Duke University Press Log

Classic Book Explains Cricket to Mystified Americans

Cricket has been in the international news lately because of a game-fixing scandal featuring the Pakistani team. Three Pakistani players have been suspended from the team for participating in an illegal betting scheme. International Olympic Committe president Jacques Rogge said yesterday that he believes illegal betting is a worldwide problem for sport, of similar magnitude to recent doping scandals. While British and South Asian cricket fans follow the scandal eagerly, many Americans are completely mystified by the sport of cricket. Those who want to understand it better should turn to the classic work on the sport by C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary. Reviewing the book when it first came out in the U.S. in 1983, the Utne Reader said, "If you want to look deeper into cricket’s intriguing history, check out Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James. First published in 1963, this modern cricket classic is both a tribute to the game that James grew up playing in his native Trinidad and a memoir of his years in England as a radical writer leading the crusade for West Indian independence." Nearly sixty years after it was first published, the book still resonates.

Pedro Lasch Exhibit Opens in London

Artist Pedro Lasch has an exhibit at Goldsmiths College in London this week. Lasch shows paintings inspired by the ten year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, featuring the Twin Towers rebuilt identically in ten sites around the world. The installation is called "Phantom Limbs" and will be on view from today through Monday, July 12.

This fall Duke University Press will be publishing Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, the culmination of a three-part project by Lasch that encompasses a museum installation at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, photographs of the installation, and this bilingual book. For the installation, Lasch placed black rectangular mirrors on the walls, each with an image of a Spanish Renaissance painting behind it. Pre-Columbian stone and ceramic figures, chosen by Lasch from the museum’s permanent collection of Meso-American art, stood on pedestals facing toward each mirror and away from visitors entering the room. Viewers were drawn into a meditation on colonialism and spectatorship when, on looking into the black mirrors, they saw the pre-Columbian figures, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Spanish priests and conquistadores, themselves, and the contemporary gallery environment.

Lasch also has a piece currently on display at MoMA PS1 entitled "An Atlas of Radial Cartography."

Public Space and the Legacy of Racism in Johannesburg

Today's New York Times has an interesting article about the difficulties getting a bus system set up in Johannesburg. Much of the city's poorer black population lives in the outer suburbs of the sprawling metropolis and for decades has had to rely on private minibus taxis to get them to jobs in the city center and wealthy close-in neighborhoods. The 2010 World Cup was supposed to finally bring reliable bus service from Soweto to Sandton, but lingering racism and "not in my backyard" activism by wealthy suburbanites has complicated things. The article mentions a number of geographical curiosities about Johannesburg, such as how a wasteland of mine dumps, factories, and vacant land still separates black from white neighborhoods. Duke Press recently published Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, a collection of essays about the teeming megacity and this coming fall we'll publish a new book that specifically addresses how the lingering effects of Apartheid continue to shape the city's geography. Look for City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg by Martin J. Murray next December. And for more general background on the spread of megacities in the Global South, check out the collection edited by Andreas Huyssen, Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age and AbdouMaliq Simone's For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities.

Kauanui on the Akaka Bill

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity, has long been an activist on behalf of Hawaiian sovereignty. She has written extensively on the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, better known as the Akaka bill. The bill was first introduced by Senator Daniel Akaka in 2000 and an amended version recently passed through committee in the House. In this editorial in Indian Country Today, Kauanui talks about some of the important changes in the new version of the bill.

Washington Post Blog Reviews The Making of a Human Bomb

The Washington Post reviews Nasser Abufarha's new book The Making of a Human Bomb in their "Short Stack" blog today. Reviewer Steven A. Levingston says that Abufarha's "research is extensive and his thesis powerful." But the book may be controversial, he writes. "Abufarha has roiled sensitivities in the past. He was reported to have praised the activities of Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." When asked to comment, Abufarha said, "I do not praise violence. To the contrary, I am engaged in research and other forms of political participation towards presenting alternatives to violence." He added, however: "I do not condemn the Palestinian resistance." He said people tend to be obsessed with the violence of the Palestinian groups, overlooking their efforts at political and cultural resistance. "I see that violence may be the ultimate but rarely the only form of engagement for these groups."

Go Wins Mary Douglas Prize

Duke Press is pleased to announce that Julian Go has won the 2009 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book from the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association for his book, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism. Congratulations, Julian!

Birla in Times Higher Education Supplement

Ritu Birla's Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India was cited, in the June 4 "What are you reading?" section of the Times Higher Education Supplement, as a book that scholar-reviewers are reading right now. John Chalcraft writes that Birla's book is "important for putting together non-Western capitalism and postcolonial studies."

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.

Understanding Post-Apartheid South Africa

Today's New York Times has an article on the malaise affecting post-Apartheid South Africa. More citizens are emigrating as crime, political corruption, and economic woes spiral out of control. For another perspective on today's South Africa, check out Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, a collection of essays that explore Africa's largest metropolis. Ackbar Abbas, professor of comparative literature at Hong Kong University and author of Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance, says the essays "offer radically new ways of thinking about this complex city." The book, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, is just out this week.

Sarkozy’s Mediterranean Union? A Guest Post by Iain Chambers

A Mediterranean Union—but on whose terms? Once again, there is a proposal of incorporation from the very country—France—that inaugurated modern colonialism in the Mediterranean. From Napoleon’s seizure of Egypt in 1798-9 to the independence of Algiers in 1962, one can trace the  whole arc of modern European colonialism as a cultural, historical and political mission. (The foundation of the state of Israel perhaps also needs to be considered as a contorted part of this history.) The real question is whether Europe can reposition itself in the Mediterranean through acknowledging not only an increasing migration of labor inscribed in foodstuffs and goods northwards across its waters, but also in the migration of cultures, histories and peoples. Of course, these histories, although invariably denied and repressed, are already deeply embedded in the making of  modern Europe: Islam since the eighth century; Arab, Jewish and Roma cultures disseminated in European musics, literatures and cuisine; the Turks since the fourteenth century (the Ottoman Empire was once the "sick man of Europe"). A Union based on these terms, rather than in merely the "freedom of the market" and the benevolence that accompanies assumptions of European cultural superiority, would require a profound re-thinking of Europe itself.

Iain Chambers is the author of Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. For more on the new Mediterranean Union, see this New York Times story or this piece from NPR.