Child martyrs and militant evangelization in New Spain. Missionary narratives, Nahua perspectives

Drawing on Christraud Geary's analysis of missionary photography in Africa, this article argues that the Houghton Library photograph album of an unknown American missionary in Natal of around 1930 was constructed for public rather than private viewing, and that the story it tells conforms largely to the pattern of the standard ‘missionary narrative’. Although obviously depicting specific individuals in certain places at precise times, the album works nonetheless on a metaphorical level in defining, in turn, the difficult access to the mission field, the extent of the ‘problem’ to be addressed, and the rewards of the missionary labours. However, while the missionary narrative is told pictorially in these broad symbolic terms, in its differences from the standard narrative and in details such as its evident concern with children, the album does reflect actual developments in mission practice in Natal around 1930.

Through a description of the interactions of Christian missionaries in Chhotanagpur with the Oraons, this article illustrates the different ways in which the missionaries grappled with and restructured their notions of the ‘tribe’ and the ‘Oraon’ across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Oraon, I argue, was initially recognized in terms of his heathen practices, his so-called compact with the Devil, and his world of idolatry and demonology. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, he increasingly became, in missionary language, an animistic aboriginal tribe, a ‘primitive’ within an evolutionary schema. As the missionaries searched for an authentic Oraon language, for myths, traditions and histories, an array of categories—heathen, savage, race, tribe, and aboriginal—seemingly jostled with one another in their narratives. Indeed, the tension between religion and race could never be resolved in missionary narratives; this was reflected in colonial ethnographic literature that drew upon and yet eventually marginalized missionary representations. I conclude by referring to a case in the 1960s filed by Kartik Oraon against the Protestant convert David Munzni before the Election Tribunal at Ranchi, which was ultimately resolved in the Supreme Court, that raised the question whether religion or race determined tribal identity.

By focusing on missionary narratives, the article offers a short description of the Ukrainian evangelical communities that have developed in Poland since 2014. Arguing that the outbreak of the war in Donbass was a decisive moment that shaped the waves of migrations from Ukraine, the article tries to analyze the strategy of reconstructing the biographies of Ukrainian evangelicals in the Polish cultural context. Using the categories of migrants and missionaries as biographical types, the article contextualizes the meaning of evangelicalism through its Ukrainian and Polish variations, and at the same time refers to the processes that are occur ring in evangelical Christianity globally.

This article examines two competing historical formations that expatriate missionaries and Papua New Guineans respectively have used to create connections between local ethnic groups and "the ancient Jews" of the Bible. In part through 1970s publications analyzed here, missionaries introduced redemptive and repetitive historicist models that established Melanesian ethnic groups as generically and iconically Jewish. The article then examines the ways in which Guhu-Samane Christians in rural Papua New Guinea take up these missionary narratives in order to produce indexical, genealogical connections to biblical Jews. Ancient Jews have become "figures" of Guhu-Samane history through interpretive discourses in which local people discover the prophetic revelations of their Jewishness that anticipate a future Christianity. Guhu-Samane Christians thus particularize their relationship to Christianity by taking up the history of another group, a Christian historical imagination that runs counter to secular forms of history that orient around issues of autonomous identity.

Forty Lost Years. The Apartheid State and the politics of the National Party, 1948–1994 by Dan O'Meara. Johannesburg: Ravan Press; and Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996. Traditional healers and childhood in Zimbabwe by Pamela Reynolds. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996. World Literature Today 70 (1), 1996 Civilising Barbarians. Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth Century South Africa by Leon de Kock. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press and Lovedale Press. In the Tradition of the Forefathers: Bushman Traditionality at Kagga Kamma by Hylton White. Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, UCT Press, 1995. What Racists Believe . by Gerhard Schutte. London: Sage Publications, 1995. Ethnicity in Focus: The South African Case . by Simon Bekker. Natal: Isaac Focus Series, 1993.

Black Hawk in TranslationIndigenous Critique and Liberal Guilt in the 1847 Dutch Edition of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak Frank Kelderman (bio) In 1846 Rinse Posthumus, a Protestant country pastor in the north of the Netherlands, received from a friend a copy of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-shekia-kiak, the as-told-to autobiography of the Sauk military leader Black Hawk. First published in Cincinnati in 1833, the Life was a best seller in the United States, but it was unfamiliar to Posthumus, who lived in a small village near the North Sea in the province of Friesland (Frisia). Over the course of the year, he studied Back Hawk’s life story and began a translation of the text for Dutch readers, which he published in the city of Leeuwarden in 1847 as Levensgeschiedenis van Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kiakiak, of Zwarte Havik. If Black Hawk can be regarded as the author of his autobiography, this makes Posthumus’s text the first foreign translation of a book-length work of Native American literature.1 Posthumus’s edition did not cause much of a stir. Years later, the Dutch anticolonial writer Eduard Douwes Dekker mentioned the book as an “important” work (Multatuli 50), but no subsequent editions of the translation were published, nor has there been any commentary on the text by literary historians. Nevertheless, Levensgeschiedenis van Zwarte Havik sheds new light on the role of Indigenous writing in a transatlantic print culture in which the representation of American Indians generated popular entertainment, theories of government, and philosophies of universal history. In Britain, the circulation of American Indian literature came on the heels of a wealth of writings about Indigenous people in periodicals and newspapers, as well as “anthropological studies, works of racial science, and missionary narratives” (Flint 3). There was a continental European dimension to this story as well, and since the early nineteenth century the representation of Indianer held a prominent place especially in the German cultural imagination [End Page 58] (Bolz; Zantop; Penny; King). But as a growing number of studies has shown, the role of Indigenous people in what Jace Weaver terms “the Red Atlantic” was not merely to provide symbolic representations of Native presence: their writings, performances, diplomacy, and protests inflected the very currents of modern political and intellectual thought (Weaver; Flint; Lyons). Extending these transatlantic dialogues to a Frisian-Dutch print culture, Rinse Posthumus’s translation of the Life not only catered to a widespread ethnological interest in Native American culture in Europe but also brought Black Hawk’s critique of settler expansion into political debates about state power that had local and transnational implications. This essay is about what happened to Black Hawk’s story in translation. Annotated by a rural pastor in the province of Friesland, Levensgeschiedenis connects Black Hawk’s account of Indian removal in the American Midwest to a region that has been marginal to the history of cultural exchange in the Atlantic world. In what follows, I consider Rinse Posthumus’s role as translator and editor, tracing how his theological commentary builds on Enlightenment assumptions about race and linguistic difference even as it carries out a universalism that validates Indigenous cultural traditions. But I also argue that his editorial work amplifies a critical current in Black Hawk’s text about the relation between settler colonialism and the role of government, which intersected with nineteenth-century debates about political liberalism and immigration to North America. Posthumus witnessed the economic decline in the northern Netherlands in the 1840s, and his edition of the Life resonates with concerns about agricultural crises in Europe and the population movements of the mid-nineteenth century. By annotating Black Hawk’s account of Sauk traditions and Indigenous dispossession, Posthumus gives voice to his political commitment to liberalism during a time of economic depression and revolutionary energy in the Netherlands. Since these pressures gave rise to a peak in Dutch immigration to the American Midwest—including the very lands that were opened up for settlement after the Black Hawk War (1832)—his commentary in Levensgeschiedenis negotiates a politics of liberal guilt over the intertwined histories of European migration and Sauk...

Missionaries played a central role in the colonial system in Congo – they were a key part of the well-known triad consisting of state, church, and corporations. During the Belgian Congo period (1908–1960), missionaries of diverse congregations were in charge of health care and education, and their religious services were the only ones officially recognized. Narratives have strongly shaped how these missionaries operated. One could even say that the conversion and missionary narrative define what it means to set up a successful ‘mission’. In my contribution, I explore how these narratives surface in two novels written in the two decades after Congo’s Independence in 1960. Entre les eaux (1973) by V.Y. Mudimbe and Het stigma (1970) by Jacques Bergeyck both refer to the missionary activities in mid-century Congo but their use of the conversion and missionary narrative complicates the common-sense understanding of them. By comparing a Flemish and a Congolese novel, this article aims to decentre the Flemish literary world as the locus where these narratives gain their meaning. By taking a more transnational, multilingual context as a starting point, it wants to shed new light on the ways in which the European missionary presence in Congo has been imagined.

Rearamembering Walter Benjamin: Critical theory and cultural translation Momme Brodersen. 1996. Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Trans. Malcolm R Green and Ingrida Ligers. London: Verso. 334pp. Gerhard Fischer (ed). 1996. ’With the Sharpened Axe of Reason’: Approaches to Walter Benjamin. Oxford: Berg. 229pp. Sigrid Weigel. 1996. Body‐ and Image‐ Space: Re‐reading Walter Benjamin. London: Routiedge. 204pp. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. 1994. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 651pp. Corporeality, scatology, and the scripted body Sue Clark, 1996. The False Bay Cycle. Cape Town: Firfield Press. Basil du Toit. 1996. Older Women. Cape Town: Snailpress. Lionel Abrahams et al. 1996. Carapace 7. A Memorial Issue for Douglas Livingstone. Edited by Gus Silber. Walter Saunders. 1996. For Douglas Livingstone: A Reminiscence. Cape Town: Ophirfield Press. Mark Swift. 1996. Testing the Edge. Cape Town: Snailpress. Brian Warner. 1996. Dinosaurs’ End: Scientific Poems. Cape Town: Firfield Press & the South African Museum. Pippa Skotnes's miscast Pippa Skotnes (ed). 1996. Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. University of Cape Town Press. Leon de Kock's civilising barbarians Leon de Kock. 1996. Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth Century South Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Marcia Leveson's people of the book Marcia Leveson. 1996. People of the Book: Images of the Jew in South African Fiction, 1880–1992. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press

Stephanie Schmidt: Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain: Missionary Narratives, Nahuas Perspectives

These surprising aspects of missionary narratives are worth consideration, not only because they helpfully inflect and nuance existing scholarship on missionaries' role in British imperialism. Perhaps more importantly, they make clear how missionary narratives provided (to borrow a phrase from Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey's essay, "On Literature as an Ideological Form") an "imaginary solution [to] implacable ideological contradictions."

This article explores how Constance Maynard understood her sexual emotions as part of her evangelical religion and how, in doing so, she was drawing on an evangelical tradition which placed strong emotion at the centre of religious experience. The article outlines how nineteenth-century women tract writers, missionaries and biographers wrote about female friendship and conversion using emotional rhetoric. The article analyses Maynard's diary entries to identify her use of missionary narrative tropes, arguing that, in the absence of psychoanalytic theories, Maynard turned to missionary narrative to make sense of her relationships with vulnerable women.

Pentecostal/charismatic pastors and church leaders describe their churches as 'new mission churches'. 'Evangelism' is used in a narrower sense and describes any activity aimed at recruiting active church members who adhere to the belief system and the ethical rules of the recruiting community. This chapter concentrates on three aspects: How the speakers locate themselves globally, how they formulate their evangelistic message to a German listener, and what they have to say about inculturation. Missionary talk is a form of symbolic mapping. The country in which the missionaries find themselves is located within the divine economy of salvation, and its culture and history are interpreted through a spiritual lens. In classical missionary narratives, such symbolic mapping usually took the form of contrasting the 'dark heathen' realities with the 'light' of the Christian Gospel and faith.Keywords: Evangelism; missionary narrative; Pentecostal pastors

iTfHOUGH I wrote Gospels in this century, I should die in gutter, Melville told Hawthorne in i 85 I, when he was well on his way toward literary obscurity.1 Although Melville's reputation today exposes what may be a wry self-mockery in this statement, his second Gospel, Omoo, often remains slighted. Critical appraisals of book have typically included condemnation of it as an incoherent and defective narrative and condescending recognition of it as a straightforward and sunny autobiography. Even Edwin M. Eigner and William B. Dillingham, who present detailed analyses of novel, call attention to its digressive narrative, its light tone, and its lack of compelling ideas.2 It is as if, in canon of works sacred to Melville scholars, Omoo holds a peculiar place as one novel completely simple and profane: not harboring the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God,3 but nevertheless (or therefore) a welcome relief for scholar toiling over Melville's usual inordinate complexity and intellectuality. Read thus in comparison to other Melville texts or according to conventional novelistic criteria, Omoo does seem to deserve its reputation as a particularly humorous but inconsequential work. I

The nineteenth century saw a number of shifts in theological approaches to and by women, away from the medieval view of the temptress towards a notion of separate spheres, for which women and men were naturally suited and divinely ordained. This chapter follows the progress of theological ideas, and their impact on literature, education, and mission as well as Christology. The author draws on the writings of figures such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the activism of Florence Nightingale and Josephine Butler, as well as a range of novels, articles in women's devotional magazines, hymns, and missionary narratives. Initially, women are still regarded as naturally submissive, maternal, and nurturing, characteristics that should be encouraged through suitable education. Where women took more assertive roles, such as preaching, this was justified as 'extraordinary', vocation. There was a Christ-like role of martyrdom or suffering, which had a dual impact on women's lives, and on gendered Christology. Towards the end of the period, large numbers of women were active in mission work following the thrust of colonialization. They developed an ambivalent relationship with the theology of Empire, and the biblical imperative of global salvation, whose repercussions are still felt.

When anthropologists come to examine the role of Christian missionaries in the transformation of non-Western societies, as they have done increasingly over the past decade, they soon become deeply embroiled in debates about narrative. Most obvious and immediate are the written and published narratives in which missionaries report their activities, providing the single most important source of data. But the more fundamental issues lie beyond: They have to do with the role of narrative in the social transformation itself, and eventually with the place of narrative in the ethnographic account that anthropology sets itself to produce. In this essay, which arises from a larger project on the encounter of religions in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, the focus of the argument will move through several levels of narrative, but it will start and finish with an argument that demonstrates why narrative is so important for the achievement of a properly historical anthropology.