Black Scholarship Matters

Though I was not ready to dive into anything that might be called Asian American biblical interpretation on my own for my doctoral dissertation,8 I did enough to sense that a group project similar to that of Stony the Road could be both desirable and feasible. Since (1) many among the already low number of Asian American biblical scholars at the end of the twentieth century were trained, as Felder pointed out, by white scholars in white institutions; and (2) I was just beginning my teaching career at the time and had little to no knowledge of how to organize or fund a gathering of scholars as the black colleagues did for Stony the Road, I decided to go beyond the biblical studies guild to see if and how scholars more familiar with Asian American studies might read the Bible. Out of that came an essay that I coauthored with Vincent Wimbush, in which we talked about identities (problems of essentialism and effacement), communities (differences within and between our two communities of color), the guild of biblical interpretation (its dismissal of or disinterest in "minoritized" readings), and possible changes (such as displacement of the biblical texts and the ancient world as the beginning and centering foci of biblical interpretation, or collaboration of biblical scholars among and across communities of color).11 One of the African American scholars I met for the first time at the symposium was Randall C. Bailey. Since Fernando F. Segovia was also present at the symposium as a respondent, Bailey approached Segovia and me about a project involving biblical scholars from all three communities of color (African American, Asian American, and Latino/a American).12 Bailey's insistence from the beginning that sexuality be a part of our conversation pushed me to widen and deepen my intersectional interrogations of biblical texts by not allowing me to put sexuality issues on a back burner.