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This paper explores textual or historical erasure as a process. In general, what sorts of changes are considered bowdlerization, excision, addition and transcreation, or commentarial reinterpretation? What is left unchanged, and why? What are the various reasons for such “laundering” of a text or its history? Who does the purifying or editing? What are the effects of such changes? And what are possible ways of approaching or judging the phenomenon?
I take as a case the national poet of Bangladesh, a man named Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), whose 12-volume oeuvre of poetry, songs, short stories, plays, lectures, and letters – all of which shows him to have been a Muslim with extraordinary sympathy for the Hindu tradition – has elicited both great admiration and even adoration, as well as great discomfort and critique.
This essay explores the history and rhetorical strategies of church leaders in constructing a Lamanite identity throughout the 1970’s. Firstly, I examine the ways in which “Lamanite work” was narratively constructed as a divinely sanctioned proselytizing mission by the LDS prophet Spencer W. Kimball. I argue that prominent members such as George P. Lee, who self-identified with the term, used their Lamanite identities to represent the opinions of Indigenous peoples broadly and thus reified the categories significance as a divinely sanctioned classification of being. With Kimball and Lee’s reciprocal foundation, I then look forward to contend with the legacy of the Lamanite category to show how Meso-American texts, like the Title of Totonicapán, became rhetorical tools to support the narratives purported within the Book of Mormon. At the same time, scholars interested in Book of Mormon archeology contended that the Lamanites existed within indigenous and Meso-American cultures. This intervention seeks to bring attention to the historical development of the Lamanite category as emphasized throughout the 1970’s, the rhetorical strategies used to reify it, and the tenuous legacy of its categorical construction.
This paper examines how Scripture functions in two of Jerome's consolation letters. While Jerome does use Scripture as a source for theological assertions, this does not explain the sheer quantity and detail in his citations from Biblical texts. I argue that these texts serve a pastoral-performative function to alleviate grief in his recipients by inviting them to the shared activity of Biblical study. The process of reading and reflecting on Scriptural texts itself serves to console the grieving recipients. The texts refocus attention from a loved one's death to Scriptural difficulties, mediate Jerome's presence as a fellow student of the Bible, and model how working through Scripture for oneself conveys a deeper consolation than simply being told what each text 'means.' Since consolation requires more than a clever argument, attention to the extra-semantic dimension of these texts is vital to understand them.