Global Religion and the Imperial Imagination

• In Event: Law, Power, and Governance of the International

Abstract

This paper examines intersections of imperial power, knowledge, and religion in colonial Africa. Although central to contemporary discussions about political stability and transformation across the African continent, religious actors historically helped order relations between sub-Saharan societies and European states. The emergence of Christian ‘faith missions’ over the long nineteenth century pulled the African continent into a fervent and resourceful soul-saving enterprise, hastened by Islam’s spread across eastern interior and western coastal regions. Mission societies proliferated in Britain, continental Europe, and North America, instrumentalized by colonial regimes to fulfill governance services. However, missionaries also provided firsthand information that fueled imperial imaginaries in ways that continue to exert downstream consequences on contemporary social and political categories. Missionary colleges became principal producers of knowledge about colonial frontiers, distorted by power and problems of translatability. These distortions shaped the epistemic spaces of empire, subsuming diverse non-European identities and modes of organization into Eurocentric categories. This paper examines these dynamics in relation to missionary societies in the Nile Valley and Lake Victoria regions. It argues that historical referent points for current ‘post-secular’ framings need to be shifted to better grasp the constitutive interconnections among religion, state power, and global governance.

Author

• Jonathan Agensky, Ohio University