In 1988, postcolonial literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published a groundbreaking essay called “Can the Subaltern Speak?” How and to what extent, Spivak demanded, can we recover the historical “voices” of less powerful people for whom records are lacking? In this brilliant collection of essays, Arun W. Jones and nine colleagues address Spivak's challenge anew. They focus on converts from colonial and postcolonial mission encounters in case studies ranging from sixteenth-century Mexico to early twentieth-century Rwanda.
Christian Interculture emerged from a conference at Emory University in 2014, called “Can the Native Christian Speak? Discerning the Voices of Indigenous Christians in Missionary and Colonial Archives.” Participants reframed Spivak's question. They asked: How can scholars recover the voices of local Christian peoples when sources from missionaries, ecclesiastical authorities, and other Christian elites have seemed to drown them out? And how can scholars find new sources or read old ones in new ways? The conference, Jones explains, yielded two insights. Participants realized, first, that the notion that “indigenous Christians have been unable to leave a historical record of their voices and activities is simply not true in many instances,” and second, that “[n]atives, whether Christian or not, were by no means necessarily ‘subalterns’, even in colonial situations” (5–6).
Mrinalini Sebastian considers both insights in a nuanced article about mid-nineteenth-century converts to Christianity in southwestern India, where the Basel Mission was active. Building on another essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sebastian suggests that we can hear, if not direct voices, then “echoes” of converts in mission records, which often included conversion testimonials. We may also hear “native Christians” through local archives—in places like Mangalore, India, as opposed to Basel, Switzerland. In an article about converts to Catholicism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century eastern Africa, Paul Kollman affirms that visiting former missions sites is worth doing, whether or not buildings and archives remain: “‘Being there’ matters.” Visits can yield insights through “simple physical proximity” and the apprehension of spatial relationships. Kollman adds that “present-day Catholics who live near the early missions remain important sources of information about those who came before them” (19). In a study of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI), a breakaway Catholic church in the Philippines, Adrian Hermann notes the importance of on-the-ground research, too, and cautions that digitized materials may not suffice. The “logic of current digitization,” Hermann warns, “tends to reproduce the logic of colonial archives and many of the problems of a colonial perspective” (206). Hermann was only able to secure early IFI newspapers because he went to the Philippines, where church archivists shared printed copies from 1903 and 1904.
Christopher Vecsey offers a brainstorming tour of written and oral sources for Native American Christians of the United States and Canada. He points to many writings—diaries, printed sermons, memoirs, and more—that Native Americans left, and then zooms in on Catholic sources. Marquette University holds a particularly intriguing collection: a series of tape recordings from theological dialogues that occurred between Jesuit priests and mostly Catholic Lakota medicine men in South Dakota in the 1970s. This as-yet-unstudied collection “awaits a fluent Lakota speaker with theological and anthropological expertise” (174). Vecsey reminds us that subalterns may speak, but not necessarily in languages that historians know.
Haruko Nawata Ward offers a fascinating analysis of texts that Jesuits published for Japanese Christians in the seventeenth century, when shoguns executed more than four thousand “Kirishitans,” as converts were known. Examining translated stories about early Christian female martyrs, she detects the likely influence of Kirishitan women in rendering the gendered nuances of Japanese language. Ward also explains why certain saints, like Eugenia (a third-century Roman woman who disguised herself as a man), appealed strongly to Kirishitan females. Kenneth Mills likewise uses a mission source—the narrative of a Spanish friar named Ocaña who visited Peru around 1600—to glean information about the “Christianizing people of indigenous and mixed descent” (132). Mills centers his article around the silver mining town of Potosí, and one “very rich Indian” resident (140) named Mondragón. Turning to sixteenth-century Mexico, Yanna Yannakakis shows “how native people deployed Christian norms in [Spanish] colonial courts to discipline and neutralize political rivals” (109). Indigenous Mexican noble converts accused others of idolatry and concubinage and found allies in local Spanish officials who harshly punished or executed those deemed delinquent—while ignoring calls emanating from Spain for greater clemency.
Esther Mombo examines Maria Maraga, an early convert to Christianity in Kaimosi, western Kenya, where Quaker missionaries opened a station among Luyia people in 1902. She uses Maraga's life, including details drawn from a mission eulogy, to “realize . . . retrieve . . . and acknowledge” the agency of women (65). As the first literate female among Quaker converts, Maraga led other women in breaking a taboo that barred females from eating chicken, on the grounds that doing so would make them unmarriageable or infertile. Local men, Mombo explains, tried to maintain this “prohibition myth” and “chicken ideology” as a “bedrock . . . of sexual inequality between men and women in all aspects of society” (74). Mombo casts a critical eye on Luyia patriarchy but also challenges the missionary tendency to present women like Maraga with pity.
J. J. Carney also recovers the story of one person: Aloys Bigirumwami, the first local Catholic bishop of Rwanda, who served between 1952 and 1974. Carney had never heard of Bigirumwami before diving into Rwandan history. “Perhaps more worryingly,” he adds, “neither had most of the experts I was reading” (214). Bigirumwami was something of a cultural dissident insofar as he rejected the ideology of “Hutu-Tutsi dualism” (215) that many missionaries abetted in promoting and that later contributed to the 1994 genocide. Bigirunwami would hardly seem to rank as subaltern, given that he left many records in missionary and diocesan archives. The bishop “spoke,” and yet few contemporaries seemed to hear him.
Arun Jones explains in his introduction that the title of this volume—Christian Interculture—aims to signal not cross-cultural connections between Western and non-Western Christians but rather dynamics among people for whom Christianity formed just one part of complex, “polyvalent” (9) identities. Together the articles cover five centuries, sweep from the Americas and Africa to Asia, and encompass Catholic and Protestant communities. They achieve something impressive by amplifying the voices—or at least the echoes—of Christian converts, who emerge as vibrant agents of history. With its straightforward yet lively and readable explorations of sources and the stories they tell, this volume would make an excellent text in a seminar on historical methods for advanced undergraduate or graduate students.
