Join us for a talk by Melani McAlister, Chair, Department of American Studies Associate Professor of American Studies, International Affairs, and Media & Public Affairs.
In the early 1960s, Congo was in crisis. As the newly independent nation’s first prime minister was assassinated and violence wracked the country, a white American evangelical missionary was murdered in the streets of the capital city. The story of his death became national news, and US evangelicals, white and black, struggled to understand the politics of race, religion, and revolution that led to his death. Drawing on letters, the internal documents of missionary organizations, popular media, and evangelical publications, McAlister explores the sometimes conflicting ways that American missionaries, US Christians, Congolese Christians, ad US policy makers tried to understand the ongoing transformations in Africa – changes that would dramatically impact US foreign policy as well as the global religious landscape of Christianity.
Melani McAlister specializes in the multiple “global visions” produced by and for Americans. In her writing and teaching, she focuses on the ways in which cultural and political history intersect, and on the role of religion and culture in shaping US “interests” in other parts of the world. Her own interests include nationalism and transnationalism, religion and culture, the rhetoric of foreign policy, and media history (including television, film, print, and digital). She is the author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (rev. ed. 2005, orig. 2001), and the co-editor, with R. Marie Griffith, of Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States (2008).
This event is sponsored by Committee for the Study of Religion, Committee on Globalization and Social Change, Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.
