Constructing a Feminist Afropean (Nigerian/British) Hermeneutical Lens for Reconfiguring New Testament Female Characters

Abstract

Extant feminist, womanist and postcolonial feminist interpretations of female New Testament biblical characters largely omit the experiences of Black women descended from Africa but living in Europe. My thesis therefore constructs a feminist Afropean (or more specifically a feminist Nigerian/British) hermeneutical lens through which to refigure New Testament biblical women and their Eurocentric reception histories. Sabrina Brancato refers to the concept of Afropeanism as “foregrounding the reciprocal embeddedness of the histories of the two neighbouring continents”; Africa and Europe (2008: 2). Drawing on literary and autobiographical approaches, alternative possibilities of interpretation are offered apropos of selected biblical characters: including the Woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her hair (Luke 7:36-50), the Samaritan Woman at the well (John 4: 7-42), the Daughter and her Canaanite Mother (Matthew 15:21-28), the Pythian Slave-Woman (Acts 16:16-34), and Herodias’s Daughter (Mark 6:17- 28; Matthew 14:3-12), in order to challenge the parochial assumptions that have often been made by previous scholarship. Afropean themes (hair, familial marriage expectation and pressure, mother and daughter intergenerational relationships, loss of Nigerian (Yorùbá) epistemology, hypervisibility, and embodied knowledge) drawn from Afropean novels, in which characterisation, individual lived experiences and stories are central concerns, form the framework in which to elucidate yet unconsidered possibilities within the biblical text. This project falls within the move to not only ‘decolonise’ thought and methodologies (Bhambra et al., 2020: 2), but to also put centre stage hybrid identity categorisations hitherto unrepresented within biblical studies.