AAR/SBL Preview
Or, Why I Haven't Been Posting Much
I haven’t been posting as frequently here as I’d like lately. That’s because it’s the busiest few weeks of the year in my academic life. The fall quarter is coming to an end next week, which means lots of grading. A few different writing assignments are coming due (some of which are already on extended deadlines). And, most significantly, the biggest scholarly guild meeting of the year is next week.
The insider lingo for this meeting is AAR/SBL, which is admittedly unwieldy. Sometimes we shorten it to either AAR or SBL, and you can tell a lot about someone’s professional identity by which way they shorten it. That’s because AAR stands for The American Academy of Religion, a huge professional society of scholars of religion, and SBL stands for the Society of Biblical Literature, which is likewise an enormous professional society of biblical scholars. I have belonged to both in the past, but right now I only belong to the SBL, because I can’t quite afford membership dues for both. And anyway, the two societies meet together (along with a number of smaller societies) once a year for a long weekend of receptions, scholarly papers, book exhibits, and awkward networking. I am not quite sure about the numbers, but something in the range of 8,000-10,000 people come together for the meetings, from all over the world (but especially North America and Europe…there’s a separate, smaller International Meeting held somewhere outside of North America each year as well). It’s such a huge undertaking that there are only a few American cities that can accommodate that many people in their convention centers, and the lore of AAR/SBL is replete with tales of logistical nightmares from the years when the meetings were in places that couldn’t really accommodate that many people. (Hello, Nashville and Baltimore). Lately we’ve been bouncing between San Diego, San Antonio, Boston, and Denver. As luck would have it, this year the meeting is in Denver.
What does one do at the AAR/SBL meeting? Different people have different strategies, but for me, sessions are the backbone of the whole thing. There are hundreds of sessions and panels, made up of thousands of research papers, spread from Saturday morning to Tuesday midday (and a few scattered on either side of that). These sessions and panels are organized by groups called program units, which focus on specific topics and invite paper proposals on those subjects. Sometimes these program units focus on a book of the bible, a religious tradition, or an historical period. And sometimes they are more topical, theoretical, or methodological. So, there might be a program unit titled Gospel of Matthew, one called Second-Temple Pharisaic Judaism, or one called Feminist Criticism. (I just made those up, although I’m sure program units like them exist). To give some real-life examples, in the past I have co-chaired the program unit titled Space, Place, and Lived Experience in Antiquity, which focuses on spatial theory and analyses of space and place. I currently co-chair (for about three more weeks) the Early Jewish Christian Relations program unit, which is just what it sounds like—a look at early Jewish/Christian relations. I’m also a committee member of the Art and Religions of Antiquity program unit, though I don’t co-chair that one. There, we look at the way visual art intersects with ancient religions—not just Christianity and Judaism, but also Mithraism, Greco-Roman paganism, and other movements.
These sessions usually last two and a half hours, and they usually feature between three and six papers. We squeeze three of these sessions in a day, one in the morning and two in the afternoon, so on a really busy day you might hear 15 or more 25-minute papers, which is exactly as exhausting as it sounds. The papers are called “papers” because they really are usually papers—written papers that people read out loud. It’s not a great form of communication, but it’s the tradition in the field, so we do it. The really good ones feature visuals and asides from the speaker that break the monotone reading of papers. But those papers are the exceptions, not the rule.
Every winter, program units put out a call for papers, and by February or March, people submit proposals. So, for example, the Gospel of Matthew group might say that they’re looking for papers about healing narratives in the book, and try to get proposals for papers that would fit into a themed session on that topic. People send in proposals, and the program unit committees vote on which ones to accept. The ones that are accepted go into those sessions that make up the meeting.
This year I have two papers that got accepted, which is why I haven’t been writing a lot of other stuff lately—I’ve been buried in trying to get those papers done. There is usually a big difference between what you think is possible in March when the proposal deadline comes around, and what is actually possible in November when it’s time to actually write the papers. The big joke is that people are usually trying to finish their papers on the flight to the meeting, but in my experience, it can stretch longer than that, to the hotel on-site, or the hallway outside the room just before the meeting happens. It’s a stressful thing, of course, because you’re reading these papers in front of a few dozen of the world’s foremost experts on the topic, many of whom have 30-year careers thinking about the very ideas you’re presenting on, and have published articles and books on the topic. So when the papers feel incomplete, it’s nerve-wracking.
My two papers this year are both related to my recent research on the book of Acts. The first one is a revision of a chapter of my forthcoming book on Acts. The paper is titled The Ambivalence of Paul in Athens, and it’s for the Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies program unit. I’ll paste in the proposal I sent in back in the spring:
Paul’s visit to Athens in Acts 17:15-18:1 is often viewed as a paradigmatic missionary text. In it, several of the most durable desires of Christianity and Christian theology converge: the gospel’s movement westward into Europe, the presentation of a bold witness among cultured and elite listeners, and at least a few conversions. Paul’s speech or sermon on the Areopagus is viewed as a triumph, signaling Christianity’s arrival and acceptance in one of the most symbolically potent places in the ancient world.
But this is an interpretation founded on centuries of Christian imperialism and colonialist ventures, and conditioned by the desire to read biblical texts with Europe and European Christianity at the center. It is only intelligible as a paradigmatic missiological text if it is read from a missiological center. Reading instead with the discourses of coloniality and necropolitics, this paper reexamines this passage from Acts as a conflicted, ambivalent, and fragmented account of Paul’s travel to Athens. This reading helps us see that Paul is a passive recipient of many of the actions that happen around him in the text, his body controlled frequently by others. His oratory is prompted by the derision of philosophers, not by their innate interest in what he had to say, and his performance attempts to flatter them by citing not his own traditions but the texts and traditions he expects them to value. As a whole, the episode portrays Paul as a curiosity collected in the market and set up for the amusement of the elite. While his message is received positively by some in attendance, others scoffed at him, and the ambivalent denouement to the episode hardly merits the celebration it has received in subsequent missiological thinking.
This paper follows this logic to ask why the episode in Athens might have been included in the text of Acts at all. If it was not meant to convey a triumph of Christian witness, planting a flag for the gospel in the midst of European intellectual power, then why does Acts tell this story? This paper argues that it is part of Acts’ larger portrayal of empire and power as uncertain and fraught with ambiguity.
Basically, that paper is arguing that the Christian tradition has read Acts 17 wrong, and that the text is more ambivalent and less triumphant than has usually been assumed. I’m in conversation with postcolonial theory here, which has really flourished over the last generation or two of scholarship, and which in my opinion is where much of the exciting work is being done in biblical studies.
My second paper is for the Paul and Politics seminar. (A seminar is a different form of a program unit). I’ve presented in Paul and Politics before, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, and I always enjoy their sessions. They’re giving me some leeway, because they usually only focus on Paul as he is (self) described in the epistles, and don’t pay much attention to the portrayal of him in Acts. (That’s a very common and accepted distinction that biblical scholars make). But they’re allowing me as an interloper this time. The title of that paper is The Double Law of Soil and Blood: Paul in Court and Custody. Here’s the proposal I sent in. It’s for a session focused on Paul and prisons and custody. Some readers of this Substack will recognize who I’m talking about at the end (but please don’t post her name, to protect her identity):
In this paper I put into conversation three instances of imprisonment: 1) the colonial imprisonments described by Frantz Fanon and theorized by Achille Mbembe under the umbrella of “necropolitics;” 2) the narratives of Paul’s imprisonments and trials in Acts 21:27-26:32 (and potential parallel mentions in Paul’s own letters), and 3) the American carceral state broadly understood, with specific attention to the racialized and racist patterns of incarceration and the practice of detaining migrants and separating families at the southern US border. This juxtaposition reveals the explanatory power of Mbembe’s articulation of necropolitics, and explores the potential of Paul’s story in Acts as a narrative of resistance to the imposition and abuse of sovereignty.
In the concluding chapter of his book Necropolitics, Mbembe poses questions that would have been intelligible to the Paul depicted by Acts, who is caught up, pressed upon, and imprisoned in the space between empire, diaspora, and homeland. Given the “double law of soil and blood” that turns the “accident of being born somewhere” into something like identity, how can we live (185)? Or, to put it as Gloria Anzaldúa does, what does it mean to “stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions” between and across multiple receptions of embodiment, and to negotiate systems that seek to negate, constrain, and destroy your body (Borderlands, 100)? As Paul moves between the “soil and blood” of Judean belonging and the enmity of an empire intent on making him Other, he embodies the kind of figure Mbembe and Anzaldúa tried to describe.
Following a review of Mbembe, I will consider the court and custody scenes of Acts and the flows of power that move through and across them, with attention to how they frame Paul’s subjectivity to Roman power and how courtrooms, audiences with officials, and imprisonments stage the tensions of Paul’s ambivalent belonging. These custody and court scenes are the instances when the author writes most frankly about the way power and sovereignty worked within the story of Paul and other early Jesus-followers, but they are also places where the author is subtly undermining and challenging the projection of Roman power upon which its sovereignty depended. Here, Paul’s self-description of his imprisonment in his letters adds resonance to the ways he understands his own relationship with empire.
Both Mbembe’s and Acts’ descriptions of power and sovereignty in claiming and possessing bodies, become the backdrop for reflecting on the necropolitics of our own time and place. As a way of focusing these reflections, I will consider the (anonymized) story of one woman who was detained for several months at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Aurora Detention Center, located about twelve miles from the AAR/SBL meetings in Denver.
This paper isn’t a revision of anything I’ve already written, so it has been consuming my time lately. I’m nearly done with the first draft, which is good, since the meeting starts in six days. But I like the way it’s coming together; I always find a lot of energy in writing things that have something to do with the world beyond the biblical text, and the comparison to the American carceral state have made writing this paper feel more relevant than simply knocking around a 2,000 year old text.
Beyond all the papers and sessions, there are some other tasks to accomplish. I’m going to a half-dozen receptions in the evenings, to see old friends, make an appearance for an organization I’m representing, or grab free food. I’ll be perusing the book exhibit, looking for interesting new scholarship and chatting up a few editors about a book project that I have coming down the pipeline a book or two from now. There are some big lectures to attend, given by luminaries in the field, and those are usually pretty inspiring. Some of the most important times during AAR/SBL are simply finding a quiet place to recharge my introvert battery.
So, that’s where I’ve been lately. Hopefully I will reach a tense truce with these papers this week and deliver them successfully next weekend, and be back to my regular schedule of productivity (such as it is) after Thanksgiving!