and twenty-first-century literature. His scholarship explores the intersections of religion and literature across genres and media, with a particular interest in visual culture and film. His teaching spans a broad range of modern and contemporary literatures—including British, American, Canadian, Irish, global, and postcolonial—and he is especially known for his popular course on horror, one of his longstanding personal interests. He also works extensively with students on their writing and creative projects.
Dudley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The New Believers: Religion and the Contemporary Novel, and reported the following:
Page 99 in The New Believers drops you into a sugarcane field, which is an easy place to get very lost in. It’s a few pages into the third chapter of the book, which examines the numinous powers in Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). On this page, I compare Díaz’s description of wind as a spiritual sign of rescue in a sugarcane field with similar imagery from the writer Jean Toomer (1894-1967) and his work Cane (1923). Both writers engage in what’s called religious syncretism, which is where different religious traditions are mixed together to produce new kinds of belief and new practices. Crucially, both Díaz and Toomer treat these spiritual powers as real rather than as metaphors or uncertainties.Visit Jack Dudley's website.
This page captures the book’s whole argument: our leading contemporary novelists want to imagine how belief in spiritual powers can transform the way we care for others and the world. Page 99 describes in detail Oscar’s rescue from that cane field by a remarkable, talking, supernatural-seeming golden mongoose—and then by Clives, a good Samaritan who was passing by. I next take the reader through how the passage from Díaz blends religious traditions, mixing Western Christianity with Dominican obeah (also known as voodoo).
That represents another key claim of The New Believers: what we’re seeing in these writers isn’t an uncritical return to traditional forms of religion but a new willingness to mix among beliefs and practices. As they sort through religious ideas—and invent new ones—these writers are guided by what can best help us materially care for the world and other beings.
Page 99 ends by setting up a challenge to contemporary critical practices, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, and now decolonial ways of thinking. These tend to overwhelmingly be negative modes of critiquing past and present cultural and political practices and their ways of making art, including the novel. Because they tend to focus less on their positive projects—that is, what they want to bring about and how they’ll do it—postmodernism, postcolonialism, and decolonialism have often lacked legitimation and had trouble motivating change. I call them “dismantling” projects in the book (99).
The top of page 100 outlines a claim about Díaz that applies to the whole book and that seeks to help empower these projects: believing in the reality of spiritual beings and forces can powerfully motivate what I call “projects of building and affirmation” (100), ones that can energize postmodern, postcolonial, and decolonial practices by providing them with a positive grounding in spirituality. These include better care for migrants, non-human animals, and other beings across differences.
That’s perhaps a surprising claim of The New Believers: that spiritual and religious practices and beliefs (which often get read as “conservative”) can be important sources of motivation, resilience, and community building for causes that are thought of as leftist and/or liberal.
--Marshal Zeringue
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