1. Even today one of the great challenges facing Christians is how to imagine their space. It has been much easier for Christians to imagine their time and live in their time. At a very basic level, the vast majority of Christians would agree that they live between the ascension of Jesus the Christ and his second coming, the paraousia. Most Christians can grasp this Christ-shaped time, even if they never speak of it in formal theological language or understand the implications of such a vision of time for how they should live. But space, that is, the spatial dimensions of their existence in faith, eludes many, if not most. Yet if life inside Christ-shaped time means at the very least a different evaluative process of time used, time lived, and time experienced, then what accompanies this time for Christians is also life in space constituted in and through Jesus Christ. There is then a new possibility for Christians to see themselves in and with that new sense of space.
2. I am not saying that the question of identity is unimportant. Indeed, it emerges fairly quickly once one begins to consider the historical process through which Christian community comes into existence. However, starting with the identity question orients our thinking toward group distinction. What normally follows from gauging the identity perimeters of the people of God is a second troubling set of questions regarding the pluralities of this identification. If Christians are the people of God, aren’t Jews the other people of God? If there are two peoples of God, why aren’t there more peoples of God, peoples of other religious traditions? One important answer to these kinds of questions has been that the term “people of God” carries a theological definition peculiar to Christians and Jews. This kind of response, however, bypasses the problem raised when one starts with distinction and definition. That starting point leads to boundary formation, which may easily be conceptualized socially, culturally, and, in the end, racially.
3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 52. Lefebvre states, “Any ‘social existence’ aspiring or claiming to be ‘real’, but failing to produce its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction unable to escape from the ideological or even the ‘cultural’ realm. It would fall to the level of folklore and sooner or later disappear altogether, thereby immediately losing its identity, its denomination and its feeble degree of reality.” The significance of Lefebvre’s insight for us is precisely in helping us draw the connection between racial existence and the constitution of spatial existence supportive of that very existence.
4. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 12–13. Paul Gilroy reminds us that race is not an easily abandoned imaginary. He states, “For many racialized populations, race and the hard-won, oppositional identities it supports are not to be lightly or prematurely given up. These groups will need to be persuaded very carefully that there is something worthwhile to be gained from a deliberate renunciation of race as the basis for belonging to one another and acting in concert. They will have to be reassured that the dramatic gestures involved in turning against racial observance can be accomplished without violating the precious forms of solidarity and community that have been created by their protracted subordination along racial lines.”
5. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 15–16.
6. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2004).
7. Robert Jenson, “Toward a Christian Theology of Judaism,” in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, Jews and Christians: People of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 2ff.
8. However, as I suggest in this chapter, it is precisely the power of this essentialized view of Israel that disrupts a reading of biblical Israel and hinders a theological appreciation for Judaism. This is not to say I deny the existence of ethnic Israel, of Jewish people; rather, the troubled history of ethnicity will be factored into my treatment of Israel so as not to reinvent the very problem we are trying to overcome, namely, the inability to see the theological significance of Israel, both biblical Israel and living Israel.
9. This is the heart of supersessionism —Israel is a historical moment reflective of a narrow ethnocentric theological vision that has been transcended with the coming of the Christ. As we saw with Bishop Colenso’s reflections, Israel presented an impoverished law—works theology rooted in blood and soil. Colenso’s work exemplified the idea of Israel as theological antique. To his credit, Colenso tried to put his supersessionist vision to good antiracist use by calling into question Israel’s election and by implication the election of any single people. For Colenso, the universal love of the Father-God enacts the brotherhood of humanity, thereby trumping any priority of Israel.
10. Tikva Simone Frymer-Kensky, ed., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder: Westview, 2000); R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); Scott Bader-Saye, Church and Israel after Christendom: The Politics of Election (Boulder: Westview, 1999); Michael Wyschogrod and R. Kendall Soulen, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
11. It has become an inescapable conclusion that the Holocaust would not have happened without a German Christian community permeated with a ferocious supersessionism that helped to fuel hatred of Jewish people. Cf. Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003); George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987).
12. Supersessionism, to be sure, is a problem that precedes the epochs of discovery. Multiple points of origin for this problem could be suggested that (a) begin with the earliest writings of the church, that is, in the New Testament itself (see James D. G. Dunn, Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135: The Second Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism [Durham, September 1989] [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999]), or (b) look toward the earlier post-New Testament thinkers (see Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004]), or (c) consider the so-called Constantine shift from a small persecuted church to a state-supported church (see John Howard Yoder, Michael G. Cartwright, and Peter Ochs, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003]), or (d) discern tensions that grow out of the rapid spread of Christianity and the concomitant rise of Christian vernacularization (see Kenneth R. Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006]). Tracing the multiple possible seeds of supersessionism, although an important endeavor, lies beyond my purview. My concern lies within the thick tangles of the problem as it grows in the colonialist soil and is nourished by the racial imaginaries of modernity and fragmented space. We saw that Colenso learned to read Israel racially much as he read the Zulus. This ability to read Israel as a race alongside other races was a profound achievement not simply of supersessionist strategies but of the racial imagination. Specifically, Israel was read inside whiteness. As we noted in chapter 1, once Israel could be read inside whiteness, whole new possibilities of subverting their election opened up. What adds to the difficulty of the supersessionist problematic is that it draws its original power from the very serious tension that emerges out of Christianity’s central claims regarding Jesus Christ. Those tensions are authentic and present a fundamental challenge to Jewish self-understanding. No critique of supersessionism can avoid this deeper point of real conflict that must be acknowledged. We can, however, draw an important distinction between that conflict, that is, the parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism, and supersessionism. More important, we can tease out from the original tension another aspect of its significance for understanding Israel’s importance. Indeed, I want in this chapter to capture some sense of the basic aspects of that tension in hopes of recasting it as a dissonance that calls for a resolution and not a supersessionist response.
13. My use of the term “goyim” is not meant to signify a racist or derogatory gesture but to mark a fundamental distinction in terms of a way of life. It is an epistemic and a sociological and, most important, a theological deployment.
14. In this regard, I draw on a notion of unconsciousness following the conceptual trajectory articulated in Fredric Jameson’s seminal text, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Jameson states, “It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative [of class struggle and warfare], in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconsciousness finds its function and its necessity,” 20. My concern is not in following the Jamesonian project but in drawing it toward a different, uninterrupted narrative, of God with Israel, of Jews and Gentiles in the body of Jesus and the racial resistance and submersion of that narrative.
15. Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, 25–108.
16. My goal in this final chapter is to unearth a fundamental ecclesial process, that is, how peoples come to exist in a new way—as the people walking with God. In so doing, I shall approach themes that have flowed through the entire text but without their fuller explanation or definition. The first theme is the importance of Israel to Christian identity. The second theme is the nature of the communion that was repeatedly gestured toward as a social desideratum. If Christians and Christian communities are ever going to engage the stronger ramifications of the performance of their faith as community, then one must slowly begin to reimagine Gentile existence as a theological starting point for imagining Christian community. It is important to clarify what concerns are not in view at this point. I am not concerned with questions of ecumenicity, that is, with questions regarding the relationship between various communions within Christianity. Addressing the theological fragmentation within the global community of Christian faith remains a very important question; however, I want to approach theological fragmentation in another key and from another angle. I am not downplaying the schisms that have plagued the church for more than a millennium. What I have displayed throughout this book are profoundly theological matters as serious as the ecclesial fragmentation that plagues the global church. We cannot, however, arrive at the kind of ecumenical dialogue that may yield unification as long as wider processes of cultural fragmentation remain unaddressed as theological problems. In order to address this fragmentation as a theological problem, the identity question must be repositioned. It must be placed inside the larger question of the constitution of the people of God.
17. Jon Levenson, “The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism,” in Mark G. Brett, ed., Ethnicity and the Bible (Leiden; New York: Brill, 1996), 152–53. I am indebted to Amanda Beckenstein Mbuvi for pointing this important essay out to me. See Amanda Beckenstein Mbuvi, “Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Construction of Communal Identity” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2008), 6.
18. Ethnicity, while a powerfully useful idea for designating people groups, takes its modern cues from the racial imagination. Specifically, the idea of ethnicity allows one to imagine the collective identities of peoples tangentially related and sometimes completely unrelated to specific land and landscapes. Ethnicity comes to designate a people by their products, stories, rituals, practices, memories, and so forth, and is often tied implicitly to their racial characteristics. The idea of ethnicity performs a softer surrogacy for land than race. It allows one to capture a sense of the fluidity of peoples in space while not taking their actual space into a strong calculation of identity. By emphasizing their products, ethnicity is able to localize identity in ways that make conceptual room for private property. This means one can imagine people in space, yet see them as fundamentally independent of the very space they inhabit. Ethnicity, in this sense, is a modern invention. However, its antecedents can be discerned precisely in the subversion of Israel’s election. See Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Both Malik and Sollors are aware of the problem with ethnicity in terms of its racializing function. It remains, however, a powerful way of conceptualizing difference even for those theorists aware of its entanglement. See Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, ed. Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
19. For a powerful example of this schema, see his classic work, Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel 1250–1050 B.C.E (London: SCM, 1980). Also see J. David Pleins, The Social Visions of the Hebrew Bible: A Theological Introduction (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001).
20. The central hermeneutic principle that informs my argument at this point is that Jewish existence must always be read theologically; that is, biblical and living Israel must be thought of as though God absolutely matters in their constitution and in their existence. Any modernist reading of Jewish existence that ignores God draws itself and Israel into a strange identity cul-de-sac. As Emil Fackenheim stated, “The modern expulsion of God from the human world made Jewish existence problematic…. The moment the living God became questionable, Jewish existence became questionable. The Jew had to embark on the weary business of self-definition.” Quoted in Katya Gibel Azoulay, Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 135.
21. Joel S. Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob: Reclaiming the Biblical Concept of Election (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007).
22. It is a crucial matter that we understand the dabarim of YHWH (the word of the Lord) as addressing Israel in respect to its journey toward and in the land. I have argued that the identity of a people is bound to their land. This means that the fundamental equation for premodern collective identity (that is, collective identity before colonialist land seizure and its commodity transformation) includes landscape and its specifics, animals, seasons, and so forth. It also means that the story of Israel with its land is the story of God establishing the identity of a people. In order to understand the implications of this divine operation, one must not only resist the modernist habit of imagining ethnicity, but also imagine a spatial dynamic to divine revelation.
23. Carol L. Meyers, Exodus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 71ff.
24. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 504.
25. Meyers, Exodus, 94. This connection between death, violence, and God has always been a disturbing connection for many Jewish and Christian readers of Israel’s story. Carol Meyers suggests that an ideological reading of the text as an ahistorical creation of an Israel “struggl[ing] to find and maintain her distinctive identity in the fluid cultural waters of the ancient Near East” may lessen the force of this depiction of a violent, mass-murdering God. However, before one commits oneself to an ethnic reading of Israel, it is important to recognize what God in the story is doing with violence and death.
26. Norman C. Habel, The Land Is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). Norman Habel suggests that there are at least six land ideologies present in the Hebrew Bible, each functioning in different modulations to announce Israel’s right to occupy the land. Habel’s reading suggest the following: (1) the royal ideology, teased out from 1 Kgs 3–10 and the select Psalms, sees the land as the source of wealth given by God to the monarch; (2) the theocratic ideology, drawn primarily from Deuteronomy, envisions the land as conditional grant given by God; (3) the ancestral household ideology, found in the book of Joshua, sees the land as family lots given by God to the faithful ones of Israel; (4) the prophetic ideology, seen in the prophet Jeremiah, holds that the land is YHWH’s personal nachalah (inheritance) to be shared by the chosen people; (5) the agrarian ideology, reflected in Lev 25–27, holds that the land is bound to YHWH and the rhythms of life centered around Sabbath-keeping; and (6) the immigrant ideology recognized in the Abraham narratives sees the land as host country promised by God to the ancestor Abraham, who without violence shared the land with its historic inhabitants.
27. Habel’s point in discerning these ideological strands in the biblical narrative is to show how a theological vision can be woven into an ideological position to justify the invasion and occupation of a desired land. Habel’s reading of the story of Israel reflects the aftermath of colonialism’s horror. His reading strategy is patently contextual. He draws a direct line from the theologically flavored ideologies of modern collectivities back to Israel’s multiple historical justifications of conquest. Habel wrote this text with the history of colonialist occupation in Australia in mind. He was keenly aware how the biblical narrative could be used to support the taking of native lands. Indeed, he resists drawing conclusions regarding land use today, preferring to offer a cautionary tale regarding the use of Israel’s story to underwrite any divinely sanctioned land possession. There is little doubt that Habel rightly sees a justification for violence in the story of Israel that sets the stage for its massive redeployment by modern nations. However, the way toward resisting the redeployment of this ideological justification is to establish a specific theological limitation. This was only for Israel, and any further claim to it, even by Israel, was collapsed onto Jesus himself. That is, Jesus presents a way forward from violence for Israel and the entire world.
28. This, of course, constitutes a counterreading to important voices in the Christian tradition. It is exactly the possibilities of the repetition of Israel-like conquest that suggest the deepest supersessionist logic, because such claims in effect perform an Israel replacement in that God speaks and commands (or allows) war for the sake of establishing a reality of redemption in a particular place. See, for example, “Francisco de Vitoria,” in Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100–1625 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 609.
29. Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (Eugene: WS Publishers, 1996), 196ff; Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1992).
30. My use of “ethnic” in this sense is a designation not of identity but of collective orientation and collective imagination. What people could possibly imagine life beyond the agon, that is, the eternal struggle for dominion and power? Certainly, not all peoples could be described as warring, power-hungry tribes, yet no people is eternally secured from feeling the effects of such peoples or being infected by the desire to secure its own future through conquest of others. Our participation in Israel’s story is precisely as the subtext, the intertextual reality that informs Israel’s textual performance.
31. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 7ff. With the first sense of suffering, Torrance does not seem to be reiterating the Protestant idea that the law was an unbearable burden for Israel. Rather, his point is the disciplining realities of the divine presence in Israel. God judges every aspect of Israel’s life. Under the light cast by the dabarim, Israel’s sins cannot be hidden, and they demand a response from YHWH, their covenant partner. Suffering in this sense is on the order of rebuke, chastisement, and discipline with the fearful reminder that YHWH is capable of punishing Israel. Here Israel’s suffering illumines humanity’s shortcomings in the presence of God. Our waywardness comes into view in Israel’s struggles of faithfulness. We also see what God desires from the Gentiles—repentance and obedience. This is the vicarious nature of Israel’s life within the commandments of God. That vicarious nature continues with the second sense of its suffering. Israel suffers because they expose our (Gentile) sin. The exposure of ways of life that Israel’s God deems unacceptable could only enlist responses of defensiveness against or, more dangerously, hatred of Israel. The story of Israel reveals a people hated by other nations because Israel’s life bore witness to divine prohibitions among the Gentiles. Yet, once exposed there was no turning back, only a turning away from the light of Israel. This suffering because of hatred ties to a third sense of suffering for Israel. Israel’s life lived in life-giving discipline provided by the wisdom of the Torah was also a guide to other nations. The one true God is revealed in Israel, and each day Israel by its quotidian practices showed to other peoples how one must live in obedience to God. Yet obedience exposes disobedience. The expression of love for YHWH can also expose the competition between this God and the gods of other nations. Why should other peoples abandon their gods for this God? Why should the demands of the Hebrews’ God be important to them? It is precisely this dynamic that illumines the nature of theological hatred of the other, that is, of Israel.
32. Of course, one can only reflect on Israel’s suffering in light of the horror of the Shoah. Indeed, the theological complexity of that event of Jewish suffering is only heightened in the light of this threefold sense of biblical Israel’s suffering. See Robert Gibbs, “Suspicions of Suffering,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Frymer-Kresky, 224. The Jewish philosopher Robert Gibbs offers helpful distinctions in the way one might envision Jewish suffering. He suggests this suffering may be viewed as representative, subordinating, or totalizing. The sense of representative suffering aligns with Christian views of Israel’s suffering as specifically vicarious, an instance of suffering for the entire world. This representative sense differs from a subordinating view in which Jewish suffering is simply a part of a historical and global reality of human suffering. In this regard, he suggests, Jewish suffering “loses any meaning without reference to the whole.”
33. Gibbs, “Suspicions of Suffering,” 225. The totalizing view stands in exaggerated relation to the subordinate view. The totalizing view makes Jewish suffering instrumental. The totalizing view makes “Jewish suffering…part of religious suffering, maybe even a vital organ, and it is justified when we grasp how the whole world forms a totality and needs suffering in order to achieve its unity” (224). Subordinate and totalizing views of Jewish suffering fail precisely because they refuse to recognize the asymmetry of Jewish suffering. Gibbs says that “it is not just particular suffering that represents the suffering of the whole world, but our particular suffering. Who suffers is a vital aspect of interpreting representative suffering.”
34. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998). These important standard texts treat the questions of historicity, that is, the historical Jesus questions, with great theological care. However, my concerns do not follow such treatments.
35. The relationship between the historical Jesus and ancient Christian communities of interpretation remains an important hermeneutic concern in New Testament scholarship. That concern, however, often gets articulated in ways that completely ignore this crucial reality of the (Gentile) subject position of the readers. In this regard, I must recall Sheehan’s account of the formation of the Enlightenment Bible and Casanova’s account of the emergence of the (colonialist) literary world order. New Testament scholarship by and large continues to function in the arena constituted between these two developments. See Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
36. Karl Barth and Geoffrey William Bromiley, The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Church Dogmatics, 4:1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956). The Christian theological themes of a virgin birth and the oneness of the Son with the Father, the Son of God as of the same substance with God his father (homoousion tō patri), flow out of a deep conviction that Christians have seen the election of God in flesh in Israel and it is Jesus.
37. See Hos 11: 1–2; Matt 2: 13–15; Exod 4: 22–24.
38. Matthew 4: 1–3a.
39. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1–3 (New York: Macmillan, 1959); Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 409ff. In the spring of 1937 over the course of several days Bonhoeffer guided a group of former seminarians in a Bible study reflecting on the temptation of Jesus. These former seminarians were part of the Confessing Church that stood against the Nazi regime.
40. One should resist the tendency to read the temptation narratives of Jesus as an exercise in discerning one’s own individual temptations. In such an exercise, my own temptation is juxtaposed to Jesus’ temptation. What Bonhoeffer’s insight makes possible is a way to return one’s vision of Jesus’ temptation to Israel and its implications for Gentile existence. (Matt 4: 3–4)
41. Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 103–4. Here in the wilderness is a new exposition and a new revealing: the tempter comes. In the wilderness where Israel fell before the tempter, Jesus must stand before the great destroyer and tempter of all peoples. As Bonhoeffer notes, “In distinction from the temptation of Adam and all human temptations the tempter himself comes to Jesus…. Whereas elsewhere he makes use of creatures, here he himself must conduct the struggle. This makes it clear that in the temptation of Jesus it is a matter of the whole (emphasis added).
42. (Matt 4: 5–7) Jesus’ life is in (hypothetical) danger. This is the worst kind of danger because it knows no bounds, no beginning and no ending. It is the danger that is inextricably tied to the fear of the unforeseen, the anxiety over the sufficiency of internal strength to face external enemies, and it is therefore tied to theological tests. See Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 105. Bonhoeffer states the case powerfully: “Jesus’ answer sets the God’s Word against God’s Word, but in such a way that there is no fatal uncertainty, and so that truth is set against lies. Jesus calls this temptation a temptation of God. He will remain only by his Father’s Word; that suffices him.”
43. Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 105. Bonhoeffer is insightful when he notes that in this temptation, “Satan fights with his very own weapons. There is no more veiling, no more dissimulation. Satan’s power matches itself directly against the power of God. Satan hazards his ultimate resources. His gift is immeasurably big and beautiful and alluring; and in return for his gift he claims worship.”
44. By Gentile presence I am not focused on the architectural logic of the writers of the Gospels in which some texts (for example, the Lukan narrative, which was probably written with a Gentile audience in mind) support Gentile inclusion, while others (such as the Matthean narrative) were clearly written in full recognition of Jewish distinctiveness. In this regard, I am not concerned with the question of the intended audience of various New Testament texts. Rather, I am drawing attention to the spatial logic articulated in the actions of Jesus in relation to Gentiles.
45. Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Church Dogmatics 4:1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 170. His words are, as Barth notes (following the insight of Luther), the divine “no” that conceals the divine “yes.”
46. Philip Schaff et al., Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory Nazianzen (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), 440.
47. Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1988), 167. The religious elite who benefited from that order objected to him and designated Jesus an agent of Beelzebul, of Satan, because he upset the sociopolitical order of things. Jesus’ response, as the biblical scholar Ched Myers notes, turns the accusation back against the religious elites. It is they who are the agents of the evil one by fitting Israel’s religious life comfortably into the hegemonic sociopolitical system. Myers states, “Jesus…turned the tables completely upon his opponents [the scribal class]: it is they who are aligned against God’s purposes. To be captive to the way things are, to resist criticism and change, to brutally suppress efforts at humanization—is to be bypassed by the grace of God.”
48. K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 19ff.
49. Myers, Binding the Strong Man, 159. Ched Myers notes that in Mark this new wine for Israel will be revealed “as the genuine social practice of nonviolent love.”
50. Orlando Patterson, in his seminal text Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), notes that the life of a slave is characterized by what he terms social death; that is, the slave is without voice, distinction, and is in a constant state of alienation. Social death forms one of the essential markers of slave existence. The others include natal alienation and dishonor. Patterson’s account of slavery illumines the nature of the risk involved in publicly identifying with Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, it helps one make sense of Paul’s account of Jesus as existing in the form of a slave.
51. Jesus could not have postured himself toward Israel in this way if in fact this new orientation was not already a reality in him. Herein lay the great mystery and a great power articulated from within the Christian vision of the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son in the Spirit. Jesus said leave parents and the determining processes inherent in kinship life because he displayed the power to recapitulate the reality of belonging through his own body. Just as violence and death found their first home in kinship with the killing of Abel by Cain, so now Jesus would destroy the power of violence and death at work in families.
52. Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith (Philadelphia; New York: Fortress; Paulist, 1984), 56. In this regard, community may be too strong a designation as we find, for example, in the seminal work of the theologian Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and Community, whose thesis that Jesus sought to establish a contrast-society is very persuasive. Lohfink states, “Jesus understood the people of God which he sought to gather as a contrast-society. This in no way means that he envisioned the people of God as a state or a nation, but he did understand it as a community which forms in its own sphere of life, a community in which one lives in a different way and treats others in a different way than is usual elsewhere in the world. We could definitely describe the people of God which Jesus sought to gather as an alternative society. It is not the violent structures of the powers of this world which are to rule within it, but rather reconciliation and brotherhood.” While this account is persuasive and fundamentally correct, it reaches for a cohesiveness that is premature given the realities of scandal that surround Jesus. He was seen by many as a madman whose theological vision was deeply suspect.
53. Matt 6: 31–34.
54. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” in Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
55. Ben Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster, 1998); Beverly Roberts Gaventa, The Acts of the Apostles (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003); Justo L. González, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001); Ernst Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971).
56. My language of gesture is not meant to turn the speaking of tongues into a mere symbol for a natural process of translation, thereby undermining a Pentecostal hermeneutic. Rather, gesture means here an intentionality to move the disciples by the presence of the Spirit toward a new imaginative possibility of the gathering of Israel in the presence of God.
57. There was real content to this contra mundi posture for Gentiles because it required them to denounce and resist involvement with pagan ritual, which was no small matter in the ancient world. Such ritual was woven into the fabric of daily life for many, and it was the central source of economic existence for even more. However, this limitation in the social imagination of the Jewish believers is understandable given not only their status as a religious minority within the Roman Empire, but also now as a religious sect within that religious minority. They were perceived as an unstable and chaotic movement that carried the real danger of upsetting the social order and disrupting multiple religious communities.
58. Indeed, one could fruitfully read the remaining chapters of Acts, which are centrally the odyssey of Paul, as the exposure of the struggle of two ways of life, Jew and Gentile, being irreversibly drawn together through the revelation of Jesus, God’s only Son. From the introduction of Timothy in Acts 16, the “biracial” child of a Jewish mother and a Greek father, as Paul’s mentee and assistant, to the constant attacks he endured from both Jews and Gentiles, to his exhausting attempts to convince both Jews and Gentiles of the new way to be found in Jesus, we see the Spirit of God laying bare the complex depths of resistance to the joining of peoples in a new way of life that would upset the social order. We also gain clues to how the Spirit-constituted gesture of communion might be worked out in the joining of peoples who would experience both continuity and discontinuity in various aspects of their cultural and social realities.
59. The vision in Christian theology today for separate but equal (theological) existence for Jews and Christians and all other Christian peoples arises out of an important attempt to address the legacies of conquest and violence as well as the desire to show appreciation and respect for cultural difference. There is also the desire to respect the integrity of and the continuation of Jewish theological tradition on the one hand and on the other hand the various cultural traditions of different Christian communities. These are notable desires; however, they must be situated in both the historical trajectory of life turned toward communion established by Jesus through the Spirit and the continuing trajectory of the reformation of identity through the processes of displacement and colonialist translation. Christian theology has the unique challenge of articulating a joining of peoples through the spatial reality constituted by the life of Jesus that overcomes the agon between peoples. This must be done, however, in full awareness of the socioeconomic processes that perpetuate an agonistic social imagination and even now continue to undermine the possibilities of that joining. Thankfully, the Apostle Paul gave us even more clues to aid in this articulation.
60. We must keep in mind that neither Jew nor Gentile here refers to a cultural monolith but to a complex variety of peoples. Thus the joining of peoples fosters the mixture of peoples and their ways of life in such a way that cultural continuity is disclosed in cultural discontinuity and cultural discontinuity is disclosed in cultural continuity.
61. Pheme Perkins, Ephesians (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997); Pheme Perkins, “The Letter to the Ephesians: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 11:349–466. Pauline authorship of Ephesians remains a disputed question: however, for my concerns Pauline authorship is not the crucial matter. There is more scholarly agreement that this letter reflects the outgrowth of Paul’s insights and may even be, if indeed Pauline, written by a mature Paul in whom these insights grew through years of life in and in between Jewish and Christian communities. Regardless, these words are significant here in the way Paul (whose name I will use for the sake of simplicity and semantic clarity) captures the Gentile situation. The urgency of these ideas is even more compelling if one considers them in light of my earlier exegesis of the temptations of Jesus and the captivity of the nations.
62. Markus Barth, The Broken Wall: A Study of the Epistle to the Ephesians (Chicago: Judson, 1959).
63. Recall Henri Lefebvre’s threefold idea of space as perceived, conceived, and lived. As noted in chapter 5, Lefebvre offered a way of grasping the creation of space in three modes: (1) spatial practice, which is the material environment, (2) representations of space, which are conceptual models we use to guide our practice, and (3) spaces of representation, which are the lived social relations of users to the environment. Space in this regard is not simply the container of activity but an activity itself, not simply a place of relation but a relation itself. Physical, mental, and social spaces are interdependent and mutually constitute one another. Lefebvre’s insight into the nature of space helps one capture the wider implications of Paul’s vision of communion between Jews and Gentiles and for the very nature of cultural intimacy. I am less concerned here with rehearsing Paul’s elaborate discussions of the salvation of Israel or the nature of the law and its relation to Jew and Gentile or his searing critique of the Christian Judaizers. Rather, my compelling consideration is looking at the new reality constituted by the life of Jesus for Jews and Gentiles.
64. By this account I am imagining a reversal of the trajectory of the intimate established by colonial relations. That trajectory established the social imaginary as bound to an intimacy established by whiteness performed through a Western episteme and its aesthetically powerful deployment of discursive systems. In such a schema, all the peoples of the world imagine cultural continuity or discontinuity or both through the dictates of use-value within particular global economic arrangements. See Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
65. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 197–99. Another crucial implication of this new space is the reacknowledgment of Christian existence inside Israel. T. F. Torrance noted that Jesus is the head of the church and the messiah of Israel (at the same time). By his statement Torrance captured what he called the organic connection between Jesus and Israel and between Jesus and the church. This connection, if taken seriously, yields a nonsupersessionist way of envisioning the life of the church as always bound up in a word for Israel.
66. It is a tragic but profound truth that there has been no significant conversation between Christian and Jewish theologians about race, the racial imagination, or whiteness. Whiteness is the given of identity that permeates the interreligious theological texts of both modern white Christian and Jewish theologians. Race is never questioned, rarely analyzed, and rarely considered in their analysis of the modern or postmodern condition of religious knowledge, religious communities, or theologies between the two groups. There are an increasing number of studies of Jews and race as well as classic studies on the relation of Jews and blacks and important work on Jews in the racial imagination of Europe. But the intersection of these concerns with theology, Jewish and Christian, is painfully absent. For examples of important texts on race and Jewish life, see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Seth Forman, Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
67. By meditation upon the body, black and Jewish, I want to draw attention to the meaning of the body, black and Jewish, within the racial imagination. I am not referring to a comprehensive comparative analysis of the ways in which Africans and Jews have been treated from the beginning of the colonialist moment through slavery and the flowering of Enlightenment anti-Semitism, although such a treatment is greatly needed. Nor is my concern an archeological exploration into the relation of the primordial people groups that inhabited the worlds now referred to as the Middle East and North Africa in an effort to discern the interactions between “ancient” Hebrews and Ethiopians. Nor is my central focus the ways in which Africans and Jews have been inscribed within racial categories, although that central fact must frame any meditation. In this regard, I will use the twin notions of “black” and “Jew” in this section to indicate Africans’ and Jews’ appearance within the racial imagination. I will also explore the contours of the iconic space that exists between the black body and the Jewish body within racial calculus. Here I am using the concept of icon in its most basic theological sense—as an artistic rendering that helps facilitate a sense of the divine life revealed in Jesus Christ. The icon exists in the midst of a constellation of participatory nodes within the life of the church. In their rendering of bodies, icons reach out to those looking at them, extending artistic lines into the lines of their existence that connect them to the multiple acts within the spiritual life, for example, prayer, worship, and liturgy. The inner logic of the icon is the incarnate life of God in Jesus of Nazareth. As St. John of Damascus taught, because God became flesh and was seen, touched, and heard in the flesh, humans may draw images of this God and the life he lived for us. Cf. Jim Forest, Praying with Icons (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1997).
68. Not every people in the world at a particular moment entered the racial calculus. Nor am I saying that racial calculus is the only factor in the formation of peoples from the day Prince Henry offered his first tithe of black bodies to the church in thanksgiving. Nor am I ignoring the microhistories of resistance to racial formation. This question signifies the power of placement and points toward the horror of the racial imagination. But it also suggests a presence(s) within the racial calculus that announces its potential destruction by their very presence in it. The black body and the Jewish body presented just such a danger from the very origins of the modern racial imagination.
69. Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–67. By Sephardic Jews he means the Jewish Portuguese Diaspora communities in Amsterdam and other places in the seventeenth century.
70. Ibid., 187.
71. Ibid., 191.
72. David Levering Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History 71:3 (December 1984): 543–64.
73. As one commentator noted, reflecting on black and Jewish life in America between 1880 and 1935, blacks sought to emulate Jews in their strategically deployed assimilationism: “Black educators, ministers, writers, and orators held up the noble image of the Jews. Jews, they maintained, had succeeded because they banded together, they lived cleanly, they saved their money, they used their intellect, and they never abandoned those left behind. In short, several generations of Black leaders told the masses of recently emancipated slaves and their immediate descendents struggling with poverty and oppression: Be like the Jews.” Hasia R. Diner, “Between Words and Deeds: Jews and Blacks in America, 1880–1935,” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 88. One can discern, in America at least, three motifs in relation to this trajectory that existed in black communities: an awareness of black national and cultic identity; a perception of the possibilities of the nation-state; and a tacit acknowledgment of the incredible power of racial identity.
74. Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 68–69. Gaines states, “African Americans found the medium [of photography] well suited for trying to refute negrophobic caricatures. In addition, black painters, illustrators and sculptors, along with writers of fiction, produced antiracist narratives and iconography featuring ideal types of bourgeois black manhood and womanhood…. Studio portraits of uplift and respectability—depicting black families with attributes of cleanliness, leisure, and literacy—found expression in the sitters’ posture, demeanor, dress, and setting. In most portraits, whether of individual, of wedding portraits, or of groups, one sees an intense concern with projecting a serious, dignified image. And these still portraits of refinement sprang to life in performance rituals, often based in the church, of elocution, preaching, and in the jubilee and quartette singing of Negro spirituals. Anything less than stylized elegance would betray the ideals of race advancement and, indeed, hold the race back, as did the profusion of commodified, demeaning portraits taken of unsuspecting, often youthful and destitute African Americans. Many whites, however, remained unmoved by African Americans’ attempts at respectful self-representation.”
75. Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences,” 31.
76. Racism emerged as an object of discourse within the generative processes of white identity in such a way as to name, identify, and address its effects without fundamentally challenging its most basic constitutive resource, whiteness. No American historian or historian of the civil rights movement and its effects has given an adequate account of this ability of whiteness to evade its own historic connection to racism and the need for its dissolution. See insightful analyses in this direction from the following: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Robert Post and Michael Rogin, eds., Race and Representation: Affirmative Action (New York: Zone, 1998); Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990); David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
77. Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2005); Also see Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford Press, 1997)
78. The central arguments growing out of the civil rights movement have been on how to transform this fiction into truth or how to expose this fiction or how to modify this useful fiction by means of a new, more expansive reading of the civil rights movement. The central tensions between blacks and Jews since the civil rights movement flow out of these abiding arguments and whether either group has betrayed the spirit of the movement, a spirit defined now in terms of capitalist opportunity, fair and just treatment under the law, and equal access to America’s resources. The sociopolitical conversation indicates a lost opportunity to question the foundations of the racial imagination.
79. There was tremendous danger in playing in the rough seas of representation. If racial representation had held Jewish and black bodies adrift, captive to the power of death, it would be very risky business to venture out onto those waters, even with superb navigational skills. But they in fact had no choice. Standing always in the background for Jewish and black bodies, generating much of the roughness of representational sea, was racial-scientific discourse. The bodies of blacks and Jews came into view as “biological data” for gauging such things as human degeneracy, criminality, intelligence or the lack thereof, social evolution, and sexuality. Racial-scientific discourse on the body diseased the Western social imagination and informed the processes of racial representation. So it was in light of these discursive realities and occasionally in direct confrontation of them that generations of black and Jewish artists courageously engaged in self-expression. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial-scientific discourse on the body grew directly out of the colonialist comparative anthropological discourse. And as I noted in previous chapters, that discourse was a strange mixture of biblical-genealogical and phenological reasoning brought to focus on colonial subjects. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, racial-scientific discourse on the body had not only given rise to racial eugenics discussions in Europe, South Africa, and America, but had also encased racial essentialism in scientific authority executed through the language of biological determinism. Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Sander L. Gilman, Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
80. From Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray to Henry Roth and Saul Bellow, from Cynthia Ozick and David Mamet to Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed, from John Edgar Wideman to Philip Roth and a whole host of writers too numerous to name, they walked on the water of representation, never drowning, and drew a cadre of disciples into the water with them. See Adam Zachary Newton, Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Paul Berman, Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delacorte, 1994); Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
81. Cited in Newton, Facing Black and Jew, xi.
82. Cited in Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 19.
83. Berman, Blacks and Jews, 40.
84. Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 182.
85. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); M. M. Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Tzvetan Todorov and Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
86. Such activity must be analyzed as part of a wider social phenomenon that was deeply embedded in American social performances. See Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
87. Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (New York: Basic Civitas, 2006).
88. In this regard there is Louis Armstrong’s important work, “Louis Armstrong + The Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907,” in Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words, Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Brothers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–36. Also see Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, 155; Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
89. Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Gioia, The History of Jazz, 135ff; Gerald Early, “Pulp and Circumstance: The Story of Jazz in High Places,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 393ff.
90. Richard Cook, Blue Note Records: The Biography (Boston: Justin, Charles, 2003).
91. Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); David Andrew Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Martin T. Williams, The Jazz Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
92. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Ronald Michael Radano and Philip Vilas Bohlman, Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Ronald Michael Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
93. Zygmunt Bauman, “Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer,” in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 321–52. Bauman states, “To be in Exile means to be out of place; also, needing to be rather elsewhere; also, not having that ‘elsewhere’ where one would rather be. Thus, exile is a place of compulsory confinement, but also an unreal place, a place that is itself out of place in the order of things. Anything may happen here, but nothing can be done here. In exile, uncertainty meets freedom. Creation is the issue of that wedlock. What makes the exile an unreal place is the daily effort to make it real—that is, to cleanse it of all things that are out of place” (321).
94. Peter Ochs, “Recovering the God of History: Scriptural Life after Death in Judaism and Christianity,” in Jews and Christians, ed. Dunn, 117.
95. In fact, the black theology movement inaugurated by black theologians such as James Cone, J. Deotis Roberts, Jacquelyn Grant, and Cheryl Sanders sought to do precisely that—to think Christian faith from the perspective of the horrors of slavery forward.
96. Ochs, “Recovering the God of History,” 117.
97. Emmanuel Katongole, “A Different World Right Here, A World Being Gestated in the Deeds of the Everyday: The Church Within African Theological Imagination,” Missionalia 30:2 (August 2002): 206–34. Also see his “African Renaissance and the Challenge of Narrative Theology in Africa,” in African Theology Today, ed. Emmanuel Katongole (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2002), 207ff; Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995); Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2002).
98. I am aware of the historic rationale for our social commitment to the church in terms of our ability to make proprietary claims on this sacred space. I am also aware of the important account of the multiple benefits continuously derived from life in the black church. But these disproportions suggest an ironic reciprocity in which Christian faith appears the symbiont of weakness and death. It is as though Christian faith fumbles along like an old country doctor applying quaint but ultimately ineffective homeopathic remedies to complex medical problems. I am not suggesting by this analogy that faith is irrelevant; rather, the question is how to give a healthy theological account of this situation.
99. Jonathan Boyarin, Palestine and Jewish History: Criticism at the Borders of Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
100. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); Gray Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds. Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994).
101. Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Also see bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009); W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).