Search

This essay examines Jordan Harrison's unpublished playscript, futura (2010), as a response to early aughts concerns about digital media shift, fears of the death of the book, and capitalist threats to privacy and individualism. The article reads the "bookishness" of Harrison's play as a commentary on how the future of writing in digital culture necessitates a historical, artifact-based awareness of how media technologies and practices entangle one another over time. Drawing on concepts of "inscription" and "metamedia" developed by Johanna Drucker and Alexandre Starre, I argue that Harrison's own media history-informed dramaturgy reflexively integrates textual-material practices performed on the page and embodied on the stage. Sections focus on the typesetting of Harrison's PDF script; in-play citations of thinkers and practitioners of typography such as Eric Gill and Robert Bringhurst; and Harrison's interweaving of allegorical motifs that reference key moments in the history of the book, including the Great Library of Alexandria, Gutenberg's 42-Line Bible, Baskerville's edition of Paradise Lost, and Paul Renner's design of Futura. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Ignatius Sancho, an Anglo-African and former slave, died in 1780, editor Frances Crew assembled his extant letters (fig. 1). Crew worked with printer-publisher John Nichols to publish the first [...]

Settler accounts of the Cayuga Native American Soyeghtowa (Logan), such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia , interpret his famous mourning speech, "Logan's Lament," as the words of a melancholic, noble savage and vanishing Indian. This essay decolonizes settler accounts of Logan's words and deeds such as Jefferson's book by considering Indigenous relationships to a once-living memorial on Shawnee land in central Ohio, the Logan Elm, which nineteenth-century settlers apocryphally identified as the site of Logan's speech. Drawing on scholarly work on Indigenous writing and historical media by Native American and settler intellectuals, as well as local knowledge keepers, sections focus on Indigenous memories of Logan recorded in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century textual archives, early twentieth-century Native American orations, and twenty-first century interpretations of Logan by enrolled members of the Seneca Cayuga Nation. These interpretations, rooted in the sacred and political significance of trees in the Haudenosaunee treaty protocol, the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the oral tradition of the Haudenosaunee Constitution, figure Logan's speech as an Indigenous history oriented toward Indigenous futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]