Invisible Meaning

Essential Skills: Reading & Writing Grd 5

A Phenomenology for Women of Color

A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference explores how phenomenology can help philosophy of race explain the persistence of race as a key indicator of social standing. Engaging with the work of women of color to think more deeply about our racial and gendered structural relations with one another, Emily S. Lee argues that phenomenology is helpful in two ways: (1) race, as a social construct, is phenomenal and (2) Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology centers on embodiment and therefore applies to both feminist and racial concerns. Lee defines the phenomenon of race as a structure that is open-ended, is developed creatively, and mediates one's situatedness in the world and relations with others. Drawing on ideas from Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, this book depicts the dynamic and creative expressions of race and racism to address the ambiguities within the experiences of race and sex and, ultimately, to conceptualize the identity group “women of color.”

Sparks of the Logos

There are two major themes running through the essays reprinted in this book: the first is the typological relation of rabbinic Judaism to Christianity, while the second is the re-animation, by going back to the roots, of a rabbinic Judaism that would not manifest some of the deleterious social ideologies and practices that modern orthodox Judaism generally does, a project that was thought of as “radical orthodoxy,” long before that term achieved its current—and almost diametrically opposing—sense among Christian theologians. The book is divided into two parts. The first part consists of several essays on midrash, exploring various aspects of rabbinic culture and their relation to hermeneutic practices. These papers are essentially more detailed studies of particular issues that were raised in two of Boyarin’s books, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash and Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (California, 1993). The second part of the book consists of reprints of four essays published in the journal Diacritics during that same decade. The material treated in the book should be of interest to historians of Judaism and Christianity, Talmudists, and scholars and readers interested in the cultural study of religion.