Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical perspectives ed. by Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena and Karen Vallgårda (review)

The flowering of colonial-missions history is increasingly acknowledged and oft mentioned in broader fields of colonial and global history. Mission archives are particularly rich, providing grassroots perspectives on the colonial encounter, and the wider dynamics of the cultural, social and political "contact zone." Mission sources are not without their problems, challenges and difficulties (cultural and racial arrogance being just one of many), but this book once again demonstrates that such sources also provide a unique culture-scape with which to approach modern global and colonial history. One aspect of the mission archive's value is the introspection of its actors, whose personal papers are often so fraught with the ambivalences of the cultural encounter. The emotional lives of missionaries, argue the editors of this collection, are particularly richly documented, and the individual chapters "work from the premise that the prominence of emotions in mission archives during this period is not coincidental, but is related to several factors," including "the importance of emotion in the Christian faith; the intimate nature of the contact required for the achievement of missionary goals; the increasing currency of the notion of individual emotional experience; changes in the political formations within which overseas missionaries operated; and the specific nature of the promotional efforts required to finance and generate support for missionary endeavours" (2). This is a long way from the stiff upper-lip of the Colonial Officer. Emotional acuity (internal and external) was an important part of faith, conversion and spiritual intimacy. This being so, mission historians have access to "an archive rich in both emotional expression and explicit commentary on the subject of emotional expression" (3). This not only enriches our knowledge and understanding of colonial missions and colonialism, but of emotional history also. "Far from being peripheral, the histories of Christian mission are crucial to the history of emotions" (3), not least in the cultivation of European empathy (problematic, partial and contested as it was) for colonial "others," and "otherness" more broadly. In short, Christian missions explicitly dealt in emotions, dwelt in internal worlds of introspection, and felt the emotional range of "others" as vital and human. They also left a vast archive enriched by these perspectives. This book delves into that archive head-first, making for an enthralling and innovative collection.

Edited collections are hard to review because of their diversity of approach, depth and voice. The origins of this collection in a 2012 conference certainly helps to brings the chapters together, and the three-part structure (Part 1: Emotional Practices, Part II: Emotions in Mission Encounters, and Part III: Mission Families and Emotional Communities) also contributes a solid internal coherence. If its objective is to prove the methodological utility of emotional history to histories of colonialism, consider me convinced. Having said that, a little more introduction to the pedagogy of that field would have been welcome—the section on "Missions and empires of emotions" (7–10) was a useful starting point, but all too brief as a way in for scholars unfamiliar with the field. Personally, I found the chapters dealing with the creation, expectation and disappointment of affect most interesting. Missionaries created "affective circuits" (McLisky) between "home" and "abroad," with various levels of interaction and with differing expectations of reciprocity. These connections were created and maintained through the curation of emotion—both in terms of promoting imagined relationships with specific converts, and in dehumanising or distancing the "heathen" masses (Acke). Meditation on mission narratives was itself an affective form of connective devotion (Stevens), and prayer was a form of transcendent association and action (Stevens, Holt). On an individual level, missionary expectations of friendship, brotherhood and gratitude were often thwarted, leading to the more corrosive emotions of anger and bitterness, frustration and desolation (Elbourne, Holt, McLiksy). Families, friendships and separations formed the affective fabric of mission lives (Morrison, McLisky, Acke), mediated by a vast range of published and unpublished texts. Emotional lives were gendered and raced, laced with expectations, contradictions...