Introduction
This page serves as the gateway to a series of 61 pieces from the Victorian missionary periodical press plus 3 bonus texts. Each of these pieces centers on or includes the representation of a unique BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voice. Collectively, the pieces offer a sample of the 250+ such pieces identified by the “BIPOC Voices in the Victorian Periodical Press” project (2021-22). The scale of this number – itself based only a limited review of relevant missionary periodicals – underscores the vast number of BIPOC voices remaining to be identified in these periodicals.
As noted above and elsewhere, the “BIPOC Voices” project reveals the need of treating these represented voices with exceptional critical caution. Nonetheless, the voices offer the promise of access to BIPOC perspectives usually excluded from relevant literary and historical studies. The voices encompass both women and men, of varying ages, from a variety of locations now associated with the Global South. As a whole, the pieces take up the introduction and evolution of Christianity in these global locations.
The timeline below, as its format suggests, presents these pieces in chronological order. For each piece, we include date, title, creators, and a short segment of suggestive “teaser” text to indicate the overall focus of the piece. A set of graduate students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Purdue University, and elsewhere encoded these pieces in HTML. The pieces then underwent further development for inclusion on One More Voice and COVE. Except for a few outliers, the pieces fall into a handful of nineteenth-century decades which defined and controlled the scope for the “BIPOC Voices” project.
For most of the pieces, our project provides the relevant segment of text plus some amount of surrounding contextual material. We mark contextual omissions with an ellipsis in square brackets (i.e., [...]). We also present each piece with full metadata, including details for accessing the original periodical in question (in cases of pieces from Special Collections, SOAS Library) or the digital representation (in case of pieces from Adam Matthew Digital). Our team encoded the 3 “bonus” texts during the period in question, although these texts do not come from missionary periodicals.
In all cases, we urge users – when possible – to consult the original physical copies of the periodicals in question. Such consultation will provide the best full textual and material context for any subsequent critical analysis. Additionally, the peer-reviewed critical essays published by our project illuminate select strategies for engaging with the production history and topics reflected in these pieces. Finally, the “BIPOC Voices” project also includes a selection of other critical materials that users may find helpful for working with the pieces.