Published In
Mémoires Du Livre / Studies in Book Culture
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2022
Subjects
Book industry -- activism -- social movements
Abstract
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.
Rights
Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.7202/1100559ar
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45108
Citation Details
Noorda, R., Norrick-Rühl, C., & le Roux, E. (2023). Exploring Transnational Dimensions of Activism in Contemporary Book Culture: Introduction. Mémoires Du Livre, 13(2), 1–12.