Duke University Press Log

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.

Celebrate Haitian Heritage Month

In honor of Haitian Heritage Month this May, sample several of our books and journal issues on Haiti including Modernity Disavowed by Sybille Fischer, C.L.R. James’s play Toussaint Louverture, Radical History Review’s “Haitian Lives/Global Perspectives” special issue, and Small Axe’s special issue on Black Radical Tradition.

Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (2004) by Sybille Fischer has become a classic text in the cultural studies of Haiti and of modernity. Fischer contends that Haiti’s revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity.

But while radical antislavery was a formation that did not consolidate itself territorially beyond the confines of Haiti, it certainly did leave a deep imprint in the psyche of most of those involved in the slave trade and the plantation economy. Fantasy, paranoia, identificatory desires, and disavowal were always part of this formation. There are layers of signification in the cultural records that cannot be grasped as long as we pay attention only to events and causality in the strict sense. Much of this book is thus devoted to drawing a landscape around the silences and gaps that punctuate the historical and cultural records. It works from significant examples and symptomatic fragments, keeping track of what is said, and especially what is not said. It is an attempt to think about literature, culture, and politics transnationally, as forms of expression that mirrored the hemispheric scope of the slave trade; to think what might have been lost when culture and emancipatory politics were finally forced into the mold of the nation-state; and to think what might have happened if the struggle against racial subordination had carried the same prestige and received the same attention from posterity as did the struggle against colonialism and other forms of political subordination.

To read more from Modernity Disavowed, click here.

Leah Gordon argues that Haiti "uses every cultural tool in its box to transmit its history. Read an excerpt from “Kanaval: Vodou, Politics, and Revolution in the Streets of Haiti”:

History, in Haiti, is still a living, vibrating, organic entity. History, in Haiti, is charged, performative, poetic, and surreal. History, in Haiti, still feels revolutionary. School fees are excessive for the majority of the Haitian people, and education standards poor, but you will be hard pushed to find a Haitian who doesn’t know the vast and intimate details of his or her own history. Haitian culture is a potent vessel for this history, continually transmitting, telling, retelling, and reinterpreting Haitian history, from the ground up.

To read more from “Kanaval,” from Radical History Review #115, “Haitian Lives/Global Perspectives,” edited by Amy Chazkel, Melina Pappademos, and Karen Sotiropoulos (Winter 2013), click here.

 

In “‘Black’ Radicalism in Haiti and the Disorderly Feminine: The Case of Marie Vieux Chauvet,” Kaiama L. Glover offers reflections on Haitian radicalism via the life and works of Marie Chauvet (1916-73). Read an excerpt:

The Haitian Republic is, at its very origins, by its very definition, a radical nation, arguably the originary psychosocial space of the black radical tradition in the Caribbean and beyond. There can be no question but that Haiti's fundamental radicalism can be traced to the spectacular seizing of political sovereignty from France by the black (former) slaves of Saint-Domingue and their creation of an independent republic in 1804. And despite the unfortunate trajectory of Haiti's postrevolutionary history, the island nation has long been a productive site-source of memory from which a discourse of Afro-radicalism first emerged and continues to resound in the region. “Place where Negritude stood up for the first time,” as Aimé Césaire so eloquently described the republic, Haiti has engaged consistently with the politically radical over the course of the past two centuries as it has struggled to protect an often tenuous independence. Radicalism in Haiti did not merely spark the flame and then pass along the torch of revolution: since 1804, Haitians have offered multiple, if not always effective, manifestations of their refusal to tolerate exploitation at the hands of a predatory state and corrupt ruling social class, colonial or “post-.” Taking various political forms over the course of the twentieth century and met in every instance with repressive violence and brutality, the commitment to radical social revolution in Haiti is part of the very fabric of the nation.

To read more from “‘Black Radicalism in Haiti and the Disorderly Feminine,” from Small Axe volume 17 and issue 1 (March 2013), click here.

 

Many people are familiar with C.L.R. James’s book about the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins. But few realize that he first wrote a play about those events.  Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts was thought lost until scholar Christian Høgsbjerg came across a manuscript in a UK archive. Here he describes coming across this astonishing find:

In 2005, early in my research for a doctoral thesis on C. L. R. James’s life and work in 1930s Britain, I went to inspect the Jock Haston Papers at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, in the north of England. Like James, Haston had been a Trotskyist in Britain during the 1930s, and listed among the Haston Papers was a file entitled simply “Toussaint Louverture.” Daring to hope to discover perhaps a programme from the original 1936 production of James’s play about the Haitian Revolution, a rare enough and valuable find in itself, I decided to save examining this file until the end. After several hours spent wondering at some of the forgotten struggles and squabbles revealed among the minutiae of internal documents relating to the tiny early British Trotskyist movement, I finally rewarded myself by turning to the intriguing folder. Opening it up, I found to my amazement a yellowing mass of thin oilskin paper headed “Toussaint Louverture: The story of the only successful slave revolt in history.” All that was missing from what I recognised immediately as the long- lost original playscript was its author’s name on the front—C. L. R. James.

To read more from Høgsbjerg’s introduction to the play, click here.

 

For further reading, check out these books and journal issues:

Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home by Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Eugene Fouron. 2001, here.

“Without One Ritual Note: Folklore Performance and the Haitian State, 1935-1946,” by Kate Ramsey in Radical History Review #84, “The Uses of the Folk,” edited by Karl Hagstrom Miller and Ellen Noonan (Fall 2002), here.

Books Inspire Art

We're very pleased that two of our books have recently inspired exciting artistic projects. 

If you're in New York City next Friday, June 8, you can catch a staged reading of The Hopefulness of Esperanza, a play by Raquel Almazán which was inspired by Denise Brennan's 2004 book What's Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. The play is about two Dominican sisters, sex workers, who stow away on a cargo ship from the Dominican Republic to France. It transpires entirely inside a storage container in which they are slowly suffocating to death. After the reading there will be a Q&A with Almazán and Brennan. Click here to make reservations for free tickets to the show at the Studio Theater on 42nd Street.

 

Enda Duffy's book The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (2009) recently inspired an art installation by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec entitled "City Velocities-Body Speeds." The project involved measuring velocities of several trams in Amsterdam, streaming the data to the exhibition space in real time, and recreating them by several powerful fans. Visitors stood among the fans and experienced the feeling of the trams' actual speed. The exhbition was part of the Dutch arts festival Sonic Arts, and Duffy was pleased to give a talk during the festival. He noted that the tram operators, initially skeptical about the project, were invited to the exhibition and found it quite interesting.

 

Classic Book Explains Cricket to Mystified Americans

Cricket has been in the international news lately because of a game-fixing scandal featuring the Pakistani team. Three Pakistani players have been suspended from the team for participating in an illegal betting scheme. International Olympic Committe president Jacques Rogge said yesterday that he believes illegal betting is a worldwide problem for sport, of similar magnitude to recent doping scandals. While British and South Asian cricket fans follow the scandal eagerly, many Americans are completely mystified by the sport of cricket. Those who want to understand it better should turn to the classic work on the sport by C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary. Reviewing the book when it first came out in the U.S. in 1983, the Utne Reader said, "If you want to look deeper into cricket’s intriguing history, check out Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James. First published in 1963, this modern cricket classic is both a tribute to the game that James grew up playing in his native Trinidad and a memoir of his years in England as a radical writer leading the crusade for West Indian independence." Nearly sixty years after it was first published, the book still resonates.

Is Travel from the US to Cuba About to Get Easier?

The New York Times reports today that the Obama administration plans to lift some restrictions on Americans' ability to travel to Cuba. Academic, religious, and cultural groups may soon be able to travel directly to Cuba to facilitate "people-to-people" cultural exchange. If you plan to take advantage of the loosened restrictions, you'll want to read The Cuba Reader before you go. It's the perfect guide to the history, culture, and politics of the island. A reviewer in the Miami Herald said, "What The Cuba Reader does extraordinarily well is to reveal the nuances and complexity of the Cuban experience. All shades of politics are here, and they infuse Cuban dance, music, film and religion." The book is edited by Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff. And look for The Havana Reader sometime in the next couple of years!

Japanese Reggae Comes of Age

The New York Times features Marvin Sterling's new book Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan today. Reporter Jonathan L. Fischer notes that, "The Japanese have been making reggae almost as long as Jamaicans have been exporting it," but that finally artists are singing in Japanese. "Japanese dancehall is becoming more and more Japanese," says Sterling, a professor of anthropology at Indiana University. Dancehall predominates in the Japanese reggae club scene, but, says Sterling, "within reason, anything goes."

In Praise of Backlist

This terrific LA Weekly article asks, why are we "sold books the same way we are sold cell phones, as if the latest models deserve the most attention"? Reviews, interviews, publicity hype is all reserved only for the lastest books. And says, Nathan Ihara, "the book they are hyping probably is not the book you ought to read, not even the book you would most enjoy reading. That book lies hidden in the back of the bookstore, or perhaps not even there. It is 10-, 20-, 35-years-old." At Duke Press, our backlist supports us. We always hope each new book is one that will still be selling in a decade. In praise of our backlist, might we suggest three older titles that are currently on our in-house bestsellers list? First is Carla Freeman's High Tech and High Heels: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean (1999). This ethnography of women working in the informatics industry in Barbados is a perennial bestseller for us, used in courses all around the country. Our editors often cite it to new authors as a way to write important scholarship that is also engaging to students. Another book currently selling well is The Cuba Reader (2003). Our Latin America and World Readers series offer the student or traveler a way to get an overview of a country's history, politics, and culture through primary documents like songs, paintings, photographs, poems, short stories, speeches, cartoons, government reports, and reportage. All the titles in the two series are  steady backlist seller for us. The third backlist title we offer you today is Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation by Brian Massumi (2002). Massumi's book was an early title in a the now burgeoning field of affect studies and is a good example of how many of our bestselling books will never see a non-academic review or spend much time on a Barnes and Noble shelf. Instead we are known for cutting-edge theory that may be difficult, but that academics in many fields need to confront. Take some time to browse our other backlist on our website. Unlike a cell phone, a truly excellent book will not become obsolete in just a year or two.

Sujatha Fernandes Quoted in New York Times

Sujatha Fernandes, author of Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela and Cuba Represent!Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures, is quoted in today's New York Times. In an article by Simon Romero, Fernandes comments about groups like the Communications Liberation Army and Guerrilla Communications, who create grafiti-based murals in Caracas. "These groups share the objective of reclaiming public space and turning it into a kind of street periodical that can be constantly renewed and painted over to get their message out," says Fernandes. Who Can Stop the Drums? is an ethnography the social movements of Caracas's barrios.

Roundup of Weekend Coverage

Some diverse media coverage of Duke Press books this weekend. First up, a very nice profile of Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, in FootNotes. D. Kevin McNeir says, "In one word, Glave is—brilliant." McNeir writes, "Our Caribbean is a unique analysis of how same-gender loving and longing intersects with religion, family, race and class all within the Caribbean context and how ostracism and alienation become the common factor and obstacle that stands in the way of true equality and freedom for far too many men and women."

Meanwhile, in California, Arnold J. Bauer did a reading at the Colusa Business and Visitors Center, and the Colusa Sun-Herald reported on the event. They quote an area librarian praising Bauer's new book The Search for the Codex Cardona. "Catherine Bernard, president of the Friends of the Colusa County Library, said she was fascinated by Bauer's book, which is a mystery that touches on the curious — and often illegal — workings of the rare books and manuscripts trade. 'I wasn't really interested in Mexican history,' Bernard said. 'I'm very Euro-centric. But the book had me booking my flight to Mexico City.'"

And over at the literary blog Beatrice, there's a nice excerpt from Fred Moten's new book of poetry, B Jenkins. Ron Hogan posts Moten's poem "Njeeri Wa Thiong’o."

Duke Authors on Haiti Earthquake

 Two Duke authors with expertise on Haiti and the Caribbean respond to the devastating earthquake. Marc Becker, author of Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements, visited Haiti just a few days before the quake. Writing for History News Network, he locates Haiti's problems in the international ostracism it experienced after independence. "The solution to Haiti's problems," he writes, "is to allow the country to develop its own economy and political system without constant outside intervention.  Otherwise, Haiti's next natural calamity will be worse than this one, and the country will continue to sink deeper into poverty, inequality, and social exclusion." Speaking to CNN.com, Allen Wells, author of Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa, contrasts Haiti's nearly nonexistent tourism industry with the Dominican Republic, where tourism booms. Quoted on Bowdoin College's news site, Wells is hopeful: "The freedom the slaves achieved in Haiti signaled the birth of the modern world. The Haitian people should not be underestimated. They are amazingly resilient. They have overcome so much and they will, with the help of the international community, overcome this."