Evangelical Encounters: The American Tract Society and the Affective Rituals of Print Circulation in Antebellum America

Sonia Hazard examines the largest media distribution system in antebellum America. Colportage mobilized hundreds of salaried distributors who delivered tracts to poor people at the doors of their homes. At its heart,... [ view full abstract ]

Sonia Hazard examines the largest media distribution system in antebellum America. Colportage mobilized hundreds of salaried distributors who delivered tracts to poor people at the doors of their homes. At its heart, colportage was a performance built around the spiritual primacy of evangelistic encounter: the asymmetric interaction between saver and sinner. Hazard mobilizes ritual studies and affect theory to argue that these serial encounters were affectively-charged rituals. Colporteurs staged a disposition of spaces, bodies, gestures, speech acts, and tempos in order to intensify affect, shape the subjectivity of readers, and to consecrate tracts as sacred objects. Mass-produced printed objects and their readers were transformed through the forge of ritual and its affects. Hazard’s investigation into the experiences of colportage suggests a rethinking of media’s “circulation,” a word that tends to imply fluidity or even simultaneity, a kind of free and self-perpetuating movement of things across a terrain. Here circulation was a form of hard affective and ritual labor that did religious work.