Description: Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the politics of border crossings, the policing of identities, and the linguistic performances on which such actions depend.
Brief description: Marc Redfield is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and German at Brown University. His most recent books are The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Fordham University Press, 2009) and Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (Fordham University Press, 2016).
Review Quotes: Shibboleth is an important reflection on the politics of border crossings, the policing of identities, and the linguistic performances on which such actions depend. Working in two directions at once, Redfield makes the story of passwords and border patrols told in the biblical book of Judges relevant to our present moment while at the same time using the work of Derrida, Celan, and Salcedo to draw attention to questions of legitimacy, inheritance, mass murder, autoimmunity, and civil strife at the heart of the biblical narrative.---Michael Levine, Rutgers University