Duke University Press Log

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.

Remembering Martin Bernal

We were sad to learn of the death of scholar Martin Bernal this weekend. We were proud to publish Black Athena Writes Back in 2001. Bernal's  three-volume Black Athena trilogy produced such debate and rancor that Bernal felt the need to write another book responding to his critics. The book provides additional documentation to back up Bernal's thesis, as well as offering persuasive explanations of why traditional scholarship on the subject remains inaccurate and why specific arguments lobbed against his theories are themselves faulty.

Bernal's editor at Duke University Press was J. Reynolds Smith, who offers these comments about the book : "Although Black Athena rankled more than a few conservative scholars, at it roots it was for me simply a fuller reading of history that ultimately reflected plain common sense. It also challenged many of the same demons exposed by postcolonial scholarship on other areas of the world and in other disciplines. Martin's views on the colonization of academic thought by western biases had many champions, not the least of whom were a whole new generation of Latin Americanists. Black Athena Writes Back was his patient response to many of the slings and arrows that threatened to distract us from the fundamental justice in his positions."

On Bernal himself, Smith says, "For someone who so inflamed his critics, as a person Martin was always the epitome of the gentleman. Sometimes laconic but never spiteful, and always extremely amusing, he was a completely delightful, wonderful human being." 

Nicholas Mirzoeff Extends His Book with New Digital Project on Scalar

Duke University Press is excited to partner with the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture in the launch of Nicholas Mirzoeff's "We Are All Children of Algeria: Visuality and Countervisuality 1954-2011," a digital extension of his recent book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. With support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ANVC aims to lessen the gap between digital visual archives and scholarly publication by allowing scholars to work more organically with visual resources, creating interpretive pathways through the materials and enabling new forms of analysis. Mirzoeff began this project as part of an NEH Summer Institute at USC.  In it, he develops and supplements the second half of chapter six of The Right to Look, which looks at cinema in revolutionary Algeria (1954-2011). The piece offers the opportunity to see the films and other visual materials discussed in that chapter and to develop the connections between the decolonial revolutions of the postwar period and the Arab Spring. We are
pleased to introduce the project with an interview between Mirzoeff and Tara McPherson of USC, who heads up the Scalar team.

Tara McPherson: The Right to Look stages a broad investigation of the protracted interplay between visuality and countervisuality in a variety of historical moments. It traverses geography, temporality, and ideology with impressive range and scope. What's to be added by a digital afterword? Why were you interested in producing "We Are All Children of Algeria?"

Nicholas Mirzoeff: Any writer is tormented at the end of a long project by what they've had to leave out. That's especially true for the section of my book that became my Scalar project dealing with the Algerian Revolution (1954-62) and its representations across global media both in the period of the war and in its long afterlife as a symbol of the unfinished debates over decolonization and, more recently, the relationship of Islam and Europe. The digital platform allowed me to explore that complexity in new ways that highlight its openness and the different understandings that are generated from particular viewpoints.
    I wanted to make this project because this form is so obviously important for the present and future of publishing in my areas of interest that it seemed indispensable to experience it firsthand.

TM: You've chosen to produce this digital companion in a new authoring platform, Scalar. Why not just use your popular blog for circulating this material? Is there some special affordance of the platform for your particular goals with this piece?

NM: I see the two forms of digital media that I work in as being related but distinct. Blogging is a format that expands how it's possible to write and think in relation to the contemporary. It makes a form over time. Scalar allows me to share a wide range of North African and European cinema, newsreel footage, guerrilla documentary and photography with the reader in a way that is obviously not possible in print. Unlike a blog, or at least one using an off-the shelf template, I have a great deal of freedom as to the look, layout and design of each "page," which can vary from one to the next.
    More than that, it allows me to explore a more complex form of narrative in which multiple threads (or "paths" as Scalar calls them) can be developed. This opens up a new set of possibilities for comparative and cross-cultural work that have only just begun to explore in digital humanities work but which I think are among its most fruitful possibilities.

TM: I find this very interesting. It seems you are pushing toward a form of writing that can embrace both linearity and multiplicity. This points toward a real potential for collaborative writing as well, bringing together multiple authors in a manner that can support both commonality and difference. Can you imagine such a mode of writing in the platform?

NM: Collaboration is built into Scalar. Each project is a collaboration between designers, author(s) and other people who are using the platform. The next step, however, is the one you hint at here. What I hope to do with a research project beginning next year is to create Scalar pieces in which a variety of authors work on one collective "book."
    My feeling is that, in order for this work, we have to begin the research at the same time as we begin thinking about the outcome in Scalar. If you come with a batch of material primarily generated with a print monograph or solo project in mind--what we might call the Vectors model--then the "mono" part remains paramount.
    Technically, the different "paths" in a Scalar project could be assigned to different authors and they could be in discussion so that when a point of intersection is reached in their researches, they co-author a page at that place of intersection, which would then feature in all of their "paths."
    It all promises to be a lot of fun!

Once again, here is a link to the project: http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/mirzoeff/index

 

 

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.

Pedro Lasch Exhibit Opens in London

Artist Pedro Lasch has an exhibit at Goldsmiths College in London this week. Lasch shows paintings inspired by the ten year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, featuring the Twin Towers rebuilt identically in ten sites around the world. The installation is called "Phantom Limbs" and will be on view from today through Monday, July 12.

This fall Duke University Press will be publishing Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, the culmination of a three-part project by Lasch that encompasses a museum installation at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, photographs of the installation, and this bilingual book. For the installation, Lasch placed black rectangular mirrors on the walls, each with an image of a Spanish Renaissance painting behind it. Pre-Columbian stone and ceramic figures, chosen by Lasch from the museum’s permanent collection of Meso-American art, stood on pedestals facing toward each mirror and away from visitors entering the room. Viewers were drawn into a meditation on colonialism and spectatorship when, on looking into the black mirrors, they saw the pre-Columbian figures, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Spanish priests and conquistadores, themselves, and the contemporary gallery environment.

Lasch also has a piece currently on display at MoMA PS1 entitled "An Atlas of Radial Cartography."

Public Space and the Legacy of Racism in Johannesburg

Today's New York Times has an interesting article about the difficulties getting a bus system set up in Johannesburg. Much of the city's poorer black population lives in the outer suburbs of the sprawling metropolis and for decades has had to rely on private minibus taxis to get them to jobs in the city center and wealthy close-in neighborhoods. The 2010 World Cup was supposed to finally bring reliable bus service from Soweto to Sandton, but lingering racism and "not in my backyard" activism by wealthy suburbanites has complicated things. The article mentions a number of geographical curiosities about Johannesburg, such as how a wasteland of mine dumps, factories, and vacant land still separates black from white neighborhoods. Duke Press recently published Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, a collection of essays about the teeming megacity and this coming fall we'll publish a new book that specifically addresses how the lingering effects of Apartheid continue to shape the city's geography. Look for City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg by Martin J. Murray next December. And for more general background on the spread of megacities in the Global South, check out the collection edited by Andreas Huyssen, Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age and AbdouMaliq Simone's For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities.

Kauanui on the Akaka Bill

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity, has long been an activist on behalf of Hawaiian sovereignty. She has written extensively on the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, better known as the Akaka bill. The bill was first introduced by Senator Daniel Akaka in 2000 and an amended version recently passed through committee in the House. In this editorial in Indian Country Today, Kauanui talks about some of the important changes in the new version of the bill.

Washington Post Blog Reviews The Making of a Human Bomb

The Washington Post reviews Nasser Abufarha's new book The Making of a Human Bomb in their "Short Stack" blog today. Reviewer Steven A. Levingston says that Abufarha's "research is extensive and his thesis powerful." But the book may be controversial, he writes. "Abufarha has roiled sensitivities in the past. He was reported to have praised the activities of Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." When asked to comment, Abufarha said, "I do not praise violence. To the contrary, I am engaged in research and other forms of political participation towards presenting alternatives to violence." He added, however: "I do not condemn the Palestinian resistance." He said people tend to be obsessed with the violence of the Palestinian groups, overlooking their efforts at political and cultural resistance. "I see that violence may be the ultimate but rarely the only form of engagement for these groups."

Go Wins Mary Douglas Prize

Duke Press is pleased to announce that Julian Go has won the 2009 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book from the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association for his book, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism. Congratulations, Julian!

Birla in Times Higher Education Supplement

Ritu Birla's Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India was cited, in the June 4 "What are you reading?" section of the Times Higher Education Supplement, as a book that scholar-reviewers are reading right now. John Chalcraft writes that Birla's book is "important for putting together non-Western capitalism and postcolonial studies."