Author: Morariu, Megan

You SHOULD…Look At: The “Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage”

“You SHOULD…Look at the “Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World” from the New Bedford Whaling Museum

 

With the omnipresence of digital culture, we often tend to think of our society as a predominately visual culture. The 1848 “Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World,” a 1,275-foot-long painting performed as a giant moving scroll, reminds us that visual communication did not begin with the advent of projected photographic images in the late 19th century.

 

You can experience the entirety of this recently restored work online, at https://vimeo.com/36824966. Now part of the collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, this work by Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington was performed across the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, part of a burgeoning and popular culture of panorama performance. The moving panorama is an aspect of global traditions of painting and performance with antecedents in Chinese, Indian, Javanese, Persian, and various European cultures. This dynamic, spirited means of telling the important stories of a community–religious, political, social, historical, personal–combines a succession of images with texts and music, allowing audiences to be reached by a multi-media experience.

 

Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, was said to have seen this panorama before he wrote his classic novel about whaling and American life. Like Melville’s book, the New Bedford panorama shows us an epic voyage on a whaling ship from New Bedford south to Cape Horn, and then into the whaling fields of the Pacific. Like Melville’s novel, the panorama is much more than an examination of a profitable extractive industry, showing us as well how Americans viewed the world, other peoples (in Latin America, the Pacific, and along the Northwest coast of North America), and how the United States might be beginning to think of its economic and political role in the modern world.

 

The “Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World” can give us a direct sense of what 19th-century Americans experienced when they attended one of the most popular performance forms of the time.”

 

-Dr. John Bell
Director, Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry
Associate Professor, Dramatic Arts Department

You SHOULD…Read: The Making of Black Lives Matter

The Cover of the Book "The Making of Black Lives Matter"“‘What you should read, see, and hear?’ You should read The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (Oxford University Press, 2017) by political theorist, Christopher J. Lebron, because he reminds us that the philosophical underpinnings of the #BlackLivesMatter movement predate the contemporary movement.  Analyzing the treatment of “Black” people over time, Lebron submits a historical framing of Black political thinkers’, activists,’ and letterpersons’ understandings about Black people’s rights (and the lack, thereof) in American society.  This treatment, Lebron notes, prompted Black Americans’ rhetorical, oratorical, lettered, and physical activism to articulate and assert Black people’s equal humanity, rights, and protection in different eras of American political history. Thus, Lebron outlines the tradition of Black resistance oriented in the long-standing Black freedom struggle to contest racial discrimination and systemic inequality in various forms (in addition to contemporary struggles against police brutality).  Lebron elucidates this longitudinal activism by examining political thought and expressions of Black men and women, such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, Anna Julia Cooper, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who establish foundational arguments about Black Americans’ humanity, (in)justice, and liberation for various iterations of “Black,” intersectional identities (class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, for example).”

-Shayla C. Nunnally
Department of Political Science & Africana Studies Institute
University of Connecticut

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-making-of-black-lives-matter-9780190601348?cc=us&lang=en&

 

Publishing NOW : Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He has been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. His current book is the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s thoughts on reading, diversity and Excel spreadsheets:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2018/03/08/uses-excel-ensure-his-reading-diverse/iBKTtBHGqnnNlTnhStA0EN/story.html

If you require an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Humanities Institute staff
(Jo-Ann Waide/Nasya Al-Saidy) by email at uchi@uconn.edu or phone (860) 486-9057 by April 5, 2018

 

Publishing NOW : Ken Wissoker

Ken Wissoker, Duke University Press
April 4, 2018, 3 pm

Ken Wissoker is the Editorial Director of Duke University Press, acquiring books in anthropology, cultural studies, and social theory; globalization and post-colonial studies; Asian, African, and American studies; music, film and television; race, gender and sexuality; science studies; and other areas in the humanities, social sciences, media, and the arts.  He joined the Press as an Acquisitions Editor in 1991; became Editor-in-Chief in 1997; and was named Editorial Director in 2005. In addition to his duties at the Press, he serves as Director of Intellectual Publics at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City.

He has published over a thousand books which have won over 100 prizes.  Among the authors whose books he has published are Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Achille Mbembe, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Charles Taylor, José David Saldivar, Lisa Lowe, Lauren Berlant, Brian Massumi, Arjun Appadurai, Sara Ahmed, Fred Moten, Chandra Mohanty, and Cherríe Moraga.  He has written on publishing for The Chronicle of Higher Education and in Cinema Journal, and writes a column for the Japanese cultural studies journal “5.”  He speaks regularly on publishing at universities in the US and around the world.

 

If you require an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Humanities Institute staff
(Jo-Ann Waide/Nasya Al-Saidy) by email at uchi@uconn.edu or phone (860) 486-9057 by March 29, 2018

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Nancy Shoemaker

 

Shoemaker

What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I’ve been at UConn for almost twenty years now, in the History Department. I had a few short-term jobs after I got my Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1991 and was very happy to be hired at UConn in 1998. I’ve been a professor of history here since 2005. My field of specialization is Native American history. I’ve published books and articles on various topics in Native Studies, from family and demographic history to women’s history to what has been a major interest of mine over the years, the history of race and racism. My last book was about New England Native men who worked in the nineteenth-century American whaling industry. It was the best research experience I ever had. I loved learning about what are now considered obscure places all over the world—Norfolk Island, St. Helena, the Marquesas—and I’ve since expanded how I describe my current academic interests to include maritime history and the history of the U.S. and the world, especially the U.S. and the Pacific. I have just completed another book, which is not out yet but I hope in a year or two. It is about Americans in nineteenth-century Fiji.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

My new book project—the one being funded by the Humanities Institute—is about the history of soap from the seventeenth century up to the present, more particularly about the history of how soap is made and about soap’s raw ingredients, so about the production of soap more than about its consumption, though I will deal a little with its consumption since obviously the two are related. This research is a big step away from anything I’ve previously done since it is more explicitly world history. I would also categorize it as environmental history since my focus will be on the extraction of the many oils used in soap—mostly tallow, olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil, whale oil–and how these geographically distinct materials came to conjoin in an ordinary household product.  Soap is what I call a “global composite.” The world is represented in every bar of soap, and yet the chemical process that creates soap obscures from view what it’s made of and consequently also obscures the environmental, social, and global impacts spawned by the mass manufacture of soap that began in the seventeenth century and mushroomed every century thereafter.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

The history of soap probably seems a big move away from my earlier work in Native American history, but my interest in soap emerged out of the Native American whaling project so there is a connection. One of whale oil’s biggest uses was as an ingredient in soap. I didn’t think much about this early on. But there came a day when I decided that I needed to find some whale-themed gift to give to all the people helping me–archivists, people who wrote reference letters for me, and so on. I could not find anything attractive and affordable until after months of searching, I stumbled across the possibility of making my own soap, which I then learned how to do. I then made a sperm whale stamp based on one I found in a Native American whalemen’s voyage journal, which I stamped onto every bar of gift soap. My journey from complete ignorance about soap to producing it in my kitchen using exotic materials from around the world that I ordered online and were brought to my door by Federal Express and UPS is one I want to share with readers. The sense of wonder when I opened and sniffed a bottle of myrrh essential oil or got my hands greasy in a big tub of palm oil (certified as sustainably produced by the online supplier, but who knows for sure?) also made me want to know the history behind the sourcing of these materials.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

We take soap for granted. It is completely naturalized as a feature of most people’s daily routines, and yet not many people know how soap is actually made, what it’s made from, and who makes it. It is also considered highly virtuous for its cleansing and sanitizing properties. Behind this seemingly innocuous consumer product is a vast global workforce and an environment transformed to produce the oils that make soap possible. I like to think that people’s intimate relationship with soap would make them interested in finding out more about it. When Americans, for instance, worry about their global and environmental impact, they think about Nike sweatshops or global warming and the buzz about these big problem issues that make it into the general media seem all about finding easy fixes to prevent labor exploitation and catastrophic environmental degradation. By making people more aware of how something so ordinary as soap has engendered massive changes in global social relations and human relationships to their environments, I would be promoting awareness of how global interconnections and human dependence on oils are so complete and complex, there are no easy fixes. Soap is not the only global composite. We are surrounded by them. However, soap was one of the earliest and became one of the most entrenched as integral to human existence.

Publishing NOW : A conversation with Dan Gerstle and Adina Berk

March 19th, 4pm,
A conversation with Dan Gerstle, Senior Editor, Basic Books  and Adina Berk, Senior Editor for History, Yale University Press

 

Adina Popescu Berk
Senior Editor for History, Yale University Press

I acquire in all periods and subfields of American and European history. I look for projects that challenge and change the historiographical conversation, as well as projects that address and inform essential questions in the public sphere and that seek to bring a historian’s perspective to a broad readership. I am particularly interested in projects that conceptualize American history broadly and place the United States in a global context. Themes and topics of particular interest are the way environmental factors and climate crises have shaped societies, the history of empires and the resistance to empires, the history of economic and financial development, connections between the United States and Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, the history of borderlands, histories of human migration, the rise of the right, African American history, Latino history, and Native American history. At Yale I am building on a distinguished history list including, among many other leading historians, recent prize-winners Manisha Sinha, Benjamin Madley, Steve Pincus, Carlos Eire, Pekka Hämäläinen, Martha Hodes, and many others.

 

Dan Gerstle
Senior Editor, Basic Books

Dan Gerstle joined Basic Books in 2013 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and acquires mainly in history, politics, current affairs, and the social sciences. The books he has edited and published include the 2017 Lincoln Prize–winning Thunder at the Gates by Douglas Egerton, Engines of Liberty by ACLU National Legal Director David Cole, Jefferson by John B. Boles, Locked In by John Pfaff, and Toussaint Louverture by Philippe Girard. Forthcoming titles include next works from historians Manisha Sinha, Walter Johnson, Matt Sutton, Jeremy Popkin, and Jared Farmer; and from journalists Bhaskar Sunkara, Joan Biskupic, and Andrew McCarthy. Dan holds a BA from Princeton University and an MA in American Studies from Yale University.

 

You SHOULD…Read: “The Black Jacobins”

  

 

 

“Reading C.L.R. James’s brilliant account of the Haitian Revolution could not come at a more appropriate time. Written in 1938, The Black Jacobins remains arguably the most powerful historical narration of a revolutionary struggle that continues fundamentally to affect us today. It traces the history of the army of rebellious slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) as is defeated the imperial armies of France, England, and Spain, finally declaring the independent nation of Haiti in 1804.

 

In the late 18th century, Saint Domingue was the “Pearl of the Antilles,” the richest colony in the world, the centerpiece of France’s mercantile empire, and the greatest individual market for the transatlantic slave trade—all of this resting on the labor of half a million enslaved men, women, and children. In 1791, inspired by the French Revolution, they revolted under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who embodied the revolutionary fervor of his people and who forms the central tragic-heroic figure of James’s dramatic narrative. James’s riveting account tracks the tension between the empowering influence of the French Revolution’s call for “liberty, equality, brotherhood” on the slaves, and the slaves’ own agency in driving the Haitian Revolution forward against seemingly insurmountable odds.

 

James’s great insight in The Black Jacobins was to demonstrate the centrality of the Haitian Revolution to any understanding of the imperialist and racist bases of modern capitalism. By tracing how the slaves were first enthused by France’s revolutionary rhetoric, then came into conflict with its commercial and class underpinnings, James probes a structural dynamic of race and class, of freedom of commerce versus freedom of humanity, that continues to impact our own societies today.

 

James wrote The Black Jacobins on the eve of World War II as a defiant call to resisting racism, fascism, and all forms of oppression. Today, eighty years later, the history he recounts of a people who steadfastly claimed their humanity, and the form in which he recounts it, give us potent tools to do the same.”

 

-Robin Greenley,
Associate professor of Art History

 

Publishing NOW: Christine Smallwood

Christine Smallwood, Harper’s Magazine
March 8, 2018, 4 pm

 

Christine Smallwood is a writer and critic living in New York. Her reviews, essays, and short stories have been published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The New YorkerBookforumThe Paris Reviewn+1, and Vice. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University and is a core faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

You SHOULD…Read: “In the Heart of the Sea”

“You should read In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick

 

If you have ever read or even heard of the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville; if you have ever had an inkling of interest in New England history; or if you have ever wondered about life at sea and what would happen if you were actually ship-wrecked, then you should read In the Heart of the Sea.

 

But why read an historical account of the 1820 whale attack on the whaleship Essex and everything that came afterwards when Melville’s Moby Dick is already a classic? Because, in the words of our very own Mark Twain “truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”  In the Heart of the Sea tells a story so fantastic, so sensational, that it can only be a work of non-fiction.

 

But that is not what will keep you turning the pages. What will keep you reading into the wee hours of the night is the way Philbrick describes the harrowing events of what followed for four more months after the Essex crew was shipwrecked. Philbrick provides not only a description of the events, but an account of how the sailors – most of whom eventually perished – physically and psychologically responded to their desperate circumstances, from the extreme thirst and hunger brought on by severe dehydration and starvation, to the crippling fear of knowing that the likelihood any of them being rescued was extremely remote.

 

Why read In the Heart of the Sea?  Because, quite simply, as a work of non-fiction, it can fill in the details that the classic novel never could.”

-Katrina Higgins,
Director of Advising

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Ruth Glasser

What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I have a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale.  I probably gravitate towards interdisciplinary programs because I’ve never been sure what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Still don’t.

In non-Humanities Institute civilian life I am an Assistant Professor in Residence in the Urban and Community Studies Program and am based at UConn’s Waterbury campus, where I’ve been since 2002.  Between Yale and UConn I worked as a freelance public historian on a variety of books, curriculum projects, exhibits, documentaries, and other more community-based history projects mostly focusing on Puerto Rican and Latino history.   At UConn, the community engagement has continued with service learning projects for students in the history and urban studies courses I teach.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

The working title for my book project is “Brass City/Grass Roots: The Persistence of Agriculture in Industrial Waterbury, 1870-1980.”  I’ve been working in a variety of archives around the state and conducting oral history interviews as well as reading massive piles of secondary literature on topics ranging from gardening to garbage, thanks to the Humanities Institute.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

It’s an odd story since it has nothing to do with my usual Puerto Rican/Latino research.  Really the project emerged organically [pardon the pun] from my students’ and my involvement with a Waterbury organization called Brass City Harvest, that has been working since 2007 to create new sources of fresh food and jobs for the city through community gardens, greenhouses, a mobile produce van and more recently, a soon-to-be-completed food hub where area farmers can process their produce for sale.  I was teaching an intro course in which we considered food deserts and food justice as contemporary urban issues.  My students began to do service learning projects with Brass City Harvest and I joined the board for a while.  The executive director asked me to do some research for a little exhibit on farming in Waterbury’s relatively recent past.  I had had no idea about the local farming sector, and when I started talking to people and uncovering sources the project seemed worthy of something more lasting than the original exhibit, so that’s how the book came about.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

As Sue Pronovost, the executive director of Brass City Harvest said when she asked me to do the exhibit, it’s hard to convince people that it’s possible to grow things in a city like Waterbury when they don’t realize that it’s happened before.  This project will hopefully reknit together past and present and future by showing that people did raise, process, and market food in Waterbury not too long ago so it is entirely possible for it to happen again.  The food sector could be an important part of Waterbury’s revitalization as well as a way to improve its public health and sense of community,

In a more general way, I hope to historicize the topic of urban agriculture, which is mostly talked about in academic and popular literature as an entirely contemporary phenomenon.  But the story of Waterbury’s agricultural past is not unique, and there are many more such stories to be told about cities and towns which supposedly were 100 percent industrial until industry left.  I hope to be part of an ongoing academic and popular conversation about how and why cities used to support their food sector, when, how and why they withdrew that support, and how they can support it again.  In our era of deindustrialization, we need to look at ways to economically and socially revitalize our cities and there are many lessons to be learned from the past.