Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color

Introduction: Searching for Relations

Introduction: Searching for Relations In Wendy Rose’s poem “Notes on a Conspiracy” (1993), an American Indian spirit expresses outrage when her skeleton is disturbed and excavated for museum display. She begins “searching for relations beneath each rock, / praying that I will not go to war alone” (86). Writing by women of color since the 1980s has increasingly utilized spirits and other beliefs held by people of color to envision spiritually inspired “relations,” political alliances that collectively resist injustice. It is important to note that the “war” these alliances engage in Rose’s poem and related writing does not involve armed struggle, but conflicts among different ideologies . Gloria Anzaldúa remarks, “Our revolution is fought with concepts, not with guns, and is fueled by vision” (“Preface” 5). Works by Rose, Anzaldúa, and other women writers of color have increasingly turned to the religions and spiritualities of people of color to provide them with “visions” and ideologies that differ from those of the dominant cultures of the Americas. These writers show how the ritual practices and beliefs of Indigenous, Diasporic African, and syncretic sacred traditions, such as Vodun, Santería, and Candomblé, can be used as the basis for imagining different forms of community. A sea change is occurring in literature by contemporary women of color. Nineteenth- and earlier-twentieth-century writing by women of color historically focused on distinct cultural identities and communities ; however, fiction by women of color since the 1980s increasingly imagines interracial political alliances (“relations”) that connect different peoples. Recent novels by women of color examine the responses of 2 / AC TIVISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL multiple communities to colonialism in North and South America. They rediscover forgotten, spiritually inspired alliances and interracial revolts involving Africans, Natives, indentured Asians, and European colonists.1 This new fiction mines interracial history, searching for historic relations among different peoples that can act as models for contemporary political engagement. Critical of a widespread disengagement from political and civic participation, and also of the contemporary novel’s disconnection from politics, this new fiction attempts to create a transnational and politically conscious reading public. The project, expressed in a variety of ways, is to deprivatize reading, to use it to inspire social critique. This politicized fiction offers itself as a means to re-create the public sphere, a space of public debate and dialogue that is critical of state power. The novel form’s historic connection to the public sphere is appropriated in an effort to engender a fuller democracy than that envisioned by the concept of nationalism. The religions and spiritualities of people of color are also deployed, as they contain rich histories and models of political engagement. Fiction by women of color since the 1980s enlists the political potential latent in novels and the belief traditions of people of color, seeking to inspire readers with visions of resistance to injustice. To examine the rich history of the beliefs of people of color and their relationship to political activism, I have avoided the terms historically used to discredit the beliefs as folk “superstitions” and “magic.” Instead, I have chosen to use the terms “religion” and “spirituality” to describe people of color’s understandings of the sacred. I use the term “religion” to foreground the many beliefs that are organized in specific theological systems and ritual practices, like Vodun and the Black Church. I use the term “spirituality” to describe those forms of sacred consciousness and ethics that may or may not be linked to specific religious traditions and rituals, such as beliefs in an animate natural world and in ancestor spirits . My use of the terms “religion” and “spirituality” together to describe the differing beliefs of people of color is somewhat unusual. Religious studies, ethnic studies, and feminism have long drawn a careful distinction between these two terms. This binary was initially created to analyze and differentiate ideas about the sacred, and it is not without bias. Vine Deloria Jr. argues that “the explanatory categories used in studying religious phenomena have been derived from the doctrines of the Christian religion” (284). Unfortunately, this has resulted in many religions being “held in deep contempt because they do not in some manner measure up to the definitions of religion as promulgated by Western/Christian ideas of the nature of religion. . . . American Indian tribal religions Introduction / 3 are among those so down-graded” (75). While we might argue that the “contempt” Deloria...