The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature By Anne Margaret Castro Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2016 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Vera Kutzinski, Ph.D. Ifeoma Nwankwo, Ph.D. Hortense Spillers, Ph.D. Marzia Milazzo, Ph.D. Victor Anderson, Ph.D. i Copyright © 2016 by Anne Margaret Castro All Rights Reserved To Annette, who taught me the steps. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful for the generous mentoring I have received throughout my graduate career from my committee chairs, Vera Kutzinski and Ifeoma Nwankwo. Your support and attention to this project’s development has meant the world to me. My scholarship has been enriched by the support and insight of my committee members: Hortense Spillers, Marzia Milazzo, and Victor Anderson. I would also like to express my thanks to Kathryn Schwarz and Katie Crawford, who always treated my work as valuable. This dissertation is a testament to the encouragement and feedback I received from my colleagues in the Vanderbilt English department. Thanks to Vera Kutzinski’s generosity of time and energy, I have had the pleasure of growing through sustained scholarly engagement with Tatiana McInnis, Lucy Mensah, RJ Boutelle, Marzia Milazzo and Aubrey Porterfield. I am thankful to Ifeoma Nwankwo’s work with the Drake Fellowship, which gave me the opportunity to conduct oral history interviews with Dr. Erna Brodber and Petal Samuel, in Woodside, Jamaica. My experiences in Jamaica deeply affected the way I approach my scholarship. In addition, I am grateful to Stephanie Higgs, Kathleen DeGuzman, and Shelby Johnson, who have read my writing in and outside of the writing studio. And I can hardly imagine this dissertation process without my transcontinental writing partner and confidante, Rebecca Wilbanks. I will likely never be able to fully express my gratitude for the community I have found here in Nashville. I am thankful for the wise guidance of Annette Lancaster, Debbie Williams, and Christie Bates. Autumn Morgan Allen, you make my life more wonderful. Matthew Switzer, you bring me joy and peace every day. And of course, thank you, mom. Your enthusiasm for me and my career is unflagging. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION............................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v Chapter I. Introduction .................................................................................................................................1 Religion and Spirituality in Literary Scholarship........................................................................2 Performative Textual Hermeneutics..........................................................................................10 Situating the Afro-diasporic Americas......................................................................................14 Situating Myself ........................................................................................................................18 Chapter Descriptions .................................................................................................................20 II. The Hermeneutics of Spirit Possession: Interpreting Mediums in Changó, The Biggest Badass and Louisiana.................................................................................................................................25 Changó: Translation as Medium, Translation as Message .......................................................27 Engaged Surrender in Louisiana ...............................................................................................44 III. Reading the Prophetic Stage: Imagining the Limits of the Possible in Bedward and Dream on Monkey Mountain ..........................................................................................................................68 Bedward’s Impossible Narrative of Theatrical Possibility........................................................71 Prophecy as Hermeneutics in Dream on Monkey Mountain.....................................................89 III. The Spiritual Life of Power: Zombies in Myal and Brown Girl in the Ring .........................108 Economies of Flesh in Brown Girl in the Ring .......................................................................110 Sounding Out Spirit Thievery in Erna Brodber’s Myal ..........................................................129 IV. “You Preached Today!”: Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison’s Sermonic Performances ... ..............................................................................................................................................156 Liturgical Preaching in Zora Neale Hurston’s Sermonic Texts ..............................................159 When a Performance Is Not a Performance: Toni Morrison’s Reading of Baby Suggs ........182 V. Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................202 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................205 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION And my prayer is versed with what you call obscene language. God within is a poet. Goddess within is a poet with action. Is she a performer? Poetic license well employed. - Josefina Báez Comrade, Bliss ain’t playing, np Josefina Báez’s performance text, Comrade, Bliss ain’t playing (2013) invites its reader to actively participate in the reading process, often by both visually and sonically tracing the poem’s word-play, as “up-down-and center, some kind of Scrabble / is encountered” (np). On the copyright page of her printed work, Báez describes her text as “performance theatre text; performance poetry, non-denominational spiritual practice of urban devotee; Dominican artist inner diary ” (np). The author manipulates the cataloguing mechanisms of published texts to frame her work in generic multiplicity. Similarly, interpreting Comrade, Bliss ain’t playing becomes an exercise in multiplicity as the reader becomes performer and audience, closely following the shifting rhythms and rhymes embedded within the complex “Dancing Syntax” of this first-person performance poem. Báez’s poetic “Secular prayer” uses the lens of her personal spiritual experiences to ruminate on the intricacies of social, economic, and political power relations between individuals and collective institutions. “The Sacred Act of Reading” examines representations of religion and socio-political power in multi-genre texts of the modern and contemporary Afro-disaporic Americas. Religion, 1 like culture and politics, signifies a wide variety of practices, beliefs, and organizations aimed at the dispersal, consolidation, and maintenance of power. I align spiritual and socio-political discourses by critically reading depictions of both metaphysical and physical relationships of dominance, dependence, and interdependence that manifest through performed, bodily practices. My dissertation adopts what I call a “performative textual hermeneutics,” which focuses on the active, reflective processes of textual creation and interpretation. I consider the methodologies of reading and interpretation presented in scribal novels, audiobooks, and written plays. Crossing the bounds of discipline, genre, and medium, my dissertation studies not only the performative behaviors of characters or performers, but also the embodied rituals of reading and listening themselves. By analyzing depictions of Afro-diasporic spirituality through a performative textual hermeneutics, my dissertation illuminates the embodied practices that physically actualize seemingly abstract mechanisms of socio-political oppression, which continue to mark the lived experiences of Afro-disaporic persons in the Americas. My dissertation’s expansive focus on spirituality and power ultimately challenges the false binary between oppression and liberation often invoked by USAmerican literary scholars studying the works of Afro-diasporic artists. I examine how the primary texts themselves question this binary by complicating the very definitions of personhood and agency through the use of Euro- American and African cosmologies and ideologies. RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY IN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP In many ways, this dissertation's interest in spirituality harkens back to the very origins of modern literary study in the “West” by way of hermeneutics, a term likely derived from the 2 Greek deity Hermes, who acted as a mediator between the gods and men. Gerhard Ebeling distinguishes three senses of ancient philosophies of hermeneutics, or “hermeneuein” as “expression (utterance, speaking), explication (interpretation, explanation) and translation (acting as an interpreter),” all aspects of meaning-making that I explore throughout this dissertation (qtd in Grondin 4). Jean Grondin (translated by Joel Weinsheimer) explains that each of the senses of “hermeneuin” attempt to encapsulate “similar movements of spirit” through language (21). While it is a fool’s errand to assign a clear lineage to hermeneutics -- just as it would be for any such capacious and foundational philosophical endeavor from our contemporary perspective -- the