i The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature By

236 Pages·2016·0.96 MB·English

The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature

By

Anne Margaret Castro

Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Vanderbilt University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in

English
August, 2016
Nashville, Tennessee

Approved:

Vera Kutzinski, Ph.D.

Ifeoma Nwankwo, Ph.D.

Hortense Spillers, Ph.D.

Marzia Milazzo, Ph.D.

Victor Anderson, Ph.D.

i
Copyright © 2016 by Anne Margaret Castro
All Rights Reserved
To Annette, who taught me the steps.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful for the generous mentoring I have received throughout my graduate
career from my committee chairs, Vera Kutzinski and Ifeoma Nwankwo. Your support and
attention to this project’s development has meant the world to me. My scholarship has been
enriched by the support and insight of my committee members: Hortense Spillers, Marzia
Milazzo, and Victor Anderson. I would also like to express my thanks to Kathryn Schwarz and
Katie Crawford, who always treated my work as valuable.
This dissertation is a testament to the encouragement and feedback I received from my
colleagues in the Vanderbilt English department. Thanks to Vera Kutzinski’s generosity of time
and energy, I have had the pleasure of growing through sustained scholarly engagement with
Tatiana McInnis, Lucy Mensah, RJ Boutelle, Marzia Milazzo and Aubrey Porterfield. I am
thankful to Ifeoma Nwankwo’s work with the Drake Fellowship, which gave me the opportunity
to conduct oral history interviews with Dr. Erna Brodber and Petal Samuel, in Woodside,
Jamaica. My experiences in Jamaica deeply affected the way I approach my scholarship. In
addition, I am grateful to Stephanie Higgs, Kathleen DeGuzman, and Shelby Johnson, who have
read my writing in and outside of the writing studio. And I can hardly imagine this dissertation
process without my transcontinental writing partner and confidante, Rebecca Wilbanks.
I will likely never be able to fully express my gratitude for the community I have found
here in Nashville. I am thankful for the wise guidance of Annette Lancaster, Debbie Williams,
and Christie Bates. Autumn Morgan Allen, you make my life more wonderful. Matthew Switzer,
you bring me joy and peace every day. And of course, thank you, mom. Your enthusiasm for me
and my career is unflagging.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
DEDICATION...............................................................................................................................iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v
Chapter
I. Introduction.................................................................................................................................1
Religion and Spirituality in Literary Scholarship........................................................................2
Performative Textual Hermeneutics..........................................................................................10
Situating the Afro-diasporic Americas......................................................................................14
Situating Myself........................................................................................................................18
Chapter Descriptions.................................................................................................................20

II. The Hermeneutics of Spirit Possession: Interpreting Mediums in Changó, The Biggest Badass
and Louisiana.................................................................................................................................25

Changó: Translation as Medium, Translation as Message.......................................................27
Engaged Surrender in Louisiana...............................................................................................44

III. Reading the Prophetic Stage: Imagining the Limits of the Possible in Bedward and Dream on
Monkey Mountain..........................................................................................................................68

Bedward’s Impossible Narrative of Theatrical Possibility........................................................71
Prophecy as Hermeneutics in Dream on Monkey Mountain.....................................................89

III. The Spiritual Life of Power: Zombies in Myal and Brown Girl in the Ring.........................108

Economies of Flesh in Brown Girl in the Ring.......................................................................110
Sounding Out Spirit Thievery in Erna Brodber’s Myal..........................................................129

IV. “You Preached Today!”: Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison’s Sermonic Performances...
..............................................................................................................................................156

Liturgical Preaching in Zora Neale Hurston’s Sermonic Texts..............................................159
When a Performance Is Not a Performance: Toni Morrison’s Reading of Baby Suggs ........182

V. Conclusion..............................................................................................................................202

REFERENCES............................................................................................................................205
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

And my prayer
is versed with
what you call obscene language.
God within is a poet.
Goddess within is a poet with action.
Is she a performer?
Poetic license well employed.
- Josefina Báez Comrade, Bliss ain’t playing, np

Josefina Báez’s performance text, Comrade, Bliss ain’t playing (2013) invites its reader
to actively participate in the reading process, often by both visually and sonically tracing the
poem’s word-play, as “up-down-and center, some kind of Scrabble / is encountered” (np). On the
copyright page of her printed work, Báez describes her text as “performance theatre text;
performance poetry, non-denominational spiritual practice of urban devotee; Dominican artist
inner diary ” (np). The author manipulates the cataloguing mechanisms of published texts to
frame her work in generic multiplicity. Similarly, interpreting Comrade, Bliss ain’t playing
becomes an exercise in multiplicity as the reader becomes performer and audience, closely
following the shifting rhythms and rhymes embedded within the complex “Dancing Syntax” of
this first-person performance poem. Báez’s poetic “Secular prayer” uses the lens of her personal
spiritual experiences to ruminate on the intricacies of social, economic, and political power
relations between individuals and collective institutions.
“The Sacred Act of Reading” examines representations of religion and socio-political
power in multi-genre texts of the modern and contemporary Afro-disaporic Americas. Religion,
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like culture and politics, signifies a wide variety of practices, beliefs, and organizations aimed at
the dispersal, consolidation, and maintenance of power. I align spiritual and socio-political
discourses by critically reading depictions of both metaphysical and physical relationships of
dominance, dependence, and interdependence that manifest through performed, bodily practices.
My dissertation adopts what I call a “performative textual hermeneutics,” which focuses
on the active, reflective processes of textual creation and interpretation. I consider the
methodologies of reading and interpretation presented in scribal novels, audiobooks, and written
plays. Crossing the bounds of discipline, genre, and medium, my dissertation studies not only the
performative behaviors of characters or performers, but also the embodied rituals of reading and
listening themselves. By analyzing depictions of Afro-diasporic spirituality through a
performative textual hermeneutics, my dissertation illuminates the embodied practices that
physically actualize seemingly abstract mechanisms of socio-political oppression, which
continue to mark the lived experiences of Afro-disaporic persons in the Americas. My
dissertation’s expansive focus on spirituality and power ultimately challenges the false binary
between oppression and liberation often invoked by USAmerican literary scholars studying the
works of Afro-diasporic artists. I examine how the primary texts themselves question this binary
by complicating the very definitions of personhood and agency through the use of Euro-
American and African cosmologies and ideologies.

RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY IN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
In many ways, this dissertation's interest in spirituality harkens back to the very origins of
modern literary study in the “West” by way of hermeneutics, a term likely derived from the
2
Greek deity Hermes, who acted as a mediator between the gods and men. Gerhard Ebeling
distinguishes three senses of ancient philosophies of hermeneutics, or “hermeneuein” as
“expression (utterance, speaking), explication (interpretation, explanation) and translation (acting
as an interpreter),” all aspects of meaning-making that I explore throughout this dissertation (qtd
in Grondin 4). Jean Grondin (translated by Joel Weinsheimer) explains that each of the senses of
“hermeneuin” attempt to encapsulate “similar movements of spirit” through language (21).
While it is a fool’s errand to assign a clear lineage to hermeneutics -- just as it would be for any
such capacious and foundational philosophical endeavor from our contemporary perspective --
the sacred frameworks from which practices of textual interpretation arose are difficult to deny.
In explicitly theological terms, the study of interpretation as practiced today in English
still bears hallmarks from Jewish exegetical practices dating as far back as 515BCE. English
scholars echo a key principle of Talmudic exegesis when they agree that textual meaning can be
gleaned by interpreting a passage by referring to another passage in that same text where the
same word appears. While I was generally conscious of the divinely-oriented origins of literary
studies before writing this project, I still found myself surprised at the extent to which
interpretive issues at the heart of theological debates resonate in the methodological arguments I
present in this dissertation. For example, my contention that the formal aspects of the texts I
study here instruct readers on how to engage with them, an idea I introduce in my first chapter on
mediums, bears a striking resemblance to Martin Luther and John Calvin’s Protestant Christian
emphasis that scriptura sui ipsius interpres, or scripture interprets itself.1 “The Sacred Act of
Reading” builds upon a tradition as old as scripture, and as contentious as scriptural debates. At

1 This phrase has also been used by Catholic figures, such as Thomas of Aquinas to claim that
one part of scripture can be used to explain another part of scripture, another key element in
literary criticism today. See James T. Bretzke’s Consecrated Phrases, A Latin Theological
Dictionary (1998)
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the same time, my decision to academically value texts and practices of Afro-diasporic
spirituality with the same kind of literary attention bestowed upon biblical hermeneutics is,
unfortunately, still fairly new in English scholarship of the United States.
African and Afro-diasporic spiritual concepts, particularly those of the West African
messenger deity Esu-Elegbara, have indeed been taken up by literary scholars as hermeneutical
tools, though usually with minimal analyses of their theoretical insights as spiritual concepts. In
The Signifying Monkey (1989), Henry Louis Gates holds that the Yoruban Esu-Elegbara is
Our metaphor for the uncertainties of explication, for the open-endedness of every
literary text ... Esu rules the process of disclosure, a process that is never-ending,
that is dominated by multiplicity. Esu is discourse upon a text; it is the process of
interpretation he rules (21).

Gates uses the mythological legacies of Esu to metaphorize his deconstructive hermeneutics of
textual engagement in African American literature. In Legba’s Crossing, Heather Russell takes
up Legba as a theoretical tool for exploring Afro-Caribbean narratology. She explains,
"According to the Yoruba, Esu-Elegbara is the god of the crossing. He is the gateway god. He is
the god who is the divine linguist, vested with the power to govern over hermeneutic and
heuristic processes” (9)2. Like Gates and Russell, I am using African-derived spiritual figures as
heuristic tools, but extending their interpretive methodologies to imagine how a variety of
spiritual phenomena, including mediumship, prophesy, possession, and preaching, theorize the
relations of power embedded within every instance of such linguistic meaning-making.
Traditionally, English literary studies that have taken up religion overwhelmingly

2 Russell adds, “For the Fon of Benin, Esu/Eshu's corrollary is Legba. Eshu and Legba are often
interchangeably used; they serve ostensibly the same function in relation to discourse” (9).
Dianne Stewart also presents Legba for theological hermeneutics “that epitomizes the Word of
the African Ancestors” (227).

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concentrated on Christian theologies and themes, sometimes extending beyond Christianity to
concepts associated with Judaism and Islam. The ubiquity of Christian topics in literary studies is
perhaps best exemplified by the ease with which my freshmen undergraduates can identify
almost any character as symbolic of Christ. Indeed, “The Sacred Act of Reading” extensively
discusses Christian exegesis (admittedly identifying a few Christ-figures along the way), along
with theology and liturgical practices of the Afro-Caribbean and African American church. This
dissertation builds upon a rich canon of scholarship on the African American Christian church.
For example, I draw on C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya’s sociological work on the
political and social power of religious institutions in African USAmerica, and in complicating
representations of power and liberation, I take up theologian Victor Anderson’s call to extend
scholarship on black churches beyond paradigms of resistance.3 By approaching black women’s
literature as potential sources for theological discourse, Womanist scholars such as Kelly Brown
Douglas and Katie Geneva Cannon have paved the way for the kind of literary studies of
theology and power that I provide here.4 Tuire Valkeakari’s Religious Idiom and the African
American Novel (2007) exemplifies what I hope is a growing trend of in-depth analysis on Afro-
diasporic spirituality (primarily Christianity in her analysis) in English literary studies. As may
be expected, the marginalization of Afro-diasporic spirituality is far more apparent when
discussing non-Christian religions and spiritual practices of the African diaspora. In chapters one
and three, I examine representations of spirit possession, mediumship, and zombification in four
novels by Caribbean, South American, and Caribbean-Canadian authors. In analyzing these

3 See C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya The Black Church in the African-American
Experience (1990) and Victor Anderson Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African
American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995) and Creative Exchange: Theology of African
American Religious Experience (2008).
4 For example, see Kelly Brown Douglas The Black Christ (1993) and Katie Geneva Canon
Black Womanist Ethics (1988).
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