I’m currently working on a book project on Revelation and I’m hoping to use this venue as a tool for articulating and organizing my ideas. This work is preliminary, although I hope that some of the ideas I present here will be original and, consequently, I ask that you cite me if you use them in any academic work. TIA.
The project is on Revelation’s color symbolism and how it intersects with both ancient thinking about skin color and people groups (think Benjamin Isaac’s idea of “proto-racism” in antiquity) and how modern interpreters (academic and more popular) deploy this in racialized ways. Specifically, I am interested in bringing to the fore how Revelation has been used in support of Whiteness and anti-Black racism. I think this is especially important in the present moment, as some sectors of the population, especially in the US, are doubling down on White Christian Nationalism.
One of the images (or set of images) I am thinking about as I embark on this project is Gertrude Morgan’s depiction of herself as Bride with her Bridegroom Christ. She has multiple representations of this, including this one from the New Orleans Museum of Art. I briefly mention this White Jesus in Thinking and Seeing with Women in Revelation (Bloomsbury 2013). I don’t really do enough with it there, since I wasn’t thinking explicitly about race (which I think is a problem). Even though this present project is not about Morgan’s work specially, these images will be in my mind as I write.
In a future post, I’ll say a bit more about color and Revelation’s image of God/ Christ.
Lynn R. Huber 