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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Conversion, Modernity, and Belief Gauri Viswanathan. understandings , and beliefs - a right henceforth usurped by official discourse . " Some of the most moving testimonies of the dramatic differences between self - perceptions and ...
... belief - Asad's historical reading that “ the only legitimate space allowed to Christianity by post - Enlightenment society is the right to individual belief " : 16 enables one to rethink western secularism , not as a linear successor ...
Conversion, Modernity, and Belief Gauri Viswanathan. CHAPTER ONE Cross Currents RELIGIOUS MINORITIES AND CITIZENSHIP On the assumption that genealogy is often a function of historical narrative and that the history of cultural ...
Conversion, Modernity, and Belief Gauri Viswanathan. language of commerce throughout the seas of the East . ... There is now in that country a large educated class , abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions ...
... belief is placed outside the space of public discourse in English culture , such a move is rendered problematic in the culture of the colonies . The clean separation between belief and law is less manageable when applied to converts in ...