Reading the Otherness Within

This chapter explores the internal otherness of the Samaritan woman (Jn 4:1–42; cf. 8:48–49). When seen in the light of Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry, the woman can be seen as an active and resistant character: in part, because she is keen to hunt for the identity of a strange traveler, Jesus; in part, because she is bold enough to mimic what Jesus says and does in an anti-colonial sense. Correspondingly, Jesus becomes an ambivalent character in relation to his racial-ethnic and political identity in the sense that he switches back and forth between Jewish and Samaritan identity and between imperial and anti-imperial identity. Thus, the otherness from within becomes unfixable within a binaristic framework by destabilizing the boundary drawn between Samaritans and Jews and between colonizers and colonized.