event

Public Lecture | Imago Mundi: Transnational Filmmaking and American Jesuit Missions in Early Cold War China

26

Jun

This talk explores the filmmaking of American Jesuit missionaries in China between 1947 and 1949, illuminating rare missionary films in conjunction with relationships between Chinese Catholic communities and international church networks immediately before the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

About the Talk:

This talk explores the filmmaking of American Jesuit missionaries in China between 1947 and 1949, illuminating rare missionary films in conjunction with relationships between Chinese Catholic communities and international church networks immediately before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Drawing from rare 16mm color films uncovered at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History and related Jesuit archives, Prof. Joseph W. Ho examines how these films captured nostalgic perceptions of lost possibilities for both missionary filmmakers and Chinese participants, while also representing hopes for the survival of religious communities fragmented by the Chinese Civil War and the nascent Cold War.

Furthermore, the films’ contents – liturgical, cultural, and political imagery – were uniquely framed by their makers’ ground-level experiences before 1949, with technological mediations of shifting temporalities and transnational spaces.

Finally, Prof. Ho traces the films forward from their creation to re-interpretations in later Sino-US relationships and rediscovery in late 20th–early 21st century archives. The films’ evolving meanings emerge as mutable images of loss, hope, and futurity – projected onto global Catholic identities through vernacular filmmaking practices.

One full-length film explored in this talk, Ageless China (1949) will be screened during the conference on 27 June, 7:00–9:00 PM in Fátima Auditorium. This will be the first time in nearly 65 years that this film will be seen in its entirety by a public audience, anywhere in the world.

About the Speaker:

Joseph W. Ho, Associate Professor of History, Albion College, Michigan

Joseph W. Ho is Associate Professor of History at Albion College, Michigan, and a Center Associate at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. He is a historian of modern East Asia, Sino-US encounters, and transnational visual culture and media. Ho is the co-editor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937–1938 (Lehigh University Press, 2017) and the author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2024–2025, he will hold fellowships at Stanford University and the University of Michigan, as well as the EDS-Stewart Distinguished Research Fellowship at Boston College’s Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History. He is currently preparing two new books: Time Exposures: Catholic Photography and the Evolution of Modern China (Hong Kong University Press), co-authored with Anthony E. Clark, and his next monograph, Bamboo Wireless: Mediating the Cold War in Asia.

Details:

Date: Wednesday, 26 June 2024 
Time: 19:30 – 21:00 (GMT+8)
Location: Don Bosco Auditorium, University of Saint Joseph Ilha Verde Campus
Language: English

Organised by Faculty of Religious Studies and Philosophy, Xavier Centre for Memory and Identity
Moderated by Prof. Thomas Cai

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Attend Online:

For more information, please contact Dr. Thomas Cai at thomas.cai@usj.edu.mo.

*This is a free event and open to the general public