African-Language Writing

The African Atlantic: West African Literatures and Slavery Studies Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi BOOKS REVIEWED Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism ByMatthew J. Christensen Albany: State U of New York P, 2012. xiv + 188 pp. 9781438439709 paper. Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature By Laura T. Murphy Athens: Ohio UP, 2012. ix + 243 pp. 9780821419953 paper. SLAVERY STUDIES, COLONIALISM, AND AFRICAN LITERATURES Within African literary and cultural studies, work on the representations of domestic West African slavery or the historical slave trades across the Atlantic and the Sahara has been sparse. Laura Murphy and Matthew [End Page 149] Christensen address this paucity in two books with strikingly different perspectives and outcomes. Whereas Murphy focuses on metaphorization and veiled communications in representations of slavery, Christensen emphasizes direct contestations of slavery’s meanings and overt appropriations of symbolic narratives and icons that critique enslavement and its legacies of political and cultural dispossession. In his explicitly transnational study, Christensen examines the memorializations of the 1839 Amistad slave revolt in the United States and Sierra Leone as a site of contestation over the meanings of emancipation and political independence. Murphy studies representations of the slave trade in Ghanaian and Nigerian literatures. Both scholars examine texts and events from about the third decade of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. In reading these contributions together, I frame my observations within an appraisal of the disjunctures among a globalizing slavery studies, African literary scholarship, studies of slavery narratives in the North Atlantic world, and the much researched study of slavery in the Americas. This wide gesture is necessary because as much as these books can be read as studies in African and African American literatures, they beckon toward larger cross-disciplinary conversations about the histories and representations of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Hitherto, most of the work on slavery in Africa has been produced outside literary scholarship. Such work, produced by historians, anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and archeologists on the historical and contemporary practices of capture, enslavement, and bondage constitutes the cross-disciplinary field of slavery studies. Although much of the work in the field through the last three decades of the twentieth century was historical, the rise of contemporary slavery studies, the attention to human trafficking, and the increasing recognition of globalized labor exploitation have transformed historical slavery studies into contemporary global slavery studies. Increasingly, the slave trade is recognized as a globalizing force with multiple historical locations and participants. New and forthcoming journals and book series—such as the Journal of Global Slavery or Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery—continue to transform the field. It is thus imperative for scholars to historicize their studies of any form of slavery and slave trade within a larger landscape and temporality of co-extensive practices of enslavement and freedom. The transformations I list above influence my reading of Murphy and Christensen. While a simple Google search will reveal countless conferences and publications on the histories and forms of slavery and bondage in Africa, it will produce far fewer search results on the representations of slavery in African literatures. This disjuncture is historical. Slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and abolition are acknowledged as catastrophic and traumatic events in Caribbean and American literatures. Hence, scholars studying representations of slavery in the Americas find a ready body of codified literatures overtly addressing its traumatic legacies. There is also a great interaction between scholars of Caribbean and American literatures of slavery and scholars of slavery studies in the Americas. Colonial conquest reconfigured Africa’s internal relationship to domestic slavery and the internal slave trades such that scholars of slavery in African literatures must take into account how colonialism impacted how slavery is remembered and represented. That is to say that all accounts of slavery and slave trade must be provincialized, i.e., taken out of any singularizing (North Atlantic or putatively global) narrative [End Page 150] and rescaled within a local nexus of meanings and historical mechanisms.1 For West African literatures, such provincializing gestures must take account of colonialism and its successor or related projects such as anticolonialism, independence, arrested decolonization...

The Cultural Roots of Capitalism Joyce Appleby (bio) In my Relentless Revolution I follow a few capitalist practices that flourished in the supportive environment of 17th-century England and became the key features of the dominant economic system of the 21st century. Why did it take so long for capitalism to emerge from the cocoon of tradition? In the 17th century the profitability of some English agricultural and manufacturing initiatives impressed contemporaries. At the same time, natural philosophers were proving the existence of a vacuum and measuring air pressure. None of this would have had any impact on the world of work where people and animals sweated in mine shafts and near blast furnaces had not the physical laws the naturalists studied lent themselves to devices for lifting, pushing, and rotating objects. Entrepreneurs then began adapting the steam engine, the pivotal innovation of the 18th century, to old ways of manufacturing and transporting. Click for larger view View full resolution William Hogarth’s The Industrious ‘Prentice Lord-Mayor of London, 1747. From Thomas Clerk, The Works of William Hogarth (London, 1821). With Newton’s physics came a diffused conviction that nature could be made to work for human beings; its forces could be understood and controlled. Enthusiasts wrote books simplifying the new science. They found a ready audience. In 18th-century England there was a vibrant intellectual scene, nourished by a plethora of civic organizations, self-improvement societies, bookstores, periodicals, pubs, and plays. A teenage Ben Franklin, visiting London to learn the mechanics of printing, discovered Newtonian physics, as did an ambitious exciseman named Thomas Paine. About the same time, Voltaire, destined to be the signature philosopher of the Enlightenment, spent three years there and pronounced Newton’s theory a human triumph. Once capitalism’s amazing power to generate wealth was detected, most countries—at least in the West—wanted part of the action. And it was relatively easy for other countries to copy English innovations; the copiers didn’t have to replicate the complex of propitious factors necessary for capitalism to install itself the first time. They could also discriminate between what they wished to copy and what they found distasteful in the modernizing dynamic of capitalism. Western Europeans began revising their cultural forms, taking up new tastes, and talking with a fresh vocabulary about the impact of private enterprise on the welfare of the society as a whole. In time, traditional ways of acting and thinking lost their controlling power. The value systems of the past came from a world of scarcity. Traditions ennobled values compatible with restraint. Capitalism undermined that system and launched a culture of its own based on rising expectations and liberal morals. More properly, it launched diverse cultures as each country created its own mix of innovation and tradition. By the end of the 19th century, it was the United States and Germany that were nurturing the cutting-edge innovations in chemistry and electricity. Constant innovations didn’t come without cost, because every improved device rendered obsolete its predecessor. Prodded by the lure of stronger sales and higher profits, innovators hurt established industries. The 20th-century Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter captured the essence of capitalism in the phrase “creative destruction” of the old by the new. Rarely has anyone so precisely hit the nail on the head. Innovation fueled the relentless revolutions of capitalism, revealing its most striking feature to be its inextricable connection with change—the constant disturbance of once stable material and cultural forms. While it destroyed venerable institutions and settled communities, capitalism also opened up to a significant proportion of men and women in the West the possibility of organizing their energy, attention, and talents in order to forge new trade links and meet old needs with new commercial products. There were more failures than successes, and the successes brought unintended consequences. Turbulence was written into the system, but capitalism had already become self-sustaining before anyone pointed this out. Capitalism was never just an economic system. [End Page 9] Its focus on enhancing production through private initiatives impinged on every facet of life and was itself affected by every institution that shaped its participants. Where commerce could live within the...

Reviewed by: The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership by Mũkoma Wa Ngũgĩ Abdelkader Ben Rhit The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership BY MŨKOMA WA NGŨGĨ U of Michigan P, 2018. 228 pp. ISBN 9780472053681 paper. The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership explores the identity of African literature or rather the lost identity of African literature. In this book, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ raises the question, “What is African literature?,” which he answers with “African literature is a question to itself.” (188) He strongly disagrees with the canonization by the writers who gathered in Kampala for the first Makerere African Writers Conference, dubbed the “Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” His book raises some pertinent questions regarding African literature’s unending battle with the language issue, which has been a matter of disagreement between Ngũgĩ’s father, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Chinua Achebe. Ngũgĩ argues that writing in African languages is a necessary step toward cultural identity and independence from centuries of European exploitation, and it is part and parcel of the project of decolonization. However, Achebe argues that African identity can be expressed through English, the colonizer’s language. Although the language question features prominently in The Rise of the African Novel, Ngũgĩ’s main argument is that African literature predates the Makerere generation. He takes issue with “the elision of earlier African writings such as the South African examples” (Cajetan 228) and the longstanding assumption—cultivated by publishers and literary critics over the decades—that the “African novel” began with the Makerere generation. This, Ngũgĩ believes, is the critical issue. “What does it mean for the African literary tradition when there is an absence of sustained critical readings of African writing before the Makerere writers?” (106). In his book, the younger Ngũgĩ reiterates the vital importance of writing African literatures in African languages because writing in English has contributed to the ascendancy of English and the thriving of African literature in English at the expense of literature written in African languages, like the earlier African writings from South Africa that Ngũgĩ highlights in his book. He states, “In The Rise of the African Novel I am exploring the question of why African literature means writing in European languages” (9). To this end, Ngũgĩ proposes the reconstruction of the history of the African novel, taking into consideration the writings of those who predated the Makerere generation. [End Page 209] The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters. The introduction highlights the major issues to be discussed throughout the book, namely the identity of the African novel, the Makerere writers, and questions of language, identity, and ownership. In chapter one, “No Shrubbing in the English Metaphysical Empire, Please: A Question of Language,” Ngũgĩ explores the “various ways Makerere and post-Makerere African writers have responded to the language question in African writing” (26). In chapter two, “Amos Tutuola: Creating the African Literary Bogeyman,” Ngũgĩ considers the “aesthetic costs and opportunities of noninterventionist editing” (26). His analysis of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) reveals a poor command of English, arguing that editors did the author an injustice by leaving grammatical errors in the text. In chapter three, “Africa’s Missing Literary History: From A. C. Jordan’s Child of Two Worlds to NoViolet Bulawayo’s Fractured Multiple Worlds,” Ngũgĩ traces the genealogy of the African novel and African literary criticism beyond their conventional beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. He takes issue with critics who “chronicle African literature commencing from the “wrong literary epoch” (qtd. in Muchiri 1), showing that Africa’s body of fictional texts is enriched by reaching “back in time … and across space” (107). In chapter four, “Manufacturing the African Literary Canon: Costs and Opportunities,” he argues that the binary between what is literary and what is popular is “a false opposition” (154) because this has led to the canonization of the African political novel at the expense of other forms and genres in African writing. His creation...

Reviewed by: The Early Reader in Children's Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers. ed. by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker Krystal Howard (bio) The Early Reader in Children's Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers. Edited by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker. Routledge, 2016. In their introduction to The Early Reader in Children's Literature and Culture:Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers, Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker define the category of the Early Reader loosely as "those books that children are first able to read entirely on their own" (4). The authors point out that although "Early Readers are often overlooked, dismissed, or merely tolerated . . . as fun, silly fare a child can uncritically consume before moving, hopefully quickly, onto more meaningful, more literary texts," this category of books "deserve[s] much more scholarly attention and careful thought" (1). Whether termed "Early Readers," "Easy Readers," "beginning readers," "intermediate readers," "independent readers," "early chapter books,"or "first readers," this broad category of books, Miskec and Wannamaker argue, represents perhaps the first moment that many young readers have to [End Page 255] independently engage with and experience pleasure from a work of literature. This collection sets out to answer Katharine Capshaw's call in the Spring 2013 issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly that children's literature scholars focus critical attention on the early reader genre, and it does so by using interdisciplinary approaches from research in the fields of education, cultural studies, literary theory, and children's literature (1–2). The Early Reader in Children's Literature and Culture includes fifteen chapters and an introduction and is divided into four sections: History, Aesthetics and Form, Culture, and Global Contexts. Overall, the chapters in Section I: History, along with the introduction, were the most noteworthy in defining and situating the development of the Early Reader genre within the history of children's literature. While the chapters in Section II: Aesthetics and Form examine the narrative and formal devices typical of Early Readers, the chapters in Section III: Culture and Section IV: Global Contexts feature close readings of notable Early Reader stand-alone or series works. Section III's chapters, focused on culture, seemed as if they would be most useful in the context of the undergraduate university children's literature classroom. In her chapter from Section I, "From the New England Primer to The Cat in the Hat: Big Steps in the Growth and Development of Early Readers," Ramona Caponegro examines historical children's books from the seventeenth through the twentieth century that had the greatest impact on the development of contemporary Early Readers (such as the New England Primer, Jacob Abbott's Rollo Learning to Read, Gertrude Chandler Warner's The Boxcar Children, The Ultimate Dick and Jane Storybook Collection, Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, and Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak's Little Bear) and sees the category as "an adaptable category with a cyclical history" (13–14). In the same section, Rebekah Fitzsimmons's "Creating and Marketing Early Reader Picture Books" explores the Early Reader genre as part of the Reading Wars controversy, a public debate about methods of reading instruction in American elementary schools during the 1950s, by taking aim at "the motivations of the creators of this specialized niche genre, and the marketing used to entice parents into purchasing this new 'essential product for their children" (38). These early chapters provide a foundational understanding of the roots of the genre and set the stage for the chapters that follow in the Aesthetics and Form, Culture, and Global Contexts sections. In their contributions to the collection in Sections II and III, respectively, Annette Wannamaker's "Babymouse in Space: Locating the Reader, Text, Character, and Brand" and Sarah Park Dahlen's "Alvin Ho: Not Allergic to Playing Indian, Feathers, and Other Stereotypical Things" each provide a critique of the content of seemingly praise-worthy Early Readers. Wannamaker laments Babymouse's "limited and limiting" depiction of the titular [End Page 256] character's status as both a child and "a female character who longs for more freedom of movement, but must learn to make do" (101, 103). Dahlen notes...

Reviewed by: Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation Theodore S. Gonzalves (bio) Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation. Christi-Anne Castro. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. [x] + 248 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780199746408 (Hardcover), $55.00. Professor Castro has written an insightful book about how the post-World War II Philippine nation-state has helped to shape the contours of creative expression in the arts, not only for its residents in meaningful ways, but also for those listening and performing throughout the Filipino diaspora. Castro presents an example of how nation, state, and cultural forms become braided in curious and sometimes frustrating ways. Filipino rebels had waged an anti-colonial war against the Spanish that concluded with their declaration of independence on June 12, 1898. The public reading of that document wouldn't have been complete without music and it comes as no surprise that the "Marcha Nacional Filipina" made its debut on the same day. The Philippine government sent copies of both the music and the declaration to the US admiral whose flotilla had been anchored in Manila Bay. His absence was no accident. Neither Spain nor the United States recognized the new Asian republic, and the anthem did not reach its intended audience. [End Page 146] Castro probably could have written a book that focused solely on the twists and turns of Filipino anthems of all types—for example, songs for a newly founded polity, or anti-war songs taught to students and activists. But Castro's book tracks larger developments that involve many of the Philippine state's most important cultural institutions. This emphasis on the role of the state is important for several reasons, not the least of which involves how we all can benefit from rigorous analyses of patronage, provenance, and the crafting of national identities. Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation is not strictly about the formal aspects of music-making, although Castro's training in that field is evident and put to effective use. Texts such as The Garland Handbook of Southeast Asian Music (Miller and Williams, eds., 2008) can serve that purpose, as well as texts like Jose Maceda's Gongs and Bamboo (1998) or Ramón P. Santos's Tunugan: Four Essays on Filipino Music (2005). See also older texts such as Raymundo Bañas y Castillo's Pilipino Music and Theater ([ca. 1970] 1975) and William R. Pfeiffer's Filipino Music: Indigenious [sic], Folk, Modern (1976). An updating of this literature is definitely needed. Castro presents cultural histories of what can be understood loosely as "command performances"; in other words, aspects of state-crafted or state-sponsored performativity that begs careful analyses of intention, execution, and dissemination. Perhaps a good companion volume to take up with Castro's study would be D. R. M. Irving's Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (2010), another text that delves into overlapping arguments regarding the musicality of empire, albeit focused on the Spanish colonial period. Castro's text takes on a contemporary "cultural history of the Philippines that outlines the role of music and performance in defining nation and, in its interrelated converse, the influence of national-level politics on shaping music expression" (6). At the center of her work are "expressions of cultural nationalism" [that] "seek to stabilize the vagaries of everything that 'culture' is said to stand for into tangible facets of national identity" (13). The major process she tracks throughout Musical Renderings is that of nationalization, how the nation-state acts in different ways and registers, as a filter, editor, patron, and promoter. Castro goes beyond merely arguing that the state is the sole tastemaker for the nation whose interests are dutifully translated in specific repertoires. Musical Renderings is arranged in the following manner: a detailed introductory chapter wherein the author identifies the scope of the study, with special attention to the relationship between the concepts of "the nation" and cultural nationalism; a chapter that introduces the reader to prominent composers who lived and worked during the US colonial period (1899-1946); and three chapters that attend to the post-World War II landscape dotted by major cultural institutions (the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company...

Introduction:Rethinking Southern Literary Studies David McWhirter (bio) Still simmering controversies surrounding the flying of the confederate flag over the South Carolina State House remind us that "southern culture" remains, forty years after desegregation, a highly charged and contested symbolic site. And "southern literature" has played a prominent role in successive constructions and reconstructions of "the South," both as a unique regional culture, and as a privileged locus—sometimes valorized, often castigated—for understanding the broader modern U.S. culture to which it stands in tense relation. In the 1920s and 30s, white southern writers and academics, concentrated in a handful of universities (Vanderbilt, Ole Miss, LSU) in some of the poorest states in the union, successfully promoted a still-influential model for understanding southern literature as a bastion of traditional values (cultural, religious, familial, communal, agrarian)—a last line of defense, or so it was argued, against a soulless, rootless, corrupt urban industrial (hence, "northern") modernity. This model—built on an elision of, sometimes an overt complicity in, the institutions and discourses of racism, on histories that depend as much on what they forget as on what they remember, and on a rigid (if highly complex) adherence to traditional gender roles—has been under fire for two decades or more by African-Americanist and feminist critics. More recently, scholars drawing on new work in cultural and postcolonial theory, social history, and cultural geography have begun to question "southern literature's" excessively U.S.-centered approach to the history and culture of the Americas, and to challenge its neglect of the cultural, linguistic, class, and social differences that fissure a purportedly unitary "South." One consequence of these new trends has been a long-overdue rethinking of our concepts of "region," "place," and the "imagined communities" they are said to embody. Interrogating the value of "place" as a category of cultural understanding, critics have increasingly wondered if discourses of southern regionalism—prone (like all regionalisms, it may be) to substitute, in Roberto Dainotto's words, "a latently ideological tool of analysis—history—with an allegedly natural one—place" —have not in fact served to construct "the South" as "the figure of an otherness that is, essentially, otherness from, and against, history."1 [End Page 1] Writing in 1952, Robert Heilman famously claimed "a deep suspiciousness of abstraction" as one of the hallmarks of "the southern temper."2 But nothing could be more abstract (or less historicized) than the idea of "the South" bequeathed to us by earlier generations of scholars, including Heilman. Permeated by the rhetoric of authenticity, even by a fetishization of authenticity, southern literary studies has long subscribed to a naïve logic of mimeticism in which southern writing is understood not only to represent, but actually to arise or emanate from, a "region" that pre-exists it—that is, from a southern soil or psyche or essence that is understood to exist prior to and independently of the languages and cultural forms in which it is represented. Thus subsumed into a unitary narrative so finished and airtight as to have forgotten its own status as narrative, the historical south, for all intents and purposes, vanishes, subsumed by a set of totalizing myths, maps, portraits, and abstractions ("the South") which, in promising the completedness of a foundation, have also blocked or frustrated our ability to generate enabling re-orientations. The South, we might say, has only recently, and reluctantly, been allowed to differ from itself, a shift suggested by the titles—No Place Like Home; South to a New Place; South of Tradition; Reconstructing Dixie—of several of the new scholarly books reviewed in this issue. "'Southern Literature'/Southern Cultures" originated in November 2002 as a symposium, held at Texas A&M University, featuring the contributors and respondents included in these pages. Representing the various critical trends that are currently transforming southern literary studies, those contributors work to reexamine, reevaluate, and dislocate past constructions of southern literature. In "Toward 'A New Southern Studies,'" Michael Kreyling gives an overview of the opportunities and risks—including recent manifestations of "calculated amnesia" —attendant upon what he calls "the present, protracted shift from southern literature (now an outdated term for what we study...

Reviewed by: Communicating with the Spirits Michael D. Bailey Gábo Klaniczayr and Éva Pócs, eds., in collaboration with Eszter Csonka-Takács. Communicating with the Spirits, Demons, Spirits, Witches 1. Buda-pest and New York: Central European University Press, 2005. Pp. vii + 295. This is the first in a series of three planned volumes containing essays presented at a conference on “Demons, Spirits, and Witches” held in Buda-pest in 1999. While this volume offers essays dealing with demonic possession, visionary experiences, trance states, and shamanism, future volumes (the [End Page 257] contents of which are listed) will focus on demonology, both elite and popular, and on witchcraft. In all, forty-three articles will be published. As is typical with conference proceedings, indeed with essay collections of any sort, the articles in this volume vary considerably in their focus, and in the depth and breadth of their coverage. The most extended contribution is that of Éva Pócs, who seems to have exercised editor’s privilege and expanded her essay to sixty-eight pages. Most of the other articles, however, appear to have been revised only slightly, if at all, beyond their original forms as conference papers. Many are only ten to twelve pages long. In terms of coverage, Pócs’s article spans several periods, but focuses on East-Central Europe. Of the other ten essays, five focus on medieval Europe, three on the early modern period, one on the modern, and one is essentially ahistorical. The authors come from several different disciplines, including history, literary studies, and folklore, although only one article really makes an issue of its particular disciplinary approach. Almost all of the articles are worthwhile. Because of their typically short length, however, few can do more than offer preliminary insights or pose interesting questions. Nancy Caciola introduces the notion that medieval concepts of demonic possession presented demons as physical presences occupying various spaces within the body. In the years since the original 1999 conference, she has actually worked out this argument to much greater extent in other article and monograph publications, which she cites here. Renata Mikolajczyk presents the demonological thought of the medieval Silesian scholar Witelo. While some of his natural interpretations for demonic activity are intriguing, she herself admits that most of his thought was not extraordinary but drew on standard demonological notions. She does not have space, however, to develop these issues fully. Moshe Sluhovsky examines ideas of demonic possession in early modern Catholic countries. His main conclusion is that problems of discernment continued unresolved from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period. Sophie Houdard, examining visionary activity in seventeenth-century France, indicates that these problems persisted, but that in this period visionary activity as a whole was coming under greater suspicion. Regardless of whether visions were supposedly divine or demonic, all such experiences were now more frequently regarded as fake. Éva Pócs closes out the section on demonic possession by presenting a long survey of categories of possession phenomena and what she calls “possession systems”—the social and cultural forms that possession experiences took in Central Europe over an extended span of time. She argues for these effectively, but also cautions that her results are only preliminary. The next section of the volume, on “Contacts with the Other World,” [End Page 258] begins with an excellent article by Wolfgang Behringer, in which he argues that late-medieval Waldensian heretics became associated with witchcraft because their holy men (and women) claimed to possess the ability to be in contact with the dead, as well as having other supernatural powers. The argument is necessarily more suggestive than conclusive, but sheds useful light on the otherwise odd association of Waldensians with witchcraft. This is followed by a short article on “thanotopic aspects of the Irish Sidhe” by Tok Thompson. Here he asserts that Irish fairy-beliefs are rooted in archaic notions of communication with the dead, since the Sidhe are associated with Neolithic burial mounds. At the end of his paper, however, he admits that he has not actually established the central linkages on which his argument hinges (pp. 200–201); instead he refers readers to his unpublished master...

Settler Colonial Strategies and Indigenous Resistance on the Great Lakes Lumber Frontier Theodore J. Karamanski (bio) Introduction The geographic and economic setting of the nineteenth century Upper Great Lakes region created unique challenges to American settler colonialism and encounters with the Indigenous people of this land of lakes and forests. Many Anishinaabeg bands responded creatively through the use of Christianity, education, and American law in an attempt to fortify their presence in the region. European Americans, who sought to appropriate the wealth of the Upper Midwest’s vast stands of hardwood and pine forests, only seldom needed to resort to guns to take control of the land. Instead of a war of conquest they entangled Anishinaabeg property owners in a bewildering legal and extralegal thicket that facilitated the plunder of the region’s most marketable resource. The initial phase of pine logging laid waste to Anishinaabeg property rights but left the Indigenous population remaining on their traditional lands. The ill treatment of Anishinaabeg landowners should have been a warning signal to policymakers in the 1880s seeking to reform national Indian policy through severalty. In his 2012 study of Great Lakes Indian history in the colonial and early national periods, historian Michael Witgen emphasizes the transregional society shared by the Anishinaabeg while at the same time documenting the “flexibility” and autonomy of action reserved to local bands. This essay is concerned with the Indigenous response to the lumber frontier’s variation of settler colonialism in the Upper Great Lakes region—the heartland [End Page 27] of the Anishinaabeg. The bulk of the essay, however, is anchored in northern Lower Michigan with the inclusion of some examples from northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi in Lower Michigan—sometimes known as the Three Fires Confederacy and who all embraced the native name Anishinaabeg—did not respond to the intrusion of lumbering in the same way as bands in other parts of the region. Yet the impact of the logging frontier on the Indigenous people was, with rare exceptions, strikingly similar.1 In the Wake of the “Middle Ground” What Richard White famously dubbed a “middle ground” of cooperation and cultural exchange that marked the Great Lakes frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries endured after the conclusion of the second war with Great Britain. The cultural forms and economic relations of that earlier period of French and British regimes in the region only slowly waned over several decades under American suzerainty.2 The latent military power of the Indigenous people of the Great Lakes region, together with the lingering possibility of their receiving support from British Canada, inclined American officials and pioneer traders to follow for a time the previously established cultural norms. This process did not take place in the area south of Lakes Erie and Michigan. Here the old fur trade ways were swept away by a quickly rising tide of agricultural settlers. Yet during the 1820s the Anishinaabeg of the northern Great Lakes faced no such direct pressure and were allowed time in which they could take stock of their relations with the American state and to initiate strategies of resistance and accommodation. Several Anishinaabeg bands adopted bold strategies designed to both frustrate a United States government intent on carrying out the policy of Indian removal and to reposition their bands in the changing economy and politics of the antebellum era. The United States government had a two-faced policy toward Indigenous peoples. On one hand, it was committed to the taking of Indian land in order to accommodate its swelling agricultural population, yet it also claimed to be committed to “civilizing” Indians so they could eventually be incorporated into the general population. In 1821 Lewis Cass, the governor of the Michigan Territory (which then embraced the entirety of the Upper Great Lakes region), visited the people of the region. Accompanying him was Reverend Jedidiah Morse, who encouraged [End Page 28] the Indians to accept Christian missionaries with the threat “Civilization or ruin.” Faced with this pressure, two groups of Anishinaabeg, independent of each other, elected to embrace a path to “civilization,” but in such a way that it was under their control. These were the Potawatomi...

Inside the Temple of Ravoni:George Lippard's Anti-Exposé Carl Ostrowski (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution George Lippard, daguerreotype, ca. 1850. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-6548. [End Page 1] George Lippard's 1845 novel The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall is usually characterized as a city-mysteries novel, a genre that introduced readers to the seamy underside of antebellum cities while protesting the economic exploitation of the urban poor. But the city-mysteries label as applied by modern commentators fails to account for the full scope of Lippard's ambitions in this complex and overwrought text. Another way of opening The Quaker City to interpretation is to view it through the lens of the exposé, a generic classification that straddles traditional lines between fiction and nonfiction and between periodical literature and book publication. The term exposé, which appears repeatedly (along with such variants as "exposed" and "exposure") in publishers' catalogs of the 1840s and 1850s, helps to clarify the relationship between The Quaker City and other forms of literature next to which it was marketed and from which it borrowed certain conventions. This reading strategy brings to light one of Lippard's unacknowledged accomplishments in the novel, his remarkable experimentation with the exposé format—in particular as practiced by authors who claimed to expose the secret crimes of Mormons and Catholics. Apparently troubled by its tendency to promote sectarian violence, Lippard structures a demystification of the exposé format around one character, an enigmatic cult leader named Ravoni the Sorcerer. As it developed in the penny press of the 1830s and 1840s, [End Page 2] the exposé form constituted itself in the author's claim to bringing shocking, hidden truths to light. George Lippard first worked within this genre at the Philadelphia penny paper the Spirit of the Times. Working as a crime reporter under the pseudonyms Toney Blank and Billy Brier in 1842, Lippard initially affected a jaunty, ironic tone as he introduced readers to the beatings, thefts, and prostitution that plagued their city at night. Lippard soon realized, however, that this material could be exploited for more serious literary ends. Such ambitions found voice in "The Love of Nancy Phillips—A Novel—Edited by Brier," wherein Lippard's pseudonymous Brier boasts that the sordid tale of a black woman seeking revenge against her ex-lover is "done up in Bulwerian style" and that he sometimes thinks he's "cut out for a novelist."1 Lippard took another step toward novelizing such material in a series called "Our Talisman," in which a magical ring allows its possessor to become invisible and read other people's thoughts. In this series, the pseudonymous "Flib" sits in on the meetings of (generically identified) Bank Directors, documenting the machinations by which they reward their large investors while defrauding poor widows and honest mechanics. Lippard foregrounds the language of exposé in these pieces, as in "Our Talisman, No. 6," where one of the corrupt Bank Directors whispers, "The 'Times' has exposed us to the Legislature," while another warns, "If our little secrets are to be exposed this way to the public . . . it will naturally destroy the institution." In other articles from the series, Flib exposes a corrupt postal official who embezzled money and hired his own relatives, a theater owner who cheated a starving actress, and various other shady, reprehensible characters that normally hold a place in respectable society.2 This series shows Lippard striking the note of radical populism that would become characteristic of his city-mysteries novels. With the 1844 publication in English of Eugène Sue's popular novel The Mysteries of Paris (originally published in Paris as Les mystères de Paris, 1842–43), Lippard and likeminded novelists saw the possibilities for adapting exposé materials to full-length fiction.3 Writing a novel (even one based loosely on actual events), Lippard could dispense with the flimsy contrivance of the talisman and report hidden crimes from the vantage point [End Page 3] of an omniscient narrator. The American version of the city-mysteries novel, with its characteristic blending of violence, illicit sexuality, and a social reform agenda...

Special Issue Introduction Les Field (bio) and Joanne Rappaport (bio) Collaborative research methods have a long history in Latin America, one that is particularly oriented toward explicit, specific, and wide-ranging projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge. In pursuit of that end, the various Latin American authors whose work is showcased in this special issue of Collaborative Anthropologies develop and deploy collaborative research methods, epistemologies, and ontologies that to some degree resemble those of North American scholars and, to an important degree, break new ground in refashioning collaborative research as a decolonizing methodology. In order to comprehend what they are doing, we must begin with a consideration of the notions of colonialism, coloniality, and colonial difference. Coloniality, a concept recently developed by postcolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2002: 61), drawing on the work of Aníbal Quijano (1997, 2000) and Enrique Dussel (1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999), can be understood as the entire ensemble of conditions created by colonialism, itself the aggregate phenomenon of the consolidation of colonial regimes over the past five hundred years. In those areas of the world that experienced colonial regimes in the wake of European conquest, coloniality is an outcome that is coterminous with the nature of modernity: coloniality creates sharply perceptible divergences between modernities in those countries that were the colonizing powers and modernities in colonized areas of the world. Mignolo calls this "colonial difference" and argues that it has structured and shaped the creation, understanding, interpretation, and representation of knowledge about modernity worldwide (2002: 61-62). In a planetary geography shaped [End Page 3] by colonialism, in which coloniality is pervasive, Mignolo discerns a "geopolitics of knowledge" that is always already unequal, because it is the outcome of colonialism and the condition of coloniality. Mignolo observes that just as the geopolitics of knowledge is the outcome of colonialism and coloniality, projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge are also enmeshed in large-scale processes of political, economic, and social change. For example, he cites dependency theory's central role in defining national policies in Latin America in the aftermath of World War II up until the late 1970s and the corollary impact of dependency theory on the decolonization of knowledge during and following those decades (2002: 63-65). While each of the authors in this issue elaborates a particular concept of decolonization, drawing upon different literatures, they all acknowledge a common intellectual genealogy that ultimately goes back, at least in part, to the work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda. In 1970 Fals Borda published an important volume titled Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual (Our Science and Intellectual Colonialism), which echoes a widespread and ongoing critique of the colonizing countries' monopoly control over the production of scientific knowledge among Asian, African, and Latin American scholars, and which ultimately inspired the methodology of participatory action research. The scenario Fals Borda lays out is simple: Western expansion takes place not only in the economic and political spheres but in the educational and intellectual arenas as well. The task of Latin American intellectuals, then, is to reframe theory and methodology so that they emanate from the colonial world, converting social research into a tool for liberation. In 1971, together with other politically committed Colombian scholars, Fals Borda made concrete proposals toward such ends in Causa popular, ciencia popular (Popular Cause, Popular Science), published by La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Social Research and Action), a network of Colombian social scientists and journalists advocating activist research alongside popular movements (Bonilla et al. 1971). La Rosca proposed inserting themselves as researcher-activists into local and regional struggles, in order to establish research priorities in conjunction with local activists. Their collaborative work would focus on the identification of local cultural, social, and political forms that could prove useful in supporting organizations with whom La Rosca worked closely in indigenous regions of southwestern [End Page 4] highland Colombia and among peasants of Colombia's Atlantic coast. In other words, Fals Borda and his associates developed a critique of the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge that would lead to its decolonization through an alliance of scholars and grassroots activists. Since the 1970s, Latin American scholars writing both...

Culture lies at the centre of the distinctiveness of overseas territories—from Greenland to Gibraltar, American Samoa to French Polynesia—to the metropolitan states of which they form a part. Colonialism and the presence of indigenous, settler and diasporic populations from different parts of the world often have created rich cultural mixtures, particularly evident in the Creole islands of the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean. Local languages or dialects, religion, ancestral traditions and ceremonies, and particularly ethnicity, set their residents apart from compatriots in Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States or France. Globalisation, education, migration, secularism and internet connectivity have challenged age-old differences in belief and behaviour, and some old practices have become anachronistic or unsustainable. Hybrid societies now blend cultures, and individuals possess multiple identities, though to varying degrees and with asymmetries between the local, national and international. Colonial-era impositions (such as Christianity) have long become ‘indigenised’ in the Caribbean and Oceania, and European languages have served as linguae francae in New Caledonia and French Guiana. Individuals and societies adopt and adapt new forms of culture, yet old ones endure: Islam as the majority faith in Mayotte, ‘custom’ in New Caledonia, Polynesian dancing and tattooing, whale-hunting in the Faroes, Carnival in the Caribbean. Indeed, recent years have seen both a resurgence in particularistic cultural practices and a greater recognition by metropolitan states of cultural autonomy in the overseas territories. Yet the personal and collective affirmation of cultural specificities have been increasingly decoupled from demands for independence. Cultural issues nevertheless remain areas for political contestation and negotiation, especially with divergent attitudes to such questions as marriage equality and other human rights concerns, ‘belonger’ status, the legacies of slavery and metropolitan political intervention.

Francophone African authors sometimes choose not to conform to metropolitan French language norms in their literary works. This is often read as a strategy of subversion and decolonization, a means of resisting literary and linguistic conventions imposed during colonial rule and of achieving intellectual liberation and self-expression. However, other readings of linguistic non-conformity are possible: for example, inflecting the French language with one or more African languages may be seen as a means through which authors assert the nature of their writing as African literature, even though they are using a European language as the main language of expression. The particular significance that readers ascribe to such innovations will be affected by many different factors, including the book’s paratexts and the reader’s own positionality. The broader “meanings” of the innovative features of Francophone African literature are thus complex and open to change, and they are also inevitably affected by translation. As readers, translators bring their own interpretation to the significance of linguistic innovation in the original works, and their decisions around how to render non-standard language have significant potential to change the political import of the original writing.

Teaching Baihua: Textbook Publishing and the Production of Vernacular Language and a New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-Century China Robert Culp (bio) It is hereby decided that starting in the fall of this year, all first- and second-year classes in lower primary schools (literally “citizens’ schools [國民學校 guomin xuexiao]”) should change first from using standard written Chinese (國文 guowen)1 to the written vernacular (語體文 yutiwen) in hopes of obtaining the results of integrating the spoken and written languages. —Ministry of Education decree, 12 January 19202 The Ministry of Education’s 1920 declarations calling for introduction of vernacular language textbooks at the primary level are often cited as a threshold moment in the movement for vernacular language.3 In fact, educators and publishers responded to [End Page 4] this decree with rapid publication of full sets of primary and secondary textbooks in a range of disciplines that used the syntax, styles, and lexicon of China’s emergent vernacular language. These textbooks, as we will see, contributed significantly to the spread and standardization of the written vernacular (白話 baihua). However, the project of creating and teaching China’s modern vernacular was more extended and decentralized than this state-centered account suggests, and textbooks played varied roles at different stages of this complex process. In this article I explore three distinct ways in which primary and secondary textbooks contributed to the production and spread of baihua. First, I build on the impressive existing literature on lexical change in the nineteenth century to establish that between 1900 and 1920—that is, during the twenty years before the Ministry of Education’s pronouncement on the language of textbooks—textbook publishing helped to consolidate the modern vernacular vocabulary. 4 Popular readers and content textbooks of the 1900s and 1910s introduced and defined many of the elements of the compound modern vocabulary of loan words and return loan words from Japanese and European languages that became fundamental elements of China’s modern vernacular. Second, I demonstrate that textbooks produced by the main commercial publishers during the 1920s and 1930s came to incorporate and spread to two generations of primary and secondary students New Culture forms of vernacular language. Because of the size of the national student body in comparison with other reading communities, incorporation of modern baihua into textbooks was a decisive step in making it a vernacular national language (國語 guoyu). New Culture movement-inspired baihua can be seen as a hybrid product that integrated late imperial styles of vernacular writing with ongoing lexical changes influenced by Europe and Japan and also stylistic and grammatical approaches based on both spoken language and European and Japanese models.5 During the 1920s and 1930s, when this language was still under construction, textbooks, which were variously written by publishers’ editorial staff, educators, and intellectuals, played a vital role in defining and disseminating baihua by providing large numbers of students with approved models of vernacular prose writing. In a preliminary effort to characterize these models, I differentiate between two registers of vernacular writing that textbooks offered students: colloquial baihua, which was based primarily on [End Page 5] conventions of everyday speech; and professionalized baihua, which followed highly Europeanized, academic patterns of vocabulary and style. Third, collection of vernacular fiction, poetry, and expository prose in secondary- level national language textbooks of the 1920s and 1930s contributed to marking certain authors and works as models of modern Chinese literature. As May Fourth intellectuals, such as Hu Shi (胡適 1891–1962) and Ye Shengtao (葉聖陶 1894–1988), drafted curricula or signed on with commercial publishers to compile vernacular language readers for secondary schools during the 1920s and 1930s, they included their own works and those of their colleagues. The result was that new literature advocates began to canonize those authors and works as representative examples of modern Chinese literature before or in step with the formal collection of May Fourth literature during the mid-1930s. Commercial textbook publishing thus provided a potent mechanism for proponents of the new literature to claim centrality and status for themselves and their works in ways similar to how literary scholar Michel Hockx describes different groups positioning themselves in the literary field through organization of societies and publication of journals.6...

Reviewed by: Exorcism and Its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature of England and Spain Barbara H. Traister (bio) Exorcism and Its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature of England and Spain. By Hilaire Kallendorf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xxi + 327 pp. $65.00. Hilaire Kallendorf has written a surprising study of early modern exorcism; it surprises by its definition and choice of exorcism texts, by its rigorous exclusion of exorcism associated with witchcraft, and by the structuralist model of analysis Kallendorf has chosen. Due in large part to these surprises, her book offers a refreshing—if often unorthodox—approach to a subject [End Page 356] that is currently under discussion by literary and historical scholars such as Nancy Caciola, Sarah Ferber, and Philip C. Almond. Because she writes about only literary texts from early modern England and Spain, Kallendorf does not deal with historical exorcism narratives. Neither does she treat literary texts in which witches incite or summon demons to pursue their enemies; Kallendorf considers these to be witchcraft rather than exorcism stories. She does, however, draw on a wide range of literary genres: dramatic comedy, satire, romance, saints' plays, dramatic tragedy, and the novel (i.e., Don Quixote). Thus, most of the texts she discusses are not those ordinarily treated in studies of exorcism. In fact, the texts might be called possession texts rather than exorcism texts because in some, particularly the tragedies, exorcism appears only in its failure or absence: "Most commonly, exorcism is absent from tragedy; when it does appear there, it fails. . . . Demonic possession resonates through the genre of tragedy, but the hope for an ultimate exorcism is forever raised and then dashed to pieces. It is the nature of the tragic experience that exorcism cannot succeed" (14–15). Working from a model derived from Lévi-Strauss, Kallendorf isolates a number of theologemes ("constitutive units of myths bearing theological content" (9)) found in a representative group of literary texts about demonic possession and exorcism. She explains that "which aspects of the exorcism experience are highlighted or emphasized usually depends on which genre the writer is working within" (9). Using this structuralist approach she charts the frequency of occurrence of eleven theologemes (for example, "the demon's entrance into the body" and "relics, holy water, and other props") in twenty-seven literary texts (xxi). This method allows Kallendorf to demonstrate (as scholars like Walter Cohen have done in other contexts) the close affinities between the literatures of England and Spain in the early modern period. Particularly notable is her conclusion that exorcism in many of the tragic texts provides an explanation for otherwise inexplicable evil. The demon becomes a scapegoat for the villain's evil, for only one possessed by an evil spirit could perform such cruelties as, for example, the husband in A Yorkshire Tragedy. In other genres, Kallendorf argues, the exorcism ritual is humanized as exorcists use rhetoric and logic to battle indwelling demons, and their appeal as texts stems largely from the struggle and ultimate victory of the exorcists. In all Kallendorf's analyses, genre is the most important variable, and her conclusions are nearly all genre specific. Perhaps the volume's most important point arises from one of the theologemes: Kallendorf argues, too sporadically given the broad presence she claims for this theologeme, that in more than two-thirds of the texts she [End Page 357] cites exorcism is a synedoche for purifying and curing the body politic. If true, this suggests a more integral relationship between church and state in the literature of both England and Spain than we are used to granting. Indeed, Kallendorf defends the presence of the "Christian legitimate marvelous" in this period, arguing that "exorcism and its texts, be they of whatever genre, are powerful testaments to the beliefs of some early modern writers in the existence of angels and demons" (198). In places, Kallendorf's analyses of her proof texts remind the reader of the mid-twentieth-century textual exegesis of scholars like Irving Ribner, Joseph Summers and Roy Battenhouse. But Kallendorf assembles her arguments from different materials than the religious allusions and analogues traced by these earlier scholars. Broadly informed by literary...

Reviewed by: Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum Americaby Teresa A. Goddu Matthew Fox-Amato (bio) Antislavery, Slavery, Abolition, Media, American Anti-Slavery Society, Print culture, Material culture, Visual culture Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America. By Teresa A. Goddu. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 344. Cloth, $55.00.) The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), for Teresa A. Goddu, was more than an influential organization in the 1830s: It was also a cultural machine. The scale and diversity of the AASS's cultural production back this point. Established in 1833, the AASS had reached an estimated circulation of 725,000 copies of its publications per year by the end of the decade. Its many publications included monthly periodicals such as Human Rightsand The Emancipator, the yearly American Anti-Slavery Almanac, and the widely read American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses(1839). It published images such as the broadside Slave Market of America(1836) and organized well-attended fairs in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia, where attendees could buy all kinds of consumer goods to support the cause. In Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America, Goddu asks how AASS representations mobilized opposition to slavery while shaping the identities of the abolitionists who consumed them. One of the many virtues of Selling Antislaveryis how it treats abolitionist [End Page 154]literary texts as one of many cultural forms produced by the movement. After a chapter on the publishing strategies and distribution networks of the AASS, Goddu examines its representations in three sections: print culture (almanacs and slave narratives); material culture (consumer goods at fairs and the fairs as symbolic sites); and visual culture (images in publications and prints). A concluding chapter explores how Black artists and writers not affiliated with the AASS appropriated and contested its aesthetics. Blending business history with wide-ranging cultural analysis, Selling Antislaveryis a compelling contribution to our view of abolitionist media. The book joins a growing body of scholarship stressing the importance of visual and material culture to antebellum activists fighting for abolition and racial justice. Work over the last decade includes Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade(Chicago, 2011); Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity(Durham, NC, 2012); Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery(Philadelphia, 2013); John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American(New York, 2015); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance(Chicago, 2015); and Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century(Chapel Hill, NC, 2020). Though not limited to abolitionism, these and other works have shown how abolitionists were keen to use images and ephemera to denounce slavery, define their public personas, and forge political bonds. Selling Antislaveryunderscores these insights while deepening our understanding of how, precisely, abolitionists were able to blanket the nation with representations in the 1830s. This was possible, for Goddu, because the AASS employed "innovative organizational structures, new technologies of reproduction and publicity, and systematized distribution" (10). The organization's top-down management structure, which started with the executive committee in New York, catalyzed expansion. The New York office took the lead in strategizing fundraising, planning the production of texts, and training paid lecturers. The AASS also embraced new media technologies, such as the steam press. Once created, AASS texts circulated across the North, to Europe, and even into the slave [End Page 155]South, as in the case of the 1835 postal campaign. Goddu describes the personnel who enabled such distribution and the actual places where people encountered media, including the many reading rooms and bookstores housed in offices of local societies. Grounded in extensive research in newspapers, personal papers, and the records of the AASS executive committee, Selling Antislaveryoffers an invaluable resource for those interested in how the AASS produced and circulated abolitionist texts with great variety, over a vast geography, in...