Hofmeyr & Burton 2014

Burton, Antoinette, and Isabel Hofmeyr. Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. Duke University Press, 2014.

Intro

Overview

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Notes

• 1 Like the wide variety of goods and commodities that made their way through the circuitry of global [2] market capitalism, books impressed themselves in the everyday lives of imperial subjects, manifesting the formal values of an elite or bourgeois self and modeling in their material form the coherence and commanding presence of British imperial power itself.
  • Cf. St Clair’s definition of the book as a specific type of commodity
• 2: More often than not, what arrived between covers was the consequence of a variety of imperial trajectories: upcyclings from pamphlet material or recyclings from scissor-and-paste newspaper clippings -- fragments remixed, in turn, through the "geographically disaggregated networks" that constituted the British Empire in its modernizing forms. In this sense the book as we imagine it may be said to be part of a global "paper empire."
  • so not just a network
• toward the book as a material form and geopolitical influence...away from the book as distinct from or superior to the varieties of imperial print cultures-in-common through which it circulated.
• For the history of books and their imperial careers that contributors to this volume have built allows us to see with particular vividness how and why changes in and challenges to empire were always dispersed events, not dependent on singular, bounded origins or forms but produced by "multiple singularities" that congealed in and against specific historical circumstances. If empire was not a coherent whole but an assemblage - a far-flung, reticulate, and vascular patchwork of spaces joined by mobile subjects of all kinds - the book itself was often also just such an assemblage.
  • philosophically this has its roots in Deleuze and Guattari -- is there a distinction between networks and rhizomes (another D/G concept) - As far as I can tell one difference might be that networks (could be) construed as ontological while rhizomes are structures that metonymically expand beyond ontological containment?
  • Rhizomes
  • More rhizomes (and assemblages - emergent unity)
  • D/G in LRB
• 4: We do so [bring the subject texts together] not by way of bringing these works into some kind of literary canon, postcolonial or otherwise. We see them more as the portable property of an ever-evolving imperial commons: not the kind that moves from "space to space unchanged" but, more precisely, the kind whose mobility reshapes the very form and content of the "book" itself.
• 5 The periodical exchange system was especially important in creating a mobile imperial commons. Initially a pretelegraph phenomenon, the system persisted among those who could not afford the steep wire service fees and/or objected to their imperial bias. These interwoven periodicals produce the textual format so familiar to anyone who has worked with imperial newspapers. Any one page will largely be composed of cuttings from elsewhere, each page convening its own miniature empire as snippets from the Calcutta Herald, the Rangoon Times, the Johannesburg Star, the Manchester Guardian, and the Sydney Herald rub shoulders. The juxtaposition of these pieces invited readers to construct their own empire without copyright.
  • like Fyfe, not technologically deterministic
• 7 Methodological difference: There are deep histories of composition, circulation, suppression, and even disappearance that these essays track, shedding light on imperial processes not otherwise visible via either a pure history-of-ideas approach or a bottom up social history approach. Appreciating the materiality of the book, its mobility and its storied career, is critical for the communicative history of empire it has the capacity to tell.
• As Tony Ballantyne reminds us in his account of Wakefield's Letter from Sydney, the public spheres of empire depended on avalanches of circulating words, whether lithographed, cyclostyled, scribbled, whispered, sung, declaimed from the hustings, printed in tomes, enacted on stage, or read aloud. By paying attention to these manifold material forms of the word, we can better grasp the big and small ways in which texts act as forces in an imperial world.
• 9: As Michael Warner has suggested [where?], this entails the recognition that books, like words, are not fictitious, or even simply material, objects. They are themselves material agents: path-makers for the circulation of ideas and discourses and, as such, makers of history in the bargain. Like Gluck and Tsing's words, we argue that books must be treated as social entities that, in our case, help to bring imperial publics and their critics into being.
  • Publics underlying this and Miller's argument: sensing Habermas public sphere lurking?
• 11: ...Leah Price has thrown light on the affective power of the [12] single volume her route into this theme starts in the present. How is it, she asks, that our methods for studying books are so divided: literary studies for the inside and book history for the outside? Why is it so difficult to study the book as an integrated object? Her answer takes us back to Victorian Britain and its particular ideology of the bound volume.
• 14: Discussing textual formations in Africa, Karin Barber has suggested that the term "printing cultures" may be more appropriate than "print culture" with its overtones of vast, monoglot, anonymous, and impersonal address.
• 16: Yet it we understand the instability of the book form as representative of the historical conditions in which an imperial commons was imagined and operated, we can better appreciate the book itself as an illuminating dye - at once clearing space for and running through empire's pathways, consolidating notions of the imperial self in some places, challenging them in others.
• 18: We encounter this model of reading across the essays presented here: the point of all ten books was that they be applied to present and pressing circumstances. Today, this more of reading would be classified somewhat pejoratively as "didactic," a style that high literary modernism has marginalized by constructing it as the abject opposite of complexity and irony. Taken together, these essays remind us of how global this form of "didactic" reading in fact was (and indeed still is). By taking an empire-wide purview, this collection supports Leah Price's parochialization of hegemonic modes of reading that we inherit from the Victorians. As she argues, today still, ideal reading is presumed to be continuous (from beginning to end), to be disembodied, and ideally to have involved book-buying. By contrast, the forms of reading discussed in this volume are discontinuous, are often embodied, and seldom entailed a book purchase. In empire, novel and tract did not always shun each other and entered alliances, producing demotic styles of reading that revise dominant assumptions about what reading is.
• 23: We have already spoken of the forward/backward motion of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea; Boehmer discusses the relationship between Baden-Powell and Kipling; and the intellectual slanging matches between James and Williams were utterly consequential to the impact of their work, on each other and on haltingly, fitfully postimperial worlds they traveled in and helped to make. In this sense, reproportioning the book as a multiform commodity, whether via an appreciation of its hybrid textual histories or via its conjuncture with other spindled texts, both mirrors and maps the dispersed assemblage of imperial spaces and places - the communicative empire - that the itineraries of our ten books make visible.
• [contrasting with the rise-and-fall narrative of imperialism] What Kath Weston in another context has called "the long, slow burn" is a much more historically accurate account of how change happens than the drama of rise and fall that has been the explanatory framework for empire tout court. It is no small irony that a study of books - those disappearing occasions for long-form thinking and slow reading - should be one of the most effective ways of dramatizing the limits of the climactic end of empire or the momentous challenge that ushers in revolutionary change. It's also a testimony to the resilience of books, and of empires, for all the hype around their disappearance, they are, for the moment anyway, not quite yet in the rearview mirror of history.

Ch.2

Overview

• thesis:
• methodology:
  • archive:
  • specific period covered:
• evidence/argument:
• relevance/stakes: