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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... narrative structures of a number of important Victorian novels about sectarian conflict , such as Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge . Although the modern English state is constructed on the premise that formerly excluded religious groups ...
... narratives to include a transcultural perspective not otherwise visible in nineteenth - century texts . By the mid - nineteenth century , the disempowerment of ecclesiastical authority in England gave civil courts the right to refuse ...
... narratives of conversion in British colonialism are interpretable is obviously not limited to the discourse of civil law , though it is within the secular structures of civil legislation that the social rewriting of conversion takes ...
... narratives are undermined by legislative processes or economic rationality deserves much closer attention than they have thus far received . Because its threatening capacity to alter social symmetries generates the internal conflicts ...
... narrative . In court cases such as the ones described in Chapter Three , testimony provided by the convert is repeatedly challenged by the dramatic structure of cross - examination , interruption , interrogation , and judicial ...