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This paper examines changes and trends in tributary gifts (pangmul 方物) sent by Chosŏn regular envoys to the Ming Emperor during the 15th and 17th centuries. First, pangmul items sent by the Chosŏn to the Ming were partially inherited from the Koryŏ era. Second, it examines how King Sejong’s 1429 request that the Chosŏn court pay its tribute by means other than gold and silver led the court to offer specialty goods as tribute instead of precious metals. It then moves on to explore how economic scarcity resulting from the Imjin Wars of 1592 led Chosŏn pangmul to be composed mostly of folding fans and stationery items such as paper (kyŏngmyŏnji, paekmyŏnji, and oil paper), inkstones (hwayŏn), ink (chinmuk and yumaemuk) and writing brushes (hwangmopil)–the dynasty’s common, major export goods. After the war, the Chosŏn dynasty regained stability and returned to its pre-war pangmul practices. However, the pangmul were not completely fixed and showed tentative patterns, going back and forth between the practices of the 15th century and the new circumstances of the 17th century. In short, this paper explores how pangmul practices were not completely fixed, and how contingencies such as the war and the changing landscape of manufacturing in 16th-century Korea influenced the composition of Chosŏn pangmul.

This article examines the joint makulatura campaign of 1974–91 by the Soviet Supply Committee (Gossnab) and the State Committee for Publishing (Goskomizdat), a campaign in which readers could exchange collected wastepaper for vouchers to obtain the popular and otherwise unavailable titles of the makulatura book series. Through analysis of the debate in Literaturnaia gazeta on the perceived waste and shortage of printing paper, the official campaign instructions, and the changing “editorial” paratexts of the makulatura books, the article sheds light on the public negotiations about the campaign and the value and reuse value of paper and reading matter in late Soviet society. By materializing the abstract relation between paper and books, the makulatura experiment turned both paper scrap and books into collection items and readers into paper suppliers. This materialization gave both readers and writers a marked awareness of paper as a raw material and a medium of cultural production. However, the shift of readers from the receiver to the producer side of the textual communication circuit also implied a collision of logics from the different perspectives of authors, collectors, publishers, and supply agencies.

Recent research on Émile Zola’s involvement with the French press of the late Second Empire and early Third Republic has clarified the shape of this history of his engagement with journalism, including a supposed absence from the fray between 1881 and 1895. This article, however, identifies in the period 1888 to 1892 , between the idealism of $\textit{Le Rêve}$ and the reflexivity of $\textit{Le Docteur Pascal}$, a period of particular reflection on the press by Zola which illuminates ‘le retour du reel et de l’actualité’ in his novels: $\textit{La Bête humaine}$, $\textit{L’Argent}$ and $\textit{La Débâcle}$.

El texto que presentamos recoge las principales conclusiones que han derivado de los estudios sobre la Colección de documentos árabes del Archivo Histórico Provincial de Granada. Compuesta principalmente por documentos de carácter jurídico, el análisis del contenido de cada uno de ellos en relación con la materialidad del soporte y las tintas así como la coincidencia en el diseño y planificación de la página revelan el uso de idénticos protocolos de ejecución. Esta investigación nos está permitiendo, además, establecer coincidencias relevantes relacionadas con los procesos de elaboración del papel entre los últimos años de permanencia de los árabes en la Península Ibérica y los primeros tras la incorporación del territorio a la Corona de Castilla y, sobre todo, con el modo de ejecutar el documento de archivo en sus formas externa e interna., This paper presents the main conclusions of our study of the Arabic documents preserved in the Archivo Histórico Provincial of Granada. The analysis of the contents of each document, the materials and inks used in their support, and also the similarities of the page layout reveals the use of identical production protocols. Furthermore, this research also enables us to establish important similarities between the paper production processes in the latter stages of the Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula and the earlier stages of its incorporation in the Crown of Castilla – in particular in relation to how the archival documents were issued, both externally and internally.

The article focuses on the representation of whiteness in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993), in particular on how the aesthetic and the socio-historical strata of the novel intersect, how by saturating the imagery of Bone with whiteness, Ng conveys the first person Chinese American narrator’s positionality and the positionality of other Chinese American characters as members of the Chinese American community and members of broader American society. The images involving whiteness compose a kind of the palimpsest overwritten with personal and communal ethnic watermarks as well as repressed, surfacing and semi-articulated history of Leila’s family that she channels into the narrative, having engaged in the process of mentally retracing the past events and recovering the material evidence or rather what remains of it and what she believes will lead her to definitive answers. On the level of narrative imagery, whiteness is intricately interwoven with the traumas plaguing the narrator’s family. Explicitly, whiteness represents death, mourning, rejection and erasure, entailing marginalization suffered by Chinese Americans because of their non-normative racial and ethnic status. Yet, implicitly, whiteness is also a constituent element of the images which facilitate the process of healing – mainly bones and paper. Narrative imagery involving whiteness contributes to the bridging of the past and the present, forming a bridge between generations, a kind of rivet that allows to at least partly retrieve personal wholeness and recapture the broken promises.

Este trabajo busca analizar la irrupción de paper como un modo de escritura que en el último tiempo está siendo impuesto en el ámbito de las Humanidades con el apoyo de una serie de instituciones que lo ha hecho posible. El objetivo de este escrito será, por un lado, estudiar sus características principales a partir de la información contenida en los manuales e instructivos para escribir papers y, por otro lado, poner en evidencia sus implicancias para el trabajo intelectual en general y el latinoamericano en particular.This paper analyzes the emergence of the paper as a kind of writing in the area of the Humanities that, in recent times, and with institutional support, has been imposed as the nearly unique and acceptable kind of academic discourse. The aim of this paper is, first, to study the main characteristics of this kind of writing, based on information in the manuals and instructions for paper writing and, secondly, to signal its implications for the intellectual work in general and for the work in Latin America in particular.