Cover Image
QR Code

Colonies in the Countryside: Doing Mission in Imperial Germany.

This article adds the rural area of Wilhelmine Germany to the rich field of studies on the colonial public sphere in order to reassess the role mission associations played. The main argument is that so called mission friends developed a specific agenda that overlapped with the official politics of t...

Full description

Published in:Journal of Social History Vol. 50; no. 3; pp. 502 - 518
Main Author: HABERMAS, REBEKKA
Format: Article
Published: Oxford University Press / USA Spring2017
Subjects:
Northern Germany
Missionaries
Imperialism & society
History
Christian missions
German church history
Germans > Missions
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:This article adds the rural area of Wilhelmine Germany to the rich field of studies on the colonial public sphere in order to reassess the role mission associations played. The main argument is that so called mission friends developed a specific agenda that overlapped with the official politics of the mission societies but emphasized different elements while downplaying perspectives crucial to official missionary propaganda. By constructing a heterotopia that spoke to rural populations experiencing the dislocations of modernization, the discourse of the mission friends offered these populations what Arjun Appadurai calls “imaginative resources of lived experience.”