Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China

by Joseph W. Ho

Overview

In Developing Mission, Joseph W. Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space—tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic of China.

When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war.

Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501761850
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2022
Series:	The United States in the World
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joseph W. Ho is Associate Professor of History at Albion College and Center Associate at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. He is coeditor of War and Occupation in China.

Table of Contents

Introduction: All Things Visible and Invisible
1. New Lives, New Optics: Missionary Modernity and Visual Practices in Interwar Republican China
2. Converting Visions: Photographic Mediations of Catholic Identity in West Hunan, 1921–1929
3. The Movie Camera and the Mission: Vernacular Filmmaking as China-US Bridge, 1931–1936
4. Chaos in Three Frames: Fragmented Imaging and the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945
5. Memento Mori: Loss, Nostalgia, and the Future in Postwar Missionary Visuality
Epilogue: Latent Images

What People are Saying About This

Hiroshi Kitamura

Developing Mission is a finely textured study of US missionary practices in China during the first half of the twentieth century. Joseph W. Ho artfully uses photography and film to elucidate the influence of Christian expansionism and its place in the modern world. A wonderful read.

Motoe Sasaki

Weaving the history of technology and culture together with the history of cross-cultural/religious encounters, Joseph W. Ho tells a great story. Developing Mission sheds new light on the literature of the history of US missionaries in China.

Editorial Reviews

This book is an accomplishment deserving scholarly attention. It is well researched with a plethora of sources in both English and Chinese and does a marvelous job in helping us understand the centrality of image-making in missionary experiences.

Church History

Ho offers a rich, layered, and inspiring history of missionary visual practices. With a diverse range of subjects and a wealth of detail, the vernacular photographs and films offer a provocative alternative to modern visualizations of China.

Journal of Asian Studies

Developing Mission is a nuanced study of a deserving topic. Ho's prose is well crafted and his analysis reflects depth and engagement with a number of fields. The book should attract interest from scholars of modern Chinese history, global Christianity and missions, and historians of technology.

Fides et Historia

The book's distinguishing characteristics include its ingenious, informative title[.] It is of great value to graduate students and historians of Chinese Christianity, Sino-US cultural interactions, and photography and film.

Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture

Ho's examinations of missionary photographs offer a compelling perspective on noncombatant photography during times of war. [He] succeeds in making missionaries and their photographs visible once more and showing how they continue to connect some of their members across the communities they imaged.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Developing Mission is a groundbreaking contribution to the historiography of Chinese Christianity. Joseph Ho not only offers us a new and exciting methodology to incorporate photographic evidence into the study of mission history but also preserves the ever-receding memory of China's missionary era.

International Bulletin of Mission Research

Joseph W. Ho provides a cross-cultural history of American missionary visual practices. Focusing on the American missionaries' images and image making in China from the 1920s to the early 1950s, the book explores how missionaries employed the camera as an agent that facilitated the translations of missionary experiences and the shaping of cross-cultural identities.

-- "Journal of Asian Studies"

Ho offers a rich, layered, and inspiring history of missionary visual practices. With a diverse range of subjects and a wealth of detail, the vernacular photographs and films offer a provocative alternative to modern visualizations of China.

-- "Journal of Asian Studies"

Ho's multi-faceted analysis effectively underscores the seminal historic relationship of missionaries as photographers. This is accomplished with rich prose alongside well-researched biographical narratives that enliven the many Protestant, Catholic, and Chinese actors; pertinent references that combine Chinese and American religious and secular history; and finally, precise--yet inviting--technical writing about cameras. All aspects engage the reader to be both positively surprised and challenged as to unpack the interdisciplinary components, stories and theoretical content, in each chapter.

-- "American Catholic Studies"

The book's distinguishing characteristics include its ingenious, informative title[.] It is of great value to graduate students and historians of Chinese Christianity, Sino-US cultural interactions, and photography and film.

-- "Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture"

Developing Mission is an extremely well-written, lyrical book that speaks to multiple disciplines. Ho draws upon film theory in meaningful and clear terms and without recourse to much jargon. He frames his story within a historical context that is accessible, and he has a penchant for including anecdotes that are moving and meaningful. This book should be extremely popular among a wide range of audiences inside and outside the academy.

-- "Review of Religion and Chinese Society"

Developing Mission is a groundbreaking contribution to the historiography of Chinese Christianity. Joseph Ho not only offers us a new and exciting methodology to incorporate photographic evidence into the study of mission history but also preserves the ever-receding memory of China's missionary era.

-- "International Bulletin of Mission Research"

Developing Mission is a nuanced study of a deserving topic. Ho's prose is well crafted and his analysis reflects depth and engagement with a number of fields. The book should attract interest from scholars of modern Chinese history, global Christianity and missions, and historians of technology.

-- "Fides et Historia"

Ho's examinations of missionary photographs offer a compelling perspective on noncombatant photography during times of war. [He] succeeds in making missionaries and their photographs visible once more and showing how they continue to connect some of their members across the communities they imaged.

-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

This book is an accomplishment deserving scholarly attention. It is well researched with a plethora of sources in both English and Chinese and does a marvelous job in helping us understand the centrality of image-making in missionary experiences.

-- "Church History"

From the Publisher

Developing Mission advances the study of missions and photography in three additional ways.

AMERICAN CATHOLIC STUDIES

Ho's multi-faceted analysis effectively underscores the seminal historic relationship of missionaries as photographers. This is accomplished with rich prose alongside well-researched biographical narratives that enliven the many Protestant, Catholic, and Chinese actors; pertinent references that combine Chinese and American religious and secular history; and finally, precise—yet inviting—technical writing about cameras. All aspects engage the reader to be both positively surprised and challenged as to unpack the interdisciplinary components, stories and theoretical content, in each chapter.

American Catholic Studies

Developing Mission is an extremely well-written, lyrical book that speaks to multiple disciplines. Ho draws upon film theory in meaningful and clear terms and without recourse to much jargon. He frames his story within a historical context that is accessible, and he has a penchant for including anecdotes that are moving and meaningful. This book should be extremely popular among a wide range of audiences inside and outside the academy.

Review of Religion and Chinese Society

Joseph Ho's book adds a welcoming balance to the field.

Church History Review