Ep55. Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border, Gregory Cuéllar

I interviewed Gregory L. Cuéllar about his book Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border: A Borderland Hermeneutic (Routledge, 2020). We talk about the way the sacred is weaponsised by elite powers to shape social reality, the way it grants permanence to the negating of the inherent sacred worth of the black and brown bodies of those approaching or crossing the border, while sacralizing the Anglo-American project of colonisation, violence, and manifest destiny. We talk about how – counter intuitively – appealing to the sacredness of the other can provide a way toward a healing strategy, and how this book seeks to “attend in a healing way to the recurring, open wounds of postcoloniality at the US-Mexico border” – wounds that are, for the author, personal.

Gregory L. Cuéllar is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, USA. He is the author of Voices of Marginality (2008) and Empire, the British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century: Archival Criticism (2019).

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