Global Hermeneutics? - International Voices in Biblical Studies ...

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was that the Nigerian school got a relatively updated library of ten thousand
volumes or so. The negative effect, though, was that the library hardly contained
any books that were written from an African perspective, as the school was not able
to find room in its annual budget for purchasing more contextually relevant books.
The library was (and probably still is) therefore not of much help for lecturers and
students aiming to reflect theologically and exegetically in relation to their
immediate geographical, social and cultural context. And further, the library gave
(and probably still gives) the impression that professional biblical interpretation
basically is a Western thing. The proper interpretation of the Bible, as it were, is
found in theological and exegetical literature written by Western scholars from
Western perspectives, and it is eventually stored in bookshelves that are made in
the United States and surrounded by beautiful landscape photos from Texas.
In other words, we notice that the consequences of the modern globalization on
biblical interpretation point in quite opposite directions; a global distribution of
interpretative communities on the one hand, and a continuation of the traditional
Western interpretative hegemony on the other. Whether the latter is a problem or
not for the former, is a political (hence interpretatively relevant!) question. Many
biblical interpreters—not only in the West, even my Old Testament class in
Nairobi—do not think of it as such, as they tend to approach biblical interpretation
from perspectives that underestimate the role of the interpretative context. Others,
however, do find it increasingly problematic that interpretative strategies developed
within (and therefore reflecting) Western (male and middle class) experiences are
assumed to represent some kind of universality, principally and practically
detached from the socio-cultural context of the interpreter.
In response, therefore, a growing number of alternative, or perhaps we should
rather say resistant, interpretative strategies have been developed. These strategies
are alternative in the sense that they reject the concept of universality of traditional
Western interpretation, and they are resistant in the sense that they—from postcolonial,
liberationist, feminist, and other consciously ideological perspectives—let
their interpretation voice the experiences and concerns of those who are
marginalized by the dominant, Western minorities of biblical interpreters. 3 Such
alternative or resistant interpretative strategies may for some time have been
thought of as “voices from the margins” of the mainstream Western guilds of
3 Cf. e.g. E. Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); G. O. West, The Academy of the Poor: Towards a
Dialogical Reading of the Bible (Interventions 2; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1999); F. F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll,
N.Y.: Orbis, 2000); R. Boer, Last Stop Before Antarctica: The Bible and Postcolonialism in
Australia (The Bible and Postcolonialism 6; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001); R.
S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002).