Duke University Press Log

Guest Post: Priscilla Wald on the Swine Flu

Today we offer a guest post from Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. You can also read Wald's comments in the Durham Herald-Sun today and listen to her interview on CBC's The Current.

I am not surprised to see the coverage of the swine flu pandemic following the conventions of what, in Contagious, I call “the outbreak narrative.”  The storyline will be familiar from news coverage of pandemics past and popular fiction, non-fiction, and film: a new microbe surfaces at a “Ground Zero” and outbreaks are soon reported from around the globe.  News media offer round-the-clock coverage, emphasizing the uncertainty of the danger and the efforts underway to address it.  Many journalists and medical experts urge calm and offer sound advice.  But the message is characteristically that pandemics are a medical problem and that the solutions are quarantine, drugs, and vaccines.
    It is certainly important to disseminate information about a potential or ongoing pandemic.  And quarantine, medical care, and vaccines are crucial. But the outbreak narrative is not just (maybe not primarily) about the pandemic.  It is a story about global transformation; it registers anxieties about a shrinking and ever more interdependent world.  The constant coverage can produce counterproductive fear, despite the best efforts of the most responsible journalists.  It can stigmatize individuals, groups, locales, and behaviors.   It can make disease seem inevitable in some populations and unacceptable in others.  It can make communicable disease, which might spread into populous world centers, seem more devastating than the chronic (and often easily treatable or preventable) diseases and conditions that have much larger mortality rates among impoverished populations. Communicable diseases are a fact of life; people will suffer and die.  But illness and death should not be inevitable for some populations and unacceptable for others.
    The outbreak narrative can paradoxically offer reassurance and foster passivity where it should promote responsible action.  It is comforting to know that medical experts are on the job and to have confidence that they are best equipped to solve the problem of a pandemic.  It is harder to think about the structural problems that seem too large to solve, and the outbreak narrative obscures them.  Diseases of all kinds flourish where people are malnourished, living in excessively close quarters, and having little or no access to health care.  It is not true that we cannot afford to address those problems; in fact, we cannot afford not to.

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times featured an article about the mixed emotions regarding Hawaii's fiftieth anniversary of statehood. Many of the observances will be low-key, Jay Jones, reports, and are being called "commemorations" rather than "celebrations." This, of course, is because of the United States's complicated post-colonial relationship with Hawai'i. Duke authors Noenoe Silva and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui write about this in their books Aloha Betrayed and Hawaiian Blood. Silva explores long-forgotten forms of resistance to the U.S. takeover of Hawaii in 1897. Kauanui examines the far-reaching legal and cultural effects of the 1921 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, which defined native Hawaiians based on blood quantum. Readers interested in Hawaiian culture should also check out anthropologist Ty P. Tengan's book Native Men Remade, a contemporary look at how native Hawaiians are retaining and changing their culture.

Santha Rama Rau Dies

Santha Rama Rau, one of the best known South Asian writers in postwar America, has died at age 86. In 2007 Duke Press published The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau by historian Antoinette Burton. Burton used Rama Rau's career as a translator of Indian culture to explore issues of gender, orientalism, and cosmopolitianism in the postwar era. Through her writing for popular magzines like the New Yorker, McCalls, and Reader's Digest, as well as her cookbooks and her stage adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Rama Rau provided an insider’s view of Indian cultures, traditions, and history to an American public increasingly aware of the expanded role of the United States on the world stage.

Duke Authors at AAS Conference and Duke Press at Powwow

Duke Press attended the annual Association of Asian Studies conference in Chicago March 26-29, 2009. Here are some of the authors who stopped by our booth.

Rebecca M. Brown, author of Art for a Modern India, 1947-1980

Rochona Majumdar, author of Marriage and Modernity

Miriam Angress, Associate Editor, with Eric Tagliacozzo and Tineke Hellwig, editors of The Indonesia Reader

Also, Duke Press attended the annual Duke University Powwow on April 4, 2009. The inter-tribal powwow was sponsored by the Native American Student Alliance.

Participants preparing to dance.

Participants demonstrating traditional dances.

The Duke Press book table.

Thanks to Helena Knox, our exhibits manager, for all of these great photos!

Tributes to Eve Sedgwick in New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The New York Times published an appreciation of the significance of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's pioneering work this weekend. "Now that colleges have created gender-neutral housing and bathrooms, and gay couples can be married in Iowa and Connecticut, it may be hard to understand the uproar that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work caused when it first appeared in the mid-1980s," writes Patricia Cohen. "At first her work was met with shocked disbelief. 'No one would hire me,'" said Sedgwick. Cohen writes that "Queer theory challenged people to question definitions and frames of reference they previously would never have thought twice about." And in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ann Pellegrini considers Sedgwick's most important scholarship and concludes, "Because of Eve Sedgwick's formative role in the shaping of queer studies, the absence left in her wake looms large. And yet her legacy lives on in the dazzling body of work she leaves behind, which we can continue to read and teach and find happiness in. Sedgwick was also, from all accounts, an amazing teacher and mentor to her students, so many of whom have themselves gone on to leave their marks on queer and feminist studies. She leaves us that other shining, pulsing legacy, then, in the form of her many students, whom she touched and graced, and whose own teaching is a kind of carrying forward of her torch and her touch." Duke Press has also been soliciting appreciations of Sedgwick from our own authors. They can be found here at our special web tribute site.

Independent Weekly Reviews Bricks Without Straw

Next month we will publish a new edition of a classic but now nearly forgotten Reconstruction-era novel, Bricks Without Straw. The novel is by Albion W. Tourgée, who was a lawyer, judge, and civil rights activist who lived in Greensboro, NC. This week the Independent Weekly reviews the novel and discusses its historical importance. Reviewer Bronwen Dickey calls the book "a firsthand document of the South's bleakest years." Our edition is edited by Carolyn L. Karcher and includes a comprehensive introduction placing the novel in historical context.

The Atlantic Monthly on Breastfeeding

Hanna Rosin recently published an article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Case Against Breastfeeding" in which she argues that women should return to formula-feeding their babies. Exploring issues like mother and baby health, relationship dynamics between the mother and father, social class and unaccommodating workplaces, Rosin has touch on a very contentious issue that brings important attention to feminism and child-rearing norms in the United States.

The article has created much controversy in parenting blogs, with comments arguing from both sides.

In response to the overwhelming interest in this issue, Duke University Press has granted free online access to the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law articles that Rosin used in her research:

Joan B. Wolf, "Is Breast Really Best? Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign" (JHPPL 32:4) jhppl.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/32/4/595

Judy M. Hopkinson, Response to "Is Breast Really Best? Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breast-Feeding Awareness Campaign" (JHPPL 32:4) jhppl.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/32/4/637

Joan B. Wolf, "Rejoinder to Judy M. Hopkinson" (JHPPL 32:4) jhppl.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/32/4/649

Bay Area Reporter Reviews Zaborowska

Jim Piechota reviews Magdalena Zaborowska's James Baldwin's Turkish Decade in the Bay Area Reporter.  He writes, "Zaborowska takes great delight in detailing her subject's adventures in Turkey, vicariously bathing in the limelight of a distinguished, outspoken writer who pushed boundaries well before his time, and graced the homosexual world with writing that transcended both color and gender lines."

Diane M. Nelson discusses the Guatemalan Civil War

Diane M. Nelson, author of Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala (2009), discusses the impact of a decades-long civil war on the people of Guatemala.

Ward Churchill: The Myth of Academic Freedom

Ward Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor who was ousted after questionable academic professionalism, recently won a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal. Churchill was accused of "scholarly misconduct"  and criticized for controversial remarks regarding 9/11. While the court could decide to reinstate the professor or force the university to pay for his losses during the time he was dismissed, the university still hopes to prevent his reinstatement.

The case draws attention to important questions surrounding tenure and academic freedom in U.S. higher education.

Read Ward Churchill's article, "The Myth of Academic Freedom: Personal Experiences of a Liberal Principle in the Neoconservative Era," free in the journal Social Text.