A settler colonial story, the settler colonial story: Dustin Michael Naegle, ‘Go Up (Again) to Jerusalem in Judah’: The Settler Colonial Mythology of ‘Return’ and ‘Restoration’ in Ezra 1-6, MA Dissertation, Brite Divinity School, 2017 | settler colonial studies blog

A settler colonial story, the settler colonial story: Dustin Michael Naegle, ‘Go Up (Again) to Jerusalem in Judah’: The Settler Colonial Mythology of ‘Return’ and ‘Restoration’ in Ezra 1-6, MA Dissertation, Brite Divinity School, 2017

27May17

Excerpt: Within Ezra 1–6 (E1-6) resides a story, a narrative of related events, ostensibly in historical sequence. While this may sound simple enough—so much so that many have assumed that the story/narrative in E1-6 is synonymous with the actual events of the past—postmodern scholarship has argued convincingly that narratives are far from simple. Rather than an objective account, the narrative in E1-6 reflects what Foucault described as “discourse,” a particular set of ideas, beliefs, practices, and biases—an ideology—that conditions how an author constructs the subjects and the world of the narrative. E1-6 is a story driven by a view of the world whose purpose is to draw the reader/hearer into this particular ideology. E1-6 is one particular representation of certain events told in hopes of persuading people that this “history” is real history, and that it is theirs. There is, in other words, a mythic quality to this historicizing discourse.

This current study is an attempt to explain part of the discourse embedded in E1-6 by utilizing the theoretical framework found in settler colonial studies, a relatively new field that attempts to understand and explain how settler societies function differently than, but also within the context of a larger colonial enterprise.

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