“Fictionality, Memory, and Epistemological Ecumenism in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.”
Forthcoming in Religion and the Arts
To the extent that the majority of documentation of the colonial encounter between Christianity and traditional “pagan” religion in West Africa is authored by Christian missionaries, an epistemological perspective that assumes the inherent superiority of Christianity dominates the historical record of this encounter. This article argues that, in his 1964 novel Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe leverages the discursive qualities unique to fiction to reimagine this historical encounter in an epistemologically ecumenical way. This reimagined perspective enables the reader to circumvent the challenges of the unbalanced historical record. At the same time, however, the very fictionality of the text continually signifies the dearth of similar archival evidence. In this way, Arrow of God is paradoxically both an act of remembering and an act of forgetting: remembering to the extent that it constructs a fascinating and plausible alternative to the biased historical record, and forgetting to the extent that the text’s necessarily imaginative quality continually memorializes the violence of the original erasure.
“I Will Throw All on the Altar”: Christianity, Hinduism, and “Human Rights” in Jane Eyre
Published in FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts
Through an analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and her essay “Sacrifice of an Indian Widow”, this essay argues that Brontë positions Christianity as the necessary precursor for the development of secular human rights, and that in so doing she categorically excludes Hinduism from access to similar developmental possibilities. By ventriloquizing an Indian widow in Jane’s speaking voice, Brontë elides the difference of identity between them and posits Jane’s Christian emancipation as a putatively “universal” model for the emancipation of women. This sleight of hand strips the ventriloquized Indian widow of the religious and cultural particularity of her circumstances and precludes the possibility of enfranchisement within her own religious tradition. By tracing Brontë’s exclusion of Hinduism, this argument attempts to render visible the early influence of Christianity on the development of “human rights” discourse. In positing it, I hope to interrogate the Western tendency to treat “human rights” as a “universal” and therefore politically neutral discourse, ignoring the ways in which it has been conditioned by its emergence in a Western and Christian cultural context.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/forum.33.7459
Becoming Graceful Figures: The Gothic and Moral Epistemology in the Nineteenth Century
Winner: Honorable Mention (Research Category) at USC Undergraduate Writers’ Conference (April 2020)
Presented at The Green Conference: Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference (March 2020)
In this paper, I examine three ambivalently realist novels (Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde) and their use of Gothic tropes to render moments of moral or epistemological uncertainty. I argue that the Gothic is used to depict both phobic treatment of gender non-conformity and to express the experience of gender-based violence to those outside of the oppressed subject position. I undertook this research under the supervision of Dr. David Grundy while studying at the University of Cambridge in the summer of 2019.
Jason Emmett Collins 