Scripturalectics

In this book Vincent Wimbush seeks to problematize what we call scriptures a word first used to refer simply to things written the registration of basic information. In the modern world the word came to be associated almost exclusively with the center- and power-defining sacred texts of world religions. Wimbush argues that this narrowing of the valence of the term was a decisive development for western culture. <br>His purpose is to reconsider the initially broad and politically charged use of the term. Scriptures are excavated not merely as texts to be read but understood as discourse: as mimetic rituals and practices as ideologically-charged orientations to and prescribed behaviors in the world as structures of relationships and social formations as forms of communication. Wimbush is naming and constructing a new transdisciplinary critical project which uses the historical and modern experiences of the Black Atlantic as resources for framing categorization and analysis. <br>Using Chinua Achebe's novel <em>Things Fall Apart</em> as a touchstone each chapter offers a close reading and analysis of a representative moment in the formation of the Black Atlantic regarded as part of a history of modern human consciousness and conscientization. Such a history Wimbush says is reflected in the major turns in what he calls <em>scripturalectics</em> part of the construction of the modern world defined as efforts to manage or control knowledge and meaning.<br>