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ABSTRACT
As an exercise in cultural studies, this reading focuses not just on the written story and its socio-historical conditions of production, but also on the story as a site where the socio-historical conditions of consumption and the social location of the reader merge with the text to produce a borderless or hybrid "cultural" text. Such a hybrid text is the inception of the story in the cultural space of the reader, where it intermingles with the values, ideologies, and interpretations of the reader who has consumed and experienced the consequences of the interpretation of the story. The Canaanite woman's story is then read through the experience of a Mexican-American reader who crosses the ideological borders of the text to contend that the ideology of chosenness cannot be the final border up to which a reading of this story can go. This alternative reading of the story emerges as the suppressed voice of the Other strives to be heard in the re-casting of the story from the Canaanite woman's point of view. This interpretation comes as a reading strategy of liberation from the imperialistic readings that have been used to oppress and suppress the emergence of the Other.
INTRODUCTION
I am reading Matthew's story with a spirit of dispossession-the one I assume the Canaanite woman had when she approached Jesus: a spirit of protest and reclamation. She was determined to take the bread from the table of those who displaced her, knowing that in a household where even the dogs get to eat what the masters waste, there must be some extra bread for the neighbors-precisely those neighbors whom the masters have dispossessed.
In my socio-historical condition of dispossessed neighbor, born and bred in the borderlands of the U.S. empire, I am certainly determined to take the bread from the table and not wait until the crumbs fall from it. I am convinced that it is only at the level of the table-as equals-and not under the table-as inferiors-that a constructive dialogue and a fair reconstitution of the world can be achieved.
The story of the Canaanite woman has been interpreted and used throughout the centuries to feed and shape the Christian faith in various ways. Although there...