The Institute for Signifying Scriptures

podcastOPTalksAfroSpiritus
Written By Open Plaza

Dr. Jacqueline Hidalgo and ISS Founding Director Dr. Vincent Wimbush discuss the work of the organization and its 20th anniversary

Symbol of Èṣù Láàlú, 2021. A pivotal in the cosmology of Yoruba spirituality, Èṣù is the deity in charge of law enforcement, orderliness, and direction, embodying the multiplicity of every issue and standing at the middle of divergent world forces. This divinity’s name varies in different locations: Exu de Candomblé and Exu de Quimbanda (Brazil); Legba in Vodou (Haiti); Leba in Winti (Suriname); and Echú in Santería and Lubaniba in Palo Mayombe (Cuba/Latin America). Photo: Ìṣẹ̀ṣeAssembly

 
 

In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Jacqueline Hidalgo talks to fellow religion professor Dr. Vincent Wimbush, Founding Director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The organization’s upcoming annual conference in Atlanta—to be held April 11-13, 2024 under the theme of “Marronage”—will also mark the 25th anniversary of the initial conference that inspired the founding of ISS, along with the publication of African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (Continuum, 2000; reprinted with Wipf and Stock in 2012). Edited by Dr. Wimbush, the anthology brought together 68 scholars and experts from a range of disciplines, including: ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies, as well as art, music, film, dance, drama, and literature.

Today, ISS is an independent organization composed of members of varied backgrounds—scholars, researchers, teachers, public intellectuals, artists, community leaders, and social activists—"who are committed to constructing and advancing a new mode of critical inquiry into social–discursive formation.” Here, the term ‘scriptures’ is “used provocatively as shorthand for an illuminating analytical wedge for cross-cultural, disciplinarily-transgressive excavation of and conversation about the politics of meaning."

 
 
 
 

"African Americans and the Bible is a provocative and challenging work whose impact on biblical study promises to be universally transformative."

Brian K. Blount
Princeton Theological Seminary

 
Featured
Jacqueline Hidalgo

Dr. Jacqueline M. Hidalgo is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego. Formerly, she served as Professor of Latina/o/x Studies and of Religion; Associate Dean for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and Director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College. She is a past president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) and Vice President of the New England/Eastern Canada Region of the Society of Biblical Literature. Dr. Hidalgo has written several essays that examine the intersections of gender, sexuality, ecology, Latine studies, and biblical studies. She is the author of Latina/o/x Studies and Biblical Studies in Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation 3.4 (2020), as well as Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). With Efraín Agosto, she also co-edited the collection of essays Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Dr. Hidalgo holds an AB from Columbia University, an MA from Union Theological Seminary, and a PhD from Claremont Graduate University.

Featured
Vincent Wimbush

Dr. Vincent L. Wimbush is an internationally recognized scholar of religion, intellectual leader, and academic gadfly, with more than thirty years of advanced graduate-level teaching and research experience. He is author/editor of more than twelve books, including White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery; MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference (Oxford University Press, 2012), Theorizing Scriptures; and African Americans and the Bible (Rutgers University Press, 2008), and scores of articles and essays. He is founding director of The Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS), an international scholarly organization, and is conceptualizer and director of several collaborative trans-disciplinary research projects, including a documentary film Finding God in the City of Angels (2010), on the ethnography of scriptures. Recipient of numerous awards and research grants, he is past president of the Society of Biblical Literature. Dr. Wimbush’s general teaching and research interests focus on the trans-disciplinary and comparative study of “scriptures” as sharp wedge for critical research and theorizing in the politics of language, social formation, consciousness, and orientation. His particular area of expertise turns around the uses of scriptures in the historical and contemporary circum-Black Atlantic as window onto the larger comparative phenomena and dynamics of scripturalizing and scripturalization.

 
Open Plaza
Previous

Liminal Theology
Next

Finding La Negrita