Conclusion: missionary writing, the imperial archive and postcolonial politics

Summary

This book has argued that missionary texts constitute a distinct genre of missionary discourse, a genre that has unmistakeable, though ambivalent, relationships with imperial discourses as a whole. To conclude, I want to trace some of the recurrent features of evangelical discourses in order both to map the overarching patterns of missionary textuality and to examine the ways in which different kinds of colonies produced different modes of representation. This chapter also addresses the complex relations between missionary and broader imperial discourses – particularly in terms of mutual imbrication and gender – to suggest the value of a focus on missionary textuality for postcolonial studies.

Across the colonial world, missionary representations of their evangelical activities amongst colonised ‘heathen’ introduced contradictory, conflicted knowledges into the imperial archive. For LMS missionaries, colonial experience provided a plethora of complex information, experiences, and narratives which could not always be aligned with imperial philosophies or society dictates. As such, almost every publication by a missionary with colonial experience was testimony to the obvious disjunction between metropolitan ideas and colonial practice. The texts analysed all bear evidence to this disjunction, though in a variety of ways. At the same time, however, these texts also promote colonial evangelical projects. This doubled discursive framework – simultaneously endorsing and challenging imperial institutions and ideas – continually troubled efforts to produce seamless representations of colonial evangelism.

Missionary writers could rarely maintain an innocent, unmediated view of textuality.