Colonies in the Countryside: Doing Mission in Imperial Germany

This article adds the rural area of Wilhelmine Germany to the rich field of studies on the colonial public sphere in order to reassess the role mission associations played. The main argument is that so called mission friends developed a specific agenda that overlapped with the official politics of the mission societies but emphasized different elements while downplaying perspectives crucial to official missionary propaganda. By constructing a heterotopia that spoke to rural populations experiencing the dislocations of modernization, the discourse of the mission friends offered these populations what Arjun Appadurai calls "imaginative resources of lived experience."