| My dissertation explores the relation between nineteenth-century American missionary ethnography on the Chinese and the production and legitimation of American imperialism. Critically engaging the work of contemporary postcolonial theorists, I question the assumption that missionary representations of the Chinese necessarily functioned to underwrite aggressive or exploitative relations between the U.S. and China. I argue instead that missionary ethnography of this period is fractured by conflicting and contradictory ideological, political, and theological commitments. This "splitness" problematizes any simple account of their cultural effectivity. Restoring the dialogue between these texts and works by canonical American authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Harte, Norris, and others, I show how missionary ethnography's participation in American debates regarding theology, race, culture, and immigration, complicate its relationship to American's imperial project in China.; Chapter One, entitled "The Ideological Work of Missionary Ethnography," demonstrates the centrality of missionary ethnography to the production of American images of and attitudes toward the Chinese. The second chapter, entitled "'The Heathen Chinese is Peculiar': The Representation of Chinese Immorality in American Ethnography," traces the conflicting representations of Chinese morality in ethnography to their sources in the theological, economic, and historic contingencies that shaped American relations to China and the mission project itself. In Chapter Three, "'A Venerable Cowlick': The Arrested Development Theory and the Cultural Work of American Missionary Ethnography," I explore conflicting uses of time-related concepts in missionary ethnography. Chapter Four, "Rice Christians, Converts, and Chinese Characteristics: The Ideological Work of American Women's Missionary Ethnography," extends Chapter Three's inquiry into how missionary ethnography locates the grounding point of difference between self and other by exploring the conflicted reaction of women missionaries to essentializing constructions of race. In Chapter Five, entitled "'Pregnant with Potential': Missionary Hybridity and the (De)Legitimation of Colonialism," I argue for an ambivalent relation between missionary ethnography and the production of American imperialist subjectivity. Having demonstrated the representational "splitness" of missionary discourse, I argue that these fissures produce an ideological space from which the representational props for colonialism are unmasked. |
