Riotous Needlework: Gendered Pedagogy and a Negotiated Christian Aesthetic in the American Ceylon Mission

Abstract

Not unlike many parts of South Asia, foot-pedal-powered Singer sewing machines are ubiquitous in Sri Lanka's Jaffna Peninsula, as much an inheritance of missionary and colonial domestic education as an implication of the island's recent war. The social history of sewing and other needle arts extends deep into the Peninsula's early modern history, at least as far back as the Portuguese period. At the centre of this article sit a circle of young Tamil embroidering women who, in the mid-1840s, helped transform what it meant to be a modern Jaffna Tamil woman. This article reads the samplers of this set, the Oodooville Group, as source material into the pedagogical and devotional worlds in which they lived. The article argues that the works, each characterised by a riot of colour, constitute an experiment in mission pedagogy revealing an encounter and momentary negotiation of both aesthetics and devotion between missionaries and the students they sought to convert.

2019 Barnard Prize Winner- A Nation of Ink and Paint: Map Drawing and Geographic Pedagogy in the American Ceylon Mission

“…literacy. 70 Although we know Batticotta Seminary students spent hours working on maps from January 1826, 71 it is not until 1849 that Oodooville students were encouraged to do so. 72 Third, while Breckenridge's maps were made within a decade of the period that Schulten identifies as being the core of student mapmaking activity in America (the 1790s to the 1830s), a slightly different periodization of maps in Jaffna should be noted.…”