Hauptseminar Negotiating Faith and Belonging The Writings of Christian Missionaries in North America 1600-1900

In colonial North America the spread of the Christian faith did not only help settlers and colonists to develop a new sense of belonging and of home. Proselytizing was also intimately wedded to competing colonial projects and their distinctive ideas about market economy, trade, agriculture, government and intercultural interaction. French colonization in today’s Canada and along the Mississippi River, for instance, depended rather heavily on the work of the Jesuits and the Ursulines. And the Puritan enterprise in New England is unthinkable without the -praying towns- that Puritan missionaries such as John Eliot set up for the conversion and anglicization of Northeastern indigenous peoples. After two waves of religious awakenings had swept across North America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Native Americans and African Americans increasingly assumed the role of missionizing themselves, contributing to a growing body of the literature of the mission and its contradictory offer of an uncompromised home in the Christian faith – an offer that had been critical of and yet complicit with empire and domination from early colonial contact onward. In this course we will take a closer look at a selection of letters, reports and narratives written by Christian missionaries in North America in the period between 1600 and 1900. Our aim will be a better understanding of the impact of the literature of the mission on the emergence of secular nationalism and on cultural pluralism in North America. A reader with the relevant material will be made available at the copy-shop in the Reckhammerweg a week before the beginning of the term. A note for prospective participants: you should bring good close reading skills to this course as well as an interest in history, religion and independent research. Anglistik Universität Duisburg-Essen WS 2013/14 alle Lehrämter, alle Lehrämter Professorin Buchenau Barbara