December 5, 2016

Journal Spotlight: History of the Present

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in american history, European history, journals, world history | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

history of the present journalHistory of the Present, launched in 2010, is devoted to history as a critical endeavor. Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians.

In 2012, the Journal was awarded “Best New Journal” by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

While the editors of HOP continue to curate exciting content, they have recently put together an exceptional special issue.

From one of the editors, Brian Connolly: “[Issue 6.2] asks how the violence of the archives of slavery contributes to the production of a history of our present. What is at stake in revisiting the devastation and death contained in the documents of slavery? How does a critical relationship to these archives of death and destruction not only unsettle our present but help think through liberated futures. In thinking through the linguistic, geographic, and representational logics of our archival reading practices, while attending to the ways in which our understanding or archives of slavery themselves—sites of lack or excess or both—all of the authors offer provocative meditations on how to reconceptualize histories of slavery through reimagined relations to the archive.”

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December 2, 2016

Our lives and all lives under the silicon heel

Posted by rkcunningham
in all things digital, labor history, radical studies | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

QiuExcerpted from the new UIP book Goodbye iSlave, by Jack Linchuan Qiu. Hans Rollman at PopMatters reviewed the book here.

Welcome to a brave New World of profit making, propelled by high technology, guarded by enterprising authority, carried forward by millions of unfortunate fellows being deprived of their souls. These millions of bodies—with massive labor power—gather in factories to produce coveted commodities. They face punishment if they disobey. If they cannot take it anymore and attempt “to go away”—a euphemism for suicide—they have to penetrate the physical barrier of a tall fence or “anti-jumping net” in order to free themselves from this hopeless world.

The factories need these workers because their products are not ordinary goods. Rather, they are addictive substances—be they sugar or gadgetry or ephemeral content—which the Old World craves in huge supply, to be shipped to the other side of the planet for consumption by people with lighter skin, many of whom also lead shattered lives. These consumers depend on the importation of addictive commodities in order to be “productive,” measured by productivity standards set by the new capitalist system. They keep feeding on it without ever needing to know about the harsh reality of the factories, oceans away.

The world turns and turns. So does the vicious cycle of coercion and exploitation, trade and addiction, culminating in unprecedented levels of profit maximization. The system seems to be “natural” and “perfect” despite, or precisely due to, its cruelty and animosity. It expands and expands, until rebel forces of activism one day emerge from the laborers, sneak into the factories, embed themselves in the new frontiers of accumulation, report to the world what they hear and see, and begin to agitate.

An abolition movement takes shape under new conditions of global geopolitics. Also empowered by new tools of communication, it starts to convince consumers that this New World is not heaven but hell, that a better world is desirable and possible, and that everyone can and should be part of this struggle for progressive change. The system is disrupted. Although it keeps working for some time, the endgame has already begun because, in addition to abolitionist mobilization and consumer awareness, the workers themselves have started to wield new and old weapons of grassroots networking, to express themselves and form solidarity, to initiate their own campaigns and redefine what it means to be a human being.

December 1, 2016

Backlist Bop: The Mars Project

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in immigration, travel | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

von braunThis classic on space travel was first published in 1953, when interplanetary space flight was considered science fiction by most of those who considered it at all. Here the German-born scientist Wernher von Braun detailed what he believed were the problems and possibilities inherent in a projected expedition to Mars.

Today von Braun is recognized as the person most responsible for laying the groundwork for public acceptance of America’s space program. When President Bush directed NASA in 1989 to prepare plans for an orbiting space station, lunar research bases, and human exploration of Mars, he was largely echoing what von Braun proposed in The Mars Project.

November 30, 2016

Release Party: The Science of Sympathy, by Rob Boddice

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in European history, natural history | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

boddice

The new UIP book The Science of Sympathy takes readers back to the Victorian Era and into the arguments over sympathy’s place in Darwinist reconsiderations of science and humanity.

Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy’s name.

Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin’s ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that “cruel” practices like vivisection and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit—natural targets of sympathy—as a danger to society and encouraged procreation by the “fit” alone. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualized obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.

November 29, 2016

Guest post: Richa Nagar on the need for politically engaged scholarship today

Posted by rkcunningham
in anthropology, feminist studies, women's history | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

nagarIn the following post, Dr. Richa Nagar discusses the importance of politically engaged scholarship for scholar activists in the post-election climate. Dr. Nagar is a professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota and is the author of Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Through Scholarship and Activism.

The precarity of current political times throughout the world challenges us in hitherto unforeseen ways. It requires us to deeply reflect and rethink our responsibility and modes of engagement with the issues, lives, and people around us. It demands that we think collectively across our locations and differences to work through our disagreements and to build trust in order to embrace new visions and practices for a just life that can be co-owned by many.

Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism gives us critical and necessary tools for embarking upon this path.  Dismantling the walls between the expert and the lay-person, on the one hand and between story, theory and strategy, on the other, Muddying the Waters offers reflections and concepts that are embedded in political and intellectual journeys across not only academia and activism, but also across languages, genres, and geographical locations. By taking us along on journeys where the self and Other as well as singular and the collective learn to accompany one another and to emerge together as part of committed intellectual and political partnerships, Muddying the Waters confronts some of the toughest and trickiest questions in the politics of knowledge production: it demonstrates how co-authorship can become a mode of co-owning authority across locations through a politics without guarantees.  Rather than deriving its power from absolute and unshakeable Truths that can be fixed on paper, such co-authorship generates its contextual and contingent truths through a radical vulnerability in which people come together to co-create an ever-evolving praxis for justice.  Such co-authorship requires us to dissolve our egos in order to move from suspicion and division toward trust and hope. It mobilizes critique in ways that insist on building conversations through a non-stop grappling with questions of ethical responsibility. It commits itself to alliance work across unequal locations through an ongoing methodology of engagement that hinges on trust, love, and the creative possibilities of situated solidarities.

November 28, 2016

200 Years of Illinois: Henry Bacon, and that’s no baloney

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in architecture, Lincoln | Tagged , , | Comments Off

lincoln memorialReverent. Classical. (Well, neoclassical.) Uncontroversial in design, though the subject has a few fringe detractors. The Lincoln Memorial began to take shape in 1915. By then, architects and others had pitched a number of, shall we say, novel ideas about the memorial, and I think we all can get a little wistful thinking of what might have been had a ziggurat arisen on the site.

Instead, a man born on November 28, 1866 in Watseka created the iconic Memorial we visit today. Henry Bacon spent a year at the University of Illinois before catching on with the famous New York architecture firm of McKim, Mead & White, the designers of the original Penn Station in Manhattan as well as Columbia University’s campus.

Like many architects of the time, Bacon often worked in the Beaux-Arts style and he shared the widespread American admiration for the ancient Greeks. Bacon drew on the Parthenon for inspiration with the Lincoln Memorial. By using granite, limestone, and several kinds of marble, he incorporated stone from across the United States to symbolize Lincoln’s dedication to the Union. His design won Bacon the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. While the Memorial remained his most famous work, Bacon enjoyed a lengthy career designing not only monuments and other buildings, but houses, in particular in and around Wilmington, North Carolina.

November 18, 2016

University Press Week: A book community

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University presses, as a rule, pay a lot of attention to their communities. That may take the form of publishing titles on their regions, or their own schools. No end of UP books go into organizing—for women, minority groups, labor, the environment, academic freedom, and dozens of other causes. Often the authors of these books live the struggle, as they used to say in the old days. They get out, get into it, and get involved.

University Press Week chose community as its theme, and a look around any UP web catalog makes it clear why. A number of presses have contributed to a gallery of books that highlight how scholarly publishing and community go hand in hand. But the gallery, for all the fascinating books it includes, really just provides an at-a-glance sampler of the community-oriented books out there. State, city, and school—if you want to know more about where you put down your feet every morning, or where you tramp to in the course of the way, the neighborhood university press is a good first stop on your tour.

November 17, 2016

University Press Week: Getting serious

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Yesterday, as part of our #ReadUP campaign celebrating University Press Week, a Justice League of academic publishing and book industry pros hosted a live YouTube webinar on various aspects of the U Press experience. Moderated by Fredric Nachbaur, director at Fordham University Press, the group revealed inside information, offered advice, and delved into how to get the outside world to groove on academic press books.

Wondering how to get readers to pick up UP books? Rework your bookstore to appeal to that hardcore reader who buys again and again? The difference between trade titles and the so-called monograph, a word I promised I’d never use on this blog? Pitching serious UP books to sales reps and buyers at stores? The panels covers all that and a lot more.It’s fifty-two minutes of FREE, essential information from some of the wisest minds in the industry.

November 16, 2016

University Press Week: Read the books that made a man/woman out of Mac

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Back before the Internet, people relied on comic books and pulp magazines for self-improvement. Charles Atlas challenged generations of boys, and a few girls, to get buff and deal with that bully who kicked sand in his/her face. Ads in tawdry detective magazines promised to provide crime-fighting skills while more mainstream publications pushed everything from speed reading to making friends to learning a foreign language in just 15 minutes a day.

whiskey flavored toothpasteUniversity presses won’t try to con you. We sell books. The kind without shortcuts. It’s just the way our evolution worked out. Had universities followed missions that involved happiness via whisky flavored toothpaste, we might today be telling you about how our aged tartar-fighting rye with the mint stripe could provide tasty dental health.

We’re in the midst of what we who love shorthand call #ReadUP, a University Press Book extravaganza that promises nothing less than enlightenment, intelligence, new worldviews, and a lot of stuff to talk about at cocktail parties.

Look, we live in a B.S.-dominant age. The best way to inoculate against it is to search out some measure of truth, the more uncomfortable the better. We provide that. We can’t even publish a book without getting the approval of a bunch of scholars first. And it’s not just egghead stuff we’re publishing. People, please! Rutgers just put out a great book on Frank Miller’s pioneering work on Daredevil. The press at Texas Christian has the science of whiskey on its roster.

Come along with us. Our books are just like the other books you love. Available at stores. Check-outable at libraries. Beautifully produced and written by actual experts in their fields. You’re smart enough to know you’re not smart enough. Same here. Every time you open a UP book you step into the light. Every time you open a UP book you make a fool angry. Every time you open a UP book you fill a sandbag against the rising tide of B.S.

 

November 15, 2016

Release Party: Reading Together, Reading Apart, by Tamara Bhalla

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in asian american studies, literary studies | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

bhalla

Though we often think of reading as a solitary activity, histories of reading demonstrate that it is in fact a deeply communal practice—structured and encouraged interpersonally by family and friends and fostered institutionally through formal education. In the twenty-first century, the practice of reading continues to be an expression of our associations and of our desire to forge particular communities, both imagined and real—communities of fellow feminists, foodies, literary connoisseurs, history buffs, fantasy fans, and romance readers to name a few. Of course, this is not to say that the simple act of reading is always an explicit or even conscious act of identification with a particular community but rather to emphasize that just as readers derive complex meaning from the literature they choose, that meaning can in turn be circumscribed by readers’ aspirations for particular forms of affiliation.
—from Reading Together, Reading Apart

Often thought of as a solitary activity, the practice of reading can in fact encode the complex politics of community formation. Engagement with literary culture represents a particularly integral facet of identity formation—and expresses of a sense of belonging—within the South Asian diaspora in the United States.

Tamara Bhalla blends a case study with literary and textual analysis to illuminate this phenomenon. Her fascinating investigation considers institutions from literary reviews to the marketplace to social media and other technologies, as well as traditional forms of literary discussion like book clubs and academic criticism. Throughout, Bhalla questions how her subjects’ circumstances, desires, and shared race and class, limit the values they ascribe to reading. She also examines how ideology circulating around a body of literature or a self-selected, imagined community of readers shapes reading itself and influences South Asians’ powerful, if contradictory, relationship with ideals of cultural authenticity.

Insightful and provocative, Reading Together, Reading Apart builds on practical fieldwork coupled with theoretical precision to reveal the surprising complexity of reading as a social practice.