Selections from This Book is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project

December 1, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

December brings us three new books. Softie: Stories by Megan Howell and Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments by Salma Monani will each be the focus of an upcoming post.

Today’s featured title, This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project presents a collection of letters and artwork by people in prison that highlights the crucial work done by the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP), a nonprofit that provides books to incarcerated people in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland. Through the words of people directly impacted by the criminal punishment system, the collection provides uncommon insight into reading practices and everyday life in prisons and jails while being an inspiration for prison book projects, prison reform, and abolition.

Simultaneously communicating the vital importance of access to books and education, and conveying the power of community, the letters sent to APBP by incarcerated people spark conversations about racism, poverty, and incarceration and shed light on the movement for accountability for state violence. This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep elucidates the violence and neglect perpetuated by carceral systems and offers a way forward based on solidarity and collaboration.

The book has excerpts from letters along with essays and poetry from APBP book clubs and WVU classes in prison; reflections from volunteers; an introduction by project founder Katy Ryan; an afterword by Steven Lazar, a former student, now exonerated; and a preface composed in solitary confinement by Hugh Williams Jr.

“If we could find a book on the sky for me, I would love it very much.” –writer from Tennessee

“I’m sorry I burdened you with my sadness. I’ll be fine. I’ll go watch my friend the spider outside my window. I call him Big Boy because he’s pretty big. He cheers me up.” –Wayne “Gator” Bates

“Then one day the guard opened my cell tray slot and said Underwood I got a book for you. I jumped up and there it was. I said darn they really did answer my request. To make a long boring letter short, I am now sitting in a cell getting ready to take a test dealing with my G.E.D.” –Underwood

Joanna Allan’s Saharan Winds: A Booktimist Sneak Peek

September 30, 2024September 30, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

Joanna Allan’s new book Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in Western Sahara to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of wind farms; the distribution of energy that wind farms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fueled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future.

From Introduction: The Helm

There is a consensus [ . . . ] among humanities and social science scholars interested in fairer ways to transition to renewable energy, firstly of the need to learn from the world’s Indigenous populations, and secondly on the root of the problem: corporate-led solar and wind factories are replicating the capitalist, extractivist logics of fossil fuels. Linked to this, our very understanding of energy emerged from the industrial revolution and the colonialism it fueled. However, I argue in this book that there is another factor that has determined the historical trajectory of energy injustices: climate and weather imaginaries, and therefore sun and particularly wind imaginaries, were at the center of the colonial project from the outset, pre-industrial revolution.

[ . . . ]

In this book, I aim not only to show precisely how changing wind imaginaries shaped (and were shaped by) colonial (energy) projects in Western Sahara, but also to explore alternative Indigenous Saharawi wind imaginaries, what role these have played in resisting colonialism, and how these may positively shape Western Sahara’s energy future. (12-13)

From Chapter 1, The Sea without Water: Navigators, Traders, and Wind Pathologies in Western Sahara

Nothing but calm, green waters pawing at the shore behind him, Gil Eannes of Lagos stood in his wet boots, whitened with sea salt, and surveyed the sandy horizon for signs of life. He recalled the reception at court—as stormy as the weather—upon returning from the previous year’s voyage. Last time, the winds betrayed him. They forced his boat to one of the Canaries, north-west of his desired destination, and not even the capture of a few Indigenous islanders could placate his sponsor, the Portuguese prince.¹ The Infant Henry had freshly promised Eannes glory and wealth should this current expedition be successful. “Make the voyage from which, by grace of God, you cannot fail to derive honor and profit,” the pious Prince, in his hair shirt, had ordered.² Now, Eannes had completed his mission to pass Cape Boujdour, a feat widely considered impossible and one that expanded the European navigable world forever. But how to prove it to the Infant?

The moist coast mists resurrected the tangled-up, brain-shaped moss. It unfurled its curling fronds, which turned from a dead brown to a radiant green—ends blushing sunset pink—and softened in texture.³ St Mary’s Rose,the most resilient of plants, thrived in deserts. Able to curl into a dry ball to protect itself when conditions were unfavorable and bloom out again when rain came, and possessing no need to anchor roots, the moss would survive the journey back to Sagres and prove that its carrier had trod the desert beyond Boujdour. Eannes scooped up the specimen and packed it carefully into a small wooden barrel.

For centuries, Cape Boujdour marked the geo-epistemological border of Western knowledge of Africa. Medieval Europeans saw the headland as the end of the world, the place where ships and their crews disappeared forever. Its name deriving from Abu Khatar, Arabic for father of danger, Cape Boujdour was a source of fear, ferocious legends, and speculation for sailors. Inland, the Sahara Desert was just as hostile as the dangerous cape, impassable to all. Fifteenth-century mariners, in the age when Europeans tried in earnest to pass the promontory, believed that “beyond this Cape there is no race of men nor place of inhabitants: nor is the land less sandy than the deserts of Libya, where there is no water, no tree, no green herb- and the sea so shallow that a whole league from land is only a fathom deep, while the currents are so terrible that no ship having once passed the Cape, will ever be able to return.”⁴

The land of modern-day Western Sahara and its coastline were understood together as one great no-man’s-land. Ghislaine Lydon argues that the long-term consequence of this European-imagined great barrier is the flawed division of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa into diametrically, culturally, and racially opposed Africans, between which the supposed border—the Sahara—has become an understudied blind spot.⁵ But in the Middle Ages, this part of the world was infamous, potentially promising a sea route to the East Indies, and, on land, access to a legendary “River of Gold.”⁶

It was not until 1434 that Gil Eannes, a squire of Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator, rounded the terrible Cape Boujdour and made it back to tell the tale.⁷ Chronicler Gomes Eannes de Azurara recorded this feat and other Portuguese exploits in “Guinea.”⁸ Guinea was the collective name for the lands south of Morocco, which was unknown to Europeans up to this time. Azurara’s texts were the first to focus on the experiences of Europeans in Africa south of Cape Boujdour. These texts also documented the start of the transatlantic slave trade.⁹ David Hughes has described this abhorrent trade as “the first intercontinental energy market.”¹⁰ Hughes argues that Spanish enslavers in Trinidad “invented fuel” by way of exploiting human labor on the island’s plantations, since fuel is energy that is stored in a measurable, transportable, and salable form.¹¹ Later, charts Hughes, eighteenth-century Spanish colonists in Trinidad proposed a “solar colony” in which cacao, pulled up by the sun, would enrich Spain.¹² He shows that solar energy and fuel more widely have a history tangled up with colonialism and enslavement.

But the history of European colonialism is also tied up with the wind. Seafarers of the Age of Sail had to learn which winds and currents could take them to their desired destination. In the fifteenth century, the so-called Atlantic Mediterranean, roughly comprising the seas, winds, and currents of the coasts of Morocco, Western Sahara, the Canary Islands, and the Azores, became a nursery for would-be imperialists.¹³ Off Western Sahara’s coast, Portuguese sailors learned to seek out the trade winds in order to travel in the desired direction.¹⁴ This movement, known as the Volta do mar, was a vital step in the history of navigation and enabled further European exploration of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the resulting imperial pursuits.

It was also the terrible northwest African winds and currents that forced European ships onto reefs and made Cape Boujdour impassable for so long. This cape was a hotspot for wrecks throughout the Age of Sail. Several Portuguese navigators that attempted to follow Eannes’s route soon after him were unable to land due to “contrary winds” and “tempests.”¹⁵ For the Portuguese that made it into the desert, the inland weather was just as worthy of chronicle. Azurara noted, for example, the fascinating findings of Joao Fernandes. Fernandes was a curious fellow among his countrymen in that he was uninterested in capturing booty and enslaving Africans but urged his prince to be left in the Sahara for several months, where he hoped to learn the ways of the Indigenous peoples. An Arabic speaker, he lived for seven months with the inland nomads, where “the heats of [the] land [were] very great,”¹⁶ and was amazed that “those Moors with whom he travelled guided themselves by the winds alone, as is done on the sea, and by . . . birds.”¹⁷

While Fernandes marveled at Indigenous uses of wind inland, his compatriots, under instruction from the Infant Henry, meticulously recorded weather patterns off Cape Boujdour and beyond. Consequently, Portugal developed a priceless inventory of northwest African winds, tides, and currents, which it was notoriously reluctant to share with other European powers.¹⁸ Wind was the key to the imperial race. (23-25)

Notes

1. Azurara, Discovery and Conquest.
2. Knight, “Gil Eannes Passes the Point.”
3. What Azurara calls Roses of Saint Maria are most likely the moss that today is commonly known as Rose of Jericho; Monod, Les Rosas de Sancta.
4. Azurara, Discovery and Conquest, 31.
5. Lydon, “Writing Trans-Saharan History,” 46.
6. Probably a reference to Senegal River, which flowed into the gold-producing Malian empire, although one province of Spanish Sahara was also later named River of Gold.
7. Branche, “Inscribing Contact,” 9.
8. Azurara, Discovery and Conquest, 6–19.
9. Blackmore, Moorings.
10. Hughes, Energy without Conscience, 144.
11. Hughes, 30.
12. Hughes, 11.
13. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, 152.
14. Fernández-Armesto, 161.
15. See several examples in Azurara, Discovery and Conquest.
16. Azurara, 95.
17. Azurara, 94. On the use of birds for navigation, Flores Morales detailed in 1949 how Saharawis observed bird flight paths in order to find water sources; Flores Morales, “Tipos y costumbres,” 407–8.
18. Cartwright, “Prince Henry the Navigator.”

Joanna Allan is associate professor in global development at Northumbria University, UK.

Buy the book today at wvupress.com.

Inclusive Teaching: An excerpt from Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy’s new book

July 20, 2022July 20, 2022 Book blogger1 Comment

Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy’s book Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom is new in West Virginia’s series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, edited by James Lang and Michelle Miller. We’re pleased to share an excerpt from the book, which ships now when ordered from our site.

We met in a cramped conference room with a group of ten colleagues in a faculty learning community hosted by the teaching and learning center on our campus. One of our assignments was to observe each other teaching and then meet to discuss our pedagogy. Debriefing over coffee, we immediately identified many ideas we held in common: we were both feeling dissatisfied with aspects of our courses and we felt frustrated that being a funny, dynamic lecturer seemed to be the definition of effective teaching by students and colleagues. We didn’t see how an instructor’s personality equated to effective learning. Discovering we were both introverts, we affirmed each other’s thoughts that deep learning by students shouldn’t require us to become people we are not. We had discussions about what pedagogical strategies better fit our personalities and the intended student outcomes. If only Jessamyn Neuhaus, author of Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers, had published her book earlier, we surely would have added it to the reading list for the faculty learning community. In her book, Neuhaus takes exception to “any hint of a suggestion that effective teaching requires a specific kind of innate personality quality or emotional state, rather than being a set of skills, attitudes, actions, abilities, and a reflective, intellectual approach that can be learned, applied, and improved with effort by anyone who wants to be an effective teacher.”

Frustration and introversion were not our only commonalities. Like so many instructors in higher education, neither of us had much pedagogy training in our graduate programs. Early in our careers, teaching workshops and education-based literature made big impressions on our development. Both scientists by training, we approached making changes to our courses through a scientific and data-driven lens. We believed that we could continually improve our abilities with teaching, a belief Carol Dweck defines as a growth mind-set. We assumed then, and still today, that effective teaching is a challenge that requires hard work, intent, practice, mistakes, reflection, and iteration. It was never a problem for us to admit to ourselves and each other when we faced challenges in our own teaching. Often, the first step to making change is to recognize that a problem exists. Because of our mind-sets and generally optimistic, change-maker attitudes, we embraced our teaching challenges and set out to overcome them.Read More »

The labor history of Appalachia’s essential workers: Previewing John Hennen’s new book

September 13, 2021 Book bloggerLeave a comment

The union of hospital workers usually referred to as the 1199 sits at the intersection of three of the most important topics in US history: organized labor, health care, and civil rights. John Hennen’s A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers, coming November 1 from West Virginia University Press, explores the union’s history in Appalachia, a region that is generally associated with extractive industries but has seen health care grow as a share of the overall economy. We’re pleased to share an excerpt from the book’s introduction.

The West Virginia teachers’ strike in 2018 briefly focused attention on the history of labor-management conflict in the state. A cross-section of mainstream and progressive media drew a crooked line to the teachers’ rebellion from earlier battles between coal operators and miners, especially the Mine Wars of 1913–1921. This attention to a significant part of the state’s working-class history was welcome and a long time coming. Some academic and independent historians have studied and written that history for decades, but the contributions of regular working people are still too often airbrushed out of the standard narratives of American history. As I write these words, the world is grappling with how to survive the shocks of the coronavirus pandemic. The curious phrase “essential workers,” although it has been around for a while, has now become part of our daily vocabulary. It reflects an awareness, finally, that the workers who feed us, protect us, clean up after us, drive us around, deliver our stuff, teach our children, and care for the old, the sick, and the injured are not just assistant people. They are “essential.” Will our appreciation for essential workers inspire a structural realignment in America’s distribution of wealth? Or is it just a transitory thing, which soon enough will fade back into the old reality, that the more essential the work, the less the pay?

This book tells the story of how some essential workers in Appalachia built a healthcare workers’ union, usually referred to as “1199,” between 1969 and 1989. That union had a history dating back to the early 1930s, where the original New York City Local 1199 was founded by a Russian immigrant with radical ideas. His name was Leon Davis. His radicalism was defined in part because of his political affiliation. In the early 1930s, when he began organizing pharmacists and drugstore workers, he was a Communist, active in the Trade Union Unity League. But he was also radical in the greater sense, in that he believed that marginalized workers in the hospital industry—Blacks, Puerto Ricans, poor Whites, women—were human beings who should be recognized, respected, and paid a decent wage. They were pharmacists, nurses, nurse assistants, janitors, housekeepers, laundry workers, maintenance workers, cooks, and dishwashers. Davis believed these workers were entitled to a dignified and comfortable life as much as anyone else. That was a radical notion. No other unions in the 1950s, when 1199 began organizing hospital workers, wanted much to do with them.