Powerful to re-read now Sylvia Wynter's "No Humans Involved" (written in 1992 in the wake of Rodney King), not just to ponder what has & has not changed, but also to be reminded of the work still to be done to "rewrite knowledge" in academia http://carmenkynard.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/No-Humans-Involved-An-Open-Letter-to-My-Colleagues-by-SYLVIA-WYNTER.pdf

In relation to my own field (Biblical Studies, broadly conceived) I've been thinking a lot lately abt what/who we treat as "objective," "neutral," "universal," in terms of the scholarly gaze of historical-critical research--& exclusionary force of those often invisible choices +

Much of the 20th-century history of Biblical Studies relates to the (very slow) inclusion of Jewish perspectives as just as "scholarly" as secular/Christian ones. And as we are reminded constantly by #manels, &c., we are still working on gender in this regard +

As much as is said about wanting to open up Biblical Studies to Humanities, howevr, perhaps not enough has been said abt our field as complicit in the v limited sense of "the human" enshrined in modern Western Humanism, as exclusionary of blackness & particularizing other others+

Still pondering this but my sense is that this has been neglected in part due to the anxious defensiveness of defending *academic* Biblical Studies as having a place within secular university, which has resulted in too-often unquestioned embrace of older ideals of "objectivity" +

Whatever the cause, I do think it is pressing, thus, not to fall prey to temptation to bracket race as if irrelevant to hist-critical research in Biblical Studies--taking seriously how shapes embodied worlds from which we study, our "inner eye," how we understand kn & difference+

For knowledge-making too, what might it mean to reframe Biblical Studies' engagement w/"Theory" not just in conv w/Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze &c, but also w/Wynter, Audre Lorde &c--who arguably have more to tell us anyway abt issues lk difference, w/which our field esp struggles?