Duke University Press Log

Wangechi Mutu and Willie Birch Win United States Artists Fellowships

Congratulations to two Duke University Press contributors, Wangechi Mutu and Willie Burch, who have won $50,000 fellowships from United States Artists. United States Artists (USA) invests in the fundamental value individual artists contribute to American society. Representing eight creative disciplines, the award recognizes America’s most accomplished and innovative artists.

Wangechi Mutu's first solo show in the U.S., Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, began its nationwide tour at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art in 2013. Duke University Press published the gorgeous full-color catalog for the show. It is now featured at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1972, and now based in Brooklyn, Mutu renders the complex global sensibility of the early twenty-first century through a distinctly hybrid aesthetic. She combines found materials and magazine cutouts with sculpture and painted imagery, sampling from sources and phenomena as diverse as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, and science fiction. In her work, Mutu marries poetic symbolism with sociopolitical critique to explore issues of gender, race, war, colonialism, and, particularly, the exoticization of the black female body.

Willie Birch's striking black and white illustrations of New Orleans musicians bring the characters in Matt Sakakeeny's 2013 book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans to life. Birch is an international artist who lives in New Orleans, where he was born in 1942. Birch received his BA from Southern University New Orleans in 1969 and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 1973. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the State of Louisiana Governor's award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His works are part of the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Congratulations to these two talented artists!

Happy Birthday, Emily Brontë!

Happy birthday, Emily Brontë! Celebrating what would have been the author’s 196th birthday, we have selected several journal articles in honor of her work. Her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, was poorly received when it was first published and Bronte died of tuberculosis just a year later. Today, Wuthering Heights is considered a classic and a masterpiece of literature.

In “Postcolonial Life and Death: A Process-Based Comparison of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Ayu Utami's Saman,” Tiffany Tsao examines the two novels' respective treatments of internal colonization,a shared thematic concern that only becomes apparent with critical attention to the similarities between scenes found in each work. Read an excerpt below:

Viewing Wuthering Heights and Saman as alike in their portrayals of the violence of domestic colonization inevitably illuminates and augments key aspects of each work. That is, when we focus on the features that the two works have in common, the differences we discover about those features, ones that previously meant little in a sea of innumerable differences, gain new significance. More specifically, we find that the two works diverge in their portrayals of the extent to which the colonization process may transform the “savage” and, consequently, the extent to which a post-colonial life based on pre-colonial ways of life is possible. Whereas Wuthering Heights portrays colonization as enacting a total transformation of the savage into the civilized, Saman portrays “savage” pre-civilization as an enduring and powerful reality that remains unaltered by the attempts of civilizers to change it. As a result, Wuthering Heights regards resistance to civilization as a reversion to a non-existent, pre-civilized past; Saman, by contrast, envisions it as the product of a way of life that has always been ongoing, independently, beneath civilization’s veneer. To put it another way, unlike Wuthering Heights, Saman posits the existence of an alternate reality an unseen primordial realm that continues untouched and undisturbed by the incursion of a so-called civilization that is oppressive.

Read more from “Postcolonial Life and Death” here.

In “'Whose Injury is Like Mine?’ Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and the Sincere Postures of Suffering Men,” Kevin A. Morrison argues that these authors, focusing on the transition from a traditional yeoman economy to a system of capitalist property ownership, present male suffering as authentic and histrionic, indicative of both power and powerlessness, and as an attempt to manage perceived threats to the self. Read an excerpt:

I employ the term sincere postures to describe Brontë’s and Eliot’s efforts to figure the gestural and rhetorical modes of male suffering as suffering while also recognizing them as calculated strategies. Representing male suffering as both authentic and histrionic, indicative of both powerlessness and power, enables these novelists to acknowledge the emotional violence that men inflict on women but then to assign a specific cause for it largely outside men’s individual control. This is less an effort to excuse such behavior than it is, I think, an attempt to authorize Brontë’s and Eliot’s own respective projects of establishing sympathy as the foundational virtue of the new bourgeois owning class whose hegemony they help to bring about. If men’s behavior toward women can be seen as emanating from genuine distress rather than inherent misogyny, women can play an active role in offering the kind of succor that might heal the wound and stop the violence that male suffering produces. However, this paradox, in which suffering is at once both a symptom of masculine precariousness and incoherency and an asset for a man’s preservation and reassertion of authority, allows Brontë and Eliot to resolve one problem only to introduce another. If suffering is constitutive of masculine dominance, then the concept of reparative compassion is incoherent because male authority relies on appeals to female sympathy to keep it intact. In my reading, these novels are poised between conservation and critique, producing an ambivalence that can be reconciled only through “imaginary or formal ‘solutions’” to the disquieting paradox of liberal masculinity.

Read more from “’Whose Injury is Like Mine?’” here.

The "Lost City" of Machu Picchu

On July 24th, 1911, American archaeologist Hiram Bingham and the Yale Peruvian Expedition team followed an eleven year old boy to the ruins of Machu Picchu. The expedition sensationalized the area and opened the floodgates of tourism in Peru. Today, tourists, adventurers, and academic enthusiasts from all over the world still flock to Machu Picchu. In honor of this wonder, sample several articles from two journals, Ethnohistory and Hispanic American History Review.

In “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science: Huaquero Vision and the Yale Peruvian Expedition to Machu Picchu, 1911, 1912, and 1914–15,” Amy Cox Hall delves deeper into the rediscovery of Machu Picchu. She examines the practices and collecting technologies of the expedition to suggest that the objects accumulated as well as the practices used in accumulating helped fashion Machu Picchu into a “lost city” that was “scientifically discovered” by Bingham. Read an excerpt:

Although popular myth associates Hiram Bingham and his global unveiling of Machu Picchu in 1911 with archaeology, Bingham was trained as a historian and “had little interest in stratigraphy” or other methodologies associated with modern archaeological research. Instead, what was practiced on the three forays of the Yale Peruvian Expedition (YPE) to Machu Picchu is better characterized as a late antiquarianism-inspired collecting spree—or, less generously, strategic “grave robbing."

In this article I suggest that the expedition’s practices and technologies helped mythologize Machu Picchu into a “lost city.” ̈ It was initially imagined by Bingham as the lost Inca city of Vilcapampa, and the expedition team’s collecting practices and the frame of science, as well as the types of artifacts collected, helped materialize Machu Picchu as both a vestige of the Inca race and a “scientific discovery.” The collecting practices combined prospecting with the notion that science had a sovereign claim on those objects that might contribute to the accumulation of its knowledge. Rather than representing a nation’s or empire’s sovereign claim over a territory and its history, the expedition relied on the universal virtue and sovereignty of science to make its objects collectible.

Read more of “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science” here.

In “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail,” Keely Maxwell explores how tourism has shaped Latin America by constructing touristic landscapes and impacting environmental problem solving. He utilizes written records and interviews to document the environmental history of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Read an excerpt:

Thousands of kilometers of former Inca roads span the Andes. One 40-kilometer section has become a new type of Andean pathway, a tourist trail hiked by 54,000 foreign visitors in 2008 alone. Tourism has emerged as a potent political economic force in twentieth-century Latin America, with concomitant environmental impacts. Yet despite the importance of tourism in the region, there are few scholarly investigations of its history, particularly its environmental history. Research has centered on how tourism developed as a leisure activity linked to modernity and capitalist industrialization, on the social construction of tourism destinations, and on social relations of hosts to guests. In Latin America, tourism histories have focused geographically on the Caribbean and Mexico and thematically on “sun and sand” or on cultural heritage tourism. The Inca Trail is part of the Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary, created in 1981 and designated a World Heritage Site for natural and cultural heritage in 1983. It is a premiere tourist destination and the center of controversy over environmental impacts, and so it provides a critical case for examining the environmental history of Latin American tourism.

Read more of “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail” here.

Performance Curators: Transforming the Theater

Performance curators occupy an “increasingly essential role in a transformation of the theater’s defining edges,” a role which has started to overlap with socially engaged and visual art forms.  In this special issue of Theater, Tom Sellar argues that these creative professionals are leading the way toward new forms and alternative practices. Sample a few articles from “Performance Curators,” edited by Tom Sellar and Bertie Ferdman.

 

In “From Content to Context: The Emergence of the Performance Curator,” Bertie Ferdman offers historical context for the recent prominence of curatorial practices in the presentation of performance. Discussing a range of alternative presenting models and bridges between the visual and performing arts, she traces the evolution of the performance curator from the logistic concerns of programming to more conceptual work. Read the excerpt:

 

“The rise of interdisciplinary performance festivals in the last decade has increased the visibility of the curator as a central and powerful figure in the changing landscape of the performing arts. A growing number of artistic directors, festival programmers, creative producers, and artists not only are beginning to pay attention to what gets seen either commissioning new work and/or selecting finished work but are also conceptualizing how, where, when, why, and for whom such events are structured and presented. As more exhibitions in art galleries and museums continue to embrace theater and dance, and visual and conceptual art is presented in performing arts institutions and festivals, the act of “curating” performance is becoming vital to both its development and its reception. If the sixties and seventies were the heyday of experimental theater and rise of postmodern dance in lineage with the historical avant garde the current moment, almost half a century later, is seeing a renewed interest not only in breaking with disciplinary models but also in providing new frameworks in which such work can exist. Presenters are now often faced with the challenge of producing work that does not necessarily fit into preconceived conventions of theater. What practices do they implement? What presentational forms do they create? Does a curatorial paradigm for such trends exist?”

 

To read more from “From Content to Context,” click here.

 

Tom Sellar delves further into the role of performance curators in his article, “The Curatorial Turn,” in which he begins to define their purpose and explores their effect on the rejuvenation and development of theater, dance, and performance in the twenty-first century.  Read the excerpt:

 

“Could the curation of theater, dance, and performance become a catalyst for the rejuvenation and development of those forms in the twenty-first century? The performance curator a figure of rising importance onto whom the aspirations and frustrations of many constituencies are projected has been hailed in some quarters as the great white hope for progressive theater makers and as a transformative agent for art institutions, including museums, turning to live events as the next extension of contemporary practice. In various indications of interest in North America alone, MOMA and the Whitney Museum have recently hired performance specialists; resident theaters have begun presenting devised work created externally by independent ensembles and artists; newly established cross-disciplinary festivals such as Philadelphia Fringe Arts, fiaf’s Crossing the Line, American Realness, and the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon, are flourishing; and artists have redefined models for collaboration and expanded definitions of socially engaged art to include town hall meetings on racial segregation in St. Louis and pop-up services centers for immigrants in Queens.”

 

To read more from “The Curatorial Turn,” click here.

Artists Karin Michalski and Sabian Baumann Inspired by Duke University Press Authors

This spring Badischer Kunstverein in Berlin is featuring the work of artists Karin Michalski and Sabian Baumann. The Alphabet of Feeling Bad and An Unhappy Archive spotlight the ideas of Duke University Press authors Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mel Chen, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. 

The Alphabet of Feeling Bad is an experimental film that features Ann Cvetkovich, author of Depression and An Archive of Feeling, sitting on a rumpled bed. Cvetkovich explains everyday negative emotions - like the idea to be at an impasse, to feel paralyzed, to be overwhelmed by demands or not to meet - and provides them with new meanings. The performance is based on conversations between her and the filmmaker Michalski and follows in the tradition of activist initiatives such as the Socialist Patients' Collective Heidelberg (SPK) of the 1970s and the more recent Public Feelings groups in various American cities. 

An Unhappy Archive assembles texts, books, posters, drawings, and other materials that call into question the social norm of “happiness.” The term was coined by theorist Sara Ahmed in her book The Promise of Happiness She describes the “unhappy archive” as a collective, feminist-queer, and anti-racist project. The archive was initiated in 2013 by Andrea Thal at Les Complices in Zurich and is now being reactivated and expanded in a new spatial context. Some of the featured books include Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling, pictured above. 

The exhibit runs through June. 

 

Carolee Schneeman Show Running in London

Artist Carolee Schneeman's first London solo show has recently opened at Hales Gallery. The show, Water Light/Water Needle, was first performed in 1966 and hasn't been seen since. The Guardian interviewed Schneeman this week about her long career. She and interviewer Steve Rose discuss her most controversial pieces, including Meat Joy and Fuses. "I never thought I was shocking," Schneeman tells Rose. "I say this all the time and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, 'This is something they need. My culture is going to recognise it's missing something.'"

Those who enjoy Schneeman's work and want to learn more about her thought processes and her life will enjoy reading her collection of letters, Correspondence Course. The letters, edited by art historian Kristine Stiles, are an epistolary history of Schneemann and other figures central to the international avant-garde of happenings, Fluxus, performance, and conceptual art. Schneemann corresponded for more than forty years with such figures as the composer James Tenney, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, the artist Dick Higgins, the dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, the poet Clayton Eshleman, and the psychiatrist Joseph Berke. The book sheds light on the internecine aesthetic politics and mundane activities that constitute the exasperating vicissitudes of making art, building an artistic reputation, and negotiating an industry as unpredictable and demanding as the art world in the mid- to late twentieth century. Art Monthly called it "a tremendous achievement on the part of the editor, the artist and the publisher."

Much of Schneeman's work also falls into the category of what might be called "difficult art," which is the subject of Jennifer Doyle's recent book Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Steve Rose compares Schneeman's work to more recent pieces by Paul McCarthy, Andres Serrano, and Casey Jenkins, all of which have aroused the ire of viewers and critics. Schneeman says, "a huge wall of taboo remains" about certain forms of art. Doyle argues that while certain forms of art may seem disgusting or off-putting at first, the artists deploy the complexity of our emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art. 

Water Light/Water Needle is on display until April 12. 

 

 

 

College Art Association 2014 Annual Meeting

Last week we enjoyed selling books and meeting authors at the 2014 annual meeting of the College Art Association in Chicago. We were glad our staff got out of Durham in time to miss the huge snowstorm that closed the university for three days. For once the weather may have been worse here than in Chicago!

We were thrilled to congratulate T. J. Demos on his winning of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. The awards committee said that his book The Migrant Image "eloquently analyzes contemporary art that engages the current political reality of continual humanitarian crises while maintaining an open-ended appeal to the imagination."

It was also exciting to participate in the launch of the Art HIstory Publication Initiative's new website. The AHPI is a partnership of university presses whose mission is to help bring art history publishing into the digital age by tackling some of the obstacles that have made it difficult for scholars and publishers to take advantage of evolving digital technologies. Editorial Director Ken Wissoker took part in the "Getting Published in the Digital Age" panel with other AHPI members.

Our first book produced with funds from the AHPI is Hannah Feldman's From a Nation Torn. Here she is with her brand new book. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are a few other authors posing with their books.

 Richard J. Powell, who curated the new exhibition Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, and edited the catalog, which we distribute. The show is currently at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and will travel to LA County Museum of Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

William Marotti, author of Money, Trains, and Guillotines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, author of Seeing the Unspeakable. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John P. Bowles, author of Adrian Piper. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maria Elena Buszek, author of Pin-Up Grrrls and editor of Extra/Ordinary.

 

The Cultural Impact of the Olympics

Over the years, several Duke University Press journal articles have addressed the cultural impact of the Olympics. Take a break from watching the 2014 Winter Games to sample these articles.

Erica Rand, "Court and Sparkle: Kye Allums, Johnny Weir, and Raced Problems in Gender Authenticity," in "The Athletic Issue," a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 19 and issue 4, 2013.

Read an excerpt from the article:

At a press conference he initiated to address the gender-test incident, Weir called the terms masculine and feminine "very old fashioned," adding, "There's a whole generation of people that aren't defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with." My own paradise would not involve throwing out masculinity and femininity or sex and race all together. They can serve as sources of pleasure, strength, community, and solidarity, inside and outside the sport, in ways that do not require policing them. If people of all genders could express, present, or perform in sport in whatever gendered ways they wanted to--which might or might not match up with the way they present themselves in other contexts--that would make for a more joyous sport. But Weir's distaste for having people define others by those terms gestures to effects of gender policing beyond fitting people into categories. As he states in Welcome to My World, being called "flamboyant" instead of "athlete" is another.

To read more from "Court and Sparkle," click here. 

 

Sally Anne Duncan, "Souls Grown Deep and the Cultural Politics of the Atlanta Olympics" in "Performance, Politics, and History," a special issue of Radical History Review, number 98, Spring 2007.

Read an excerpt from the article at the African American performance group Souls Grown Deep:

Unprecedented as it was, Souls Grown Deep was forced to the periphery of the Olympic stage. A vital opportunity was missed to give international visibility to the South’s unique community of African American self-taught artists. This essay examines the social and cultural processes that exalted a banal global art show while suppressing a landmark African American visual performance. This is a case study of the cultural politics of Atlanta, the vested interests of the fine art and folk art worlds, and, most of all, of the performative power of art exhibitions themselves. In Atlanta, the experiential knowledge embedded in the African American artists’ modes of creation and communication in Souls Grown Deep provided a potent social counterpoint to a falsely transcendent Olympic vision embodied in Rings.

To read more from "Souls Grown Deep," click here.

Amy Bass, "Objectivity Be Damned, or Why I Go to the Olympic Games: A Hands-On Lesson in Performative Nationalism," in "The Pleasure Principle: Sport for the Sake of Pleasure," a special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, volume 105 and issue 2, 2006.

Read an excerpt from the article:

My relationship with the Olympics continued after my dissertation was complete and I began my life as a professor at Plattsburgh State University. Within months of arriving in Plattsburgh, I audaciously asked if I could leave the following fall semester to go with NBC in a supervisor role to the Sydney Games. I was indoctrinated: I was part of a small group of highly specialized people who drop everything for several weeks during an Olympic year and gather together, working for whatever network is broadcasting the Games. It is a unique group, knowledgeable in multiple languages, geography, world politics, and specific random sports (from gymnastics to curling to judo, in which it is legal, by the way, to break your opponent's arm as a means to win). Plattsburgh graciously worked out a way for me to go, which included teaching an honors seminar--The Black Athlete--online from Sydney. I returned with more life-altering experiences: watching Marion Jones run, sitting in the bleachers as the United States beat Cuba for the baseball gold medal and listening to rumors that Castro was in the house, and again witnessing a spectacular Closing Ceremony. I reworked the dissertation after returning from Sydney, and by the time Salt Lake City rolled around I was in the final editing phases of my book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, more confident than ever of the viability of sports, especially the Olympics, as a fruitful site to examine how the world works, whether in terms of my own focus on exploring how ideas of race and nation are culturally manufactured, or the broader goals of determining where in the world politics exists.

To read more from "Objectivity Be Damned," click here.

Launch "Legendary," 2012 winner of the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography

 

Duke University Press is proud to join the Center for Documentary Studies in celebrating Gerard H. Gaskin and his forthcoming book Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene, the 2012 winner of the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The book's color and black-and-white photographs document the world of house balls, underground pageants where gay and transgender men and women, mostly African American and Latino, celebrate their most vibrant, spectacular selves as they “walk,” competing for trophies based on costume, attitude, dance moves, and “realness.”

Join us this Thursday, November 7^th, for Gerard H. Gaskin's artist talk at the Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, North Carolina. The event kicks off at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30 with an introduction by Deborah Willis, the renowned curator and photographer who chose Gaskin’s longtime project for the prestigious biennial prize. The event is free and open to the public. For directions and additional information, see the event page. 

 

New York City will host several upcoming Legendary events. On Thursday, November 14^th, Gaskin is speaking as part of The Camera Club of New York's 2013/2014 Lecture Series. Location and ticketing information for this event can be found here.

The Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts is hosting Gaskin for a book signing and discussion the evening of November 19^th. Joining Gaskin for the discussion are Frank Roberts, whose essay "The Queer Undercommons" appears in Legendary, and Deborah Willis, chair of the department. See the event page for information on tickets and location.

December 1-31^st, W Hotel presents Legends, a month-long photographic exhibition and philanthropic initiative celebrating New York House Ballroom Legends and style culture. Curated by Gaskin, the exhibit will be open to both guests and locals and will feature photos from Legendary. Legends will kick off with a talk, book signing, and reception on November 20, 2013. More details on the event are still to come. Follow us on Facebook to catch all the latest details.

Remember to check out these and more great Duke Press events on our events calendar.

Duke Authors at the 2013 CAA Convention

We enjoyed meeting authors and selling books at last week's College Art Association annual meeting in New York City. 

Congratulations to Claudia Calirman, whose book Brazilian Art under Dictatorship won the Arvey Book Award from the Association for Latin American Art. The committee said the book stood "out for its nuanced insight into a fascinating chapter of Brazilian visual culture."

Maria Elena Buszek, author of Pin-Up Grrrls and editor of Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art.

 

 

Kellie Jones with her book EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art. 

Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality.

 

 

Margo Machida, author of Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary.

 

Tom Finkelpearl and his new book What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation.

 

 

Keith Moxey, whose book Visual Time: The Image in History, will be available in June, with his wife Michael Ann Holly.

 

 

And finally, we didn't get her picture, but Mira Schor, author of A Decade of Negative Thinking and Wet, participated in the prestigious Distinquished Artists Interviews at the meeting. Read a summary of the interview at the tART blog.

Thanks to Duke Press staffer Julie Thomson for the photos.