Page 217 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

200 Isabel Hofmeyr

Lower East Side, New York (Boyarin 1992), these studies explore different
dimensions of the mutually constitutive relationship of readers and texts and
what kinds of social practice such textual events (or multi-literacies [Street
1993]) constitute.
Allied to this work have been traditions of scholarship that seek to engage
self-consciously with the materiality of the text and what role this plays in
interpretation.
As Lynn Schofield Clark asks, what difference does it make to read the
Bible in a leather-bound, gilt-edged edition or in the format of the new
teenage magazine Bibles that mimic publications such as Cosmo Girl,
Seventeen, and Teen People (2007a: 1–33)? To purloin the subtitle of George
Bornstein’s Material Modernism (2001), “What is the politics of the page?”
Book history as a field of enquiry has sought to answer this question. In the
words of Roger Chartier, we need to understand “the text itself, the object
that conveys the text, and the act that grasps it” (1989: 161).
The remainder of this chapter seeks to explore these themes of text,
textual community, and social practice. The examples on which the chapter
relies are mainly drawn from nineteenth-century mission Protestantism.
Apart from this being my area of specialization, this topic provides us with
a unique purchase on questions of transnationalism. As the world globalizes
apace, the academy has to grapple with ways to address these emerging
realities. One key issue is how transnational subjects come into being.
What are the genres, modes of address, and forms of reading that must be
formulated for readers to imagine themselves in transnational terms? All too
often, this process is assumed to be self-evident. As mission Christianity is
always transnational, it provides a good point from which to consider this
question methodologically.
A focus on nineteenth-century textual transnationalism can act as a
supplement to the growing body of work on religion and media. Much of this
work tends to be on the reception and use of media within a defined national
territory. Whether examining Pentecostal films in Ghana (Meyer 2006) or
Christian bookstores in the United States (Borden 2007), the emphasis is
on the consumption of these media in a defined national space rather than
asking what happens between these spaces.
This chapter explores these questions under two rubrics: transnational
textual circulation and translation.

Transnational textual circulation

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