TRANSNATIONAL TEXTUAL CIRCULATION

Isabel Hofmeyr

The protestant evangelical mission movement can usefully be considered as a pioneer of transnational print mass media. Driven by urgent evangelical imperatives, Protestant mission organizations were responsible for pumping out billions of printed texts to all corners of the globe. In the words of one of its historians, the movement was “the greatest single medium of mass communication in the nineteenth century” (Bradley 1976: 41).

Seen theologically, this activity is not surprising. Evangelicals held that Christ’s “great commission” to spread the gospel formed the core of Christianity. There was an urgent imperative to disseminate Christian ideas to as many people as possible.

Unsurprisingly, one prevalent theme in mission media was that of conspicuous circulation. Mission exhibitions invariably included displays of religius material that had been translated into foreign languages. This translation dramatized the fact that these texts had circulated far and wide. Likewise figures such as the colporteur or Bible woman enacted mission texts in motion. Transport was a trope in mission narratives with ships forming a common thread in mission publicity. Most large mission societies owned sea-going vessels to ferry their personnel about. Such ships provided publicity opportunities in terms of funding drives, stories, pictures, hymns, and poems. The ship became a metaphor of the word itself, sailing out to all corners of the globe.

In the early years of the Protestant mission movement, this belief in conspicuous circulation expressed itself in the widespread notion that the Bible, unaided by human hands, would magically circulate, converting all those it encountered. The early propaganda of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBC), founded in 1804, portrayed Bible rather like mini missionaries (Canton 1904: 317). In these parables, text are invested with extraordinary powers of possession and enchantment.

This theory of enchanted reading is particularly clear in relation to a key evangelical genre, the tract. Handbooks on tract distribution and reading portrayed these “noiseless messengers” (USCL 1948: title) as mesmerizing objects. In one account, a man is given a tract that he tears up in a rage and throws down on the carpet, expecting that the servant will sweep it away. The next day, the torn scraps remain. The man summons the servant. She explains the she saw the word eternal on one of the pieces of paper and felt afraid to sweep it away. The man sticks the pieces of torn paper together, reads the tract and is converted (Watts 1934: 8).

On the face of it, this view of textuality may appear unremarkable. Across all religions, sacred texts are assumed to have magical properties: they fall from heaven, they are acquired in dreams, they are dictated by angels. This example would constitute an evangelical Protestant instance of this phenomenon, driven as such ventures were by urgency and fervor.

However, this miraculous circulation also has to be read in terms of technological development on which it depended and at times stimulated. As Lesley Howsam’s history of the BFBS demonstrates, the modernization of the bookbinding industry was precipitated by the BFBS-created demand for Bibles (1991). The BFBS were ever on the lookout for new forms of technology that could provide sturdily bound Bible in the numbers required. By the early nineteenth century, bookbinding was still organized as a small craft industry. Before the 1820s, books were not bound as a matter of course and instead, it was common practice to buy unbound sheets and have theme bound to the customer’s specifications (Howsam 1991: 123).

The book as we know it today, namely as a modern commodity, identically produced in edition bindings, did not fully exist. The organization that helped to bring this practice into being was the BFBS, which required large numbers of books whose bindings could withstand the distances they had to travel. Under the pressure of BFBS production schedules, bookbinding was forcibly shifted from a pre-modern craft to a modern mass-production industry.

A consideration of religius texts in the Protestan mission domain, then, leads us into the heart of modernity itself. One part of this relationship hinges on the ways in which the production and management of Protestant texts acted as a force for modernist innovation. David Nord’s work on the American Bible Society demonstrates how the exigencies of distributing texts across vast distances brought into being modern management practices such as detailed record keeping and statistics (2007: 37-66).

A second aspect of Protestant textual production and modernity is less direct and pertains to the oft-noted way in which modernity, an apparently austere and secular process, in fact feeds off ideas of magic and enchantment. By its own account, modernity is meant to be a universal force of rationality, secularism, and disenchantment. However, as much recent work indicates, this universal rationality is something of an optical illusion. On the one hand, this mirage depends on the trick of passing off a particular European historical experience as universal (Chakrabarty 2000). On the other, modern institutions and their audiences conspire to imbue modernity with magical abilities as a way of making these new institutions intelligible (Murdock 1997). The widely studied phenomena of viewers believing that televisual media are haunted forms part of this process (Sconce 2000). Televisual media portray people who are not there. Rather than mastering the boring mechanical detail of this phenomenon, popular cultural beliefs gloss this process in terms of ghosts and spirits.

The mass production and circulation of Bible captures these processes of enchantment admirably. This development depended on a combination of magical evangelical belief and cutting-edge technology through which identical commodities poured out of bookbinding factories. BFBS publicity insisted this circulation was divinely inspired and at times sought to suppress its mechanical aspects, in one case removing the phrase “printed by machinery” from a BFBS edition (Howsam 1991: 95). More speculatively, we might also ask how Protestant ideas of magical circulation create an environment in which the idea of transnational circulation itself can start to make sense.

Yet, what of the reception of these circulating texts? What did readers in various parts of the world make of Protestant Bibles? To address this issue, we turn to themes of translation.