Intertextuality as a Means of Negotiating Authority, Status, and Place—Forms, Contexts, and Effects of Quotations of Christian Texts in Nineteenth-Century Missionary Correspondence from Yorùbáland

Abstract

From the early 1840s, Church Missionary Society agents were active in the Yorùbá mission in what today is Southwest Nigeria. Both European and African missionaries—often former slaves who had converted to Christianity—corresponded with the Society, and in their writing frequently used quotations from the Bible and other core Christian texts. These quotations were recontextualised (Fairclough 2003) in the missionaries’ writing and formed intertextual bonds (Blommaert 2005) between their correspondence and the original texts. For the missionaries these bonds provided solace and meaning in difficult situations, established their status and authority as proficient theologians in the face of their European audience, and explicitly linked them with the Christian narrative of ‘spreading the word’. Especially for the Yorùbá agents, this practice of creating intertextuality was a means of negotiating and affirming their African-Christian identity, thus establishing and expressing their new place in the Christian tradition.