Duke University Press Log

Dan Cook in Philadelphia Daily News

Dan Cook, author of The Commodification of Childhood, is interviewed in the Philadelphia Daily News about young girls' affinity for princess culture.  "The question comes down to, What is the ultimate harm?" Cook says. "Does it lead to a particular view of femininity? At what point does it get to be too much?" Cook will be speaking on princess culture Thursday, January 31 at 7:30 at the Barnes and Noble in Marlton, New Jersey.

LA Times on Chilean Indigenous Activists

The Los Angeles Times features an article on the hunger strike of Patricia Troncoso, a Chilean activist trying to call attention to the plight of the Mapuche, an indigenous community which is largely landless, disenfranchised and the victim of police repression. For background on the Mapuche and their struggles, readers can turn to two Duke University Press books: Florencia Mallon's Courage Tastes of Blood, which gives the history of one Mapuche community across the twentieth century; and Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef's memoir When A Flower is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Femnist. A leading activist during the Pinochet dictatorship, Reuque Paillalef collaborated with the government in the creation of the Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) and the passage of the Indigenous Law of 1993.

Weisbard Reviewed in Bookforum

Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music edited by Eric Weisbard is reviewed in the new issue of Bookforum. Reviewer Geeta Dayal writes, "Listen Again has the guiding vision and rigorous analysis that so much current journalistic and scholarly writing on popular music lacks. . . . The eclecticism on display here isn’t distracting; the book benefits by drawing on many perspectives. Instead of reading as a throwback to music criticism’s glory days, Listen Again maps a future for the field."

The Enduring Legacy of Américo Paredes

Scott McLemee's column in Inside Higher Ed today features Ramón Saldívar, who won an award at the recent MLA conference for his book The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Paredes's landmark book With a Pistol In His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero.  McLemee reports that "although the book did not reach a wide audience at first, it did come to the attention of the Texas Rangers, who were not pleased. At least one Ranger expressed an interest in revising the historical record by shooting Paredes. Evidently he thought the better of this idea." McLemee recorded an interview with Saldívar which is available as a podcast,which "offers a good introduction to Paredes’s own life and work, and expresses some of Saldívar’s deep engagement with them."

Confronting the History of the Slave Trade

Yesterday's LA Times features an Op-Ed by Marcus Rediker about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech calling for atonement for the slave trade. Most accounts of the slave trade focus on the role of the English and the Americans, but in fact the French transported and enslaved four times as many Africans as the Americans did. Christopher Miller argues that the French have not yet come to terms with their role in the brutal trade in his new book The French Atlantic Triangle, which is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. It was only in 2006 that the French government formally acknowledged its responsibility for the slave trade, which was not abolished there until 1831.

Pecknold on The State of Things

Diane Pecknold, author of The Selling Sound, appeared on WUNC's The State of Things to discuss the rise of the country music industry.

Gonzalez-Day on Weekend America

Ken Gonzalez-Day will be on the radio show Weekend America tomorrow. Check your local listings. He'll be talking about his book Lynching in the West and his photographs of lynching trees.

Steven Kaplan on The Splendid Table

Steven Laurence Kaplan, author of Good Bread is Back, appeared on NPR's The Splendid Table with Lynn Rosetto Kasper yesterday.

Should Authors Cross Picket Lines?

Publishers Weekly has an interesting piece on whether authors will cross the Writers Guild of America picket lines to make appearances on Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The reporter actually called me to see if we'd had any authors booked recently. Alas, neither show has ever called us despite my attempts with some of our general interest titles. The two shows have emerged in the past year or so as one of the most important venues for serious nonfiction authors. University press authors seldom have any other shot at a television appearance and the "fake news" shows can introduce them to a wider, younger audience than print reviews in places like The New York Review of Books.
So my first reaction as a publicist would be to tell any author who was asked to be on one of the shows, "Go, do it! You have to!" But I wouldn't be surprised if many of our authors might balk. One unnamed university press publicist in the PW story says, "People are concerned. They don’t want to be seen as strikebreakers, crossing the picket line. After all, they’re professional writers, too. But, then, it’s every writer’s dream to appear on Colbert or The Daily Show. People aren’t sure what to do." Right now I'll just cross my fingers that we here at Duke Press even get a chance to decide whether to break the strike or not.

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, 1963-2007

We were saddened to learn of the death of Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, author of the forthcoming book On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism. Eze, Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, passed away December 30, 2007 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. A memorial service for Professor Eze will be held at DePaul on January 24.