Race, Religion, and Rupture: Re-Reading the Civil Rights Era

“Race, Religion, and Rupture: Re-Reading the Civil Rights Era” investigates the relationship between religious institutions and racial formation in the context of Civil Rights era activism in the work of writers as diverse as John Okada, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Nicholasa Mohr, Piri Thomas, Edward Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya and Nash Candelaria. My work addresses a new imperative in ethnic studies by exploring the role of religion in the formation of a multiplicity of racial and ethnic identities. Essentially, my work seeks to illuminate the variety of ways religion articulates race in the United States while also offering a mode for the authors the study undertakes to meditate on their own racial experiences. Ultimately, for all these writers, religion becomes a primary mode through which to map their relative relationships to the U.S. body politic in regards to race and racial hierarchy. Consequently, “Race, Religion, and Rupture” insists that race and religion cannot be treated as bounded, immutable categories. Rather, this study treats them as co-constitutive, so inextricably linked that they necessarily must be read through each other