‘Beyond their own dwellings’: The Emergence of a Transregional and Transcontinental Indigenous Christian Public Sphere in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

This article deals with a largely ignored or overlooked type of historical sources which, at the same time, are of utmost importance for a future polycentric history of World Christianity: journals and periodicals from the Global South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries published not by Euro-American missionaries but by local Christians. At the end of the nineteenth century, indigenous Christian elites in Asia and Africa increasingly began to articulate their own views in the colonial public of their respective societies. They founded their own journals, criticised serious shortcomings, and developed non-missionary interpretations of Christianity. At the same time, they established transregional or even transcontinental networks between ‘native’ Christians from different missionary or colonial contexts. The article presents the main results from two major comparative research projects on indigenous Christian journals from Asia, Africa and the Black Atlantic around 1900. It introduces the concept of a ‘transregional indigenous Christian public sphere’ and highlights the role of the press in processes of religious modernisation in different cultural contexts.