American Book Research Articles

Pulpit, Press, and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada

Scott McLaren’s fine study provides a detailed analysis of Methodist book culture in early nineteenth-century Upper Canada. His discussion of book production, supply, sales, pricing, and profits illuminates how Canadian Methodists responded to the oft-competing influence of their American and British Methodist colleagues in a charged and turbulent political context.McLaren is a historian and librarian at York University in Toronto, and he writes in a very readable and engaging style. He does not presume much knowledge of Canadian Methodism, perhaps because the book was published in a series on book culture rather than a specialized religious history series. Thus, the story of Methodism in Upper Canada unfolds naturally as McLaren discusses his topic. His lens is broad, and he considers books and periodicals both as an important part of Methodist finances and as cultural objects with a deep connection to denominational identity. In so doing, McLaren offers fresh insight on book culture and Canadian religious historiography.McLaren’s argument proceeds chronologically, and the first chapter focuses on the establishment of the Methodist Book Concern in America and its early inroads into Upper Canada before the War of 1812. McLaren highlights how the Book Concern marketed its products as integral to the greater good of the Methodist Episcopal Church, thus establishing its wares as key markers of denominational loyalty. Methodism came to Upper Canada from the United States, and McLaren discusses the way early preachers such as Nathan Bangs and William Case sold books from their saddlebags, creating an insular denominational market in a context where books were difficult to acquire.In the second chapter, McLaren argues that American Methodist books and periodicals were decisive in maintaining Canadian ecclesiastical ties to the Methodist Episcopal Church after the War of 1812, despite strong political pressure to cut off all American influence. Chapter 3 centres on Egerton Ryerson, whose publishing activities (including the founding of the Christian Guardian newspaper in 1830) furthered his fight against the creation of a religious establishment in Upper Canada.The fourth chapter discusses the tightrope that Canadian Methodists walked as they began to assert ecclesiastical independence while remaining financially dependent on the sale of American Methodist books. Ongoing political pressure pushed the Canadians to pursue a shaky merger with the British Wesleyans in 1833. McLaren highlights the disadvantageous terms that the Wesleyans forced upon Canadian book sales, requiring them to purchase more expensive products from the London Book Room at a lower discount than they received from the Americans. The merger also undercut the ongoing Canadian petition for a financial settlement from the American Book Concern, discussed in the fifth chapter. The already weakened Canadian case went up in smoke when a February 1836 fire ravaged the Book Concern in New York. However, McLaren argues that the Canadians’ failed pursuit of a lump-sum settlement allowed them to reset their relationship with the Americans. The Canadians continued to receive steep discounts on the Book Concern’s publications, and they were able to free themselves of the pretence that their bookselling partnership was part of a shared denominational identity.This set the stage for the revitalization of the Canadian Book Room under John Ryerson and Anson Green’s stewardship in the 1840s, discussed in chapter 6. Much to the chagrin of the British Wesleyans, who dissolved their merger with the Canadians in 1840 (only to re-establish it seven years later), American books continued to dominate among Canadian Methodists, but they were now marketed for their low cost, rather than their status as markers of denominational loyalty. McLaren argues that this shift to seeing American books simply as commodities had far-reaching effects on Canadian publishing. The Canadian Methodist Book Room went on to become a major supplier of books to the broader reading public, and later established an important Canadian publisher that produced secular as well as religious literature. This distinctly Canadian path, McLaren notes, diverges from British and American Methodist publishing, both of which maintained a more strictly religious focus.McLaren’s book is based on careful scholarship and displays his extensive knowledge of Canadian Methodist history. His argument contrasts with that of Todd Webb, whose Transatlantic Methodists (2013) stressed the importance of British Wesleyan influence. McLaren’s focus on publishing points to an important stream of American Methodist influence, which endured long after official ecclesiastical ties to the Methodist Episcopal Church were severed. If he were writing today, one suspects that McLaren would discuss Egerton Ryerson’s influence on the development of the Indigenous residential school system. The issue is not directly relevant to McLaren’s argument, and the harmful residential school programme was not developed until the later nineteenth century. However, it would be helpful to address it on some level, given the ongoing public debate concerning Ryerson’s legacy, punctuated by the recent toppling and decapitation of his statue in Toronto.

Indigenous Divergences from the Sacrifice Zones and Rehabilitations of Extractivism When the Hills are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community. ThomasPearson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 256 pp.The Extractive Zone. MacarenaGómez‐Barris. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 208 pp.ExtrACTION: Impacts, engagements, and alternative futures. KirkJalbert, AnnaWillow, DavidCasagrande and StephaniePaladino, eds. New York: Routledge, 2017. 237 pp.

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean AnthropologyEarly View Book Review Indigenous Divergences from the Sacrifice Zones and Rehabilitations of Extractivism When the Hills are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community. Thomas Pearson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 256 pp. The Extractive Zone. Macarena Gómez-Barris. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 208 pp. ExtrACTION: Impacts, engagements, and alternative futures. Kirk Jalbert, Anna Willow, David Casagrande and Stephanie Paladino, eds. New York: Routledge, 2017. 237 pp. Juan Javier Rivera Andía, Juan Javier Rivera Andía orcid.org/0000-0002-4099-5765 Polish Institute of Advanced StudiesSearch for more papers by this author Juan Javier Rivera Andía, Juan Javier Rivera Andía orcid.org/0000-0002-4099-5765 Polish Institute of Advanced StudiesSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12597Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

A Content Analysis of Chinese American Contemporary Realistic Fiction Books

AbstractThis paper reviews a corpus of 40 Chinese American contemporary realistic fiction picturebooks published in the United States. These picturebooks feature Chinese immigrants adjusting to American culture, Chinese American celebrating heritage culture, bridging two cultures, and connecting with their home country. The findings reveal that these picturebooks authentically reflect the Chinese American's lived experiences, celebrate their heritage culture, and emphasize their value of family and intergenerational relationships. Some picturebooks depict the tension of the language barrier. Other than immigrant life and poverty, none of these picturebooks witnesses issues around race, gender, and same‐sex families, although most picturebooks feature female main characters. Instructional implications are provided for teachers to use Chinese American picturebooks.

One step away from hell? Transformation of books into art objects

The article considers a popular and controversial modern phenomenon — the use of books as a medium for various mixed media art forms. The author gives examples of contemporary book altering techniques, such as book carving, painting and upcycling, etc., following the trend of transforming our interaction with books into a show of craftsmanship and entertainment. The critic points out that, in order to create a visually stunning and artistically expressive altered book, artists often work with beautifully published tomes, complete with quality materials, imaginative design and moderately used look, rather than with inferior mass-produced or defective books. It is not uncommon for book alterers to use antiques or rare editions: for example, British and American book artists particularly value Victorian books. It follows that, rather than popularising and creatively reimagining the book as such, this fad causes erosion of the meaning and profanes the process of book reading and contemplating.

CAN WHITE AMERICANS INCLUDE COLORS IN THEIR CANON? SEARCHING A POST-NATIONAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

Racism in the USA not only takes place in law, economics, politics, mass media and new media, education, literature, and popular culture but also occurs in philosophy. An abundance of Latino philosophers, African-American philosophers, and Native American philosophers are excluded from the American philosophy canon. To discover whether racism happens in the field of American philosophy, the writer surveys 15 American philosophy books written between the 1940s and the 2020s by various American writers, the whites and the non-whites. The writer carries out an ‘index-study’: scanning philosopher names in the index of each book, identifying and scrutinizing the names, listing and categorizing them into race categories, counting them, comparing the number of non-white philosophers and white philosophers mentioned in each book, putting them in a table, and interpreting why there is a disparity between the number of non-white and white philosophers included in the books. The survey result shows that racism happens in American philosophy; the writers of the 15 American philosophy books exclude an abundance of non-white philosophers. There is a critical need to write a new, post-national American philosophy book that does justice to non-white philosophers in the near future so that racism diminishes.

Interpreting the Mark in the Graphic Novel "Palestine": A Reportage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

The graphic novel "Palestine" is one of the graphic novel documentaries about the conflict in Palestine. The purpose of this research is to understand the process of meaning 'marks' in the graphic novel. The method used is qualitatively descriptive. The results suggest that the graphic novel "Palestine" may never know whether the "mark" can change things, but Joe Sacco's graphic novel "Palestine" was recognized as the best novel at the American Book Award in 1996, although at the same time it was denounced by the Israeli media and public.Â

In a Word, and: Flashlight, and: Absence, and: Embrace

In a Word, and: Flashlight, and: Absence, and: Embrace Dunya Mikhail (bio) In a Word When my students misspell Arabic,they discover how letterscan change fates.Amal (hope) can makean anagram of alam (pain),an exercise I'd hesitate to dissuade,and shafa (healing) will meansome shaqa (suffering)I can't spare them,but when they learn bahr,letting them express a desireto go to sea, I ensure they don'tspell harb, before they end upin a war they never intended.Even a kiss (qubla) could explodeif they wrote qunbla (bomb),but I can't keeptheir best teacher (life)from giving themall the lessons they need. [End Page 11] Flashlight They all know the little boyfrom the flashlighthe carries—not from a fearof the dark in Tahrir Squarebut to shine it as he searchesfor his father, among the facespainted on the tunnel wall.Every day the protestersdraw new facesand when he haloes themwith his flashlight, another deathilluminates their firmament.When one day,the little boy didn't arrive,his face was painted on the wall,beside a dimmed flashlight. Absence The tree too,gets memory loss.She forgets the birdsand their nests on the branchestenderly encircling the eggs,the breath of their flapping wingsteaching her leaves to fly.She forgets the birdsongs,as if she didn't hear them seasonafter season, just as she doesn't waitfor them to return after the storm. [End Page 12] When a bullet tumbles one birdfrom its perch, seed fallingfrom its beak—she will forgetthat, too, but she will knowsomething is missing,leaving a scar in the placewhere a strange silence abides. Embrace Deep inside the beach,moss grows around a rock:a soft embrace.When the water washes it away,it trembles like the gestureswe make waving from balconiesfor our loved onesin the time of pandemic. [End Page 13] Dunya Mikhail Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965 and came to the United States in 1996. Her books include In Her Feminine Sign, selected as the Wild Card Choice (UK) and chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019; The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, a finalist for the pen/John Kenneth Galbraith Award and long-listed for the National Book Award; The Iraqi Nights, which received POETRY magazine's Translation Award; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, which won the Arab American Book Award; and The War Works Hard, shortlisted for the Griffon Poetry Prize and named one of the New York Public Library's Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005. She edited a pamphlet titled 15 Iraqi Poets. She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press

Franklin Book Programs in Iran (ca 1953–1978) and the politics of translation during the Cold War

ABSTRACT During the Cold War, books in translation were considered an important means of strengthening ideological and cultural influence in many regions of the world. Among a variety of different publishing activities undertaken, Franklin Book Programs, a US-initiated translation and publishing venture, was designed with the specific purpose of translating American books and disseminating them in emerging and non-aligned nations. This article aims to analyse Franklin Book Programs’ translation and publishing work in Iran, one of its most successful operations. It draws on archives, interviews and the correspondence of some of the prominent agents involved in Franklin Book Programs. This story illuminates a significant chapter in Iranian translation and publishing history, as well as revealing an important, and often overlooked, dimension of the USA’s global cultural Cold War.

Review Essay: Enduring Love in the Time of Migration and Fragmentation

Review Essay: Enduring Love in the Time of Migration and Fragmentation

US publishing as a cultural phenomenon: history, current realities and prospects

The article analyses the specifics of the formation of the American publishing system in the context of the incipience of national culture and statehood. It highlights the importance of print production as an important component of the overall system for the formation and maintenance of the original face of the United States – both in the early stages of the formation of the state and culture, as well as in modern realities, complicated by the Covid pandemic situation. The US publishing system is at the forefront of technological changes that affect both American and world reading and book culture: not only the diversity and democratisation of the form of consumer culture, but also the quality of the media sphere as a special space for the life of a modern person. The experience of the American book market, the US publishing industry is considered, demonstrating the importance of publishing as a meaningful tool for socialisation and inculturation, its significant influence on the formation of national traditions of "bookishness", reading culture, and on the level of the general cultural education of the nation.

Welcoming Black Children into Literary Wildscapes: Wildness in African American Children's Picture Books

Welcoming Black Children into Literary Wildscapes: Wildness in African American Children's Picture Books

We Flesh: Musser, Spillers, and Beyond the Phenomenological Body

Not all homo sapiens are human subjects. This paper explores the lived experience of homo sapiens but not human that I call “lived flesh.” A lived experience/distinction that shouldn’t be possible on Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm.” The use of flesh is deliberate and emerges from my engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” through Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hortense Spillers’ “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Amber Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The affective, experiential, and ethical practices of american Blackwomxn in these texts problematize Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity and his account of the generality of Being (“The Intertwining – The Chiasm”). Merleau-Ponty’s effacement of raced, sexed, and gendered difference results in a construct of the human subject that cannot include all homo sapiens.

And they all lived unhappily ever after: Positive and negative emotions in American and Russian picture books.

The U.S. and Russian cultural contexts are thought to foster different models of emotion, with the former emphasizing positive emotions more and negative emotions less than the latter. Little is known about the ways in which parents transmit these models of emotions to children. Cultural products, such as popular storybooks, may serve to provide important tools of transmission. Two studies examined similarities and differences in the extent to which children's books from these cultural contexts depict emotions. In Study 1, U.S., Russian American, and Russian parents described the extent to which books that they recently read to their children depict positive and negative emotions. Although no differences emerged for depictions of positive emotions, U.S. parents described reading books with lower levels of negative emotions than Russian parents, with Russian American parents in between. These differences were partially due to parental beliefs about sadness. In Study 2, verbal and nonverbal depictions of emotions were compared for sets of popular children's books from the U.S. and Russia. U.S. books verbally referenced anger and sadness and depicted happiness, anger, and fear faces less frequently than Russian books. Taken together, these studies suggest that American and Russian parents value and expose their children to different depictions of emotions, particularly negative emotions. Future studies need to examine the ways in which children in these cultural contexts interpret depictions of emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

Interview with Gordon Henry

Gordon Henry is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota and professor of American Indian Literature, Creative Writing and the Creative Process in Integrative Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. He is the author and co-editor of many books and collections, including The Failure of Certain Charms: And Other Disparate Signs of Life (2008). His novel The Light People (1994) won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Following some of the stages in his career and personal story, which he kindly accepted to share with me, this interview highlights some of the crucial key issues concerning Native American people and cultures, questions that still need a wider transnational space both inside and outside academia. Discrimination based on language has influenced the history of Native American people for centuries, starting from the forced education of the young in the 19th century and continuing in the 20th, in the context of Hollywood film productions. Linguicism, language-based racism (Phillipson 1992), is a topic that needs to be addressed in the light of the recent flourishing of extremist thought worldwide, which carries the abused rhetoric of ‘us vs them’ (van Dijk 2015) and, at the same time, spurs protest movements. This reflection goes hand-in-hand with the controversial topic of the appropriation of Native American cultural practices by old and new wannabes (non-people who are so much fascinated by Native American cultures that end up imitating them by, for example, choosing a Native name or emphasising certain aspects of the culture which they admire, often basing their beliefs on stereotypes), whilst people living in the Reservations are still neglected and the Native American and Alaskan Native population register extremely high suicide, homicide and alcoholism rates compared to the U.S. all races population (especially women). But, the efforts and educational programs aimed to preserve languages and cultures (like the Lakota Language Consortium or the Rosetta Stone Endangered Language programs), the vibrancy of the artistic scene in the visual, literary and music fields, the various forms of activism and community engagement projects (such as, for example, the MMIWG movement – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – the water protectors protest at Standing Rock, known as #NoDapl, or the prayerful journey called Run4Salmon in California) are also to be acknowledged as milestones in the process of regaining self-sovereignty by Native people. Against the background of these considerations, I am pleased and honoured to share thoughts, feelings and emotions with Gordon Henry.

Poe in Cyberspace: The First Amendment, Antitrust Law, and an Internet Rhubarb

Poe in Cyberspace: The First Amendment, Antitrust Law, and an Internet Rhubarb

Two Languages in Communication: Spanish and Latin American Books in the United States

Two Languages in Communication: Spanish and Latin American Books in the United States

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman (review)

Reviewed by: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman Steffi Dippold Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities. By Andrew Newman. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 236 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. What was a book? What was the role of reading in colonial America? In his absorbing Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities, Andrew Newman reconsiders these important questions by looking at the physicality of printed texts and the reception and circulation of books within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century captivity narratives. Newman challenges conventional approaches to early modern literacy and intertextual allusion by drawing attention to scenes in which captives engage with a spectrum of print practices and books as material objects—both their own and those of their Indigenous captors. His focus is on nonfictional stories of captives because he recognizes this genre—gestated from harrowing conditions of isolation, violence, and trauma—as a rare archive not only of Indigenous behavior and belief systems but also of colonial hermeneutic strategies that, because of their unfamiliarity and historical distance, require reconstruction. Breathing new life into American book studies and histories of reading, Newman’s ambitious work issues a riposte to the understanding of literacy and print culture as exclusively imperial. Its revelation of arresting and untracked colonial and Native uses of books joins exciting new scholarship by Lindsay DiCuirci, Phillip H. Round, Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, and Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss that complicate assumptions of how texts and literacy mattered across cultures in early America.1 As Newman’s title stresses, his work is both a study in allegory and an appeal for a better understanding of the complex lives of print and writing in the colonies. Many stories of captivity, he shows, brim with teasing metareflections about books (often gifted by Native captors), scattered material cultures of letters and notes, and scenes of reading and remembering other texts. To do justice to this rich spectrum of activities, Newman deliberately broadens the narrow concept of literacy defined as “the ability to read and write” and explores instead what he open-endedly calls “literacy events” (3). This shift is significant. It creates critical awareness for a [End Page 774] network of undertheorized practical, embodied, and imagined practices and anxieties of the period related but not limited to print. A case in point is the paranoid fantasy of the kidnapped James Smith, who panicked out of fear that “reading my books” might push his Iroquois captors into “puting [sic] me to death” (1).2 Why do captives imagine death by reading, Newman asks? What can such literacy events tell us about the understanding of books, self, community, and American cultures of reading at large? Much like a captivity narrative, Allegories of Encounter moves from familiar canonic materials to the increasingly unfamiliar and underexplored. The first four chapters discuss symbolic reading and consumption of texts, or how captives attributed “another sense” (13)—typically a secondary allegorical spiritual meaning—to their literal descriptions of capture and exile. Here Newman’s primary target of analysis is Christian typology, the hermeneutic heart of Puritan practical piety, as he shows how ordinary people recycled biblical scripts to articulate a sense of self in extraordinary circumstances. Guiding readers from Mary Rowlandson’s canonical The Soveraignty and Goodness of God in the first chapter, to captivity’s model master narrative Psalm 137 in the second, to accounts of capture by the Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues and the Puritan minister John Williams in the third, and to the narratives of the converted Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and the Puritan-abductee-turned-Native Marguerite Kanenstenhawi (also known as Eunice Williams) in the fourth, Newman’s detailed close-readings unpack messy multilayered textual cultures that linger in-between the spoken, the embodied, the handwritten, and the printed.3 Refusing to distinguish theory from practice or the symbolic from the experiential, Newman recovers how, not only in retrospective scribal practices but in their actual lives, captives lived allegory “like lucid dreamers, aware and motivated by the significance of the stories they were...

Professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn: Reflections on a Dear Friend and Mentor

Abstract: In this essay, Sarah Hernandez reflects on her friendship with Dakota writer and scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Cook-Lynn, the author of fourteen Native American studies books and numerous articles, has mentored countless Native students over her long career. This personal reflection provides insight into Cook-Lynn's teaching methods and impact.

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards