World Book Club - Robert Seethaler: A Whole Life

Spanning much of the twentieth century and told with an elegant simplicity which belies the harshness of the tale it tells, Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life is the story of one man's relationship with an ancient landscape.

Andreas Egger knows every nook and cranny of the Alpine mountain valley that is his home and from which vantage point he witnesses the arrival of the modern world, in all its many and daunting forms.

A stark yet tender book about love, loss and endurance, and about finding dignity and beauty in solitude A Whole Life has already touched many thousands of readers with its message of solace and truth.

(Picture: Robert Seethaler. Photo credit: UrbanZintel.)

New Books in Native American Studies - Natasha Varner, “La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico” (U Arizona Press, 2020)

A close friend and muse of many of postrevolutionary Mexico's greatest artists, Luz Jiménez's likeness appears across Mexico City in the form of painting, photography, and sculpture. Jiménez's ubiquity has earned her the titles of "the most painted woman in all of Mexico" and "the archetype of Indigenous Mexican woman." And yet the details of her complex life as an Indigenous woman at mid century have long remained shrouded by artistic depictions of her face and body. Jiménez's experience of hypervisibility and simultaneous erasure in postrevolutionary Mexico is no anomaly; during the early to mid-twentieth century, Indigenous women were idealized and objectified as relics of Mexico's past as cultural elites sought to manufacture a distinctly mestizo future. The experiences of modern Indigenous women constitute the focus of Natasha Varner's new book, La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2020), a vivid recovery of the intersections of settler colonialism, gender, visual culture, and modernity.

Varner employs methods from the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and settler colonial studies in an innovative new study of postrevolutionary Mexican visual culture. Drawing upon a range of midcentury media - including newspapers, photography, film, postcards and tourism materials, and more - Varner weaves together narratives of visibility, erasure, survivance, dispossession, and identity that ultimately center upon on Indigenous women's experiences and livelihoods. Despite efforts to erase Indigenous women from Mexico's future, La Raza Cosmética impresses upon us a powerful reminder of Indigenous women's persistence in Mexico - at midcentury as well as in the present.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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World Book Club - Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions

A modern classic in the African literary canon and voted in the Top Ten of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, Nervous Conditions is the coming-of-age story of two Shona girls, Tambudzai and Nyasha, both trying to find their place in contemporary Zimbabwe.

Whilst Nyasha has been to England and questions the effect of that Westernisation on her family, Tambudzai is from a more traditional branch of the family and is awed by her cousin’s seeming sophistication.

Through its exploration of race, class, gender and the nature of friendship, the novel dramatizes the 'nervousness' of the 'postcolonial' condition that vexes us still.

(Picture:Tsitsi Dangarembga. Photo credit: Hannah Mentz.)

New Books in Native American Studies - John G. Turner, “They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty” (Yale UP, 2020)

John G. Turner's excellent new history of the early American separatists, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty (Yale University Press, 2020) provides a new benchmark study of Plymouth Colony. Turner provides a readable and convincing narrative of how a group of religious refugees sought to establish a home to pursue their radical Protestant faith, while struggling to extend the same liberties to Native peoples and other dissenting groups. This brilliant work of scholarship sheds light on neglected sources and models a striking balance between charitable and critical reading of this significant moment in early American history. Find out more about John Turner on his website or follow him on Twitter (@johngturner2020).

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World Book Club - Bill Bryson: Notes from a Small Island

This month World Book Club discusses Bill Bryson’s hugely acclaimed travelogue Notes from a Small Island with the author and his readers around the world. After two decades as a resident of the United Kingdom, Bryson took what he thought might be a last affectionate trip around his adoptive country before returning to live in his native America. Notes from a Small Island is the irreverent and hilarious account of this meandering journey through his beloved island nation. From Dover to Downing Street, from Giggleswick to Loch Ness by way of Titsey and Nether Wallop, Bryson rejoices in Britain’s inimitable placenames and much else of more substance besides, his very own State of the Nation address, as it were.

A huge number-one bestseller when it was first published, Notes from a Small Island has become that nation's most loved book about Britain.

(Picture: Bill Bryson. Photo credit: Catherine Williams.)

New Books in Native American Studies - Tony Tekaroniake Evans, “Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond” (Washington State UP, 2020)

In 1877, Eloosykasit was on his way Tolo Lake, a gathering place frequented by the Nez Perce, when he heard news of the Wallowa band's flight from the U.S. Army. Only seventeen at the time, Eloosykasit elected to remain with the migrant Nez Perce, arming himself with a rifle abandoned at White Bird Canyon, and following Chief Joseph on toward Montana. Over a century later, in the summer of 1989, Eloosykasit's descendant, Josiah Pinkham, traced the same path as part of an immersive summer program organized entirely around the Chief Joseph Trail. The trip was but one of many ways that the Upward Bound Program - based out of University of Idaho and known regionally as "the Indian Program" - provided Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike with experiences that recentered Niimíipuu (Nez Perce) and Skitswish (Coeur D'Alene) history and culture. Well-known across the Nez Perce Reservation, Coeur D'Alene Reservation, and nearby communities, Idaho's Upward Bound Program serves as the focus of journalist Tony Tekaroniake Evans' latest book, Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond (Washington State University Press, 2020).

Drawing on dozens of interviews with former Upward Bound participants and instructors, Evans traces the development of the program under longtime coordinator Isabel Bond, who has spent decades working to support local Indigenous youth through education. Evans weaves historical narratives both old and recent into a story of community-building and cultural appreciation. Though situated deeply in Nez Perce and Coeur D'Alene history and homelands, Evans' Teaching Native Pride shows the ways that Bond's Upward Bound Program, in many ways, serves as a model for educational experiences that highlight the importance of Indigenous pasts, persistence, experiences, and expertise.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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World Book Club - Sjón – Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was

On this month’s World Book Club, Icelandic literary superstar Sjón will be answering questions from readers around the world about his novel Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was.

Set in Reykjavik in 1918, it’s the story of sixteen year old Mani, whose life is completely changed by the arrival of the Spanish flu in the city.

It’s a fascinating novel about human resilience and connections, a love letter to cinema and a portrait of a place at a very particular moment in its history.

Moonstone won The Icelandic Literary Prize in 2013.

Sjón is one of Iceland’s leading novelists and his work has been translated into 30 languages. He’s also a poet and librettist and was Oscar nominated for his lyrics for the film Dancer In The Dark. Presented by Harriett Gilbert.

(Picture: Sjón. Courtesy of Sjón.)

World Book Club - Yaa Gyasi: Homegoing

A novel of breathtaking sweep revealing the devastating impact of slavery through history. This month World Book Club discusses the multi-prize-winning debut novel Homegoing with its acclaimed Ghanaian author Yaa Gyasi and her fans around the world. The story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a white slave-trader, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history. A novel of remarkable sweep and power, with each character’s life indelibly drawn, Homegoing reveals the devastating legacy of slavery and the resilience of the human spirit.

(Picture: Yaa Gyasi. Photo credit: Peter Hurley/Vilcek Foundation.)

New Books in Native American Studies - Justin Gage, “We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance” (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)

Writing to U.S. President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Oglala Lakota leaders Little Wound, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and Red Cloud insisted upon a simple yet significant demand to allow western Indigenous nations to retain intertribal communication networks, stating that "we do not want the gates closed between us." These vast networks - and the written letters, in-person visits, and anticolonial ideologies that sustained them - are the focus of historian Justin Gage's new book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Gage shows how sustained communication between reservations enabled a diversity of peoples to share knowledge of common experiences under U.S. settler colonialism, culminating with the rise and rapid spread of the Ghost Dance.

Focusing on extensive correspondence between Indigenous communities at over thirty western reservations, Gage elevates the voices of Indigenous leaders, diplomats, family members, and others who sought to use English literacy, one of the United States' primary tools of assimilation, to resist confinement within colonial boundaries. The result is an essential study of how the U.S. federal government struggled and ultimately failed to limit Indigenous mobility and the powerful intellectual currents that helped Indigenous nations to assert their autonomy and sovereignty at the turn of the century.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Liza Black, “Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960” (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Indians" to produce profit. Black shows how non-Native film producers, in producing monolithic and historically static Native caricatures for profit, reinforced settler colonial narratives on screen while simultaneously denying Indigenous actors, extras, and staff of their modernity.

Thorough in detail and innovative in analysis, Black incorporates film studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and history, shedding new light on the mid-century film industry and Native peoples' roles in it. Black chronicles the contours of American settler colonialism and its cultural and economic manifestations both on- and off-screen, giving the "authentic Indian" so familiar to non-Native audiences a much-needed dose of historical context. The result is an engaging story of Indigenous talent, labor, and livelihood that transcends critical moments in Native and U.S. histories alike.

Listeners can now purchase Picturing Indians using code 6AF20 for a 40% discount on the University of Nebraska Press' site.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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