Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

In Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia (UP of Mississippi, 2020), Frederick Luis Aldama brings together comics scholars Joshua T. Anderson, Chad A. Barbour, Susan Bernardin, Mike Borkent, Jeremy M. Carnes, Philip Cass, Jordan Clapper, James J. Donahue, Dennin Ellis, Jessica Fontaine, Jonathan Ford, Lee Francis IV, Enrique García, Javier García Liendo, Brenna Clarke Gray, Brian Montes, Arij Ouweneel, Kevin Patrick, Candida Rifkind, Jessica Rutherford, and Jorge Santos to present a comprehensive collection examining Indigenous comic book artists and the history of representations of Indigenous peoples throughout comic book history.

This collection highlights the representations and misrepresentations of Indigenous subjects and experiences in comics throughout the Americas and Australasia. In addition, it looked at the work of Indigenous comic artists highlighting texts such as Daniel Parada’s Zotz, Puerto Rican comics Turey el Taíno and La Borinqueña, and Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection. An important volume for comic history and historians, Aldama and contributors bring together the first comprehensive text that show the powerful voices of Indigenous arts and start to address the ways in which the field must start to understand how colonial and imperial domination represented throughout the history of comics still impact Indigenous people and cultures.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital in people's lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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In Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Audrey Horning revisits the fraught connections between Ireland and colonial Virginia. Both modern scholars and early modern colonialists themselves viewed English incursions into Ireland and North America as intimately related. But the precise nature of this relationship has been a matter of contention. In the standard narrative, British efforts to establish plantations in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prefigured the colonization of Virginia. But Horning shows that such causal connections break down upon closer scrutiny.

Ireland in the Virginian Sea deftly brings the tools of archaeology and historical scholarship to bear on British colonialism across the Atlantic. Horning shows that, while colonial ventures in both Ireland and Virginia were personally and financially entangled, the two responded to their unique cultural and geographical contexts. Attempts to impose unidirectional causality dissolve under the burden of Horning’s formidable body of textual and archaeological evidence. What emerges instead is a much more sensitive narrative that accounts for, rather than suppresses, the chorus of voices on either side of the British Atlantic.

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Life or death choices in a bid to survive the horrors of 1970s Communist China

This month in the penultimate edition of a year celebrating the globe’s greatest women writers World Book Club talks to acclaimed Chinese author Yiyun Li about her harrowing debut novel The Vagrants. Winner of the Guardian First Book Award The Vagrants is based on real events which took place in China in 1979 during the era that ultimately led to the fateful Tiannanmen Square uprising. In the provincial town of Muddy Waters a young woman, Gu Shan, is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. The citizens stage a protest after her execution and, over the following six weeks, the novel charts the hopes and fears of the leaders of the protest and the pain of Gu Shan’s parents and friends, as everyone in the town is caught up in the remorseless turn of events.

(Picture: Yiyun Li. Photo credit: Roger Turesson.)

Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is an ambitious exploration of modernity, history, and time in post-colonial Guatemala. Set in the Q’eqchi Maya highlands of Alta Verapaz from the 19th century into the 20th, Julie Gibbings explores how Q’eqchi, ladino, and German immigrant actors created the overlapping, messy and contentious political worlds of modern Guatemala, with attention to the “asymmetric information, expectations, and power ...their mutual misunderstandings and distinct worldviews” of each of these groups. More specifically, Gibbings argues that in the state and coffee planters’ active erasure of Maya political ontologies and worldviews in the nineteenth century created an explosive twentieth century where modernity was always unfulfilled and imminent, but deeply desired by ladino and Maya communities alike.

Gibbings seeks to unsettle our view of Guatemalan modernity, and demands that readers attend to the innovative politics and the historical agency of Q’eqchi elites and laborers as well as that of ladinos and Germans. In order to do this, Our Time is Now makes use of sources as diverse as myths about half human cows who haunt German plantations and community interpretations of devastating weather patterns in order to show how Q’eqchi activists’ engaged with both liberal political worlds and their own autonomous values. While Ladino liberals and German settlers both insisted that Mayans were anti-modern, uncivilized, and thus not ready for citizenship by definition, Mayan patriarchs and Q’eqchi liberals argued for their own rights and developed distinct visions of progress. Q’eqchi actors’ engagement with liberal modernity and insistence on their own agency created a “revolutionary time” that “diverged from nineteenth century teleological and linear history.” In the twentieth century, the unfulfilled promises of modernity created revolutions and unrest over and over again.

Dr Gibbings is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History and a Lecturer in the History of the Americas for the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. She is also the co-editor of Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution in Post-Peace Guatemala, out this year from the University of Texas Press.

Dr Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Union College. She is working on a manuscript about mineworkers, race, and revolution in Bolivia.

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Agnès Delahaye’s new book, Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (Brill, 2020), is the story of John Winthrop’s tenure as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s. In a correction to the prevailing narrative of Puritans alone in the New England wilderness, Professor Delahaye shows the colonists’ commercial connections to the Old England and the Atlantic World and how earnestly the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Company maintained these through promotional writing, where their particular, innovative project of permanent settlement can be traced and contextualized.

John Winthrop’s Journal reveals a deep desire for economic independence, or “competency,” born of his frustrations with his limited options in a cramped England, which he played out in a New World—a Promised Land—that he considered to be boundlessly fertile with possibility. Always expanding, Winthrop competed ruthlessly with the indigenous Americans in a “continuous process of rumors, intimidation, conflicts and negotiations, which Winthrop navigated with unwavering confidence in his own racial superiority” (p. 261). Settling the Good Land is a remarkable and magisterial study of a man who simultaneously held (and realized) these ambitions with one hand and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the other. Yet, he saw no conflict in them but rather the “fulfillment of his religious and personal calling” (p. 121).

Professor Delahaye teaches in Lyon at Université Lumière Lyon II and is a member of the interdisciplinary Triangle Research Group which combines “action, discourses, economic and political thought” to better understand the meeting of political ideas and consequences. Last year she received the rank of habilitation to direct doctoral theses, the highest rank in the French academic system.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

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In his new book, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (UNC Press, 2020), Dr. Jeffrey Erbig charts the interplay between imperial and indigenous spatial imaginaries and shows the critical role that indigenous actors played in imperial border-making between the Spanish and the Portuguese in the Río de la Plata region during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Dr. Erbig demonstrates how this process does not fit neatly into concepts of resistance or accommodation, as Hispano-Portuguese border-drawing from 1750 to the end of the century was in-part necessitated by indigenous actions, shaped by indigenous actors, and even reinforced the authority and autonomy of certain native polities. Far from peripheral players on an inevitable path to destruction as they are mostly remembered today, native peoples were essential to determining the early-modern history of the Río de la Plata. Centering the actions of indigenous agents and incorporating archival material from seven countries along with digital mapping techniques, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met will prove to be an enduring contribution to the historiography of indigenous studies, the Río de la Plata region, cartography, and borderlands topics.

Dr. Jeffrey Erbig is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world.

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Charles F. Walker’s Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru, 2020, is part of Oxford University Press’ Graphic History Series, which takes serious archival research and puts it into a comic format. For this volume, the brilliant Liz Clarke illustrated Dr. Walker’s biography of a ½ brother of José Gabriel Condorcanqui Tupac Amaru, the leader of the 1780-1783 Tupac Amaru Rebellion. Juan Bautista was a relatively minor figure in the revolt who was arrested with scores of others in the Spanish repression of the rebellion but was not executed. Instead he spent decades in brutal confinement on three different continents. His life interacts with several phases of the Age of Revolution and offers a subaltern perspective on the era. Listeners should find the Latin American angle on the Age of Revolution particularly enlightening. Witness to the Age of Revolution does a stunning job at literally illustrating the sprawling Spanish empire from Peru to Argentina and Cadiz and on to North Africa. Liz Clarke’s gorgeous artwork bring images of Iberian colonialism to life in vivid color. We also get a solid introduction to maritime history as Juan Bautista is transported halfway around the world. Witness to the Age of Revolution is a fascinating story, comparable to the tales of the Man in the Iron mask as told by Alexandre Dumas. Walker’s account of Juan Bautista’s suffering, the friendship between the Andean prisoner and an Augustinian priest, and the rebel finally achieved his freedom will engross readers.

Charles Walker is Professor of History and the Director of the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at the University of California, Davis, who has held a MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair in International Human Rights.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

 

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A fast-moving, passionate, genre-bending work of art that both dazzles and entertains. This month, World Book Club discusses the much garlanded novel How to Be Both with its acclaimed British author Ali Smith and her fans around the world. Still not able to gather together in a studio, presenter Harriett Gilbert and Ali Smith will be talking remotely to international listeners via all manner of means - phonelines, emails, Skype calls, and social media. In this playfully ambitious novel, a 15th-century artist, Francesco del Cossa, travels through time and space to discover a grieving sixteen-year-old girl in contemporary England taking comfort in a painting he (or is it she?) created. Or is it all the other way around? And whose story comes first?

(Picture: Ali Smith. Photo credit: Sarah Wood.)

Before the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana became one of the state’s top private employers—with its vast landholdings and economic enterprises—they lived well below the poverty line and lacked any clear legal status.

After settling in the Bayou Blue in 1884, they forged friendships with their neighbors, sparked local tourism, and struck strategic alliances with civic and business leaders, aid groups, legislators, and other tribes. Coushattas also engaged the public with stories about the tribe’s culture, history, and economic interests that intersected with the larger community, all while battling legal marginalization exacerbated by inconsistent government reports regarding their citizenship, treaty status, and eligibility for federal Indian services.

Well into the twentieth century, the tribe had to overcome several major hurdles, including lobbying the Louisiana legislature to pass the state’s first tribal recognition resolution (1972), convincing the Department of the Interior to formally acknowledge the Coushatta Tribe through administrative channels (1973), and engaging in an effort to acquire land and build infrastructure.

Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984 (University of Nebraska Press) demonstrates how the Coushatta community worked together—each generation laying a foundation for the next—and how they leveraged opportunities so that existing and newly acquired knowledge, timing, and skill worked in tandem.

Denise E. Bates is a historian and an assistant professor of leadership and interdisciplinary studies at Arizona State University.

David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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David Tavárez is a historian and linguistic anthropologist; he is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Vassar College. He is a specialist in Nahuatl and Zapotec texts, the study of Mesoamerican religions and rituals, Catholic campaigns against idolatry, Indigenous intellectuals, and native Christianities. He is the author or co-author of several books and dozens of articles and chapters.

This is his second time on the podcast; the first one was about his edited volume, Words & Worlds Turned Around (2017), and here is the link for that discussion.

Today’s interview is about Professor Tavárez’s book The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press), which was first his doctoral dissertation, then was published in 2011, and came out in paperback in 2013. In this book, Professor Tavárez guides his readers through four centuries of the Mexican Inquisition in the episcopal sees of México and Oaxaca. His work is the result of ten years of research in twenty-nine archives in Mexico, Spain, the United States, France, Belgium, Italy, and Vatican City, following 160 judges and 896 defendants accused of “idolatry, sorcery, and superstition”.

In this discussion Dr. Tavárez explains the origin and ethos of the ecclesial and judicial authorities, their changes over time, and their internal disagreements. He also describes the nature of the societies they were trying to influence, and how these movements changed since the sixteenth century, following them to the present day. The painting of the 1716 Auto de Fe that is on the cover of his book and that Dr. Tavárez talks about with the host during the interview can be seen here.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. He has also written about missionary efforts in Early Modern Colonial Mexico.

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