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
Results 6-10 of 90
... England's longstanding exclusionary politics had the deleterious effect of creating a separatist consciousness and pride in Jews that Christian missionaries were unable to penetrate or undo . When , therefore , in the 1830s , Sir Robert ...
... England , for instance — legislation to enfranchise religious minorities in the wake of national union and disestablishment : Could an Englishman be both English and Catholic , Jewish , Nonconformist ? As a result of altered relations ...
... England's power from within . Denial of foreign allegiance and dual loyalty became an obligatory feature of Catholic arguments , so much so that members of a committee formed in 1787 for the purpose of negotiating with the governent to ...
... England into the last phase of the move to lift civil disabilities . On gaining his seat , Bradlaugh introduced a general affirmation bill , replacing oaths , that became law in 1888 . The incorporation of Dissenting groups , Catholics ...
... England . First , this concurrence of events introduces a politics of identity into both English and colonial life , where the grounds for Englishness are increasingly determined by the individual's ability to become detached from the ...