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While biblical scholars increasingly use insights from postcolonial theory to interpret the Bible, the Bible itself is often neglected by postcolonial criticism, with the result that there is little influence in the other direction: from the Bible to postcolonial criticism. This second edition of Last Stop before Antarctica begins to repair the imbalance by pointing to the vital role that the Bible played in colonization, using Australia—one of the first centers of postcolonial criticism—as a specific example. Drawing upon colonial literature, including explorer journals, poetry, novels, and translations, it creates a mutually enlightening dialogue between postcolonial literature and biblical texts on themes such as exodus and exile, translation, identity, and home.

Roland Boer, Ph.D. (1993), McGill University, is Research Professor in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University. He is the author or editor of numerous books including Rescuing the Bible (Blackwell), Criticism of Heaven (Brill), and Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies (Society of Biblical Literature). He is founding and managing editor of the international journal, The Bible and Critical Theory.

“[This book’s] distinctive contribution to the growing literature of postcolonial biblical studies is its tracing of the presence of the Bible in diverse modes, some of them benign, in the colonial and postcolonial world. … This is a fascinating and, with the advance of globalization and the supposed ‘crisis of capitalism’, a yet more topical read.”
— W. J. Houston, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament