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2006 Northeast Modern Language Association Panels |
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Channette Romero "Turning (Not Returning) to Religion in Literary Criticism"
Do not cite without permission of the author. |
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There has been a lot of recent critical discussion about a "return to religion" in contemporary literature. In Imaginary Homelands Salman Rushdie says, "the idea of large numbers of persons going back towards religion is an essentially Western one. In the East, relatively few peoples left their faiths." I believe Rushdie's statement can be extended beyond the East/West boundary to describe individuals everywhere who have continuously lived outside or alongside mainstream secular Enlightenment narratives. My paper will explore ethnic American literature and its attempts to represent the continuously-held religious beliefs of formerly colonized peoples in the Americas. In doing so, it will wrestle with literary criticisms' attempts to come to terms with these literary narratives of religion. Despite Mary Louise Pratt's and Stanley Fish's recent calls for a complex study of religion, much of the current critical discussion about this "return to religion" has come from secular theorists like Edward Said who fear a growing connection between religion and neoconservative politics. Although these critics are expressing a legitimate fear about the connection between religion and the political Right, their positions depend largely on a popular secular fantasy that paradoxically views religion as both residual, threatening to die away any moment, and simultaneously always powerful enough to threaten to return literary critics and the rest of the world to neoconservative politics. Those critics that do take a more positive view of the study of religion and literature usually view the use of religion in texts as simply a literary tool that allows contemporary writers to disrupt the hegemony of narrative realism and European Enlightenment ways of knowing, rather than as the actual worldviews of religious communities and writers. In the context of ethnic American literature, these literary techniques are traditionally labeled "magical realism." My paper argues that both of these critical positions misread ethnic American texts because of their reliance on traditional secular narratives. Literary criticism needs to move beyond secular fantasies that view religion as all-powerfully conservative and as merely a literary tool, towards a more complex view of the connections among religion, politics, and literature. Literary critics are right to see a growing surge in the foregrounding of religion in contemporary literature. However, it does not actually represent a "return to religion." Many African American, American Indian, and Chicano/a communities have been able continuously to hold onto some of the religious and spiritual beliefs of their ancestors, despite the dominance of colonialism and mainstream culture. Instead of seeing this growing foregrounding of religion as representing a changed view towards religion, we should view this as a change in politics. I believe this change represents an attempt to come to terms with the fact that the political activism of the 1960s and 1970s that helped ethnic communities publicly articulate their sense of peoplehood (the Civil Rights Movement, American Indian Movement, Chicano/a Movement, etc.) failed to bring about full equality in the Americas because they continued to perpetuate the race-based exclusions that characterize mainstream America. By foregrounding multiracial, religiously-based communities in their novels, ethnic writers like Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Rudolfo Anaya, and Sandra Cisneros are trying to reimagine new, more enabling forms of community based on inclusive religious affiliation, rather than location within specific political borders or ethnicities. Contemporary ethnic American literature suggests that religion and literature enable this rethinking of identity and community through their ability to connect individuals to one another across time, space, nations, and cultures. However, these writers consciously point out that these narratives of religion function not just as literary techniques, but as representations of an often-ignored connection between religion and progressive politics in these communities. My paper argues that a more complex understanding of the way religion works in these literatures will help us as literary critics to move beyond our too-narrowly defined secular methodologies towards a fuller understanding of the connections among literature, culture, and religion.
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