Duke University Press Log

"Archives and Archiving," a CFP for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

The latest call for papers for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly volume 2 and issue 4, "Archives and Archiving", edited by Aaron Devor and K.J. Rawson, has just been released.

This issue of TSQ will investigate practical and theoretical dimensions of archiving transgender phenomena and will ask what constitutes “trans* archives” or “trans* archival practices.” 

While transgender-related experiences have long been captured by archives to some extent, the last few decades have witnessed an increased commitment to collecting trans* materials. Consequently, sizable trans* collections can now be found in a range of institutional contexts including grassroots archives, nonprofit organizations, and university-based collections.

Given this trend, myriad practical considerations that trans* materials present for archiving warrant further attention. What should or should not be included in trans* archives? What are the best practices for acquiring, processing, preserving, and making transgender materials accessible? Given practical limitations of space and money, how do we decide what to prioritize? And who decides? What are the implications for history when archivists make such decisions? How should archives negotiate ethical concerns specific to trans* archives? What relationship—if any—do trans* materials have to broader LGBTQ collections? What cataloguing tools are available and how do they obscure, distort, or make meaning of the lived experiences of trans* people? What are the benefits and limitations of using “transgender” or “trans*” as umbrella terms in an archival context? How are archivists and archival practices changed by the challenges of dealing with trans* materials? What role can digital technologies play in collecting and accessing trans* materials, particularly born-digital materials?

These practical considerations would be incomplete without a closely related theoretical exploration of trans* archiving. How, for example, are bodies representable (or unrepresentable) through archival documents? How can embodiment itself be considered an archive of memory and feeling, a sedimentation of social practices, a living medium for the transmission of cultural forms? What power do archives have in shaping popular understandings of transgender phenomena? How are researchers affected by their encounters with archival materials? How do archives steer researchers in particular ways with metadata, organizational systems, and finding aids? Can archives help construct community and personal identity? Does digitization inherently change trans* historical artifacts? 

We welcome submissions of full-length academic articles on a wide range of topics related to trans* archives and archiving. Such topics might include:
• practical and philosophical considerations for developing transgender collections independently or within broader archives
• how transgender archival materials intersect with and depart from LGBQ archival materials
• critical reflections on working in trans* archives and/or with trans* archival materials
• sex, desire, and pornographic collections
• considerations of the body within and as represented by archives
• understandings of embodiment itself as an archive of affects, memory, practices, and social forms
• capturing lived experiences with archival artifacts and ephemera
• recontextualizing historical materials within the context of the archive
• affective encounters 
• ethics of historical representation
• archival temporality and considerations of time and timeliness
• the role of archivists
• institutionality of government, state, academic, non-profit, and grassroots collections
• processing and interpreting trans*-related materials
• hidden collections
• archival language practices, cataloguing, and classification
• digital technologies within archives, digital archiving, and archiving born-digital materials
• intersectional identities
• access and accessibility
• archival activism

We will also consider for publication shorter essays, opinion pieces, first-person accounts, practical advice, how-to guides, or interesting archival documents. We encourage contributions from a wide range of authors including academics, independent researchers, archivists, and activists. 

Please send a complete manuscript by October 15, 2014 to tsqjournal[at]gmail.com along with a brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 5,000 to 7,000 words, and 1,000 to 2,000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed by e-mail to both guest editors for the issue: Aaron Devor(ahdevor[at]uvic.ca) and K.J. Rawson (kjrawson{at]holycross.edu). We plan to respond to submissions by early January 2015. Final revisions will be due by March 1, 2015.

About the journal
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, visit http://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/tsq.

Call for Proposals for Radical History Review

Historicizing the Politics and Pleasure of Sport
Issue number 125 (Spring 2016)
Abstract Deadline: September 1, 2014

The global reach of football (soccer), basketball, cricket, and Olympic sports in the contemporary world can be traced back to European and U.S. imperial and commercial expansion. The agents of that imperialism—teachers, soldiers, traders, and colonial officials— believed sport to be an important part of their “civilizing mission.” Military interventions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, often accompanied by “soft power” cultural programs and private business ventures, fueled the popularity of Western sports. Reform movements tied eugenics and racism to their dissemination. But local elites and subalterns were not simply duped; they enjoyed the games on their own terms. As more communities participated, sport came to represent and constitute broader processes of social change. In the stands, sports pages, and clubhouses, fans rendered sport a place to debate racial and gender hierarchies. In the late twentieth century, international sport became part of a new global capitalist network of sport institutions (e.g. FIFA, International Olympic Committee, International Cricket Council), private corporations, mass media, and migrant athletes and coaches. In this process, sport came to symbolize and intensify unequal social and economic relations.

Histories of sport reveal a paradox: sport generates empowerment and disempowerment; inclusion and exclusion; unity and division. Sports have provided spaces for pleasure, freedom, solidarity, and resistance, but they have also reproduced class privilege, patriarchy, and racism. The performance of masculinities, creation of ideal body types, and the ongoing marginalization of women in sport illustrate these tensions. Recent events in Brazil, where controversy over contemporary mega sporting events merged with massive demonstrations for a range of social justice issues, highlight the unusual capacity of sport both to crystallize inequalities and to trigger civic activism. Reports of labor abuses in Qatar and censorship and environmental damage in Russia cast a dark shadow on the human and material costs of hosting “mega” sports events.

The editors invite submissions from scholars working on any period and world region. We are especially interested in studies that build upon the rich historiography about the nature of agency, identity, and embodiment as a way to explore sport’s contradictory past and present. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Sport, nationalism, and internationalism
- Sport, the public sphere, and citizenship
- Sport and radical protest
- Race, ethnicity, and “color lines” in sport
- Sport, reactionary politics, and racism
- Fan cultures, youth, consumption, and solidarity (including fan violence)
- Historicizing playing styles, aesthetics, and physical movement
- Histories of bodies, gender, and sexuality (including women’s athletics, masculinities, heteronormativity, queering of sports)
- Sport and the Global South (including sport migration, neocolonialism)
- Histories of Disability/Ability in sports
- Histories of illicit sport, gambling, and doping
- Revisiting landmark works, such as C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963)
- Sport and the Cold War
- The Sporting Press
- Sport-Media-Tourism Complex and mega events
- Stadiums as sites of political struggle, urban geopolitics, and the spaces of sport
- Processes of professionalization and relationships to amateurism
- Historiographies, methodologies, and sourcing of sport studies

The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but it also encourages such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for the Teaching Radical History section. Preliminary inquiries can be sent to Peter Alegi ([email protected]), Brenda Elsey ([email protected]), and Amy Chazkel ([email protected])

Procedures for submission of articles: At this time the journal is requesting abstracts that are no longer than 400 words; these are due by September 1, 2014 and should be submitted electronically as an attachment to [email protected] with “Issue 125 submission” in the subject line. By October 15, 2014, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article to undergo the peer review process. The due date for completed drafts of articles is February 1, 2015. An invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee publication; publication depends on the peer review process and the overall shape the journal issue will take.

Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), and secure written permission to reprint all images. Authors must also secure permissions for sound clips that they may wish to include with their articles in the online version of the journal. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 125 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Spring 2016.

Abstract Deadline: September 1, 2014
[email protected]

Happy Birthday, Fredric Jameson!

Today is Fredric Jameson's 80th birthday. We thought we'd use the occasion to consider his vast influence on Duke University Press. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Romance Studies here at Duke University, where he has taught since 1985.

Former Executive Editor Reynolds Smith remembers when Duke was considering hiring Jameson. 

 "I remember vividly the excitement around Duke when it began to seem possible, even likely, that Fredric Jameson would come to the university to be part of its faculty. My friend and Duke University Press author, Gustavo Perez Firmat in Romance Studies, was on the hiring committee. When he and I talked about Jameson as a prospective Duke hire, it was as if we were talking about some marvelous, miraculous event like the discovery of gold on West Campus. Jameson was not only the author of acclaimed works like Marxism and Form, and The Political Unconscious, there was now actually a book about him! About he himself! An introduction to his work published by none other than Cornell University Press, in which he got billing in the title alongside Louis Althusser and Karl Marx! Karl Marx! In fact Jameson’s name was first! Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious! That this should be true of any living literary critic, let alone one at Duke University, was astounding. Gustavo and I sat in the audience at Fred’s job talk, watching him hold forth on Madame Bovary in his brown leather motorcycle jacket, and my jaw hung open."

The rest, to use a cliche, is history. In 1991 we published Jameson's book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which remains our all-time bestseller. Smith says,"What turned out to be most amazing was that the marvelous things were only beginning at Duke. With the strong support of our Provost, Phillip Griffiths--whom, in that era of glasnost and perestroika Fred would come to call 'the Gorbachev of our university'--Fred, Stanley Fish, and all the other intellectual stars they would attract to the university over the coming years would transform the humanities at Duke and at Duke University Press beyond any of our abilities to imagine at that time."

Jameson and Fish started a book series with us, Post-Contemporary Interventions,  which came to include over 120 inflential books, including The Cultures of Globalization (1998), which Jameson edited with Masao Miyoshi, and Jameson on Jameson, a book of interviews with Jameson edited by Ian Buchanan. He has also published in our journals Social Text and SAQ. Jameson continues to support the Press in many ways, including reading manuscripts and recommending scholars.

Editorial Director Ken Wissoker says, "I've often called Duke University Press 'The house that Fred built.' His Postmodernism made possible all that came after.  Like the Duke Literature Program, still filled with brilliant intellectuals, each of whom could trace the threads of their thought to an aspect of Fred Jameson's, the Press's list changes all the time, but the centrality of Jameson's topics, ideas, and questions remains."

Happy Birthday, Fred, and thanks for everything, from all of us here at Duke University Press!

April is Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. Check out a couple of our newer poetry titles and some older ones, too!

Rafael Campo's Alternative Medicine is his sixth collection of poetry. These Lambda Literary Award nominated poems examine the primal relationship between language, empathy, and healing. Read "Band of Gold" on the Lambda Literary website, and check out this great profile of Campo on the PBS Newshour. 

 

 

 

 

Renato Rosaldo's latest book The Day of Shelly's Death perfectly bridges our poetry list and our anthropology list. Rosaldo calls his moving exploration of the day his wife Shelly died while doing fieldwork "ethnographic poetry." Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Juan Felipe Herrera said, "This text is revolutionary; it presents another way, a new way of making poetry matter."

 

 

 

 

James Applewhite is one of North Carolina's best-loved poets. In the News and Observer, Fred Chapell wrote, ""The publication of James Applewhite's Selected Poems is a signal event in the history of North Carolina literature." In their feature "Ten Poems Every North Carolinian Should Read," Our State Magazine singles out "Barbecue" from Selected Poems. Read the poem here. 

 

 

 

Words of Protest, Words of Freedom, edited by Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, collects more than 150 poems that showcase the American civil rights struggle of the mid-twentieth century. Including the work of Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, and Alice Walker, among many others, this collection is a must-read for a poetic perspective on that tumultuous era.

 

 

 

Want some explication and criticism along with your poetry? Check out our quarterly journal Poetics Today. Edited by Meir Sternberg, Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. 

 

 

 

Check out all our poetry titles here. Happy reading!

Library Meetings: Bigger than Small Talk

Our Library Relations team: (L to R) Kendall, Beth, and Kim

Our Library Relations team travels to conferences around the globe, including the United Kingdom Serials Group Annual Conference (UKSG), the International Federation of Library Associations Annual Conference (IFLA), and the Frankfurt Book Fair. If you come across a Duke University Press booth in your travels, we hope that you'll come say hello.

Kim Steinle, Library Relations and Sales Manager

"One of the nicest things about library conferences is the opportunity to finally meet a librarian in person after years of e-mails. Face-to-face conversations about usage reporting or budget constraints can be so productive. The frank exchange of information helps us be as responsive as possible to librarians' concerns." Kim's next meetings are North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) and IFLA.

Beth Hoskins, Library Relations Coordinator

"I'm always struck by how easily small talk leads to big ideas at library meetings. I remember chatting with a librarian who was frustrated by all of the time she spent sorting through massive site licenses. As a result, we trimmed our e-collection site licenses down to two pages. It was great to learn about a specific way that we could lighten a burden for our customers."

Kendall McKenzie, Data and Project Specialist

"Conferences give me the chance to absorb the library culture. We love to learn about librarians’ challenges, successes, new trends, and what they want most out of their content. It’s exciting to have these conversations in person and really witness their energy." Kendall's next meeting is UKSG.

UKSG

If you'll be attending UKSG, please look for Kendall and Leslie Eager at Stand 74. Leslie is returning for her second UKSG and Kendall is looking forward to attending for the first time. 

We'd love to see you while we're in the UK. If we can meet either at the conference or on a campus visit, please contact us!

Submit Your Work for Camera Obscura's 40th Anniversary

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: COLLECTIVITY

For the fortieth anniversary of Camera Obscura, the journal invites submissions on the theme of collectivity.

Collectives often emerge in periods of crisis in response to new social, economic, and technological conditions. Camera Obscura’s feminist editorial collective has functioned in this way since its beginnings in the 1970s, a time when many forms of cooperative action proliferated. In this period, collectives formed around issues of gender, race, and politics, with many organizing around forms of media production. In the last ten to fifteen years, a growing constellation of collectives, many international, has emerged, configuring artists and activists in new political and cultural formations. These collectives are a response to developments like the growing impact of digital media and mobile technologies, new paradigms of relational aesthetics, new configurations of labor and precarity, and the rise of neoliberal policy, which has worked to erode the public sphere and shared resources in favor of the idea of individual responsibility. In contrast, the theory and practice of collectivity emphasize participation, consensus, and working toward common goals. However, as anyone who has been part of a collective knows, these formations are never free of difficulty and disagreement—difficulties that relate to issues of communication as well as to the very dynamics of gender, sexuality, class, race, and multinationalism that demand collective responses. 

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Conceptualizing “collectivity,” “cooperation,” and “commons” 
• Historically specific investigations of past and still-functioning collectives
• The affective economies of collectivity
• The analysis of films, videos, or other media objects produced through collective action or participation
• The cultural, discursive, and economic structures that underlie and produce collectivity 
• Collectivity and forms of labor and media
• The temporality of collectivity
• Collectivity and utopianism
• The relationship of technological change to collectivity
• The relation of collectivity to identity, individuality, and subjectivity
• Transnational forms of collectivity 
• Collaboration, microtopias, communities of practice, and the space of the commons
• Swarms, multitudes, and political uprising
• Specific dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, and class in collective formations

Camera Obscura welcomes both essay-length submissions and shorter writings appropriate to our “In Practice” section. The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2014.

For more information about submitting your work, click here.

Q&A with Denise Brennan

Denise Brennan is is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Her new book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States, is a riveting account of life in and after trafficking and a forceful call for meaningful immigration and labor reform. 

First of all, can you give a brief description of trafficking into forced labor? Why don’t trafficked persons simply leave—as many migrant laborers do—when working conditions get really bad? Why can’t they just walk away?

 I see trafficking into forced labor as one end of a continuum of everyday forms of migrant labor exploitation. Some trafficking cases are clearly at one end of the continuum. Guards with guns and locks on doors are obvious signs of violent coercion, but most of the workers I met were not physically restrained. I met many workers who did not walk out unlocked doors—for example, domestic workers who did not leave while their abusers were at work. What kept them there? A lot of things: promises of payment, language barriers, lies about corrupt police, and fears about unknown dangers in the United States. And to what would they be running? Abusive employers take their passports, withhold payment, and restrict their contact with the outside world. Without any identification, money, contacts—or even seasonally appropriate clothes—workers in situations of forced labor feel isolated and alone.

 What I learned speaking with men and women who were in forced labor in low-wage labor sectors is that everyone perceives exploitation differently. Simply put, what scares some does not scare others. That’s where individual perception of risk and harm comes in. Every individual experiences coercion subjectively. This subjectivity of coercion explains, in part, why the U.S. government has issued so few trafficking visas (T visas). Attorneys have to prove coercion—they have to explain why their clients did not walk out unlocked doors.

 In the book you mention that trafficked persons sometimes labor side-by-side with other migrant laborers. How do you tell the difference between a migrant worker who has been trafficked into forced labor and a migrant worker in a low-wage, exploitative job? In other words, what are the telltale signs of extreme labor exploitation v. run-of-the-mill exploitation?

Trafficking happens in work sites where exploitation of migrants is commonplace. Extreme abuse can blend into everyday forms of abuse. Wage theft—not paying overtime, or agreed-upon wages—for example is rampant in low-wage labor sectors. Migrant workers, especially those new to the United States with limited English and little knowledge of their rights, expect and accept a certain degree of exploitation. This book looks at the tipping point between everyday forms of exploitation, and abuse that goes too far. What is that tipping point? Neighbors and co-workers should question why, for example, domestic workers never seem to leave their employers’ house, or why farmworkers never go into town. Peer outreach workers describe meeting fellow workers who are fearful of attending any of their organizations’ events or meetings. This is a sure sign that these workers' employers are monitoring them—even in their downtime.

The book’s focus is on rebuilding a life in the United States after forced labor. Yet, as the reader might expect, you also have a lot to say about their experiences during their time in forced labor. How does their time in forced labor affect them?

Remarkably, the women and men I met are emphatic that their time in forced labor has changed them—but does not stop them. Often they are angry about the time and money that their abusers stole from them. Some have nightmares and flashbacks. But they are clear that they look ahead, not behind them.

You emphasize that formerly trafficked persons generally live in poverty. How is this different from other new migrants who live in low-income neighborhoods and work in low-wage jobs?

Life Interrupted’s main focus is on how trafficked persons rebuild their lives. They struggle. They not only have to deal with traumatic events of the past, but they also enter the ranks of the working poor. They do so alone, without family or friends to offer support. This is what differentiates them from other low-wage migrants: trafficked persons resettle on their own, not as part of a larger community. Those who were exploited by somebody from their home country often strategically avoid neighborhoods and jobs with co-ethnics. It can be dangerous to live in a community where your abuser, or his or her associates, may still be at-large. And, most trafficked persons do not even know a single other person who was trafficked, so they do not have the opportunity to learn from others who have been through similar experiences.

In what ways are men and women's experiences in forced labor different?

They aren’t. What has been different is the level of media and policy attention on women's exploitation in the sex sector. In fact in many instances “trafficking” has been used interchangeably with “sex trafficking.” The book introduces women who were brutally exploited in the sex sector. But we also meet many other women and men who also were brutally exploited in farm work, factory work, domestic work and restaurant work. It is just not possible to measure exploitation or to posit that exploitation in one labor sector is worse than in another.

This conflation of trafficking with sex trafficking helps explain why so few trafficking visas have been issued to date. Since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was passed in 2000, fewer than 4000 persons have been awarded trafficking visas. The legislation allows for 5000 visas to be issued every year. This means we could have issued 65,000 visas by now. Why have so few been issued? I argue that the number remains low because law enforcement has focused its efforts on finding exploited workers in only one sector: the sex sector. In the process, many women who are not trafficked are arrested and deported if they are undocumented. These policies have driven sex workers to work underground, rendering already vulnerable workers even more vulnerable. Clearly we could be doing more to find and protect exploited workers across low-wage labor sectors, without harming those who choose to work in the sex sector.

What can be done to reduce the incidence of forced labor in the United States? What is the best strategy?

Trafficking into forced labor is preventable. Holding international temporary labor recruiters and employers accountable is a first step. They must guarantee that their workers’ labor contracts are fair. These contracts should be free of excessive (and bogus) recruiting fees and provide decent wages and overtime pay. Also, a worker’s visa status should not be tied to one employer. If a migrant worker is being exploited (or witnesses coworkers or neighbors being exploited) he or she needs to feel safe to report abuse. I never met a trafficked person who knew about the T visa while they were in forced labor. Rather, they only find out about the TVPA and the protections it offers after they exit forced labor. Most undocumented migrants — and temporary workers (guest workers) — assume that if they come forward to report any kind of abuse they risk arrest and deportation.

At the end of Life Interrupted I outline some basic policy steps to prevent trafficking such as passing immigration reform, monitoring worker recruitment programs, closing the Fair Labor Standard Act (fsla) loophole that excludes some agricultural workers and care workers in private homes, supporting domestic workers’ bill of rights introduced in state legislatures, ending immunity for diplomats who abuse workers in their employ,and rescinding state- and local-level law enforcement policies.

 So immigration reform is intimately tied up with preventing trafficking?

 The U.S. government’s policies on trafficking are nothing short of schizophrenic. Without meaningful immigration reform that protects workers in all labor sectors from abuse, threat, and retaliation, trafficking into forced labor will continue. At the same time that abuse is rampant and unfettered in certain industries (such as in agriculture), migrants also face racial profiling in their communities. Policies and programs that deputize local police to enforce federal immigration law, along with Arizona-style, state-level anti-immigrant legislation, keep migrants from reporting all kinds of crimes and abuse in their neighborhoods and worksites.

 Trafficking into forced labor is an extreme version of what happens in sites where low-wage migrants work every day. The 4000 T visas issued thus far are clearly a drop in the bucket. These are the exceptions to an otherwise punitive immigration regime. It is a fiction to assert that we are truly fighting trafficking when 11 million individuals live and work in the shadows. If we are serious about fighting trafficking, we would end policies that silence migrants. Employers know they can exploit with impunity. I think the shockingly low number of T visas says it all. On one hand law enforcement tries to reach out to the most extremely exploited workers, while, on the other, they simultaneously look for undocumented migrants. One set of polices undoes the other. Finding more workers in situations of forced labor means offering protections—not handcuffs.

Association for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, March 2014

We enjoyed meeting authors and selling books at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Philadelphia last week.

 

Congratulations are in order for Akhil Gupta, whose book Red Tape won the 2014 Coomaraswamy Prize!

 

Here he is celebrating with his daughter, who holds her mother Purnima Mankekar's recent book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is Purnima Mankekar, with Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were happy to meet Robert Stolz, whose new book, Bad Water, came out just in time for the conference!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was great to visit with Michelle Bigenho as well, pictured here with her book, Intimate Distance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you to everyone who came by our booth this year. We'll be looking forward to sharing more great books with you next year in Chicago!