Reading Three Books By University Of Arkansas Faculty Who Also Happen To Be Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Parishioners
I have three books sitting on the counter next to me, each one lovingly printed by an academic press. All three books are by members of my congregation and published in the past year. An embarrassment of riches!
Having learned that three parishioners had published books (it’s not every year one mid-sized congregation produces so much literature), I gave myself an ambitious assignment: read all three books and write an essay that responds to them.
As a regular reviewer of books, I initially considered the assignment a moderate one. By force of habit and interest I’m familiar with the process of reading a book and then reviewing it.
I’ve always found intriguing, but have rarely attempted, the kind of multi-book review you can read in journals like the New York Review of Books, where the publisher assigns a reviewer anywhere from 3-7 books published in a subject area to review collectively.
So this is a bloggish attempt, imitation being the best form of flattery and sometimes inspiration to try new things.
These books are a little more difficult to collate or “sync” because they are each about such disparate things. They are, respectively, on the topics of the “secular in 18th century Romantic literature,” “the Southern states and mass media,” and “Chilean and Peruvian literary criticsm/LGBTQ studies.”
What literally unites the three books? They are all authored by members of my church (all of whom are faculty at the University of Arkansas). What further unites them? They’re all writing at intersections that fascinate and impact me as a pastor. They’re honestly, entirely apart from the fact they are written by members of the parish, books that could have ended up on my winter reading stack simply out of readerly interest.
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I’ll proceed by three stages. First, I will introduce you to each book. This won’t be a review per se but more some notes on what I love about them and what I hope you might love about the books if you read them.
After that, I’ll try to draw some connections between the works. I think there are some.
Finally, I want to meditate just a bit on what it means for a congregation to have ready-to-hand books written by members. In other words, I want to talk about what it means for these books to have a “place” as part of our congregation life. What can they do? Who can they be?
Here we go…
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Erika Almenara’s new book is The Language Of the In-Between: Travestis, Post-Hegemony, and Writing in Contemporary Chile and Peru. Erika is a poet, a professor of Spanish at the University of Arkansas, and her academic interest is in Latin American cultural production, especially in the cases of marginalized subjects and communities.
Her book seeks to move discussions forward around “non normative gender, desire, embodiment, and identity in its production of a language that serves the survival, pleasure, and resistance of the travestis1 with whom it engages.
Erika is one of the few people in my life who has read, and then truly applies, the work of Spivak, in particular the concept of the subaltern. A subtitle in her introduction even riffs on Spivak’s famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, instead asking, “Can the Travesti speak?” (17)
I find her whole project fascinating, particularly the way she ties together standards of normatively with the perils of the emergence of the demands of the nation-state. She argues that as seen through the literature and history of Peru and Chile, there is a kind of modernizing nationalist discourse that in attempting to establish a national identity tends to homogenize and subordinate those excluded as considered different.
Almenara argues that it is precisely the function of the travesti as an “in-between” that serves a kind of post-hegemonic function. “The experience of the travesti—and its language—in its alternate communitarian dimension, thus holds the potential for transforming the community to a political reason… the travesty’s experience and its language can not only transform the real circumstances of their social group so that they can access more egalitarian conditions with respect to other groups with which they coexist but can also change the historical discourses that only foster the construction and articulation of stable and firm subjectivies, since these historical discourses produce, from an ideology of homogeneity, inequality and discrimination based on identity” (112).
Almenara then makes the case for this argument in a detailed analysis of the works of Pedro Lemebel, Giuseppe Campuzano and Claudia Salazar.
One other highlight in the book, its vulnerability. In the epilogue Erika writes, “For someone who learned, through years and years of sexual molestation as a child, that her voice did not matter, incorporating my voice has been a difficult task. Nevertheless, through the interviews I conducted for this book with travestis, nonbinary and genderqueer, and trans people from Peru, Chile, and the United States, I learned firsthand about courage, survival, risk, and creativity. In a way, we might say that my interviews motivated and pushed me to release my voice from its enclosure” (195).
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Our second book is Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South, edited by Gina Caison, Stephanie Rountree, and Lisa Hinrichsen. Lisa is the member at our church.
Over the past few years I’ve ended up in a variety of enjoyable conversations with Lisa Hinrichsen on the topic of media studies/ecology. This area of inquiry was influential in my first book, Mediating Faith: Faith Formation In A Trans-Media Era. So of course my ears perked up when I learned Lisa had an edited volume out on media studies, and in particular one that also engages the South as a region.
The collection ranges really widely, which makes it all the more fascinating. I was not anticipating when I picked it up that I’d have the chance to read the most amazing primer on shape-note singing, or that after reading the essay on the video game Kentucky Route Zero I’d make use of an early snowy Friday evening to play my way through the first three chapters of that game.
But that’s how essay collections work. I think people rarely read ALL the essays in a given volume, but if they read like me, they look through the Table of Contents, pick out a few, page through the rest, and typically get drawn into at least one essay they had thought they wouldn’t read when first skimming the ToC.
The editors make a few points in their introduction I’ve been pondering ever since. First, they argue that the “South” as a region serves to reify national sovereignty in the U.S. imagination as the liberal empire’s regressive regional foil. It’s as if the U.S. needs the South or would have had to invent it, and so with the rise of new media, “as a geographic region and a virtual idea2, the U.S. South has seemingly experience little dissolution due to an increasingly mediated, networked national and international population” (3).
This is their working definition of “regional remediation.” It sees a dynamic process that returns to previous organizing logics in older media that enact in new mediations old asymmetries of power. Each of the essays in the volume serves to illustrate this key thesis in various ways. Whether it’s Frederick Douglas and self-portraits, or Twitter conducting essentially a wild-card experiment in human management, the point of media studies, especially considered as “media ecologies,” is to disambiguate media effects themselves from the process of transitions to new media.
Lisa’s introduction to the second section includes this gem, which I quote in full because it’s so of-the-moment and insightful:
Focusing on platform companies as primarily economic actors ends up obscuring the ways that these companies and the platforms they create, seek to act as new social institutions, transforming societies on a global scale. The rise of extracting, processing, and analyzing data is not just an experiment with new forms of capitalist value-creation and extraction in the face of waning economic growth, but a wild-card experiment in human management that exceeds the traditional limits of behavioral economics. By monentizing human interiority, turning subject into object, monopolistic new media companies diffuse market logics and entrepreneurial rationalities into new, converged territories, altering working conditions and labor market norms in ways that ask for more and give less.3
I was both surprised and pleased to read an entire essay on sacred harp shape-note singing in this volume, and I’d be remiss not to quote one part of it for readers. I’ve heard folks here in Arkansas talk about shape-note singing, and I know there are some hobby groups around, but honestly my first encounter with it was during a trip to Maine, when we stopped at a park for lunch in a little lobster town and a group was seated in a gazebo facing each other in the setting arrangement of sacred harp (the “hollow square”) and singing.
Here’s what Paul Fess writes. I hope it serves as a friendly primer for those curious and maybe enough encouragement to purchase the collection of essays who want to read more:
Over the course of its development shape-note singing has risen to the level of a metonymic figure for souther regional distinctiveness despite its origins in a New England buzzing with the religious energies of the Second Great Awakening. Firs appearing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the shape-note method involved a seemingly minor shift in musical transcription practices wherein compilers of hymnbooks used notes with different shaped heads as visual cues to help singers discern a given pitch, rendering a more accessible representation of music in print. Rather than its practitioners undergoing formal training or relying on the leadership of a musical precentor, singing from these tune books only required reading the shapes of the notes on the page. This method enabled a more congregation-centered singing experience and signaled a democratization of Protestant church music that took it out the hands of specialists, leaders, and trained choirs and empowered churchgoers themselves to obey the biblical injunction to teach and admonish ‘one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. (70)
It’s a bit of a revelation to be reminded that yes, in fact, music is media also, and that the technologies of the medium can function in the service of democratization.
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Finally, we have Words Made Flesh: Formations of the Postsecular in British Romanticism by Sean Dempsey. I’ll admit, in the last couple of decades I’ve typically had more interest in issues of post-secularity than in British Romanticism, so Dempsey’s book was an invitation back into a section of English literature I had only really examined in college, and then only briefly. 4
That being said, on another level this book is clearly more “pastor’s backpack adjacent,” riffing as it does in the title on the sacramental theology of Christianity and the notion of Jesus Christ as the “Word Incarnate” or the Eucharist as the real presence of Christ spoken through a liturgical act.
This is of course not precisely the direction Dempsey is going with the book, but it is what the title might immediately invite Christian readers to consider.
However, Dempsey is up to something else.
I’m entirely thrown by an early question in Dempsey’s book. Sean asks, “What does secularity feel like?” I’ve never asked myself that question so directly even though I “feel” secularity in my very bones. I live and breathe it.
I had never really considered Romanticism along the lines of media ecology, so the first shift Dempsey accomplished in my thinking was to reconsider periods in literature not as “movements” but more as a kind of new media itself. For example, in his presentation of a working definition of sensibility and sentimentality (), he argues that “sensibility and sentimental literature function as early forms of virtual reality” because the strategy in such literature is not simply to write in a way that facilitates us seeing in our own mind’s eye what is being described (like on a screen) but actually to feel it ourselves as if we were there (53).
This then also illustrates the extent to which new media (like virtual reality) usher in various kinds of bio politics, because these modes of literature were attempting, through the affect, the train our very bodies on how we should be and act in public. Like the title of the book, “Words made flesh.”
Dempsey argues that Romanticism in particular compared to previous eras like the Enlightenment facilitates the return of the “infra sensible” but now in an emerging secular context shaped by literature rather than religious praxis. And precisely because Romanticism facilitated literary experiences that centered the affect, such literature can offer insights for the blind spot of secularism in ‘its failure to fully thematize… the ‘infra sensible register’ or the role of those ‘affects and dispositions operating below the threshold of consciousness’” (21).
As I mentioned, Sean’s work overlaps Christian ministry perhaps the most of these three works. He reads a lot of the same stuff I read, at least. So I found particularly intriguing this argument midway in his introduction, that the “field of religion and literature is significant even if religion is best understood as a ‘network of bodily practices’ because… ‘texts are technologies for distributing affects, while bodies are landscapes of already existing effects” (25). This certainly offers a compelling post-secular description of why religious communities tend to gather “in the body” and then place at the center of their gathering “texts as technologies for distributing affects.”
In his introduction, Dempsey states, “A scholar of religion and literature is one who is interested in investigating scriptural and non scriptural mediations (or poiesis) that perpetuates the performance of (religious) meaning for a community of readers.” This is one way to describe the popular understanding of secularization, where in some ways the shared reading of literature becomes a new religious practice (see for example the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text). But Dempsey is working with Charles Taylor’s understanding of the secular which is slightly more nuanced, where the secular is not the absence of religion but rather a space in which there are options, and in that space of options religion itself takes on a new tenor. “Secularization can be thought of as the process through which we come not only to tolerate but also to appreciate other people’s stories (i.e., recognize the value for us of their patterned response to the constitutive too-muchness that characterizes human existence).
In a literature classroom this would include reading very different novels from various cultures, for example. In religious spaces, it is what interfaith dialogue looks like.
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In a funny way, sitting down to read these three books is kind of like sitting down together with my parishioners. In fact if I read an entire book by a parishioner, that is likely far more time than I would spend with them otherwise, and certainly a deeper dive into their current thinking and work.
Except it isn't—on another level—like being with them in person. When I see them in person it’s another kind of mediation, with such difference that on some levels as I read each book I thought to myself, “How is this like and not like the author I know as parishioner?” I guess this is a kind of post-modern question, differentiating between a text and author.
Reading a book is the most intense way of engaging with somebody when you're not personally with them, which I guess is maybe one of the attractions of books. Perhaps books are appealing (and this is just a theory) to us because we can get so much into the head or the authorship of somebody who has written the book while also not having to be regularly interrupted by the greater intensity of interpersonal presence.5
All three author-parishioners are, in various ways, considering media effects in their work. Perhaps this is not surprising. They are, after all, writers and readers of books. As a reader of books, this is the most pleasant and illuminating part of the practice. For example, Almenara and Dempsey in particular proceed along the regular path set out in the academy for academic inquiry—they first offer an introduction and thesis (lengthy in and of itself and specifically engaging the academic literature of the field) and then they move into chapters reading specific authors. In the case of Almenara’s work, this meant getting to encounter authors I would not otherwise have read (I can’t read Spanish and unfortunately read less Latin American literature than I should). In the case of Dempsey’s work, this meant encountering authors whose name I’m familiar with but who I have only read in passing (like Coleridge and Keats). However, since I also read a lot of cultural criticism and philosophy, I had the additional pleasant of experience of hearing Dempsey and Almenara bring those forms of thought (like Benjamin and Deleuze and Kant and Spivak) into conversation with the literature they were reading.
This means when I read an academic work, I get a wonderful summary of fiction/poetry I may never read, further insight into philosophy that is sometimes difficult to read directly (try reading Deleuze…), and so then also a synthesis of fields I haven’t always brought intentionally together in my own thinking (in the case of all three authors, the topic of cultural production and media ecology!)
It makes me want to audit their classes now.
But also, hopefully (and this to me is phenomenologically mysterious and seldom noted) if you have the chance to read an entire book by a member of the parish, you get a greater sense of the depth of church life. That is to say, on a Sunday morning you might simply see Sean and Lisa sitting with the kids in a pew, rising to sing, sitting to color with their kids, or you may see Erika at an outdoor service or event, and what you won’t know from that immediate experience in person of them is that they are the author of these books; that they have been engaged, over many years, in forms of cultural production, mediation, performance; and that in addition to meeting them in person in their face-to-face humanness, they also have extensions of themselves they’ve lovingly brought into being in the community of academic discourse. These books.
This comes to mind for me at various times in the parish: if I consider the architect who designed our columbarium, or the artist who painted a mural, the church council member who developed a process we still use years later, the volunteer who started a new program, etc. But books as a specific kind of cultural production both illustrate a long commitment to thinking over a sustained period of time and stand as a contribution to greater thinking that makes them… unique. It’s why I love reading and reviewing them.
I hope maybe I’ve encouraged you to read them also. They’re all available direct from the publishers or wherever fine (academic) books are sold.
A term used in Latin America to designate those assigned male at birth who develop another gender identity according to different expressions of femininity.
The South is “everywhere” now.
Sometimes I wonder why I read philosophy, but these three authors have reinforced for me how important it is both for our thinking about the world, and also as a pastor for engaging my parishioners. Almenera engages Spivak Hinrichsen here in this passage engages Deleuze and Guattari, and as we’ll see soon in the third book, Dempsey engages Charles Taylor, all of whom are crucial reads in my own thinking and practice as a pastor.
I mean, I’d still like to visit the Lake District…
I wonder whether Marshall McLuhan would call this “hot” or “cold” media…