Castro, Anne Margaret. The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature. University of Virginia Press, 2020. Castro, Anne Margaret. The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature. University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Resumen

 The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature by Anne Margaret Castro proposes “performative textual hermeneutics” to describe and analyze embodied performance in the composition and mediation of Afro-diasporic literature that draws on religious practice. It contributes to scholarship on Afro-diasporic literature in English by focusing on religious practices therein as a key to literary interpretation. Enabled by the historical connection between ritual studies and performance studies (e.g., Victor Turner) and in extension of African American studies’ emphasis on the expressive aspects of sermons by considering performance as part of interpretation, Castro’s study “reads embodied performances of spirituality within discursive texts” in a way that uses the same “multisensory and embodiment-focused” sensibility in the performances themselves as her own “methodology of reading” (2). Through a performance-inflected analysis of religious practices in Afro-diasporic literature—from preaching to mediumship, zombification, and prophecy—Castro seeks to “challenge the primacy of Western assumptions regarding the aesthetic and intellectual value of non-European, and specifically Afro-diasporic works” (192). Castro persuasively argues that the Afro-diasporic literature she analyzes teaches us how to read embodied performances of religious practice therein not as fascinating cultural accoutrement but as themselves a mode of interpretation—that is, performative textual hermeneutics.