Suchergebnisse

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Institutional Antiracism and Account- ability Project and is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world's leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University. He recently sat down with Contexts Co-Editor Fabio Rojas and Production Manager Alisha Kirchoff to discuss his career and research.

The Philadelphia Negro pioneered the field of urban sociology. As a result, scholars often highlight its academic interventions that over a century after its publication remain germane to the study of cities and multiethnic populations in urban settings. While emphasis on the text's scholarly originality and contemporary analytic relevancy is central to demonstrate its importance, consideration of The Philadelphia Negro's book history provides an equally compelling account of its enduring significance. Book history addresses the creation of a book as a physical publication. Book history also considers the authorial choices behind infrastructural, textual adornments such as appendixes or maps. In addition, book history deals with subjects like cover art and how publishers and authors often cocreate the external visual presentation of a book's interior contents. In this brief book history, I explore an editorial history of critical scholarly editions of The Philadelphia Negro, an analysis occasioned by a recent 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press updated edition of the text that features sociologist Elijah Anderson's revised editorial introduction, first published in 1996. In other words, I historicize critical scholarly editions of The Philadelphia Negro to trace the book's reception and meaning over time. I also examine selected textual and infrastructural features of each critical edition, most especially the book covers. Historical analysis of sociological writing summons historians (like me) to perform cross-disciplinary intellectual labor while it also invites sociologists to consider historical context more expansively in their assessment of sociological texts.

Contemporary fan fiction is overwhelmingly digital in both publication and dissemination; it has never been easier to access this subculture of writers and writing. However, fan fiction in print has likewise never been so accessible, as a slew of recent popular novels proudly proclaim their fannish origins and make claims such as "More Than 2 Million Reads Online—FIRST TIME IN PRINT!" Further, traditional fannish mores insist that fan work should never be done for profit, and yet numerous print works adapted from fan fiction have become best sellers. I would like to problematize how we consider form and content in both creation and reception, how the popular value of work waxes and wanes in relation to its fan fiction status. In other words, how can we read fan fiction as part of a continuum of historical publication practices by women, and problematize our hierarchies of value between print and digital?

This book examines paper and material aspects of the written word in early modern Europe. The contributors investigate the origins of paper production as well as manufacture, use, ownership, trade and preservation of books. This interdisciplinary volume brings together the research of paper experts, book historians, philologists, conservators and specialists in watermark analysis, paper trade, the history of collections and object biography.

The history of the printed book in Africa is a relatively new line of inquiry. One of the most challenging issues confronting its practitioners will be to produce authoritative and comprehensive records of the national output of African countries, an essential prerequisite before venturing into more complex analysis. In this panorama, Eritrea and Ethiopia seem to represent two happy exceptions: the pioneering work of Ḫǝruy Wäldä Śǝllase, Stephen Wright's Ethiopian Incunabula and then the supplements by Stefan Strelcyn, Osvaldo Raineri, and Kibrom Tseggai have allowed for the reconstruction of large sections of the print production of the two countries. This article maps out the cultural and political context in which the attention for Ethiopian incunabula emerged and traces the stages of the collective effort that has allowed the preservation of the traces of the early printed documentation in Eritrea and Ethiopia. The article argues that there are still significant margins of improvement in the retrospective coverage of the history of the printed book in Africa, especially since the arrival of digital technologies and the Internet that have offered a very effective set of tools for solving some of the problems that have plagued African retrospective national bibliographies since their inception.