ABSTRACT
With what he calls “scripturalization,” Vincent L. Wimbush (2012) sensitizes us to “the use of texts, textuality, and literacy as a means of constructing and maintaining society” (87). Through his reading of Olaudah Equiano’s writings from the eighteenth century, Wimbush suggests that “scripturalization” is a powerful, mystifying, and hence magic-like process that exercises an “unbounded influence over the credulity and superstition of people” (33). In this essay, I will go back to an earlier work by Maxine Hong Kingston to highlight a different aspect of “scripturalization”: it is also a never-ending process in which people can participate to destabilize, break open, change, and perhaps even hijack what counts as scriptures as well as who they are as a people.
