Duke University Press Log

Guest Post: Evan Watkins on Academic Freedom

Evan Watkins, special issue editor of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly 108:4, “Academic Freedom,” discusses the new issue and academic freedom.

When Grant Farred first approached me about a special issue of SAQ on academic freedom, we were both very concerned about all the recent instances where faculty had been harassed, intimidated, sued, and often fired as a direct result of their political statements. Like other editors and contributors to special issues on the subject (e.g., Social Text and Works and Days), we felt the current political situation had led to a dramatic increase in these instances while at the same time academic freedom protections were being eroded generally. As our discussions progressed we determined to keep the immediate political circumstances of individual faculty at the central core of the issue, as we have with the essays from Norman Finkelstein, Eric Cheyfitz, who has been centrally involved in the Ward Churchill case, and Cary Nelson, who as AAUP president has a remarkable knowledge across the spectrum of community colleges, colleges, and universities.

Nka Roundtable: Richards' Response to Enwezor

If I may respond quickly to Okwui's points about South Africa.  This may be too particular and sectional, but here goes.

There is much to support in what I read as a debate about South Africa's 'exceptionalism' in almost any terms.  Idealisation of the 'miracle' that allegedly happened here - indeed the very language of the 'miracle' - has not helped us much. It has obscured some intractably painful facts of history which are still playing out with a vengeance.  The gap between the heady, even utopian promise of 1994 and the reality of (now) 2009 is alarming.  An ongoing sense of struggle and crisis conditions much of my experience certainly,  and I hope this has been clearer in what I have tried to contribute here than any sense of hubris or business finished of any kind.  It is also alarming to try and reconcile my instincts and more public disposition with Okwui's comments about the sub-human.  I cannot but support Okwui's parenthetical injunction here, but do not know how we got to that point.  But perhaps that's a function of trying to communicate in this way.  Too general, tone is difficult to assess etc. 

Nka Roundtable: dele jegede

Having read Chika’s response to Okwui on the location of the scholarship of African art, I ask that we not lose sight of the context within which this scholarship is produced. Those of us from Africa who are privileged to exercise our creative and intellectual rights in the West today thrive because of the opportunities that exist and the access that we have. It does not take a genius to realize that a high percentage of African scholars who are resident in Europe or the United States, and whose work can be regarded as critical, benefit from a context that is at once rigorous and challenging, but a context that rewards innovation, foresight, and excellence. This is the core ingredient that Chika probably misreads as sophistication.

Nka Roundtable: Chika Okeke-Agulu

Let me clarify what I meant by quality--since Ikem responded to my invoking quality in my leading comment/question--because I believe that the reason the work of our continental colleagues is not getting "air time," is not because we (and I mean people at the roundtable as well as our colleagues in the west) have no access to it, but because we don't see them as "sophisticated" enough, except in the case or scholars like Frank who lives in Nigeria (and I don't say this because he is on the panel; rather, it is because of the quality of his work that he is here).

Nka Roundtable: Okwui Enwezor

I have had the opportunity to chew over Chika’s question and the various responses it elicited from. About the question of African art scholarship being in exile, I beg to differ, I see it as being at home in the world. Contrary to what Susan says about the discomfort Chika’s query may have generated I think it is an all too familiar scenario across the entire continent, not just for art history, but in every discipline. So of course, it matters that a great deal of the scholarship being produced in our field (at least the visible ones) are produced outside of the continent.

Nka Roundtable: John Peffer

Susan is right and so is John Picton, in stating the naked truth. And I support and cheer their interventions. Personally I can say my silence is more a product of the first month at a new teaching gig and the mountain of work I owe my students (sorry folks, they come first!) than of being stunned by harsh but real revelations. I should say, along that line, that Colin's and Frank Ugiomoh's earlier posts regarding the desperate situation in the academy in Africa--though we Americans are in a position of relative luxury--sounded all too familiar. It is as if some intimation of third worldism is now, too, edging into American higher education (the arbitrary cuts, the creeping instrumentalization/if not outright commercialization of even the liberal arts, the rationalization/quantification of teaching...). Are even we "lucky" scholars headed down that "African" road?

Nka Roundtable: Colin Richards' Response to Susan Vogel

Is it because this discomfiting question is about us? Not about a somewhat abstract field, but a question about the very members of this roundtable and how our own professional identities bear upon our chosen subject. Chika’s broad framing, “does it matter that the scholarship . . . is resident outside the continent?” deserves an answer beyond the implied – yes it matters. He invites us to address the causes of this situation – tellingly described by Colin Richardson and Jessica Winegar – but he ends with the essence of the question: how it relates directly to the value of our work, and to the nature of its audiences.

-My experience of this is a little schizoid – not always comfortable. Another way – tamer – is to keep bifocal or polyfocal, keeping different constituencies in mind when I write or otherwise act.  There are tensions in doing this, as these constituencies (home and away) are so fraught.  This said, I believe these tensions can be extremely positive – they reflect living tensions within Africa itself, and between ‘Africa’ and its comrades writing in different circumstances. Positive not just in a weak sense, but they give a real edge and depth to scholarship here I often find rather lacking in a lot of what I read on contemporary art, with some exceptions. Does this make sense?   

Robert Frank Retrospective Opens at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A fiftieth-anniversary exhibition of Robert Frank's celebrated The Americans opened this week at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reviewing the exhibition in the New York Times, Holland Cotter finds it still relevant today. "In the nominally post-racial Obama era, its political urgencies feel less immediate than they once did, but also prophetic. Its mournful tenderness, without being sentimental, seems deeper than ever." Robert Frank served as the judge for the third annual Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. He chose Danny Wilcox Frazier as the winner and Duke Press was proud to publish Driftless: Photographs from Iowa in conjunction with CDS Books. Robert Frank wrote a foreword for the book, praising Frazier's "passionate photographs without sentimentality. His work reaches out: let me tell your story, it is important. Frazier’s work will survive—his book will be the foundation for more to come. . . ."

Duffy's The Speed Handbook Reviewed in Times Higher

The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism by Enda Duffy is reviewed in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Reviewer Howard P. Segal calls the book "brilliant" and praises it for being accessible to general readers. He especially likes that "Duffy implicitly refutes the claims of contemporary high-tech inventors and promoters that the pace of change since the 1980s is unprecedented and that Americans, among others, had previously led comparatively slow-paced lives." "Duffy respects and reads the past in its own complex terms," he writes.

Paredez Event in Austin, TX

If you are going to be in the Austin area tomorrow night, make sure to check out Deborah Paredez's event for her new book, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. The reading will be tomorrow night (9/25) at 7pm at BookWoman. Please visit BookWoman's website for more details.