Images on mission: the Church Missionary Society and the construction of visual regimes in the Kingdom of Buganda (East Africa, 1875-1922).

Abstract

This research project has as main objective to analyze the processes involved in the construction of certain visual regimes produced from the social interactions established between British Anglican missionaries and the populations that inhabited the Kingdom of Buganda, East Africa, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of 20th. For this purpose, we select a diverse set of documents, consisting of travelers' writings, missionaries narratives, illustrated albums and periodicals related to the actions taken by the Church Missionary Society in the Great Lakes region between the 1870s and 1920s.Through contact with such sources - still little explored from the perspective of image as a product and producer of social dynamics - we intend to understand the multiple roles that the visual records - photographs, engravings, drawings and illustrations produced in this scenario - played in the conformation of European practices, discourses and projections about the African continent.Adopting as a guiding thread such assumptions, we also intent to discuss how the production of missionary iconography elaborated in the context of the implantation of British imperialism in East Africa taken place from different social agencies, had transited through different circuits and was reappropriated in different fields of the knowledge. (AU)