Sites: Making Narrative Space in American Religions
by Isaiah Ellis
“The great fear of the period That Uncle Sam may be swallowed by foreigners : The problem solved,” 1860-1869, Library of Congress.
Thomas Tweed’s introduction to Retelling U.S. Religious History, and the essays that followed, argued that making space for new narratives in the study of American religion involves considering how those narratives are threaded by space, citational politics, and particular practices of seeing (analytically, in the archive, on the landscape) narrative of American religions. Hence the nifty homophones “site,” “sight,” and “cite” that orient Tweed’s introduction.
The connection among these terms has been formative for my work on the religious politics of infrastructure and urbanism. Working especially with David Walker and Jenna Supp-Montgomerie’s recent work, I have argued that infrastructures ought to capture our attention as sites that have profoundly affected how Americans narrate what it means to live in a liberal, modern, and moral society. In examining where such aspirations become an object of intervention, I have found among my sources particular ways of seeing the American religious landscape, as well as particular narrations of what religion is and what America is.
There is a crucial point of inflection embedded in the homophonic tapestry Tweed weaves: how can we begin to set our sights on “America” as a generative problematic rather than a presumption—a set of shifting boundaries rather than a fixed terrain? In my own graduate program, we felt the ripple effect of this line of thinking as we set our sights on a hemispheric view, hoping to acknowledge and amend methodological nationalism. We called our field “Religion in the Americas.” In my current department at the University of Toronto, we name our study of America “Religions of the Americas and Turtle Island,” a nod to an Algonquian and Iroquoian spatiality and narrative about this land. The way we self-narrate will always bear the imprint of a geographic re-telling.
Our present situation (or re-situation) beckons us to think beyond “religion in the United States” as conventionally understood—to think of what and who came before the United States and its imperial precursors; to reckon with the contingencies and slippages in Euro-American and United States empire from the historical terrains of vast early America to contemporary pipeline politics on Native land; to examine the interweaving of Mexican, Canadian, Caribbean, Pacific, trans-Atlantic geographies, and the various identity and community formations that resist inscription in Anglo-Protestant domestic and political regimes. The future exploration of Tweed’s themes thus belongs, in large measure, to studies centering those whose stories traverse North American national borders and refuse their narrative shape. I’m thinking of Aisha Beliso-de Jesus’ “transnational sexual assemblages” of Santeria, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh’s use of the term “spiritual infrastructures” to point toward the persistence of African inspiration in religious forms that thrive outside the walls of halls of worship, and Sylvester Johnson’s definition of race as a colonial project. At every level, site produces narrative power.
In truth, any thoughtful scholarship in American religion must interrogate where we think the people and processes we study unfold (or as Pamela Klassen writes, the “land and waters” where we and our research subjects stand). How should scholars of the United States who work in English-language sources only apply a hemispheric framework, or other new formations of “site” and “sight” that are not dependent on studying things that happen outside of national borders. To the extent I have found that application, I have found it in critical attention to the infrastructures that more or less quietly render certain kinds of American spatiality as conventional. We who continue to study Anglophone North America must do our part to keep “site” in the analytical foreground, pushing it ever closer to its conceptual limits.
How exactly are we prepared to do this? We can take one lesson from a critical response to Tweed’s work in this volume and his later theory book, Crossing and Dwelling. As geographer of religion Kim Knott wrote in response to Crossing and Dwelling, through Tweed’s body of work we now have a theory of religion that is in a meaningful way spatial, but whether we have truly developed a spatial analysis in the study of religion is another question. The analytical potential of “sites” follows from, but is not automatically realized by, critical conceptions of space such as those Tweed and the other authors featured in Retelling U.S. Religious History offer.
Similarly, as American religions, or “religion in the Americas,” continues down a path of pluralization in its geographic and narrative scope, we must be aware of the limits of that pluralism: how polyvocal are our conceptions of American religious site and space, really? Will the sites most in need of illumination lie dormant within the same grand narratives, collected and then neglected?
For better or worse, sites and the narratives we form around them have always been with us. The risks of narrative provincialism are as great as ever when such formations are built atop presuppositions about how people and ideas have moved across the North American continent. We are better off for treating site and space with the kinds of complexity we reserve for our treatment of other categories and concepts, for in the undoing of one narrative geography we might find other ones unfolding.
Isaiah Ellis is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. He is a historian of American religion with expansive interests in how religious concepts are made material in unexpected places, particularly in social forms, built environments, economic landscapes, and the production of state space. His book manuscript in-progress titled Apostles of Asphalt: Race, Empire, and the Moral Politics of Infrastructure in the American South, examines competing narrations of infrastructural and economic modernity in the U.S. South during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and asks how contemporary debates about American religious, racial, and moral life are articulated through the prism of infrastructure.