Eric Smith and Cindy Brewer, German and Slavic Language
Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century mission literature differs from most colonial texts, due to the missionaries’ treatment and focus upon the “native” population. Yet, most literary critics believe that Catholic and Protestant mission literature—particularly texts in African and Polynesian island missions—share the same roots and literary forbearers as colonial literature during the time period of 1860-1939. Colonial literature holds the ideas of nationalism, imperialism, white superiority, social Darwinism, and justification for taking land. Thus, most literary critics view mission literature as products of Colonialist writers. Despite the negative reception, all missionaries were not solely focused on conquering and destroying the native cultures. On the contrary, these missionaries attempted to actually record the native languages, such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s praise for German missionaries who saved the Swahili language from being eradicated by fellow African tribes and practices. These missionaries also helped to institutionalize and save some native practices connected to boys’ and girls’ initiations, pregnancy, marriage and death. Although most missionaries (and even colonizers) were not necessarily bound by a desire to conquer the native peoples for the mere purpose of attaining more land and simply destroying cultures, missionaries were and are often viewed negatively because several missionaries during this time period attempted to physically and symbolically destroy local religions and deities. Consequently, the other missionaries have been overlooked due to the actions of these few missionaries, and my project has been to counter the current avoidance of studying these Catholic and Protestant missionaries and their literature.
In preparation for this year’s project, I contacted mission archives across the European continent, building a working relationship with scholars abroad. I travelled independently to several mission archives and libraries across Europe, such as the mission archive in Herrnhut, Germany, where I worked one-on-one with the Moravian archive director, or the libraries of Cambridge and Oxford. While in the Moravian mission archive, I experienced first-hand the difficulty of approaching mission texts from a secular approach, even though I spent the year prior in preparation to research in the mission archives. Most of the current mission archives have had previous experience with research students or professors vilifying their missionaries through their published books and articles. On the other hand, most archivists in libraries that contain large amounts of mission documentation and literature are not as familiar with the records contained, as these documents have been primarily searched for individual missionaries’ or missionary societies’ efforts in recording native languages. Therefore, I spent many hours trying to familiarize myself within these various archives and often building trust with the primary archivist. Also, during my research time in Scotland, I interviewed several people in the Scottish Parliament about their knowledge of the 1911 Edinburgh Worldwide Mission Conference, while also spending several days within the Scottish National Library.
Before starting this project, there was no literary criticism focusing on German-language mission literature as a genre, beyond factual observations from historians and historical anthropologists. There was not even very many articles or books that focused on missionary literature, as only a few scholars have even examined these missionaries’ work even within an anthropology perspective. Yet after 289 hours (seventy hours of which were spent in German and British archives), I finally collected barely over a dozen different books and articles solely pertaining to mission literature. We now better understand how missionaries were writing in specific fictional literary styles, which reshapes the historical mission facts to fit into the positive missionary narrative. During this exploration, I was able to write two separate papers about ten pages in length each (some of which will be able to be used in Cindy Brewer’s upcoming book Missionary Imagination and Colonial Desire: A Thematic Approach to German-Language Mission Literature 1885-1918). The first paper entitled “An Introduction to Writing Mission Literary Criticism” was written to be used for undergraduate and graduate students to see the relevance of analyzing missionary literature, especially in seeing this literary genre as distinctly different from colonial literature. My second paper entitled “Picking an Archetypal Role: Understanding the Negative Perceptions of the Adventurous Colonial Missionary in Relationship to a Demi-God’s Quest” was written to show why those more adventurous and colonial missionaries were not as villainous as history as made them out to be. I am currently working on expanding these papers to become my Honors Thesis: “The Great Missionary Divide: Analyzing German and English Mission Literature after the 1911 Edinburgh Mission Conference.” In my research, I was able to see a connection of how this 1911 Edinburgh Mission Conference possibly inspired the political tensions between Great Britain and Germany in the years leading up to World War I. I am also going to be altering some of the concepts of my papers to be used in Professor Brewer’s introduction on missionary imagination.
Most critics that I have read and interviewed see mission literature as a subset of colonial literature, but is colonial thought really the basis for mission literature? With the help of Professor, I have challenged the notion that Catholic and Protestant mission literature share the same roots and literary forbearers as colonial literature during the time period of 1860-1939. There are many differences between the two literary genres. Colonial literature holds the ideas of nationalism, imperialism, white superiority, social Darwinism, justification for taking land, and a motivation by money. Although missionary literature can hold some of these colonialist elements, it also demonstrates sympathy for the plight of the native population, highlights the self-sacrifice of the African Christians, and builds up the belief in the inherent worth of African souls. In my research and writing, I have not necessarily negated the negative aspects of these missionaries, as some of their well-intentioned efforts lead to greater social oppression (such as the concentration camps during the Herrero Genocide). However, I believe that these missionaries also helped to counteract common racial stereotypes, often through their literature.
Although I have been widely successful in my research over the past year, I have barely scratched the potential of this research field. Throughout this year, I have met and discussed the issues of examining nineteenth and twentieth century missionaries with leading postcolonial critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and leading World War I expert Peter Martland. Both of these experts have discussed with me the controversial nature of my research, while emphasizing the importance that this research has if there missionaries that were fighting against racial stereotypes and biases. Therefore, my work and writing up to this point has been fruitful, but I could easily spend a lifetime in exploring this genre, which ORCA has allowed me to examine.