Neither people, nor their experiences, nor our institutions follow single disciplinary or methodological tracks. Yet, most scholarly books about them do just that – using a very specific toolbox to tell what, as a result, can only ever be just part of a story. It makes sense: we are trained with a specific set of skills and we use them to tell stories the best way we know how. But there are costs to this approach; when we follow one track, there are many roads not taken. On the other hand, we can’t do what we can’t know. But maybe our friends can.

Televised Redemption is many things: ethnography, history, psychology, media theory, sociology, and critical race studies, with a dash of political science thrown in. . It’s also, astonishingly, co-written by three authors (Wow. How?), and still maintains a (somewhat) coherent argument and consistent readability. But there are costs to this approach too: it does a great deal, but there is also a great deal that it cannot do. That’s okay; that might even be great. Because this is the kind of book that asks as many questions as it answers, gesturing to the byways and off-road trails that it does not follow. But that others can and will. And that is certain: this is a book that will inspire countless projects to come.

That’s partly because it starts by thinking race and religion together anthropologically, a methodological approach being led by the authors of this volume. It does so under the broad rubric of media (with, surprisingly, rather less focus on television that one might expect from the title), which allows the authors to probe how media is used as a form of racial redemption. Black religious media is centered as a fundamental part of the struggle against racial discrimination and for equality, as in these mediascapes, “blacks are equally the sons and daughters of God.” It’s the story of black religious media, and it’s the story of black resistance as shaped through strategies of representation. As this book insists, you shouldn’t do one without the other.

The book brings together three significant, if differently constituted, black religious communities in the US: Christianity (with a focus on the prosperity ministry); Islam (specifically Nation of Islam and the American Society of Muslims); and the less well-known (and significantly smaller) Black Hebrew Israelites. All three communities have fundamentally different relationships to the notions of The State generally, and to the United States in particular. All three are in constant and productive conversation and tension about their critiques of the State and how to participate in the body politic. And all three leverage religious media in different ways as a path to personal redemption and racial redemption. Those differences are valuable: the diversity of approaches to redemption contributes to the enduring strength of black religious media and its humanizing influence. Black religious media fundamentally insists on the value and equality of blacks to whites even as it speaks to very different ideologies of faith and citizenship.

The book is divided into two parts, each with three chapters. The first is a history of the three religious communities in the US that incorporates close readings of a variety of religious media and their role in ideological formation, while the second offers a media ethnography built on careful and methodologically innovative fieldwork. We learn in the first half about the past thirty years of African American Christian Broadcasting and its role in calling for communal social justice and civil rights, deftly contrasted with more recent prosperity gospels that operate under a logic of capitalistic fairness and individualism. (This is by Martha F. Frederick; if you find it interesting, she expands on the argument and data in Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global.) Carolyn Moxley Rouse offers us an innovative reading of a variety of images in three Muslim newspapers, Freedom’s Journal (1827-1829), Muhammed Speaks (1960-1975), and Muslim Journal (1981-present), and their relationship to a broader rejection of the United States as the primary site of nationalism, as well as excavating important histories of splits within the community. John L. Jackson Jr. applies some of the methodologies he introduces in 2013’s Thin Description Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of the Jerusalem to chronicle the rich range of media approaches employed by Ben Ammi, the founder of the Black Hebrew Israelites. Ben Ammi uses the corner soapbox, newspapers, and DVDs and social media to advocate for African Americans as the true descendants of Ancient Israelites who belong in Israel.

Again: all three have drastically different ideologies shaped by and reflected in their media strategies and representations. And also again: all of these mediascapes are centrally concerned with questions of citizenship, the struggle for inclusion and equal protection, and the relationship between the two.

Which, it turns out, has a lot to do with women. Another important theme across the book is how women use religious media for gender and racial redemption, both personally and for their communities more broadly. Frederick explores that through “prosperity gospels,” which “advance in the hands of women” while Rouse looks at Black Muslim blogs and magazines to think about the “post-postcolonial racialized postracialism within the African American Muslim community” and its implications for gender norms and the search for different forms of community. (Jackson talks rather less about gender; men tend to.)

The second half of the book is for the voyeurs, the storytellers, and the people who read books to imagine worlds that might be different from their own. It offers a series of case studies, fully acknowledging the limitations of this approach, while immersing us in the lives of people like Shonda, who found personal and practical redemption in televangelism’s prosperity gospel; Maryam and Wajda, who prefer the limitations of the United Arab Emirates to the US, finding greater freedom in the Muslim theocracy than in the racist US; and Laura and Michael, the producers of The Green Hour, a weekly Black Hebrew Israelite radio show. These are fascinating stories, and they all show how black religious media works towards a redemption vision, and how that work actually works on the ground. I want to know these people more, and I want to know more people in these communities. But I also want to know more about religious media itself; not just how these communities interact with it and are represented by it, but what kind of system religious media is, and how African Americans have resisted its racialized models of representation as much as they are subject to it. I also want to know how more about the broad range of technologies and whether there are specific stakes to the choices each community makes about their communicative media.

Which is okay, because as I said, I’m sure someone is working on that right now.

***

Sharrona Pearl is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  A history and theorist of the face and body, her most recent book Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other was published by University of Chicago Press in 2017.  A frequent blogger and writer, you can find her work at Kveller.com, Lilith.org, romper.com, Chronicle Vitae, Real Life Mag., and Aeon, among others.  You can find clips and more at www.sharronapearl.com, and say hi on twitter @sharronapearl.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Televised Redemption appeared first on The Revealer.

Finally, after a short speech, and while he still stood at the podium, beaming, that song came on. You know the one. That Rolling Stones song that after two years has everybody trying to figure out why he plays it. Why would he not? Listen to the first two minutes on high volume. Imagine you’re standing in front of an audience who believes you are the Son of God incarnate. Angels, almost unintelligible at first, begin to sing. Then: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, well you might find, you get what you need.” And then: a slow, mournful guitar. A funeral scene. It’s the last days. It’s a new era. Whatever pain you felt, well get over it. It’s not that your pain will go away. It’s that it doesn’t matter anymore. You’re going to keep hurting — a lot! — but it doesn’t matter anymore. Your pain is what you needed all along. Trump will make us all hurt, and he’ll laugh while he does it, and we’re in on the joke.

Next, let’s check in with some of our favorite other religion-related publications, Sacred Matters published an interview with Jennifer Garber about Colonial Violence, Sacred Power, and Gods of Indian Country

Broadly speaking, this book is situated within recent work about the cultural history of the concept of religion. The Americans in this book, which include Catholic and Protestant missionaries and reformers, invoked the word “religion” constantly, however their uses were slippery. Sometimes they meant a universal human impulse to connect with the supernatural. More often, “religion” served as a placeholder for their own particular traditions. Protestants, especially, talked about Indians’ need for “religion,” but meant a sort of generic Protestantism that Tracy Fessenden has so helpfully delineated. Every once in a while, some Christians living in Indian Country referred to Kiowa “religion.” Work by David Chidester reminds us to pay attention to such references. When did Americans call Native ritual activity “religious” and when did they withhold that descriptor? I track these usages (and their impacts) in the book.

And Mayanthi Fernando is guest curating a forum on Sex, secularism, and “femonationalism” at The Immanent Frame. 

In their important new books, Sara Farris and Joan Wallach Scott examine how and why gender equality has become the basis for claims that Europe and North America are distinct from—and superior to—the rest of the world, and especially the Islamic world.

While Laura Kipnis also wrote about Joan Wallach Scott’s new book, this time alongside R. Marie Griffith’s new book, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics in Letting Their Hair Down for The New York Review of Books.

Whereas Scott faults secularism for not achieving racial and gender equality, R. Marie Griffith leaves you doubting that the United States ever achieved secularism. In Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics, she shows that at every turn in the culture wars of the last century or so, religious leaders have battled to obstruct gender, sexual, and racial equality, frequently with the cooperation of elected officials and the judiciary. Warring over birth control, censorship, sex education, interracial sex, abortion, and same-sex marriage, tearing their ranks and the country apart in the process, the antisecular factions clearly believed that the moral life of every American—and the body of every woman—was in their divinely ordained purview.

While we’re on the subject of gender, sex and religion, Kaya Oakes wrote about Forgiveness in the Epoch of Me Too for Killing the Buddha

We are in a peak moment right now when it comes to men asking women for forgiveness. And in each case, before any of the violations make it to court–which they rarely do–the forgiveness is meted out not by the judicial system, with its mythologies of checks and balances, but by the person who was violated. The onus for forgiving, over and over again, is laid at the feet of the victim. What are these men really asking women to do? To absolve them and clear their consciences, so they can move on. Meanwhile, the women are left behind to grapple with the repercussions of the abuse.

Ed Kilgore reported on  #MeToo in the Pews: A Backlash to the Southern Baptist Patriarchy for The Daily Intelligencer

Tendrils of the #MeToo movement are reaching into unexpected corners of the patriarchal rock garden of American society. Most notably, a series of sexist and even violence-excusing remarks from Southern Baptist Convention theologian and former SBC president Paige Patterson is creating an unprecedented backlash in that famously conservative and politically incorrect faith community, the largest among American conservative evangelicals. Notably 2,500 Baptist women signed an open letter asking the overseers of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Patterson serves as president, to “take a strong stand against [his] unbiblical teaching regarding womanhood, sexuality, and domestic violence.”

And Sarah Seltzer wrote about Birthright Israel and #MeToo for Jewish Currents

As the #MeToo movement unfolded, Jewish Currents spoke with more than 50 Birthright Israel participants and staffers about their experiences with the often-fraught sexual and gender dynamics on the trips, uncovering the case above along with eight other alleged incidents of sexual misconduct ranging from verbal harassment to assault. The participants and staffers told us about a volatile mix of sex and alcohol that, as on college campuses, has the potential to turn toxic. In the cases of some incidents recounted to us, it did.

But many spoke of something more: a pervasive environment of sexual pressure that encourages Jews to meet, marry, and, someday, procreate with other Jews while being awed by the beauty and culture of Israel. This expectation is communicated before the trip even begins via official Birthright social media, and on the trips is expressed most directly around encounters between American women and Israeli soldiers.

Speaking of Israel, Nathan J. Robinson wrote about Israel and the Passive Voice for Current Affairs

In the United States, news reports from Israel often have something strange about them: People seem to die violently, but nobody ever seems to kill them. In 2014, when an Israeli missile destroyed a cafe in Gaza, blowing eight patrons to pieces as they watched a soccer game, the headlines in the New York Times were: “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” and “In Rubble of Gaza Seaside Cafe, Hunt for Victims Who Had Come for Soccer.” No word of whose missile it might have been; the missile seemed to have acted spontaneously of its own volition, and the hunt through the rubble seemed to be happening without anything even precipitating it. Just as reports on killings by police will claim that “A man died yesterday in an officer-involved shooting,” when the Israeli army kills Palestinians (as it often does), we read that “protesters have died.” The passive voice is the favorite rhetorical tool of propagandists worldwide, who “regret the mistakes that were made” without having to admit who made them. 

Also on the subject, don’t miss this CBS News interview with Noura Erakat

And speaking of the passive voice, Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle wrote about The Historian Behind Slavery Apologists Like Kanye West in The New York Times

According to a new Southern Poverty Law Center report on how slavery is taught in public schools, current pedagogy continues to focus on slavery from the perspective of whites, not the enslaved, while failing to connect the institution to the white supremacist beliefs that supported it. Textbooks often ignore slaveholders’ desire to make money and too easily slip into grammatical constructions — Africans “were brought” to America — that absolve enslavers of their actions.

While Ta-Nehisi Coates responded with I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye: Kanye West wants freedom—white freedom. for The Atlantic

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of. West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.

It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community. And maybe this, too, is naive, but I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too. I wonder if his life would have been different, would have been longer. And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of “I,” but a black freedom that called him back—back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home.

And one of our favorite historians, Jelani Cobb wrote a much more inspiring profile in  William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump for The New Yorker

Barber speaks in a resonant baritone, with precise phrasing, but he is a true thespian of the pulpit: his eyes widen in mock surprise or squint in faux confusion at an act of outrage or injustice. Sometimes, after making a point, he whirls around, looking over his shoulder as if to see whether anyone has overheard him. From the balcony, he boomed, “We don’t need a commemoration, we need a reconsecration.” He had blown past the five-minute mark, but the crowd was with him. He warned, “The Bible says woe unto those who love the tombs of the prophets.” The duty of the living, he said, is not simply to recall the martyrs of the movement but to continue their work. “We’ve got to hold up the banner until every person has health care, we’ve got to hold it up until every child is lifted in love, we’ve got to hold it up until every job is a living-wage job, until every person in poverty has guaranteed subsistence.” He finished to loud and sustained applause. Shortly afterward, at a minute past six, the time that King was shot, an enormous bell in the motel courtyard rang thirty-nine times—once for each year of King’s life—and the crowd on Mulberry Street began to disperse.

Rev. Dr. William Barber

Eboni Marshall Turman wrote, in memoriam, ‘If God Is White, Kill God’: Why Dr. James Cone Was Once the Most Hated Theologian in America for The Root.

Nevertheless, his fiery rhetoric and scathing critique of church, academy and society was a wake-up call to the entire Christian community. While some continue to disingenuously characterize his critique as angry, hostile and excessively harsh, what must never be forgotten is the depth of his love for black people.

Cone’s profound love and abiding joy for black life surfaced every time he stood in front of a classroom or put pen to paper or heard the spirituals and the blues. His love surfaced in his passion for black art and black dance, and his celebration of black excellence lived out loud in the face of white supremacy and its goons.

The most hated theologian in America built an entire disciplinary field. He authored more than 12 books and over 150 articles. He trained, chided and developed more generations of black theologians and black pastors than any other systematic theologian in the contemporary world. He taught us that God is black and that black is beautiful, baby. He did all of this because he loved us so.

And Churches make a drastic pledge in the name of social justice: To stop calling the police reports Julie Zauzmer for The Washington Post

And in far, far fluffier and more superficial church news (really, pretty much as far in the direction of fluff and superficial as we can get) the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute once again teamed up with Vogue magazine to host a giant party. But this year, the Vatican was on board and the outfits were, well, have a look for yourself here.

Rihanna at the 2018 Met Gala

For some background, Jason Horowitz explains How the Met Got the Vatican’s Vestments for The New York Times

Still, in a church where Pope Francis’s dressing down has made dressing up out of style, questions remain about how a lush exhibit and its related gala, organized by Ms. Wintour, squares with the pope’s desire for a less ostentatious, poorer church.

“Francis with his simple clothes expresses another concept. It’s not combative with the others,” said Cardinal Ravasi, who said he considered fashion a critical cultural language and the lent vestments expressions of the church’s power, beauty and splendor through the centuries.

Lilah Ramzi wrote about The Divine Inspiration Behind the Met Gala’s Floral Centerpiece for the gala’s host publication Vogue

“The tiara is the most striking component of the Pope’s ensemble,” Avila explained. “I wanted to depict a religious garment, given the theme of the exhibition.” The result of the laborious undertaking was resplendent, made up of 80,000 roses, color-matched to evoke the papal headpiece’s luminous gilt metal work with blooms in gold and silvery-white. Avila rendered the triple-tier tiara’s emeralds, diamonds, pearls, semi-precious stones with convex circles of jewel-toned plexiglass, “to capture the radiance of real jewels,” he explained.

And according to Kristi Upson-Saia at HyperAllergic, Early Christians Would Have Found the Met Gala Gaudy.

Were early Christians tapped to curate the fashion for the Met exhibition, they would showcase painfully coarse tunics that inspired reflection on and penitence for the sinful state of humanity; they would cover every inch of their model’s body to inhibit viewers’ sexual arousal; and they would highlight menswear. Were they asked to style celebrities for the Gala, they would likely advise them to skip the red carpet, trading the fame to be gleaned from appearances alone for merit earned through mundane acts of charity. Such piety would surely amount to sacrilege in the eyes of fashion critics and paparazzi.

But probably our favorite piece of writing about the Met Gala so far was Patricia Lockwood (and Her Mom) Talk Jesus, Fashion, and Who Wore It Best at the Met Gala over at The Cut

ME: Madonna?

MOM (in a snake voice): Madonna.

Meanwhile, Andrew Bui reports that Pope Francis Calls Pappy Van Winkle a ‘Very Good Bourbon‘ over at Tasting Table

And in other fashion, news, Ramadan Mubarak: “Black Panther” Has Inspired a New Trend in Ramadan Attire in Indonesia reports Steve Mollman for Quartz

Predictably, entrepreneurs have been selling versions of the shirt to Indonesians eager for their own. Vendor stalls in Tanah Abang, a sprawling market in Jakarta known for clothes and textiles, report high demand, and say they continually sell out of the shirts, especially since Ramadan began fueling demand. Even before Ramadan, which began last week, the shirts had been selling strong in Indonesia, appearing around the time of the film’s debut in February.

Lastly, how about a few notes on religion and technology?

According to Yomi Kazeem and Abdi Latif Dahir at QZ African cities are battling escalating noise pollution—but religion stands in the way

The pollution problem in many African cities goes beyond just the air quality.

Over the years, governments across the continent have attempted to tackle the noise pollution problem in major cities. In addition to the daily bustle and commercial activities, much of the noise comes from the thousands of religious places of worship that dot these cities.

Also, apparently Treadmills Were Meant to Be Atonement Machines explains Diane Peters for JSTOR Daily

Inside of a century, the once-popular prison treadmill proved too cruel and pointless for its home nation, but that did not stop it from being imported to the U.S. The treadmill came to America in 1822, and was set up in four different prisons. It was briefly popular at the prison on East 26th Street in New York City. The first one installed there, which cost $3,050.99 to build, busied 16 prisoners at a time, who ground 40-60 bushels of corn a day. Within two years, the prison had built three more, two of them used by women. But, by 1827, the mills had fallen into only sporadic use and then were abandoned when the prison relocated. In Newgate, Charleston, and Philadelphia, treadmills were installed, used sparingly, and given up on in short order.

And finally, Japan: robot dogs get solemn Buddhist send-off at funerals reports Justin McCurry for the Guardian

Bungen Oi, one of the temple’s priests, said he did not see anything wrong with giving four-legged friends, albeit of the robotic variety, a proper send-off . “All things have a bit of soul,” he said.

And that’s all for this month. See you again soon!

The post In the News: Heavenly Bodies, Robot Funerals, and Kanye appeared first on The Revealer.

Mandatory Separation details a number of interconnected transformations—of religious traditions, of political identity, of educational practices—that collectively shaped the history of modern Palestine and later, the state of Israel. It began from an observation that many “enlightened” figures in 19th and early 20th century Jewish and Arab Muslim circles blamed customary forms of religious education for a whole host of communal woes. Whether they spoke of the incomplete integration of European Jews into their national communities or the political weakness that enabled the colonization of Arab lands, modernizers were quite certain that the problem had much to do with the narrowness of traditional religious schooling, the supposed neglect of “practical” subjects, and the pedagogical backwardness associated with the heder and kuttab (Jewish and Islamic communal schools). This excerpt, taken from Chapter Four of Mandatory Separation, uses literature as a window into this modernist critique. It also gestures at one of the overarching arguments advanced in the book, namely, that the reform and rationalization of religious education was a pet project of the British colonial administration as well — though each party came to the table with distinct ideas as to what that entailed! For British administrators, religious education served as a source of potentially “universal” values that were thought to transcend the political tumult, whereas Jewish and Muslim leaders tended to view modernized religious education as the cornerstone of their respective nationalist projects. In sum, Mandatory Separation details this contestation over what religion is and how it is supposed to function socially and politically — questions that, I might add, are very much still alive today.

***

Musty Rooms and Medieval Masters

If education was to become the germ of social transformation, as modernists argued it should, the first line of attack involved discrediting existing modes of religious learning as backward and socially debilitating. Literature served as one of the primary vehicles for advancing such critiques, and depictions of the ẖeder, talmud torah and kuttāb [Jewish and Islamic communal schools] assumed a remarkably similar form in writings of Jewish and Arab intellectuals despite their otherwise distinct milieu: the schoolroom is dark, musty and dirty, lacking in the necessary furnishings; the teacher is foolish and abusive; rote memorization is promoted over real understanding, the texts studied are inappropriate for young children; the language is corrupted, either by the Yiddish of the melamed (teacher) or the vulgarities of colloquial Arabic.

The portrayal of the ẖeder as a “schoolroom of hell” was a recurring trope in Haskalah literature aimed at discrediting the old social order, so much so that any positive aspect of this education was forcibly repressed in furtherance of the maskilim’s ideological agenda.^[i] The paradigmatic condemnation of the ẖeder came in Shelomo Maimon’s autobiography, in which he stated that “the defective approach to teaching, deriving from the ignorance of the teacher, prevented the student from attaining systematic knowledge of either the Hebrew language or the Bible.”[ii] In other words, the deficiencies of the ẖeder were responsible for depriving the child of an intimate connection to his authentic Jewish heritage. In addition to its pedagogic shortcomings, maskilim often depicted the ẖeder as a place of physical violence directed against young children by the teacher and his assistant. In Avraham Bar Gottlober’s memoirs, for instance, the ozer (assistant) is so abusive that children perish from his beatings.[iii] Similarly, In Yehuda Lieb Levine’s autobiography, a stick-wielding melamed kills the writer’s brother at the tender age of six. Even more astoundingly, the author recounts that he himself is nonetheless sent to the same ẖeder with the same savage teacher, until his father relents and agrees to hire private tutors instead.[iv] Within this literature, the abuses of the teacher are mirrored by the filthy conditions of the school, which is almost without exception portrayed as dark, dirty, and lacking space—both physical and psychological—for children to develop freely and flourish. If the Enlightenment marked a high point in the concern for the individual as an autonomous, self-fashioning agent, the ẖeder represented the narrowness of the corporate Jewish community in which collective welfare was continually privileged over individual growth.

Yet, as Avraham Holtzman has shown, the ẖeder was not without possible redemption. Rather, for Zionist writers, it could serve as a vehicle for the preservation and further development of the Hebrew language and culture but only on the condition that it be drastically transformed. The clearest articulation of this latent potential appears in Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s short story “Safiaẖ” (Aftergrowth), in which the protagonist attends two different ẖederim. The first is characterized by the usual darkness, yiddishkeit, and physical filth, while the second offers a manifestation of what the ẖeder could be: still steeped in classical Jewish texts, but now conducted in Hebrew, often outdoors, and absorbed in tales of biblical heroism rather than with the ritual laws stemming from Leviticus. This impulse to reconstitute an institution—or an entire tradition—by returning to core texts, languages, and ideas was not unique to Zionists but emblematic of a larger modernist phenomenon that stressed the primacy of one’s roots. While interest in this project, which placed renewed emphasis on the Hebrew language and the Hebrew Bible (i.e., Old Testament), began with European maskilim, these interests grew more critical among Zionist thinkers and activists. The more-committed ideologues among the latter tended to view the diasporic existence of the Jews and its trademark cultural artifacts—chief among them the Talmud, Yiddish, and other “foreign” languages—as a blip in historical time and ultimately insignificant to a national past and future rooted in the Land of Israel.[v]

Likewise, critiques of the kuttāb among Arab-Muslim intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were part of a larger movement of renaissance, or nahḍa, which focused considerable attention on social reform through a return to Islam’s essential core.[vi] The kuttāb, associated with the backward masses and the sheikhs who taught them, who were themselves often ignorant of “true” Islam, served as a favorite target of scorn. This was not necessarily a modernist trope, as the Arabic language has no shortage of proverbs dedicated to the supposed foolishness of the kuttāb teacher – “stupider than a kuttāb teacher” being a frequent insult. Such claims were already being countered in the ninth century CE when the famed writer al-Jahiz defended the lowly kuttāb teachers, who “like any other class of men” included “the superior and the inferior” alike.[vii] Yet these critiques assumed a sharper quality in the writings of nahḍa intellectuals, many of whom began their education within katātīb, pursued advanced studies in European cities, and returned to their native lands with a passion for political and social reform.[viii] These writers were not just criticizing the kuttāb in the abstract but measuring its deficiencies in comparison to contemporary European models and linking its shortcomings to the political and cultural status of the nation as a whole. In this regard, the modernist critique of the kuttāb was not a mere continuation of medieval jesting.

One of the more famous—and entertaining—treatments of the subject can be found in al-Ayyam (The days), the autobiography of Taha Hussein. His account references the physical violence often found within katātīb, but the teacher (mockingly referred to as “Our Master”) and his assistant (“the ‘Arif” or “knowing one”) are primarily faulted for their dishonesty, corruption, and blatant opportunism. The teachers are seen as benefiting from a well-established bribery ring, wherein children offer dates, sugar, and money to secure their teachers’ favor or, at the very least, to mitigate their blows. The teacher treats young Taha with benign neglect—purchased through such bribes—and allows him the freedom to play and converse with other children while almost completely ignoring his studies. His abiding interest remains his own financial gain in the form of school fees, food, drinks, clothing, and other gifts given after a child’s memorization of the Qur’an. This “capacity for falsehood” is what remains with the author even after the Qur’anic verses dim from his memory.[ix]

During the Mandate period, Taha Hussein’s autobiography would became required reading in one of Palestine’s most prominent nationalist schools, al-Najah in Nablus. The modernist critique of the “vile kuttāb” reached a fevered pitch within institutions like al-Najah, which positioned itself as its enlightened antithesis. Textbooks authored by the school’s headmaster, Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, reflected a heightened awareness of the link between traditional schooling, public ignorance, and political weakness. For instance, writing of the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, Darwaza singled out its educational failures as one of the government’s key offenses:

The [Ottoman] government was not interested in opening schools and educating the country’s children, because education opens people’s minds, makes them aware of their rights, and spurs them to demand them. Pupils would learn reading and writing in the vile katātīb… sitting on the earth, and the teachers who taught them did not know much of anything. And their salaries did not come from the government, but [they] would rather take bread from every child.

The situation of governments in Europe was much better than this state because they convened representatives of the people, created assemblies out of them, and consulted (tashāwara) them in everything they wanted to do. They took an interest in the country’s condition and improved schools and roads, while no citizen dared to accept a bribe. As a result of this the countries of Europe progressed, while the Ottoman countries became degenerate and weak.[x]

As we have seen, the Ottomans did open many public schools in Palestine in the decades prior to the First World War, making this characterization more significant in terms of what it tells us about contemporary Arab nationalist thinking than the Ottoman education record itself. In particular, it is worth noting the attention Darwaza draws to the lack of furnishings and other school equipment and the fact that the teacher was paid not by the state—as would befit a true modern country—but in the form of bread from each student.

A further element of the modernist critique sprang from the association of communal schools with popular forms of religiosity, particularly with mysticism. Anxiety over the influence of Hasidism in European Jewish communities was widespread among the rationalist proponents of the Haskalah, who charged the movement with fostering a culture of illogic and superstition.[xi] Eager to find a place for Jews within the emerging social and political order promised by legal emancipation, Hasidism represented a major obstacle that threatened the attainment of a pluralistic accord founded on reason. Conversely, it was the medieval figure Maimonides and his famed adoption of Aristotelian logic that maskilim looked to as a source of inspiration for the modern Jewish renaissance.[xii] Within the spectrum of communal figures that undermined the Enlightenment sensibility, the ẖeder teacher was among the worst offenders. A recurring trope in this literature charged him with provoking superstition and anxiety within children who, so afraid of ghosts, would recoil from their own shadows. Furthermore, this educational culture of irrationalism was thought to represent the source of the (male) Jew’s supposed physical and spiritual degeneration. It is within its walls and at the hands of its cruel teachers that the Jew emerges as weak, uncultured, and disconnected from nature.[xiii]

In a similar fashion, Sufism functioned within the metanarrative of Islamic modernism as a barrier that separated Arab Muslims from “authentic” Islam. Sufism and popular customs like visits to the tombs of local saints were derided as sources of unlawful innovation (bid‘a) that had corrupted Islam’s rationalistic foundations. The fact that Sufi practices were closely tied to local and popular forms of piety similarly undermined the idea that true Islam existed in a singular form that was textually determined. Reformers held that mysticism must be forcibly rooted out from Muslim communities—beginning, of course, with schoolteachers—to combat the interconnected slides toward popular ignorance and political subjugation. In his autobiography, for instance, Taha Hussein explicitly identified Sufism as the premier source of social backwardness, noting that “the country people, including their old men, youths, lads and women, have a particular mentality in which is simplicity, mysticism and ignorance. And those who have had the greatest share in producing this mentality are the Sufis.”[xiv]

Despite these failings, the old and corrupt could become the basis of the new and noble if tradition could be stripped down to its elemental core. Though initiated earlier by Jewish and Muslim reformers themselves, this was a process in which the Government of Palestine also became an active participant. But how could such a transformation be enacted? As I argue, the government’s reform efforts operated on two planes that may at first seem contradictory. On the one hand, education administrators supported the introduction of “practical” education within communal schools as a means of inculcating the economic values of industriousness and self-sufficiency. On the other, they insisted that any curricular or pedagogic reforms be in the best interest of preserving tradition itself. Thus, rather than upend customary forms of Jewish and Islamic schooling, officials in the Department of Education viewed themselves as chipping away at the ossified crust of custom to allow the light of religious authenticity to shine through.

***

[i] For a review of literary and autobiographical depictions of the ẖeder, see Holtzman, “Ben hoka‘ah le-hitrafkut.”

[ii] Quoted in Ibid., 78-79.

[iii] Gottlober, Zichronot mi yamei ne‘uri. Originally published as a serial in the Hebrew Journal Boker Ore between 1879 and 1886.

[iv] Levine, “Zichron ba-sefer—rishumim mi-toldotai ve-korotai”; Holtzman, “Ben hoka<ayn>ah le-hitrafkut,” 81-82.

[v] Zerubavel, Recovered Roots. The notion that Jewish history in the diaspora was not “real” history because it was characterized by passivity rather than sovereignty also found expression in the Hebrew literature, most famously in Haim Hazaz’s short story “The Sermon.” The story centers around Yudka, a Russian immigrant and reticent man who makes an unexpected announcement before a Haganah committee that he “objects to Jewish history.” As he explains, “You see, we never made our own history, the Gentiles always made it for us. Just as they turned out the lights for us and lit the stove for us and milked the cow for us on the Sabbath, so they made history for us the way they wanted and we took it whether we liked it or not. But it wasn’t ours, it wasn’t ours at all!” Hazaz, “The Sermon,” 236.

[vi] In our contemporary context, the impulse to return to the core or fundamental principles of Islam is most likely to be associated with conservative Salafi movements, yet during the period of nahḍa the same conceptual move helped propel liberal strains of Islamic thought. The relationship between these two very different kinds of fundamentalists has yet to be explored in detail. For a detailed examination of Islamic modernism’s development and influence in Greater Syria, see Commins, Islamic Reform.

[vii] Tibawi, Islamic Education, 36.

[viii] Musawi, Islam on the Street.

[ix] Hussein, The Days, 38. Originally published in Arabic in 1929.

[x] Darwaza, Durus al-tārikh al-‘arabi min aqdam al-azmina ila al-ān, 292.

[xi] The classical account of this fraught relationship appears in Raphael Mahler’s Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, which, despite its plainly ideological bent, reviews many important sources related to the conflict between maskilim and Hasidism. For a more detailed account of these battles, many of which appeared at the communal level, see Wodznski, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland.

[xii] Pelli, The Age of Haskalah, 133n5. As Yaakob Dweck has shown, the embrace of Maimonides as a bulwark against mysticism was already apparent in seventeenth-century Venice. See Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah.

[xiii] Holtzman, “Ben hoka‘ah le-hitrafkut,” 79.

[xiv] Hussein, The Days, 57.

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Suzanne Schneider received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the Deputy Director and Core Faculty of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. An interdisciplinary scholar working in the fields of history, religious studies, and political theory, Suzanne’s research interests relate to Jewish and Islamic modernism, religious movements in the modern Middle East, the history of modern Palestine/Israel, secularism, and political identity in post-colonial contexts. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford University Press), and her writing has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, The Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Revealer: A Review of Religion and Media. She is currently working on a book about religion and violence in the modern age. 

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The Temptation of St. Anthony by Martin Schöngauer c. 1480-90. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In the midst of one shooting after another of unarmed black men by police officers, one comment keeps sticking in my mind: officer Darren Wilson’s expressed fear of Michael Brown before he shot him six times and killed him. Wilson claimed of Brown, “he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon.”

What does it mean to look “like a demon”? How would Wilson know what a demon looks like? Was he implicitly claiming he’s actually seen a demon? Or was Wilson, most likely, projecting an image of a demon from popular media onto the face of a real person?[1] A monstrous, unreal other overlaid on the face of another, real person? And has media so influenced us that we don’t know the real from the fake and we’re ready to pull the trigger regardless?

Demons are religio-cultural creations, emerging at various points in time and confronting us as our other. They are creatures that look just enough like us to elicit our recognition, but they are disfigured by our fears: white walkers in Game of Thrones; the gigantic, winged Balrog of Morgoth rising from the dark abyss to take down Gandalf in Lord of the Rings; or a creepy doll in Annabelle: Creation. In a nice reversal, and reminding us how quotidian they may be, we see them walking the earth as Matthew McConaughey in The Dark Tower.

These ancient, mythical creatures from the dark depths have tantalized audiences since ancient Assyrians brought Lamashtu to life, Indo-Aryans told stories of Vritra, and Jews wrote of the dreadful Beelzebub. They’ve been devastating and demolishing for millennia.

We love our mediated demons, in word and image, but keeping them on the other side of the screen has proven to be a challenge. The world on screen crashes into the world off screen and we struggle to sort through the differences.

Cognitive and corporeal confusions

Cognitive scientists are increasingly showing how our bodies and minds have evolved in ways that make it difficult to readily differentiate between reality and representation. Screened realities and actual realities swirl in our memories, producing our pasts, our stories, and ultimately, ourselves. Summarizing much of this research, cognitive psychologist Jeffrey Zacks notes “that if you watch a film–even one concerning historical events about which you are informed–your beliefs may be reshaped by ‘facts’ that are not factual.”

Study after study has shown how if we watch historical inaccuracies in films, we are likely to remember them as true, even if we’ve already read about the “truth” of the matter in other places. Films rewrite our memories. They can help us remember history, and thus are useful in pedagogy, yet if the accounts are not “historically accurate” (and I use that term loosely), we will just as likely believe the made-up aspects as we will facts.

Which means: believe what we want, but there is no “real world” separate from the “filmed world.” Instead, as I argue in my recent book, Religion and Film, cinema re-creates the world. There is no pretending that going to the movies is merely an “escape” that has no bearing on the rest of our lives. Instead, the movies, and mass media in general, influence our views of race, religion, gender, sexuality, as well as our understanding of historical fact.

The real and false demons of The Exorcist

We can see similar cognitive confusions in the screened demons of The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin and based on the best-selling novel by William Peter Blatty. The release of the film, the day after Christmas in 1973, was met by what came to be called “The Exorcist Phenomenon.” People lined up for hours to watch the film, even in freezing January temperatures, and many were so thrilled to be scared they went for second and third viewings.

Meanwhile, inside the theaters a staggering number of people vomited or fainted during the screenings. The deep, raspy voice of the devil coming out of little Regan’s mouth was too much for many, while others lost their senses when her head did a 360. One Los Angeles theater owner estimated that during each screening, a half-dozen people were fainting, vomiting, or quickly running for the exits in his theater.

Screened realities and “real life” were confused, and there were reports across the United States about local priests being called by parishioners who had just seen the film and feared that they too might be possessed by a demon and needed a good dose of psychological and/or theological counselling.

While the general public flocked to the film, critics didn’t have such a warm reception. In her book, Catholics in the Movies, Colleen McDannell takes care to note how Pauline Kael at the New Yorker and Vincent Canby at the New York Times panned the film. The main problem for them was that the demonic possession wasn’t an allegory of something else, in ways that George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead had been seen as a veiled comment on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Instead, notes McDannell, “For Kael, Canby, and other reviewers, the film tricked people into thinking that the devil and the world of demonic possession were actually real.”

It was the hyperreality of The Exorcist that allowed it to cross over from the screen and possess the bodies of its audience, making them faint, flee, scream with fright, and send high-brow reviewers into full condemnation mode.

Now, 45 years later, William Friedkin has just released the documentary, The Devil and Father Amorth, the “true story” of the official exorcist of the Diocese of Rome. The trailer introduces us to Father Amorth, saying “this is not fiction. It’s different from all the movies.”

Friedkin shifts from “fake” exorcism–Linda Blair doing 360-head spins–to the “real” exorcism of a woman. As the press release notes, it “is a startling and surprising story of the religion, the ritual and the real-world victims involved in possession and exorcism.”

And yet, the trailer itself borrows from standard horror film audio-visual tricks with eerie sounds, slowly opening doors, and quick takes of writhing bodies. Fiction films have taught us how to see horror, and now we can’t look any other way, even when we’re trying to show the reality of it.

How do we know the difference? Maybe truth and fiction, the world on-screen and the world off-screen, are not so separable, at least within the deep recesses of our bodies.

Re-framing the screen

The reality is, getting rid of fiction–and images of fictional creatures such as demons–is not an option. Indeed, fiction is critical to human’s evolutionary history.

Yet, in many circumstances, it is essential that we figure out “what really happened,” and so lawyers, juries, and historians work to sift through evidence that points toward something of the previous reality. As any good judge and journalist will admit, the past is always a reconstruction, just as justice demands a truthful reconstruction.

One response is to use education to help separate the facts of history from the fictions. Those studies noted above that tell of the fact-fiction blurring in the classroom also suggest that, given proper warnings, students can remember the correct information, at least much of the time.

And while our cognitive systems don’t treat presentation and re-presentation differently, we can relearn our visual patterns, changing our neural pathways. I’ve argued elsewhere that changing the images on screen can influence the ways we see people off screen, including our racial and racist preconceptions of others.

Writing in The Corporeal Image, documentary filmmaker David MacDougall makes a case for the power of films, saying that they “allow us to go beyond culturally prescribed limits and glimpse the possibility of being more than we are. They stretch the boundaries of our consciousness and create affinities with bodies other than our own.” MacDougall is talking here about a range of films, not only documentaries.

And so, we need better movies, even if they are about demons. Even if they are fiction. Even if they are not real. Because they change the ways we see in the so-called “real world.”

Fighting our demons means, among other things, fighting against racist, sexist, ageist, Islamophobic, and homophobic stereotypes, among others. These are rampant across contemporary audio-visual media. We’ll always confuse what’s on screen with what’s off-screen. But by pointing toward better representations, and producing better representations, on-screen, we begin to change the ways we see off-screen, offering “affinities with bodies other than our own” and perhaps making the face of the other less demon-like.

***

[1] There is, of course, a crucial question of how racism operates here, and how these images become racialized. I’ve written about race and images elsewhere recently at The Conversation. See also Maryam Monalisa Gharavi’s “Transcript of a Face.”

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S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate, PhD, is a writer, public speaker, editor, and part time college professor whose books include A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects, Blasphemy: Art that Offends, and Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World. His essays have been appeared at Salon, Newsweek, The Christian Century, The Islamic Monthly, Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches, and elsewhere. He is a board member of the Interfaith Coalition of Greater Utica, NY, and President of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life/ CrossCurrents. He lives in Central New York with his family, and holds a visiting appointment at Hamilton College, NY. 

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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“Discussion soon began again of a Vinland voyage, since the trip seemed to bring men both wealth and renown.” — The Saga of the Greenlanders (c.1200)

“But even now is Madoc on the seas; /He leads our brethren here; and should he find/That Aztlan hath been false… oh! hope not then, /By force or fraud, to baffle or elude…” — Robert Southey, Madoc in Aztlan (1805)

“And behold this last, whose branch hath withered away, I did plant in a good spot of ground; yea, even that which was choice unto me above all other parts of the land of my vineyard.” — Jacob, 5:31 The Book of Mormon (1830)

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” –Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Seth Eastman at Dighton Rock (Horatio B. King, July 7, 1853)

Dighton Rock State Park, a little less than fifty miles from Boston, contains Massachusetts’ second most famous boulder.

Reverend John Danforth first came across it in 1680 on one of his nightly perambulations. The roughly five foot tall, forty ton, hexagonal shaped stone was illustrated with overlapping, etched pictograms, inscribed with varying degrees of depth. Of a seemingly occult nature, the hieroglyphics were untranslatable to Danforth and have borne variable interpretation ever since.

That old Puritan divine, Cotton Mather, having an interest in ancient things pulled from the ground (he once hypothesized that a mammoth tusk was evidence of antediluvian Nephilim), also commented on the rock. He wrote that among “the other Curiosities of New-England… is that of a mighty Rock” upon which there are “very deeply Engraved…. strange Characters: which would suggest as odd Thoughts about them that were here before us, as there are odd Shapes in that Elaborate Monument.” Mather, who did not let never having seen the Dighton Rock stop him from theorizing about it, was simply one of many to confront this enigma.

A mad dribble of curving lines intersecting with rectilinear X’s, the far right depicts two squiggly figures capped with lackadaisical smiley faces (and are those other abstract mounds next to them also people?). Towards the left there is a broad shouldered figure, lacking differentiated limbs, but with a hard, angular arrow for a body. Some of the lines are organized such that they might suggest Latin letters: there’s an “O,” an “R,” an “F,” possibly an “N.” One can almost make out the word “Orfins,” or depending on if that last letter is seen as circular, perhaps “Orfio” (A reference to the Orpheus myth, or the Middle English narrative of Sir Orfeo? Mather never conjectured that far). Whatever this stone signified, ever since Danforth many have been in agreement – whoever created it was not native.

Inscription on Dighton Rock as Drawn by John Danforth in 1680

For three centuries the rock has been a Rorschach test, with amateur scholars, observers, and tourists seeing a multitude of progenitors. Some read Babylonian cuneiform, and others the alephbet of Phoenicians, Nordic runes, or the Ogham of the Irish. In 1783, Yale president and Congregationalist minister Ezra Stiles matter-of-factly noted in an itinerary that he had “Visited Dighton Rock charged with Inscriptions & Character which… is Phoenician or Carthaginian,” and in his “Election Sermon” delivered a few days before, he considered the civilizations which visited the Americas before Columbus (his argument in the service of a pernicious white supremacy).

In the early nineteenth-century, Danish archeologist Carl Christian Rafn claimed that the engravings were Norse.[1] In 1912, Brown University Psychology professor, Edmund B. Delabarre, “translated” the faint, indecipherable letters as a message from the lost sixteenth-century Portuguese navigator Miguel Corte-Real, who conveniently informed posterity that he “became a chief of the Indians.”[2]

Creative (and agenda-serving) readings aside, historian Duncan Hunter has reiterated what should be obvious, that Delabarre’s theory was “as wrong as every other theory has been, save one: the markings, as they were initially observed in 1680, were made… by Indigenous people.” Ockham’s razor indicates either Algonquin or Lenape origins, for as Hunter says that would be “the least cumbersome and most plausible explanation.” Yet the Dighton Rock remains an artifact in the collective reliquary of pseudohistory, an exhibit speaking to lost lands and hidden histories, of when (with apologies to Blake) those feet in ancient time did walk upon New-England’s mountains green. Yet, parsimony has never been as attractive as fantasy; as recently as 2002 British naval officer and noted crank Gavin Menzies claimed that a sailor in Zheng He’s Chinese Imperial Navy had actually made the carvings in the fifteenth-century.

These amateur and pseudo-historians have seen the Dighton Rock, and relics like it, as evidence of European contact before colonization. They embrace a panoply of dubious theories, such as that the etymology of “Guatemala” came from Buddhist missionaries honoring Siddhartha of Gautama or that “penguin” is a word with Welsh origins; that conquistadors encountered blonde Indians in the Appalachians or that Roman statuary lay at the bottom of Rio’s harbor; that Rosslyn Chapel upon the Scottish lowlands has a medieval depiction of corn, or that Viking rune stones dot the Midwestern prairies.

The significance of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories is that they freely play with an idea of America that can be told and retold. Some of those theories have empirical merit, the vast majority do not, but a figurative appreciation of these stories are what I call the “antecolumbian imaginary,” a discourse written in a particular spatio-temporal poetics whereby individuals and communities can rediscover America or, more accurately, reinvent it. But this reinvention is never ideologically neutral, and whether the antecolumbian imaginary evidences utopian strivings or something more noxious is a complicated issue (arguably the very same issue that defines the American project itself). Focusing on the material reality or non-reality of pre-Columbian contact theories ignores the manner in which fictionality is threaded throughout our normative, sanctioned models of early modern colonialism.

In this way, the antecolumbian imaginary is related to the sociologist Benedict Andersen’s perennially useful concept of nation-states being constituted as “imagined communities.” In his 1983 monograph on the subject, Andersen argued that the nation-state developed as a means to bind groups of people over a large area, united in the fantasy of commonality based on nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, and so on. Setting out to answer how subjects living in a vast country could regard themselves as members of the same community, Andersen’s critical term gives us a way to understand how ideas of commonality and connection were created to provide social cohesion in increasingly centralized states. He argues further that such “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined.”

Anderson claims that such a process is at the core of the formation of any nation state, but “America” has some unique considerations regarding that operation, always as much a mythic designation for a place as it was an actual location. “America” was invented long before it could ever have been discovered, and the truer atlas that circumscribes it is a work of romance rather than of geography.

America was the first part of the globe not to fit into the tripartite structure of antiquity’s geographic divisions, reflected in the seventh century writer Isidore of Seville who could confidently explain that the Earth is “divided into three parts, one of which is called Asia, the second Europe, the third Africa.” Many exegetes claimed that the geographic divisions corresponded to the three sons of Noah and were thus part of biblical history, but even a scholar like Isidore could conjecture about mysterious unknown worlds, writing that “there exists a fourth part, beyond the ocean, which is unknown to us.” In that sense, belief in the continents existed before they were ever colonized, and “America” has more in common with Eden, Atlantis, Thule, Brasil, or Cockaigne, than it does with Britain or France. More in common with Thomas More’s “Utopia” for that matter, another imagined community that was conceived of less than a decade after Waldsmueller and Ringmann christened the new continents, and which was importantly located in the western hemisphere.

In his 1958 book The Invention of America, Mexican historiographer Edmundo O’Gorman asked “When and how does America appear in historical consciousness?” According to O’Gorman, “America” is a mythic concept that was invented in order to be overlaid upon actual continents, marking them as radically other. He thus ingeniously explains how America was, in fact, an idea that had to be created, not a land that was simply waiting to be discovered.

For O’Gorman, Columbus did not so much discover America as it was, rather had to be invented by explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci (whose name was given to the continents) and cartographers like Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller (who gave the continents that name).

Dubious relics like the Dighton Rock thus remind us of a salient reality; that America is a mythic trope which stretches back to Plato’s Atlantis out beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and which radiates forward to whatever new myths we will need to construct to save ourselves. America has never been anything so much as a gathering of fictions masquerading as facts, and a collection of facts better understood as fictions. Which is to say that there is a mythic “America” which must be separated from that actual land mass bordered by the Atlantic and the Pacific and stretching from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. What the antecolumbian imaginary offers is a way of revising that received script of what constitutes “America;” a method of amending that epic narrative, whether to explicate or erase the original sins of colonialism, to make the story more encompassing, to probe the contours of America itself, or for some other reason.

What makes artifacts such as these and the attendant pseudo-historical hypotheses that surround them so problematic, is that interspersed with these romantic dreams, illusions, inventions, and legends related to the peopling of these continents is the violence done to native peoples; both as a function of colonialism itself and the stories we tell about colonialism. The Dighton Rock’s problematic status is not so different from that of more historically legitimate artifacts. After all, “objectivity” can be a chimera as concerns artifacts both respectable and apocryphal. Though the Dighton Rock is not as universally known as that other pebble just a few yards from the Atlantic in Plymouth, it is no less “real.” For, though there is scant reliable evidence that any pilgrim’s slipper ever graced that particular stone upon disembarking from the Mayflower, it remains the cornerstone on which we pretend that the New England colonial project was inaugurated.

Ever inhabitants of epistemological uncertainty, fiction taken as fact can have catastrophic effects on actual people. As such, the antecolumbian imaginary, even in dreaming of alternate American histories, can, in its desires, reinscribe violence as completely as history did in actuality.

Take the popular tale of the twelfth-century Welsh prince Madog, ab Owain Gwynedd, or Madoc. Elizabeth’s court astrologer John Dee writing in 1576’s The Limits of British Empire (the first treatise to use that particular designation) claimed that Madoc “Sought, by sea (westerlie from Irland), for some forein, and – Region to plant hymselfe in with soveranity: with Region when he had found, he returned to Wales againe.” Dee recounts that Madoc, and thus his descendants, were the claimants to “Farguara; but of late Florida,” as well as the “Apalchen” mountains and other “notable portions of the ancient Atlantis, no longer – nowe named America.”

Madoc became a mainstay of the English antecolumbian imaginary in writers like George Peckham, Humphrey Gilbert, and Richard Hakluyt. The good Rev. Stiles wrote that “There is a Tribe that speak Welch to this day & have a Writing rolled up in Skins,” and Cotton’s son Rev. Samuel Mather claiming that Madoc “left Monuments there both of the British Language and British Usages,” constructing a fantasy of European colonials unsullied by colonialism. Until 2008 a historical marker in Mobile Bay, Alabama read “In memory of Prince Madoc a Welsh explorer who landed… in 1170 and left behind with the Indians the Welsh language,” and contra all historical, genetic, and linguistic evidence, one can find scores of internet sites claiming that tribes such as the Mandan were actually Celtic. These unsubstantiated claims of Welsh-speaking Indians drape indigenous lives in the mantle of whiteness. This is the malicious core of the antecolumbian imaginary.

Predictably, there has also been a tradition of conflating the Cherokee, Pueblo, Navajo or Apache with Reuben, Simeon, Zebulon and Naphtali. Evidence of the ten lost tribes of the Kingdom of Israel dispersed by Assyrian invasion in the generation before the Babylonian captivity have proliferated since Europeans first encountered Native Americans. Historian Tudor Parafit writes that, “the identification of the indigenous Americans as members of the Ten Lost Tribes played a significant part and was to remain part of a general discourse in North America until the time of Jefferson.”

The unlikely pair of Bartolomeo das Casas and Torquemada both figured the Native Americans as being the lost Israelites, and in Puritan New England missionary John Elliot famed for his villages of “praying Indians” conjectured that those same “Indians” were the descendants of the ancient Hebrews. Leaders such as Rhode Island founder Roger Williams parsed supposed Hebrew words in the Algonquin tongue, and the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania William Penn matter-of-factly wrote that as concerns their origins “I am ready to believe them of the Jewish race; I mean of the stock of the ten tribes.”

The hypothesis was so popular throughout the history of English colonization in the Americas that it was instrumental in the policy of Jewish readmission to England during Interregnum. Drawing from apocryphal and misinterpreted proto-anthropological data concerning Native South Americans who kept dietary laws similar to kashrut, who commanded menstruating women to purify themselves in a mikveh-like ritual baths, and whose language was filled with apparent Hebrew cognates, Dutch rabbi Israel ben Manasseh held that the Jews had been dispersed throughout the entire world, and that millennium would only arrive once they were readmitted to that final realm of England.

As with all instances of the antecolumbian imaginary there is the violence of erasure – native peoples configured into something that they are not as if an invented identity is preferable to reality. But the Jewish-Indian theory also demonstrates the mercurial nature of the antecolumbian imaginary, for it audaciously situates the geographical scandal of the fourth part of the world unmentioned in the bible directly into sacred history, by most completely transcribing “America” into that atlas of paradise.

Paradise isn’t a real place though, and a history of humanity could be written entirely of the bloody results of those who took metaphor for reality. America may have been Eden to the explorer, but it was the poetry of those descriptions which allowed Europeans to deliver such violence onto the people who already lived in these lands, writing them off as superfluous or merely a natural aspect of the (not actually) empty land, free to be cleared as if they were trees or stones in a farm field. Hunter argues that among other artifacts, “Dighton Rock has been a mirror that reflects the prejudices and ignorance of everyone who has preferred not to see what is actually here,” and he quite fairly claims that pre-Columbian transoceanic contact enthusiasts promote a “multifaceted colonizing culture… [that has] employed the rock in a never-ending act of cultural ventriloquism.” Hunter contends that pseudo-history does violence to indigenous culture through a process of erasure, a process which is the very engine of colonialism.

Hunter is correct that this rhetoric is often explicitly racist, even in the seemingly more innocuous condescension that claims the Aztecs received their knowledge of pyramids from Egyptians, or that Zuni culture’s unique qualities were imported from Japan. Of course the vast majority of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories are bunk. People wish for varied reasons that there were Phoenicians in Massachusetts, Vikings in Wisconsin, Welshman in Alabama, or Hebrews in New Mexico chiseling the Decalogue into stone. Much of this enthusiasm is attributable to ideologies of white supremacy, from Thomas Jefferson and contemporaries conjecturing that the monumental mounds of the Mississippian peoples were made by ancient Jews, to Stiles preaching that Native Americans were both physically and spiritually the descendants of the Canaanites (and could thus be dealt with accordingly).

So, perhaps you’re asking: Can there be anything useful in the antecolumbian imaginary? And should we even try to find it?

An argument could be made that a version of the myth might serve to imagine the counter-factual potential of alternate history where our national original sins didn’t have to be colonialism and genocide. In these models, the antecolumbian imaginary is used for dreaming about an American dream that never occurred, but that acknowledges something redemptive or even utopian in the myth of a New World. Yet the painful and undeniable truth is that colonialism and genocide are what marked the “discovery” of America, and so dreaming of a world where history didn’t occur in the bloody way that it did must by definition be fraught, its promise undeniably problematic.

Which is not to say that the tension between what is promising and problematic about the antecolumbian imaginary can’t be explored within examples of the mode. One denomination, in particular, has more fully done this than any other, even while we must acknowledge that particular group’s own troubled racial history. In Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon (which members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints claim was uncovered in upstate New York by the prophet Smith in the early nineteenth-century), the faithful read in King James-inflected early modern English about groups like the Jaredites, the Lamanites, and the Nephites, all descendants of the ancient Hebrews, who gathered in the Americas building the great Mesoamerican cities, warring amongst themselves, and being visited by Christ before the ascension.

Bigotry still surrounds discussion of Mormonism, with their belief in Indian Hebraism only serving to confirm suspicions for many people. Yet Smith should rightly be viewed as a genius who used canonical scripture and the actual land of America to produce something new, the first fully theological encapsulation of the antecolumbian imaginary. Religion scholar Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp explains how the authors of apocryphal gospels saw them “not simply as vessels of divine revelation but as occasions for devotional creativity.” The Book of Mormon was an opportunity to “improvise and engage with religious texts.”

To judge Christianity or Judaism by the standard of allegory while assuming Mormonism to simply be unsubstantiated literalism is a hypocrisy, and when divorced from any historical claims the Book of Mormon can be read as it should be – the first scripture to exemplify the antecolumbian imaginary. We need not read the Book of Mormon through the lens of logos, but should rather content ourselves to interpret it with the Urim and Thummim of mythos. Smith appropriated the sense of sacred spatiality which defined the Abrahamic faiths and interpolated it upon the American continent, so that when in I Nephi 2:20 it’s said that “Ye shall prosper and be led to a land of promise” we see the complete merging of sacred history with profane, of America reconceived as a chosen land.

Because the covenantal nationhood exemplified by the antecolumbian imaginary at its least exclusionary can remind us that the concept of a “chosen land” need not be circumscribed by constructions of ethnicity. Indeed the Hebraic concept of covenant (or the Mormon concept for that matter) is such that adherence to a creed, what sociologist Robert Bellah called “American civil religion,” is what defines one as an “American.” There are risks with such an approach of course, not least of which in giving due respect to those original inhabitants of this land and their descendants, for whom even the most charitable models of covenantal nationhood threaten erasure. As a political project, partisans of covenantal nationhood will ultimately need to contend with that reality. But while models of covenantal nationality can certainly be exclusionary, they’re still worth defending at our current moment, when a poisonous Blut und Boden ideology threatens to infect the body politic once again. That explicitly fascistic model of citizenship based on fictions of blood and soil has always threatened to spill real blood and steal actual soil. At its most dangerous, the antecolumbian imaginary has affirmed such models, seeing the physical land of America as promised to some specific (normally white) people.

But I wonder, with perhaps a bit of hope, if a kernel of redemption for the antecolumbian imaginary can be reconciled with covenantal nationhood? To do such requires us, separate from the actual historical work of reconstructing the past, to admit the fictionality of Welsh Indians and Phoenicians in New England, while allowing for all such legends to be “mythically true.” But this only works if we affirm that all of those legends are mythically true, while reveling in the paradox. In that way the mad scramble to claim this or that group as the continent’s discoverer is eliminated, while acknowledging that “America” as a mythic concept is one which every group can lay claim to be in an ongoing process of discovery. By making everyone the “discoverer” of America we remind ourselves that the land was never really discovered at all, while simultaneously elevating every person to the grandeur of pilgrim. It requires us to affirm several contradictory things at once, but the great power of fiction is that it allows us to do precisely that. In the process, what’s uncovered is a type of scripture all encompassing enough to posit all peoples as founding citizens of that utopian republic, which although it is imaginary, can have ramifications more emancipatory than the equally invented, but toxic myths of blood and soil.

Always an imagined land, with as much of Atlantis about it as anything else, the antecolumbian imaginary elevates America fully to the mythic, with legend separate from history, identifying meanings as readily as facts. In examining that crisscross of lines upon Dighton Rock, women and men have seen evidence of those who were here before, or rather half-remembered glimpses of what could have been, in another reality. A palimpsest, whose very surface (carved and recarved so as to “highlight detail,” as such artifacts often are) records those invented histories. At its most noble there is the possibility of redemption in such narratives, constructing a fictitious space that allows everyone citizenship in our utopian, imagined republic. More often, such artifacts serve to obscure or erase that which is actually there, an imagined republic imposed upon the actual lives of those who were here first. For the Dighton Rock, like all such relics, is an artifact more significant than it is authentic; an artifact from a country that never existed, but in which innumerable people have yearned to plant their standard.

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[1] And if wrong about that, he was ultimately proven correct about a Viking presence in Newfoundland.

[2] With appropriate irony, the psychologist who saw Latin inscriptions and Portuguese heraldry on an ancient New England stone was also an innovator in ink-blot therapy.

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Ed Simon is a senior editor of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a frequent contributor at several different sites. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion will be released by Zero Books in 2018. He can be followed at his website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Strange Characters; or, the Antecolumbian Imaginary appeared first on The Revealer.