The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature (Review)

Anne Margaret Castro’s The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature (2020) makes significant contributions to the fields of religious, literary, performance, Africana, and Caribbean studies. These contributions revolve around reading, capaciously conceived. While working primarily with “literary” texts, many of the written texts encompass multi-modal/multi-sensory dimensions. This multi-modal composition proves essential to Castro’s method of “performative textual hermeneutics,” which theorizes how reading always already entails interpretation, which is itself always already “performative” in the sense that interpretation is actualized through perception.