Exploring Transnational Dimensions of Activism in Contemporary Book Culture Introduction

The board book A is for Activist is an ABC children’s title written and illustrated by Innosanto Nagara, an Indonesian social justice graphic designer living in the United States. The title started out as a self-published book crowdfunded on Kickstarter for his own child in 2012, was then picked up by independent publisher Seven Stories Press, and has since achieved bestselling sales status. While originally published in English, it has been translated and sold all over the world, including by Seven Stories’ Spanish-language imprint Siete Cuentos, in an edition with Martha Gonzalez’s translation and an audio version from guitarist and activist Tom Morello. This example highlights the transnational dynamics of power, identity, and language in a book’s activism in the world. It also is an example of what Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser call “commodity activism”: for better or worse, buying commodities—in this case, books—can be a form of participation in and identification with social movements. Building on, but also expanding Rachel Schreiber’s concept of “print activism” in the long twentieth century, this special issue highlights how books-as-objects and books-as-commodities, as well as the institutions and people who produce and distribute them, can catalyze political and social change. In Schreiber’s parsing, “print activism” refers to “print media’s role in social and political activism”; Schreiber identifies print activism as the “central vehicle by which activists on all points of the political spectrum—left, right, and center—spread their opinions, elicited support, created networks among like-minded individuals, and attempted to establish cohesive group identities for the larger world.” Even as activism takes on new forms in the ever-changing mediascape, the key issue remains of circulating knowledge and information, though the “forms these knowledges travel through shift according to technological advances and individual access to these technologies.” Of course, as core book historical models have emphasized, books are written, published, distributed, and consumed in particular moments in time, shaped by social, political, and legal contexts. And as Bush and Krishnan remind us, “Print activism also depends on readers.” Additionally, researchers can become activists in their own right, not only researching about activism but using research itself as activism to catalyze political and social change. The scholar‑activists whose work appears in this special issue ask the important questions about their role in the research process and how the research centres marginalized people and groups, and recommend imperatives for change. Ramasubramanian and Sousa identify scholar-activism as being “community-driven, social justice-oriented, action oriented, grounded in co-creation of knowledge, interdisciplinary, long term in nature, challenging of the status quo, driven by intrinsic motivators, and boundary-blurring.” The scholars represented in this special issue highlight patterns of oppression: structural racism, the white gaze, heteronormativity and homophobia, misogyny, and Anglocentrism. Their research also recognizes patterns and modes of resistance: self-publishing for Black French and German authors, menstrual activism to eliminate a tampon tax, elevating Black voices through publication in South Africa during apartheid, publishing and celebrating non‑Anglophone Afrikaans language and culture through magazines, developing international feminist publishing networks to resist racism and colonialism, etc. Their research focuses on underrepresented groups and perspectives as a way to expand who is centred and which types of publications are valued in book studies. For the three editors of this special issue, it was our own research interest in books as activism and contemporary transnational book culture that led us to this special issue. We acknowledge the limitations of our own subject positions and identities (as we are all white women), even though there is diversity in our backgrounds and approaches. We live and operate in three distinct book industries and national cultures—South Africa, Germany and …