All Things Visible and Invisible: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Christian Missions in Modern China

[摘要] ;;All Things Visible and Invisible;; is a transnational history of visual practices situated in Sino-US cultural and religious encounters across the Republican era and the early PRC. This study examines photography and filmmaking as visual world-making – a collective culture of vernacular visual practices and image-based knowledge production. I investigate the ways in which American Protestant and Catholic missionaries imaged their experiences in China while developing a visual ;;missionary modernity” (ways of seeing shaped by modern cross-cultural and religious perceptions) against the backdrop of local and national Chinese histories. I take into close account the specific imaging technologies – variations in image-making processes and equipment – that structured these practices and their historical afterlives. As mobile material artifacts, still images and films also circulated representations of on-the-ground experiences across transnational cultural networks, visually bridging China and the world. These visual practices ultimately escaped their missionary mold and entered greater trans-Pacific cultural imaginations, uniquely mediating Chinese and American identities while shaping modern visions of a global East Asia.Drawing from a large body of previously unexamined photographs, films, and private and institutional documents, I map the history of American missionary visual practices onto a larger trans-regional history of Republican China (and after 1949, the early People’s Republic of China) between 1921 and 1951. I begin by tracing American Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries’ first visual encounters with interwar China, and then continuing into connections between photographic experience and religious conversion; vernacular filmmaking and translations of time and local community; and missionary visual practices as shaped by the contingencies of the Second Sino-Japanese War. I conclude with links between visual imagination and nostalgia surrounding the American missionary enterprise’s postwar decline and the competing rise of the People’s Republic. In sum, ;;All Things Visible and Invisible;; argues that visual practices were central to American missionaries’ ways of envisioning modern China and Chinese communities’ representation in transnational cultural and religious institutions – even as the world itself radically reshaped those behind and in front of the lens.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] US History

[关键词] Modern Chinese History;US History;Visual Culture;History of Photography;Global and Transnational History;Global Christianity;History (General);Humanities;History