ABSTRACT
Missionary periodicals of the nineteenth century are replete with descriptions of the foreign ‘other’ with missionaries cast as experts for a European audience. Yet far from containing benign descriptions of people from other cultures and religions, missionary writings presented an image of the ‘other’ that was designed to elicit support from a European audience through depicting the ‘other’ as helpless and in need of missionary intervention. The construction of the ‘heathen other’ was a form of epistemic violence, with this chapter arguing that missionary periodicals contained several intertwined epistemic violences. Through a close analysis of the German-language Evangelisches Missions-Magazin (EMM) the paper sets out to detect a gender-specific epistemic violence through exploring the portrayal of Indian men and women within the EMM, arguing that missionary magazines inherently present acts of epistemic violence via numerous practices which can be seen both in light of discursive and institutional violence. This chapter draws and extends on Kristie Dotson’s descriptions of epistemic violence in terms of ‘testimonial quieting’ and ‘testimonial smothering’. It introduces the concept of ‘testimonial optimising’ to describe how missionary writings constructed testimony in the light of the perceived testimonial competence of the audience in order to ensure that the testimony elicited the greatest possible support for the ideological aims of the self. The self-assumed ability of missionaries (both male and female) to speak about and for Indians, and Indian women in particular, was an act of epistemic violence as Indian society, culture, and religion were constructed as in need of ‘saving’ through the hands of European missionaries. One common strategy was the eliciting of pity in order to remind European Christians both of their responsibilities to those seen to be less fortunate and of their own privileged position. This chapter will reveal various strategies of testimonial optimising apparent in the EMM that were used to subjugate the Indian society – women in particular – to epistemic violence and consequently to silence them and to belittle their cultural and religious understandings. It will examine gender-specific cultural representations that were created for European audiences and how these representations contributed to the legitimisation of European missionary work within India. In examining the broader discursive framework of gendered violence, missionary writings provide clear evidence as to how gendered epistemic violences were enforced and were able to influence gender-relations within a given society.
