Duke University Press Log

Fred Wesley Jr. Has a New Gig

Fred Wesley Jr.,  legendary funk, soul, and jazz trombonist, has a new, unlikely gig: klezmer artist. Wesley has joined Abraham, Inc., a collaboration between classical and klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer and DJ Socalled. The band was featured on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday. Krakauer calls the band, which also includes rapper C-Rayz Walz, jazz guitarist Cheryl Bailey, and bassist Jerome Harris,"a mash-up." Wesley was nervous when he first began playing klezmer because its Eastern modal scales are so different from what he usually plays. But he soon realized they had plenty in common. "It was a funky beat and I recognized [it]," Wesley said. To learn more about Wesley and his extraordinary career playing with James Brown, Parliament-Funkadelic, and the Count Basie Orchestra, read his autobiography, Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman.

Duke Press at Book Expo America

Book Expo America, the U.S. publishing industry's largest trade show, begins today in New York City with panels and speeches. The exhibit hall opens tomorrow. Duke Press will be there promoting our Fall 2010 titles. We'll be giving away lots of copies of Amitava Kumar's new novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing, the story of two cousins whose lives intertwine in the busy, complex world of modern India. Other advance reading copies we'll have on hand include Kumar's nonfiction book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (recently given a starred review in Publishers Weekly); jazz great Randy Weston's autobiography, African Rhythms; performance artist Suzanne Lacy's Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007; a collection of plays by Black Arts Movement great Sonia Sanchez entitled "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't" and Other Plays; Judith Armatta's definitive account of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, Twilight of Impunity; an ethnography of human pharmaceutical test subjects called The Professional Guinea Pig by Roberto Abadie; and a fun look at women and global surfing culture, Surfer Girls in the New World Order by Krista Comer.

If you're attending BEA, please stop by our booth, #3727 and pick up some great books and a cool tote bag to put them in. If you won't be there, stay tuned to our Facebook page and Twitter feed for some giveaways this week!

Enda Duffy on Rorotoko

Today Rorotoko features an interview with Enda Duffy, author of The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Duffy argues "that many of the radical new forms of modernist high culture, and even more the original formats being pioneered by the new mass media, were developed to represent speed’s thrills." His book looks at the fascination with speed in both high art and popular culture in the early twentieth century.  Duffy also wants to understand human energy, such as the representation of adrenaline: "Just as there is a history of slowness as well as a history of speed, a history of human energy too remains to be written. The turn of the century moment that saw the isolation and description of the role of adrenaline is a key transformative moment in that history." He hopes his book will be a contribution to the field of biopolitics as well as to literary and cultural studies.

Fall 2010 Catalog Available for Download

Check out all our great forthcoming Fall 2010 titles by downloading our catalog at our home page now! The cover is an image from Suzanne Lacy's Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007.

Artforum Interviews Mira Schor

Mira Schor, author of A Decade of Negative Thinking and Wet, is interviewed on Artforum.com this week. She talks about her new blog, a counterpart to her book called A Year of Positive Thinking. "There are so many things that I love in art, film, art history, and political history, which help me to be an artist; I really want to share that part of my experience," she says. Blogging comes naturally to Schor, both because she has been an "inveterate self-documenter" since childhood and because she loves to write. "I can’t imagine not writing––it would be like not thinking or speaking," she says.

Daniel Widener Profiled in San Diego Union-Tribune

Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles, was profiled in yesterday's San Diego Union-Tribune. Widener is a professor of history at University of California, San Diego. Widener tells reporter Robert L. Pincus, "This topic also came out of my life." Widener grew up in Los Angeles's Echo Park.  Pincus writes that Widener's "parents’ lives intersected with those of black artists like Alonzo Davis, whose career is chronicled in the book. They frequented one of the pivotal showcases for black artists, Brockman Gallery, which Davis ran along with his brother, Dale Davis." The article also discusses Widener's interest in his current home of San Diego. “I think it’s pretty extraordinary what is happening here,” observes Widener. “This is a city on its way to becoming something else. It’s changing demographically. But I don’t think anyone has a handle yet on what it will be like in the future.”

Bob White wins Joel Gregory Prize

Congratulations to Bob W. White, author of Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu's Zaire, for winning the 2010 Joel Gregory Prize. The Joel Gregory Prize is awarded by the Canadian Association of African Studies to the best book published in African Studies in the social sciences and humanities, written by a Canadian, a landed immigrant, or an African who has completed a Ph.D. program in Canada or has worked in a Canadian organization devoted to the promotion of knowledge of Africa. The award was announced at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of African Studies on May 5th.

In Rumba Rules, the first ethnography of popular music in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bob W. White examines not only the economic and political conditions that brought this powerful music industry to its knees, but also the ways that popular musicians sought to remain socially relevant in a time of increasing insecurity.

Alpa Shah on BBC

Alpa Shah, author of the forthcoming book In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India, will present a documentary about Jharkand on the BBC show Crossing Continents on Thursday, May 6. You can listen online, and meanwhile check out this report on the Maoist insurgency by Shah. Shah has been visiting Jharkand since its inception as a state in 2000, interviewing people and following the conflict. Her book argues that well-meaning indigenous rights and development claims and interventions may misrepresent and hurt the very people they seek to help.

Publishers Weekly Gives Starred Review to New Kumar Book

Publishers Weekly has given a Starred Review to Amitava Kumar's forthcoming book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. The reviewer writes that "Kumar’s searching and humane account of the global consequences of the U.S. 'war on terror' gets behind the rhetoric and state public relations campaigns in a brisk but thoughtful narrative." The reviewer concludes: "An arresting and heartrending work of public protest and valuable social analysis, this work contributes forcefully to a subtle, human-scaled accounting of 21st-century geopolitics." The book will be available in August, along with Kumar's first novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing. Check out Kumar's website or follow him on Twitter.

The Unknown History of the Birth Control Pill

May 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the FDA's approval of the birth control pill. Time Magazine did a long story on the development of the pill and its integration into American society. But they left out a fascinating and mostly unknown part of the story. In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco, a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. The development of the Pill led to increased demand for the yams, and to thus to increased opportunities for the Mexican farmers who cultivated and harvested them. In her new book Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill, Gabriela Soto Laveaga reconstructs the story of how rural yam pickers, international pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican state collaborated and collided over the barbasco. By so doing, she sheds important light on a crucial period in Mexican history and challenges us to reconsider who can produce science. In a review of the book on Feminist Review this weekend, Maya N. Vaughan-Smith says Jungle Laboratories is "an engaging read for women who are curious about the political economy of the pills they are popping on a daily basis."