Dramatic Resistance: Interpreting Revelation through Multiple Lenses

For quite some time, scholars have noted that Revelation is a text that encourages and exhorts its viewers to find ways to resist empire within their contexts, yet Revelation’s anti-imperial meaning can be lost to readers struggling to disentangle the text’s complex imagery. In this volume, U-Wen Low introduces readers to a range of methods, including biblical performance criticism, visual exegesis, postcolonial criticism, and hidden transcript theory. When used together, these frameworks allow interpreters to wrestle with Revelation without losing sight of the performative nature and anti-imperial claims of the text. Each chapter is a primer on one of Low’s four frameworks, with case studies that illustrate various ways the methods might be combined to further illustrate how Revelation functions as resistance literature. Scholars and students interested in ancient performance and visual theories or in postcolonial readings of the Bible will gain a deeper understanding of both Revelation and of how performance theory sheds light on biblical texts.

U-Wen Low is Assistant Professor of Public Religion at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and an Honorary Research Associate of Pilgrim College in Melbourne, Australia (Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung land). He is the author of several journal articles on the book of Revelation, Pentecostal studies, and biblical performance criticism. He is the coeditor of Persuasion and Performance: Cultural Immersions (2026).