Euro-American biblical scholarship has traditionally conceived of the Bible in a way that removes privileged readers from personal responsibility in the subjugation of marginalized communities. Peter McLellan terms this practice gentrified biblical scholarship: readers removed from difference, because of the gentrification of space in the West, who are left without the conceptual resources to understand their relationship with the Bible as simultaneous relationship with minoritized communities.
McLellan deploys the theoretical fields of hauntology and critical space theory to argue that the Gospel of Mark is a haunted place. A project written largely in New Jersey’s wealthy northern suburbs, each chapter converses with vignettes from Newark, New Jersey’s Ironbound neighborhood—a low income, largely Latinx and immigrant community—to explore relations between these two otherwise isolated locales. The result is a discussion of gentrifications harmful effects on vibrant communities, made invisible to suburban Christian readers, and an effort to explore how marginalized people make persistent demands upon those who hold Mark’s Gospel sacred.
Table of Contents (v)
Acknowledgments (vii)
Introduction: Mark’s Gentrified Readers and the Ghosts who Haunt Them (1)
Haunting My Own Gentrified Mind (5)
The Ironbound: A Material Conversation Partner (7)
“Go and Tell His Disciples”: Mark as Scripture, Mark as Social (10)
“He is Not Here; See Where They Laid Him”: Haunting, Literary and Local (18)
“Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified One”: Scripturalizing Spaces of the Dead (31)
Abstracted Bodies, Racism, and Deadly Places (33)
The Politics of Spatial Throwntogetherness (41)
Mark as a Scripturalized Haunted Place (46)
The Structure of the Argument (53)
Chapter One. “You Always Have The Poor With You”: Mark’s Passion Narrative as a Persistently Decentering Place (59)
“Always” Decentered by the Persistence of the Margins (62)
An Insistent “Always” (63)
Some Particulars of “Always” (76)
A Polluted “Always” (78)
Polluting the Suburbs, Polluting Mark’s Passion (89)
Shipping Death (90)
Kyriarchy Haunting the Cross (97)
An Open, Empty Tomb/An Open, Populated Gospel (104)
Conclusion (111)
Chapter Two. “Out of the Tombs” (5:1–20): An Illegitimate Alliance out of Place and out of Time (115)
Liberation as Policing the Other (118)
Necro(deca)polis (127)
Making Room for Death (129)
Policing Death Worlds, Creating Criminals (142)
Sanctuary Cities and the Creation of Illegitimacy (143)
Materializing the Dead (145)
A Haunting Alliance (155)
Agency in the Face of Conquest (156)
Complicity in Necropolitics (161)
A Spectral Alliance (165)
Conclusion (170)
Chapter Three. “I will be Made Well”: Social Death and the Contestations of the Dead (5:21–43) (173)
Put to Death out of Time: Contestations and Scarcity (179)
An Interruption: The Past (183)
Contestations in Narrative Time (185)
An Interruption: The Present (192)
Contestations in Religious Time (194)
An Interruption: Everyday Life (209)
Contestations in Postcolonial Time (210)
Specters Making Contested Space (216)
Agency and Responsibility in Haunted Space (217)
Agency in Mark 5:21–43 (219)
Making Haunted Space (224)
Conclusion (227)
Conclusion (231)
Bibliography (235)
Index (267)
