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Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature recovers a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism. From camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals, Realist Ecstasy explores how realism represents ecstatic bodies as objects of fascination, transforming spiritual experience into the very material of realist description. In an era of “separate but equal” religious pluralism and systematic racial terror, realism mobilized the gestural and performative idioms of religious ecstasy to confront ongoing histories of violence and imagine new modes of social affiliation. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped produce and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance. Approaching realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices, Realist Ecstasy argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice, at a moment when the body’s capacity to reliably signify was everywhere at stake. Interrogating realist practices that worked to order, disorder, and reify racial and religious difference under Jim Crow, Realist Ecstasy challenges and transforms conventional understandings of realism’s relationship to histories of secularization, while reframing secularism itself as a densely heterogeneous set of performances and representations.

This essay tracks the gesture of touching a button across a series of early twentieth-century photographic and literary texts, mapping the uneven shock and pleasure of electrified contact as it emerges under the body politic of Jim Crow. Examining William Vander Weyde's images of the electric chair at Sing Sing prison alongside James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the essay argues that these texts invite us to recast early twentieth-century black resistance in electrical terms, terms that expose racial violence as a function of technological progress while, at the same time, reclaiming electricity as a form of material and rhetorical contestation.

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