Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and BeliefPrinceton University Press, 2021 M05 11 - 328 pages Outside the Fold is a radical reexamination of religious conversion. Gauri Viswanathan skillfully argues that conversion is an interpretive act that belongs in the realm of cultural criticism. To that end, this work examines key moments in colonial and postcolonial history to show how conversion questions the limitations of secular ideologies, particularly the discourse of rights central to both the British empire and the British nation-state. Implicit in such questioning is an attempt to construct an alternative epistemological and ethical foundation of national community. Viswanathan grounds her study in an examination of two simultaneous and, she asserts, linked events: the legal emancipation of religious minorities in England and the acculturation of colonial subjects to British rule. The author views these two apparently disparate events as part of a common pattern of national consolidation that produced the English state. She seeks to explain why resistance, in both cases, frequently took the form of religious conversion, especially to "minority" or alternative religions. Confronting the general characterization of conversion as assimilative and annihilating of identity, Viswanathan demonstrates that a willful change of religion can be seen instead as an act of opposition. Outside the Fold concludes that, as a form of cultural crossing, conversion comes to represent a vital release into difference. |
From inside the book
... origins in world - historical models developed during European colonialism , these sorts of insights have not extended their reach to question the temporality of , say , Freud's assessment of religion as equivalent to the stage of ...
... origin reestablishes “ Hindu ” and “ Muslim " as fixed categories , quite at variance with the ways these women define themselves at the moment of both rupture and recovery . A social worker assigned to the refugee camps is quoted as ...
... origin in colonial India . Chapter Six , “ Conversion , Theosophy , and Race Theory , " focuses on Annie Besant's conversion to theosophy and examines more broadly how alternative spiritual movements , which proclaimed a universal ...
... origins of modern religious and ethnic strife , then at least prototypical enactments of the drama of citizenship . This drama unendingly complicated itself by questioning and rethinking the possibilities of dual allegiances brought on ...
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