Duke University Press Log

Priscilla Wald in Bookforum

Priscilla Wald's book, Contagious:  Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative,is reviewed in the most recent issue of Bookforum.  The reviewer writes:  "Wald is at her best when probing the literary and historical roots of today’s conventions, homing in on particular moments in the past. She is superb, for instance, in recalling how an immigrant Irish cook named Mary Mallon was deemed a typhoid carrier, recast as the notorious Typhoid Mary, and banished to an island off the Bronx."

Glave Criticizes Jamaican Prime Minister at Calabash Festival

Thomas Glave was the first reader at Jamaica's Calabash literary festival last Friday. Before reading from his new book Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, Glave bravely spoke out about recent anti-gay remarks made by Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding. To loud applause, Glave said, "Mr Golding, think about how much you are not helping Jamaica the next time you decide to stand up and say that only some Jamaicans – heterosexuals, in this case – have the right to live in their country as full citizens with full human rights, while others – homosexuals – do not. That is not democracy. That is not humane leadership. That is simply the stupidity and cruelty of bigotry.” His full remarks are available at the Long Bench blog.

Joanna Frueh in Tucson Weekly

Joanna Frueh's Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert) is reviewed in the Tucson Weekly. Reviewer Jarret Keene writes, "Clairvoyance is a great place to start learning about not just 20th-century performance art, but also about one of the more intriguing and unheralded performance artists of our time."  He describes the book as a "beautiful and very pink 400-page tome that looks great on a coffee table" and compares Frueh to "a rock star."

Fiftieth Anniversary of Robert Frank's The Americans

This week's Time Magazine has an article about the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Frank's landmark documentary photography book The Americans. The book is being reissued this month. In 2007, Robert Frank served as the celebrity judge for the third Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The winner, Danny Wilcox Frazier, cites Frank as a major influence. His book, Driftless: Photographs from Iowa was published last fall to much acclaim. Frank chose Frazier for the prize because of his “passionate photographs without sentimentality. . . . his work reaches out: let me tell your story, it is important.”

McLemee on VH1's "Sex: The Revolution"

In his weekly column for Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee examines the new VH1 miniseries Sex: The Revolution and laments the lack of academics interviewed for the show. He comments that Linda Williams, editor of Porn Studies and author of the forthcoming Screening Sex, is the only academic he saw on the show, and then only for a couple of soundbites. But, he says, "That does not mean that the series lacks a coherent perspective. On the contrary, it pretty strictly follows a very streamlined version of what Foucault, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), called 'the repressive hypothesis.'"

NPR Reporter on How Buffy Kept Her Sane in Iraq

Today on Morning Edition, NPR's Jamie Tarabay talked about watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD in her hotel room while she was a reporter in Iraq. She drew parallels between Buffy's situation as lonely, misunderstood slayer and her own feelings as she went about her dangerous work. The contributors to Duke's collection of Buffy scholarship, Undead TV, all argue for the continuing relevance of Buffy in today's world.

Glave in Bay Area Reporter

Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited by Thomas Glave, is featured in the Bay Area Reporter. They're looking forward to the collection's release in June and write, "Glave has gathered little-known writers and such established figures as Reinaldo Arenas, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff and Assotto Saint, and his contributors hail from the Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent, St, Kitts, Suriname and Trinidad. An excerpt from Arenas' Before Night Falls gets the action started, and titles from pieces we're still to read do titillate, such as the poem "Saturday Night in San Juan with the Right Sailors" by Rane Arroyo,  and the story "We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" by Achy Obejas."

Brazil's Environment Minister Steps Down

Marina Silva, the Environment Minister in Brazil, has stepped down according to the BBC News.  She was a staunch defender of the Amazon rainforests and, according to the BBC, "Correspondents say Ms Silva's resignation will reinforce a perception that President Lula is more concerned with economic development than conservation."
Brazil's environmental efforts at both the state and local level are the subject of Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret E. Keck's 2007 book Greening Brazil:  Environmental Activism in State and Society.  The book challenges the claim that environmentalism came to Brazil from abroad, and retells the story of environmentalism in Brazil from the inside out, analyzing the extensive efforts within the country to save its natural environment, and the interplay of those efforts with transnational environmentalism.

David Price in The Guardian

David H. Price, author of Threatenting Anthropology and the forthcoming Anthropological Intelligence (June 2008), is mentioned in this article from the Guardian. Price is a founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which has been speaking out against the Pentagon's Human Terrain System (HTS) program, in which social scientists are deployed in the "war on terror." Last week Michael V. Bhatia, a graduate student in political science who was serving in the HTS program, was killled in Afghanistan.

Linda Williams in Chicago Tribune

Linda Williams, editor of Porn Studies, and author of the forthcoming book Screening Sex (November 2008), is quoted in a Chicago Tribune op-ed by Laura Hodes. Hodes writes about the differing treatment of male and female nudity in recent films Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Female nudity is displayed with intent to arouse the audience, while male nudity is played for a laugh, she argues. Linda Williams says, ""There is nervousness about male nudity, and what you do when you are nervous is you laugh. It is almost a permanent adolescent reaction that is built into American movies, and we haven't gotten beyond the adolescent reaction to the more adult reaction." Hodes includes further comments by Williams on her blog.