Ethnic Fictions, Racial Realities Sample Clauses

Ethnic Fictions, Racial Realities. This dissertation is not concerned primarily with purportedly “real” ethnic identities or a historical reconstruction of who ancient Jews, Romans, and Greeks 79 Xxxxx, Hellenistic History, 243. 80 Xxxxx, Hellenistic History, 241. were.81 Instead, I argue that in Acts ethnic identities are literary projections with roots in historical realities, but these literary projections are ultimately social fictions. As Hall asserts, “ethnic identity is not a ‘natural’ fact of life; it is something that needs to be actively proclaimed, reclaimed and disclaimed through discursive channels. For this reason, it is the literary evidence which must constitute the first and final frame of analysis in the study of ancient ethnicity.”82 The production of ethnic reasoning in Acts resides in the constructed literary world Luke posits for his readers. The narrative theological claims propounded by Acts are fertile ground for the development, questioning, and exploitation of ethnic identities and difference. Ultimately, however, ethnicities are interstitial phenomena, residing in the small yet complex conceptual space between socially constructed ethnic identities and the implementation and performance of these ethnic identities in tangible social spaces, like the production of literature.83 Though the practice of ethnicity evident in archaeological remains that draw Xxxxx’x attention are not identical to the discursive production of ethnic reasoning in literature, there is a certain interdependence between the two to which she has alluded.84 The ethnic reasoning present in literature depends on some degree of fealty to “real” ethnic ideas embodied in practices that xxxx one group over against another in order to prove persuasive, which is ultimately the aim of the literary production of ethnic identities. In this way, the distinction between “fictive” and “real” dimensions of ethnic identities is not entirely clear-cut. This dissertation focuses on the former but must grapple with the latter in order to 81 Contra Helm, “Races and Physical Types,” 137-54 whose analysis begins with skeletal remains and continues to rely on physical attributes as the core of racial identity.