Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Wagon Tracks Volume 37, Issue 3 (May 2023)

Wagon Tracks

Contents

2 On the Cover: Leaving Independence by Charles Goslin

4 Insights from your President

5 Joanne’s Jottings

6, 32 Art and the Trail: Edward Holslag at 21c Kansas City, by Joanne VanCoevern

7 In Memoriam: George Bayless Donohow, John Conoboy, Mary Cottom, Dorothy Kroh, Star Jones, Dr. Joyce Thierer

8 2023 Symposium

11 Board of Directors Nominees

14-20 Rebecca Mayer's 1852 Honeymoon with 50 Men and 500 Mules, Part 2 by Joy Poole

21-24 Searching for Page Blackwood Otero by Dr. Michael Olsen

24-25 What’s in the News along the Santa Fe Trail? Using Newspapers for Historical Research by …

Network + Publication + Ecosystem: Curating Digital Pedagogy, Fostering Community, Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris

Publications and Research

We are excited to share our work on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (DPiH), which was published on the Humanities Commons in 2020 by the Modern Language Association after almost a decade of work. DPiH is a large-scale scholarly project that presents the stuff of teaching (syllabi, assignments, and resources) through a curated set of keywords such as “Poetry,” “Disability,” “Queer,” and “Annotation,” among many others. For each keyword, a curator or set of curators has selected and annotated ten pedagogical artifacts; created a curator’s selection statement; and presented …

Understanding The Beauty Of Mathematics By Composing Claude Debussy's Syrinx Into Mathematical Equations, Mackenzi Mehlberg

Honors Projects

Mesmerizing melodies and narrative storytelling are exemplified in Claude Debussy's Syrinx. As a well-known piece of solo flute literature, it is considered beautiful. Conversely, mathematics is seen as logical, and by implication not beautiful. Using Fourier Analysis, Syrinx can be represented in a different context: a series of mathematical equations. These mathematical equations can then be played as a different interpretation of Syrinx. With this interpretation, we see that mathematics is beautiful.

Abort The Court? How Abortion Jurisprudence Has Highlighted Questions Surrounding The Legitimacy Of The Supreme Court, Junia E. Paulus

Honors Projects

The Supreme Court is often viewed with awe and the justices treated with reverence. It is the highest court in the United States, tasked with interpreting the law. But is the Supreme Court the neutral arbiter of justice it purports to be? Most recently, the 2022 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the fifty-year precedent of Roe v. Wade, causing the Court to face increasing scrutiny and questions of its legitimacy. I conduct a philosophical analysis of the arguments made by the justices in the opinions on Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and …

The Problem With Asian American Literature, Sophie G. Huang

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Asian American literature has reached an impasse: it continues to aim for representation and institutional recognition, but the category has become so broad that it is hard to say what the center of it is anymore. I argue that the interests of the Asian American community would be better addressed better with a more fluid conception of the category. The fundamental issue that plagues the Asian American community is racialization. Attending to this requires letting go of the racial category as a rallying point and doing away with representation politics. I read Aiiieeeee!, the first anthology of Asian American literature, …

Aesthetic Engagement In Everyday Life: Reflections On Aesthetic Life And Why It Matters By Dominic Mciver Lopes, Bence Nanay, Nick Riggle, Zhou Caishu

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Kole, Isaiah Aladejobi

Masters Theses

This project focuses on the development of building blocks influenced by the architecture and design styles of Yoruba culture and Washington DC. These building blocks aim to provide an educational and culturally enriching experience for individuals of all ages, with a particular focus on youth.

By combining the traditional design elements of Yoruba architecture with the modern urban aesthetic of Washington DC, the building blocks offer a unique blend of cultural influences for children and adults to explore. Through hands-on building activities, users can engage with the cultural heritage of these two regions, while also developing important skills such as …

Virtual Fantasy, Joey Petrillo

Masters Theses

Virtual Fantasy is a proposition in opposition to virtual reality. Fantasy is essential to queer survival; we daydream to escape the hetero-normative structures we’ve been forced to live in — imagining new futures without binaries, linearity, or traditional notions of success. By exploring immersion, escapism, and agency in our virtual worlds through a queer lens, VF offers a reframing of our relationship to VR — embracing digital spaces and their potential to imagine new futures and possibilities, while remaining present in the world around us, as we are here in our bodies, now.

Input / Output, Zach Scheinfeld

Masters Theses

Input/Output emphasizes the processes and systems that create engagement, narrative, and meaning in graphic design, as opposed to singular inputs and outputs. In a series of experimental frameworks, ranging in form from 3D printed objects to browser-based painting tools, variables are put into the hands of the audience and user, creating conditions that are prime for retooling, repurposing, world-building, and play. Throughout, an open dialogue and feedback loop is formed between interface and user, author and reader, and teacher and student, where power, agency, and structure are in constant circulation, resulting in the emergence of unexpected forms, speculative technologies, and …

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

2023-06-06 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from June 6, 2023.

Betty Jean Hendley Clifton

African American Funeral Programs

No abstract provided.

What Could A Trans Book History Look Like? Toward Trans Codicology, J D. Sargan

Criticism

This article draws on critical trans studies and queer archival practice to propose a book historical mode that extends what we know about the premodern trans experience beyond the recovery of individual biographies. Instead of turning to textual sources for the identification of transness, the author looks to Susan Stryker’s call for the “recuperat[ion of] embodied knowing as a formally legitimated basis of knowledge production.” Bibliography, he suggests, makes claims of objectivity that engender a particular reluctance to respond to such calls. But the lived reality of archival research is one of affective embodiment. Affect theory is an area that, …

Making Mary Ann Waters Is A Free Black Woman: Critical Fabrication As Bibliographic Method, Kadin Henningsen

Criticism

This article discusses the process of creating an artist’s book on Mary Ann Waters, a Black trans woman and sex worker in Antebellum Baltimore. In addition, informed by the author’s experience of making the artist’s book, he proposes a process of critical fabrication—which brings together Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation” with Natalie Loveless’s articulation of “research-creation”—as a method for critical bibliography.

(In the issue section "Bibliographic Knowledge(s)")

Make Mine Melody: Building Beloved Community In Bibliography Using Mad Citation Practice, Sarah Madoka Currie

Criticism

Bibliography can be reconstructed to privilege the imaginaries of radicals that are “lesser known.” The dis-visibilizing of marginalized neurodiverse scholars and theorycrafters has much in common with the institutionalization approaches that constrict and model obstructed life for neurodivergent bodyminds. In a proposal for mad citation practice, a series of hopeful strategies for nonretrofitted inclusivity and authorial diversity are constructed for the reader instead, which bear similarities to feminist and disabled care practices: explicit permission-setting, naming ontology, lived or living experience validity, commentary or subscript authorization, visibilized quotation selection, draft approval, and cocollaborator approvals all form the basis of a radically …

“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson

Criticism

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …

Citing Seeds, Citing People: Bibliography And Indigenous Memory, Relations, And Living Knowledge-Keepers, Megan Peiser Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma

Criticism

By turning the page or reading further, you are accepting a responsibility to this story, its storyteller, its ancestors, and its future ancestors. You are accepting a relationship of reciprocity where you treat this knowledge as sacred for how it nourished you, share it only as it has been instructed to share, and to ensure it remains unviolated for future generations.

This story is told by myself, Megan Peiser, Chahta Ohoyo. I share knowledge entrusted to me by Anishinaabe women I call friends and sisters, by seed-keepers of many peoples Indigenous to Turtle Island, and knowledge come to me from …

Acts Of Disruption In The Eighteenth-Century Archives: Cooperative Critical Bibliography And The Ballitore Project, Danielle Spratt, Deena Al-Halabieh, Stephen Martinez, Quill Sang, Joseph Sweetnam, Stephanie Guerrero, Rachael Scarborough King

Criticism

This essay outlines a method of intersectional feminist book history that we call “cooperative critical bibliography,” a practice of engaging faculty and students at different ranks and at different institutions in the act of collaboratively transcribing and digitizing historical archives of understudied communities, often those that comprise the quotidian and domestic daily lives of everyday people. Cooperative critical bibliography’s non-hierarchical method centers the shared expertise and scholarship of students as they participate in broadening the accessibility of historical knowledge and revising standards of the historical literary canon through transcription, digitization, and shared reflection. By creating a pedagogical space that resituates …

Listening To Bamewawagezhikaquay’S Teachers: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’S Citational Cosmopolitics, Shelby Johnson

Criticism

This article argues that Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, offers vital citations of Anishinaabe cosmologies, including lineages of human and nonhuman teachers and perspectives on animate archives that should inflect new approaches to textual studies. Bamewawagezhikaquay’s writings express a citational cosmopolitics, a practice where Bamewawagezhikaquay invokes, and occasionally translates into English, human and more-than-human agents in the cocreation of Anishinaabe knowledge. In her descriptions of Anishinaabe plants and geographies, she models a citational praxis that intersects with resurgent frameworks on orienting to Anishinaabe writings, including birchbark maps and cliff paintings, not as inert objects but as dynamic nodal points in …

Towards An Experimental Bibliography Of Hemispheric Reconstruction Newspapers, Joshua Ortiz Baco, Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Jim Casey, Sarah H. Salter

Criticism

Digital collections of newspapers have drawn broader attention to the fragmented and scattered print histories of minoritized communities. Attempts to survey these histories through bibliography, however, quickly meet with a fundamental problem: the practice of bibliographic description calls for creating a static record of social affiliations. Given the overwhelming scholarly consensus that categories such as race, ethnicity, and language are socially constructed, this article introduces an experimental bibliographic method for mapping the vast landscape of historical newspapers. This method extends the machine learning affordances of a recent project called Newspaper Navigator to enumerate the newspapers in Chronicling America according to …

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

Barbara Grier’S Enumerative Bibliographies: Iterating Communal Lesbian Identities, Julie R. Enszer

Criticism

Barbara Grier, best known for her publishing work with the Naiad Press, started her literary life in the pages of The Ladder, the magazine of the Daughters of Bilitis. Working initially under the tutelage of Jeanette Howard Foster, Grier cataloged and categorized work by and about lesbians during the repressive decades of the 1950s and 1960s. By tracing Grier’s work in three major bibliographic projects, the Lesbiana column in The Ladder, the Lesbian in Literature (published in three separate editions), and Lesbiana (a book Grier published from her columns), Grier’s bibliographic practices, enumerative and annotative, emerge as tools …

On Feminist Practice In The Rare Books And Manuscripts Trade: Buying, Cataloguing, And Selling, Rebecca Romney

Criticism

This article seeks to delineate principles for incorporating feminist practices into the three main roles of the antiquarian bookseller: buying, cataloging, and selling. While scholarship in feminist bibliography is growing in the academic sphere, and feminist movements for individuals in the rare book trade (such as the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America’s Women’s Initiative) have seen success in recent years, few formal explorations of feminism in the everyday practices of the trade have yet followed. Laying this groundwork is an important step in the wider efforts to build a more diverse, inclusive, and accessible rare book trade and body of …

Craftivism And Cottonian Bindings: “The Handiwork Of Greta Hall”, Helen Williams

Criticism

Edith Southey, Edith May Southey, and Sara Coleridge Jr. covered Robert Southey’s books in vibrantly printed dress fabrics, creating a collection that came to be called “the Cottonian Library.” This article is a manifesto for Cottonian bookbinding to be studied as feminist literary activism. It argues for the importance of looking beyond the book trades to the domestic and unremunerated ways in which women contributed to Romantic period book design, suggesting that the new feminist Craftivism can prompt us to historicize and to acknowledge the significance of Cottonian bookbinding as a practice that cannot be omitted from any history of …

Surface Reading Paper As Feminist Bibliography, Georgina Wilson

Criticism

This article models a mode of feminist bibliography by “surface reading” paper. Taking Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1605) as a case study, this article reads watermarks as reminders of paper’s three-dimensional materiality, whose surfaces and depths model the more and less legible forms of labor which contribute to paper’s making. Watermarks here become a creative and critical prompt to recover the interventions of John Spilman (the papermaker whose output was used for Sejanus), Spilman’s workers, and especially his female ragpickers. This article fuses close reading of literary texts and archival sources with bibliography and theory to demonstrate fresh …

Beast And Man In India: Undoing John Lockwood Kipling’S Imperial Citation, Oishani Sengupta

Criticism

This article posits that John Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India (1891), the illustrated compendium on animals that mixes discussions of colonial cross-species entanglements with personal reflections on transforming local arts and crafts in India in the service of imperial power, is a multiauthored book. Centering the presence of Indian illustrators as central to Beast and Man’s texture, this essay uses the term “imperial citation” to highlight the range of strategies Kipling uses to overtly and covertly appropriate the labor of Indigenous creators within the fabric of this volume. By placing the material text within the context of colonial …

“In The Cards”: The Material Textuality Of Tarotological Reading, Jesse R. Erickson

Criticism

This article examines deep-seated relationships that inextricably bind the material makeup of divinatory card decks to their multifarious literacy functions. Unpacking the deceptive underlying complexities in these objects requires both an ontological analysis of their multicultural rootedness and a speculative exploration of their propensity for memetic adaptation. The concept of “reading” cards as textual objects has typically existed on the fringes of Western literacy paradigms. In reality, however, considering the rather commonplace use of pedagogical objects such as alphabet cards and flash cards, the practice of reading cards should be recognized for its considerable role in literacy instruction. In looking …

Critique! Critique! Critique! Black Labor In The Early American Book Trade, John J. Garcia

Criticism

This article pursues two lines of inquiry: first, recovering the presence of Black labor in the history of the book in colonial North America, the British Caribbean, and the early United States, with a second and complementary discussion of why critique must be foregrounded in the field formation of critical bibliography. Free and enslaved Black men and women helped make early American books possible. Their presences are to be found at the edges and vicinities of print cultural production, in roles such as papermaking, wagon driving, and forms of domestic labor that extended to the libraries and reading practices of …

Trees And Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, And The Logan Elm, Mark Alan Mattes

Criticism

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 …

Warp/Weft/Word: Inscriptive Materiality, Epistemological Violence, And The Inka Khipu, Travis Sharp

Criticism

Many competing theories of the Indigenous inscription practice known as the khipu have been offered, from L. Leland Locke’s long-standing postulation that khipus are accounting devices, to Walter Ong’s description of them as aide-mémoire, to Gary Urton’s more experimental theory that they constituted an early form of binary composition. Just as fraught is the history of the khipu, which were utilized by the Inka, intermediated by Spanish and Catholic authorities in their legal and religious systems, and, finally, banned and burned as seditious and sacrilegious. Contemporary khipus are primarily limited to those used by herders, but Chilean American poet-artist Cecilia …