Call for Papers at 2019 Book History Conference in Amherst

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (S.H.A.R.P.) will hold its 27th annual conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, from Monday, 15 July, to Thursday, 18 July 2019.

The conference theme is “Indigeneity, Nationhood, and Migrations of the Book,” and here is the call for submissions:

What is the role of place in book history: from “native tongue” to “Native writing,” author’s homeland to author’s house, sites of reading to websites? Print capitalism has been adduced as a factor in the consolidation of vernaculars and national literatures and the rise of the national imaginary from Europe to its colonial regimes. Rather than viewing the relation between indigenous and European communication practices as a hierarchical and sequential one of center and periphery—“literacy” replacing “illiteracy” (whether dismissed as “inferior” or eulogized as “authentic”)—what could we learn by instead exploring it as one of encounter and continuing evolution?

Consider the setting for SHARP19: New England—the very name connoting old and new “worlds”—was at once native land for the original inhabitants, with their established social and communication systems, and a site in which European settlers, rather than simply replicating the homeland (making a “new” England), created out of many sources and influences a different, distinctly American culture. Successive generations of arrivals—from captive Africans and indentured Asians to voluntary, if often unwelcome, immigrants—writing in their mother tongues or in English, transformed the very notion of an “American” language and literature. Alfred Kazin, son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia, provocatively entitled his pioneering 1942 study of modern American prose, On Native Grounds. How have literacy and print functioned here and around the world on a spectrum including oppression, resistance, assimilation, and dialogue?

We invite book historians to train their eyes on indigenous cultural practices, national literatures, colonized and colonizing texts, landscapes and sites of literary life, and textual migration and exchange in a global context.

S.H.A.R.P. sessions are generally ninety minutes long, consisting of three 20-minute papers and a discussion period. Proposals must include a title, abstract (250 words maximum), and short biography of the presenter (100 words). Proposals for full panels must also include a panel title and abstract (250 words) as well as information about each paper in the panel. The organizers welcome “lightning talks, posters, and digital project demonstrations,” with the same requirements as paper proposals. The submissions window closes on 1 December. For more details, see the call page.