Date: Tuesday May 24, 2022
Time:3:20-5:20 pm
Location: Communications 139
Abstract: This talk explores the ways in which vernacular films and film technologies created transnational visual cultures within the American Protestant and Catholic missionary enterprise in twentieth century China. Mobile filmmaking by missionaries gave rise to unique visual narratives that built upon prior image-making practices, captured ground-level perceptions, and represented modern visualities that crossed geographic and ideological boundaries. Circulated through international religious networks, missionary films reached audiences in East Asia as well as the United States, moving between private and public contexts in ways that commercial films could not. Technological agency was central to these engagements, with the performativity of 16mm cameras, projectors, and filmmaking processes shaping experiences on the ground.
The films’ creative contexts and contents, however, were not limited to the promotion of religious beliefs or one-dimensional impositions of foreign culture. The experiences of filmmakers, subjects, and viewers overlapped with medical and educational activities, indigenous and global developments in Christian community, and nation-building projects across peace and war. Some films captured representations of new cross-cultural identities, while others framed humanitarian efforts and antiwar negotiations of trauma during periods of military violence and regime change. Over time, the fragmentary ways in which these films were made and viewed (and later, forgotten and rediscovered) came to represent mutable legacies of missionary visions in modern China’s historical evolution.
Bio: Joseph W. Ho is Assistant Professor of History at Albion College and a Center Associate at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. His research concerns transnational visual culture in Sino-US encounters, histories of photography and filmmaking, and modern East Asian history. Ho is the co-editor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937-1938 (Lehigh University Press, 2017), and author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2021).