- The Sacred Art of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature by Anne Margaret Castro
Anne Margaret Castro’s The Sacred Art of Reading theorizes reading “Afro-diasporic texts.” The book’s specific corpus includes works that have been written and circulated in the public sphere through print culture, yet which also pass through assemblages of the sacred in the complex meaning systems that inform the Black Atlantic. Castro’s theorization of the act of reading takes place along three intersecting axes: first, texts themselves (sermons, plays, poetry, novels, and ethno-graphic field notes); second, the layered circumstances of a given text’s production, focusing both on the author and on the participation of a community in the composition of the texts; and third, readership, deliberating on how the given text circulates in a more official cultural or academic industry, in the form of print or audible texts available to audiences through archives, booksellers, and libraries. In Castro’s research, each text is itself an assemblage of texts, whose cumulative interaction pays the gift of the sacred forward to a reader who is open and conditioned to accepting it. For example, Castro’s compelling first chapter engages an assemblage of texts around Zora Neale Hurston’s analytical attention to the sermon as genre and as a congregation of performative utterances. Castro’s analysis goes beyond pointing out intertextualities, theorizing how a certain repertoire of “diasporic literature” imposes upon its readership a spiritual practice of “embodied mediumship” that stands to both “overwhelm” and “imbue” them “with spiritual forces amidst a white-dominant setting” (93).
Castro’s cogent mastery, reassemblage, and distillation of the diverse academic production of the past three decades around “Afro-diasporic” spiritual [End Page 129] practices compose a book that clearly works through the fraught relationship between and among theology, religious studies, ethnomusicology, anthropological theory, sound studies, literary studies, and critical theory. Castro’s study then belongs alongside some of the most caring scholarship of the past thirty years, scholarship that bridges the traps of academic discipline. Castro’s Sacred Art of Reading is reminiscent of such pivotal works as Eileen Julien’s African Novels and the Question of Orality (1992), Leslie G. Desmangles’s The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (1994), and the late Margaret Mitchell Armand’s Healing in the Homeland: Haïtian Vodou Tradition, as well as the decades-long repertoire of scholarship from Colin Dayan, Miguel A. De La Torre, and Terry Rey and the more recent emerging scholarship of Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús and Kyrah Malika Daniels. Against the exigency of secular objectivity in academe, Castro refuses to objectify the study of the sacred. She rejects reading practices that continue to steer academe toward disappointing paths trapped in their own racializing and racist configurations. Instead, her book masterfully demonstrates not only that the spiritual must always be accountable to the scientific and vice versa, but also that antiracist futures can only take place through “sacred” reading practices. Her work thinks through what it means to cultivate the agility to navigate the radically distinct and nonetheless historically imbricated epistemologies that emerge from “a white-dominant setting” (93), on the one hand, and a response to such violence as deliberated on from the perspective of Africana intellectualisms, whose undergirding ethos is a “message of grace” cultivated “through self-love and spiritual community” (45), on the other.
The first and last chapters respond to each other, with the first addressing the performative potentialities of the sermon in “studying rituals of collective authority within the preaching scenes of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing (Sermon in the Valley, 1931; ‘The Sermon,’ 1934; Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934) and Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987, audiobook, 2007)” (18–19). The final chapter thinks through how the “collective authority” deliberated on in the production of the sermon lingers in the background of the quasi-sheer hopelessness of the interpellative mode of the prophesy. It is the collective action of...