Miniature Messages radiates the energy that teaching can provide to scholarship. Its consideration of how postage stamps metonymically indexed Latin American politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries testifies to the influence of instructional technology on research. To the certain appreciation of many readers, Jack Child explains how the transition from analog to digital reproduction, from slides to JPEGs and carousels to PowerPoint generated not only new pedagogical possibilities but new insights about culture and history. However, Miniature Messages’ parochial methodology (and technology) prevent fulfillment of its expansive aspirations.
Miniature Messages’ unnecessary prolepsis — justifying stamps as sites of semiotic significance — indicates a lack of scholarly communication with contemporary cultural studies. It leans heavily on a discussion of semiotics singularly based in the century-old observations of U.S. philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pp. 13 – 15). Its bypass of more relevant foundational thinkers — Roland Barthes, for starters...
