Prizes for Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Book)

First Book Prize [link]
Date: 12/6/2021 12:00:00 AM
Organization: Modern Language Association [link]
Abstract: Allison Bigelow’s Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World is a work of immense erudition and impeccable research. It examines Indigenous metallurgical knowledges in colonial archives to reveal the surprising ways in which technical language encoded cultural meanings, values, and practices of colonial subjects. The entanglement of mining communities of the Americas, Africa, South Asia, and Europeans unsettles imperial histories of science and technology. Bigelow refines the raw materials of her wide- ranging archive with interdisciplinary methods equally wide ranging: comparative literary interpretation, historical linguistics, and visual analysis. This important account of cultural exchange and coercive appropriation, distortions and erasures, has profound implications for our present extractive age.

James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History [link]
Date: 1/6/2022 12:00:00 AM
Organization: American Historical Association [link]
Abstract: This innovative study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the Americas features the four main metals—gold, iron, copper, and silver—of imperial endeavors. Ranging across the Americas during the 16th and 17th centuries, Mining Language deftly demonstrates that colonial mining methods had Indigenous and African roots. Primarily a literary scholar, Allison Margaret Bigelow is fully committed to interdisciplinary work. Her pioneering linguistic and visual analyses uncover a world of incorporation and erasure.

Philip J. Pauly Prize [link]
Date: 11/19/2022 12:00:00 AM
Organization: History of Science Society [link]
Abstract: The Philip Pauly Prize is awarded for the best first book on the history of science in the Americas (broadly defined to include North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean) and written in English.

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