Conference Agenda

When a group of Congregationalist Williams College graduates founded the American Marathi Mission in Bombay in 1813, they became the first American missionaries abroad and the first Protestant missionaries to establish a permanent station in western India. American missionaries’ role in the “civilizing mission” of the British Raj is rarely acknowledged, but a study of their magic lantern exhibitions suggests that they helped set in motion a sonic/visual paradigm that reverberated within and beyond colonial India. In 1865, Rev. Henry Bruce of Massachusetts discovered that he could gather large, attentive audiences on evangelical tours of the Masharashtrian countryside with the help of the magic lantern. Bruce’s lantern exhibitions included Christian morality tales accompanied by slides of bourgeois, white America, Bible stories illustrated by painted slides of (white) biblical figures, and an occasional Marathi hymn. He took Marathi listeners’ silent spectatorship as evidence of religious awe and the seed of modern subjectivity, but for listeners whose spaces of everyday life had become illuminated by white faces and unrecognizable homes, confusion seems just as likely. They were, moreover, not as silent as Bruce’s idealized accounts suggest.

The “society of spectacle,” in Guy Debord’s influential terms, re-presents the activities of life as consumable images and staged events (DeBord 1967). For Debord, spectacle depoliticizes and pacifies through its “permanent opium war,” a choice of words that resonates with Marx’s characterization of religion as the “opium of the people.” Despite this evocation of a famous statement on religion and power, Debord’s universalizing abstraction says little about religious discourse or experience, nor about colonialism, race, or sound. The magic lantern is in many ways a prime exemplar of Debordian spectacle—missionary slides were commodified images meant to produce a passive, quiet spectatorship that indexed both modern listening and Christian listening. But attendees at lantern shows were not just spectators; they were also audiences in the more literal, auditory sense. In this talk, I argue that silent spectatorship was the missionary and capitalist ideal, but Marathi audiences used their voices to deflect and resist the power of the white, mediated image, effectively transforming spectacles into events.

Displaying artificial optical illusions in theatrical settings was fashionable in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In particular, phantasmagoria, spirit images that were painted on glass slides and projected from the magic lantern, were often presented by illusionists with sound effects, which produced a compelling sense of realism in the images’ “liveliness” and enhanced the entertainment value of the show. Such display of optical illusion has inspired recent music scholars in their re-reading of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertory. However, a more skeptical reading of optical illusion, one that associates the idea of confusing (and confused) vision with deception and Otherness, has not been fully investigated, even though this reading prevailed in the literature, philosophy, and commercial products of the same era.

In this paper, I focus on this “private” reading of optical illusion. Using the contents of selected magic lantern slides and cardboard images housed at the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles) and a magic lantern in the collection of the Toy Museum, Nürnberg, I illustrate how commercial products that circulated in nineteenth-century bourgeois households problematize the spectacle embedded in optical illusion, which often represents the racial Other. Connecting this reading to Die Frau ohne Schatten, I argue that R. Strauss and Hofmannsthal re-defined conventional readings of optical illusion by cultivating traditional understandings of glass, especially its material attributes. Hofmannsthal invokes glass’s fluidity and artificiality to depict the heroine’s supernatural identity and her ability to manipulate the senses of humankind, yet endows her with a shadow, a symbol of humanity, in the end. Strauss chooses the glass harmonica, an instrument long associated with the otherworldly, to portray her transformation into humanity. These “redemptions” of optical illusion’s traditional association with the supernatural and its opposition to humanity suggest both artists’ awareness of and critical response to that convention. My discussion expands on recent scholarship on the theatrical aspects of optical illusion. I also offer an alternative to seeing nineteenth-century music and visual culture in unilateral alliance, a tendency in recent scholarly discourse.

Historians commonly deride the British colonial administrator Frank Brayne for two reasons: his quintessentially Victorian paternal bigotry against his Punjabi charges, and his less-quintessentially Victorian faith that the media technologies of gramophone, radio, and magic lantern would improve agriculture by improving Punjabi peasants’ moral and cognitive development. Brayne toured Punjab’s countryside and All-India Radio’s studios with songs celebrating village industry, magic lantern lectures about his songs, and songs about his lantern lectures. Like Brayne’s administrative colleagues, historians since the 1990s describe these efforts as singular, “quixotic” failures. This paper partially revises these accounts by reversing historians’ focus, examining colonial musical propaganda’s effects on the metropole, not the colony. Evidence in gramophone recordings, classified documents, newspapers, and film-industry publications suggests that Brayne’s magic lantern lectures and their promises of music-mediated development successfully captured hearts and minds — but those of British nobility, not Punjabi peasantry. Colonial musical propaganda failed to stimulate village economies, and radio broadcasts failed to reach villages. But through retellings of musical propaganda’s heroic successes in lantern lectures in England, the idea of musical propaganda successfully stimulated the imaginations of Christian missionaries and Brayne’s elite patrons . This was no small achievement, in light of contemporaneous English suspicions about “publicity’s” social consequences. British administrators favorably termed Brayne’s novel musical propaganda “The Mussolini Model” when debating its efficacy, and the efficacy of British imperial-developmental enterprise.

By siting Brayne’s seemingly “quixotic” failures to musically “develop” Punjabis in the context of British imperial fantasies of (musical) persuasion, I extend the scope of these ostensibly “local” musical propaganda efforts to transnational debates over colonial development. London elites praised Brayne’s magic lantern lectures, perhaps because Brayne’s fantasies of mass-mediated musical persuasion invoked administrator-theorist J.S. Mill’s influential proposition that mass-mediated communication spurred societal development, which Mill’s disciples enacted in colonial policy. Brayne’s successes in acquiring publicity for musical propaganda, failures to persuade villagers, and his music’s wider circulation through magic lantern than through radio, all suggest that colonial propaganda was most effective for elite self-persuasion about imperial power in purportedly powerful new media — a form of musical magical thinking using musical magic lanterns.