Gatherings: New Directions in Indigenous Book History
Due Date: 03-01-2024
With the advent of critical bibliography and the emergence of Indigenous book history as a subdiscipline, we solicit proposals for chapter-length contributions (4,000–6,000 words) to our proposed edited collection, Gatherings: New Directions in Indigenous Book History. We welcome original research on the material book’s relation to the Indigenous peoples of North America, including analyses, reflections, and provocations. For example, how might we define an Indigenous book? How have these books moved within, across, and outside Native communities? What material techniques and innovations have Indigenous authors, printers, publishers, and authors brought to the book? Where does Indigenous book history engage with, and depart from, other histories of the book?
In asking these questions, this volume builds on several productive interventions into the often settler-oriented disciplines of bibliography and book history, including in the work of scholars and writers like Matt Cohen, Louise Erdrich, Phillip Round, Theresa Warburton and Elissa Washuta, Germaine Warkentin, Caroline Wigginton, and others. Our volume extends on this important work by inviting contributions from a wide range of academic disciplines, material archives, theoretical frameworks, and interpretive methods.
Proposals might consider
- materialities of Indigenous books (including altered and ornamented books)
- interactions between Indigenous books and other Indigenous expressive forms
- historical and present-day curation of Indigenous books in libraries, archives, etc.
- literary marketplaces and the economics of Indigenous book production
- coterie, community-based, and independent publishing of Indigenous books
- digitization of the production and consumption of Indigenous books
- adaptation of the Indigenous book into traditional and new media
- descriptive and analytical bibliographies of Indigenous books
- scholarly editing, translation, and republication of Indigenous books
Please send proposals (250–500 words) and brief biographies (100 words) to Amy Gore and Dan Radus by 1 March 2024. Proposals for collaborative work are welcome. If accepted, completed chapters of 4,000–6,000 words will be due in fall 2024.