Sauling around : the trouble with conversion in African American and Mexican American autobiography, 1965-2002
Date
2010-04-08T21:24:23Z
Authors
Walker, Madeline Ruth
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Abstract
While the social sciences have interrogated religious conversions as intensely social, historically situated phenomena, literary studies has not focused the same scrutiny on these textually rendered events and the forces that shape them. This dissertation explores religious conversion and resistance to conversion in African American and Mexican American autobiography from 1965 to 2002, with attention to conversion's social context and its potential for harm. Constant change and the negotiation of resistance and assimilation to the dominant culture are seminal topics for ethnic Americans; the conversion narrative is therefore often seen as a normative genre in ethnic writing, particularly ethnic autobiography. For the most part, religious conversion in African American and Mexican American autobiography has either been ignored or misread as normal and beneficial, even though the binaries of black Christianity versus Nation of Islam, and Catholicism versus Protestantism are sites of religious and racial ambivalence in these two ethnic traditions. The autobiographical texts of Malcolm X, Oscar Zeta Acosta. Amid Barak, and Richard Rodriguez call into question rosy views of conversion and suggest that we need to examine how conversion stories sometimes erase difference and cover over discourses of power. The American multicultural ideal of religious pluralism has meant that critics are too ready to praise religious conversion in America as advantageous or beyond the ken of criticism because religious belief is seen as belonging to the untouchable arena of cultural identity.
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African Americans, Mexican Americans, Autobiography, United States