Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature by Lindsay V. Reckson (review)

In Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature, Lindsay V. Reckson uses the current scholarship on secularism to examine, as she notes, a period that this theory has ignored: post-Reconstruction America and the emergence of Jim Crow. Reckson argues that this era, with its consolidation of notions of race and its creation of racial segregation, is “central to . . . a regulatory regime of secularism” (5). African American uneasiness with the secular regime, held in place by a predominately Protestant Christian majority culture, is performed in racial, ethnic, artistic, and religious forms. Ecstatic performance of racialized persons, therefore, is multiply located—behind, before, and beside the dominant culture (234)—a formulation that she takes from the “Bacchic performance” (236) in a church in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928).

Reckson argues that “realism gives us a sense of how deeply encoded the secular is with structures of white supremacy” (3). As she examines the semiotics of the “frenzied black body,” Reckson argues that even as realism struggles to forget how it is implicated in white supremacy, its effort to leave it behind is haunted by what it tries to contain. For example: “Naturalizing racial and spiritual boundaries as part of its steadfast attention to the material world, realist practice nevertheless remains strikingly animated by ecstasy’s occluded histories of violence” (234), signaling a “very real proximity between ecstasy and terror.” Realism’s autonomy, therefore, is “haunted by what [it] can ever completely forget.” Ecstatic performance, however, happens not just within but also beside these ongoing histories, opening often occluded possibilities of freedom as they both archive the past and present and open “(counter)investments” (235).

In Jim Crow America, Reckson writes that secularism is a drama “at or of the skin” (7). Therefore, performance is constrained by a Gordian knot of “racial violence, compulsion, and the ‘religious’ ” (2). Her objects of inquiry are sites of inspiration, contagion, and enthusiasm, religious forms and gestures emerging from the Second Great Awakening, which included emotional, ecstatic, and personal conversion experiences, and which, in its relative openness to people of color, led to reform movements and progressivism. Yet for Reckson, these movements reinscribe rather than transcend racism as they stand within its structures and strictures.

Reckson examines the particular fascination in Black spiritual experience with Black and other racialized bodies in ecstasy, while also demonstrating how progressivism is interwoven with racially coded white supremacy. The stability of this secular order is continuously haunted, however, by a Derridean return of what post-Reconstruction America thought or hoped was dead and buried. This return happens because the material world is structured by this haunting, by the “pervasive systems of racial capital, imperialism, and genocide” that shaped the present moment. Haunting, Reckson argues, “might be the dominant affect of secularism,” and is “integral to what it means to be modern” (5). Secularism is both epistemological and formative as it disciplines the reason and the imagination (6), as her opening example of the figure of Henry Johnson in Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1898) demonstrates.

Alongside this disciplining, however, Reckson recognizes how Black bodies in ecstasy and in the case of the Ghost Dance, Native American bodies as well, threaten secular intelligibility: They stand somewhat outside the regulatory frame. Race and personhood are problems that the secular realm struggles to make legible and interpret. Racialized bodies in ecstasy approach, open, or suggest only a meager proximity, an attenuated space in which freedom can be performed. These performances suggest the possibility of arrangements other than those of the reigning secular order, as bodies in motion unsettle fixed understandings. As Reckson writes, “This unsettling, transfixing, spellbinding performance of the unintelligible— circulating in dynamic ways through realism’s taxonomic enthusiasms, its broadside effort to forge sense out of a turbulent social sense—is at least part, I want to suggest, of what Jim Crow secularism feels like” (3).

The possibilities, as we have noted, are not...