Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics [Hardcover]

Be always converting, and be always converted; turn us again, O Lord, Thomas Shepard urged his Cambridge congregation in the 1640s. This mandate coming down from American Puritan times to New Age seekers, to be always converting, and always converted, places a radical burden on the self as site of renewal and world-change, even as conversion becomes surrounded by deconversion (rejection of prior beliefs) and counterconversion (turns to alternative beliefs) across global modernity.

Rob Wilsons reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry Lpkkahaia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, torn from the stomach of his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that Lpkkahaias conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American, because he dared to redefine himself via this drive to rebirth.

By mapping the poetics and politics of conversion and counterconversion, Wilson returns conversion to its central place in the American literature, history, and psyche. Through Lpkkahaias story, and through the works of the Tongan social scientist and fiction writer Epeli Hauofa, Wild West poet Ai, and the mercurial Bob Dylan, Wilson demonstrates that conversionseemingly an anachronistic concern in this secular ageis instead a global, yet deeply American subject, less about salvation or finality than about experimentation and the quest for modern beatitude.

Energetic and wide-ranging.[A] sparklingly innovative treatment of Hawaii and New England Protestants evangelism there in the 1800s (a reading that gains new relevance in light of the election of Barack Obama). Wilson also looks at Bob Dylans identification as a born-again Christian in the late 1970s, noting that it did not lead to affirming any given neoliberal hegemony; he points out that Dylans engagement in both conversion and counter-conversion negates potential conservatism. This paradigmatic rl#)