William Ellis, John Williams, and the Role of History in Missionary Nation-Making

These surprising aspects of missionary narratives are worth consideration, not only because they helpfully inflect and nuance existing scholarship on missionaries' role in British imperialism. Perhaps more importantly, they make clear how missionary narratives provided (to borrow a phrase from Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey's essay, "On Literature as an Ideological Form") an "imaginary solution [to] implacable ideological contradictions."