Recasting the Protestant Gaze

In addition to their published writings, missionaries used items of material culture to educate and elicit support from their constituents at home. This chapter and the next move beyond text-based approaches and examine the colossal archive of missionary images and objects collected from Muslim contexts. This fifth chapter centers on images, including photographs and printed postcards, of Muslims and Islamic rituals that missionaries published, sent to their supporters, or displayed in slide shows, scrapbooks, and albums at churches and mission gatherings. Such images often conveyed messages about Christian superiority and western civilizational preeminence through religiously inflected cultural critique, reflecting Protestant gender constructs and racialized notions about Islam. Yet, even when reinforcing cultural tropes, images of Muslims could also have a humanizing effect, which in many cases missionaries also intended in order to cultivate sympathy.

Art · Gaze · Protestantism · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies