Friday, January 3, 2020
The Religious And Theological Dimensions Of Ralph Ellison...
M. Cooper Harrissââ¬â¢s monograph, Ralph Ellisonââ¬â¢s Invisible Theology, brings into focus the religious and theological dimensions of Ralph Ellisonââ¬â¢s authorship. Against reductive tendencies of materialist and secular accounts of racial identity, Harriss argues that Ellisonââ¬â¢s understanding of race, characterized as an invisible theology in a secular age, makes possible a reconsideration of the relation between race, religion, and secularism. In order to bring the religious aspects of racial life into view, Harriss proceeds along two lines: genealogically, he situates Ellisonââ¬â¢s writings in an array of religious and theological contexts. These include, for example, attending to different genealogies of invisibility which inflect Ellisonââ¬â¢s ownâ⬠¦show more contentâ⬠¦Harrissââ¬â¢s contention is not that racial formation in Ellison should be thought of as a religious instead of a secular concept; rather, it is that race is a secular concept p recisely because it is internally indivisible from religious antecedents (191). Given this network of connections, Harrissââ¬â¢s book belongs next to recent studies which explicate the dynamic crossings between race, religion, and secularism (e.g., Theodore Vial, Modern Religion, Modern Race, Oxford University Press, 2016). Second, Invisible Theology marshals the resources of religious studies to foreground unappreciated dimensions of literary texts. Harrissââ¬â¢s book particularly stands with other studies engaging the neglected religious aspects of twentieth-century African American literature (e.g., Josef Sorett, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, 2016). Harrissââ¬â¢s distinctive methodological points are noteworthy: naming the presence of religion and theology in Ellisonââ¬â¢s fiction does not depend on its belonging to a confessional standpoint; instead, taking cues from the hermeneutical tradition which includes S chleiermacher, Geertz, and Tillich, Harriss means for these characterizations to specify a negotiation of hyphenated and oppositional identities (say, racial and national), and the process
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.