Book Reviews  1061

versus foreign decision making that controlled the building and modernization of railways 
and ports, while highlighting the decreased trust in knowledge coming from Europe and the 
increase in “homegrown expertise.” Local engineers sought more control over foreign com-
panies, citing that these foreign engineers were not acquainted with the terrain. Finally, the 
purpose of education was a matter of debate, especially during the wars of independence, 
where there was much reference to popular education and the need for literacy by people of 
all social ranks. Latin American governments understood the importance of elementary edu-
cation to the broader community. However, issues arose as education was used as a vehicle 
of indoctrination, with nations installing curricula based on state-approved commitments to 
morality and patriotism, and in countries like Peru, for example, elementary education be-
ing seen as urban-base when more than half of the population was rural, and with education 
policies ignoring the ways of life of Indigenous peoples. 

Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America offers an intellectual sojourn 
to nineteenth-century Spanish America formulating inquiries as to who has access to knowl-
edge, what type of knowledge is considered more valuable, the legitimacy of knowledge 
born or shaped by a nation, and the importance of knowledge to construct national identity. 
To conclude, this book is concerned mainly with knowledge within an intellectual, political, 
and transnational perspective from a primarily creole and white men perspective. In addition, 
at least one of the chapters addresses the role of national and public libraries. Let us hope 
Miller will grant us future publications detailing her findings on indigenous knowledge and 
its historical contribution to Spanish America.—Kathia Ibacache, University of Colorado Boulder

Esther Milne. Email and the Everyday: Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 336p. Hardcover, $35.00 (ISBN 978-0-262-04563-6).

As academic library workers, we often disparage the ways in which 
email runs our lives as a bureaucratic and affective technology. Typi-
cally we give it no more thought due to its banality in our lives. It is 
strangely familiar, boring, and often an afterthought, until we make 
a poorly calculated, and usually extraordinary, misstep. Esther Milne 
argues that this tension between the banal and extraordinary is what 
makes email a compelling focus for media and cultural studies, given 
the arrival of “moments where email communication becomes odd, 
unfamiliar, and at times perhaps even exotic” (15). Despite its omni-
presence, Milne notes that email has been largely overlooked by these 
fields, and this book is an ambitious attempt at undertaking a wide view 
of email as a larger media landscape. For Milne, email is never simply 

just correspondence; it must be understood broadly in terms of its structure, infrastructure, 
and variant contexts of use.

Milne’s introduction to the book focuses on providing a broader context to validate email 
as a phenomenon worthy of deeper study, informed by historical, methodological, and theo-
retical approaches. While well-represented in studies about workplace behavior and email 
use, linguistics, letter-writing, literature, and internet history, Milne specifically notes its un-
derrepresentation in media, communications, and cultural studies research, despite several 
specific works by media scholars. More glaring to Milne is the astonishing gap given that 
cultural theory often studies the “everyday”; examples include the work of Donna Haraway, 



1062  College & Research Libraries November 2021

Nick Couldry, and Ben Highmore. Milne’s book’s focus on the sociotechnical and affective 
practices around email’s use is informed by two mixed-method online surveys (both N > 
1,000), interviews, and close analysis of primary and secondary sources. Central to Milne’s 
engagement with the everyday is her focus on stories and the complexity of email as a “media 
manifold” as described by Couldry. 

The remainder of the book focuses on three major themes: “Histories and Landscapes” 
(email’s technical and historical foundations); “Affect and Labor” (exemplified through both 
institutional email and email lists); and “Archives and Publics,” which relates how email 
constructs, comprises, and interacts with the public sphere and cultural landscape. The first 
two chapters in the “Histories and Landscapes” section focus on primary moments in email 
history through sociotechnical and metahistorical lenses. Milne explores primary stories and 
their context (the construction of email address syntax and header formats bound to the con-
ditions or structures under which they were needed or created), as well as counterclaims to 
narratives of invention of email as a means to demonstrate the tension between the banality 
and exceptionality of the everyday. The third chapter in the section focuses more broadly on 
the “email industry”—including email providers, marketing firms, and analytics vendors—to 
demonstrate the complexity of email as a media manifold. Unlike commercial sectors like the 
entertainment business, the email industry has also been understudied by media and cultural 
studies. Email analytics belie the complexity of how people interact with email on a variety 
of devices, and how many email providers (for example: Gmail, operated by Google), make 
changes to give them a competitive advantage.

The chapters in “Affect and Labor” investigate in more depth how email is used: first, 
workplace use of email and its role as a form of “bureaucratic register” laden with affect, and 
the affective labor involved with email list moderation. Milne describes the changing nature of 
work and our own perceptions of bureaucracy, exemplified by how we use and interact with 
email and its affective and psychological impact on each of us. While bureaucracy is commonly 
viewed as reducing emotion or affect, Milne describes a slippage from the conventional register 
as “bureaucratic intensity,” wherein affect bubbles to the surface in work email in ways that 
are in hindsight recognized as unacceptable. Milne’s analysis of email list moderation echoes 
recent scholarly work on social media content moderation, although she rightfully notes that 
the practice predates it. Her stories on email list use and moderation center on the importance 
of sharing stories in various support groups, and how moderators view their (often uncom-
pensated) labor. The two chapters in “Archives and Publics” focus on how emails constitute 
various public spheres and domains as well as how they get reinterpreted in various settings. 
The first chapter focuses on case studies of the slippage among public, personal, professional, 
and private email by investigating the Enron corpus and Hillary Clinton’s private email used 
during her tenure as Secretary of State and how disclosure operates across these contexts. Like 
Milne’s other examples, she argues that these public and private domains are in tension. The 
final chapter investigates email as an art form and aesthetic subject, investigating how it has 
been informed by past stylistic and creative practices such as epistolary literature and mail 
art, and through looking at specific creative works represented as or representative of email.

Email and the Everyday meets Milne’s goal of addressing the complexity of email as a ubiq-
uitous media landscape through evocative and familiar stories of the everyday drawn from 
her research methodology and contextualized through additional examples drawn from sec-
ondary sources. While her project is ambitious and is largely successful, its major weaknesses 



Book Reviews  1063

relate to its ambition. The shift across various stories demonstrates the complexity of email as 
a media manifold; but, at times, any given section or chapter could have gone deeper. Milne 
also hastily engages with email archives in her conclusion but overlooks more recent work 
by archivists. Nonetheless, the book has done its duty to argue for more in-depth scholarly 
investigation. Library workers curious about how to best serve media and cultural studies 
scholars are encouraged to read this book as they engage with how our institutions can sup-
port the study of email considering this manifold complexity: as record, media, commercial 
sector, and cultural phenomenon.—Mark A. Matienzo, Stanford University

Moya Bailey. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York, NY: 
NYU Press, 2020. 248p. Hardcover, $28.00 (ISBN: 9781479865109).

Moya Bailey is known for coining the term “misogynoir,” defined 
as the “particular venom directed at Black women through negative 
representations in Media” (xiii). Bailey has personal experience with 
this phenomenon. She gained a name for herself in the world of hip-
hop cultural criticism in 2004 as an undergraduate student at Spelman 
College when she led a protest of the rapper Nelly’s visit to her college 
campus. At the time, Nelly had been named “Misogynist of the Month” 
at Spelman, a women’s college and HBCU in Atlanta, because of his 
controversial, sexually explicit music video “Tip Drill.” The music 
video was constantly replayed on television and included graphic and 
explicit sexuality involving Black women. Bailey and her classmates 
were unaware that the college had agreed to host a bone-marrow drive 

for the rapper’s sister, who had leukemia. The student protest upended the bone-marrow 
drive, gained national attention, and is still discussed as a pivotal moment in hip-hop. Bailey 
and her classmates at Spelman received condemnation for their stance nationwide. Bailey 
cites this experience as the catalyst to her coining of the term “misogynoir.”

In Misogynoir Transformed, Bailey builds on this legacy, introducing readers to the concept 
of misogynoir and centering Black women in the fight against these narratives. Bailey traces 
the impact of misogynoir including hypersexualized descriptions of Black women that have 
existed since the country’s founding, the mockery of minstrel shows, the subservient mammy 
stereotypes and “welfare queens” of mainstream television, and more recent representations 
of Black queer folks from the web. Bailey uses an in-depth analysis of social media trending 
topics to create a vivid depiction of how users interact with stories about Black women. In 
four fantastic chapters, Bailey outlines the role Black women play in transforming perceptions 
in Media and how they work to resist misogynoir as a dominant cultural narrative. 

In chapter 1, “Misogynoir Is a Drag,” Bailey looks at how misogynoir has been displayed 
in digital spaces by men in “drag.” Readers new to this discussion are provided with the 
contextual description of the historical stereotypes of the Sapphire character, which grew 
from minstrel shows, to the relatively recent performances of Sheneneh by Martin Lawrence, 
Madea by Tyler Perry, and a viral character named Peaches written by Lena Waithe. These 
extremely popular comical performances have further bolstered perceptions of black women 
as unintelligent, undesirable, and lacking in femininity. Bailey’s exploration of drag perfor-
mance also acknowledges the effect this comedic practice has on nonbinary people and trans 
women by making trans women the butt of jokes and pushing them outside of the realm of