Event Details

Informal discussion of a short pre-circulated text. All welcome. You can join in conversation or just listen in.

To receive the extracts just email e.lysne@lancaster.ac.uk

The readings for this session (with Winter Jade Werner, on Tuesday, 10 June, at 2:30pm UK time) are: an excerpt from Missionary Travels by David Livingstone (1857) and a 2012 essay by Justin Livingstone (unrelated to the former).

This will be our last conversation for this academic year, so even if you’re unable to get to all of the reading, please do join us!

All welcome to join in the conversation or just to listen in.

Here’s a note from Jade to frame the readings – broadly, she’ll be chatting about missionary activity, imperialism, religion, and how authors capture (or don’t) the critical imagination:

First, as Justin notes, Livingstone--a celebrity in his own time--was also the subject of countless near-hagiographic biographies well into the late twentieth century. However, he’s failed to gain much critical attention. I think the lack of scholarly interest in Missionary Travels is worth probing. What accounts for the text's inability to gain traction among literary critics today? In other words, what does it say about our field that a figure with this amount of sheer name recognition simply fails to ignite the imagination or capture critical interest?

Second, as you'll see in the excerpts, I'm interested in the disjunction between what we remember Livingstone for--an unapologetic advocate for the union of Christianity and commerce, a "soft" imperialist who paved the way for the formal expansion of British power by opening trade--and these weird moments peppered in his text where he seems to actually deplore the pathological personal qualities that commerce has engendered in various South African tribes (bottom of pg. 225-26; briefly, pg. 227-28). If Livingstone was so hopelessly self-divided in life and text, then why do "we" (that is, the popular imagination) still read him as unambiguous and single-minded in his message and mission?

Finally, I would love to pick this group's brain about the religious and missionary commitments of this text. Interestingly, the most recent critical wave of scholarship on Livingstone (which, to be clear, is not a wave at all, more like a gentle lapping) isn't being generated by scholars interested in religion and literature, but instead by scholars interested in imperialism (one of whom actually said to me about Livingstone, "I just don't see why religion matters."). I think religion matters a great deal, and I would like to discuss this issue with the group.