Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions

This collection of essays looks at missions, their complicity in European colonialism, and their postcolonial aftermath. It examines the spread of Christianity, ranging over the anthropological, textual, historical, and geographical dimensions of mission enterprises, with topics as diverse as the influence of mission printing and record-keeping on traditional life in Africa to the role of missions in changing styles of dress in India. Also, uniquely, the collection includes essays analyzing the role of proselytizing in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as American liberal democratic capitalism. The volume is interdisciplinary, focusing on textual and material aspects of missions. Like Griffiths’ earlier ground-breaking books in postcolonial studies, and Scott’s well-known interdisciplinary work on missions and postcolonial literatures, this collection will be fascinating to scholars in postcolonial/cultural and mission studies and be useful as a teaching tool as well. Mixed Messages was listed among the 15 best books for 2005 in the Jan 2006 issue of The International Bulletin of Mission Studies .

J. MARSHALL BEIER McMaster University, Ontario, Canada JEFFREY L. COX Department of History, University of Iowa, USA GARETH GRIFFITHS University of Albany, New York, USA ISOBEL HOFMEYER University of Witwatersrand, South Africa NORMAN ETHERINGTON University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia ELIZA F. KENT Department of Philosophy and Religion, Colgate University, USA KLAUS KLOSTMEIER University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada JANE SAMSON University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada JAMIE SCOTT York University, Toronto, Canada JANE I. SMITH Hartford College, Connecticut, US JAMES WILLIAM COLEMAN California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California, USA PETER VAN DER VEER University of Utrecht, the Netherlands