tion>Moses and Multiculturalism
FLASHPOINTS
The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, distinguished both by their historical grounding and their theoretical and conceptual strength. We seek studies that engage theory without losing touch with history, and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints will aim for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history, and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucpress
SERIES EDITORS
Judith Butler, Edward Dimendberg, Catherine Gallagher, Susan Gillman Richard Terdiman, Chair
1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, by Dina Al-Kassim
2. Moses and Multiculturalism, by Barbara Johnson
Moses and Multiculturalism
Barbara Johnson
Foreword by Barbara Rietveld
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© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Barbara, 1947–2009.
Moses and multiculturalism / Barbara Johnson ; foreword by Barbara Rietveld.
p. cm.—(Flashpoints, 2)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26254-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Moses (Biblical leader). 2. Multiculturalism. I. Title.
BS580.M6J64 2010
222’.1092 dc22 2009019422
Manufactured in the United States of America
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO U39.48–1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
To Shoshana Felman
CONTENTS
Chapter 4. Frances E. W. Harper
Chapter 5. Moses, the Egyptian
FOREWORD
If the story of Moses didn’t exist, Barbara Johnson might have invented it to illustrate concepts she began writing about in 1980. “The problem of difference,” she wrote in the Opening Remarks to her first book, The Critical Difference, “can be seen both as an uncertainty over separability and as a drifting apart within identity.” The focus in this new volume functions as a prism through which she looks at the “separability” of the cultures that have contributed to the formation of the Moses figure through stories told by different peoples and how the “drifting apart within identity” played out in each culture that claimed him as its own.
The point of departure in Moses and Multiculturalism is the mixed identity that Moses carried within him: he was born a Hebrew, raised as an Egyptian, and married as a Midianite, then returned to Egypt to liberate the slaves from whom he had been estranged. Johnson explores those dimensions through her analyses of the biblical Moses, the Egyptian Moses, the Frances E. W. Harper Moses, Freud’s Moses, and others.
“What literature often seems to tell us,” Johnson has observed, “is the consequences of the way in which what is not known is not seen as unknown. It is not, in the final analysis, what you don’t know that can or cannot hurt you. It is what you don’t know you don’t know that spins out and entangles ‘that perpetual error we call life’ ” (p. xii).
