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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... groups . In part , the concessions to Catholics in 1829 were inevitable responses by the English government to the volatility of the Irish situation and the political pressures created by it . Although Catholic Ireland remained ...
... group having ties that superseded national boundaries . When Anglo - Jews perceived that Catholic emancipation was not stymied by the vexing problems of dual loyalty to spiritual and temporal authority , they were encouraged to believe ...
... groups , Catholics , and Jews now dispensed with the concept of heretic as defining what a true Englishman was not . By the mid - nineteenth century , with criteria of doctrinal allegiance no longer determining Englishness , national ...
... groups to participate in the nation state . Of course , the fact that religious enfranchisement effectively displaces the extension of the franchise across social classes creates tensions of another kind that have persisted in English ...
... groups who accepted emancipation as their right of entry into England's public life , even at the cost of renouncing the specificity of their religious identity , for colonial converts such renunciation is a denial of their conversion ...