Dr. Moses Ochonu, courtesy of Vanderbilt University History Department, 2013

Revisiting major debates on the impact of colonialism on Africa’s economy is a big task. So big, that History Compass allowed African historian Dr. Moses Ochonu of Vanderbilt University the space of two articles to re-open the conversation.

As we’re all aware, issues of poverty and economic marginality on the African continent have assumed more urgency in the world. Now, more than ever, people are asking: how did it come to this?

Historians are in the unique position of returning to historical questions in order to answer the economic questions of the present. The future of Africa’s economy will be determined by the forces of globalization, the international market, as well as domestic innovation, investments in infrastructure, and trade. In light of this future, which is becoming increasingly clear and urgent, Ochonu wanted to revisit the debates over the history of African economies.

In his History Compass articles (available here and here), Ochonu wanted to provide a one-stop overview of colonialism’s economic impacts on Africans as well as Africans’ own impacts on colonial economic events and outcomes. He points out that Africa’s colonial economies give us a window into the contemporary debates about Africa’s economies. Already during colonial times, African economic outcomes were determined by the actions, devices, and the maneuvering spaces Africans created themselves. This often occurred in spite, or in defiance, of exploitative colonial policies.

Colonial Map of Africa, 1910s. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Current debates about African economies, whether about colonial times or the postcolonial

period, present Africans in a perpetual state of reaction. Africans are shown to experience colonial economic structures and globalization, act on them, and negotiate them, but are never able to shape their outcomes.

But it isn’t that simple. “They also found their niche in the colonial economy, took advantage of it, and created maneuvering space in it.” Ochonu found it crucial to write African economic agency back into discussions of colonialism and poverty. Africans were and remain proactive actors in their economic affairs. Their actions should be essential to the story.

And despite drafting two full articles to guide historians wishing to revisit the story of African economic agency in light of colonialism, poverty, and globalization, there were a lot of stories and examples that didn’t make the cut. A section on gender was too large to be included, and may become the centerpiece of another project.

Colonialism put power into the hands of men in Africa. For many African males, this was the first time, and women reacted by becoming autonomous economic entities operating within emerging urban spaces. Victorian understandings of male and female roles created a host of what Ochonu calls unintended consequences.

“Colonial authorities in Africa all had particular views of African female economic actors. This created unique challenges as well as opportunities for women in Africa, in ways men did not have to contend with.” Ochonu speculates that this gave rise to female innovation: they rose to meet the challenges and overcome colonial prejudice. In the process, they invented new vocations, reconfigured the household economy, and reemerged as major players in agriculture, commerce, and artisanal guilds.

“Colonial authorities in Africa all had particular views of African female economic actors. This created unique challenges as well as opportunities for women in Africa, in ways men did not have to contend with.”

This is important because historians often overlook the unintended consequences. We write about cause and effect, but the unplanned and unintended, and the seemingly implausible or illogical is just as interesting, if more challenging to trace. But African historians must do so, because it projects a less rigid and deterministic picture of colonial planning and decision-making. In many respects, pragmatism took precedence over the metropole’s grandiose intent, and Africans, particularly women, took advantage of this pragmatic atmosphere of on-ground colonization.

African women disrupted the colonial economy in profound ways that affected the economic realities of today: Informal economies today are dominated by women whom scholars rarely fold into studies on poverty and globalization in the developing world. A multiplicity of voices changes the narrative of Africa’s economy from a reactive one of endemic weakness and unchallenged exploitation, to one in which Africans had, have, and will continue to have opportunities to determine their economic futures in our world.

A special thanks to Moses Ochonu for the interview. For more on this topic, check out his latest book, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression.

‘Asymmetric Explanations of Group Differences: Experimental Evidence of Foucault’s Disciplinary Power’ by Dr. Peter Hegarty

…

Provisional Abstract:
Whilst the same group differences can be explained in many ways, explanations of group differences tend to spontaneously figure the distinctive attributes of lower-status groups against a background norm of high-status groups’ attributes. We suggest that this asymmetry occurs in the explanations of scientists and laypeople who have been influenced by the history of ‘disciplinary power’ which works to disempower lower-status people by making them visible to the human sciences. We argue that social groups who are habitually studied first in research programs, more commonly encountered social groups, and prototypical social groups are all less likely than their counterparts to be marked in spontaneous explanations of empirical group differences. We present evidence that groups who are explicitly mentioned in such explanations are assumed to be lower in power. We describe some limitations to current knowledge about such asymmetric explanations and suggest some directions for further research, including our thoughts about how to ingrate existing findings with the possibility of formulating cognitive alternatives to the status quo among minority groups.

‘The Dark Triad of Personality: Ten Years On’ by Dr. Delroy Paulhus

…

Provisional Abstract:
Ten years ago Paulhus and Williams (2002) called attention to the ‘Dark Triad’, a constellation of three conceptually distinct but empirically overlapping personality variables. The three members — Machiavellianism, narcissism and subclinical psychopathy — often show differential correlates but share a common core of callous-manipulation. There are now dozens of studies on the triad and, according to Google Scholar, over 300 citations. The goal of this review is to update and critically evaluate this rapidly expanding literature. The standard measures of each Dark Triad member are reviewed along with newer combination measures. The three variables are linked to mainstream personality models, namely, the interpersonal circumplex as well as Five- and Six-Factor Models. A key issue is when they they act similarly and when they are distinct.

Abstract: This review essay of The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms discusses questions of coverage and of timing (the relative belatedness with which Anglo-American modernist studies has embraced global perspectives; the question of whether other traditions are coeval or belated; the relationship between post-colonial and late modernist texts).

Author Biography: Katie Trumpener is Emily Sanford Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale, where she regularly co-teaches an introduction to World Poetry and Performance. Her Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton UP, 1997) postulated an early nineteenth-century transcolonial anglophone literary system; her The Divided Screen: Germany’s Cinemas 1930 to the Present (to be published by Princeton) analyses Third Reich attempts to colonize world cinema and Germany’s Cold War position as global epicenter. Another book-in-progress analyzes modernist memories of childhood from a comparative, trans-European perspective.

Spot the Future Historian, by Angela Sutton, 2012

If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc.  idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu.  If I use your idea I will give you credit here.

Abstract: There are different forms of modernity or modernism since there is no such thing as the so-called “singular modernity” or modernism. The paper illustrates how Chinese modernity or modernism has formed to deconstruct the “singular modernity” and Westcentric form of modernism. As an alternative modernity or modernism, the rise of Chinese modernity or modernism has not only contributed to the grand narrative discourse of global modernity or modernism but also paved the way for different forms of modernity or modernism in the current world.

Author Biography: Ning WANG is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University, and Zhiyuan Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Among his numerous books and articles in Chinese, he has authored two English books: Globalization and Cultural Translation (2004), and Translated Modernities: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Globalization and China (2010). He has also published extensively in such international prestigious journals as New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, boundary 2, Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Language Quarterly, Neohelicon, Semiotica, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, ARIEL and many others.

Abstract: This essay explores how global modernism might be understood to reveal the agency of the periphery in the creation of modernity, thus countering Eurocentric understandings of global history and exposing to view the exploitation, violence and uneven development that characterizes the modern world.

Author Biography: Paul Young is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture in the Department of English, University of Exeter. His first book, entitled Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, was published as part of the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth Century Writing and Culture Series in 2009. He continues to research and publish on the cultural dimensions of Victorian global expansion.

History Compass

Science, Technology, Health

Available free online until the end of the year.

Disability in the Middle Ages: Impairment at the Intersection of Historical Inquiry and Disability Studies
Irina Metzler

New Directions in the Study of Religious Responses to the Black Death
Justin Stearns

Blood in Medieval Cultures
Bettina Bildhauer

Recent Perspectives on Leprosy in Medieval Western Europe
Elma Brenner

Integrative Medicine: Incorporating Medicine and Health into the Canon of Medieval European History
Monica H. Green

Writing the History of the Natural Sciences in the pre-modern Muslim world: Historiography, Religion, and the Importance of the Early Modern Period
Justin Stearns

Religion and the Enlightenment(s)
M. Sandberg

Science and Technology in India: The Digression of Asia and Europe
Aniruddha Bose

‘Dead Meat’ Dramas: Diseased Meat and the Public’s Health
Keir Waddington

The Ties That Bind: Infanticide, Gender, and Society
Brigitte H. Bechtold and Donna Cooper

The Fertility of Scholarship on the History of Reproductive Rights in the United States
Joyce Berkman

Eugenics and Historical Memory in America
Alexandra Minna Stern

Having a Clean Up? Deporting Lunatic Migrants from Western Australia, 1924–1939
Philippa Martyr

Re-visiting Histories of Modernization, Progress, and (Unequal) Citizenship Rights: Coerced Sterilization in Peru and in the United States
Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

Flu: Past and Present
George Dehner

Malaria in Africa
James L. A. Webb Jr.

Polio in Nigeria
Elisha P. Renne

Sowing the Seeds of Progress: The Agricultural Biotechnology Debate in Africa
Noah Zerbe

The League of Nations and the Debate over Cannabis Prohibition
Liat Kozma

The Medical History of South Africa: An Overview
Anne Digby

Constructing a Narrative: The History of Science and Technology in Latin America
María Portuondo

A Survey of the History of Science in New Zealand 1769–1992
Rebecca Priestley

History for the Anthropocene
Libby Robin and Will Steffen

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the role of Fredric Jameson in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. In particular, I reflect briefly on the advantages and limits of Jameson’s “singular modernity” thesis as a paradigm for global for modernist studies.

Author Biography: Steven Yao is professor of English at Hamilton College. He is the author of two books: Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (Palgrave 2002) and Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse From Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford 2010), as well as numerous articles. In addition, he has earned fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies. Most recently, he has been awarded an American Council on Education Fellowship for the 2012–13 academic year.

The “Discovery” of the New World, by Angela Sutton

Christopher Columbus, and the holiday (or holidays, as the US isn’t the only country who celebrates him) named after him are fantastic opportunities for teachable moments in virtually any history classroom.

In the past, I’ve asked students to read passages of Christopher Columbus’s journal or his letters to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Together, we’ve reflected on what they have learned in the past about Columbus, and discussed all the things you do when teaching with primary sources: we talked about the reasons sources are generated, and their historical context, and how and why the source came to be preserved in the present.

Then I’ve show them blogs and opinion articles by historians who discuss the less palatable facts about Columbus, by historians like Howard Zinn who highlight how dangerous he was for the Americas,  and by Native American activists who denounce Columbus for what he has done to their Amerindian ancestors.

I’ve asked students to find more information on the controversy surrounding Columbus Day, and they came back in full force with news of protests, and more opinion articles.

I then asked students why I’ve asked them to find these things.

“Because Columbus was bad?” asked one.

Before I could answer, another student chimed in. “No, because he’s still important now. What he did is still affecting populations in our country.”

Bingo.

Then I asked what our honoring this man each year says about how America values its native populations. Then the class moved into a discussion of how the US perceived of itself and why we use this day to celebrate Columbus instead of the contributions of Native Americans.

By this time the class was fired up. I didn’t have to ask any more questions, and instead focused on moderating the discussion between students. The class touched on many important points related to imperialism, racism, colonialism, colonial legacies, hegemony, and power – all the things a good history class should uncover.

In this way, Columbus Day has become a valuable teachable moment to show students that history is living, and that something that happened in the 1400s can still affect the way we perceive of ourselves as a nation today.

Abstract: Elleke Boehmer’s ‘How to Feel Global’ responds to the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms by exploring some of the variations and differences in the meaning of the global and the modern that are thrown up by bringing these terms into critical conjunction. In particular, the review examines the different conceptions of the world that underlie the Handbook’s readings of global modernism, and the contradiction that is produced when a close focus on modernity as capitalist expansion comes partially to occlude an attention to modernism as experimental form.

Author Biography: Elleke Boehmer is the author of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995 ⁄ 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (2002), Stories of Women (2005), and Nelson Mandela (2008). She has published four novels, Screens again the Sky (1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (2000), and Nile Baby (2008). She edited Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004), and the anthology Empire Writing (1998), and co-edited JM Coetzee in Writing and Theory (2009), Terror and the Postcolonial (2009), and The Indian Postcolonial (2011). Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010) is her first short story collection. Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and General Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literature Series.

Abstract: Translation plays an important role in creating the category of ‘world literature’, a term that has acquired new currency in this era of globalization. Commenting on essays by Susan Stanford Friedman, Rebecca Beasley, Jessica Berman, Eric Bulson and Laura Doyle, I suggest that the global spread of modernism and its local flowerings need to be understood through the vigorous translation activity that accompanied it. I focus on vernacular modernisms in India between the 1920s and 1960s in order to show that the impact of translation was by no means unidirectional or targeted towards the West. Translation from both European and non-European languages was an indispensable element in the climate of Indian modernist writing, especially as printed in the poetry magazines of the early twentieth century. The simultaneously local and cosmopolitan character of this modernist literary corpus, far more important and extensive than Indian literature in English, can only be understood through a continuation of the project of modernism’s translations.

Author Biography: Supriya Chaudhuri was educated at Calcutta and Oxford, and is currently Professor of English, Director of the School of Languages and Coordinator of the Centre of Advanced Study in the Department of English at Jadavpur University, Calcutta. She works both on early modern English literature and on 19th and 20th century Indian and English cultural history, literature and cinema, and has published widely in these areas. She is the author of the chapter on ‘Modernisms in India’ in the Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010), and has co-authored Conversations with Jacqueline Rose (Seagull ⁄ Chicago University Press, 2010).

In April 2012, Oxford University Press published the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough, including 28 essays on some of the many modernist movements and works that emerged around the world between the later nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.  These new essays treat authors from Viet Nam, Turkey, India, China, Algeria, Nigeria, South Africa, Russia, Cuba, the Caribbean, central Europe, western Europe, and the United States, among other places.  Literature Compass Editor in Chief  Regenia Gagnier and  Associate Editor Laura Doyle invited leading  scholars in comparative literature, world literatures, postcolonial,  globalization, and translation studies to  comment on the Global Modernisms collection for the Global Circulation Project (GCP).  Responses by Supriya Chaudhuri,  Elleke Boehmer, Steven Yao, Paul Young, Wang Ning, and Katie Trumpener are published on the Global Circulation Project (http://literature-compass.com/global-circulation-project/), with an Introduction by Doyle and Gagnier, and other responses are forthcoming. Meanwhile, we invite all readers who have read the Oxford volume to enter the dialogue here on the Literature Compass blog.

Check in every Monday for the opportunity to join a discussion on the papers below:

The Global Circulation Project’s Forum on Global Modernisms (pages 589–592)
Laura Doyle and Regenia Gagnier
Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(50K) | Request Permissions

Translation and World Literature (pages 593–598)
Supriya Chaudhuri
Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(57K) | References | Request Permissions

How to Feel Global: The Modern, the Global and the World (pages 599–606)
Elleke Boehmer
Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(65K) | References | Request Permissions

On the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms; or the New WWJD (pages 607–610)
Steven Yao
Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(48K) | References | Request Permissions

Peripheralizing Modernity: Global Modernism and Uneven Development. (pages 611–616)
Paul Young
Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(59K) | References | Request Permissions

Multiplied Modernities and Modernisms? (pages 617–622)
Ning Wang
Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(57K) | References | Request Permissions

Modernist Geographies: The Provinces and the World (pages 623–630)
Katie Trumpener
Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(66K) | References | Request Permissions

Opponents of marriage equality and some free market supporters have asked what gay men and lesbians hope to achieve by calling for boycotts against Chick-fil-A. Many see economic action against Cathy and Chick-fil-A as anti-Capitalist, even un-American, arguing incorrectly that it violates his freedom of speech. The history of queer economic activism, however, demonstrates just what is at stake, and what boycotting can achieve.

Even before the modern homosexual rights movement gained momentum in the 1970s, gay men and lesbians recognized the relationship between economic forces and human rights. Already in 1963, in response to UK tabloid press sensationalism that vilified homosexuals, author Douglas Plummer called on gay men and lesbians to boycott publications that demonized them. “If homosexuals stopped buying those particular newspapers,” he foresaw, “some circulations would drop by many hundreds of thousands of copies.” Plummer recognized the economic clout that homosexuals might have, but before a larger coordinated community existed, his call for economic action went unanswered.

Following the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, in which gay men and lesbians stood against police raids and harassment in New York, a greater community began to form. This wider community soon saw economic action as a strategic tool against state and legal oppression. Just five years after Stonewall the Los Angeles Police Department responded to the threat of a boycott against Hollywood businesses by revising its policies toward gay Angelenos.

And in 1977 the most famous gay boycott demonstrated the potential of economic action to oppose anti-gay sentiment and further build a cohesive community. In January, Dade County (Miami) passed an ordinance to prohibit discrimination in the areas of housing, employment and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. In order to overturn it, Florida Citrus Commission spokeswoman, entertainer and former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant formed Save Our Children, which collected sufficient signatures to force the issue to a voter referendum. The stage was set for the first time for coordinated national action among a broad spectrum of gay men and lesbians.

Responding to Bryant’s anti-gay positions and her links to the Citrus Commission, calls for a boycott of Florida orange juice rang out across the nation. As today, gay leaders and ordinary citizens were mixed about the tactic of using a boycott to oppose personal beliefs and business interests. Some questioned the desirability of silencing Bryant or threatening her employment through economic action against her employer. Others worried about a boycott’s effects on economically vulnerable farm workers. In California, however, columnist Harvey Milk, who would become the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, called on the city, unions, and gay leaders to boycott Florida orange juice. He argued that buying orange juice amounted to “supporting a person who is preaching hatred towards every Gay person.” Milk, who continued to promote gay equality while he sat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, would be assassinated the following year.

According to Herndon Graddick, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Cathy and Chick-fil-A are responsible for some five million dollars in donations to “anti-gay” organizations like the American Family Association and the Family Research Council as well as support for organizations that promote therapies to “turn” homosexuals straight. Chick-fil-A’s support for “the biblical definition of the family unit” has now made this an issue not only for gay men and lesbians, but for a broader range of consumers. The debate is not restricted to those whom it most directly affects, but instead to anyone who might use their money to support Cathy’s business and his cause, or to deny them funds by boycotting Chick-fil-A and spending their money elsewhere.

Economic action against Chick-fil-A is unlikely to dissuade Cathy from supporting or funding groups dedicated to fighting marriage equality. But despite the media interest and apparent success of former Arkansas Governor and Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee’s August 1 “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” history shows us that queer economic action and boycotts can in fact have broader successes beyond the immediate issue at hand. Economic action against Chick-fil-A implicates all consumers of fast food, asking them to make decisions with their dollars either to support marriage equality or to fund Cathy and anti-equality groups. The explosion of support across social media suggests increasing demand for marriage equality beyond just gay men and lesbians.

In the end, the boycott against Florida Orange Juice and the backlash against Anita Bryant failed to prevent the overturning of Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance. In the immediate context of Miami, the boycott seemed to have failed. But most local and national gay and lesbian organizations nonetheless highlighted the action’s success in creating a national movement devoted to gay and lesbian human rights that contributed to the mobilization of a national consciousness.

Twenty years after the Stonewall Rebellion, protesters on Fifth Avenue in New York rallied together around the cry “We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We’re Not Going Shopping.” By 1989 they recognized that their choices as consumers could be strategically employed to support some businesses or boycott others for their employment practices, marketing and advertising or promotion of social and political causes. In 2012, a US election year, consumer choices are even more political as they become mainstream news and affect policy statements among future candidates.

Like the Florida orange juice campaign, which solidified a national gay and lesbian political movement, non-violent economic action against Chick-fil-A is likely to have greater impact beyond protesting the specific policies of this fast food restaurant and its executives. It may in fact galvanize a broad coalition of gay men, lesbians but significantly also allies in support of marriage equality in the US. This concrete expansion of the movement for marriage equality beyond those whom it affects directly to include progressive men and women, religious leaders, and average folks everywhere may turn out to be the greatest strength of this economic action.

Rules for the Observance of Feast-Days in Medieval England
Volume 34, Issue 90, November 1961

The Book of the Disguisings for the Coming of the Ambassadors of Flanders, December 1508
A. R. Myers
Volume 54, Issue 129, May 1981

‘For refreshment and preservinge health’: the definition and function of recreation in early modern England
Elaine McKay
Volume 81, Issue 211, February 2008

Sports and celebrations in English market towns, 1660–1750
Emma Griffin
Volume 75, Issue 188, May 2002

The Cult of the Centenary, c.1784–1914
Roland Quinault
Volume 71, Issue 176, October 1998

Bonfire Night in Mid Victorian Northants: the Politics of a Popular Revel
D. G. Paz
Volume 63, Issue 152, October 1990

Queen Victoria opens Parliament: the Disinvention of Tradition
Walter L. Arnstein
Volume 63, Issue 151, June 1990

Reynolds’s Newspaper, Opposition to Monarchy and the Radical Anti-Jubilee:Britain’s Anti-Monarchist Tradition Reconsidered
Antony Taylor
Volume 68, Issue 167, October 1995

The ‘Last Night of the Proms’ in historical perspective
David Cannadine
Volume 81, Issue 212, May 2008

Exhibiting a new Japan: the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and Expo ’70 in Osaka
Sandra Wilson
Volume 85, Issue 227, February 2012

The Olympics, documentation strategy and the Minnesota Method
Cathy Williams
IHR Archives and Society podcast, February 2012
Read the HistorySPOT blog post for this podcast

‘A Man Cannot See His Own Faults': British Professional Trainers and the 1912 Olympics
David Day
IHR Sport and Leisure History seminar series, February 2012

Sport’s Role in 1951’s Festival of Britain 
Iain Wilton
IHR Sport and Leisure History seminar series, March 2012

Part of Interior of the Comédie-Française (A.Meunier, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies is pleased to present a Special Virtual Issue on Eighteenth-Century French Studies, comprising previously published papers and an original Introduction by David McCallam.

Introduction
David McCallam

Voltaire and War
Haydn Mason
Volume 4, Issue 2, September 1981

Illegal Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France: Incidence, Detection and Penalties
John Dunkley
Volume 8, Issue 2, September 1985

Images of Islam in Some French Writings of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
Ahmad Gunny
Volume 14, Issue 2, September 1991

Sexual/Textual Politics in the Enlightenment: Diderot and d’Épinay Respond to Thomas’s “Essay on Women”
Mary Trouille
Volume 19, Issue 1, March 1996

“Vous avés achevé mes tableaux”: Michel-Jean Sedaine and Jacques-Louis David
Mark Ledbury
Volume 23, Issue 1, March 2000

Candide and La Nouvelle Héloïse
Robin Howells
Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2006

Rehearsals at the Comédie-Française in the Late Eighteenth Century
John Golder
Volume 30, Issue 3, September 2007

“La différence de couleur n’en fait point dans l’âme”: Behn’s Oroonoko and the French Anti-Slavery Debate
Ursula Haskins Gonthier
Volume 31, Issue 2, June 2008

Part of Frontispiece, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies is pleased to present a Special Virtual Issue on Education in the Eighteenth Century, comprising previously published papers and an original Introduction by Michèle Cohen.

Read it exclusively online:

Introduction
Michèle Cohen

The Treatment of Education in the Encyclopédie
D S Wilson
Volume 11, Issue 1, March 1988

Berquin’s L’Ami des Enfants and the Hidden Curriculum of Class Relations
John Dunkley
Volume 16, Issue 2, September 1993

Capturing (and captivating) childhood: The Role of Illustrations in Eighteenth- Century Children’s Books in Britain and France
Penny Brown
Volume 31, Issue 3, September 2008

“The Proper education of a Female …is still to seek”: Childhood and Girls’ Education in Fanny Burney’s Camilla; or, a picture of Youth
Coral Ann Howells
Volume 7, Issue 2, September 1984

London’s Charity School Children: The “Scum of the Parish”?
Dianne Payne
Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2006

“A Little Learning”? The Curriculum and the Construction of Gender Difference in the Long Eighteenth Century
Michèle Cohen
Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2006

“Leisure to be Wise”: Edgeworthian education and the possibilities of Domesticity
Richard De Ritter
Volume 33, Issue 3, September 2010

History Teaching in Late Eighteenth-Century Russia
David Saunders
Volume 10, Issue 2, September 1987

The British Reception of Madame de Genlis’s Writing for Children: Plays and Tales of Instruction and Delight
Gillian Dow
Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2006

Educating Christian Men in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: Public School and Oxbridge Ideals
William Van Reyk
Volume 32, Issue 3, September 2009

Autonomy and Perfectibility: The Educational Theory of Godwin’s The Enquirer
K. E Smith
Volume 5, Issue 2, September 1982

Two Zwarte Pieten, courtesy of Wiki Commons

People from outside of the Netherlands are often shocked when confronted with the Zwarte Pieten. They associate these figures with  the American tradition of blackface minstrel-shows which contributed to the proliferation of racist stereotypes, attitudes, and perceptions within a racially divided society. The Dutch are aware of this issue, and how it looks to outsiders. This year, Vancouver’s cancellation of the Sinterklaas celebration due to Zwarte Piet made it into the Dutch news. The organizer of the festival said “We will have to teach the Canadians and the entire North-American population what Zwarte Piet really is.” This attracted much commentary and criticism from the Netherlands. But foriegn outrage and rejection to the Zwarte Piet isn’t new to the Dutch:  In 2008, Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, made the decision to remove Zwarte Piet  from its holiday lineup in response to tourist and layover flyers’ protest. Yet despite criticism from the outside world, Zwarte Piet remains a popular figure whom the vast majority of Dutch people want to keep at the center of Sinterklaas festivities.

I have interviewed a Dutch anthropologist from the University  of Utrecht, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, to get the perspective of an insider academic. Though Tamimi’s parents are both Iranian, he grew up in the Netherlands and considers himself Dutch. As a child, he enjoyed the figure of Zwarte Piet alongside his classmates. In high school, however, Tamimi experienced an increasing discomfort with Zwarte Piet as he came to understand the way in which he is portrayed and the reasons he is embraced. Yet whenever he tried to broach the subject, he was rebuffed with an explanation that Zwarte Piet has always been a part of the Dutch Sinterklaas festivities. This explanation almost implied that those who questioned Zwarte Piet were in some way un-Dutch.

Tamimi feels that as an academic, it is his role to point out the fallacies surrounding Zwarte Piet’s historic origins. Arguments such as the debate over Zwarte Piet and his racist image have everything to do with the ways in which history is presented.  Dutch nationalists focus on preserving tradition at any cost, and often invoke history to do so: they stress that tradition and nation is old and has old roots. As historians, could it be our job to stress that traditions are invented and not as rooted as people think?  Tamimi gives an example: Most Dutch people claim that Zwarte Piet has been around forever. They don’t know that Zwarte Piet was invented in the 19th century and became a family-friendly Sinterklaas icon only in the 20th century, “..and that’s not old.”

I asked Tamimi if this spirited clinging to Zwarte Piet could be connected in any way with the election of Dutch Parliamentary leader Geert Wilders of the PVV, the Netherlands’ right-wing anti-immigration political party. Tamimi believes so: “the immigrants and nonwhites who oppose Zwarte Piet have to do with Wilders. They are edgy, and unsure of how to respond to Holland’s new anti-immigration legislators.”  Tamimi says that the Dutch who voted Wilders into power supported the leader’s vote against the European constitution. “They are closing themselves off from the rest of the world. You see it in all kinds of things. In the Zwarte Piet discussions, they don’t care and they feel no shame about how they are perceived. If a nonwhite immigrant says that they believe Zwarte Piet to be racist, they will be shut down.”

Zwarte Piet blackface Kit which can be found in most Dutch supermarkets during the holiday season. (Angela Sutton, 2011)

Tamimi says that most Zwarte Piet supporters get angry when called racist. They are  not interested in engaging in debate, and instead reject all criticism of this figure. But for many non-white Dutch people, Zwarte Piet is the elephant in the room. Sometimes, Tamimi doesn’t dare talk about it because he can sense the anger coming from other Dutch compatriots before he opens his mouth.

“But what nonwhites say is paramount. If black people in Amsterdam say the figure of Zwarte Piet is racist, then it is racist because they say so. Sinterklaas is a white guy on a horse surrounded by black fools. The Pieten are morally risible characters. Fans of the Zwarte Pieten can laugh at them, and take candy from them, but they don’t want their daughters to marry one.”

Though Tamimi is still in the minority with his view, he isn’t alone. The “Zwarte Piet is Racisme” movement is at its all-time strongest, and the internet is splashed with bloggers weighing in on the debate. Blogger  Peter Breedveld writes (my translation) “Yet Zwarte Piet is self-evidently racist. The explanation that he is so black from a chimney is an insult to everyone’s intelligence…Zwarte Piet is a typical negro-caricature.”  Breedveld  goes on to explain that over time the different explanations given for Zwarte Piet only serve to worsen the racist imagery. He asserts that the very fact that Zwarte Piet exists in a racist country full of anti-immigration laws is proof of the racist nature of Zwarte Piet. “We were the last to abolish slavery and we are the only ones who still wear blackface,” he writes.

In searching for the balance between honoring holiday traditions and forging an inclusive society, the historians’ role becomes key. The world becomes more global every day, and not less, despite the policies racist leaders like Geert Wilders might implement. Nations can never truly shut out the rest of the world. The Netherlands in particular will  be unable to sustain an immigrant-phobic stance because its history as a colonial slave-trading powerhouse of the Atlantic World will catch up with the nation. By including the voices and wishes of all Dutch people, not just the Caucasian ones, the Netherlands can begin the healing process that invariably accompanies such a brutal past.

Now is the time to begin, while the Sint Nicolaas Genootschap Nederland is attempting to get the tradition of Sinterklaas on a UNESCO list to protect it as a world heritage. Tamimi asserts that it is important now more than ever to showcase the controversy surrounding the figure of Zwarte Piet before he becomes enshrined and protected in his current racist form.

Rainbow-Petes, an alternative to Zwarte Pieten (courtesy of the Facebook Regenboog Pieten Fan Page)

I would argue that Zwarte Piet protestors are not a group of Grinches and Scrooges. They do not want to destroy Dutch children’s holidays. Removing the racist elements of the Sinterklaas festival does not have to mean obliterating Dutch tradition, only amending it to fit a more inclusive society.  While the Afro-Caribbean majority former Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Antilles still celebrate Sinterklaas in the Dutch way, some people there are questioning Zwarte Piet. Last year, some groups of  Paramariban revelers have adopted the figure of Zwarte Piet in innovative ways which fuse Dutch culture with national pride: they have brought back the tradition of rainbow Pieten to Suriname. The video clip of this parade shows both black and white Surinamese celebrating the arrival of the inoffensive rainbow Pieten. The rainbow Pieten do not seem to mar the joy and spirit of the event, and revelers in Paramaribo appear to love their rainbow Pieten as much as their counterparts in The Hague enjoyed the arrival of the Zwarte Pieten.

To close out, I asked Tamimi what he thought about the future of Zwarte Piet.  He replied “It’s a very sensitive issue and it is too soon to tell. I have a saying that goes ‘In Holland you can say nasty things about God, but don’t mess with Zwarte Piet.'”

They are available here.

This two-day event brought together a large number of Irish history scholars, from the postgraduate to the professor. Judging from the number of speakers and the attendance levels, the organisers were right to assume that there was a need for such a conference, and plans are already afoot for a further instalment next year.

Among the highlights was a round-table session to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Natives and newcomers: essays in the making of Irish colonial society, 1534-1641 (Dublin, 1986). Chaired by Professor Nicholas Canny, this session brought together a number of the contributors to that seminal volume. The reflections offered by this group, all of whom have since made substantial contributions to scholarship on early modern Ireland, made for interesting listening.

The keynote address was delivered by Professor Marian Lyons on the subject of ‘The variegated Irishness of the Irish in seventeenth-century Europe’. This wide-ranging lecture offered, amongst other things, a useful overview of the experiences of Irish natives as newcomers on the continent.

Alongside these offerings, there was plenty for anyone interested in early modern Ireland to digest; the availability of the podcasts
goes some way towards offsetting the problem of having to choose one out of the three parallel conference sessions running at any one time over the two days.

I am not aware of any conference proceedings publication plans, but it is to be hoped that a good deal of the research presented will find some appropriate outlet in print over the coming years. This should help to reinforce the growing vibrancy of this field, just as Natives and newcomers managed to do a quarter-century ago.

History Compass is pleased to present a Special Virtual Issue on the Occult in History, freely available until the end of the year.

Table of contents as follows:

Astrology in the Middle Ages
Hilary M. Carey

Magic in the Middle Ages: History and Historiography
David J. Collins

Magic and Impotence: Recent Developments in Medieval
Historiography
Catherine Rider

Kabbalah: A Medieval Tradition and Its Contemporary Appeal
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Magic and Divination in the Medieval Islamic Middle East
Edgar Francis

Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European Witch
Hunting
Thomas A. Fudge

A New Trumpet? The History of Women in Scotland 1300–1700
Elizabeth Ewan

Deference and Dissent in Tudor England: Reflections on
Sixteenth-Century Protest
K. J. Kesselring

Sexuality, Witchcraft, and Honor in Colonial Spanish America
Nicole von Germeten

Vaya con Dios: Religion and the Transnational History of the
Americas
Pamela Voekel, Bethany Moreton and Michael Jo

The History of Prophecy in West Africa: Indigenous, Islamic, and
Christian
Joel E. Tishken

The Missionary Impact: The Northern Transvaal in the Late Nineteenth
Century
Alan Kirkaldy

University of Western Sydney, Australia

Literature Compass Special Issue: Life Writing and Critical Practice, 2011

Further Reading

Across the course of my research into issues of writing and representation and the affective power of research I have yet to come across a book that has affected me as much as Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer (1996). While the focus of the book rests with anthropology, Behar’s insights into the personal effects of research and fieldwork, and the line between the observer and the observed, are critical to contemporary studies involving the ‘writing of the other’. Behar’s book allowed me to rethink the auto/biographical divide and the processes and experiences that can inform the making of a biographical text.

Literary texts that deal, in part at least, with the affective qualities of biographical writing and/or the experience of unearthing the past are becoming more common. Richard Holmes’ seminal work Footsteps (1995) is well-known. Lesser-known but more contemporary works include Robert Dessaix’s Twilight in Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004) and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (2010). While these works do not explicitly deal with methodology, they do point to the feverish qualities of past/present field relationships.

In general, the field of biographical writing and biographical narrativity is widening. As I have indicated elsewhere, autoethnography and studies in qualitative research have a great deal to offer those interested in issues of method. Beyond Behar, the work of Carolyn Ellis (1995, 1996, 2004), Rosanna Hertz (1994), Kim Etherington (2004) and P.A Atkinson, A Coffey, S Delamont, J Lofland and L Lofland (eds) (2001) is also recommended.

Syllabi

This article aims to stimulate debate around issues of biographical narrativity, methodology and the affective power of the biographical research experience. The essay emerges out of a larger study that explores the processes and experiences that inform the making of a biographical text in an attempt to understand the effects of those experiences on research and writing, and the production of biographical knowledge more broadly. ‘Writing Intimate Lives: Mediations in Biographical Praxis’ would benefit a unit or course interested in issues of writing and representation – both in biographical writing and in qualitative research more broadly. Questions that might emerge after reading might include: how do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write and how? How does our encounter with the biographical world come to be enacted in biographical writing? Is it true that biographical studies has tended to ‘police’ or over-determine representational modes and the relationship between the biographer and the subject? And how might we develop a way of thinking about biography that enables us to reflect upon the epistemological basis of our theory and practice, thereby expanding its field of significance?

In the midst of my railroad enthusiasm a colleague mentioned to me that I should construct a ‘travel course’ around the theme of 19th-century American railways (my university offers many very popular travel courses during the interterm and summer) with Chicago as the ‘hub’ of the course.  In that vein, here’s my idea:

We would take the train into Chicago, following in the footsteps of so many Americans during the 1890s who were using that mode of transport to get to the ‘big city.’ Depending on time constraints we might take the Coast Starlight up to northern California and then the California Zephyr all the way into Chicago. If that was too much train-time, we could fly to Denver and take the train from there.

Readings:

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Sister Carrie

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

The Pit: a Story of Chicago

Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930

 We’d use HistoryPin to map historical happenings and perhaps also Hypericities (which I’m hoping will have a mobile-device component soon) to drill down through layers of spatial history as we navigate the contemporary spaces.

My questions for you:

Do you have any suggestions of readings or of tools that I should use for this hypothetical class?

If you were leading a travel course where would you take your students?

What advantages can you see of actually going to the place that you’re studying rather than simply learning about it within a classroom setting?

A McArts degree? NO! (Wikimedia Commons)

Throughout the fall term last year, every time I entered the Arts Building of my campus I had to walk over the words “McArts Degree.” In the first week of term someone had painted them in two-foot-high, whitewashed letters at the entrance to the building. They were impossible to miss. It dominated the small outdoor plaza. These words remained there, confronting me and everyone else who entered the building, until they were finally obliterated by the snow and cold.

This message affected me every day that I went to the university.

I can only imagine how this message felt to undergraduates (or even graduate students) who saw it every single day. I’ve earned a PhD, been selected for a Postdoc at a respected institution, and proven myself to my intellectual peers. And yet, I still felt that this simple insult took something away from me. But what about new students? What message might they take from this prominently placed message at their university?

This year I came back to the university after a summer away and the first thing I remember noticing was that the words were not there. In their place, using half-foot-wide masking tape, someone had marked out the words “Use a Condom.” I was thrilled. Not only were the offensive words gone, but someone had co-opted this space for a useful and important message that new undergrads away from home should hear often and loud.

Days later my optimism was undermined by a new insult. Painted in even larger blue letters, and obliterating the healthy message advocating safer sex, was another jibe at arts majors: “I have an Arts degree. Can I take your order?”

I’ve written elsewhere on the History Compass about the denigration of the humanities. It is a pervasive problem. Messages like these tell students that the arts and humanities are impractical, selfish studies without the merit of science programs and professional schools. Funding priorities that sacrifice the arts and humanities further reinforce this message (while making it more and more difficult to teach them well.) At the History Compass we’re particularly concerned about this.  Jean Smith has written about the value of history specifically, while Angela Sutton has sought to debunk the myth of the humanities as a financial burden on institutions.

At their worst, these messages of denigration and attacks on funding are mutually reinforcing. In a culture that dismisses and denigrates the arts and humanities, it is hardly surprising that those with the authority to do so remove their funding and deprioritize them further.  In the UK, Middlesex University closed its History and then its Philosophy Department. The Conservative government has advocated removing state funding entirely. In the US, SUNY Albany cut language and theatre programs. And in Canada, the $200 million Canada Excellence Research Chairs initiative included no scholars in the Arts and Social Sciences. Not one. Bombarded with messages such as these, it’s hard enough to contemplate study in the humanities. It’s even more difficult when your own studies are dismissed as merely a “McArts Degree.”

What can we do?

Happily, the best course of action is to prove these accusations wrong. Our many successes are our best response. They are examples of the value in the arts and humanities. But we must also confront these attacks. I hope to be able to write an update to this blog soon, where I can congratulate my university for recognizing the harm of this kind of message and removing it.

In the 10 years since the events of September 2001 a vast amount of scholarly research has been written on the impact of 9/11. Wiley-Blackwell is pleased to share with you this collection of free book and journal content, featuring over 20 book chapters and 185 journal articles from over 200 publications, spanning subjects across the social sciences and humanities.

Simply click on your area of interest below to access this reading and learning resource today:

If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc.  idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu.  If I use your idea I will give you credit here.

The highlight of this occasion was the lecture on Yeats given by His Excellency Ambassador Dan Mulhall to a room packed full of university staff and students. Mulhall has both researched and taught extensively on the period during which Yeats lived. His extensive knowledge of his subject and his experience in giving poetry readings duly lent assuredness and clarity to what he had to say.

Mulhall’s lecture explored the consequences of the fact that Yeats enjoyed such a long career as a productive writer, as opposed to a figure like Wordsworth who apparently produced nothing worthwhile beyond the age of forty. Had he died in 1900, Mulhall argued, Yeats would be remembered as a fine romantic poet. Instead, he remained active right across World War I and the upheaval in Ireland in 1916 and the years following, and Mulhall explained how such momentous events in turn helped to shape the marked evolution in Yeats’s writing.

It was nice to hear an admission that the speaker was not too keen on the later Yeats’s mysticism, as I remember quite well how the undergraduate class of which I was a part was none too enthused by gyres, whether they turned or not.

Mulhall finished his lecture with a digression on Irish culture more generally, even asserting that Ireland had preserved more of its traditional society than other European countries, particularly through Gaelic Games. The locals seemed interested in his description of the game of hurling, but I’m not sure they were convinced by the closing diplomatic remarks to the effect that the current crisis in Ireland would eventually be resolved without costing German taxpayers a cent.

According to a post on H-Asia, the Ohio State University is collecting statements from faculty that will be passed on through the University’s government affairs office. In private emails and on Facebook, established scholars and grad students have acknowledged the utility of the DDRA program, and lamented its sudden departure for this year. But so far I haven’t seen much public comment, beyond this post, and an eloquent post on China Beat, in which Maura Cunningham makes the point that we can ill afford to lose area studies specialists at this geopolitical moment.

“By not providing the funding necessary to support this year’s crop of applicants, the government is implying that such work isn’t important, that we can exist in a global community but don’t need to understand it.”

This year’s cancellation is devastating to the research plans of a particular cohort of graduate students. Cruel as it is, the loss of one year of research will not cripple a field. But if the program is suspended for several years, or indefinitely, then scholarship that requires specific language training and long in-country research will be restricted to private universities with endowments to support such research.

I trained at a public university, and benefited from the Fulbright-Hays DDRA program for a year of work split between South Africa and the Netherlands, a trajectory I could not have self-financed, and that would not have been possible only with the support of the African Studies Center at UCLA. My research—and more importantly, my teaching of hundreds of undergraduates a year at a public university—would not be possible without the foundation I received in a year of overseas research as a graduate student.

While it is unlikely we can affect the decision to suspend the Fulbright-Hays program for 2011, concerned scholars need to let decision-makers in Washington know that this funding is crucial for what we do now as teachers and researchers, for how we can educate graduate students, and how we can effectively teach undergrads—who deserve to learn about places outside the US from people with a deep first-hand understanding of other cultures. Without ongoing new research, the significant body of knowledge created from the rich history of Fulbright-Hays grants will soon be out of date, and we will have no way to know it.

Urge your university to make a response. Contact your campus Fulbright-Hays coordinator and ask him or her to object (and to contact this year’s applicants so they don’t hear this news through the grapevine first). Write to your congressional representative and senators, letting them know there is a constituency for informed study and teaching about the world beyond America’s shores.

The global financial crisis is real, and its consequences grave. It should not, however, be reason for the US government to retreat from global engagement.

The Montreal International Poetry Prize will award $50,000 for a single poem in any style and in any English dialect. We will also produce an annual global poetry anthology – something curiously missing from our cultural environment.

To reflect its global perspective, the Montreal Prize has assembled an editorial board of accomplished poets from Australia, Canada, England, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Malawi, Nigeria, Northern Ireland and the US. These poets will select 50 poems for the competition’s shortlist, which will be published in a unique global poetry anthology, representing the very latest work from around the world. From these finalists, Andrew Motion will select the winner of the prize, to be announced after the anthology is published.

You can find out more about us at http://www.montrealprize.com, and you can read about it here at the Huffington Post and here at Poets & Writers.

The early entry deadline for the competition is April 22. The final entry deadline is July 8.

If you have any questions about the Montreal Prize,  contact lenepp@montrealprize.comy.

Yet sometimes, it can feel as if the cycle of applying for these grants and fellowships is endless.  That’s where this comic comes in:

For those of you waiting to hear back from your summer grant application process, good luck!

If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc.  idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu.  If I use your idea I will give you credit here.

The papers presented are of the sorts that really force the historian to think and rethink about what exactly s/he is doing when doing history, and that can only be a positive thing. As Professor Jörn Leonhard noted at the opening of the proceedings, the existence of historical time is perhaps the one thing all historians agree upon.  Yet, at the same time, they rarely historicize time.   

Freiburg Münster (Wikimedia Commons)

The keynote lecture on ‘Globalization and Time’ was presented last night by Professor Lynn Hunt of UCLA. It is possible to draw attention here only to some of what Professor Hunt had to say.

She began by drawing attention to the fact that globalization, an ‘elastic term’, has only recently been discovered by most historians. She was able to demonstrate this point in a stark manner by referring to the use of the word ‘globalization’ in book titles, as recorded on Worldcat®. Before 1980, it hardly featured at all. Needless to say, it has been rather more prominent since then. Hunt suggested that this may have something to do with the fall of communism and with the prevalence of the untestable assumption that there is no available alternative to capitalism.

This lecture was packed with marvellous insights. We were taken on a tour through the Julian and Gregorian calendars to the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884, and on to the various efforts to introduce calendar decoupled from the birth of Jesus. The potential consequences of the fact that most students now prefer to study twentieth-century history at the expense of earlier periods were touched upon too. Hunt also linked this development to the manner in which the discipline of history has begun to follow the sciences in their search for constant innovation and the ‘new’. At the other end of the time scale, ‘deep history’ throws up a range of further issues.

This ranging from questions of recent history to those of deep history brought us to the question of modernity, and ways in which the concept of the ‘modern’ can foster a teleological view of history. Hunt insisted that modernity ought to be seen as a provisional location, where some are, rather than where others are headed.  

The clear message emerging from this lecture, and from the rest of the conference so far, is that we need to think more about time. It is hard to argue with that.

Everyone here is feeling the strain, and straining for the relief that the end of term promises. The winter has been unseasonably cold and long in Saskatoon. Many of us are looking forward to research trips abroad. And of course, grading responsibilities and other duties tend to hit hardest at the end of the term.

University of Saskatchewan's Thorvaldson Building (Wikimedia Commons)

Reflecting on the year behind me though, I’ve gained so much at the University of Saskatchewan. I’m surrounded by generously supportive colleagues who have never wavered in helping me adjust to the unfamiliar life of a junior scholar. I can’t speak highly enough of our Chair, support staff, History Department faculty and grad students, and my fellow postdocs, all of whom have welcomed me and answered innumerable questions and requests with poise and kindness. My postdoc supervisor, a kind and gentle elder scholar, has become a mentor and friend. And with their collective help I’ve gained professional experience, credibility, increased my publishing output, and laid the foundations for a potential future in academia. I owe them more than I can express, and this blog post is in part a thank-you.

But this year has also been a challenge, and I definitely feel I’ve needed the entire year to settle in to Saskatoon. When I arrived I looked forward to having the best of both worlds as a postdoc: I could interact with the faculty while still relating to the graduate students. In reality, it wasn’t so simple, and the postdoc doesn’t immediately fit in either group. That’s the part you have to learn on the ground. A postdoc is (at least at first) a solitary experience. It takes a painfully long time to build up relationships and connections in a new department when you’re neither student nor professor. I’ve felt completely welcomed in my department from the first day, but it really is only in the last month or two that I have really felt a part of the department.

Teaching plays a big role in building relationships and sustaining that feeling of being part of something. My own work and research is largely independent, but teaching is a collaborative exercise. I’ve welcomed the advice of current profs, discussed teaching strategies with grad students, and simply been in the department more as an instructor. Without teaching this term, I might be further along in my research and revisions, but I’d also be more dislocated and detached from any intellectual or other community at the university.

A postdoc, however, really is the most incredible opportunity, particularly these days as competition for professional positions in academia becomes ever more fierce. But future employment aside, a postdoc is also an amazing opportunity to evaluate your own goals and values. How does academia look from the inside when you’re no longer a student? How does it feel to be at the front of the class with no safety net or anyone to defer to?

The smartest things the organizers of my current postdoc did was to make it two years long. If it were ending now, I’d feel as if the rug were being pulled out from under me just as I was gaining balance. I’m incredibly fortunate, having built these connections and friendships, professional skills and intellectual output, still to have a second year to continue forward. So, here’s to A Postdoc’s Life, Year II !

(To be continued…)

Radio history, like television history, is difficult to get right and is rarely satisfactory for the specialist. But specialists need to remember that these programmes are not particularly designed for them, and that for the duration they ought perhaps to exchange their shoes or shades for those worn by the ‘ordinary’ public.

Oliver Cromwell (Wikimedia Commons)

Dr Patrick Geoghegan’s   Talking History  on Newstalk is one of several history-focused programmes regularly broadcast nationwide in Ireland. Topics of discussion in recent weeks have included the Battle of Waterloo, Mark Anthony, the American Civil War and George Bernard Shaw. On 14 March, the programme took the form of a debate about Cromwell in Ireland, focusing on his nine-month campaign in Ireland in 1649-50 and its legacy.

The panel was impressive: Micheál O Siochrú of Trinity College Dublin; John Morrill of Cambridge University; Eamonn O Ciardha of the University of Ulster; and Senator Joe O’Toole. O Siochrú and Morrill in particular have published widely on the subject of Cromwell, while O Ciardha’s knowledge of the Irish language sources in particular never fails to fascinate.

If anything, fifty minutes was not enough to allow each of them to tease out the points they had to make. A good deal of time was devoted to background and context, which can hardly be done without.  Yet the areas of disagreement, inevitably the most interesting aspect, lay in the finer detail. For example, Morrill and O Siochrú diverged on the point of how much blame Cromwell ought to take for what occurred in Ireland in the decade after 1649; massacre; famine; confiscation; plantation; transplantation; and transportation to the colonies. O Ciardha’s point that Cromwell was viewed by Irish contemporaries as just one of a number of English rogues is surely relevant here. A blog post is not the place to tease out these detailed points either; you can find some of my own views on the matter here.

O’Toole’s contribution was certainly the most colourful. He labelled the massacre at Drogheda in September 1649 as ‘our 9/11’, described Cromwell as ‘an absolute racist’ guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing and drew attention to the enslavement of Irish women and children in the 1650s. This traditional reading has a good deal of truth to it, but it has been considerably refined and nuanced in recent decades by historians such as O Siochrú and Morrill.

In sum then, the show certainly highlighted something of the continuing gulf between scholarly research and the popular understanding of Cromwell in Ireland. Thanks to the efforts of O Siochrú in particular, this gulf is not now as wide as it was even ten years ago. This reality was reflected in the content of the listeners’ texts with which Geoghegan peppered his commentary. Although Seán in Wexford insisted that Cromwell was a war criminal, another listener called for Irish people to recognise Cromwell’s ‘intellectual strengths’. While Mairéad in Dublin labelled Cromwell ‘a psycho equal to Hitler’, Richard in Cork felt that ‘we could do with his likes now to knock the country into shape’.

I hope, for Ireland’s sake, that Richard does not have any political or military ambitions!

Communicating about Communication: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Educating Educators about Language Variation (pages 245–257)
Christine Mallinson and Anne H. Charity Hudley

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(99K) | References

Beyond ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’: Breaking Down Binary Oppositions in Holocaust Representations of ‘Privileged’ Jews (pages 407–418)
Adam Brown

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(92K) | References

Language and Communication in the Spanish Conquest of America (pages 491–502)
Daniel Wasserman Soler

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(87K) | References

Equal Representation of Time and Space: Arno Peters’ Universal History (pages 718–729)
Stefan Müller

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(168K) | References

Recycling Modernity: Waste and Environmental History
Tim Cooper

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(86K) | References

A Hybrid Model of Moral Panics: Synthesizing the Theory and Practice of Moral Panic Research (pages 295–309)
Brian V. Klocke and Glenn W. Muschert

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(105K) | References

Borderlands Studies and Border Theory: Linking Activism and Scholarship for Social Justice (pages 505–518)
Nancy A. Naples

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(101K) | References
Cultural Sociology and Other Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity in the Cultural Sciences (pages 169–179)
Diana Crane

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(90K) | References

Fertility and Inequality Across Borders: Assisted Reproductive Technology and Globalization (pages 466–475)
Eileen Smith-Cavros

Abstract | Full Article (HTML) | PDF(80K) | References

By Victoria Nesfield,

The European Society for the Study of English held its tenth international conference in Turin, Italy in August. The biennial conference, now in its twentieth year selects a different European city for each conference; ESSE-10 was the first time Italy has hosted the conference. With 800 delegates in attendance of 44 nationalities, ESSE-10 was an exciting meeting ground for academics worldwide whose research interests lie in literature, linguistics and the study of the English language.

Three Plenary Lectures were delivered, by Timothy Webb, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Bristol, who spoke on ‘Editing Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography’; Catherine Belsey, Research Professor in English at Swansea University who presented on ‘Gendered Revenants’; and Maurizio Gotti, Professor of English Language and Translation at Universita di Bergamo, who delivered a lecture on ‘Building and Breaking Discursive Conventions in Academic Writing.’ 12 lectures nominated by National Associations and 12 round table discussions took place, along with nine poster presentations. The most substantial section of the conference was a series of 75 seminars covering a range of topics from Shakespearean and Elizabethan era works, to 21^st century literature, across themes as diverse as politics, historical testimony and science fiction, and covering a variety of modes of literary theory. Linguistic themes covered by the seminars, round tables and lectures included discussions on translation, teaching English, semantics, legal language and inter-cultural studies. Across a diverse and broad spectrum of literature and language themed discussions, several themes emerged as ‘conferences within conferences’, notably the array of Shakespeare discussions, legal language seminars, the relationship between Scotland and Italy in literary studies, and a significant theme of cultural studies.

The scale of the conference, along with the number of delegates made the orchestration and organisation a grand task, but the registration process was a well-run system. The maps, schedules and information packs, provided in blue satchels made delegates instantly recognisable all over Turin for the week of the conference, and gave the city an extra buzz of excitement and sense of participation for those involved. A conference of this size was bound to be accompanied by the obligatory technical hitches and delays, and it was. The seminars however, are designed to be informal events structured to generate debates and questions, and a few power-point issues did not hinder the discussions and the opportunities to network. The biggest logistical issue ESSE was forced to negotiate was the University layout, with the several campus buildings spread out across the city centre. It is unfortunate that the beautiful 18^th century Rectorate building could not have been used to accommodate more events, with the publishers’ book shops being housed in a separate campus to the opening day registration and evening reception in the Rectorate, and the welcome address in a third building. The distance between the buildings may have inhibited higher attendance at various seminars, lectures and round tables, but with the necessary room numbers and the building constraints, the University of Turin did it’s best to accommodate, with a large number of student guides on hand and organised bus transport between campuses throughout the conference. With seminars and discussions on a huge array of themes and subjects across the study of English literature and language, ESSE caters for a large academic area, and ESSE-10 provided an excellent opportunity to meet peers and engage with a vast and exciting academic field.

ESSE-11 will be held on the 4^th – 8^th September 2012, hosted by Istanbul, Turkey. The European Journal of English Studies (EJES) is published by ESSE in cooperation with Routledge.

ESSE website: http://www.essenglish.org/

There is, to reprise Avital Ronell, no off switch for the ‘post-human’. The call is always (for) you. It leaves you ringing.
—Julian Yates, “It’s (for) You; Or, the Tele-T/r/opical Post-human” (forthcoming in the inaugural issue of postmedieval)

I have been spending my holiday break in the final copy-editing throes for the inaugural issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, slated for publication in April 2010, “When Did We Become Post/human?” My co-editor, Craig Dionne, and I decided to try something a little different here and asked contributors to write, not full-length, heavily footnoted scholarly articles, or even full-blown essays, but rather, to engage in short [3,000 or so words] riffs and ruminations on:

a) the possible productive intersections (of any type) between studies in earlier historical periods and ongoing discourses on the posthuman and posthumanism in the contemporary humanities and sciences;

b) how certain discourses of the pre- and early modern historical periods might problematize the assumptions of a posthumanism that considers itself to be either thoroughly modern or somehow outside of history;

c) the ways in which the history and culture of pre- and early modernity help us to address and perhaps adjudicate some of the troubling questions raised by contemporary discourses on the posthuman relative to issues of embodiment, subjectivity, cognition, sociality, free will, sexuality, spirituality, self-determination, expression, representation, well-being, ethics, moral responsibility, human and other rights, governance, technology, and the like.

For a while now, most discourses on the post/human and post/humanism have been undertaken by scholars in the humanities working in the most contemporary literary and other periods [Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, Bruno Latour, Judith Halberstam, Donna Haraway, etc.] or by scientists working at the leading edge of biological, chemical, computing, and other research fields who often view the humanities in general as not adequate to the task of determining the future of the human. It is not that history is viewed as irrelevant to the question of the post/human, so much as it is seen as being somehow unprepared for the question, because the world is viewed, by some, as having changed, thanks to various technological and other innovations, to such a fundamental extent, that wholly new modes of thought and even ethical practice, are required. It is our hope, with this issue, to demonstrate that scholars working in what might be termed premodern periods [medievalists, but also early modernists] have much expertise to bring to bear upon the question of the post/human, in both its material and theoretical manifestations, and also in its implications for a future that could never be entirely free of a past that, in some ways, was more capacious and theoretically provocative in its post/humanisms and post/humanist thought than we generally allow. It is my [even greater] hope that this issue will also highlight the important value of premodern studies in the (new) spaces of deliberation over the future roles the humanities might play in what is likely still to be the all-too-human yet also post/human future. In addition to the 31 contributions from scholars working in medieval and early modern studies, there will also be 4 responses from Katherine Hayles, Kate Soper, Andy Mousley, and Noreen Giffney.

I will leave you here with some snippets from the essays in our inaugural issue, in order to hopefully encourage you to read the whole shebang when it finally arrives in its entirety. I should add here, first, that the inaugural issue will be entirely available and free online, and that four full essays [by Jeffrey J. Cohen, Karmen Mackendrick, Julie Singer, and Scott Maisano] will soon be available for free as a preview of the issue. And if you follow postmedieval on Twitter, you will receive issue updates and links to all of these.

SNIPPET PREVIEW — postmedieval, “When Did We Become Post/human?” (Vol. 1, Issue 1: April 2010):

Refigured by the call of the ‘post-human’, I argue that we find ourselves reterritorialized in questions of form, rhetoric, genre, and translation, understood now as ways of moving, ferrying, or shifting things (persons, concepts, plants, animals) between and among different spheres of reference. When, for example, Latour issues the call for new ‘speech impedimenta’ (Latour, 2004, 62-64) or ways of speaking, Stengers studies modes of scientific authorship (Stengers, 1997), Hayles surveys modes of embodiment or the poetics of electronic literature (Hayles, 2008), or Haraway asks us to think about the mediatizing of entities by way of critter-cams, duct tape, or agility sports for the dog/person companion species (Haraway, 2001; 2008), we are being invited to try out new rhetorical and technical means by which to transform noise into news of an other. Taking the tele-t/r/opical call of the ‘post-human’ means, for us, I think, being prepared to understand our expertise in these terms, and so configuring the textual traces named ‘past’ as an archive or contact zone which may offer occluded or discarded ways of being. —Julian Yates, “It’s (for) You; Or, the Tele-T/r/opical Post-human”

The notion that we have always been natural-born cyborgs has important consequences for cultural historians. What is now often called posthumanism (together with the related viewpoint known as transhumanism), and which is predominantly — often sensationally — associated with the new forms of bioengineering that seamlessly integrate humans and intelligent machines, is not therefore an apocalyptic break with previous ideas of ‘the human’, but part of a continuum that encompasses the entire history of ‘the human’. Think of this temporal recalibration as one way of slashing the post/human: in this schema, the ‘post’ is simultaneously present, future and past, and the past is correspondingly folded into the ‘post’ — and the ‘human’ is decisively relocated as an entity distinct from the Enlightenment ideal of ‘Man’, though not perhaps in the ways in which Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe imagine that relocation (Haraway, 1990; Wolfe, 1995). For we are talking here less about the forms of hybridization that Haraway invokes (organism/machine, human/animal, physical/non-physical) or about Wolfe’s quite proper concerns about ‘what kinds of couplings across the humanist divide are possible’ (Wolfe, 1995, 66) than about rethinking the architecture of the mind as it engages with an external environment. Because cultural historians shy away from the idea that anything is ‘natural-born’, it’s important to appreciate that Clark’s model is anything but a recuperation of the universal, liberal humanist subject: it fully recognizes historically-contingent forms of ‘mindware’ upgrading. The task for a newly reconfigured cultural studies is to explore these forms — and to ask, given the bias amongst some scientists and ‘third culture’ thinkers against history, what history might add to our understanding of embedded cognition. —Ruth Evans, “Our Cyborg Past: Medieval Artificial Memory as Mindware Upgrade”

[Katherine Hayles’s] How We Became Posthuman matches its rhetoric to its argument by highlighting anxiety in its cybernetic subjects as we face the prospect of disembodied humanity. Medievalists should be sympathetic since embodiment is key to the conception of full medieval personhood. Hayles reacted against a new desire to loosen the link of person to body and much speculative thinking continues to push in this direction. As contemporary science fiction shows, we can conceive a variety of technological advances that might allow intelligence to exist electronically and humans to become increasingly independent of their bodies. While some form of materiality and localized perspective seem necessary, in the future a person will be identified less by materiality or information than by understanding. The ability to recognize a being as a durable, comprehensible interlocutor will be the litmus test of the posthuman being. —David Gary Shaw, “Embodiment and the Human from Dante through Tomorrow”

Katherine Hayles’s more recent work poses the question of pre/present/post- humanness as such: How does the body know time? (Hayles, 2008). This is an inquiry applicable in so many senses to our rapidly evolving moment as we click through, log on, and interface (emphasis here on our tendency still to privilege new modes of media as space/place, not time). But it is also a question that re-frames the question of what time can mean — in time and as time. And here we may have something timely, something new. Is it possible that critical conversations surrounding the field of new media provide new affordances for an affective reading of time as embodiment? Can these registers of affective mediation speak to what potential we might conjure in doing history? As such, how does the body know time? How does time know the body? —Jen Boyle, “Biomedia in the Time of Animation”

In this article for the inaugural issue of a new journal that strives to develop a present-minded medieval studies, I want to experiment with the pleasure of trying to let what is arguably the newest of academic fields (the first issue of the new journal Transgender Studies Quarterly will come out later than the first issue of postmedieval) speak to one of the oldest. By finding its single moment of transgendered content in William Langland’s late fourteenth-century allegory Piers Plowman, this article cannot claim to find an ancestry for contemporary transsexuals. At best, it can gesture, with the rest of this journal, towards the multiple intersecting temporalities able to co-exist and, contingently, to meet, when medievalists keep both past and present in their heads at the same time. In doing so, I hope to pass some spark of excitement between that which is marginal because long dead and gone, and that which is marginal because subject to incomprehension and oppression. The term ‘transgendered’, like the term ‘queer’, is a term conceived broadly enough to potentially include medieval people: a certain percentage of persons who describe themselves with this term live either in-between genders or in some other complex relationship with the binary of male and female. As consequence, the term ‘transgender’ has an ambivalent relationship to twenty-first-century medical technology and is more open to appropriation by and about those not entirely interpellated by its power, including, potentially, medieval people. The drawback of such an appropriation, as with that of the term ‘queer’ is that it’s an easy label that can be diluted to the point of meaninglessness, a caution that shadows my every utterance. —Masha Raskolnikov, “Transgendering Pride”

However irregularly, intermittently, or incompletely, contemporary dramatic performance increasingly refuses to be cast as print’s ‘other’. The signifying forms of writing often seem less to direct the ‘languages of the stage’ than to provide one channel, and often not the dominant channel, of the discourse of theatrical performance. Theatre illustrates N. Katherine Hayles’ critique of the epistemology of ‘information’; rather than taking the stage for the site of the mere reproduction of the text’s ‘information’ — as though the text inscribed ‘information’ as ‘a free-floating, decontextualized, quantifiable entitity’ (Hayles, 1999, 59) — contemporary performance openly treats dramatic writing as an instrument that will be changed in the information it conveys by the means of its performance. Of course, to consider Shakespeare performance in this way raises the question of whether it is — or ought to be — conceived as a specific genre, in which performance properly works to decant textual ‘information’ by other means. This is, conventionally, the humanist, ‘stage-centered’ vision of Shakespeare performance, and of dramatic theatre more widely; it is, incidentally, a vision of dramatic performance often shared — though differently valued — in performance studies, too. What’s striking is how laminated this understanding is to a narrow understanding of the uses of print, and of the terms of literary value and the practices of hegemony associated with print culture. For regardless of whether or not Shakespeare ‘invented the human’, the technologies of being human — definitively, the technologies of writing, but also the conventions of acting, the framing practices of theatrical production — are now quite differently disposed, and instrumentalize the constitution and performance of the subject in different ways. —W.B. Worthen, “Posthuman Shakespeare Performance Studies”

From now on, the site can be found at http://contexts.org/sociologylens/.  Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

Users logged into Facebook this week to find various messages from the company telling them of changes in the way they will share their information. While the company frames all of this as putting users in “control” of their own data, it strikes me that this is more about empowering the company than the users. Users are given more opportunity to share more information with more people, creating more of the data that Facebook profits from.

Whether you care if Facebook profits from all of this or not, it is important to identify the rhetorical strategy: to accumulate more data that Facebook ultimately controls and owns by telling its users that they are increasingly in control.

As CEO Mark Zuckerberg states that you have more control of your data, he is simultaneously allowing you to share more by changing the defaults that users rarely deviate from. Now more information such as as your name, profile picture, gender, networks, friend list, and any pages you are a fan of are publicly available to anyone on the Internet rather than just with your friends. See: Facebook’s Privacy Upgrade Recommends I Be Less Private. Further, Zuckerberg is not mentioning that he still owns this data and is poised to profit from it.

Unlike other posts on this topic, this is not an argument that Facebook dupes us into sharing too much. The mass exhibitionism and voyeurism in our current moment runs much too deep –often contrary to capitalist goals. Instead, one should simply read Facebook’s insidious message of “empowerment” with a skeptical eye.

Finally, we can describe this strategy as an outcome of the new more weightless prosumer capitalism. Prosumer because we simultaneously consume and produce nearly all of the content on Facebook. Weightless (as I’ve previously argued for, using Bauman’s terms) because we-the-laborers are unpaid and are given the product for free. Thus, capitalism is hardly distinguishable as such, increasingly hidden by the rhetoric of user-empowerment. Facebook is letting our mass exhibitionism spread, lubricating social interactions as well as they can, and cashing in on the data we supposedly “control”. ~nathan

The New Facebook Privacy Settings: A How-To

Secrecy and New Religious Movements: Concealment, Surveillance, and Privacy in a New Age of Information

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Notions of authenticity and modernity are often challenged by indigenous groups.  The Ya’kuana and the Sanema of Venezuela (see article below) use microphones to record birdsongs, the Yanomami of Brazil have learned how to use video equipment to document their own cultural traditions and ceremonies, and the Runakuna of the Peruvian Highlands adopt Western urban clothing in their ventures into the cities.  Often with indigenous groups there is an underlying current of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the Other.  The traditions, languages, clothing, and religions associated with indigenous groups are held to standards of authenticity and purity that surpass reality.  There are critics both within and outside of indigenous groups that claim that the use of such technology or the adoption of non-indigenous clothing are signs of inauthenticity.  These issues raise serious questions about when, where, and why and how we hold others to such strict measures.  Further, what does it mean to be authentic and perhaps most importantly, why are technological advancements off-limits to particular populations?

Such a process of Othering reveals a deep pattern of Othering, a discriminatory symbolic dimension over the use and ownership of modernity and of the articulation of an identity.

NY Times, “Clinging to the Forest Despite Chaos”

Edward Said in the Blackwell Dictionary of Culture and Critical Theory

Despite last week’s promising government figures showing a decline in the American unemployment rate, “Welfare and Citizenship: The Effects of Government Assistance on Young Adults’ Civic Participation,” serves as a reminder to social scientists that with every great social shift (such as the global economic downturn) we must re-examine our premises. The article, which relies heavily on data collected between 1996 and 2000, argues that declining civic participation can be causally linked to welfare participation. The authors echoed the concern that, “[d]eclinging voter turnout rates, an increase in single-issue, self-interested politics, and a retreat from associational ties and community involvement, among other trends, have signaled to many the weakening of American democracy.” This decline, they postulate, can be attributed, in part, to social assistance programs that bear stigma.

The article differentiates two tiers of state benefit programs. The first tier, “including social insurance benefits such as unemployment insurance, social security, and Medicare,” are thought to be universal entitlements with little or no stigma attached. The second tier, “including welfare and other supports for the poor such as general assistance and food stamps” are discretionary- causing the full citizenship of recipients to be called into question. The article hypothesizes that, despite the best intentions of scholars such as Marshall and Tocqueville, the “contemporary welfare state reduces active citizenship,” resulting in “lower political engagement among those who have participated in government assistance… [with] stronger effects among those receiving more stigmatizing welfare benefits (eg AFDC, food stamps) but weaker or no effects for those who receive less stigmatizing ‘first tier’ forms of government assistance.”

While the article recognizes the work of other theorists who attribute this low voter turnout to pre-existing characteristics already associated with low voter turnout including poverty, education, and age, the article maintains that the resulting disaffection is related to social stigma and the self-perception of only quasi citizenship. The authors cite Habermas’ argument that, “contemporary states managed by large bureaucratic apparatuses and dense laws may actually promote passive client citizenship.” The article concludes that in addition to designing social assistance programs that promote more active citizenship, policy makers must design a social assistance program that can overcome the more stigmatizing attributes of schemes like that of the food stamp program.

It will not be social policy, however, that makes the first step to overcoming the stigma of welfare programs. The New York Times published a feature on November 29 that took an in depth look at the social safety net in the past year. According to the report, food stamp use is currently at a record high. More than 36 million people are participating in the program; one in eight Americans and one in four children. This growing group is not comprised solely of single mothers and the chronically poor but also married couples, the newly jobless and workers whose hours have been significantly reduced.

While the number of those receiving assistance is on the rise, still only-two thirds of those eligible participate. According to Kevin Cancannon, an under secretary of agriculture, “This is the most urgent time for our feeding programs in our lifetime, with the exception of the Depression. It’s time for us to face up to the fact that in this country of plenty, there are hungry people.” The article also demonstrates that much of stigma surrounding “second tier” welfare programs is perpetuated by politicians and government representatives. In the 1990s, when some sought to abolish the food stamp program or “nutritional aid,” “Congress enacted large cuts and bureaucratic hurdles.” The same bureaucratic hurdles that Habermas warned would encourage passive citizenship.

The Times article explains that in cities and counties across the States, “old disdain for the program has collided with new needs” and “use has grown by half or more in dozens of suburban counties from Boston to Seattle, including such bulwarks of modern conservatism as California’s Orange County, where the rolls are up more than 50 percent.” It seems that the face of the welfare recipient is changing rapidly and drastically as millions of Americans find themselves in unanticipated hardship. This shift leads one to wonder if, as recovery continues and recipient rolls begin to decline again, this lapse in harsh stigma will be more than temporary. If nothing else it provides a window for the program’s proponents to create reform, including encouraging civic participation, without quite as thick cloud of doubt and disdain.

Read the article in the New York Times

Read “Welfare and Citizenship: The Effects of Government Assistance on Young Adults’ Civic Participation” by Teresa Toguchi Swartz, Amy Blackstone, Christopher Uggen and Heather McLaughlin

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is taking place in Copenhagen from December 7^th to 18^th. Prior to the start of the conference, members of an action group, Stop Climate Chaos, organized demonstrations encouraging world leaders to advance a world climate change agreement. Around the world, people participated in these demonstrations including 40,000 people in London, 7,000 people in Glasgow, and many more in Belfast. Members of another action group, Camp for Climate Change, organized a 48-hour-long protest in Trafalgar Square in London. Protesters explained that they wanted to illuminate the influence of the “political and economic system” on climate change. At these protests, people declared several demands, one of which called for core nations to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown contended that the majority of people believed scientific evidence for human-made global warming. He hoped that world leaders at the conference would be able to convince skeptics: “There’s a flat earth group over the evidence, if I may say so, that exists about climate change, and we’ve got to show them that the scientific evidence is strong.” He also explained: “The public need to be angry about the extent to which we have not taken action sufficiently as a world until now, and they’ve got to then see that the first climate change agreement is not only necessary, it’s absolutely essential.”

Schofer and Hironaka (2005) determined that the institutionalization of the world environmental regime corresponds to lower levels of global environmental degradation. At the conference, world leaders may create a world climate change agreement. This world policy may influence national governments by passing down scripts. This increased penetration coupled with increased structure and persistence of environmental institutions has the potential to reduce environmental degradation and combat climate change.

Reference

Schofer, Evan and Ann Hironaka. 2005. “The Effects of World Society on Environmental Outcomes.” Social Forces 84:25-47.

Read More

“Emerging Trends in Environmental Sociology” By Frederick H. Buttel and August Gijswijt

Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland

(Note: The Following comments were prepared for a symposium sponsored by the Center on Religion and Culture, September 15, 2009.)

Let me begin by quarreling with the title of this discussion. I think it is certainly a good idea to focus on consumption because: (1) of its enormous importance in the developed world; (2) it is not going away even with the current recession; and (3) it reflects a willingness to move beyond our traditional, and now outdated, focus on production. However, a discussion of consumption in the U.S. cannot be divorced from issues relating to production, including the decline in the U.S. and the rise elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, in production. Further, we need to realize than an artificial distinction is being made between consumption and production. These two processes have always been combined in the process of prosumption and that phenomenon has increased greatly in recent years with the growth of systems (e.g., fast food restaurants, ATMs) that rely on putting consumers to work (producing) and, most importantly on the Internet, especially Web 2.0 sites (e.g. Facebook, Wikipedia, blogs) where the consumer is also the producer of the content on those sites (vs. Web 1.0 sites such as Yahoo where the content is created by the producer).

I would also quarrel with a focus on America in a global age in which nation-states, including the U.S., are of declining importance. This is true in the realm of consumption in the sense that what is consumed in the U.S. cannot be separated from what is produced elsewhere in the world (especially China), as well as what is not being consumed by many (“the bottom billion”) in many parts of the world. Hyperconsumption in the U.S. (and other countries such as Great Britain where the level of consumer debt is higher than in the U.S.) and its relationship to under-consumption in the less developed world is a global issue and needs to be discussed in that context.

Then there is the question: What have we done to ourselves? What do we mean by ourselves? It could be Americans in general, but that is too broad a category since most of the upper class has not hurt itself, or suffered very much (Bernie Madoff and many of his clients are exceptions) and many in the lower class cannot be seen as playing a large enough role in consumer society to be hurt by its decline (although they have been hurt, and hurt the most, by the larger economic decline). Thus, the implication of this is that the main focus in this should be on the consumption of the vast American middle class (itself far too broad a category). However, to focus on the middle class, to blame it for its current predicament (high levels of consumption, indebtedness, foreclosure, etc.) is in many ways to “blame the victims”. In saying this, I am not saying the middle class is innocent; that it didn’t play a significant role in creating its own economic problems (greed manifested in too much consumption and debt; naivete about the problems they were creating for themselves). However, we need to look to the larger global and national forces that contributed mightily to the problems of the middle class (and to those of the U.S. in general). Let me enumerate at least some of them:

1-Cheap products.

a-For decades the US market has been inundated with cheap products (e.g. shiny electronic gadgets from Asia) that are often far more expensive in their countries of origin. These have proven hard, even foolish, to resist. As many have demonstrated, most recently Ellen Shell (2009) in Cheap, there is a high cost to low price (an idea most often associated with Wal-Mart) and one of those costs is its role in spurring hyperconsumption.

b- Then there is the seemingly low priced (but nonetheless highly profitable) industrial food that increasingly dominates our supermarket shelves and lies at the heart of the success of fast food restaurants, as well as higher-end restaurant chains. Inexpensive industrial food also has the same high costs, as well as its devastating effect on the health of consumers (obesity, diabetes, especially in children).

2-Easy, even fraudulent, credit. Given the events leading up to the Great Recession, I needn’t belabor the excesses and abuses of the mortgage and credit (and debit) card companies which lured millions of American consumers into high levels of debt for which they should never have qualified and that they had no way of ever repaying.

3-The billions, probably trillions, of dollars all invested by all sorts of companies have to make products alluring, even impossible to resist. Marketing and advertising are the obvious villains (see the TV series, “Mad Men”) here, but then there are those who build our spectacular contemporary “cathedrals of consumption” (Las Vegas casino-hotels, Disney World, cruise ships [the new Royal Caribbean Oasis of the Seas which can accommodate 6,000 passengers], mega-malls [e.g. the problem-plagued Xanadu in the Meadowlands across the river from New York City]) in order to lure consumers to them and then structure them in such a way that consumers are led, usually unwittingly, in the direction of hyperconsumption.

4-We must not forget the role played by the US government (and others) in inducing Americans, especially those in the middle class, to consume.

a-Long-running tax breaks such as deductions for mortgage payments (interest, taxes) that help fuel home-building and -buying.

b-Post 9/11 pronouncements by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and President George Bush that we needed to get out and shop (and Robert Reich’s response asking when it had become our public duty to consume -of course, it had and that responsibility continues).

c-Pronouncements and policies after the onset of the Great Recession and to this day including:
-Stimulus packages, 2008 tax rebates, as well as fears about the latter that people would save the money and not spend it on consumption
-Worry over the continuing unwillingness to consume and the increase in the savings rate (after decades worrying about our minuscule savings rate)
-Cash for clunkers; $8,000 rebates for first time home buyers, etc.

d-Fundamental contradiction: the government abhors, critiques the causes of the Great Recession (at least publicly)- especially hyperconsumption, hyperdebt- but it cannot countenance a smaller economy, lower growth, lower tax revenues, etc. The government feels the need to stimulate the economy in general, and consumption in particular, leading to at least the eventual possibility of renewed hyperconsumption, hyperdebt.

a-Return to an agricultural age? Not likely for many reasons- not enough money, profit in it; not enough jobs in an era of industrial agriculture.

b-Return to an industrial age? Not likely since most of our once-successful “smokestack industries” are dead or dying; they are too expensive to rebuild; other parts of the world have huge leads in these industries, especially technologically; we would need to pay our “new” industrial workers wages that approach those in the less developed world; etc.

c-(Return to) the age of services? Services are still important, but declining in at least some areas in the US (e.g. call centers, radiology) as a result of outsourcing; also traceable to recent declines in consumption since many service jobs (“McJobs”) related to consumption.

d-Lack of alternatives above brings us back to consumption (70% of US economy; importance of Consumer Confidence Index [CCI] vs. Producer Price Index [CCI]; from GM to Wal-Mart, Nike) as route to economic success in the U.S. (other alternatives? alternative energy; Green products, processes):

1-Can we buy enough consumer-related services from one another to make for a prosperous economy?

2-Is our economy really helped by buying more cheap (sometimes dangerous, unhealthy) products from China, etc?

3-Can we, or any economy, consume ourselves to affluence? It now seems clear that pre-2007 many mainly consumed themselves into the illusion of affluence.

A Likely Future Scenario:

a- Our global economic position after WW II (advantages in production) and after 1970- or 1950s and the “Consumer Republic”(advantages in consumption; rise of consumer society) were both unsustainable

b-The US will need to adapt to a relatively smaller economy (lower wages; less hyper-, conspicuous-, consumption)

c-A global redistribution of wealth (OPEC, China, India, Brazil, etc.) is underway

d-Greater global economic equality is welcome (easy for me to say), although new inequalities are arising (e.g., oil-producing states)

Hope?

a-Creative Destruction- something new to arise on the base of the wreckage (empty auto factories, strip malls, big-box stores) of production and consumption in the U.S.

b-Comparative advantages in the US- creativity, ingenuity, innovative use of compressions of space and time, increases in speed,

Will We See a Change in Values (e.g. hyperconsumption, hyperdebt)?

There are positive movements in the direction of a change in values (voluntary simplicity, Slow Food), but I’m never optimistic about values changing on their own, especially in consumption which arguably became our “religion” (with its “cathedrals of consumption”). However, to the degree that they are forced to change, they are more likely to change as a result of larger structural changes. They will change as a result of the structural changes discussed here (e.g. global redistribution of wealth), but those with vested interests in hyper-consumption, -debt (the U.S. government, producers, consumers, banks) will oppose such changes (and who, what is strong enough to oppose successfully such a confluence of powerful actors?).

George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.  He has chaired the American Sociological Association’s Section on Theoretical Sociology, as well as the Section on Organizations and Occupations, and is the first Chair of the section-in-formation on Global and Transnational Sociology. His books include The McDonaldization of Society (5th ed., 2008), Enchanting a Disenchanted World (2nd ed. 2005), and The Globalization of Nothing 2 (2nd ed., 2007). His most recent book is Globalization: A Basic Text (Blackwell, 2010). He is currently working on The Outsourcing of Everything (with Craig Lair, Oxford, forthcoming). He was founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. His books have been translated into over twenty languages, with over a dozen translations of The McDonaldization of Society alone.

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Following the recent sad news of the death of 4 year old John Paul Massey, after he had been attacked by his uncle’s American bull mastiff, media attention has refocused on the ownership of ‘dangerous’ dogs. As part of the BBC ‘Pledge Watch’ series of articles, Justin Parkinson has taken the opportunity to revisit the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991.

Following a spate of dog attacks on children in the early 1990s, media coverage focused on various breeds of dogs as symptomatic of Britain’s growing levels of aggression. One particular case – the fatal canine attack on Rukhsana Khan – led to the creation of emergency legislation, supported by the Conservative government and the labour opposition. The Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 banned the import of four types of dog, as well as allowing for those dogs deemed dangerous to be subject to a compulsory destruction orders. The legislation also made the wearing of muzzles when for certain types of dog.

Despite allegations that ‘the Dangerous Dogs Act is among the worst pieces of legislation ever seen, a poorly thought-out knee-jerk reaction to tabloid headlines that was rushed through Parliament without proper scrutiny’ it is seen by many as necessary. With recent NHS statistics suggesting that dog attacks are on the increase, it would seem that this particular act is not able to tackle the problem. It would seem that for the foreseeable future, certain types of dogs will continue to be ‘folk devils.’

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Chas Critcher on Moral Panic Analysis: Past Present and Future

In a recent article from The Nation, heavyweight media scholars John Nichols and Robert McChesney remind readers that the current crisis in American journalism does not necessarily mean that the industry is fated to fail. Rather, Nichols and McChesney optimistically open the article with the news that the Federal Trade Commission is planning to hold (they are holding it right now) a hearing to “assess the radical downsizing and outright elimination of newspaper newsrooms and to consider public-policy measures that might arrest a precipitous collapse in reporting and editing of news.” Additionally, they note that the Federal Communications Commission “is also launching an extraordinary review of the state of journalism.” With these unprecedented actions slated to take place, it would appear that journalism is on the road to recovery. Receiving support from national organizations, after years of monetary losses and the decline of social impact, would work to restore journalism in both the private and public sphere. Unfortunately, Nichols and McChesney do not foresee the FTC or the FCC action as the answer to the journalism industry’s crisis. Rather, they see their approach, which uses the Internet as the catchall scapegoat, as counter-productive and derailing a larger issue. They write, “Now for the bad news: the way the challenges facing journalism are being discussed, indeed the way the crisis is being framed, will make it tough for even the most sincere policy-makers to offer a viable answer to it.”

This frame that Nichols and McChesney make reference to is that the journalism industry is suffering due to the rise of the “Internet Age.” The problem is that if both federal agencies base their recovery plan on the Internet, there will be considerable oversight regarding the underlying catalyst: the increase in commercial interest and the decline in democratic interest. They write, “The decline of commercial journalism predates the web. Newsrooms began to give up on maintaining staffs sufficient to cover their communities – effectively reducing the number of reporters relative to the overall population – in the 1980s.” This reduction in staff allowed for increased profits at the expense of hard-hitting news (which was being replaced by sensationalism and press releases). However, while Nichols and McChesney do recognize the impact of the Internet, they maintain that its impact has been “to accelerate and make irreversible a process that began before the digital age.”

In the end, Nichols and McChesney urge policymakers to abandon the notion that the journalism industry will be as profitable as it once was. Rather, due to the rise of the Internet, the landscape has changed, and the focus should return to promoting information and democracy, which at this point will require subsidies from the government. Journalism should not be equated to commercial value; rather, it should represent a tool for an informed public. Focusing on the Internet will derail the urgent conversation that needs to take place: democracy over profits. Nichols and McChesney write: “Today, as in the early Republic, our system of government cannot succeed and our individual freedoms cannot survive without and informed, participating citizenry, and that requires competitive, independent news media. For that to happen, the FTC, the FCC and Congress must stop blaming the Internet and start thinking about how enlightened subsidies could revitalize the very necessary public good that is journalism.”

While this article, titled “How to Save Journalism,” is a much-needed call to reorient the journalism crisis from commercial interest to democracy, it still puts the fate of the industry in the hands of government agencies. What can we do? Should we write letters to Congress? When and where is the FTC hearing? Can the public attend? Nichols and McChesney are successful in critiquing the government’s approach to this issue, but they fail to follow up with how citizens can provide additional support. If democracy is fundamental reason for supporting journalism, isn’t the public essential for its revival?

The Guardian – US Government Discusses the Future of Journalism

Keep an eye out for this great special issue coming soon in Literature Compass! The line-up is as follows:

“Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century” – Preface’, Regenia Gagnier, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00672.x

“Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century” – Introduction’, Arthur F. Marotti, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00673.x

‘Electronic Archives and Critical Editing’, Jerome McGann, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00674.x

‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, Hans Walter Gabler, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00675.x

‘Editing Without Walls’, Peter Robinson, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00676.x

‘Our Affection for Books’, Susan J. Wolfson, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00677.x

‘His Days Among the Dead Are No Longer Passed: Editing Robert Southey’, Lynda Pratt, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00678.x

‘Different Demands, Different Priorities: Electronic and Print Editions’, Stuart Curran, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00679.x

‘Editing Manuscripts in Print and Digital Forms’, Arthur F. Marotti, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00680.x

‘All of the Above: The Importance of Multiple Editions of Renaissance Manuscripts’, Steven W. May, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00681.x

‘Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts:  Theory, Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text’, Margaret J.M. Ezell, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00682.x

‘Different Strokes, Same Folk: Designing the Multi-form Digital Edition’, Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00683.x

“Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century” – A Conclusion’, Laura Mandell, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00684.x

“Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century” – Combined Bibliography’, Marotti et al., Literature Compass 6 (2009), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00685.x

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Image source: Jef Poskanzer, Wikimedia Commons

There will be no new content uploaded to the site after Friday 30th October, but there is still much to discuss. All of the presentations and comments will remain on the website indefinitely, and we’d encourage you all to keep engaging with the content so long as there are issues to be explored, and interdisciplinary barriers to be broken down! If you sign up to receive email alerts of new comments, you can keep up with any ongoing conversations.

We sincerely hope you have enjoyed the conference – here are some things that you can do to stay in touch:

• Check out the Compass journals and recommend to your librarian. Researchers, teaching faculty, and advanced students will all benefit from the accessible, informative articles that provide overviews of current research. Personal subscriptions are now also available.
• Complete the post-conference opinion survey, coming to you next week. Your thoughts will help us make decisions about future conferences.
• If you have suggestions, or even just a short comment, you can pop it in our Suggestion Box or Email us
• Access the Publishing Workshops and Keynotes via iTunes (as from the conference website). The raw feed for the podcasts can be found here.
• Share our keynote video lectures via our Vimeo channel
• Tell others about your experience of the conference!

Final reminder: your 20% book discount token is valid until 15th November, so visit the book exhibit before then.

Until next time…?

Thanks again,

The Compass Team
www.blackwell-compass.com

Today marked the penultimate day of Wiley-Blackwell’s first Virtual Conference. As I am sure you will all agree, thus far, each day has contained many gems, and today has been no different. Eileen Joy’s (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) keynote lecture: ‘Reading Beowulf in the Ruins of Grozny: Pre/modern, Post/human, and the Question of Being‐Together’ looks at the aftermath of the Russian bombing of Chechnya through the lens of Beowulf.

The two final papers of the conference were provided by P. Grady Dixon (Mississippi State University) & Adam J Kalkstein (United States Military Academy) and Nicole Mathieu (CNRS, University of Paris). Their papers respectively entitled: ‘Climate–Suicide Relationships: A Research Problem in Need of Geographic Methods and Cross‐Disciplinary Perspectives’ and ‘Constructing an interdisciplinary concept of sustainable urban milieu’ have looked at indisciplinarity from a geographical and environmental perspective. The final publishing workshop was ‘How to Survive the Review Process’ by Greg Maney (Hofstra University).

Although, the conference is due to end tomorrow it is not too late to register and take advantage of the book discount and free journal access. Each of the papers and podcasts will remain on the website, and it is hoped that you will keep the comments coming in.

Day eight of the conference was once again marked by some excellent contributions. The first paper ‘Cultural Sociology and Other Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity in the Cultural Sciences’ by Diane Crane (University of Pennsylvania) suggests that for many scholars ‘disciplinary isolation is the norm.’ However, Crane proposes that by utilising what she describes as ‘free‐floating paradigms’ such barriers can be removed.

The second paper of the day by Christine Mallinson, (University of Maryland) entitled ‘Sociolinguistics and Sociology: Current Directions, Future Partnerships’ also takes sociology and interdisciplinarity as its main themes. Mallinson’s paper concludes with practical advice as to how best to achieve research partnerships.

Together with these exciting papers, Catherine Sanderson (Amherst College) offered advice in her publishing workshop: ‘The Joys and Sorrows of Writing an Undergraduate Textbook.’ There was also an opportunity to spend time in the Second Life cocktail bar with the Compass Team.

The seventh day of the conference has continued with the key themes of ‘breaking down boundaries’ and interdisciplinarity. Roy Baumeister (Florida State University) began the day with his keynote lecture entitled ‘Human Nature and Culture: What is the Human Mind Designed for?’ By utilising the concepts of evolutionary and cultural psychology, Buameister is able to explore the intrinsic significance culture holds for humanity.

Two other papers were also presented today. ‘Text as It Happens: Literary Geography’ by Sheila Hones (University of Tokyo) and Stefan Müller’s (University of Duisburg‐Essen) ‘Equal Representation of Time and Space: Arno Peters’ Universal History.’ These contributions have utilised a wide and diverse range of disciplines including history, cartography, geography and literature. Finally, Devonya Havis’ publishing workshop entitled ‘Teaching with Compass’ offers some interesting ideas as to how best implement technology within the classroom.

Welcome to the second week of the Wiley-Blackwell Virtual Conference. The first day back has started with a keynote speech from Peter Ludlow (Northwestern University) entitled ‘Virtual Communities, Virtual Cultures, Virtual Governance.’ Conference delegates also had the opportunity to meet Peter at the Second Life Cocktail Bar.

There were two other papers on Monday’s session Adam Brown’s (Deakin University): ‘Beyond ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’: Breaking Down Binary Oppositions in Holocaust Representations of ‘Privileged’ Jews’ and ‘A Hybrid Model of Moral Panics: Synthesizing the Theory and Practice of Moral Panic Research’ presented by Brian V. Klocke (State University of New York, Plattsburgh) & Glenn Muschert (Miami University). In addition Wiley-Blackwell’s Vanessa Lafaye held a publishing workshop entitled ‘The Secret to Online Publishing Success.’

As you can see, this week promises to be as exciting and innovative as the previous one. All of the papers and workshops from last week are still available to download from the conference site, and both the ‘battle of the bands’ and the opportunity to contribute a ‘winning comment’ remain.

The first week of the conference has come to an end, and the final day has included two exciting papers, as well as a publishing workshop. The first paper entitled ‘Full Disclosure of the “Raw Data” of Research on Humans: Citizens’ Rights, Product Manufacturer’s Obligations and the Quality of the Scientific Database’ was presented by Dennis Mazur (Oregon Health and Sciences University). In his lecture, Mazur highlights the difficult and contentious issues involved in human testing, particularly the tensions between participants and drug manufacturers.

The second paper also takes an interdisciplinary approach to medical matters. Eileen Smith‐Cavros (Nova Southeastern University) lecture entitled ‘Fertility and Inequality Across Borders: Assisted Reproductive Technology and Globalization’ looks at the emotive issue of assisted reproduction. By surveying existing literature, Smith Cavros is able to look in detail at some of the many issues which impact upon reproduction.

Together with these two papers, Duane Wegener’s (Purdue University) publishing workshop: ‘Top 10 mistakes New Scholars Make When Trying to Get Published’ marked the end of the first week.

Enjoy the weekend and we look forward to seeing you next week.