by certain ambivalences  anxieties and
contradictions. The hybridized Biblical texts  readings and interpretations generated through
retrieval and incorporation of the defunct pre-colonial past created interstices that became
sites for assimilation  questioning and resistance. The book explores how Africans employed
«allusion» as a valid method of interpretation  showing how the critical principle of
interpretation lies not in the Bible itself  but in the community of readers willing to
cultivate dialogical imagination in order to articulate their vision. The author proposes an
African hermeneutical theory  which involves the fusion of both the «scholarly» and the
«ordinary» readers in the task of biblical interpretation within a specific socio-cultural
context.

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