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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... English growth . In developing the theory that civic equality gave English history its incomparable monumentality , enabling England to spread its domain to the far corners of the earth , Macaulay expressed a classic Whig position on ...
... English Jews are , as far as we can see , precisely what our government has made them . " In this passionate call for admitting Jews , Macaulay turns the tables around by denouncing as unpatriotic not the Jews but rather the English ...
... English contexts , is clearly less focused on cultural adaptation than on progressively secularizing religious identity into an autonomously conceived national identity . In the great secularization movements of the nineteenth century ...
... English parliament to relax the entrenched disabling legislation of the past . That the chroniclers of English parliamentary history chose to present religious emancipation not as the result of revolutionary change but rather as the ...
... English and colonial life , where the grounds for Englishness are increasingly determined by the individual's ability to become detached from the content of local or regional affiliations while maintaining their form . Second , the ...