Published by Europa Editions, The Passenger series offers an unconventional take on typical travel guides with new writing, original photography, art, and reportage from around the world. The series was first launched in 2018 by the independent Italian publisher Iperborea, and was brought into English by Europa in 2020. It has also been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean.
The book-magazine travels far and wide to bring back the best writing from the places it visits. It assembles not only reportage, but also long-form journalism and narrative essays with the aim of telling stories of the contemporary life of a place and its inhabitants: “It takes readers beyond the familiar stereotypes to portray the shifting culture and identity of a place, its public debates, the sensibilities of its people, its burning issues, its pleasures and its pain.”
An Author Recommends section provides cultural tips on books, films, music and more from contemporary authors such as Valeria Luisell (Mexico), Banana Yoshimoto (Japan), Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona), Pitchaya Sudbanthad (Thailand), Paolo Macry (Naples), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) and more. Digging Deeper provides short bibliographies for further reading, and The Playlist links to curated Spotify playlists of music from the featured city, country, or region. To date there have been eighteen volumes published in English, and all are shelved in Morrison Library’s travel section, waiting for their next trip.
Map of Luso-African Literary Publishers by City generated by Bee Lehman
More than 80 works of literature from Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique arrived in Doe Library last week. This selection of poetry, short stories, and novels in Portuguese was made possible through a generous 3-year grant from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) in Lisbon. The absence of Lusophone African literature from mainstream African literary studies (mostly in English and French) has been noted by contemporary scholars. These new works of post-colonial fiction and verse listed below are held by few academic libraries and reflect the UC Berkeley Library’s longstanding commitment to collect and make accessible underrepresented voices from across the world in more than 400 distinct languages. Please enjoy this curated list by book dealer Susanne Bach Books which provides a snapshot of the rich literary output from Lusophone Africa over the past three years:
100 poemas para Neto / Poetas da União dos Escritores Angolanos. Luanda, Angola: EAL – Edições de Angola, 2022.
Just in time for the end of the semester, a couple hundred ebooks have recently flown in from from Spain from publishers like Akal, CSIC, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, Ediciones Universidad de Cantabria, Plaza y Valdés, Dickinson, Editorial Egales, Trotta Editorial, Ediciones Complutense and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. All are available through the Digitalia Hispánica platform. Below are some highlighted from Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert available to you wherever you may find yourselves this summer:
Originally part (from 1894) of the quarterly issues of the Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France (RHLF), and since 2002, it has been an annual volume published in special editions. It gathers together references of French and Francophone literatures from the 16th century to the present day. The BLF was first published by Armand Colin until 1997; then by the Presses Universitaires de France; and since 2017 by Classiques Garnier.
Since 1996, the BLF has been the result of the joint work of a team at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, who is in charge of the indexing, and the Société d’histoire littéraire de France. The digital publisher of the BLF, Classiques Garnier Numérique, ensures the technical management and updates of the database.
The BLF is updated daily, as soon as new publications are indexed. Thanks to this, it constitutes a unique tool for researchers, teachers, students, and all those who are seeking to inform themselves about French literature, writers, subjects or periods. More than 200,000 detailed records from 1998 to the present day are currently online, including 105,000+ book chapters; 75,000+ journal articles; and 28,000+ reviews.
Today, we are launching a new library research guide for Iberian Literatures & Criticism. The new guide will improve navigation and discovery in UC Berkeley’s vast literature collection in Romance languages, mostly found in a classification commonly known as the PQs. Over the course of the past year, we have critically reviewed the former guides, weeded outdated resources, and replaced them with more current content with links to digital resources when available.
This literary research guide, like the others for Italian and French & Francophone literatures launched last year, is now benefiting from the LibGuides platform, which makes it much easier to revise than the former PDFs. The guide is structured by sections for article databases, general guides and literary histories, reference tools, poetry, theater & performance, and literary periods. In addition to literature in Spanish and Portuguese, it also includes less commonly taught literatures and languages such as Catalan, Galician, Basque, Arabic, Ladino, and more. There is also a new section for Luso-African and Hispano-African literature.
The online guide also interfaces seamlessly with related guides published by the UC Berkeley Library. For example, on the home page, there is a prominent link to the online list of recently acquired publications on the general Spanish & Portuguese guide, making it even easier to stay current on new books in all of the call number ranges.
Because the guides are much easier to update, they encourage user interaction and invite community suggestions for inclusion (or deletion).
When you have time, please take a look at this new resource and let us know what you think.
Various issues of the third series of Que vlo-ve ?
In these austere times where both financial resources and shelving space are limited, it has become a rare occasion when we are able to pursue full-runs of older periodicals. However, the recent acquisition of these two—one from France and the other from Belgium—in more or less the same time period has sparked the idea of hosting a hands-on journal presentation for those interested in interacting with the journals before the issues are processed, cataloged, bound, and stored in their distinct library locations.
Que vlo-ve?: bulletin de l’Association internationale des amis de Guillaume Apollinaire was published from January 1973 to 2004. Centered on the work of the celebrated 20th century French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish descent, its intention was not to duplicate articles published in the annual Guillaume Apollinaire series by Lettres Modernes. Instead, it was meant to welcome articles that could not easily find a place, news of the association and of the museum as well as news that members of the scholarly society wished to disseminate internationally.
Sardonic and visually rich, this wartime French literary and artistic journal published by Jean Cocteau and Paul Iribe, was characterized by a restrained modernism and a fiercely nationalistic, anti-German perspective. Le Mot (The Word) was a wartime sequel to François Bernouard’s Schéhérazade: Album Mensuel d’Oeuvres Inédites d’Art et de Littérature (1909-11). Its primary purpose was to establish an entirely French artistic style and taste—anti-bourgeois and uninfluenced by German modernism.
Reports of the brutal treatment of noncombatants (such as mass executions that included women, small children, and the elderly) and damage to towns and cultural centers shocked the public, leading to a characterization, particularly within France, of the German soldiers as destructive and uncivilized “huns” particularly within wartime propaganda. The bi-monthly periodical included cover designs by not only Iribe and Cocteau but also Sem, Raoul Dufy, Léon Bakst, André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Pierre-Emile Legrain. Cocteau signed his drawings as Jim, the name of his dog. In August 1914, when war was declared with Germany, he was twenty-five years old. Like many patriotic young Frenchmen, Cocteau tried to enlist but was turned down because of his health. Looking for other ways to serve his country and the war effort, he collaborated with Iribe to launch Le Mot. As a teenager, Iribe drew illustrations for the popular caricature journal L’Assiette au Beurre (The Butter Plate), which ran from 1902 to 1912. He also freelanced for Le Témoin, Rire, Sourire and other periodicals and was enthusiastic about starting a satirical journal of his own.
Please join us for an interactive show and tell with special guest Willard Bohn, alumnus of the Department of French and Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Illinois State University.
Thursday, February 6 4-5:30 pm 223 Doe Library (accessible through south end of the Heyns Reading Room)
United Nations: For All Children a Safe Tomorrow-IF You Do Your Part. Issued by United Nations, Department of Public Information. United Nations poster collection, circa 1940s. The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley. BANC PIC 2005.010:002–D
On Wednesday, January 15, members of the newly formed Global & Area Studies Interest Group (GASIG) convened via Zoom to discuss new directions and topics of interest for librarians and staff working on international issues and themes at UC Berkeley. The knowledge sharing group provides a forum for Library employees to address issues related to supporting teaching, learning and research about specific world regions and countries, as well as international and global studies broadly. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to: collection development, collection management, digitization, metadata and discovery issues, campus partnerships, and fundraising.
Since its founding in 1868, students and faculty at UC Berkeley have concerned themselves with a breathtaking range of languages. In support of teaching and research, the University Library, which collects and preserves materials in all languages, now boasts a collection of nearly fourteen million volumes. It is among the largest academic libraries in the U.S. with more than one third of its print resources in more than 400 non-English languages, and even more in digital formats. Over a dozen Berkeley departments offer instruction in more than sixty languages.
The group will meet once or twice per semester, communicate via a group email list, and endeavors to host a series of educational events such as a library resource showcase featuring both hidden and well-known collections. Membership is open to all interested UC Berkeley Library employees across units, functions, and classifications. José Adrián Barragán-Álvarez (Bancroft Library) and Claude Potts (Arts & Humanities Division) are co-facilitators for the first two years. For more information or to join the group, please either one of us directly.
Nova História do Cristianismo Negro na África Ocidental e nas Américasmakes a historiographical intervention aimed at the history of black Catholicism and black religion in the Americas in a broader way. Dewulf’s central and well-documented assertion is that black Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has roots in pre-Tridentine Portuguese Catholicism. Even before the advent of the slave trade, Catholicism had become an indigenous African religion, at times assuming pre-Tridentine and syncretic forms that have become irreconcilable for the Europeans of the post-Tridentine period. This argument has significant historiographical consequences; the long-standing confusion about the religiosity of the enslaved people is, at least in part, the result of assumptions that Africans knew little about Christianity before their enslavement. On the contrary, Dewulf traces these religious forms to the slave ships that transported human “cargo” to the Americas. This book is a timely salute to the Catholic and Christian studies that has for a long time portrayed Christians of African descent as marginalized and atypical people, rather than important global actors. (Citation of the Committee of the Prize John Gilmary Shea of the year 2023)
Jeroen Dewulf is Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies at the UC Berkeley Department of German and a Professor at Berkeley’s Folklore Program and an affiliated member of the Center for African Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies. He recently completed his long-term role as director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies where he is chair of the Center for Portuguese Studies. His main area of research is Dutch and Portuguese colonial history, with a focus on the transatlantic slave trade and the culture and religion of African-descended people in the American diaspora. He also publishes in the field of Folklore Studies and about other aspects of Dutch, German, and Portuguese literature, culture, and history.
Judging by the explosion of new books on artificial intelligence, or AI, being published in Italy, you might think this Mediterranean country is the the editorial epicenter for one of the hottest interdisciplinary topics. Whether you are in the humanities, social sciences, human sciences, computer science, or STEM fields, “intelligenza artificiale” as it’s called in Italian will eventually find its way into your coursework or research. Here are just a few of the books on AI to recently reach bookstores in Italy and that have not automatically been sent to the UC Berkeley Library. However, if you are inclined just let your friendly Romance languages librarian know and he’ll be happy to push the first button to initiate this demand-driven order.*
*Demand-driven acquisition (DDA), is a model of library collection development in which a library only purchases materials when it is clear that a patron has demonstrated the need for a resource. If implemented correctly, DDA can make it possible to purchase only what is needed, allowing libraries to spend the same amount of money as they previously spent on monographs, but with a higher rate of use.
At the intersection of Chicana/o/x Studies, Digital Humanities and Library History, Bibliopolítica: A Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library chronicles the history of one of the first Chicana/o/x collections, the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bibliopolítica shares the stories of trailblazing library workers, students and community members who worked to preserve and make Chicana/o/x resources available. Featuring photographs, ephemera, archival documents, and oral histories, Bibliopolítica offers an original digital collection of primary sources and is the first audiovisual history of this special place that helped redefine what libraries could be.
Bibliopolítica takes its name from a book of the same title that Richard Chabrán and librarian colleague Francisco García-Ayvens published in 1984, BiblioPolítica: Chicano Perspectives on Library Service in the United States. In 2024, it remains one of the few titles dedicated to the discussion of Chicana/o/x librarianship. Bibliopolítica: a Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library adds to this important conversation, but it is only the beginning of a much needed longer and more detailed history of the Chicano Studies Library and the contributions of Chicana/o/x library workers.
Co-curated by Amanda Belantara – Assistant Curator at New York University Libraries, Lillian Castillo-Speed – former Chicano Studies Library Coordinator, now Head Librarian of the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley, and Richard Chabrán – former Chicano Studies Library Coordinator, Team Leader Latino Digital Archive Group.
Digitization of archival items by Chrissy Huhn and UC Berkeley Library IT and Oral history recordings at Berkeley by Pablo Gonzalez and Angelica Garcia. See additional credits.
