Duke University Press Log

San Francisco Bay Guardian Reviews Slaves to Fashion, Glave in Out 100

Two nice bits of news today. First, Monica Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity is reviewed in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Reviewer D. Scott Miller says he will now "direct all queries" regarding black dandies to Miller's book, which demonstrates "uncanny feats of scholarship that illustrate ways in which the figure of the black dandy has been an elephant-in-the-room — albeit a particualrly well-dressed one."

We were also pleased to learn that Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, and quite a sharp-dressed man himself, was named one of Out Magazine's Out 100. Glave is praised for his short story collection, The Torturer's Wife, but it should be noted that he won his Lambda Literary Award for Our Caribbean!

Jayna Brown Wins ASTR Award

Jayna Brown, author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, has just been announced as the winner of the American Society for Theatre Research's Errol Hill Award for 2009. Congratulations, Jayna!

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?"

Samuel Charters Shares a Playlist with New York Times

Samuel Charters, author of A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora, and countless other books about music, writes a playlist for the New York Times Papercuts blog today. It's called "Living with Music: Some Songs I Wrote About, and Some Others I Haven't Gotten Around to Writing About Yet." Charters shares some of his favorite blues, rock, and gospel songs on the list.

Jayna Brown Wins TLA Award

Jayna Brown, author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, has just been announced as the winner of the Theatre Library Association's George Freedly Memorial Award. The George Freedley Memorial Award honors excellence in writing on theatre during 2008. The Freedley Award is named for George Freedley, the first Curator of the New York Public Library's Theatre Collection, and first President of the Theatre Library Association. According to the press release from the Theatre Library Association, "Professor Brown's book is a groundbreaking study of African-American women performing in cabaret acts, chorus lines and burlesque revues between 1890 and 1945."

Congratulations, Jayna!

Monica Miller's Slaves to Fashion Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Monica Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity is reviewed in Publishers Weekly. The reviewer calls the book, a cultural history of the black dandy, "a stimulating study of the social meaning of fashion in the black community," and concludes that Miller "offers an incisive, nuanced analysis of a rich vein of cultural history." The book will be available in November.

Image: Ikè Udè, 'Self Portrait' from Uses of Evidence (1996). Courtesy of the artist.

Wacquant Interviewed in Chronicle Review

Karen J. Winkler interviews sociologist Loïc Wacquant in this week's Chronicle Review. Wacquant's new book Punishing the Poor explains how over the past two decades neoliberal societies have sought to control the poor through a combination of penal sanction and welfare supervision. In the interview, Wacquant talks about "prisonfare," the role of the neoliberal state in regulation of the lower classes, and why scholars of criminal justice and scholars of welfare ignore each other.

Willmington Star News Reviews Bricks Without Straw

"Duke University Press has performed a public service by releasing, in an inexpensive ($23.95) paperback edition, a North Carolina classic," writes Ben Steelman in his Willimgton Star News review of Bricks Without Straw, the novel of Reconstruction by North Carolina judge Albion W. Tourgée. Steelman writes about how Tourgée countered other contemporary accounts of Reconstruction, rejecting "Southern charges that it was marked by corruption and incompetence (at least, any more corruption and incompetence than the governments its followed and preceded). Rather, he shows how black efforts at self-determination were sabotaged by Klan violence, once the protective umbrella of federal occupation was removed."

Charters on WPR's "Here on Earth"

Samuel Charters was interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio's "Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders" program on May 28, 2009. Listen to the interview here. Samuel Charters, one of the very first musicologists to study Afro-American music, has summed up his life's work in A Language of Song, which details his journey to Africa and to find Africa-influenced music in the United States, Brazil, and the Carribean.

Celebrating John Hope Franklin

A celebration honoring the lives of John Hope and Aurelia Whittington Franklin is taking place on Duke University's campus today. President Bill Clinton will be among the speakers honoring the Franklins. John Hope Franklin, a Duke University Press author and beneficiary of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, passed away on March 25, 2009.