James Joyce set his classic novel, Ulysses, on the 16th of June, 1904. The day, nicknamed “Bloomsday” after the protagonist Leopold Bloom, has since become a commemoration of the life and work of James Joyce. In honor of Bloomsday 2014, sample several recent articles on James Joyce and Ulysses.
Beth Blum’s article “Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual” examines Declan Kiberd’s “Ulysses” and Us, a guide for the common reader of Ulysses, that attempted to “pry Joyce’s masterpiece from the grip of the ‘corporate university.’” Read an excerpt:
‘It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people,’ Kiberd declares. Instead of tracing Homeric parallels or poring over skeleton keys, we should, he suggests, approach Joyce’s text as nothing other than a ‘self-help manual.’ Ulysses, he explains, ‘is a book with much to teach us about the world--advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do men; how to walk and think at the same time.’ Kiberd’s book was received favorably in the popular press and, perhaps unsurprisingly, less so in the academic journals. Scholars appreciated his lucid, jargon-free prose but recoiled at his brash claims, his reliance on ‘anecdotal’ evidence, and the text’s ‘gossipy biographical flourish.’ If Joyce’s goal was really to reach the ‘common reader,’ reviewers wondered why he did not write more simply.
To read more of “Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual,” click here.
In “Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico,” Brian L. Price juxtaposes Mexican authors and James Joyce and considers how Joyce is “assimilated into their own cultural projects as literary object and literary experience.” Read an excerpt:
Non serviam is Lucifer’s declaration that he will not serve the God of heaven. It is a challenge to authority, a declaration of autonomy, and--at least since Blake--it was become a motto for embattled artists. Thus, near the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce’s fallen angel, Stephen Dedalus, declares that he will not answer the Church’s call to serve a priesthood to which he had earlier dedicated himself following the spiritual retreat in the third chapter…. Despite Stephen’s explicit declaration that he will not serve either Irish nationalism or the British literary canon, however, he is ‘supersaturated’ with that in which he says he does not believe: Ireland, Catholicism, and Shakespeare plague him throughout A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. This tension between the desire for unfettered artistic exploration and the omnipresence of national concern is one of the hallmarks of Mexican cosmopolitan writing.
To read more of “Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico,” click here.
For a comprehensive list of all Duke University Press journal articles on James Joyce, click here.
Articles:
“Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual? James Joyce’s Strategic Populism,” by Beth Blum in Modern Language Quarterly, volume 74 and issue 1 (March 2013)
“Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico” by Brian L. Price in Comparative Literature, volume 64 and issue 2 (Spring 2012)
Olé, Olé, Olé! It's almost time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil! To celebrate, we've asked some of our authors who specialize in Brazil to write guest posts for our blog.
We start off the series tomorrow with Bryan McCann's critique of the idea that the World Cup will bring economic prosperity to Brazil. The following week, on June 18, Jeffrey Lesser writes about multiculturalism and football in Brazil. On June 25 we present an excerpt from Seth Garfield's book Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil, in which he remembers watching the 1994 World Cup with a group of Xavante Indians. On July 2, John Gledhill writes about how preparations for the World Cup have affected the poor. And finally, on July 9, Marc Hertzman writes about gender and the World Cup. We hope you'll check in each week to read these posts and get a deeper understanding of how the World CUp is affecting Brazil.
We are happy to announce that Richard C. Keller and Jaime Wadowiec have both won awards for their articles featured in French Historical Studies.
Richard C. Keller won the Koren Prize for his article, "Place Matters: Mortality, Space, and Urban Form in the 2003 Paris Heat Wave Disaster" (volume 36, issue 2). The William Koren Jr. Prize is awarded to the outstanding journal article published on any era of French history by a North American scholar in an American, European, or Canadian journal.
Kirsten Weld is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. In 2005, human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of Guatemala's National Police. In her new book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, Weld tells the story of the astonishing discovery and rescue of 75 million pages of evidence of state-sponsored crimes, and analyzes the repercussions for both the people and the state of Guatemala.
This book centers on the discovery and rescue of a massive police archive produced during Guatemala’s thirty-six years of civil war, from 1960-1996. Tell us how this discovery came about. How did you come to be involved?
The discovery of the archives was, quite literally, explosive. Nobody knew that these files still existed, because the administration that signed the Peace Accords took deliberate steps to keep them secret. But one night in June 2005, a four-hour-long series of blasts rocked Guatemala City: a cache of munitions left over from the civil war, stored in frightful conditions on an urban army base, accidentally ignited, showering shrapnel and spewing toxic smoke into the surrounding neighborhoods. Urban legend had it that there was a similar weapons storage problem at a nearby police base, so local residents demanded preventative action. But when investigators from the human rights ombudsman’s office showed up at the police base, they found something even more incendiary than bombs and guns: rooms upon rooms heaped with old papers. They realized that they had found the lost archives of the infamous National Police.
Initially, though, the archives posed more questions than they answered. Who would take custody of this enormous, 75-million-page body of records documenting over a century’s worth of tense, bloody history? Who would do the work to rescue the archives from the rot and abandon to which they’d been consigned, and who would pay for it? What would be the repercussions of reopening a conversation about postwar justice and memory in a country where those who dared to speak of the past were still routinely threatened or killed? What secrets would emerge from the archives?
Slowly, and against all the odds, the outlines of an ad-hoc project to clean, organize, and analyze the files came into being. About eight months into what was then still a shaky, fledgling initiative, I contacted its leaders and floated the possibility of writing a book chronicling their efforts. Believing, I think, that it might provide some extra measure of security to have a foreign observer on-site making a case for the importance of the work they were doing, they agreed to let me join the project as a volunteer, making me the only foreigner to work as a rank-and-file member of the archival recovery team.
No doubt reactions to this discovery were varied and complex. How have the people and government in Guatemala responded?
The competing reactions reflected the deep polarization of postwar Guatemalan society. Human rights organizations, advocates of postwar justice, and what remained of the old Left were thrilled, hopeful that this enormous cache of files could be used as evidence in war crimes trials and could help clarify the fates of some of the country’s many desaparecidos, or disappeared people. Conservative sectors studiously ignored the discovery—publicly, at least— but the efforts to rescue the archives faced attacks on multiple fronts, ranging from intimidation to arson attempts. Unknown assailants hurled Molotov cocktails into the archives site on numerous occasions. Workers at the archives project were, in some cases, spied on and harassed. Immense amounts of political pressure were deployed in an attempt to block any revelations that might implicate former police or military officials in crimes against humanity. But because the archival rescue project has managed to achieve major visibility both nationally and internationally, it has thus far survived.
What happened to the people documented in the archive? Did any of them survive? Since its discovery, have any of the victims documented come forward?
Many did survive. These files are, after all, the administrative archives of the police, so they contain traffic tickets, noise citations, personnel registries, and other bureaucratic ephemera documenting the regular churn of urban life. That said, however, many other individuals whose names appear in the files were indeed killed by state security forces, even though the records themselves tend to be circumspect on this front—a police report will state that someone was killed by “unknown individuals” or in a “traffic accident,” even when the forensic and eyewitness evidence strongly indicates otherwise. So analysts need to triangulate the information contained in the files with data from other sources, including newspaper reports, oral testimonies, and US government documents. One of the most important tasks underway right now, in collaboration with forensic anthropologists, is to try and match the new documentary evidence about people who were buried anonymously in the country’s many common graves with the DNA evidence currently being exhumed from those graves. The idea is to return the physical remains of the dead and disappeared to their surviving family members.
Survivors have flocked to the archives in search of information about their lost loved ones, but others, we have to assume, stay away, because they fear reprisals or for other reasons. Importantly, many of the people staffing the archival rescue project have personal connections to the people in the files, whether because of their own past political involvement or just because of how pervasively the civil war impacted daily life. So it’s common for those staff to stumble across references to friends, acquaintances, and family members during the course of a day’s work at the archives. As you can imagine, and as the book discusses in detail, that’s a very powerful and complex emotional experience.
People all over the world are celebrating St. Patrick's Day today. Brush up on your Irish history with Suellen Hoy's "The Irish Girls' Rising: Building the Women's Labor Movement in Progressive-Era Chicago" from Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (volume 9, issue 1; Spring 2012).
Read an excerpt:
Hannah O’Day was the thirty-year-old Irish 'girl' who, with red flag raised, led a march of approximately seventy-fi ve young women out of the canning department of the Chicago packinghouse of Libby, McNeill & Libby on February 5, 1900. Although hardly a girl, O’Day was not married and lived, as did many single Irish women, with her family (a brother and his wife, in this case). She was an old-timer who had worked at the yards since she was eleven years old and at the Libby plant for the past twelve years. While it is not known if she had walked out before, there is no doubt that on this cold, cloudy February morning O’Day led a group of coworkers, most of them Irish and likely Catholic, in a ragtag parade through the yards and into the street. They acted spontaneously and boldly. They clearly had had enough.
This incident is one of many strikes in the first decades of the twentieth century that demonstrate a concerted resolve by working women to secure economic and social justice for themselves and those who came after them. However, the stockyard strike of 1900, the earliest of many that would follow, was a pivotal event that has been neglected in the histories of women, labor, and Chicago. Prompted by an abrupt wage slash, this strike solidified the identity of these women as workers. Although the strike failed, it became a platform leading to the first women's local in the stockyards in 1902, which by 1904 was a durable organization, the Chicago branch of the national Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). When Hannah O'Day, friends Maggie and Annie Condon, neighbor Annie Killeen, and their coworkers marched out of the Libby plant 'without even a parley,' as Upton Sinclair noted, they were immediately dismissed, blacklisted, and replaced by eager applicants. In time, a 'new union' emerged, which helped lay the foundation for a much larger organization of wage-earning women seeking better working and living conditions. As for the rebellious strikers, the stockyard rising would transform them from exploited canners into women workers with a collective consciousness of themselves as trade unionists and participants in 'women's public culture,' though which conditions of working-class and middle-class activists sought economic and social justice.
For more of "The Irish Girls' Rising," click here.
Browse the introduction and table-of-contents of the following special issues on Ireland and Irish culture:
"The Irish Question," a special issue of Radical History Review, edited by Van Gosse and Donal Ó Drisceoil (Spring 2009)
Heading to the OAH annual meeting in Atlanta this April? Duke University Press will be there with Labor giveaways! Stop by the booth to pick up your Labor supplies.
Maybe Mardi Gras isn't celebrated in your city, but who says you can't get into the spirit? Duke University Press has published many journal articles on Mardi Gras, and we've made these two freely available for the holiday—so don your beads and mask, cut a slice of king cake, and dive into these articles.*
Milton may be far from mind when one now thinks of or, better, experiences what is advertised as the world's greatest free party. Yet, as we have begun to consider, a rather detailed, even learned usage of literature—particularly English Renaissance and classical literature—played a structuring role in Comus's endeavor to appropriate and dignify the residual Latin traditions of Carnival. Propounding a caste status for its founders that was then more an aspiration than an actuality, a commemorative booklet issue by the Mistick Krewe in 1947 thus explains that 'as the members of Comus were socially important this meant that their celebration of Mardi Gras was orderly, educational and cultural.' (pages 49-50)
For more of "Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras," click here.
Mardi Gras attracts many domestic and international tourists to Sydney during February, and their numbers peak just prior to the parade and party at the end of the festival. The festival, parade, and party are major events on Australia’s tourism calendar. There is a strong representation from countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, as well as increasing numbers of tourists from Southeast Asia, and Mardi Gras packages are advertised in the gay and lesbian press in European and North American countries. While approximately 15 percent of the eighty events at the festival are free, many of the most popular ones require tickets... Full participation in the festival is an expensive undertaking, especially when coupled with the costs of outfits; body treatments such as waxing, tanning, gym training, hairstyling, and party drugs; and, for tourists, accommodation and transportation costs. Many people are willing, however, to spend large sums because Mardi Gras becomes for them the major yearly event that helps define their gay or lesbian identity. (page 84)
*If you're in a location that really celebrates Mardi Gras, don't be concerned. You can still read these articles through the end of the month. Recover from your festivities and then get to reading.
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.
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.
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.
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.
February 9 marks the centennial of the birth of country music star Ernest Tubb, who stormed the country music scene in the 1940s with a new honky tonk sound and a string of hits that included “Walking the Floor Over You.”
We published Ronnie Pugh's biography of Tubb in 1996. Pugh will celebrate the centennial today in Nashville with a panel discussion on Tubb's life and legacy at the Nashville Public Library. Here's an excerpt from the preface of his book, about why he is a Tubb fan.
Why did I become an Ernest Tubb fan? Why does anyone? Delving into my psyche and my past for a subjective look at the great Tubb career, maybe I can answer the second question alongside the first.
My Tubb fandom was in many ways against the grain, a leap I had to make across generational and cultural barriers. I grew up in a comfortable, middle class, East Texas home, one of three grocer's sons. A mid-baby-boomer (born 1953), I was seriously out of step with more publicized members of my generation; but then, if I hadn't been, I might never have loved Ernest Tubb. From my parents I first learned certain values that I have never seriously questioned. We were Republicans well before most Texans were, liking Ike (and Richard Nixon), at odds with our "Yellow Dog Democrat" surroundings, which had been Ernest Tubb's East Texas a generation before. Even more antithetical, perhaps, to any appreciation of Ernest Tubb was a belief instilled by my old-school Methodist parents, that decent people do not smoke or drink. It pains me to go into a nightclub to hear a country singer, though on rare occasions I have done it.
The lifestyle chronicled in so many country songs may have been worlds away from mine, but the music was always acceptable, to my parents and to me, and I warmly embraced it. It was my first and only favorite popular music, the choice of my adolescent years, and I never once wavered in the face of peer pressure from my rock-loving contemporaries. Mom loved and taught us the music of her youth—gospel that ranged from Stamps-Baxter to the Cokesbury (Methodist) Hymnal—and Dad, though not musical himself, was a big country music fan. He had actually seen Rodgers perform in Marshall in 1932, an admirable accomplishment that I rated right up there with his attending the first All-Star game in Chicago the next year.
In the spring of 1966, I first saw Ernest Tubb on television, and Tubb's TV show soon became my hands-down favorite. I agonized when Saturday afternoon NBC baseball games of unplanned length preempted, The Ernest Tubb Show, though I've always loved and still love baseball. Just a few weeks after meeting Tubb through television I bought my very first album, at the Famous Discount center in my hometown of Marshall, Texas: Ernest Tubb's debut LP with Loretta Lynn. In the next few months I purchased every Tubb LP that Marshall stores carried; a few more years passed before I knew about mailorder from the Ernest Tubb Record Shop.
For years Tubb records topped my want lists, and during high school years I started tuning in the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. If Ernest was on the Luzianne Coffee show at 8:30, then I'd do my best to stay up right on through the Midnite Jamboree, to hear his songs and to learn where he and the Texas Troubadours would be playing in coming weeks. I gladly forsook a high school band trip to Galveston, Texas, to see Tubb in person for the frrst time on Shreveport's Louisiana Hayride, March 22,1969. Concerts that I attended were so rare as to be memorable. I guess most of his East Texas-area dates were at nightclubs like Longview's Reo Palm Isle, where I wouldn't dream of going, even if I'd been old enough—but there were always fan club publications, infrequent new records, and best of all, new old records. What struck me from the beginning was Tubb's sheer staying power. At the time Tubb was still a major star and a force to be reckoned with, a full twenty-five years after his first hits. Thinking back now on those impressionable days, I recall that veterans in all walks of life fascinated me. A favorite TV show was David Wolper's Biography; my favorite baseball player just before his retirement was Warren Spahn, who pitched his last in 1965, the year before I discovered the great country music veteran Ernest Tubb via syndicated television. Small wonder that history later became my academic major. I could not have said just why longevity as such impressed me; I did not then infer from it such admirable qualities as perseverance, flexibility, or determination. One new Tubb record I particularly enjoyed from those days even spoke (tongue in cheek, perhaps) of his own staying power-looking ahead to the day "When My Getup Has Got Up and Gone."
It never occurred to me then that Ernest Tubb was not a "good" (i.e., "trained," "smooth," "melodious") singer; unlike the drunks hanging around the jukeboxes, I never imagined I could do as well or better. I only knew that he was fun to listen to, even on the sad songs. He enjoyed singing, and he made me enjoy his singing. I discovered him through television, and there I could plainly see a man singing right through a smile. Tubb had fun teasing his band during instrumental breaks, and he faced the camera with a succession of smiles and winks. Only years later could I divorce that visual image from his sound sufficiently to realize a truth that his radio audience of a previous generation had perceived: Ernest Tubb sang with an audible smile. You didn't have to see him: something in that warm, drawling baritone told you he was happy.
The songs themselves had a directness, simplicity, and clarity that made them easy to understand and easy to remember. "Waltz across Texas" and "There's a Little Bit of Everything in Texas" naturally appealed to a fellow Texan. While our shared Texas origins went some distance toward cementing my admiration of Tubb, the same factor didn't help his TV show co-star Willie Nelson; I couldn't wait for the idiosyncratic Willie to quit so I could hear more of Tubb. Ernest Tubb matched each song to the appropriate emotion. I sympathized when he sang "Our Baby's Book," and while I certainly didn't know what "l've been untrue" meant, it was as though he felt and made me feel the narrator's anguish for wrongdoings in another early favorite, "Try Me One More Time."
When I later saw Ernest Tubb on stage—several times ultimately—my admiration increased. Here was a man who'd go to almost any lengths to please his fans. He certainly pleased me, and I could tell he pleased the others who came. At his best on stage before a live audience, Tubb seemed genuinely glad that you cared enough to come; you left a concert feeling almost that you had done him a favor. That kind of favor you wanted to do more often.
Reading about Ernest Tubb in country music's periodical literature—the record of his many accomplishments and the words of praise from his peers—learning, in short, what he meant to country music certainly enhanced his appeal for me. That's still true, even after the years of research that went into this book (including those years of fandom only, which I didn't know at the time were research years). I have tried to be objective, to rise above mere fandom, in this book; but I can truthfully say that learning of Ernest Tubb's darker side, his human failings, has not lessened my esteem for him or my love for his music.
We had a wonderful time this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association selling books, mingling with historians, and celebrating retiring Senior Editor Valerie Millholland.
Millholland received the Distinguished Service Award from the Conference on Latin American History. This award is usually given to a senior scholar; it's very unusual for it to go a publisher and we feel so proud that CLAH has chosen to honor Millholland's contributions to the field in this way. She was introduced at the awards luncheon by Barbara Weinstein, who said, "Rarely, if ever, has this award gone to someone whose impact on the field has been as broad and wide-ranging as Valerie's." Millholland gave a wonderful talk about her years as an editor. It will be published later this year in the journal The Americas. She received two standing ovations for the talk and award.
We also toasted Valerie Millholland at a wine and cheese reception in our booth. Many of our authors gathered to celebrate Millholland's achievements and to pose with her for a photo.
Editing one of our popular Latin America Readers is a true labor of love. Collecting selections and permissions can take years. Co-editor Elizabeth Hutchison celebrates the publication of The Chile Reader with Millholland.
Gilbert H. Joseph has published nine books with Duke, including his most recent (with Jurgen Buchenau), Mexico's Once and Future Revolution.
The party failed to show up due to a catering error, but we still toasted our journal Hispanic American Historical Review. Editors Jocelyn Olcott, John French, and Pete Sigal joined managing editor Sean Mannion in a drink.
Many of our other authors came by to pose with their books. Here are a few; check out the rest of the photos from this terrific conference on our Facebook page. You can also see some video ributes to Valerie Millholland in this YouTube video.
Thanks so much to all the authors and staff who made the celebrations at this conference so special. And best wishes to Valerie Millholland on her retirement.
