Miniature Messages

Miniature Messages radiates the energy that teaching can provide to scholarship. Its consideration of how postage stamps metonymically indexed Latin American politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries testifies to the influence of instructional technology on research. To the certain appreciation of many readers, Jack Child explains how the transition from analog to digital reproduction, from slides to JPEGs and carousels to PowerPoint generated not only new pedagogical possibilities but new insights about culture and history. However, Miniature Messages’ parochial methodology (and technology) prevent fulfillment of its expansive aspirations.Miniature Messages’ unnecessary prolepsis — justifying stamps as sites of semiotic significance — indicates a lack of scholarly communication with contemporary cultural studies. It leans heavily on a discussion of semiotics singularly based in the century-old observations of U.S. philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pp. 13 – 15). Its bypass of more relevant foundational thinkers — Roland Barthes, for starters — diminishes its approach. If any topic demands engagement with the twentieth-century’s preeminent semiotician it is the (inter)national politics of postage-stamp culture. Too, if any topic would allow critically incisive (rather than the too-often perfunctory) dialogue with the likes of Benedict Anderson, this is it. This is not a matter of citation tag but of necessary connections to relevant literatures about national mythologies and print communication.Miniature Messages’ most engaging chapters address Child’s regional expertise. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 respectively cover Argentina, the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, and South American Antarctica. Here the international and national converge as stamps represent official cultures’ graphic projections of national borders. Miniature Messages compellingly details how such (often) aspirational representations have caused cross-border conflict. However, these sections draw attention more for their geopolitics than semiotics. Much of their analysis reduces stamps to political indexes: “In Argentina,” Miniature Messages typically notes, “it is illegal to show a map of the country without including the Malvinas, the South Atlantic islands, and the Antarctic sector” (p. 148). Critical observation rarely goes deeper.Argentina’s position as a singular national case study raises unasked questions. Chapter 5’s introduction insists that “the semiotics of Latin American postage stamps can be effectively illustrated with Argentine examples, and applying the tools of semiotic analysis to the postage stamps of this country can contribute to a greater understanding of Argentina’s history, politics, and culture” (p. 95). If Argentina’s politics deserve particular treatment then how can they explain the stamps of other Latin American countries? And if Argentina’s stamps can stand for the rest of Latin America’s, what separates the semiotics of stamps of the region from those of countries elsewhere in the world? Or, why focus on Latin America as a (postage-stamp) region? Moreover, points in the Argentina chapter needlessly repeat in the ones about the Malvinas and Antarctica (and all three repeat things said in the book’s earlier essays about “Internal Politics” and “International Relations”). The distended Southern Cone chapters could have been consolidated in a single essay (and the entire book could have been more concisely organized to limit redundancy, sharpen transitions, and speed flow).Sixteen attractive pages of high-quality color images comprise a very welcome mid-volume gallery; however, its use requires constant flipping between prose and image. Expense undoubtedly restricted these essential, full-scale reproductions to a midvol-ume interlude rather than better-integrated visual evidence. Nevertheless more creative engagement with representational theory — the work of visual-evidence theorist Edward Tufte comes to mind — might have helped overcome the conventions of visual representation that minimize Miniature Messages’ messages on the printed page. Instead of images indexed statically to parenthetic citations elsewhere in the text, the color plates could have worked more dynamically and creatively as a scholarly visual essay.Child recognizes the need and possibility to expand the book’s form. He generously invites readers to request from him a CD-ROM that expansively illustrates his volume with hundreds of JPEGs. This digital appendix provides a vault of evidence invaluable for readers’ research and (especially) instruction. But as formulated — in directory folders — it less transcends than extends the printed page. The disk demonstrates the digital limits of scholarly book publication as much as its scholar’s admirable intentions. That the digital archive is not included with the book (perhaps owing to the publisher, not the author) indicates a lack of communication between image and prose further emphasized by the disk’s flattening format. This book deserved an interactive digital design to exceed its print analysis. This would have required innovative collaboration between scholar and technologist (and publisher) to produce a robust electronic environment, whether on a disk or the Web, which in addition to more examples offered more analysis, to move the reader imaginatively among images and metadata.The author explains that his book began as an article. And the great number of stamps it references notwithstanding, Miniature Messages reads as if analysis has been stretched rather than expanded. Nonetheless, Miniature Messages suggests the possibilities technology can play in generating and disseminating research within and beyond both a classroom’s walls and a book’s pages. Its pages (and CD-ROM) will interest many who study and teach Latin American history and public culture

Art history · Epistemology · Latin Americans · Media studies · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Postage Stamps · Print culture · Scholarship · Semiotics · Sociology · Classics · History · Law · National Identity and Symbolism · Philosophy

• Geopandering

  Open Access•Stanley D Brunn, Thomas L Bell•Geographical Review•2023

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