American Contact

Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History

Rhae Lynn Barnes, Glenda Goodman, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Glenda Goodman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781512825763
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

How studying material texts can help us better understand the diversity of the Americas, past and present

A Hawai'ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball, repurposed by enslaved people in colonial Antigua; a book of poetry printed in a Peruvian penitentiary. Countless material texts—legible artifacts—resulted from the diverse intercultural encounters that characterize the history of the Americas.

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.

Contributors: Carlos Aguirre, Ahmed Idrissi Alami, Chadwick Allen, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Molly H. Bassett, Brian Bockelman, George Aaron Broadwell, Rachel Linnea Brown, Nancy Caronia, Raúl Coronado, Marlena Petra Cravens, Agnieszka Czeblakow, Lori Boornazian Diel, Elizabeth A. Dolan, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Cecily Duffie, Devin Fitzgerald, Glenda Goodman, Rachel B. Gross, David D. Hall, Sonia Hazard, Rachel B. Herrmann, Alex Hidalgo, Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Rachael Scarborough King, Danielle Knox, Bishop Lawton, Jessica C. Linker, Don James McLaughlin, John Henry Merritt, Gabriell Montgomery, Emily L. Moore, Isadora Moura Mota, Barbara E. Mundy, Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, Marissa Nicosia, Diane Oliva, Megan E. O'Neil, Sergio Ospina Romero, John H. Pollack, Shari Rabin, Daniel Radus, Nathan Rees, Anne Ricculli, Maria Ryan, Maria Carolina Sintura, Cristina Soriano, Chelsea Stieber, Amy Ku?uleialoha Stillman, Chris Suh, Mathew R. Swiatlowski, Marie Balsley Taylor, Martin A. Tsang, Germaine Warkentin, Adrian Chastain Weimer, Bethany Wiggin, Xine Yao, Corinna Zeltsman.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. The Layered Legibilities of Intercultural Encounters
• Chapter 1. Through the Medium of the Land: Serpent Mound Within and Without Ohio
• Chapter 2. Writing-on-Stone and Book History: Recording the Life-World of the Great Plains
• Chapter 3. Reading and Misreading an Eighth-Century Maya Stela
• Chapter 4. The Birth and Life of the Tlaquimilolli (Sacred Bundle)
• Chapter 5. Indigenous Fabrics of Empire in the Sixteenth-Century Northern Andes
• Chapter 6. Alonso de Molina’s Grammar Book in Sixteenth-Century Tenochtitlan
• Chapter 7. Writing and Resistance in the Conquest of Mexico’s Wake
• Chapter 8. Intercultural Encounters and the Codex Mexicanus
• Chapter 9. Bookmaking in Tlatelolco After the Apocalypse
• Chapter 10. Chihoatenhwa’s Prayer: A Wendat-Jesuit Print Encounter from Seventeenth-Century New France
• Chapter 11. A Timucua Epistle from Seventeenth-Century Florida
• Chapter 12. A Contested Pennacook Object in a Seventeenth-Century Puritan Mission
• Chapter 13. Daniel Gookin’s “Doings and Sufferings” and the Contradictions of the New England Mission
• Chapter 14. And Their Words Were Reduced to Writing: The Materiality of Torture Transcripts in Early Eighteenth-Century Audiencia de Quito (Ecuador)
• Chapter 15. Christoph Saur’s House: Toward an Anticolonial History of the Settlement of Germantown
• Chapter 16. Slaveholding, Seasoning, and the Circulation of Culinary Knowledge in the Frankland Family Receipt Book
• Chapter 17. A Jewish Gravestone in Eighteenth-Century Charleston
• Chapter 18. The Uses and Reuses of Ephemeral Colonial Print in Black Households
• Chapter 19. A Guatemalan Rulebook and the Discipling of Catholic Singing in the Spanish Colonial World
• Chapter 20. An Eighteenth-Century Quaker Poem and Transatlantic Abolitionism
• Chapter 21. Ephemeral Texts in a Semiliterate Society: A Subversive Pasquinade in 1790 Caracas
• Chapter 22. Disparate Sources of an 1800 Settlement Negotiation in Freetown, Sierra Leone
• Chapter 23. Texas Mexican Women and the War of Independence from Spain: Memory, Writing, Forgetting
• Chapter 24. Refuting Procolonial Discourse in Postcolonial Haitian Pamphlets
• Chapter 25. Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu’s 1838 Arabic Address in Jamaica
• Chapter 26. Monk on Fire: Imag(in)ing Buddhism in the Americas
• Chapter 27. Afong Moy’s Ephemera and the Ephemerality of the Early Asian American Archive
• Chapter 28. Coloring Outside the Lines: The Comic Valentine as a Queer and Gender-Variant Object
• Chapter 29. Lady Historian, Cuban Exile, and German Hatter: An Immigrant Story of Emma Willard’s Compendio de la Historia de los Estados Unidos as Translated by Miguel T. Tolón
• Chapter 30. Chinese Print in Early California
• Chapter 31. A Letter from Nineteenth-Century Afro-Brazil
• Chapter 32. Three Ways of Reading Protestant Missionary Marginalia
• Chapter 33. Framing Colonization for Mormon Youth in the Juvenile Instructor (1866)
• Chapter 34. Improvising Indigenous Geographies in the First Atlas of Argentina, ca. 1870
• Chapter 35. Proud Raven: Contesting the “Lincoln Pole”
• Chapter 36. Hides, Hymns, Quills, Crosses: An Embellished Nineteenth-Century Dakota-Language Hymnal
• Chapter 37. Yun Ch’i-ho’s Diary and Asian-American Encounters in the American South, 1888–1893
• Chapter 38. Multiple Literacies in Hawaiian Sheet Music
• Chapter 39. Dime Novels and the Creation of the Italian Immigrant Criminal
• Chapter 40. Chauncey Yellow Robe’s Resistance in the Early Twentieth-Century United States
• Chapter 41. Cataloging Mexican History in the Age of Pan-Americanism
• Chapter 42. Scouting for the Victor Talking Machine Company: 1917 Traveling Recording Ledgers from Latin America
• Chapter 43. Making Books at the Penitentiary: César Vallejo’s Trilce
• Chapter 44. 1930s U.S. Encounters with Sierra Leonean Dance Dramas
• Chapter 45. Interwar Black Internationalism and the Creation of Unwritten History of Slavery (1945)
• Chapter 46. Inscribing Black Atlantic Religions: An Afro-Cuban Libreta from Havana
• Chapter 47. The Circulations of a 1968 Haitian Compas LP
• Chapter 48. Rebecca Rubin: American Girl and American Jewish Heritage
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments