858  College & Research Libraries September 2022

Complex infrastructure often invokes stopgaps to manage the measurable effects of a 
problem. What it means to make, in the context of those infrastructures, is an “enactment of 
[city] knowing—which cannot be reduced to computation” (72). It’s unsurprising that this 
conclusion flows immediately into a discussion of libraries and public knowledge in chapter 
3. Mattern complicates the library’s position in these projects and within itself: libraries could 
have a “productively adversarial” role against “smart” initiatives (81). Moving fast and break-
ing things tends to strain resources and break people. Mattern cites practitioners, theorists, 
and those who work in hazy, less defined spaces of expertise, and the text is stronger as a 
result. Mattern engages with maintainers, writing with a voice that inhabits doing and observ-
ing with few peers. 

Mattern does masterful work that only scholars willing to pay the interdisciplinary taxes 
required to develop this analysis can achieve. Mattern draws from architecture, technology, 
libraries and archives, archeology, sociology, and media studies with ease. Mattern is able 
to graft and weave more specific vocabularies of maintenance across scale. Because so much 
necessary work exists at each of these scales of repair, A City Is Not a Computer provides tools 
to better make legible and understand both the work and its often overlapping scope. One 
review will not do justice to this achievement, but the scholarship, advocacy, and communi-
ties that follow certainly will. 

A city is not a computer. Neither is a library. Mattern’s work will find readers of both 
utility and joy, and each of these readers will develop different metaphors, reclaim knowledge, 
and reframe value propositions. As each of us confronts what it means to exist in liminality in 
this moment of strangled, unevenly distributed momentum, Mattern’s research is a striking 
and necessary text that resonates in multiple disciplines, a handbook to ethically reconstitute 
the world.—Scarlet Galvan, Grand Valley State University

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann. Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time. New Brunswick, NJ: 
Rutgers University Press, 2021. 216p. Paper, $29.95 (ISBN: 9781978822429).

In this book, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann traces the way literary maga-
zines in the middle of the twentieth century created different senses of 
geographical belonging and affiliation for their readers. She explores how 
these journals created relations to locality and elsewhere that betrayed 
their desires for specific kin relationships. Seligmann accomplishes her 
ultimate goal of mapping polycentric networks of infrastructure, ideas, 
and literature for us that are worthy of study in their own right, without 
reference to the global centers of literary production where capital fuels 
larger infrastructures that we are constantly in danger of confusing for 
value. 

At the center of the book is the concept of “location writing.” In 
chapter 3, “Gaceta del Caribe v. Orígenes in Cuba: Black Aesthetics as Battleground,” Seligmann 
focuses on the cultural combat between these two magazines. The former wants to work in 
close alignment with Black culture, which it rightly sees as closer to the Cuban reality. As 
Seligmann writes, “the Caribbean location enunciated by Gaceta del Caribe functioned strate-
gically to covertly orient the national literary canon and the Communist Party in Cuba away 
from a Eurocentrist orientation toward the politics and aesthetics located in Black popular 
culture.” In other words, the title of the journal, its entries, and its constant geo-cultural ref-



Book Reviews  859

erences point to the Caribbean instead of Europe, doubling down on the relation to an Afro-
descendant base. The latter, on the other hand, wants to look toward Europe, minoritizing 
the literature that finds kinship with the Black popular culture of its own surroundings. The 
journal does this mostly through an overvaluing of rarified language that points inward to 
a whitened refinement of the spirit, and outward to the European literary traditions of the 
time, overtly desiring to be recognized by them. Origenes, Seligmann shows, participates in 
the erasure of race and geographic affiliation to an actual Caribbean reality, precisely because 
this is the quintessential universalist move that we associate now with Eurocentrism and 
European literary and philosophical traditions. In this sense, Origenes does location writing 
by decentering its own location. In their opposing strategies, these two adversary magazines 
write into being a geographical imaginary that determines their literary output. They write 
or erase location, and those locations and erasures drive their writing in turn. 

These world-building and kin-building strategies are masterfully excavated in the other 
chapters as well, each looking at a different language tradition, with the last chapter returning 
to the polycentric whole. In each of the chapters, as she does in the third, Seligmann reads 
both the whole journal and selected entries to gather her evidence. In chapter 1, she sets the 
methodological stakes for location writing, arguing that we should read the dominant trend 
in this period to be the move toward a pan-Caribbean identity, as Gaceta would have it, not 
Origenes. I was persuaded by this but was left wondering if studying other journals of the 
period, exhaustively going through the wider Caribbean, would yield a more mixed result. 
That’s work that remains to be done, and (in full disclosure) Dr. Seligmann and I are planning 
a digital archive of Caribbean literary and cultural magazines of the twentieth century that 
may help us answer that very question, among others. Surely the methodologies she lays out 
in this book will comprise our main toolkit. That said, Seligmann is always careful to point out 
how location writing of a Pan-Caribbean, decolonial affiliation will always be “incomplete,” 
and she is, of course, right.

In chapter 2, Seligmann looks at Tropiques, a journal founded in Martinique by poet 
Aimé Césaire, cultural critic Suzanne Césaire, and philosopher René Ménil in 1941, with a 
five-year run that would come to have an outsize influence that reaches our own time. This 
chapter delineates the first concrete example of “location writing” in action oriented toward 
a Pan-Caribbean identity, and imagined as a decolonial cultural project. Despite this orienta-
tion—and opposed to Gaceta and more in line with Origenes—Tropiques still imagines itself in 
a relationship with Europe and European traditions, even if contestatory. This analysis aligns 
with the explicit desire of the editors to join a Universal through an uplifting of their Particular 
circumstances. This Universal is not to be confused with the racist, exclusive Universal of Eu-
ropean humanism, as Seligmann elegantly suggests, but is grounded instead in a reimagined 
Universal that already has room for the particularities of the Caribbean. This is location writing 
at its best. This is also the chapter where Seligmann introduces the centrality of infrastructural 
conditions in making, unmaking, or limiting the possibilities of location writing. 

For me, reading this book as a former Digital Scholarship Librarian, and for the readers 
of this journal, Seligmann’s analysis of the role of publishing infrastructure—in particular 
the relatively feeble one of the Caribbean compared to centers of capital—opens up valuable 
avenues for debates about our collection practices and the networks implied by our growing 
digital practices. Her analysis connects the production of literature, beyond the simple material 
realities of print literary magazines, to the very concept these magazines have of themselves, 



860  College & Research Libraries September 2022

the literature in their pages, and their audiences. In her book, publishing infrastructure is not 
an invisible and neutral container for content, but a force that actively shapes it. Seligmann 
captures this most concisely in her discussion of the journal Bim from its humble Barbadian 
origins to its status as a broad-based anglophone Caribbean journal: “I consider the infrastruc-
tural capacity of a magazine to generate literature to be shaped by the set of possible relations 
it may establish to other forms of literary infrastructure.”

In other words, these literary magazines cannot be understood fully until we place them 
in relation to the range of actual and relevant infrastructures they imply. If Origenes adopts a 
Eurocentric tack, it does so in relationship to European infrastructure. If Bim becomes West 
Indian, it does so in relation to the specifics of cross-Caribbean infrastructures. This astonishing 
insight opens the book to a librarian reading, especially for those libraries that see themselves 
today as the architects of a hybrid—digital and analog—cultural and historical record. 

While Seligmann does not address libraries or archives directly in her discussion of in-
frastructural relations, she does provide useful concepts for us to carry on the conversation as 
stewards of one of the central infrastructures of world literature. These concepts emerge most 
clearly in chapter 5, when Seligmann departs from her “slow reading” of specific journals, 
turning to cartography to elucidate the location-making of the journals. Through a series of 
maps and careful analysis, she teases out three axes for cartographic location-making that can 
help us imagine literature that is not compelled to gravitate toward the centers of capital. These 
concepts are “authorship, circulation, and influence,” and Seligmann designs provocative 
maps from these to help us visualize the geographic imaginaries and realities at play in her 
book. For us, these three concepts serve as an invitation to imagine the many more axes that 
will help us be better partners, and perhaps even co-stewards, of these polycentric literatures 
around the world—always responsive to the idea that the moves we make will have a role to 
play in the future cultures that will matter to us.—Alex Gil, Yale University 

Libraries and Sustainability: Programs and Practices for Community Impact. René Tanner, 
Adrian K. Ho, Monika Antonelli, and Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, eds. Chicago, IL: ALA Edi-
tions, 2021. 176p. Paper, $49.99 (ISBN: 9780838937945).

In 2019, ALA adopted sustainability as one of the core values of librari-
anship, highlighting the importance of libraries to be resilient in this 
changing world. The conversation has morphed from merely “think-
ing green” to adopting the “triple bottom line” view of sustainability. 
Practices should aim to be environmentally sound, socially equitable, 
and economically feasible to be considered sustainable. This book aims 
to explore how libraries can address the issues of sustainability, looking 
into some actions that are proving successful in communities. This collec-
tion of essays constitutes a wide view of sustainability, offering myriad 
ways to promote the library as a leader for sustainable communities. The 
book is split into four parts: leadership, planning, programming, and 
transformation. Each section includes ideas that can be implemented at 

many libraries alongside suggestions that challenge how libraries operate in their communi-
ties and how we educate a new generation of librarians.

As expected, the book includes multiple essays about sustainability programming (think 
repair clinics and DIY events), discussion of collection development initiatives like seed libraries