Bamboo Wireless: Mediating the Cold War in Asia (book manuscript in preparation)
“Hearing New Life: Record Players, Radio Broadcasting, and Missionary Aurality in Modern China, 1920–1949,” in Missionary Sources, Aayushi Gupta and Kate Tilson, eds. (Brill, forthcoming)
As recorded music and radio networks spread across modern China in the 1920s onward, an intersecting world of sonic technologies permeated the experiences of missionaries and Chinese Christian communities. Record players propagated popular and religious music in churches and mission compounds, while shortwave Christian radio stations promoted interregional broadcasts across interwar and early wartime eras. Such media amplified missionary and Chinese Christian voices as mediatory, reformist elements in Republican imaginations. Balancing cross-cultural engagements on-air and on the ground, radios and records embodied ideological ambiguities. On the one hand, they represented religious competition with the state; on the other, they served as Christian vehicles for national or transnational modernities and the nascent democratization of sound communication. Drawing from multimedia histories and recently- discovered private sources, this paper reconstructs sonic technologies and experiences linking the missionary enterprise and Republican China that are now beginning to be heard again.
“Through the Narrow Gate: Visual Performativity and Cinematic Translations of Missionary Transnationalism in China,” in Translation as Practice: Intercultural Encounters, China, and the Creation of Global Modernities, Filippo Marsili and Eugenio Menegon, eds. (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming)
As movie audiences settled into seats around the twentieth century world, the films they encountered on the silver screen featured the character of the missionary in China – equal parts hero(ine) and hapless victim, foreign interloper and embedded ally. This essay explores how missionaries as filmmakers or cinematic tropes reflected Sino-US ideals and anxieties about the other, translated by the colliding worlds of missions, Hollywood, and transpacific encounters.
I trace the ways in which missionaries-as-mediators blurred the lines between on-screen and on-the-ground experiences. At times, they served as technical advisors for the films that featured their characters, or as cinema critics in their own right, pointing out distortions of communities and environments in which they worked. In counterpoint, their on-screen portrayals provided lenses through which US commercial filmmakers projected ideas about gender and sexuality, racial difference, and colonial and postcolonial conflicts – from warlord-era clashes in Republican China to the Cold War in East Asia. In doing so, I argue that the missionary trope and its evolutions on screen represented highly mutable visions of American presence in China and global imaginations of modern Chinese identities.
