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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... argue for domestic reforms on the principle that they were consistent with the destined international course of English history . He elaborated this argument more systematically in an extraordinary essay , " Civil Disabilities of the ...
... arguing that their disloyalty was state - produced . By shifting the Jews ' insularity to an effect of state policy , rather than a cause of their exclusion from citizenship , Macaulay brilliantly undermined the rhetoric of patriotism ...
... arguments , so much so that members of a committee formed in 1787 for the purpose of negotiating with the governent to win emancipation decided to call themselves the Protesting Catholic Dissenters . The Test Acts of the 1670s , along ...
... argued that , though dialogism in the English novel exists as the liberal incorporation of hegemonic and subaltern voices , it finally affirms only the voice of the dominant subject as the voice of active agency . " The colonized , he ...
... argue , among other things , that the secular state's struggle to preserve difference while striving for religious tolerance and inclusiveness is often too overwhelming for narrative form to handle . The overburdened narrative structure ...