Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840-1900

by E. Cleall

Overview

Missionary Discourse examines missionary writings from India and southern Africa to explore colonial discourses about race, religion, gender and culture. The book is organised around three themes: family, sickness and violence, which were key areas of missionary concern, and important axes around which colonial difference was forged.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230296800
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	06/29/2012
Series:	Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
Edition description:	2012
Pages:	243
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

ESME CLEALL studied at the University of Sheffield, UK, before completing a PhD at UCL. She currently teaches Modern History at the University of Liverpool. Her research is on the social and cultural history of Britain and its Empire and the intersections between 'race', 'gender' and 'disability' in colonial thought. Her new project investigates nineteenth-century understandings of deafness.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgements ix

Note on Terminology xi

Introduction: Difference and Discourse in the British Empire 1

Part I Families and Households: Difference and Domesticity

1 Representing Homes: Gender and Sexuality in Missionary Writing 29

2 Re-Making Homes: Ambiguous Encounters and Domestic Transgressions 48

Part II Sickness and the Embodiment of Difference

3 Pathologising Heathenism: Discourses of Sickness and the Rise of Medical Missions 79

4 Illness on the Mission Station: Sickness and the Presentation of the 'Self' 98

Part III Violence and Racialisation

5 Violence and the Construction of the Other 123

6 Colonial Violence: Whiteness, Violence and Civilisation 142

Conclusion: Thinking with Missionaries, Thinking about Difference 162

Notes 171

Bibliography 207

Index 231