tc_admin

A World Transformed Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power by James Walvin

by tc_admin

University of California Press | $29.95 | Published 2023 | 416 pages | ISBN 9780520397859

From the Press: “A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.

This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.”

The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650-1850 by Danielle C. Skeehan

by tc_admin 0 Comments

Johns Hopkins University Press | $57.00 | Published 2020 | 200 pages | ISBN 9781421439686

From the Press “A history of the book in the Americas, across deep time, would reveal the origins of a literary tradition woven rather than written. It is in what Danielle Skeehan calls material texts that a people’s history and culture is preserved, in their embroidery, their needlework, and their woven cloth. In defining textiles as a form of cultural writing, The Fabric of Empire challenges long-held ideas about authorship, textuality, and the making of books.

It is impossible to separate text from textiles in the early modern Atlantic: novels, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets were printed on paper made from household rags. Yet the untethering of text from textile served a colonial agenda to define authorship as reflected in ink and paper and the pen as an instrument wielded by learned men and women. Skeehan explains that the colonial definition of the book, and what constituted writing and authorship, left colonial regimes blind to nonalphabetic forms of media that preserved cultural knowledge, history, and lived experience. This book shifts how we look at cultural objects such as books and fabric and provides a material and literary history of resistance among the globally dispossessed.

Each chapter examines the manufacture and global circulation of a particular type of cloth alongside the complex print networks that ensured the circulation of these textiles, promoted their production, petitioned for or served to curtail the rights of textile workers, facilitated the exchange of textiles for human lives, and were, in turn, printed and written on surfaces manufactured from broken-down linen and cotton fibers. Bringing together methods and materials traditionally belonging to literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, The Fabric of Empire provides a new model for thinking about the different media, languages, literacies, and textualities in the early Atlantic world.”

In Search of Mary Seacole The Making of a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian by Helen Rappaport

by tc_admin

Pegasus Books | $29.95 | Published 2022 | 416 pages | ISBN 9781639362745

From the Press “Raised in Jamaica, Mary Seacole first came to England in the 1850s after working in Panama. She wanted to volunteer as a nurse and aide during the Crimean War. When her services were rejected, she financed her own expedition to Balaclava, where her reputation for her nursing—and for her compassion—became almost legendary. Popularly known as ‘Mother Seacole’, she was the most famous Black celebrity of her generation—an extraordinary achievement in Victorian Britain.

She regularly mixed with illustrious royal and military patrons and they, along with grateful war veterans, helped her recover financially when she faced bankruptcy. However, after her death in 1881, she was largely forgotten.

More recently, her profile has been revived and her reputation lionized, with a statue of her standing outside St Thomas’s Hospital in London and her portrait—rediscovered by the author—now on display in the National Portrait Gallery. In Search of Mary Seacole is the fruit of almost twenty years of research and reveals the truth about Seacole’s personal life, her “rivalry” with Florence Nightingale, and other misconceptions.

Vivid and moving, In Search of Mary Seacole shows that reality is often more remarkable and more dramatic than the legend.”

White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery by Thomas Harding

by tc_admin

W&N | £10.99 | Published 2022 | Ebook | ISBN 9781474621076

From the Press “When Thomas Harding discovered that his family had profited from slavery, he set out to interrogate the choices of his ancestors and Britain’s role in this terrible history. His investigation took him to Demerara (now Guyana), the site of an uprising by enslaved people in 1823, the largest in the British Empire and a key trigger in the abolition of slavery. Charting the dramatic build-up to this landmark event through the eyes of four people – an enslaved man, a missionary, a colonist, and a slaveholder – Harding lays bare the true impact of years of unimaginable cruelty and incredible courage and asks how those who benefitted from slavery can take responsibility for the White Debt.”

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock

by tc_admin

Knopf | Hardcover | $32.50 | Published 2022 | 335 pages | ISBN 9780691194011

From the Press: “Abolitionist Cosmopolitanism redefines the potential of American antislavery literature as a cultural and political imaginary by situating antislavery literature in specific transnational contexts and highlighting the role of women as producers, subjects, and audiences of antislavery literature. Pia Wiegmink draws attention to locales, authors, and webs of entanglement between texts, ideas, and people. Perceived through the lens of gender and transnationalism, American antislavery literature emerges as a body of writing that presents profoundly reconfigured literary imaginations of freedom and equality in the United States prior to the Civil War.

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

by tc_admin

The University of North Carolina Press | $32.95 | Published 2023 | 424 pages | ISBN 9781469669946

From the Press: “Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, by contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America’s Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.”

Ebook available through the TCU Library. Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism by Tristram Wolff

by tc_admin

Stanford UP Press | $70.00 | Published 2023 | 323 pages | ISBN 9781503632769

Publication Date 2023

Pages: 323

“In this revisionist account of romantic-era poetry and language philosophy, Tristram Wolff recovers vibrant ways of thinking language and nature together. Wolff argues that well-known writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau offer a radical chronopolitics in reaction to the “uprooted word, ” or the formal analytic used to classify languages in progressive time according to a primitivist timeline of history and a hierarchy of civilization. Before the bad naturalisms of nineteenth-century race science could harden language into place as a metric of social difference, poets and thinkers try to soften, thicken, deepen, and dissolve it. This naturalizing tendency makes language more difficult to uproot from its active formation in the lives of its speakers. And its “gray romanticism” simultaneously gives language different kinds of time–most strikingly, the deep time of geologic form–to forestall the hardening of time into progress. Reorienting romantic studies to consider colonialism’s pervasive effects on theories of language origin, Wolff shows us the ambivalent position of romantics in this history. His reparative reading makes visible language’s ability to reimagine social forms”

Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880-1910 by Michael J. Connolly

by tc_admin

McGill-Queen’s University Press | 65.00 CAD | Published 2023 | 184 pages | ISBN 9780228014959

From the Press: “In the late nineteenth century a resurgent Jacobite movement emerged in Britain and the United States, highlighting the virtues of the Stuart monarchs in contrast to liberal, democratic, and materialist Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America. Compared with similarly aligned protest movements of the era–socialism, anarchism, nihilism, populism, and progressivism–the rise of Jacobitism receives little attention. Born in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Jacobitism had been in steep decline since the mid-eighteenth century. But between 1880 and 1910, Jacobite organizations popped up across Britain, then spread to the United States, publishing royalist magazines, organizing public demonstrations, offering Anglo-Catholic masses to fallen Stuart kings, and praying at Stuart statues and tombs. Michael Connolly explains the rise and fall of Anglo-American Jacobitism, places it in context, and reveals its significance as a response to and a driver of the political forces of the period. Understanding the Jacobite movement clarifies Victorian Anglo-American anxiety over liberalism, democracy, industrialization, and emerging modernity. In an age when worries over liberalism are again ascendant, Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880-1910 traces the complex genealogy of this unease.”

Ebook available through the TCU Library. Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830-1860 by Katie McGettigan

by tc_admin

University of Massachusetts Press | Paperback $34.95 | Published 2023 | 320 pages | ISBN 9781613769652

From the press: “Examining the transatlantic writings and professional careers of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, this book explores the impact of literary, cultural, political and legal manifestations of authority on nineteenth-century British and American writing, publishing and lecturing. Drawing on primary texts in conjunction with a rich body of archival sources, this study retraces Romantic debates about race and nationhood, analyses the relationship between cultural nationalism and literary historiography and sheds light on Carlyle’s and Emerson’s professional identities as publishing authors and lecturing celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic.

During the antebellum period, British publishers increasingly brought out their own authorized and unauthorized editions of American literary works as the popularity of print exploded and literacy rates grew. Playing a formative role in the shaping of American literature, the industry championed the work of U.S.-based writers, highlighted the cultural value of American literary works, and intervened in debates about the future of American literature, authorship, and print culture.

The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature examines the British editions of American fiction, poetry, essays, and autobiographies from writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Flagg Gould. Putting these publications into historical context, Katie McGettigan considers key issues of the day, including developments in copyright law, changing print technologies, and the financial considerations at play for authors and publishers. This innovative study also uncovers how the transatlantic circulation of these works exposed the racial violence and cultural nationalism at the heart of the American experiment, producing overlapping and competing visions of American nationhood in the process.”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour by Robert Volpicelli

by tc_admin

Oxford University Press | Hardcover $80.00 | Published 2021 | 218 pages | ISBN 9780192893383

“Many Americans’ first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person-through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour. 0Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural and historical scope to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors-Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden-on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit’s particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience-elite, popular, and everything in between.”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.