Missionary discourses of difference : negotiating otherness in the British Empire, 1840-1900 / Esme Cleall.

  • Cleall, Esme, 1983-
Date:
2012
  • Books

About this work

Description

"Through their copious published writings, missionaries conveyed their experiences and anxieties about people and cultures they encountered in a much-consumed strand of colonial discourse, that allowed the British public to imagine the remote countries they inhabited. Using research that draws on these writings from missionaries in southern Africa and India, Missionary Discourses of Difference is organised into three important themes of imperial and postcolonial scholarship and major missionary concern: family, sickness and violence. Each thematic section considers both how missionaries represented race, religion, gender and culture and how their thinking was shaped by anxieties about their own experiences. This two-pronged approach allows for a sustained interrogation of the interplay between self and other in missionary writing and probes the limits of inclusion beneath the missionary commitment to universalism."--Publisher's description.

Publication/Creation

Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Physical description

xi, 243 pages ; 23 cm.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-230) and index.

Contents

Representing homes: gender and sexuality in missionary writing -- Re-making homes: ambiguous encounters and domestic transgressions -- Pathologising heathenism: discourses of sickness and the rise of medical missions -- Illness on the mission station: sickness and the presentation of the "self" -- Violence and the construction of the other -- Colonial violence: whiteness, violence and civilisation -- Conclusion: thinking with missionaries; thinking about difference.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    CX.U
    Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780230296800
  • 0230296807
  • 9780333919095
  • 0333919092