You SHOULD…Read: Frankenstein and Black Skin, White Masks

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“I recommend reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) together.  Shelley was an anti-colonialist who was also concerned with the great question of what it means to be a human being, especially as posed by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  The novel raises the problem of taking responsibility for what one creates and the damage that occurs from failing to do so.  She raises, as well, the perspective of the created, the Creature, whose existential struggle against his monstrosity is epic.  Fanon examines a similar question from the perspective of those created from colonialism, enslavement, and its accompanying racism.  Written when he was 25 years old, it places him in conversation with the precocious Shelley, who wrote her great work when she was 19.  These books offer the prescience and intellectual capacity of youth and the importance of speaking to the human condition across the ages.   As both show, maturity requires not imitation but realizing the question one must pose for subsequent generations.   Failure to do such leaves little recourse but to burn in the cleansing force of fire or collapse in the despair of tears.  And what might such question be but the creation of conditions for living embodiments of freedom?”

 

https://www.thereadinglists.com/lewis-gordon-reading-list/

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm

https://www.amazon.com/Black-White-Masks-Frantz-Fanon/dp/0802143008

 

-Lewis Gordon,
Professor of Philosophy
University of Connecticut

You SHOULD…Read: “The Fifth Season”

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“You should read …

N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. To identify this book as “fantasy” or “post-apocalyptic,” while accurate, would also be wholly inadequate. At its core, The Fifth Season is a novel about power, oppression, and the costs—physical, emotional, and psychological—of living in a world that denies your humanity so thoroughly that you cannot even recognize it in yourself.

In brief, the story involves a tectonically unstable world in which one small group of people possess the power to sense and control these tectonic shifts. When a massive earthquake shakes this fragile land, it initiates a “fifth season” of ash and death, forcing characters to make difficult choices about how to survive. This summary makes the novel seem primarily environmental in its concerns, but Jemisin is after more than a warning about the dangers of massive ecosystem collapse. At its core, The Fifth Season is a study of fear as a method of social control, determining who is “us” and who is “other,” who is a person and who is merely a tool. Jemisin’s nuanced world-building is designed not to impress with its innovation, but rather to bring us into a deeper understanding of how histories are forgotten and rewritten over time and how caste systems are built over generations. Like all good fantasy, the allegory of own world is clear, but at the same time the fictional world offers us the opportunity to explore with new eyes, exposing our own biases and assumptions. Jemisin draws us into her characters with remarkable skill, vividly evoking the difficulties of loving and trusting when your life is marked by fear and abuse. In the end, we must ask which poses a greater threat to these characters’ survival: the land itself, unstable and deadly, or a society that asks nothing less than the sacrifice of our own humanity. ”

 

-Lindsay Cummings
Assistant Professor of Dramatic Arts
CRT Dramaturg
University of Connecticut

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with James Beebe

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

I am Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Experimental Epistemology Research Group, and member of the Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). My Ph.D. is in philosophy, but I have extensive training in psychology as well. Most of my research has been in a field known as ‘experimental philosophy,’ where I perform empirical studies of how laypeople and experts in fields outside of philosophy think about questions of perennial philosophical debate—e.g., questions about the nature of knowledge, evidence, and rationally justified belief.

 

What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am currently writing a book entitled The Limits of Skepticism that examines skeptical philosophical traditions in both the ancient and the modern worlds in an effort to understand what distinguishes healthy, constructive doubt from crude denialism. The book considers which kinds of skepticism and doubt should be taken seriously, how far skeptical doubts can be pushed before they collapse, and how illegitimate challenges to our knowledge can be rebutted. As part of my research on skepticism and doubt, I am studying how experts from a variety of fields (environmental science, astrophysics, chemistry, biology, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, public policy) approach persistent disagreement within their disciplines and how much doubt (if any) they think members of the general public should have about their fields when specialists within it are known to disagree.

 

How did you arrive at this topic?

In the highly polarized political climate of the U.S., there is a great deal of disagreement among members of the general public, yet this disagreement does not seem to lead people to question their convictions as often it probably should. However, when there is a small amount of disagreement among experts in some field (e.g., in climate science, education, economic policy, healthcare), this disagreement is often leveraged into strong reasons for doubt about certain claims by people who have various personal interests at stake concerning those claims. So, the question of which kinds of doubts we should have about which issues seemed like an important topic to be working on.

 

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

Because the information age seems to have entered a post-truth stage, in which we are flooded with as much misinformation as information, private citizens must exercise greater discernment in distinguishing reliable from unreliable sources of knowledge and balancing their convictions and doubts. I hope that insights drawn from various philosophical traditions around the world and from the opinions of scientific and public policy experts can help us understand what an intellectually virtuous response to peer disagreement and conflicting expert testimony can look like.

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

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.