The Missionary Narrative as Coercive Interrogation

This article takes as its starting point the late nineteenth and early twentieth century missionary discourse of feminine self‐denial, and attempts to chart the ways in which it became a subversive theme in women missionaries’ ‘letters home.’ It argues that in the simultaneously public and private act of letter writing, women missionaries created complex sexual and political self‐narratives. By co‐opting the imperial rhetoric of a threatening, violent East, and then setting up their letters as conversations with an invisible interrogator, missionary women repeatedly forced their audiences to discover the various ways in which they had been seduced by this East, and had thereby deviated from accepted feminine norms. In the process, they both reinforced imperial notions of race and civilization and undermined the likewise imperial notion of protective domestic space

Aesthetics · Art · Denial · Interrogation · Literature · Narrative · Outrage · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology