Duke University Press Log

40th Anniversary of Our Bodies, Ourselves

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the landmark book Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Collective. In celebration, they are hosting a symposium on Saturday, October 1 and launching the ninth edition of the iconic text. USA Today's Anita Manning says the book "not only challenged the medical establishment and its assumptions about women, it also encouraged women to explore their own bodies and provided, in unexpurgated terms, information about sexuality and reproduction that went far beyond the birds and bees." Kathy Davis, senior researcher at the Institute of History and Culture at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, calls attention to the global reach of Our Bodies, Ourselves in her book The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders. Our Bodies, Ourselves has a global reach, with more than 30 foreign language editions in circulation. But the American edition was not simply translated, Davis explains. Rather, careful consideration by local groups was given to adapting the book to each culture while retaining the empowering feminist message. Davis will be attending the symposium and moderating a panel about Our Bodies, Ourselves's global partners. Check out the symposium if you're in Boston, and read the book to learn more about this important global feminist project.

American Literature Essay Wins 2010 Walker Prize

Congratulations to Chadwick Allen who has been awarded the 2010 Don D. Walker Award from the Western Literature Association for the year's best essay in western American literary and cultural study for his essay,  “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run.” Prize committee members wrote of the essay:

“I find the piece simply spectacular, and so novel in the field of literary studies generally for its interests in mathematics, astronomy, and science of any kind… Chad Allen is well known as a deft close reader, but here he takes this skill to an exponentially new level.”

“ [H]is reading of Blood Run is brilliant in its illumination of how Hedge Coke’s mathematically precise form aligns with her argument about the importance of the mounds as both presence and trace. I really think he hits it out of the ballpark here by showing the ties between mathematics, science, Indigenous technologies, and literature.”

The essay appeared in volume 82:4 (December 2010) of American Literature, and is available for free here. 

Read More About Prohibition in California

Ken Burns's new documentary Prohibition airs this weekend on most PBS stations. Most accounts of Prohibition focus on the East Coast and Chicago, and few tell about how Mexico was affected. After you watch the documentary, consider deepening your knowledge of the era by reading Paul S. Vanderwood's Satan's Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America’s Greatest Gaming Resort. Vanderwood tells the story of the Tijuana resort Agua Caliente, which developed in response to Prohibition in the U.S. Diplomats, royalty, film stars, sports celebrities, politicians, patricians, and nouveau-riche capitalists flocked to Agua Caliente’s luxurious complex of casinos, hotels, cabarets, and sports extravaganzas, and to its world-renowned thoroughbred racetrack. Although Agua Caliente went into decline after World War II and the ending of Prohibition, it was the inspiration for Las Vegas.

Listen to Kristen Ghodsee Read from Lost in Transition

Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism tells of ordinary lives upended by the collapse of communism. Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences with Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. One chapter of the book, a short story called "Tito Trivia," has won the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's 2011 Ethnographic Fiction Award. In the podcast below, Ghodsee reads another chapter of her book, "Comrades, 2000," in which she recounts interviewing a young Muslim woman about her memories of how the end of communism changed how she addressed her teacher at school.   

Ghodsee Podcast

Writing Culture at 25 Conference This Weekend

We're excited for this weekend's conference Writing Culture at 25: Theory/Ethnography/Fieldwork. It's hosted by Duke's Department of Cultural Anthropology and the journal Cultural Anthropology. The conference commemorates the 1986 publication of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography edited by George Marcus and James Clifford. Although Duke University Press didn't publish that seminal volume, its influence on anthropology, and thus on our own books, cannot be underestimated. A number of Duke Press authors and friends of the Press will be presenting and attending, including Orin Starn, author of the forthcoming book The Passion of Tiger Woods and co-editor of our Latin America Readers series; and Lee Baker, author of Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture. The conference is free and open to the public, so check it out!

Christine Yano on the Premiere of "Pan Am"

ABC-TV’s new series Pan Am is generating a high level of buzz.  Entertainment shows preceding the premiere featured not only clips of the show, but also interviews with former stewardesses, infamous author Donald Bain (Coffee, Tea, or Me), and others from the generation characterized as the “swinging 60s.”  What these previews suggest is an amalgamated, nostalgized view of an era when – as they say – people knew how to dress, knew how to travel, knew how to treat the service providers.  Many Americans of a certain age can sympathize with the source of the nostalgia, given the demeaning experience that commercial air travel has become these days.  However, this is nostalgia for specific class and race experiences that many could not share. The nostalgia of Pan Am positions the 1950s and 1960s as an era of domestic “innocence” – when women could still be women and men could still be men.  This is painted as an era when lines and lives were more clearly drawn, etching in gender roles as clearly as racial roles.

The innocence does not extend to the international scene.  Pan Am situates itself within the Cold War era of espionage, political intrigue, and the airline’s (and some of its personnel’s) role within these.  What the show does not depict are the incipient seeds of domestic social change.  With black-white race relations simmering not far from the surface, with ethnic revitalization movements waiting in the wings, with feminist movements just underway, the “swinging 60s” of Pan Am skirts the deep national contradictions of the era.  Here were working women in that very modern of industries that relied upon them playing traditional hostess roles, even while traveling the world.  This included women of Asian ancestry who I wrote about in my book Airborne Dreams.  While stewardesses were getting their hair coiffed and girdles checked, other women were beginning to reject those very bodily accoutrements as symbols of patriarchal control.  Indeed, the so-called swinging era was riddled with numerous contradictions and ironies if we take off the spectacles of nostalgia.

I was fortunate enough to watch the premiere of ABC-TV’s Pan Am with a group of people (147 strong) whose ties to the era and this television show are extra special – the Pan Am Association - Aloha Chapter in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Gathered at the Hawaii Yacht Club for the occasion (some in uniform!), they relished those spectacles of nostalgia affording them yet one more occasion to shout out, “Pan Am lives!” “Gone but not forgotten!”  They scrutinized ABC-TV’s show for inaccuracies (color of uniform, length of stewardess’s hair, use of a Jetway during that period).  They cheered at depictions of bygone icons – the Pan Am building in New York with its rooftop helipad, even the pilfering of fancy food and drink in First Class by stewardesses (one overheard comment: “Now it’s getting real!”).  Pan Am reassures them all that at least for one television season on Sunday nights, their display of loyalty to the airline of a past era – “the best years of their lives!” – may be shared by viewers nationwide.

Tiya Miles Wins MacArthur Award

We offer a huge congratulations to University of Michigan history professor Tiya Miles, who has won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Miles is a public historian whose research is on the relationships between African Americans and Cherokee peoples in colonial America. Miles is co-editor, with Sharon Holland, of our book Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. She also contributed a chapter to Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler. The MacArthur Fellows Program awards $500,000 to individuals of exceptional creativity and accomplishment. Congratulations again to Miles!

Congratulations to Our Recent Award Winners

We are pleased to announce that our authors have won several awards recently.

Tara Rodgers's Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound has won the Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music.

Karen Strassler's Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java has won the  Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. The prize rewards work "that is theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, and in the spirit of the tradition for which the SCA has been known—interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative."

Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness has won the Book Prize from the Feminist and Women's Studies Association. The prize "aims to reward ingenuity and scholarship in the fields of feminism, gender or women’s studies."

Sandra McGee Deutsch's Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1955 has won the 2011 Book Award from the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.

Jerry Dávila's Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950–1980 has won the Alfred B. Thomas Award from Southeastern Conference on Latin American Studies.

Karen Engle's The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy has won the American Political Science Association Human Rights section Best Book Award.

Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz's edited collection The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement has won the Bronze Award from the Association for Borderland Studies. The prize committee citation says, "Scholars of borders and bordering are sure to profit from the meticulous dissection of the norms and mechanisms of sovereignty, space, citizenship, and humanity to be found in these pages."

Congratulations to all our prize-winning authors!

 

Historicizing 9/11

As the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, a new issue of Radical History Review critically investigates the meanings of 9/11 by focusing on the ways in which the attacks have been historicized in numerous social and cultural spheres. “Historicizing 9/11,” published this week, probes the contested understandings of the attacks in political rhetoric, cinema, literature, visual arts, photography, public spaces, museums, archives, and education.

“Historicizing 9/11” is available online for free until the end of September. Contributors to the issue consider

• 9/11 historicizing at public memorial sites
• the archiving of oral histories and digital materials
• contributors’ experiences teaching the events of 9/11 at universities in the US and Pakistan
• US and British reactions to 9/11 and to the terrorist bombings of the London Underground
• presentations of 9/11 in the work of the novelists John Updike, Don DeLillo, and Dan Brown
• depictions of the events and their aftermath in film, comics, and graphic art, and the historical implications of images of the jumpers from the World Trade Center

The issue, edited by Jim O’Brien and Andor Skotnes, also includes two series of original works of arts that subversively reflect 9/11.

Read the issue online for free here. The print issue will be available for sale here starting September 12.

Barbara Gordon Discusses Recurrent and Late-Stage Breast Cancer

Check out our latest author interview video! Barbara L. Gordon, one of the authors of Breast Cancer Recurrence and Advanced Disease: Comprehensive Expert Guidance (2010), discusses why she was inspired to write a book on late-stage cancer and offers helpful advice to others facing this situation.

 

This comprehensive guide gathers in one place authoritative medical information about recurrent and late-stage breast cancer, and it addresses the practical, emotional, and interpersonal aspects of death and dying.