Difference between revisions of "Hofmeyr & Burton 2014"

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

Intro

Overview

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

Notes

• 1 Like the wide variety of goods and commodities that made their way through the circuitry of global [2] market capitalism, books mimpressed 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 pamplet material or recylcings 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

Ch.2

Overview

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

Notes