Date of Award
4-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2026
Degree Name
Licentiate in Sacred Theology (STL)
Director
Jeremiah Coogan
Abstract
Through a postcolonial biblical performance-criticism method, this thesis examines the liberative potential of Mark 5:1-20 for colonized communities. Reading the Gerasene demoniac narrative through the communal memories and performance of the Ewe people of Togo, this thesis demonstrates how the oral performance of the Gospel in colonized communities that have an oral-performance framework like the Greco-Roman world can enact deliverance from colonial suppression and open space for subjugated knowledge to emerge. At the same time, it critically engages the limits of this potential: because meaning-making is bound to context and embodied memory, the interpretive encounter between Mark's first-century colonial world and the Ewe colonial experience reveals similarities that facilitate meaning production. Yet their experiences also reveal fundamental differences, revealing both the possibilities and the challenges of cross-cultural subaltern communication. In writing about voices and bodies lost in the written text of the Bible and in using biblical performance criticism, the thesis embodies the liberative potential it seeks to uncover in the Markan pericope. In this way, the thesis is itself a sign that the lost voice and body of the subaltern, both in the Greco-Roman world and today, can be heard.
Recommended Citation
Akakpo, Selom Ghislain, "Liberating Voices and Bodies: Mark 5: 1-20 and the Ewe of Togo" (2026). Jesuit School of Theology Dissertations. 161.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/jst_dissertations/161
