Scripturalization: Discourse, Formation, Power – serie

Continuing his project of critical analysis of the scriptural formation of culture, Vincent L. Wimbush has gathered in this book essays by scholars of various backgrounds and orientations who focus in different registers on the theme of masquerade as the “play-element” in modern culture. Masquerade functions as a window onto the mimetic performances, dynamics, arrangements, psycho-logics, and politics (“scripturalizing”) by which the “made-up” becomes fixed or one among our realities (scripturalization). Modern-world racialization (and its attendant explosions into racialisms and racisms) as the hyper-scripturalization of difference in human flesh (registered in psychosocial relations as a type of “scripture”) is argued in this book to be one of the most consequential examples and reflections of masquerade and thereby one of the primary impetuses behind, and determinants of, the shape of the realities of modernities. The open window onto these realities is facilitated by touchstone references to—not exhaustive treatment of—a now famous eighteenth-century life story, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). This story, told by a complexly positioned Black-fleshed self-acknowledged ex-slave/“stranger,” is itself a “mask-ing” that throws light on the predominantly white Anglophone world as masking (as scriptural formation). Equiano/Vassa’s story as masking helps makes a compelling case for analyzing through Black flesh the ongoing shaping of the modern and the perduring mixed if not also devastating consequences.

This book analyzes the narrative dynamics of social formations in British India, using statistical and ethnographic records, visual cultures, and linguistic exercises to describe the British Empire’s production of knowledge about so-called “strange new worlds.” Lalruatkima then labels these narrative dynamics as “scripturalizing” to account for the creation, or writing, of these worlds into existence. This focus underscores empire as one of many such formations imagined against the backdrop of contested conversations about what it is and what it could be. When reverse engineered, empire throws into sharp relief its constituent narrative placeholders, and the sequences of meaning-making that connect them. Power differentials between the imperial center and frontier determine the placeholders and how they fit into the larger narrative. These discursive components in turn engender the politically charged attitudes and relations within the imperial domain. Lalruatkima excavates the imperial archive for material that accounts for these narrative dynamics.