Duke University Press Log

Newitz Lodges Complaint Against Worst Movie Ever Made

Via BoingBoing, we learn that Annalee Newitz, author of Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, has lodged a formal (tongue-in-cheek) complaint against the film The Mutant Chronicles which she says "is quite possibly the worst movie ever made, and therefore should be subject to an injunction preventing it from being watched by anyone, for any reason." In her hilarious blog posting, she lays out the case against the "defendant," and outlines the injuries she suffered while watching the terrible film.

Sernett Comments on Clinton Use of Tubman Quote

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening, Hillary Clinton quoted Harriet Tubman as saying, "If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going." But, as Milton C. Sernett, author of Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, says in the New York Times, there's no evidence that Tubman actually said these words. Because Tubman was illiterate, Sernett says, "we have mediated histories of her — stories always told by others — that leave it open to a great deal of interpretation and reinterpretation by each generation as they search for a usable Harriet Tubman.” Sernett has been asked to weigh in on a dubious Tubman quote before during this campaign. Back in February, Robin Morgan quoted Tubman in her defense of Hillary Clinton, "Goodbye to All That (#2), and Sernett suggested that Morgan should be more careful in her citation. In the case of Clinton's speech, however, Sernett is more open: "Senator Clinton was not on the podium there as a historian. She was there as a symbol in her own right. I thought there was a refrain throughout her speech that was more feminist than some of her other speeches. Given the audience and the moment, it was an appropriate citation."

Kelty in Times Higher Education Supplement

Christopher M. Kelty's Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software is the "Book of the Week" in the Times Higher Education Supplement. John Gilbey writes, "Just occasionally, you come across a book that reflects part of your own life and experience in a way that makes you stop and say: 'Yes, that is the way I remember it happening.' This is one such book." He concludes, "This is a very significant book that succeeds in capturing the essence of a period of huge change in the way we look at intellectual property and commons. The word revolution is overused, but I'd suggest that it might be appropriate to apply it in this instance. More than this, Kelty's solidly focused text offers an effective roadmap for the deeply convoluted raw material that defines this period - providing a detailed, and well crafted, reference for future investigators."
An interview with Kelty is also posted over at Geert Lovink's Net Critique blog.

Examining the Role of Bananas in Central American Politics

Food and the politics of food were central on Bob Edwards Weekend. Last week's broadcast included an interview with Peter Chapman, author of Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. Steve Striffler offers an ethnographic exploration of the United Fruit Company in Central America in his work In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995. Striffler tells the story of how Ecuadorian peasants gained, and then lost, control of the banana industry. Striffler is also the co-editor, with Mark Moberg, of Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Banana Wars reveals how the banana industry marshaled workers of differing nationalities, ethnicities, and languages and, in doing so, created unprecedented potential for conflict throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Pam Spaulding off to Denver

Wish Duke Press's IT Manager, Pam Spaulding, luck as she heads for Denver to cover the Democratic National Convention for her blog, Pam's House Blend. Pam is featured in the New York Times today.

Cubans Go For Gold

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Cuban baseball team is in familiar territory—playing for gold. The longstanding success of Cuban baseball is intertwined with what it means to be Cuban. Thomas F. Carter explores the interconnection between baseball and Cuban identity in his forthcoming book The Quality of Home Runs: The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball. Carter's lively ethnography suggests that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad and points out the aspects of baseball that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, or returning home.
Newly available is Adrian H. Hearn's Cuba: Religion, Social Capital, and Development. Hearn provides a detailed, on-the-ground analysis of how the Cuban state and local religious groups collaborate on community-development projects and how they work with the many foreign development agencies in Cuba.

Tibetan Literature

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that online access to iTunes in China was blocked after it was revealed that Olympic athletes downloaded songs from the compilation Songs for Tibet, as the recording's producer, The Art of Peace Foundation, had urged them to do. The compilation, featuring 20 international recording stars, was created to support                                 Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

Duke University Press offers a different kind of Tibet-related compilation: Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, the first detailed English-language overview of contemporary Tibetan literature.

Duke Authors Garner Major Awards

Two Duke University Press authors have recently received prestigious awards from their peers. Fred R. Myers, author of Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, has received the 2008 J. I. Staley Prize. The Staley Prize is awarded annually by the School of Advanced Research to a living author in honor of a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship in anthropology.
Margo Machida, author of the forthcoming Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary is the recipient of the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. The award presentation will take place in February 2009 at the conference in Los Angeles, CA.

Making Sense of Uganda's Civil War

Called Seeds of Peace, a multimedia feature on the Washington Post's web site provides extensive information about the civil war that has ravaged northern Uganda for more than twenty years.

In Living with Bad Surroundings, the ethnographer Sverker Finnstrom offers an in-depth look into how northern Uganda's Acholi people, who live in the middle of the                             brutal conflict, make sense of it.

California Ruling: Docs Can't Discriminate against Gays and Lesbians

Yesterday the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that doctors in California cannot discriminate against gays and lesbians, whether or not the treatment sought conflicts with the doctors' religious beliefs.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit against a fertility doctor who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian patient. A recent Duke University Press book, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience, analyzes issues surrounding the intense medicalization of the reproduction process for lesbians, who become fertility patients not (or not only) because of their physical conditions but because of their sexual identities.