“…Such spirits appeared frequently to those “who occupy their former earthly residences” (Nichols , 84), and when they did so, their alterity was embodied in stereotyped differences of language, “air, gestures, manners, and customers,” clearly demarcating those “white” control spirits, like Jimmy Nolan, who acted as proxy “figures of identity” (figures most similar to the self), from “Indian” control spirits who presented “figures of alterity” “with respect to which the (normal) identity of the speaker emerges as a sort of unmarked ground to the figure of abnormal alterity” (Hastings and Manning , 304):Among the remarkable phenomena of what is called Spiritualism in the Western, and therefore more recently settled portion of America, is the frequent influence or possession of persons called mediums by what claim to be the spirits of the Indians, who a few years ago owned and peopled the forests and prairies of that vast region. Many mediums, susceptible of such entire control, give their communications in the Indian languages, of which, in their natural state they are entirely ignorant.…”
Section: Racialized Voices: Whispering Whites and Loud Indiansmentioning
Recent media studies research on 19th‐century Spiritualism has foregrounded the technological metaphors that suffuse Spiritualist models of the séance. However, this article shows that the actual phatic channels proposed by Spiritualism consisted almost entirely of mediating chains of human spirits who stood between the bereaved séance guests and the spirits of the dear departed called “strangers.” While the “strangers” were, like the séance guests, departed white people, the authoritative “control spirits” were frequently exotic others such as “Indians” from the American imaginary of the Frontier. Beginning in 1875, the apparent transparency of the Spiritualist séance became the object of critique of an emerging occultist movement of Theosophy, which sought to undermine the authoritative human spirits of Spiritualism by turning the human spirits of the Spiritualist séance wholesale into disruptive non‐human mediators called “Diakkas,” “Bhuts,” and “Elementals,” and replacing Spiritualism's authoritative “Indian” control spirits drawn from the imaginary of the American frontier with Tibetan “Mahatmas” drawn from the orientalist imaginary of the Empire. These elementals initially represented noisy non‐human “parasites” of Spiritualist channels, but later these parasites take over the channel and become the channel themselves in the form of what came to be called the “elemental essence.”
“…Such spirits appeared frequently to those “who occupy their former earthly residences” (Nichols , 84), and when they did so, their alterity was embodied in stereotyped differences of language, “air, gestures, manners, and customers,” clearly demarcating those “white” control spirits, like Jimmy Nolan, who acted as proxy “figures of identity” (figures most similar to the self), from “Indian” control spirits who presented “figures of alterity” “with respect to which the (normal) identity of the speaker emerges as a sort of unmarked ground to the figure of abnormal alterity” (Hastings and Manning , 304):Among the remarkable phenomena of what is called Spiritualism in the Western, and therefore more recently settled portion of America, is the frequent influence or possession of persons called mediums by what claim to be the spirits of the Indians, who a few years ago owned and peopled the forests and prairies of that vast region. Many mediums, susceptible of such entire control, give their communications in the Indian languages, of which, in their natural state they are entirely ignorant.…”
Section: Racialized Voices: Whispering Whites and Loud Indiansmentioning
Recent media studies research on 19th‐century Spiritualism has foregrounded the technological metaphors that suffuse Spiritualist models of the séance. However, this article shows that the actual phatic channels proposed by Spiritualism consisted almost entirely of mediating chains of human spirits who stood between the bereaved séance guests and the spirits of the dear departed called “strangers.” While the “strangers” were, like the séance guests, departed white people, the authoritative “control spirits” were frequently exotic others such as “Indians” from the American imaginary of the Frontier. Beginning in 1875, the apparent transparency of the Spiritualist séance became the object of critique of an emerging occultist movement of Theosophy, which sought to undermine the authoritative human spirits of Spiritualism by turning the human spirits of the Spiritualist séance wholesale into disruptive non‐human mediators called “Diakkas,” “Bhuts,” and “Elementals,” and replacing Spiritualism's authoritative “Indian” control spirits drawn from the imaginary of the American frontier with Tibetan “Mahatmas” drawn from the orientalist imaginary of the Empire. These elementals initially represented noisy non‐human “parasites” of Spiritualist channels, but later these parasites take over the channel and become the channel themselves in the form of what came to be called the “elemental essence.”
“…This density becomes the semiotic condition that allows Eve's voice-affected by the Devil's temptation-to break through into the narrators' voices as an identifiable figure of alterity. 40 This space also produces the semiotic conditions that allow the deity's voice to break through into the narrators' voices both as a qualitative contrast to Eve's (and the Devil's) voice within the narrative and as a generalized command to all in attendance and all peoples of the world (''Everyone repent!''). In this way, the formulation of a moral chronotope of evangelism and sacrifice introduced early in the sermon becomes filled with characterological attributes qua moral voicings in competition one with another.…”
This paper is an analysis of the final sermon of Billy Graham’s 1973 Crusade in Seoul, South Korea, when he preached to a crowd estimated to exceed one million people. Next to Graham at the pulpit was Billy Jang Hwan Kim, a preacher who, in his capacity as interpreter, translated Graham’s sermon verbally and peri-verbally—utterance by utterance, tone by tone, gesture by gesture—for the Korean-speaking audience. I examine the dynamic pragmatics (for example, chronotopic formulations, deictic calibrations, voicing and register effects, and indexical dimensions of entextualization) by which a sermonic copy across linguistic codes became an evangelical conduit between Cold War polities. In so doing, I demonstrate how the scope of intertextual analysis can be expanded productively from the narrow translation of denotation across codes to the broader indexical processes of semiotic “transduction” across domains of cultural semiosis.
“…Evoked figures may not (re)present narrators' "own identity"/"selves," but may be figures of "otherness," from which current participants distance themselves (Hastings and Manning 2004). "Crossing" , when people perform out-group ways of speaking, often involves precisely such enactments of figures of otherness.…”
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