Missionary Spaces: Imagining, Building, Contesting Christianities in Africa and China, 1830s-1960s: 17 (KADOC-Artes, 17) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 946270144X ISBN 13: 9789462701441

Publisher: Leuven University Press, 2024

Synopsis

The ‘spatial turn’ of missionary places

Situated at the crossroads of missionary history, imperial history and colonial architecture, this volume examines the architectural staging and spatial implications of the worldwide expansion of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on specific architectural fragments, analysing the intersection of Christian edifices in colonial and traditional urban settings or unravelling the social understanding of missionary places, each chapter strives to understand the agency of missionary spaces. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and fields, this book aims to centre those missionary spaces by approaching them not merely as décor around and within which the missionary encounter was acted, but by making them part and parcel of it.

Through its approach, Missionary Spaces provides a new paradigm for scrutinising the ‘spatial turn’ for missionary histories and contributes to the increased attention across the humanities to space, place, and location since the late 1990s. Space does not occur as an historical given, but as a social construction to be analysed, while at the same time having explanatory value of its own.

This book focuses on Africa and the Chinese Region with contributions on Burundi, China, Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, and Taiwan.

Contributors: Leon Bouwmeester (KU Leuven), Lawrence Braschi (Church of England), Bram Cleys (MAS | Museum aan de Stroom), Thomas Coomans (KU Leuven), Céline Frémaux (French Guyana), Johan Lagae (UGent), Maarten Onneweer (AidEnvironment), Alexis B. Tengan (independent scholar)

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About this title

About the Author

Thomas Coomans is a full professor of architectural history and built heritage conservation at KU Leuven and director of the Advanced Master in Conservation of Monuments and Sites (RLICC), at the Faculty of Engineering Science.

From the Back Cover

The ‘spatial turn’ of missionary places

Situated at the crossroads of missionary history, imperial history and colonial architecture, the contributions in this volume investigate the architectural staging and spatial implications of the worldwide expansion of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By looking at specific architectural fragments, analysing the insertion of Christian edifices in colonial urban settings, or unravelling the social understanding of missionary places, each of the chapters contemplates an aspect of the agency of mission spaces.

Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, this book approaches missionary places not as the mere décor against which the missionary encounter was enacted, but as an integral part of it. In doing so, the contributors test the applicability of the spatial turn, an interpretative paradigm that has been dominant across the humanities since the late 1990s, to missionary historiography.

Richly illustrated and with a global focus, the volume addresses case studies from, among other countries, China, Japan, Madagascar, Congo, Tanzania, Ghana and Lebanon.

Contributions: Lawrence Braschi (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), Alexis Bremner (University of Edinburgh), Elisabeth L. Cameron (University of California), Bram Cleys (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Thomas Coomans (KU Leuven), Céline Frémaux, Allen M. Howard (University of Wisconsin), Aleksandra Majstorac-Kobiljski (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), Maarten Onneweer (Universiteit Leiden), Karen Hestad Skeie (NLA University College Bergen), and Alexis B. Tengan.

Edition details

• Publisher: Leuven University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 946270144X
• ISBN 13: 9789462701441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Coomans Thomas