Missionary Places, 1850-1950: Imagining, Building, Contesting Christianities: Imagining, Building, Contesting Christianities in Africa and China, 1840-1960 (KADOC Artes, 17, Band 17) - Hardcover

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Thomas Coomans is an architectural historian, professor at the Department of Architecture of KU Leuven, and program director of the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation.

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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.