Duke University Press Log

Sunday Times Returns to Java to Profile S. Ann Dunham

 The Sunday Times (London) sent reporter Christine Finn to Kajar, Java in Indonesia to revisit the site of S. Ann Dunham's research there. As you have read before on this blog, Dunham, who died in 1995, was President Barack Obama's mother. An anthropologist, she did her fieldwork on Javanese metal workers in the village of Kajar. Finn writes, "Dunham is still remembered in the central Javan hamlet of Kajar as a generous benefactor whose gifts of money, food and schoolbooks helped numerous villagers. Yet none of them had realised that the woman who paid several visits to research rural crafts in the 1980s had a son who was to become America’s 44th president." Duke will publish Dunham's dissertation, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia next month.

Thomas Glave Interviewed by Examiner.com

Thomas Chin, the San Francisco GLBT Literary editor for the Examiner.com, interviews Thomas Glave this week. Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, talks about writing, activism, and one of his other loves, watching ballet. Glave offers this advice to new writers: "I would say read as much as possible, as widely as possible -- and read books, not only periodicals. It is in fact ridiculous, and even arrogant, to expect to become a writer of any real merit if you don’t read. And if you don’t read, why would you expect people to read your work?"

Pittburgh Reporter Searches for Paris's Best Baguette

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Bob Hoover recently traveled to Paris in search of the perfect baguette. He took along Steven A. Kaplan's 2006 classic Good Bread is Back as his inspiration and guidebook. Kaplan, he writes, is known as "the world's authority on the social history of bread in Paris," but his critics sometimes refer to him as an "ayatollah." Hoover visits some of the bakeries Kaplan recommends and encounters "bread factionalism."

Lawrence Reviewed in Bookforum

Tim Lawrence's Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 is reviewed in the new issue of Bookforum. Reviewer John Rockwell praises Lawrence for writing "the broadest and most insightful study of the whole musical scene so far." He adds, "[E]ven if you didn’t know about Russell and are not yet persuaded to pursue him further, this is still a book worth reading. Psychologically, Russell emerges as indeed fascinating, more fascinating than his music, as a maverick without, Lawrence notes, the feisty self-righteousness such figures often embody."

Karadzic Trial Begins in The Hague

The trial of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who stands accused of genocide, began yesterday in The Hague. But the accused refused to appear, claiming he needed more time to prepare his defense. Karadzic's recalcitrance will remind many of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic made a mockery of the proceedings and died before a verdict could be issued. Next fall we will publish the definitive account of the Milosevic trial, Judith Armatta's Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Armatta, a lawyer, sat inches away from Milosevic throughout the entire trial as she served as an observer for the Coalition for International Justice, a human rights organization. Her book presents both a day-to-day account of the trial and analysis of its significance as well as personal accounts of victims of the Balkan wars. Armatta argues that the trial set an important precedence and that studying and understanding it is crucial to future efforts to bring war criminals (like Karadzic) to justice. After the jump, read an excerpt from this important forthcoming book.

Karen Ho in The Guardian

The Guardian's "Brain Food" column features anthropologist Karen Ho this week. Aditya Chakrabortty writes, "Anthropologists used to study the alien: pygmies in rainforests with blowdarts and more piercings than a knife-thrower's assistant. Nowadays, however, few societies are more foreign than that found on Wall Street. After all, what could be more outlandish than the tribes of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and the famously fierce Goldman Sachs – with their obscure tongue (CDOs, CLOs and the rest), their worship of gold and those grisly ritual cullings of staff?" Ho's book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street is an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers which shows how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed.

San Antonio Express-News Reviews Paredez's Selenidad

The San Antonio Express-News reviews Deborah Paredez's Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Reviewer Yvette Benavides writes, "What is certain and undeniable about Corpus Christi's most famous daughter is this: What we can now never know about Selena's rising star reveals other truths after her death." She continues, "It is perhaps no coincidence that the decade in which Selena died is the same decade that witnessed the so-called cultural and commercial "Latin explosion." It is also perhaps no accident that a resurgence of anti-immigration discourse and policy emerged with those same events. 'The fact that she died at a particular moment in American history is important,' says Paredez." Paredez will be reading from and signing her book tonight at 7 p.m. at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio.

Seminole Gaming in the News

After months of trying to agree on a gambling compact, it appears that Florida's Seminole tribe and its state government are at an impasse, reports the Miami Herald. At issue is the desire of some lawmakers to expand gambling throughout the state and the refusal of the Seminoles to give Florida $150 million a year in shared gaming revenue if the expansion goes through. But the even larger issue looming behind the dispute is that of sovereignty. The Seminoles claim that Federal law makes them a sovereign nation, not subject to the state of Florida's fines and rules. The Florida House of Representatives has asked the Federal government to step in and halt gaming on the Seminole reservations. These large issue of sovereignty are discussed in detail in Jessica Cattelino's High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. She argues that the Seminoles have used their vast gaming profits to shore up both their cultural traditions and their sovereignty, and that while states and the Federal government have both been happy to let tribes claim sovereignty when they were poor, the addition of huge gambling profits raises the stakes for everyone. When asked about the current impasse, Cattelino said she is "particularly intrigued by the potential for the tribe to negotiate gaming terms with the federal government and thereby cut out the state."

Village Voice Praises White's Rumba Rules

The Village Voice looks to expert Bob White and his book Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire in an article about music in the Democratic Republic of Congo. White argues that "many linguistic complexities are rooted in the repression endured under Joseph Désiré Mobutu, a/k/a Mobutu Sese Seko, the CIA-installed despot who changed the country's name to Zaire for much of his 32-year reign (which finally ended in 1997)." Reporter K. Leander Williams especially likes White's chapter that analyzes "soukous lyrics by such stars as J.B. M'Piana, Koffi Olomide, and General Defao to show that love paeans and praise songs are often veiled cries for help, community, even power in a society gone awry."

Gender Not Always Clear Cut

The Washington Post has a thoughtful article today about how in athletics and other areas, it's not always easy to assign a gender to a person. The recent plight of runner Caster Semenya brought to the forefront the issue of competitors who have always identified as women, but who test genetically as male. Reporter David A. Farenthold writes that, with one in 100 people having a medical condition that might make gender assignment difficult, these issues extend far beyond athletic competition. Many people with these medical conditions identify as intersex. Katrina Karkazis's Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience is the first book to examine contemporary controversies over the medical management of intersexuality in the United States from the multiple perspectives of those most intimately involved (parents and doctors as well as intersex people themselves). It has been widely praised for its thoroughness and sensitivity. Check it out if you'd like to know more about this complex issue.