Liberation Narratives and Theologies as Sites of Struggle – Thinking with Gender, Genocide, Gaza, and the Book of Esther: Engaging Texts of Terror(ism) by Sarojini Nadar

ABSTRACT This article engages with Sarojini Nadar’s recently published book, Gender, Genocide, Gaza, and the Book of Esther: Engaging Texts of Terror(ism), analysing its key contributions. The article first draws out and synthesises Nadar’s arguments across the book’s seven chapters. It then highlights what I consider the most important intervention of this text: the work that Nadar does to complexify the story of Esther from its popular reception as a singular narrative of Jewish liberation to a nuanced story of shifting power dynamics where gender and ethnic violence and erasure are sanctioned in a sacred economy of violence. The article builds on this argument to make the case for the complexifying of liberation histories, narratives and theologies more broadly as a necessary practice to ensure that movements for justice do not perpetuate the forms of oppression they seek to oppose.