Shining Lights
This dissertation tells the story of shining lights within the nineteenth-century missionary movement. During this period of rapid technological development, missionaries marshalled physical illumination to promote spiritual insight. Thanks to portable magic lanterns and glass slides, missionaries like John Williams, David Livingstone, Samuel Crowther and his son Dandeson could communicate with an increasingly diverse range of potential converts by supplementing their spoken presentation of the gospel with visual material. Projection equipment made it possible to literally and figuratively “shine their light before men.” Although circulating lanterns was not their primary goal, missionaries’ efforts to spread Christianity produced what I would characterize as the first global screen culture. Projected images could transcend linguistic barriers in the South Seas and in Africa by conveying information visually rather than verbally. While these magic lantern shows were designed to inspire religious conversion, audience members often responded to the images on screen in ways that the missionaries did not expect. These responses ranged from lavish displays of wealth to tearful silence to raucous joke-telling.Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
Matthew 5:16 KJV
In order to reconstruct the content of these magic lantern shows and their cultural contexts, I rely on textual sources to trace when and where these lantern shows occurred. I then compare descriptions of images in text to extant examples of slides and lanterns. Rather than reading textual sources primarily as accounts of lantern shows, I analyze physical ephemera as records of intercultural contact and exchange through case studies that center around four missionaries who were well-known in the nineteenth-century. Restoring the cultural context of these lantern shows reveals the ways that audiences co-opted lantern shows in order to negotiate their relationship to Christianity and to the empire. Before doing so, I must first describe the historical factors that led to the global distribution of lantern slides, particularly the industrialization of slide manufacture. I then survey approaches to nineteenth-century magic lantern shows within scholarship on missionary activity and within pre-cinema studies. I draw from theories of mediation in media studies and anthropology to address the duality of textual sources as records of magic lantern shows and as representations of the cultural forces at play in the creation of these records. In doing so, I characterize the dissertation as an “archaeology of mediation” which excavates the layers of technology that shape representations of nineteenth-century magic lantern shows in physical and digital forms.
