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. |
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... Christianity , Pandita Ramabai , whose spirited questioning of Christian creeds led the English missionaries who sponsored her stay in England to interpret her feminist stance as essentially heretical . Moving from gender to race theory ...
... Christian conversions , since the absorption of Jews as English citizens would presumably diminish their alienation from Anglican culture — an alienation that Anglo - Jews had turned into forms of group cohesion and community ...
... Christianity ” as the defining principle of subjecthood , even while retaining the moral foundations of Christianity . The administration of colonial law in matters involving Christian conversions is a case in point . Even when Hindus ...
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