May 18 “The Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed, and Everywhere: Cold War Politics and American Missionaries in 1960s Africa” – Hank Owings

Monday, May 18, 2015, 12:00-1:20pm (Swift Hall Room 208):

“The Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed, and Everywhere: Cold War Politics and American Missionaries in 1960s Africa” – Hank Owings

The 1960s witnessed both African legal independence and significant but limited political empowerment for African-Americans. Simultaneous to both historical changes and often associated with each, pejoratively and not, was the expansion of Marxist ideologies and the growth of the Soviet Union – two separate Twentieth-century phenomena that Americans in popular discourse frequently associated together. Moreover, shifting social attitudes challenged Americans, particularly religious Americans, at home as they adapted to the collapse of post-WWII social values.

Within these significant social changes, how do white, Evangelical missionaries in Africa from the United States respond to social changes abroad? Specifically, how do these missionaries understand their own sense of Christian mission in a context where they must confront challenges to both their racial and political values in ways that differed significantly from Americans at home? This paper examines the ways by which white Americans confronted and imagined their own cultural values abroad while mediating between political shifts domestically and abroad. Beginning with an analysis of how 1960s Americans conceived of both race and “Africa,” it relies on Wheaton’s African Inland Mission archives to perceive how American missionaries abroad narrated their own experience and responds to these changes.

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