What is Shining Lights?
Abstract
This dissertation excavates the global history of early screen culture by studying the letters, journals, and published autobiographies of four missionaries who used projection equipment: John Williams, David Livingstone, Samuel Crowther and his son Dandeson. As the most detailed eye-witness accounts of lantern shows on the fringes of the empire before the advent of photography, these primary sources enable me to reconstruct the images that missionaries showed, explore the local context of these events, and discuss the representation of magic lantern shows in letters, journals, and diaries. Unpublished material reveals that Williams, Livingstone, and the Crowthers echoed the content of lantern shows in Britain; in addition to projecting scenes from the Bible, they also gave educational lectures on natural history, transported their audiences to London through travel narratives, and even cracked jokes using comic slides. Missionaries expected their audiences to respond to the projected images and to the spoken narration that accompanied them, but audiences often participated in ways that the missionaries did not anticipate. Far from being a one-way transmission of religious thought, magic lantern shows invited reciprocal performances from their audiences. These responses ranged from lavish displays of wealth to tearful silence to raucous joke-telling. I suggest that these unscripted moments speak to the ways that audiences co-opted lantern shows as a space to negotiate their relationship to Christianity and to the empire.Because lantern shows served as sites of education and entertainment, they have been marshalled as anecdotal evidence to support dominant critical narratives within Victorian studies about missionary activity as an extension of Britain’s colonization efforts. James R. Ryan points to Livingstone as a forerunner of the educational lantern shows produced by the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC) in 1902. Similarly, Jack Thompson and Ann Colley look to precedent set by missionaries in their studies of photography and the late-Victorian visual imagination. Instead of focusing solely on the visual material that missionaries presented, I place projected images within their global and local cultural contexts. Drawing from anthropology and ethnography, I argue that magic lantern shows and their subsequent representation in textual sources are best understood as moments of mediation, a mode of analysis that I characterize as an “archaeology of mediation.” By taking setting and audience participation into account, I emphasize the ways in which local forces, including local traditions, beliefs, medical knowledge, and physical geography, shaped the overall tone and content of lantern shows. While no project can fully recuperate the erasure of non-missionary perspectives and voices from the archive, eyewitness accounts of magic lantern shows in manuscript material serve as portals through which to study local history and shifting identities in light of increasing colonial contact. Foregrounding the contributions of local audiences and “native” missionaries like Samuel and Dandeson Crowther ultimately challenges Euro-centric histories of early screen culture.
Chapter Overview
As an archaeology of mediation, this dissertation is structured as a stratigraphy; each chapter excavates a layer of material surrounding a technology of mediation, spanning from the technologies at the heart of the lantern show to letters to print to web sites. In doing so, I explore how each technology contributes to our understanding of significant figures within the nineteenth-century missionary movement.The first case study analyzes a sequence of copperplate-printed slides described by John Williams in a letter to his son. Using Ludwig Vogl-Bienek’s concept of “presence” as a framework, I argue that the absence of scenery in projected images minimized distinctions between the space represented on screen and the space inhabited by the audience. When Williams projected an image of Christ on the cross to an audience in Samoa in 1839, he reported that “their feelings were overcome, and they gave vent to them in tears.” In its original form, the letter suggests that Williams felt uncomfortable deploying technology to elicit emotional responses. During the lantern show, Williams tried to reassert the boundary between the audience and Christ by explaining that the projected image “was only a representation.” Published accounts of Williams’s lantern show elided his insistence on the immateriality of the image of Christ crucified in order to celebrate his efforts to evangelize with the aid of technology.
This published account would inspire three of the Victorian period’s most celebrated missionaries to bring lanterns with them on their expeditions. David Livingstone, the subject of my second case study, accidentally frightened his audience with an image of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac in 1852. Livingstone’s writings offer more details about his African audiences than the content of his lantern shows. A closer examination of his field diary reveals a dramatic shift in African reactions to the lantern, moving from reciprocal acts of storytelling to formal, courtly encounters to tense refusals to see the lantern show. The dramatic change in tone corresponds with the most politically-charged leg of his first expedition. As a Nduna of the Kololo, Livingstone represented the trade interests of both Britain and African empires. Reactions to Livingstone and his lantern not only reflect African attitudes towards British colonization, but also towards the Kololo who had provided men and provisions for Livingstone’s journey. Instead of reading Livingstone’s audiences in black-and-white terms, I show how local politics and local history shaped the reception of Livingstone and his projected images.
Similarly, Samuel and Dandeson Crowthers’ lantern show before King Pepple in 1867 reveals the complex political negotiation that happened in response to the images on screen. Unlike the missionaries discussed in the preceding examples, my third case study discusses a lantern show in which the projectionists as well as the audience members would have been considered “native” by their contemporaries. For the Crowthers, the lantern show registers as a performance of Britishness. Due to the inclusion of comic material, the Crowthers’ lantern show more closely resembles the annual Sunday School treats in Britain than those reported by non-native missionaries. For the Africans in the Crowthers’ audience, the lantern show offered an opportunity to consolidate King Pepple’s power. Oko Jumbo, one of the king’s sub-chiefs, eagerly explained the stories depicted on screen to the other chiefs. In the Gleaner, Oko Jumbo’s enthusiastic response speaks to the success of the Crowthers’ evangelistic efforts. The original letter suggests that Oko Jumbo’s role as translator was not simply a demonstration of academic mastery of scriptural material for the missionaries. Instead, it reads more as a carefully calculated performance of loyalty for King Pepple. The representation of the Crowthers' lantern shows in print were designed to appeal to juvenile members of the missionary society, who were also significant financial contributors to the London Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society.
As a study of the nineteenth-century screen experience, this dissertation explores the potential for digital publishing platforms to offer interactive, virtual encounters with archival material. Drawing from my experience as a project scholar for Livingstone Online, I present my analysis of primary sources through a Scalar-powered website. This tool enables me to form my case studies around 3D models of magic lanterns, 360 degree recordings of magic lantern shows, and animated images of slides described in eye-witness accounts. In doing so, I reconstruct the visual effects described by missionaries in their letters as a means to trace the visual tropes that current screen technologies inherited from nineteenth-century technologies. In the dissertation’s final chapter, I reflect on the digital methods that I used to mediate projectors, slides, and documents into a digital environment in order to advance a more just representation non-European contributors to the global history of the screen. By characterizing digital remediation as "knowledge design" in Jeffrey Schnapp's sense of the term, I expose the ways in which the dissertation's digital form prompted new directions for scholarly inquiry.
The dissertation concludes with a brief coda on Erewhon (2018), a play that remediates Samuel Butler’s novel of the same name (1872). The play exposes and negotiates the colonial underpinnings of Butler’s novel through a magic lantern and an iPhone, offering a mode of mediation that exposes the limitations of technology through which to view Britain’s colonial past while simultaneously using this technology to image more equitable and ethical futures.