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2 - Humanitarianism’s Way in the World

On Missionary and Emergency Imaginaries

from Part I - Genealogies and Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2019

By
Kerry Bystrom  and
Eleni Coundouriotis
Edited by
Crystal Parikh
Crystal Parikh
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

This chapter seeks to recover forgotten ideological and structural causes behind humanitarianism, ones which have been eclipsed by its association which the fraught aid industry, the white saviour syndrome, and the general ineffectiveness of sentimentality when it comes to humanitarian action. Distinguishing between the worlds of “missionary” and “emergency” humanitarian expression (with histories dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, originating separately in discourses of reform and abolition, and that of crises such as natural disaster and war), the authors show how these two strands present widely different narratives and concepts of suffering, innocence, temporality, witnessing, evidence, and so on.

Keywords

missionary humanitarianismemergency humanitarianismwhite saviorsentimentalitysuffering
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature , pp. 27 - 41
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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