New book! Associate Professor Glenda Goodman and Rhae Lynn Barnes (History, Princeton) co-edited American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History, out this month with University of Pennsylvania Press's Material Texts series.
American Contact explores the dynamics of intercultural encounters through the medium of material texts. The forty-eight short chapters present biographies about objects that range in size from four miles long to seven by ten centimeters; date from millennia in the past to the 2000s; and originate from South America, North America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Each essay demonstrates how particular ways of reading can render the complex meanings of the objects legible―or explains why and how the meanings remain illegible.
In its diversity and breadth, this volume shows how the field of book history can be more inclusive and expansive. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the material practices of communicating power and resistance, subjection and survivance, in contact zones of America.