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!

How do we publish our work? (Wikimedia Commons)

The most important and inspiring statement of the day was a comment made by our department Chair, Valerie Korinek. She concluded by assuring the audience that they had already made the first step to publishing their manuscripts simply by participating in the workshop. By attending, by engaging, we had taken ourselves and our work seriously on a professional level, and this was truly the first step to publishing our work as professional historians.

I was inspired by Prof. Korinek’s comments more than I expected.

The workshop included a variety of speakers, and should be a model for similar events at other universities. One postdoc spoke of the experience of revising his dissertation into a manuscript and the process of seeking a publisher. A junior professor who was currently involved in press negotiations described her more advanced relationship with a publisher. And finally our department chair spoke from the perspective of a published author and also as a senior historian. She described her successes, what she’d do differently, and what we needed to do to position ourselves as professional historians. We also heard from executive editors from the University of Manitoba Press who relayed to us their guidelines and what they looked for in a publishable manuscript.

I’ve been sitting on my dissertation for a year or so now. Partly because I was devoted to looking for employment, and partly because I needed a rest, I just haven’t returned to it till recently. But in the last six months I’ve made some small revisions, done a bit of extra research, and asked scholars outside my dissertation committee to read it and offer feedback. So, I’ve been thinking about the next step, but until the workshop I was unable to make the leap. Anxiety, fear of rejection, uncertainty about my own skills maybe, all of these fears kept me from moving forward until now.

But I already knew which press was the best fit for my project. Even though the Manitoba editors were helpful, I knew that my project and priorities fit better with a large US university press. I researched the press’s online presence, so I also knew the other titles in its series, the editorial contact, and the submission requirements. I didn’t know what goes into a book proposal, but I learned that at the workshop. The UBC Press even gives examples of successful book proposals. (Read them, they are invaluable guides.)

So, using these as a model, I wrote my own book proposal, asked a former professor for a letter of introduction to the executive editor, and threw caution to the wind. Now, the press is interested in my work, I have a schedule for draft submission, and a goal. I also feel more and more like a professional historian with something interesting and important to say.

Perhaps I flatter myself, but I hope some of you will read this post, check out the UBC Press submission examples, and then write up your own book proposal. Maybe you’ll send it off to a publisher. And maybe you’ll get a positive response too. Good luck!

Can you briefly summarize the article for our readers?

I’m happy to – in this article I have endeavoured to bring together the Canadian, Australia and New Zealand literature on soldier settlement of the 1920s as well as a smaller literature on empire wide ex-soldier settlement schemes. It forms a surprisingly cohesive body of literature even though it is quite dispersed and various authors reside in history, geography and economics departments in a number of different countries. There was a considerable degree of similarity amongst many of these schemes in terms of their objectives and the institutional arrangements for their implementation as demobilisation took place and as allied governments sought to repay debts of honour to returning soldiers.  There was also a wide spread view that the schemes were largely a failure regardless of whether you are reading about Canada, Australia or New Zealand.  A closer reading of the literature suggests however, some of these judgements were particularly harsh and that there are some pitfalls in too easily using and assigning labels such as ‘success’ or ‘failure’.

Your article focuses on soldier settlement in the British Empire after World War One and primarily examines scholarship on such settlement in Australia and New Zealand. What implications does this literature have to other areas of study, whether imperial history, “British Worlds”, historical geography, the history of migration or various national histories?

I don’t think it has any provocative implications for historical geography. In terms of the message, just as historical geographer Joe Powell in 1980 was able to lay out a framework for a comparative study of soldier settlement, my efforts have helped question some of the earlier depictions of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ as overly simplified and have pointed to the timeliness of revisionism about the ‘failure’ of the scheme.

I don’t think we have to reduce the soldier settlement research equation to an either or situation of British Worlds or national histories.   There are still some significant gaps to be filled in national accounts, for instance in Australia, Victoria has been much more well studied than neighbouring New South Wales.  On the other hand national histories can sometimes ‘silo’ our vision so that you lose sight of some of the commonalities of institutional arrangements; of similar social, economic, and environmental difficulties facing soldier settlement.  Likewise, transcending national boundaries enables individual settlement schemes to be positioned along a continuum such as the degree of centralisation so that the distinctive features of specific national schemes can be more clearly appreciated and this can be lost sight of when they are studied in isolation.  In addition, empire resettlement considered really needs to be considered in overview and not just by considering various Dominion experiences as a series of discrete containers. Fedorowich’s work is particularly interesting in this regard, especially the way in which he melded together an imperial resettlement thread with a series of empire wide ‘national’ comparative studies all in a single volume.  The challenge of course is to be able to write about the empire and various Dominions with equal competence and authority.

You mention that the literature on soldier settlement remains undeveloped in several areas, notably “the urban, the place of women, and the position of indigenous peoples.” Are there other areas that have been overlooked? What kind of future work would you like to see both in terms of topic and scope?

Yes I think it is underdeveloped in several areas and perhaps also in that the approaches taken are rather traditional (and I would include my own work in this latter category) and this applies to both ‘British Worlds’ and various national histories.  The histories of the White Settler Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand all contain variations on a frontier ethos. Soldier settlement in Australia and New Zealand for instance can be positioned as an extension, of the last pulse, of an era of closer land settlement that began in the latter nineteenth century.  Accordingly it is all too easy to study soldier settlement as an entirely rural phenomenon.

I think there is also room for a stronger social focus. Marilyn Lake’s work in Australia demonstrated the potential here some time ago.  Many of the soldier settlers were married or aspired to marry as soon as they were established on their farms. The vicissitudes of farming life were shared by all in the family to varying extents and there is still the potential to interview some of the now elderly children of soldier settlers about life on the land in the 1920s and 1930s, though this option would need to be taken up quickly.  Some incidental information of this sort from New Zealand points to familial definitions of ‘success’ that varied considerably from the measures applied by officials (for instance I remember one person telling me that ‘our car was never put on blocks because there was no petrol’ unlike the neighbours and another that ‘our phone was never disconnected’ because we couldn’t pay the bill but some neighbours had been.

In  addition, I think it would be useful to reconnect the work on soldier settlement with that on repatriation so that we can get a better appreciation of the range of state responses to the problems of demobilising large citizen armies and of placing economies back on a peace time footing within short periods of time.

Another potentially rewarding area would be to reconsider the equivalent World War II soldier settlement schemes – in New Zealand these are referred to as ‘rehab’ [rehabilitation loan] farms.  Typically the WWII farms are regarded as successful compared to the WWI schemes, but I think it would be timely to scrutinise these claims. Indeed I think there this whole area contains some rich possibilities.

I think there is also scope for further comparative research and here ‘British Worlds’ may well be a useful overarching organisational category, and there is room for more work on the ideologies imbedded in soldier settlement, for example the belief that farm work often in remote locations was the best way of restoring men who had been wounded to health and the continued use of military metaphors whereby soldier settlers were engaged in a fight against nature to civilize the country side and make it productive. Finally, I would point to the advantages of having historians, geographers, and economists working in this area for their collective efforts have provided a richer understanding that any single discipline can easily offer.  Perhaps it is time for an overtly interdisciplinary research project to be developed.

As a historical geographer by training, you mention that despite overlaps, scholars approaching soldier settlement with a “geographic focus” might produce different questions and answers especially regarding the question of success or failure than those approaching it from a “historical focus.” Can you elaborate a bit more about this distinction?

Our undergraduate disciplinary specialisations can continue to shape our world views in all sorts of subtle ways. Reduced to  its essentials, when discussing soldier settlement with historian colleagues or when reading historians work on the topic I can see how my research questions have tended to be more concerned with place, space, and environment and theirs with political and socio-economic developments through time.

Fleshing this out a little; I was initially interested in discharged soldier settlement in New Zealand in terms of its [historical] agricultural geography (though I did do some fieldwork looking for relict features from the 1920s in the present day agricultural landscape in terms of drainage ditches, fences, shelter belts and surviving buildings).  I also resorted to some traditional sorts of mapping techniques to try and understand on-farm land use patterns, particularly for the contiguous groups of soldier settlements on Crown Lands. It would be fair to say that the ex-soldier farmers for me at this time remained grey and shadowy actors. In contrast my historian colleagues have focussed much more on the politics of soldier settlement and on the life experiences of some individual ex-soldier settlers.

What is interesting I think is how these different sorts of starting points lead onto different sorts of research questions and indeed can produce some contradictory answers about the ‘success’ and ‘failure’ of the schemes.  For instance, if the farm is the focus then you might argue that the continued existence of this farm as a soldier settlement across a number of ex-soldier occupiers from the 1920s to the 1950s, perhaps being ultimately freeholded by a second generation represents ‘success’.  On the other hand, if the focus is on individuals, a particular ex-soldier farmer who occupies but relinquishes the farm in a short period of time might be labelled a ‘failure’.  The former I would label a ‘geographical’ focus and the latter a ‘historical focus’.  But this distinction although useful it ought not to be used inflexibly.  I have introduced a stronger ‘historical’ element into some of my work by paying more attention to individual ex-soldier farms as active agents.  I would also acknowledge that some historians have always shown sensitivity to place in their soldier settlement work i.e. their work incorporated much I what I mean by ‘geographical focus’.

Can you tell me a bit about your own research?

My own research in this area began in a curiosity driven fashion while I was doing some work on the late 19th century subdivision of the large pastoral estates of the Canterbury Plains of the South Island of New Zealand. It also needs to be understood against the conventional wisdom on soldier settlement at the time, as articulated by New Zealand geographer Professor Ken Cumberland in his television series ‘Landmarks’ in which he stressed the failure of soldier settlement on the agricultural frontier in New Zealand, particularly on the difficult North Island hill country.  Yet the cadastral maps of Canterbury that I was looking at had many areas labelled as soldier settlements that were on lands that had been farmed since the 1850s.  This prompted me to want to look at some of these ‘other’ soldier settlements that, of course, far out number those created on the bush [forest] frontier.

I also made a decision to try and approach this very much at the ‘grassroots level’ so to speak by working at the farm level and trying to build up a picture of the scheme as a whole by case study work across the various farming districts of the country and by looking at regional and finally national level statistical information.  The previous work had tended to be under taken at a national level, had a strong political focus, and a top down orientation.  My strategy as it evolved was to try and complement this existing work.   Some of the more recent historical work at this time was also taking a revisionist line and argued that the scheme was perhaps not the total failure that it had been portrayed in the New Zealand historiography. This provided a bit of extra incentive to keep going.  I think my work has tended to support the revisionist position that the scheme was too quickly and simply deemed to be a total failure. This line of inquiry was however, a departure from my earlier research which had tended to focus on environmental management, particularly regards state forestry and soil and water conservation (though this prior work had been based on archival work).

Challenging aspects of the work have been the scale of the scheme of over 3000 farms of 1.4 million acres [0.56 mil ha] on Crown Lands   with another 5000 farms totalling 1.25 million acres [0.5 mill ha] purchased with government loans. The nature of the official reports and archival records posed additional challenges some of which remain seem insurmountable.  The former reports tend largely to be a set of accounts of sums loaned and repaid which are difficult to reorganise in order to answer basic questions about the numbers of settlers involved at any one time and about failure rates. The files are quite variable, some giving a very detailed picture of the conditions facing the occupiers, though often for only short periods of time (three to ten years) others with minimal material therein.  Furthermore over half of the soldier settlers occupied farms that they purchased on the freehold land market with government loans and the records for this group are very scarce mostly having been destroyed when the mortgages were discharged.

I have now gotten to the point where I can try and offer some broader interpretation.  I have pulled this together in a paper in the New Zealand Geographer in 2008 in which I produced a ‘typology of failure’ and argued that there were in effect three separate and distinct episodes of failure to do with individuals, failure residing in the weaknesses of the scheme particularly regards creating un-economic sized farms, and finally a more systemic failure caused by the impact of the Great Depression.  In passing I would note that Marilyn Lake in her study of soldier settlement in Victoria, Australia, using different labels identified some similar episodes of failure.

I have also done some very preliminary research on the urban housing part of the soldier settlement scheme which tends to have been completely overshadowed by the farm settlement provisions (and seems to have been comparatively much more successful).  Finally, once I had worked from the farm level studies up to some of the national political discussions about soldier settlement, I became more attuned to the ideological debates surrounding the scheme and this had lead me to appreciate how it also provides an interesting window into issues of national identity and empire in new Zealand during the 1920s.a

Oh ratemyprofessors.com, how interesting your chili peppers  make our lives!

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.

Students rely on Wikipedia. Professors can pretend that their threats of Fs on assignments matter, but in reality it offers little deterrent. Students can and do weave facts, information, opinions and interpretations that they find online into their papers. If the material seems reasonable, or general, or cited elsewhere, it might not even draw our attention, particularly when we have to grade 50 or 75 or 90 term papers on a weekend. What is the solution?

One answer, probably the most common, is to scold and threaten. We tell our students that Wikipedia is an inappropriate and unacceptable source for historical research and writing. We threaten them with Fs and rewrites. Another answer is to explain to students why Wikipedia is an unreliable source. It lacks appropriate documentation of sources, and is written by individuals with uncertain research skills who base entries largely on sometimes-dubious secondary material. And then we threaten them with Fs and rewrites. But is there a third solution? We know our students use Wikipedia. Can we use this to our advantage? Can we teach them about online sources and how to determine the credibility of what they read and discover?  Can we undermine their reliance on Wikipedia, while at the same time use it as a teaching tool?

All term I’ve told my students that Wikipedia is an inappropriate source for university work, and that recourse to it in their work is forbidden. This seemed to work, and their term paper proposals and other writings have so far remained fairly clean. Then I read the midterms. All material necessary for complete answers to all midterm questions was available in lectures, documents, and text readings. But when I graded the midterms, I began to find unexpected references to statistics and details I was unfamiliar with appearing in more than one exam. I googled particular terms and discovered that even when provided with all materials necessary for a complete A-range response on the exam, my students still used Wikipedia as a study tool. And they clearly made notes that they then memorized, preferring the statistical “facts” to the focus on interpretation that I emphasized.

After frustration and disappointment passed, I thought about what I could do. Forbidding Wikipedia is only a partial success, and impossible to enforce completely. Promising to deliver instant Fs on any work relying on it seems too draconian. Certainly there has to be something to learn here, something that we can apply to the classroom?

Over at the Cliotropic blog Shane Landrum has one idea. Noticing that Women’s History was significantly underdeveloped on facebook, Shane is exploring the idea of assigning Wikipedia building and cleanup assignments:

If you teach history courses on women, gender, or sexuality, or on the history of any racial or ethnic minority in the United States, it’s worth considering adding a Wikipedia assignment to your syllabus. … Students could learn a lot about what we know and how we know it from editing the articles, and I think it also would teach them to be more skeptical the next time they try to use Wikipedia as a reference.

As Shane points out, others are already building similar assignments in exciting ways. A historian of ancient Rome has worked out many of the logistics:

I’ve used the “stubs” feature of Wikipedia to generate a list of 120 topics relating to ancient Roman civilization that need full articles. Then I’m requiring the 120 students in my upcoming Roman Civilization class to each write one article. This will hopefully teach them how to do original research in the library on obscure, narrowly focused topics and then create something of lasting value to others. The students will also be required to each review three of their fellow students’ articles in order to learn about the collaborative editing process. I’m a little nervous about its success, but I’m hoping to be part of the solution to the issues raised by Wikipedia, rather than contributing to the problems.

I’m convinced that there’s something to this. I’m wary of validating Wikipedia as a legitimate source through assignments like this, but I can see the immediate value offered by giving students the opportunity to do original research for publication in a venue they can already identify with. And maybe if they realize that the people writing entries are no more expert than themselves, they’ll have a greater awareness of the risks of using Wikipedia as a source.

Of course, one way around this problem is to limit your research to people or causes with whom you are sympathetic or broadly agree. This of course happens frequently and is probably more likely to go unexamined than if you are researching those with whom you have a strong personal disagreement. But of course, it comes with its own problems and can result in an unquestioning acceptance of a particular narrative. And, just as it is necessary to research those who suffered under oppressive regimes, cruelty or discrimination, it is important to research those who committed acts that we today see as reprehensible, whether slave-holders, those behind genocide and other atrocities or common criminals.

This is a particularly sensitive subject in African history, where scholars interested in European settlers or the colonial state often come under criticism, as though their scholarly interests somehow betray a sympathy for imperialism, racism or colonialism, rather than a desire to untangle and understand how these processes and systems worked. And this is understandable to a certain extent, especially when considering the long and in many ways ongoing struggle undertaken by many historians of Africa to highlight African voices and perspectives, against a Euro-centric narrative, which had long painted Africans as primitive and privileged the European viewpoint. But though this corrective is important and indeed vital, it does not mean that only African viewpoints and voices should be studied, but rather a variety of perspectives, sources and subjects, including those of European settlers, colonial officials and indeed, Rhodesian soldiers.

For example: to this date, no historian has been able to uncover any evidence of bra-burning feminists of the 1960s.

This month, I pledge to use my historian super-powers for good instead of evil. Although women did not create the documents I use to write my dissertation, I will read against the grain to find their voices between the lines.  To write a history without women is to write only half the story.

If you’re curious about what it takes to incorporate women in your historical research,  I recommend historian Tanya Roth’s blog.  Roth is completing a dissertation on the integration of women into the US military (1945-1978) and has written many thought-provoking  posts on how she makes sense of the documentation and oral interviews.

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.

VIDEO ABSTRACT:

Bartolomé de las Casas and the African Slave Trade (p 1526-1541)

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

A revisionist view of Bartolomé de las Casas as the ‘author’ of the introduction of African slaves to the Indies/Americas in the early 16th century. The article details Las Casas’ thinking and actions and concludes that while Las Casas did—among other contemporaries—suggest the importation of African slaves to lift the burden of oppression off the Amerindians, his perspective and view was altered radically in the last third of his life. The article explores the meaning of African slavery in the context of the place and time where Las Casas grew up—Andalucia in southern Spain—where slavery was quite different from the way it developed on the plantations of the Americas. And the article relates how Las Casas’ theoretical and practical defense of Amerindians eventually was extended by Las Casas’ into a defense of liberty for all men, including African slaves.

A snowy Sunday at Altglasshütten (image by author)

The key ingredient here was time.

At so many events involving postgraduates, they have perhaps 20-30 minutes to present their work and receive feedback before making way for the next speaker. In contrast, the recent workshop set aside up to one and a half hours for each paper. This allowed students to give their paper and respond to the comments offered by the designated expert commentator present. The floor was then opened to the rest of the participants. The result was a number of detailed and rich exchanges, of which the benefits were obvious for all to see.

The value of the workshop was further enhanced by presentations from guest professors. First up was Achim Landwehr, Professor of Early Modern History at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf. His opening paper ‘Analyzing (historical) discourses: is there a tool box anyway?’, helped the set the scene, with its blend of Foucault and practical reflections on the usefulness of discourse analysis. He was followed by two students, Benjamin Grünert, who spoke about ‘Spartan pederasty and discourse’, and Andreas Bösche on ‘Dositej Obradović’s idea of friendship’. Already we had moved from Foucault’s toolbox, to Xenophon’s appraisal of male relationships in Sparta, to the writings of a key figure in Serbian national history.

Saturday was taken up with reflections on the practical applications of network analysis. The proceedings opened with Professor Paul D. McLean from the Department of Sociology at the State University of New Jersey. He offered some insights into his work on Renaissance Florence, which drew upon a large number of surviving letters to reconstruct patronage networks. The subsequent postgraduate papers, from Thomas Wittkamp, Dorothea Urban and Kathrin Sharaf, dealt respectively with lord and vassal relationship in the early middle ages, political patronage in contemporary Italy, and computer aided qualitative network analysis. In each case, the uses or potential uses of network analysis/theory were teased out. Kathrin Sharaf’s work, which analyses Facebook usage among young Egyptians, is proving to be particularly topical at the moment.

The final and shorter session on Sunday morning included a marvellous offering from Professor Robert Alan Schneider of Indiana University, who spoke about ‘Literary and Intellectual Sociability in the Age of Richelieu’. The unenviable task of summarising and commenting upon the entire weekend’s proceedings then fell to Ronald G. Asch, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Freiburg and spokesperson of the Gradiuertenkolleg. Amongst other things, he drew attention to the methodological challenges posed by the fact that friendship has no official social status, and that both it and patronage have never been dominant discourses in society.

All in all, this participant certainly learned a great deal.

Oh, and the cakes were not bad either.

In his recent History Compass article “The Male Body, Beauty and Aesthetics in Modern British Culture,” Deslandes explored the historical significance of male beauty. Across studies of sport and physical culture, disability and WWI disfigurement, and queer history, he argues, awareness and understanding of beauty and aesthetics offer insights not only to histories of masculinity but histories of British society as a whole. For this reason, Deslandes argues, historians must pay greater attention to physical appearance, value placed on male beauty, and the adornment and manipulation of the male body to better understand the British past.

I had the opportunity to interview Professor Deslandes about the arguments in his History Compass piece, its broader implications, and place within his current research.

In your History Compass piece you exhort historians to pay closer attention to questions of aesthetics, appearance and body adornment. What do these issues offer to historians of gender generally and masculinity specifically?

On a basic level, paying attention to the aesthetics of the attractive man, masculine physical appearance, and male body adornment (the focus of my History Compass article) reminds us that obsessions with beauty affected men and women equally in the past. Of greater concern to me, of course, is the way in which a focus on the physicality of gender expression might allow us to think more systematically not only about Judith Butler’s, now well-known, concepts of performativity but also about the ways in which gender and beauty ideals were literally inscribed on the face and the body. For historians of masculinity, who in recent years have turned their attention to reconstructing the ‘lived experience’ of male gender identities, the study of physical appearance and the personal experience of beauty and ugliness might help us to understand how militarism, athleticism, and imperialism (three areas that historians of masculinity have explored in great detail) influenced standards of attractiveness and personal gender expression. Finally, examining languages of beauty and ugliness (and, by extension, the dynamics of personal attraction) might allow historians of gender to examine more fully how our subjects expressed desire, even in source material that might, on the surface, appear to be wholly unrelated to sexuality.

What can fuller understandings of male aesthetics and beauty contribute to other historians who explore the “history of science, race and war, and … British society as a whole”?

I see great potential in these areas of study. Explicit and implicit references to beauty permeate the writings of nineteenth and early twentieth century biologists, physiognomists, phrenologists, and ‘racial scientists’. While some scholars have published innovative and nuanced studies of these fields (I am thinking here, most notably, about Sharonna Pearl’s recent book About Faces: Physiognomy in NIneteenth-Century Britain), relatively few have paid significant attention to the language of physical attractiveness (and the aesthetic comparisons that were made between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ peoples) in the massive volume of books, pamphlets, and articles that Victorian and Edwardian scientists produced. Similarly, while historians of eugenics have touched on some of these themes in recent studies, new histories of the eugenics movement will, in the future, need to pay much closer attention to aesthetics and beauty. Finally, historians of war stand to gain much by paying greater attention to beauty, in a similar manner to how Ana Carden-Coyne has explored these subjects in her recent book, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War. Histories of wartime propaganda, injury and disability, military medicine, post-war memorials, and, even, the battle experience would all be enriched in substantial ways by paying closer attention to the aesthetic languages and experiences of combat, death, and disfigurement.

In your History Compass article you refer to youth, particularly in regard to men’s magazines. How might agedness also inflect our understandings of and research into the history of masculinity?

The vision of masculine beauty that dominated in the period under consideration in my article was one in which youth was valorized and celebrated–in advertisements, beauty manuals, magazines, photographs, and, later, film–as the ideal of physical attractiveness. This does not, of course, mean that physical appearance was not of concern to middle-aged and elderly men. In fact, an entire industry of beauty products for men, intended to eradicate baldness, correct poor posture, and hide or eliminate belly fat, were directed at male consumers over the age of forty. Historians of masculinity must, in my opinion, take seriously the aging process and the impact that it has had on male understandings of the self and impressions of physical appearance. While some historians of old-age have deliberated on these issues, I see great potential in the study of the middle-aged. Men in this age group were (and still are) often the most reflective historical subjects, precisely because they were forced to confront graying hair and growing paunches, and the sense of displacement that these physical experiences produced. In thinking about masculinity, it is also necessary to take very seriously intergenerational relations and tensions, as I attempted to do in my book Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920. Relations between men of different age groups allow us to understand how concepts of masculinity were contingent not only on class, racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual identities but also on one’s stage of life.

The history of masculinity is now a valid subfield among an established cohort of scholars. Where do you see it going in the future?

I have been extremely heartened by the growth of scholarship in this area of study, much of it very good. Historians working in the field have tackled a broad range of new subjects in recent years. Homosocial institutions continue to garner considerable attention but in ways that reveal not only the relational nature of gender but also the rituals, symbols, and everyday experiences of members. Some of this work has produced new insights about the relationship between men and domesticity (here I am thinking about Amy Milne-Smith’s work on gentlemen’s clubs) or encouraged scholars to rethink exemplars of British masculinity (most notably the Royal Air Force flyer during the Second World War-the subject of Martin Francis’s new book The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939-1945). I am also encouraged by the number of historians of British politics who have chosen to focus on masculinity in their considerations of governing styles and campaign rhetoric. The field continues to be enriched by practitioners of what some have called the ‘New Queer History’. The emphasis, in much of this work, on the connections between sexual desire and fantasy (as well as actual sexual practices) and certain masculine types, styles, or poses (I am thinking here about the ubiquitous guardsman) has yielded a number of very important insights.

In the future, I hope to see more studies that mine personal diaries, letters, and memoirs for evidence of the ‘lived experience’ of masculinity. As this sort of deep research is completed, our picture of masculinity is bound to become both more complete and more complex. Particularly important will be efforts to reconstruct the experiences of men with non-normative sexual desires and also those who were neither white nor middle-class. I would also like to see historians do much more on male/female relationships (both romantic and non-romantic) and pursue more detailed examinations of the history of heterosexuality. One area that I am particularly excited about (and which has taken off more fully in the United States than it has elsewhere) is the field of transgender history. We stand to learn much about masculinity as social construct, lived experience, and cultural practice by examining the lives of subjects whose gender identity and/or expression was different from their biological or birth sex. As is only fitting for a historian of male beauty, I see great potential in the future for those who are interested in studying masculinity as an aesthetic expression. A corollary to this, of course, is an emerging field that deserves further consideration–the material culture of gender. By examining the accoutrements of gender that were required by men to shave, dress their hair, bath, and prepare their bodies to be clothed, we stand to learn much more about the relationship between often nebulous concepts of identity or subjectivity and the very tangible world of products and objects.

How does this piece on the significance of male beauty fit in with your current research?

Writing this piece provided me with an opportunity to reflect on the state of the field, historiographically speaking. I am in the process of writing a book that examines the culture of male beauty in Britain from the 1840s to the present. This project begins with the rise of photography as a cultural practice and ends with a consideration of the impact of the internet on both conceptions of masculine beauty and the material culture of attractiveness and physical fitness in twenty-first century Britain. While preoccupations with physical fitness figure into this book, this is not principally a study of the physical culture movement or athleticism (areas that have been ably covered in studies by Michael Anton Budd and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska). My study departs from this approach, in part, by focusing much more directly on the male face. It also, however, attempts to provide more comprehensive coverage (and, hence, an overarching narrative) of masculine attractiveness by exploring topics ranging from the Victorian beauty industry to the rise of the teenage fan magazine in the 1950s and 1960s to gay pornography in the 1970s and 1980s. Along the way, the book I am writing will narrate individual stories about figures like the late nineteenth- century beauty entrepreneur Alexander Ross, the First World War poet Rupert Brooke, facially-disfigured soldiers, the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, the twentieth-century artist Keith Vaughan, and David Beckham. The focus in this book is on showing how the study of male beauty can illuminate larger themes in British history while also establishing how standards of facial and bodily attractiveness changed or remained the same over a one-hundred and sixty year period.

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

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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

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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

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

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Cultural Sociology and Other Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity in the Cultural Sciences (pages 169–179)
Diana Crane

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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

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

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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.

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“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.’

Read More

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

Today, December 2, Maryland pastor Lennox Abrigo will be at the White House to discuss immigration reform. According to the New York Times, Abrigo and other pastors across the state have witnessed increases in the number of immigrants in their congregations as well as increases in the problems that these individuals face. Abrigo told the paper, “Members of our church have been deported… Families are disrupted.” Despite such challenges, the Times reports that immigration reform activism is on the rise Activists are working hard to fight stereotype and misconception.

To begin with, reformers are expanding their base. Because the majority of immigrants in the United States are coming from Mexico and Latin America, the fight is led largely by Latinos. According to Washington NAACP bureau director Hillary Shelton, “The immigration debate needs to have, in addition to a Latino face, it needs to have a Haitian face. It needs to have an Asian face.”

Identity is not the only misconception that immigrants face. Their communities are often perceived as havens for crime. A recent study by Schott A. Desmond and Cheris E. Kurbin, published in the Sociological Quarterly, goes a long way in refuting this theory. In their article, The Power of Place: Immigrant Communities and Adolescent Violence, Desmond and Kurbin examine the relationship between immigrant concentration and adolescent violence. The two use statistical analysis to confront the “immigrant paradox” -“the counterintuitive finding that immigrants have better adaptation outcomes than their national peers despite their poorest socioeconomic conditions.” The findings of the study indicate that immigrant concentration is negatively related to adolescent violence.

The supposition of increased violence is based on the premise that immigrant communities are often low-income and fewer economic opportunities can be linked to increased crime rates. However, the face of evidence to the contrary, the authors examine possible explanations of the supposed phenomena. These theories include, cultural preservation, social ties, networks, and informal social control, as well as employment and ethnic entrepreneurship. It is also carefully noted that the article is not advocating the segregation of communities based on ethnicity. Rather, social scientists should embark on further research and apply the lessons of immigrant communities to areas where adolescent delinquency is a problem.

Read the article in the New York Times

Read “The Power of Place: Immigrant Communities and Adolescent Violence” by Schott A. Desmond and Cheris E. Kurbin

While abortion is certainly a hot-button issue on the American Political Scene, the fervent debate over the topic – mostly fueled by a clash between liberal and conservative, predominately religiously-oriented moral entrepreneurs – faded into the background after the presidential election season. In short, abortion is an issue that, while always central for some, tends to become peripheral outside of election seasons, during which candidates of both parties accuse one another of either caring too little for life or of obstructing a woman’s right to choose.  However, of late, the health care debate has re-ignited the passions of pro-life activists and politicians who seek opposition to the constitutional right of a woman to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. What makes this instance of this on-going clash less quotidian than the usual back and forth over when life begins or whether the rights of a mother or fetus are more important is that it is being used to stall political change in the form of health care reform.

The debate over a woman’s right to choose is a moral debate with a long history in religion, philisophy and even in the formation of the modern medical profession. Emotions are elicited in the face of moral issues and abortion is one that tends to get people’s blood boiling. For the pro-life camp, the idea that a life would be terminated is offensive. For the pro-choice camp, the idea that a woman would not have a right to chose the fate of her own body and make decisions on her own behalf is offensive. The heated debates between pro-life and pro-choice groups are evidence enough to show the deeply emotional nature of this subject.

So, what’s the point? The intertwined nature of morality and politics often leads to the stalling of reform – in this case, as I argued earlier this year, the stall would be on reform the country desperately needs. The idea that a moral issue will stall perhaps the greatest chance we have to do an even greater moral deed - provide people the health care that they need, so they won’t die – is striking. The possibility that a government option (that we don’t know yet will be available) could pay for abortions is keeping us from providing Americans who are dying, with the care they need. I bring this up as an important issue not to denigrate the pro-life advocates who object to this possibility, but to show how our emotions are always involved in politics and that, if we do not pause to think about how they operate and affect the political process, we will not be able to understand and effectively analyze the social and political change or the driving forces behind it. If we go on ignoring the fact that emotions are central in the political process, we ignore perhaps one of the greatest reasons why people rally behind political causes – or stand in the way of political reform.

Health Bill Revives Abortion Groups

Emotional Dimensions of Social Movements

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

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The Compass Team
www.blackwell-compass.com