Stratigraphy as Structure
Case Studies as Core Samples
This dissertation's primary narrative offers a series of case studies organized around Williams, Livingstone, and the Crowthers. This path through the material resembles a core sample by surveying the layers of technologies that mediate their magic lantern shows. As major figures within the missionary movement, they offer touchstones for the shifting priorities of the London Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society over the course of the nineteenth-century from evangelization inspired by British exploration of the South Pacific, to a conflation of missionary activity and geographic exploration, to the support of local church leaders and "native" missionaries. Throughout the nineteenth-century, global and local networks played a significant role in shaping the trajectory of missionary activity. John Williams’ lantern and sliders materialize the importance of local social networks in sustaining early missionary work in the South Pacific. Livingstone’s letters foreground the role Africans played in the extension of British trade networks. The Crowthers’ efforts to develop non-European (or “native”) church leadership relied on networks of donors created through the periodical press. However, editors downplayed the contributions of “native” missionaries to the lantern's global history by excising portions of their letters.The dissertation’s final chapter considers my own act of mediation in writing, designing, and building this website. Since the point-of-view preserved by the material archive is a European one, the representation of these artifacts risks reinforcing white narratives about Victorian colonial encounters. This problem is further compounded by the fact that current screen technologies inherited the visual vocabulary of the magic lantern show, particularly those given by Victorian missionaries. Thus, historically-inclined projects like mine must be doubly careful not to minimize non-European perspectives in their content or in their form. By thinking of digitization as a process, not just an aggregation of digital products, I practice a mode of digital scholarship that recognizes and celebrates the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century mediants who informed this project.
Layers in Focus
This dissertation offers a comparative study of mediating technologies through three additional paths. Each path focuses on a layer in this archaeology of mediation, thereby placing that technology in three different contents. Click the title to explore the path. (If you wish to continue following the dissertation's main path, use the blue button at the bottom of the page to navigate to the next page.)Technologies of the Magic Lantern Show
Within studies of the nineteenth-century missionary movement, the magic lantern has been described as a tool that reinforced the main tenets of Christianity while also functioning as a potent visual symbol of the benefits of increased trade. This perception of the lantern assumes that audio-visual modes of communication amplified calls for conversion and industrialization. While this may have been missionaries’ explicit goal, I argue that projected images more often than not undermined their evangelistic and economic endeavors. By pairing details of their shows with extant examples of slides, I demonstrate how the mechanical affordances of projection apparati contributed to moments of misrepresentation, miscommunication, and misunderstanding. The lantern shows of Williams, Livingstone, and Crowthers contained moments of implied violence. For Williams, the apparent materialization of Christ in the moment of his death elided the boundary between the space represented on screen and the world inhabited by the audience, ultimately undermining the Protestant theology driving Williams' missionary work. In Livingstone’s lantern shows, the image of Abraham sacrificing Isaac aligned with this theological views, but the Lunda members of the audience perceived this projected image as a physical threat because their geopolitical borders had been destabilized by the warfare and mass migration in South Africa. This threat jeopardized the formation of a new trade network proposed by the Kololo, Livingstone’s African sponsors. Dandeson Crowther’s lantern show relied on comedic violence as a form of humor. The mechanical slide of a butcher’s head swapping with a boar’s decapitated the figure on screen in order to make a visual pun in English. The humor of this slide was lost on their audience who spoke mainly Igbo and Bonny. This created an opportunity for a local cannibal to provide an alternate narrative for the slide by stating that it offered a moral for the audience should follow, thereby reinforcing local African forms of spirituality rather than Christian ones. Reconstructing these moments through digital tools required both object-oriented and experience-oriented practices of digital remediation.
Field-Authored Documents
As a secondary sites of mediation, field-authored documents like letters, journals, and diaries serve a double function in that they record details about the magic lantern show as well as information about the show’s local context. The appearance of lanterns and slides in these letters creates a textual space for representations of the audience. By foregrounding the presence of non-European perspectives in these materialities, I argue that lantern show audiences are best understood as microcosms of complex, local cultural landscapes. I demonstrate that missionaries leveraged the novelty of the lantern to increase local support for their missionary efforts. Though Williams' lantern shows did not result in professions of faith, the fact that there were Samoan catechists who could describe the content of the show in detail forty years later suggests that his lantern lectures on Samoa contributed to the sustained growth of the local Christian community. For Livingstone, partnerships with local African groups (many of whom would not be considered indigenous to the part of Africa which they inhabited) were grounded in mutual trade interests rather than in shared beliefs. The Ishinde’s performances of power and his expensive gifts to Livingstone reveal that the lantern show was part of a Kololo diplomatic mission to strengthen trade partnerships along the Barotse floodplain. The Crowthers’ characterization of the lantern show as a leisure activity created opportunities for them to monetize the lantern’s popularity in order to support building new churches. Their correspondence with well-placed members in the Church Missionary Society contributed to the development of a new publication that supported “native” pastors through funds and donations of equipment (including lantern apparati). Locating these letters and field-authored documents in the archive relied heavily on digital remediations of this material.
Publications
Published accounts of lantern shows in missionary society periodicals, expedition narratives, and biographies sheds light on the global circulation of narratives describing missionary efforts. By foregrounding the omissions and changes made by editors to field-authored material in preparation for print, I argue that the periodical played a central role in establishing the lantern’s reputation as an educational tool. In this endeavor, editors tended to adopt two strategies. The first was to elide moments of miscommunication or misunderstanding, including Williams’ assertion that the projected image was “just a representation” and Livingstone’s frustrated attempts to shout of particularly talkative crowds in Kololo and Lozi villages. Publsihed versions of the Crowthers’ lantern shows not only excluded the cannibal’s joke, but editorial changes aligned their lantern shows with Sunday School treats in Britain. This tactic infantilized the Crowthers’ adult African audiences in order to reinforce European missionary narratives about the need for white ecclesiastical and political leadership in Nigeria. Simultaneously, changes to the Crowthers’ letters were designed to appeal to British children as a means to encourage continued fundraising efforts. Digitally remediating and publishing these sources in a web-based environment engages in a project of recovery in order to foreground the contributions of non-European missionaries and audiences to early screen culture. In doing so, I imagine ethical futures for continued scholarly conversations through the dissertation’s web-based form.
