Imperial Emotions: Affective Communities of Mission in British Protestant Women's Missionary Publications c1880–1920

This paper explores the ways in which the imagery and vocabulary of emotion circulated to create affective communities of mission in the missionary texts of Empire bringing Indian and British subjects into the ‘heart’ of colonial difference. In so doing, we argue, emotion is revealed as another dimension of the ways in which racialised power circulated to construct the imperial social formation of both colony and metropole. Our study focuses on women missionary writings during the 1880s and 1890s and the early 1900s. We argue that in all of these writings, the rendering of a transnational space of shared emotion works to draw the missionary women, the readership ‘at home’ and the Indian women and children who are the objects of women's mission work, into communities of ‘right feeling’. Our study also captures how these communities of feeling registered change, specifically with the growth of more secular discourses of empire and religion as modernity gained pace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, refigured in tropes of secular professionalism redolent of the modernities of the twentieth century.