Acts of Empire, Second Edition

The Acts of the Apostles and Imperial Ideology

Christina Petterson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532676307, 9781532676314
• eBook ISBN: 9781532676321
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This book combines New Testament studies and cultural theory, and analyzes Acts of the Apostles as a product of imperial discourse. In five chapters, Christina Petterson engages Acts with ideology, gender, class, and empire with different emphases. All of these analyses argue that Christianity can never be set outside discourses of exploitation, discrimination, and hierarchies, but must always be set within them.

Chapter Two

The Reign of the Phallus

Any treatment of gender, empire, and Acts must at the very least acknowledge Jeffrey Staley’s exquisitely crafted article on Acts 16 and its postcolonial analysis of Lydia and the slavegirl.81 Using the work of Musa Dube alongside his own childhood memories, Oliver La Farge’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel, Laughing Boy, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Ceremony, Staley analyzes Lydia and the slavegirl as border women, who serve to “legitimize the ideological and territorial conquests of nascent Christianity.”82 His argument is that the use of two women to mark the border between the colonized and the colonizer deflects attention from Paul as “ideological colonizer” by forcing the reader to choose between the two responses to Paul.83 There are two things I want to discuss in respect to this article: first, its use of women, and, second, its understanding of colonialist ideology.

Sarah Tsosie was a bright Navajo girl with whom Staley and his brothers grew up. All had a crush on her. She was baptized at the mission at thirteen, got pregnant before she finished school in the reservation border town of Shiprock, and died lonely and severely alcoholic some time before the narrative takes place. While I can sympathize with Staley’s discomfort at using stories from the Navajo Reservation and appreciate his conscious efforts at positioning himself, there are a couple of things in his presentation of Sarah Tsosie that niggle at me. The first item is the shift that happens on page 121: “Recently I have begun to think of Sarah Tsosie as Slim Girl, a central character in Oliver La Farge’s classic novel about Navajo Indians.”84 Before this sentence, we have been at her grave; we have followed the romance between her and Staley’s brother Rob, her school days, her decline, and her death. And then in one sentence she is reduced to a literary character, a text within the text within the text. To put it in clichéd terms: in order for her to become the fabric that ties the other texts together, she too must become a text. I realize that she is already textualized in the narrative of Staley’s childhood, but this is pushed even further in that she becomes a literary figure in a text within the text of his article. I am not overly impressed with the way in which she is cast, first as a young woman, whose body caused such excitement amongst the Staley boys, then as a slut, whose self-same body and what it had borne came to be despised by the Staley men, and then finally buried, only to be resurrected as a symbol of border identity, to become, ironically, the embodiment of “the ambiguous relationship of the colonized to the colonizer.”85 I shall return to this issue of textual embodiment below.

Turning to the matter of colonialist ideology, Staley mentions that colonialist ideology created Sarah, as well as Lydia and the slavegirl and that this colonialist ideology must be critiqued.86 A way of moving beyond such an ideology of the biblical text is to supplement the biblical text with intertexts such as Silko’s Ceremony, in which “the border women, the colonized are empowered—even called—to engage their wits and creatively reappropriate the new and old in ways that the colonial power cannot imagine. [. . .] Ceremony offers a lively, postcolonial, post-canonical voice to colonialist-engendered border women like Sarah Tsosie, Slim Girl, Lydia, and the pythonic slavegirl who otherwise remain co-opted, disempowered, or dead.”87

I find it intriguing that La Farge’s novel was labeled colonialist ideology and Silko’s novel postcolonial. Is Ceremony then not a product of colonialist ideology? To discuss that, we must first consider what constitutes a postcolonial subject. As Arif Dirlik argues, the subject position of postcolonial discourse is not only contingent on global capitalism as conditioning the emergence of postcolonial criticism, but also, as O’Hanlon and Washbrook note, the material conditions and class relations of the postcolonial intellectuals.88 A postcolonial subjectivity is, in other words, firmly connected to class, particularly the middle class. In most cases this class is a result of colonialism, either as a stratification of society, as in Greenland, or a consolidation of already existing social structures, as in South Africa.89 One of Dirlik’s issues—and there are several—with postcolonialism is the reluctance of postcolonial intellectuals to address the economic system (global capitalism), which established the conditions for postcolonial criticism—namely postcolonial critics—in the first place.90 To illustrate Dirlik’s point with an example from Greenland, the Danish colonizers decided who was to receive formal education. In most cases this opportunity was limited to men with a legitimate Danish father. This group in turn became the Greenlandic intelligentsia, which went on to form the Greenlandic literary tradition. They were economically advantaged, since they earned wages, which by far exceeded what their countrymen could earn through hunting. This group...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Self
• The Reign of the Phallus
• When in Rome . . .
• Dissecting Language Acts
• The Nature of Acts
• Violence, Empire and the Constitution of the Western Subject
• Bibliography