Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief - Couverture rigide

Viswanathan, Gauri

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0691058989 ISBN 13 : 9780691058986

Editeur : Princeton University Press, 1998

Synopsis

This text presents a re-examination of religious conversion. The author 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 propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Gauri Viswanathan is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Date d'édition: 1998
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0691058989
• ISBN 13: 9780691058986
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 328
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible