Singapore: NUS Press, 2020. xx, 430 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$36.00, paper. ISBN 9789813251090.
This book could have and should have been written more than a decade ago, when the historiography of circulations, crossings, and mobilities across Asian seas was peaking. The nodal centrality of Penang in Jean DeBernardi’s excellent history of Christianity’s globalization in Asia through the Brethren archives inevitably invokes the 2001–2002 Penang Story project, which brought together conservationists, intellectuals, and scholars to explore the connections and tangents that made Penang a world heritage site. The resulting collection, Penang and Its Region (NUS Press, 2009), was part of an emerging historiographical movement that gave us the analytical vocabulary and, no less important, transnational imaginaries, to witness the inter-constitutive formation of the global and the local across our histories and see our cherished local landscapes in the new light of intercultural hybridities.
Christian Circulations could be read as a successor to this trajectory of scholarship on Indian Ocean transnationalisms stretching from Engseng Ho’s Graves of Tarim (University of California Press, 2006) to Sunil Amrith’s Crossing the Bay of Bengal (Harvard University Press, 2013), but as the South China Seas counterpart. Unfortunately, DeBernardi very carefully avoids the referencing of this rich body of scholarship despite the obvious links. Instead, DeBernardi locates her work resolutely in the global history of Pentecostalism and mission history, with British theologian and historian Allan Anderson as her main interlocutor. As a scholar of Chinese Catholic heritage, I cannot help but see the obvious historiographical issues of diasporic Chinese genealogies and mobilities, inflected through the meaning mill of conflicts and accommodation between evolving Christian practices and Chinese popular religions, as everyone struggles with the question of modernity.
DeBernardi alludes to these throughout the texts, from the Hokkien evangelists’ tussle with the Guanyin Temple in George Town in the 1870s, to China-origin revival and evangelism of the interwar years, to the quarrel between the Hong Kong-origin New Testament Church on the one hand and the Church of Singapore and the Charismatic Church of Penang on the other hand over authentic Pentecostalism in the 1960s. Yet it is surprising she does not tackle the mutations of Chineseness and Christianity, especially since her works on Chinese religion, identity, and modernity in Penang, Rites of Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2004) and The Way that Lives in the Heart (Stanford University Press, 2006), are well known. Christian Circulations is a missed chance for the final book in a would-be brilliant trilogy.
As someone who also studies the rise of independent Asian Christianity, I deeply appreciate DeBernardi’s assiduous tracing of links and interactions between Western and Chinese missionaries as they voyaged between Southeast Asia and China through the port cities of Penang and Singapore. These are dotted lines that many of us see faintly, as familiar names of individual and influential evangelists pop up in conversations, interviews, tracts, and texts. Now DeBernardi has provided us with an authoritative mapping of the ideational and interpersonal relationships between these individuals and institutions. Not just a cartography of Christian networks, fraying and reforming, Christian Circulations assures us that no religion should be seen as either global or local, or neither local nor global, but always both in flux.
Yet the methodological individualism drawing on George Simmel’s refusal to see society as anything “more than individuals connected by interaction” (358) causes Christian Circulations to stop short of asking important sociological and anthropological questions. The first segment of DeBernardi’s story about Western missions to the region, consisting of seven short chapters in two parts, is about the sojourn from Britain to India to Penang and finally to China and the Taiping Rising, before the disappointing return to Penang. This is a story of desire for China, where Penang and Singapore appear to be merely waypoints and staging ports, a recurrent theme since St. Francis Xavier stopped over in Portuguese Malacca. In DeBernardi’s story, missionary efforts in Penang and Singapore were fitful, but she cites sporadic evidence of local efforts to keep the flame alive. The circulations look less circulatory than merely passing through Southeast Asia. The interesting question is how Asian Christianity was formed and shaped by this history of abandonment.
In part 3 of the book, “Circulations,” the pace of the narrative quickens, with longer chapters showing the movement of ideas and evangelists. DeBernardi alludes to the scholarship on Asian transnationalisms, locating Singapore as the emerging central node in Southeast Asia from which the evangelists visited “every city,” preaching among the diasporic Chinese in Java, in chapter 8, and referencing the Penang Story by pointing to “Penang and Its Networks, 1874–1912” for chapter 9. China continues to haunt the narrative, as chapter 10 explores the consequences of the anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion for pushing missionaries back to Penang and Singapore, just as the Chinese elites in these two cities began to form their nationalist voices and engage Christianity in their quest for Chinese modernities.
Part 4 of the book is titled “Schism and Continuity” and tracks the struggles of the local churches as they grow independently and engage with new influences in the twentieth century. This part reads like a new book on the contemporary history of the indigenization of evangelical Pentecostalism and its entanglements with new national forms of Chineseness. Though the book claims to end its history in the year 2000, the story of circulations ends with the Church of Singapore breaking away from the New Testament Church in 1965, the year Singapore separated from Malaysia, and thus away also from the circulations of the Chinese diaspora into a localized parochialism. This is another missed chance for DeBernardi, to historicize the old circulations of the British Empire and the China prize with the new transpacific circulations of American Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism sweeping the region during the Cold War.
Daniel P. S. Goh
National University of Singapore, Singapore