Narratives of nation invoke feelings of longing for community and displacement of identity in the people. Through their narratives, nationalist writers consciously forge a community to configure such displacement out of diverse and contending cultural elements, traditions, and people. In resonance with such narration of nation, the writer(s) of the Gospel of John imagined a community of the disciples that was an alternative to the dominant Roman Empire. The Gospel, as many nationalist discourses under colonialism, is an enabling discourse for the colonized community, and thus, is a decolonizing text. In search of a community, however, the Gospel coercively forged many contending discourses into one, bearing resemblance with a colonizing discourse of the Empire. In doing so, even though the Gospel is a displacement narrative of the colonized, it manifests marginalization and lack of awareness of Other within its own construction of identity. The Gospel of John, therefore, is a de/colonizing text. The Gospel forcefully destabilizes, excludes, and marginalizes the voices of Other in its narratives. These marginal voices are represented by the claims of Ioudaioi and Samaritans that simultaneously enable and contend the Gospel's essentialist articulation of communal identity and boundary. Interpreting a discourse of margins such as the Gospel of John alerts one to the critical notion and reality of the ambivalent marginality that contains both danger and promise. Reading the Gospel of John for decolonization, in that case reading the Bible, therefore, requires a constant critique that destabilizes rigid binary pattern of thought, time, or axis of power by continually asking a question -- who are the receiving ends of this newly forged discourse of power or interpretation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TCU/oai:etd.tcu.edu:etd-05052011-082923 |
| Date | 05 May 2011 |
| Creators | KD, Naw San Dee |
| Contributors | Francisco Lozada |
| Publisher | Texas Christian University |
| Source Sets | Texas Christian University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/msword |
| Source | http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-05052011-082923/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to TCU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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