“Decolonizing Josiah: Toward a postcolonial reading of the Deuteronomistic History” Ph.D. Dissertation by Uriah Yong-Hwan Kim

Abstract: This dissertation employs postcolonial criticism to reading the Deuteronomistic History intercontextually with Asian American history in order to decolonize an understanding of Josiah and his kingdom that both appeals persistently to the metanarrative of nationalism and is still affected by the legacy of Orientalism. The author argues that the story of Josiah is embedded in the Deuteronomistic History, which is viewed as a history that narrates the identity of Western civilization. Although postmodernism has challenged this identity narrative of the West, it has also undermined the postcolonial project of writing “a history of their own” that does not always refer to the metanarrative of nations. The author advocates an understanding of the Deuteronomistic History as “a history of their own” similar to Asian American history and other subaltern histories that do not refer to the nation as the only legitimate place of narratives about the people and their culture. Until recently there has been an assumption, without much evidence, that Josiah had expanded his kingdom and unified the divided kingdoms, and the recent debate on the extent of Josiah’s kingdom is no more than variations on the expansion thesis which is based on the domain assumption of biblical studies that the northern kingdom belonged to “Greater” Israel. The author argues that the province of Samerina, a part of the former northern kingdom, remained intact during Josiah’s reign as a politically organized people—even if the supposed retreat of Assyria occurred, which the author disagrees—refuting the notion that the land/space was “empty” of power and people, and thereby questioning the nationalist principle of congruence of people/culture and land/polity. The author then argues that Josiah and his kingdom were located in a political, ideological landscape shaped by the Neo-Assyrians, where they experienced the realpolitik of liminality, opening the possibility of narrating their history from interstitial space rather than from the center. By means of an intercontextual reading between Josiah and Asian Americans’ experience of the realpolitik of liminality in North America, the author moves toward a postcolonial reading of the Deuteronomistic History.