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• 1 media/BOWEN EMANUEL NEW & ACCURATE MAP OF ALL THE KNOWN WORLD1752.png media/Linschoten1596.jpg 2016-01-14T07:17:50-08:00 The Asia-Pacific on the Shelves of the John Carter Brown Library 28 Bibliography of texts, maps, and manuscripts image_header 2016-05-05T07:05:44-07:00             In 1982 the George S. Parker map curator Susan Danforth mounted an exhibit at the John Carter Brown Library of “Early Western Images of Asia,” on the occasion of the annual meeting of the New England Conference of the Association for Asian Studies.  Danforth called attention to the close junction between European voyages of discovery to the Americas and those to Asia evident in the collection of books and maps at the JCBL. “For,” she noted, “the discovery of America was part of the same dynamic as the European push toward the Spiceries and was treated as such by many early writers and chroniclers.”  In this spirit, we offer an expanded version of Danforth’s earlier project.              
              In the last few decades, the topic of Americans in interaction with East Asia has attracted much interest, both in academic scholarship and general-market publications, in exhibits, in school and college coursework, and at academic conferences.  The Library's collection, however, has its origins in founder John Carter Brown's avid interest in Americana, an interest characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century's singular focus on nation-building within an Atlantic World.  As an institution founded to explore the Western Hemisphere through the transatlantic European gaze, the library's ever-growing collection of texts on Pacific crossings and the Eastern Hemisphere during the early modern Age of Discovery fell into shadow. In highlighting the large number of texts related to the Asia-Pacific integral to the library's collection, this bibliography belies the modernity of an East-West or Atlantic-Pacific geopolitical partition and prompts us to consider alternative global divisions that better reflect early modern European imaginaries and the "Age of Discovery." [Image above of China from Itinerario by Jan van Huyghen Linschoten, 1596]
                                  
  How to Use the Bibliography
              Rather than impose our own discursive schema to organize the dozens of works identified here, we rely on folksonomy, or “tags,” used by the JCBL librarians in cataloguing the texts as well as those found in within current scholarship.  The digital format of the bibliography allows users to browse works within one very simple tag, such as a time period (16^th Century) or a genre (Voyage & Exploration) or a language (Latin). Our "tags” are found by clicking on the small menu icon on the upper left of this screen.  The narrative we and other contributors use to embellish a text in the bibliography does not impact the simple, mainstream tagging terms used to organize the texts.
               The digital format allows the infinite addition of entries in the bibliography, as well as the subsequent addition of new tags as scholarly paradigms and usages shift. The original bibliography is a Zotero file, which automatically syncs to this website. As new entries (with tags) are entered into the Zotero file, they immediately become part of the "Asia-Pacific on the Shelves of the JCBL" website.  We welcome your contributions.  Please contact the author for access to the Zotero file.
  
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