Introduction: Negotiations in Transitive Spaces

Abstract

The co-authored chapters in this volume are the result of over a decade of ongoing conversation. While our training is in the distinct disciplines of religious studies and political theory, our concerns overlap in several places including, but not restricted to, cultural criticism; the role, function, and power of discourse; the “other,” in all the forms that it can take, particularly in literature and literary criticism; and, more generally, “meaning” in all human activity. These diverse mutual interests coalesce around a shared concern with narratives of otherness and dislocation. In this book, we read these narratives not merely as critiques of existing structures, but, more significantly, for what they bring forward from the traditions in which they are embedded and how they challenge those traditions, both political and religious. We also read these narratives for what they tell us about either overcoming those structures or creating meaning within them, for while we cannot live outside meta-narratives, our interdisciplinary approach seeks new spaces in which answers to questions of meaning are made possible. This relation between “tradition and the individual talent,” as T. S. Eliot would put it, or between tradition and the “other(s),” as we would put it, is the site where culture develops.¹