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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... tolerance that entered English public life by the mid - nineteenth century did indeed enfranchise Dissenters , Roman Catholics , and Jews , whose incorporation into the structures of political governance showed an England moving toward ...
... tolerance and liberalism.23 If dissent expresses itself most powerfully as conversion , particularly to minority religions , the reasons are not hard to understand . By undoing the concept of fixed , unalterable identities , conversion ...
... tolerance by the state . Incidents of conversion in society enable the state to demonstrate a unity larger than the community , splintered as the latter is by the departure of members from its fold . For this reason , the resistances of ...
... tolerance . Prominent in judicial records , this dual move is repeated in literary writing , though not ... tolerant state , the latter by definition must be capacious enough to imagine different positions within society . Such ...
... tolerance and inclusiveness is often too overwhelming for narrative form to handle . The overburdened narrative structure of two striking nineteenth - century works – Maria Edgeworth's Harrington ( 1817 ) and Charles Dickens's Barnaby ...