Scriptures Everywhere

This was the third and final session of the Spring 2026 season for the Institute for Signifying Scriptures' podcast, Scriptures Everywhere. We concluded our conversation about Cruelty as Citizenship by Cristina Beltrán. The participants reflected on why Latina/o/e/x people both complicate and reinforce whiteness in U.S. democracy and considered the historical context of racial categorization in bo...

In this episode, we move from Stephen Best's None Like Us (2018) to a kind of flip side of diasporic belonging, the violent practices that constitute citizenship. We focus our discussion on Cristina Beltrán's  Cruelty as Citizenship (2020) as we consider how the pleasures of cruelty are scripturalizing practices, and scriptures are that "something significant," that sanctified border, that binds c...

In this first episode of our spring 2026 season, we speak live from the Institute for Signifying Scriptures Annual Meeting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We discuss the introduction to Stephen Best's None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018) with a focus on how scriptures make diasporas and what it takes to demystify and "decode" the scriptural traditions of social life. Special tha...

In our final episode of the fall 2025 season, we discuss the role of memory, of how and why we try to forge a sacred past and communal memory, how gender matters to the dynamics of  Barracoon as a site of memory, and what it might mean to find messier ground. We look ahead to our meeting in person in Alabama in February 5-7, 2026.

In this episode, we discuss different forms of knowing and understanding, and how Hurston makes Kossula into scripture even as his stories depict for us strategies for navigating distinct, and sometimes conflicting, scriptural worlds. We particularly examine the language of understanding, and the photograph of him at the end of Hurston's narrative about Kossula. 

In this second conversation about scriptures, memory, and Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon , we discuss the title of the book and what it tells us about the politics and emphases of scripturalizing practices. We also consider facets of Hurston's and Kossula's language that point us towards practices, ways, and forms of knowing and not knowing.

In this first episode of our fall 2025 season on memory, we gathered to discuss Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" , which was written almost 100 years ago but only published in 2018. We consider how its recent publication represents a form of scripturalizing alongside how Hurston's own work seeks to make a person into scripture. 

In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Arthur Carter, Dr. Rachel Beckley aka Rachel Schwaller, and Dr. Richard Newton discuss how the Institute for Signifying Scriptures currently works as a site of intellectual marronage. What does marronage mean for intellectual life? What is to be gained by the Signifying (on) Scriptures project?

In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Lalruatkima, Dr. Robin Owens, and Dr. Katrina Van Heest discuss the early years of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures in the 2000s. What is the ISS? What were the questions about scriptures that were examined in its first decade?

In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Tat-siong Benny Liew speaks with Dr. Grey Gundaker and Dr. Velma Love about the African Americans and the Bible conference after 25 years. Why did this conference matter in 1999? What are its legacies for the study of the Bible, scriptures, and African American communities?

Recorded in 2023, our inaugural episode comes from HTI's Open Plaza Talks podcast . Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego, talks to fellow scholar Vincent L. Wimbush, Founding Director of the  Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) , which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024. This episode was originally released to celebrate the an...