Harvard University Press Blog

Remembering Daniel Bell

We at Harvard University Press were saddened last week by the death of Daniel Bell, who for many years helped to steer the Press as a member of our Board of Syndics. In the space below, Michael Aronson, HUP Senior Editor for Social Sciences, shares some of his memories of Bell and their time together. In the coming days we’ll hear as well from Lindsay Waters.  (UPDATE: Lindsay Waters’ piece is now posted here.)

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Daniel Bell, who died on January 25th, was one of the great sociologists and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. He came to Harvard from Columbia University in 1969, joined our Board of Syndics in the early ’80s and stayed, as I recall, until he became professor emeritus in 1990. He was a wonderful member of the board, able to comment perceptively on many manuscripts outside his specialty, and with a keen sense of the market. He also knew how important a good title was, and was always coming up with suggestions for improving them. He encouraged us to publish unusual and daring books, including Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. He also strongly supported the Walter Benjamin Project. I often thought that if he hadn’t been an outstanding social thinker, he would have been a great publisher. Indeed, successful publishers, including Jeremiah Kaplan, Arthur Rosenthal, Erwin Glikes, and Martin Kessler sought out and followed his advice and suggestions about books and authors in building their lists. (I believe he suggested to Steven Weinberg that he should write what became the classic The First Three Minutes.)

Dan’s parents were immigrant garment workers in New York. His father died when he was only 8 months old, leaving his mother with two small children. Dan grew up with a fierce love of books and learning. He told me that in the 1930s he read many novels, especially French novels by Georges Bernanos, Romain Roland, Jules Roy, and others. A former student of Dan’s told me there was a connection between his love of books and his penchant for wearing sweaters. As a youth he could not afford to buy books, so he spent a lot of time in public libraries, which were often cold.

I didn’t get to know Dan well until he retired. Partly that was due to my earlier positivist view of social science and my being unduly impressed with quantitative approaches, which were not his “shtick.” Under his tutelage, my views broadened and I came to believe that history and a good stock of knowledge were crucial to understanding the social world. We would go out to dinner at Legal Seafoods or S&S Deli and talk about the Russian Revolution, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (I was hoping to give him a copy of Prison Blossoms later this spring), the trials of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, which were big events in my youth. Being a staunch anti-communist, he kidded me about my leftist background and ties with people who got into trouble with Congressional investigating committees in the late ’40s and ’50s. (At the time, it was no laughing matter.)

Shi'ism: A Religion of Protest

In his new book, Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest, Hamid Dabashi argues that the nature of Shi’ism is historically incompatible with positions of power. From its very founding amidst a dispute over who would rightly succeed Muhammad, Shi’ism has been imbued with a defining spirit of dissent. Today, though, in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, Shi'ism has ceased to be a mere sect within the larger context of Islam and has emerged as a global claim on our most urgent political attention.

As Hamid Dabashi explains in the video below, his goal in writing the book was to capture the soul of Shi’ism. “The principal argument of this book,” he explains, “is that as a religion of protest, Shi’ism is successful and legitimate only when it is combative and in a warring posture, and it loses that legitimacy the instant it comes to power.”

The book includes a detailed discussion of the Shi’i doctrinal foundations, an encompassing view of its historical unfolding, and a varied investigation into its visual and performating arts. In this effort to explain the spirit of Shi’ism to a wide audience, Dabashi hopes to positively influence global political discourse. The book is the product of his conviction that “an accurate, detailed, and purposeful knowledge of Shi’ism is today indispensible to our understanding of global affairs, from the heart of Shi’ism in the Iranian and Muslim world, to the widest reaches of religiously nuanced politics.”

 

 

 

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, an essayist on current affairs, and an anti-war activist. For more information about him and his work, visit www.hamiddabashi.com

Tweeting American Regional English

This morning I was on my beanwater until I got a schnibble of flannel cake caught in my goozle. I should’ve pungled for that larrupin' kolacky instead.

Say what now?

Here it is again: This morning I was feeling lively until I got a small piece of pancake caught in my throat. I should’ve shelled out for that delicious sweet-toppinged pastry instead.

To understand that patchwork of linguistic curiosities up top you’d have to be versed in the dialects of New England, the Appalachians, the upper Midwest, Texas, German settlement areas, and the West. Or, you could just follow the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) on twitter. All those gems up there have helped to make @darewords one of my favorite follows in just the two months that it’s been active.

Offline, the Dictionary of American Regional English exists as a highly esteemed multi-volume reference work that documents words, phrases, and pronunciations as they vary from place to place across the United States. The books are the result of face-to-face interviews carried out in all 50 states, and of analysis of a comprehensive collection of written materials like diaries, letters, novels, newspapers, histories, and government documents that cover our history from the colonial period to the present.

The first volume, covering A through C, was released in 1985. The fifth and final, for which Joan Houston Hall is again the Chief Editor, takes us from Si through Z and is due in 2012. These books are the end result of a process that began way back in 1889 with the founding of the American Dialect Society, as explained in this history on the DARE website. Despite being reference works, though, these books aren’t meant to collect flug in the rumpelkammer. They’re the toast of any gathering of American linguists, sure, but the DARE books have also proven extremely useful to librarians, teachers, historians, journalists, playwrights, detectives, physicians, psychologists, and dialect coaches, among others. So you can understand the excitement over the approaching fifth volume, which will finally complete this presentation of American Regional English from A to izzard.

Until that time, though, follow the @darewords twitter feed for a word a day. And do so in the knowledge that your very presence on twitter is helping to both document and propagate regional slang. As reported earlier this month by the Chronicle of Higher Education, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a computer program to analyze the language of tweets, through which they can determine the location of a Twitter user in the United States with a median error of roughly 300 miles. Regional English, alive and well.

(UPDATE: DARE Volume V is now available!)

Putting "Blood Libel" in Historical Context

In an address following the tragic shootings in Tucson earlier this month, Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase “blood libel” to describe the intentions of those linking the violence to political rhetoric drew swift criticism. Many took exception to her loose use of a term that refers to a very specific accusation against Jews that has a long history of painful employment. We asked Magda Teter, a professor of History and of Jewish Studies at Wesleyan University, to explain the history invoked by the term “blood libel.”  Teter is the author of the forthcoming Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation. Her piece, below, gives much-needed historical context to this modern political moment. 

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When Sarah Palin used the term “blood libel” in response to the shooting in Arizona that left six people dead and severely injured others, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, she stirred a controversy. To defend herself in the midst of the controversy, Palin defined the term “blood libel” very broadly as “being falsely accused of having blood on your hands.” Despite her broad definition, blood libel is a term that refers very specifically to the historical accusation that Jews killed Christian children to obtain their blood. A false accusation, to be sure, but one with a long and painful history, marking centuries of Jewish-Christian relations.

As an anti-Jewish accusation, the blood libel emerged in the Middle Ages, first in the twelfth century following the massacres of the First Crusade, when Jews were accused of an act of “ritual murder”: crucifying a Christian in enmity of Christianity and reenactment of the Passion of Jesus. But in the thirteenth century, “ritual murder” accusations turned into the “blood libel,” perhaps because of the increasing centrality of blood imagery in Christian ritual and worship at the time. In 1236, Jews in Fulda, Germany, were accused of killing several Christian children in order to collect their blood for medicinal purposes. Emperor Frederick II ordered an inquiry, which, of course, found no Jewish need for blood.

Still, many more such accusations took place, resulting in 1247 in a papal bull condemning “the unpraiseworthy zeal” and “detestable cruelty on the part of Christians” who had launched such accusations. The bull prohibited any similar charges against Jews under “ecclesiastical punishment without appeal.” Despite such strong condemnations, the accusation against Jews became an enduring transnational phenomenon, which lasted for over eight hundred years, from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, and, as the Sarah Palin incident suggests, still has a resonance in the twenty-first. Other medieval anti-Jewish tales waned, such as that of the desecration of the host or poisoning of wells, but the blood libel adapted to changing cultural climates.

Indeed, Sarah Palin is not the first to use “blood libel” in a political context. Despite being condemned by popes and monarchs alike, “blood libels” against Jews can, in fact, be barometers of the reach and limits of the power and authority of European rulers, certainly in the premodern era, and can reflect cultural and political transformations of the society at large, since the efficacy of condemnations of such accusations were related to the power and influence of the individuals who issued them. Similarly, the way in which blood libels were used illustrates political aspirations of those who raised the charges.

David W. Blight on The Civil War Sesquicentennial

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War, the commemoration of which provides an opportunity to look back on that great tragedy and retrace the conflict. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have convened online panels to do just that, and there are countless other rich resources available for examining the conduct of the war. The Sesquicentennial, though, is also an opportunity for considering the role that the Civil War has played in American culture through these one hundred and fifty years.

About ten years ago we published David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which was recently recognized as one of the dozen best books ever written about the war. The book is about how the Civil War functioned for America in the fifty years after its end, through the immediate efforts to put the country back together, through the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow system in the South. Blight shows how Americans in both the North and the South, led by the Federal Government, focused on healing the nation at the expense of pursuing justice for the countless Americans impacted by the war, chief among them the four million former slaves.

Later this year we’ll publish a new book from Professor Blight, on four writers who were both shaping and reflecting American memory of the Civil War during the Civil Rights era – James Baldwin, Bruce Catton, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. Working on this new project, which examines the role of the Civil War at its Centennial, led him inevitably to consider its impact today, at the Sesquicentennial, a time when the constitutional questions raised by the Civil War churn as tumultuously as ever.

We caught up with Professor Blight at the American Historical Association meeting in Boston earlier this month, where he was kind enough to join us for a conversation on the Civil War’s importance in America’s past and present. In three parts posted below, Professor Blight addresses the defining role of the Civil War in American culture, the conflicting aims of healing and justice in the years after the conflict, and the role of the historian in contemporary debate.

 

 

The Crisis of Neoliberalism

Earlier this month we published a new book from Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, both of whom are Directors of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Duménil and Lévy are the authors of an earlier Harvard University Press book, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution, in which they showed that, despite free market platitudes, neoliberalism was a planned effort by financial interests against the postwar Keynesian compromise. In their new book, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, they examine the global economic collapse of 2007-2010 as an inevitable outcome of the rise of neoliberal economics. Unlike much that’s been written on this collapse, Duménil and Lévy focus not on villifying individuals, but on describing the larger forces at work. And, again unlike most other accounts, the authors offer concrete prescriptions for revitalizing our global economy and closing the door on the era of neoliberalism. With accessible language accompanied by well-designed graphs and charts, The Crisis of Neoliberalism is a useful new guide to understanding the world around us.

Gérard Duménil was recently interviewed by the nonprofit news agency The Real News Network. In two segments that you can watch below, Duménil gives a lucid explanation of neoliberalism and its rise before turning to the inherent instabilities that led to this crisis. He also touches here on solutions, which are outlined in far greater detail in the book.

(Note: these videos are loading a little slowly from their host.  If you have any trouble with playback, just press pause and let them load for a minute or two.)

Part 1:

   

 

The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In The Word of the Lord is Upon Me, Barnard College Sociologist Jonathan Rieder delves deeply into the complex life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. The anchor for Rieder’s analysis is King’s “righteous performance,” in which Rieder sees “an uncommon ability to glide in and out of black, white and other idioms and identities in an elaborate dance of empathy.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in praising The Word of the Lord is Upon Me, commended Rieder for “movingly represent(ing) King as a master performer who was never less than authentic, who always matched action to thought as manifested in the beauty of his words.”

In the excerpt below, Rieder draws out the significance of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech not just as a turning point in the Civil Rights movement, but as a breakthrough in American cultural life that thrust a style of black performance into the mainstream.

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King’s unplanned swerve into “Dream” in Washington may have followed a rustling in the audience that served as encouragement. At a key point, others on the platform, realizing that King had wandered off the text, urged him on. Mahalia Jackson appears to have interceded from her place on the stage: “Tell them about the Dream, Martin.”

Whatever triggered the shift, what followed was a display of black preaching in all its glory for the larger nation to behold. More than the improvising itself, the call and shout that may have catalyzed it, or the spirituals that introduced it, the cutting loose of the finale marked “Dream” as a civic version of the black performed sermon. Merging his voice with that of Isaiah and Amos, King transported his audience to the biblical time of inspired prophecy, fusing the foretaste of the coming of the Lord with the savoring of freedom’s coming. As he approached the run-up to his climax, King was bobbing and weaving, sampling from everywhere, blurring the boundaries between oration, sermon, and song. He moved from Isaiah’s vision—“every valley shall be exalted”—to the “I have a dream” refrain, then suddenly sampled “My country ’tis of thee,” was off to the chant of “Let freedom ring,” and finally reached the crescendo of the slave spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

“I Have a Dream” was a breakthrough in American cultural life. It channeled the classic theme of American possibility into a hybrid form that was part political oration, part black sermon. It set a precedent for bringing black performance into mainstream venues. This wasn’t just music in a metaphoric sense; it was singing almost literally as well. King had invented a kind of political soul music, steeped in Afro-Baptist intensities, yet modulated enough to transfer to the larger society. One can label “Dream” a typical piece of civil religious oratory only if one ignores its distinctive style. After his own fashion, King was declaring to the nation, “I’m black and I’m proud.”

Gun Control, Mental Illness, and the Arizona Shootings

A couple of HUP authors have been among those trying to make sense this week of the tragic shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, Arizona on January 8th.

Katherine Benton-Cohen, an Arizona native and the author of Borderline Americans, contributed an opinion piece to Politico on the post-shooting characterization of Arizona as “the Tombstone of the United States.” As Benton-Cohen explains, the tendency to view Arizona as some static outpost of the Wild West is simply ahistorical. “Tombstone lawmakers in the 1880s,” she writes, “did more to combat gun violence than the Arizona government does today.”

She continues: “For all the talk of the ‘Wild West,’ the policymakers of 1880 Tombstone—and many other Western towns—were ardent supporters of gun control. When people now compare things to the ‘shootout at the OK Corral,’ they mean vigilante violence by gunfire. But this is exactly what the Tombstone town council had been trying to avoid.”

Benton-Cohen, whose book explores racial categories and vigilante violence in Cochise County, Arizona, also was interviewed by the Georgetown Blue and Gray. In that conversation, she further explains the history of Arizona’s gun laws and the prospects for their reform. As she explains, though, her goal is not the outright banning of firearms. “I’m not interested in banning every gun in America,” she said. “I come from a family of hunters. They have legal firearms in the state of Arizona, and that’s fine with me. I’m looking for ways to keep dangerously mentally ill people and dangerous people from owning dangerous handguns and semi-automatic weapons.”

The mental state of alleged shooter Jared Loughner has been one of the many flashpoints in the aftermath of the attack. Richard J. McNally, Harvard Professor of Psychology and author most recently of What is Mental Illness? weighed in on the discourse developing around Lougher’s mental health. In a Salon piece titled “Why Psychiatrists Can't Predict Mass Murderers,” McNally addresses the reasonable urge to make sense of the senseless and to learn from this incident. While many in the media have been recounting Loughner’s troubled past and wondering why authorities seemingly failed, time and again, to take action in ways that could have prevented this tragedy from occurring, McNally explains the difficulty of such intervention: 

Let's assume that we've identified a set of characteristics often exhibited by mass murderers. What does that buy us? It enables us to answer the question, “Given that someone is a mass murderer, what characteristics is he likely to exhibit?” That's an interesting question, but it's not the one we want to answer. Rather, the question we really want to answer is, “Given that someone exhibits this profile of characteristics, how likely is he to commit mass murder?” Answering this question is extremely difficult because the predictors are invariably far more common than the event we hope to predict, and mass murder is very rare. Although mass murderers often do exhibit bizarre behavior, most people who exhibit bizarre behavior do not commit mass murder.

Despite the difficulties presented, McNally accepts for science the need to learn from incidents like the Arizona shooting. “The consequences of missing a future mass murderer in our midst are appalling, and the enormity of such a mistake fuels the hope that someday science will overcome the daunting challenge of distinguishing the truly dangerous from the merely odd.”

On Tracking a Wandering Soul

Gabriella Safran’s Wandering Soul is the first full-length biography of S. An-sky, the author of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk. An-sky, born Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport in 1836, lived an extraordinary yet emblematic life across multiple identities, countries, and careers, amidst the cultural and political upheaval of his era. In praising Wandering Soul as a “rich and lucid biography,” the critic Adam Kirsch observed that “Today, when ‘liminality’ is a buzzword in literary studies, a figure like An-sky seems to hold a profound truth about the modern condition.” Here, Gabriella Safran recounts her time among An-sky’s papers in Ukraine, and finds parallels between the lives of her subject and her Ukrainian hostess.

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Doing the research for Wandering Soul, I followed S. An-sky, the peripatetic Russian-Jewish writer and revolutionary who was my subject, through the territory that he knew as the Russian Empire. In the summers of 2003 and 2004, I worked at Kiev's Vernadsky Library and stayed with friends of friends, a couple with two college-age children. I admired the grace with which these tall people inhabited their small rooms, the proportionality of plates to cabinet, chairs to table. It was my first time in Ukraine, and my hostess Natasha, a stylish woman with big glasses, told me about her life there. She had come to Kiev in the 1970s, a poor girl from the provinces, to work in a weapons factory: young women, with their sensitive fingers, are best at this delicate assembly work. Then she studied engineering and learned to design the warheads that the Soviets directed at the West. It was a prestigious, well-paid profession, and being forbidden contact with foreigners did not trouble her. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, the job vanished. To support her family, Natasha became a smuggler, buying cheap clothes across the border in Turkey and selling them in Kiev. At the time of my visits she had a capitalist-era job at a company selling organic, hypoallergenic cosmetics and detergents. Her co-workers were all post-communist kids two decades younger than she was. As I walked from the archive to the metro and the metro to the apartment, I looked forward to talking with Natasha and answering her practical questions about life in the United States. (I sensed that she remained mystified about why Stanford University would want to pay my expenses to sit in a Kiev archive and read hundred-year-old papers, but she was too polite to keep asking.)

In the intervals between chats with Natasha, I read letters people had sent to An-sky and the rough drafts of his own letters. I imagined his delight when he wrote to his patron, the rich Baron Gintsburg, to report that the legends he had gathered on his ethnographic expedition to Ukrainian shtetls had inspired him to draft a play, The Dybbuk. I felt the pain and frustration in the five drafts of the letter he would eventually send to Edia, his young, unfaithful, wife, to ask for a divorce. I read letters from his publishers about deadlines, from his relatives asking for money, from another writer about how his daughter was crippled during a wartime pogrom. Like Natasha, An-sky lived at a time when political changes in the Slavic territories made ordinary people's lives unpredictable and hard. In the 1890s, a budding radical, he had left Russia for France and Switzerland. At the end of 1905, in the wake of revolution, he came back to Russia. He reported on the Dreyfus Affair, the bloody 1906 pogrom in Bialystok, the 1913 Beilis blood libel trial in Kiev. He was in turn—and simultaneously—a revolutionary propagandist, a Jewish cultural impresario, an amateur social scientist, a negotiator with the Bolsheviks. When the occasion demanded, he became an expert on peasant literacy, European education, the redistribution of land in Romania.

Ishmael Reed on the Language of Huck Finn

Not a small amount of debate bubbled up recently over the plans of the publisher NewSouth Books and the scholar Alan Gribben to release censored editions of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Their intention, they say, is to offer versions of these texts that are cleansed of their most hurtful racial epithets, so as to enable continued teaching of the books in this era when Huckleberry Finn has all but disappeared from young classrooms.  The issue was addressed from a variety of perspectives in a New York Times roundtable.

This plan to radically alter one of the most important novels in American history sent us back to an essay on Huckleberry Finn by the great Ishmael Reed, one that was included in our New Literary History of America. In the essay, presented here in full, Reed offers a characteristically sharp take on Huck Finn that, read in the context of this debate, makes clear the importance of Twain’s original language to the book’s continued power.

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Mark Twain's Hairball

Ishmael Reed

Structurally, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the story of an escaped black slave named Jim and a young white boy named Huck floating down the Mississippi River on a raft, is about as solid as a New Orleans levee and, beginning with the entrance of Tom Sawyer, seems to implode, but its epic sweep is impressive, its characters, both major and minor, engaging, and the novel tells us a good deal about how nineteenth-century Americans lived—as well as what has changed and what hasn’t.

The characters are given to excessive speech-making, and some of it is reminiscent of the form of tall-tale-telling prose poetry Muhammad Ali gets credit for inventing. “I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!” one of Twain’s characters boasts. “Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’ed by an earthquake, half-brother to cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on my mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing!” Some of Twain’s characters use gab to hustle the gullible; today they would be on Madison Avenue, and then as now using advertising to attract customers to their dubious wares. Even Jim, one of the few characters in the book with anything close to integrity, has a game. He peddles a hairball removed from the innards of an ox that, he claims, can solve mysteries and predict the future—if you feed it with money. An early talking head.

The novel is Twain’s hairball, a prescient book that lays down patterns of race relations in American life, just as the hairball represents the superstitious thinking not only of Twain’s time, but, when twenty-first-century presidential candidates appeal to millions of voters by claiming that the earth is 8,000 years old, of ours. Superstition takes many forms: when Twain wrote, Americans were as easily turned into mobs by rabble-rousers as they are today. Once it might have been characters like “the duke” and “the king,” the fast-talking con artists who take over Huck and Jim’s raft; in our time their place is taken by talk-show hosts as well as by those who are considered part of the nation’s intellectual elite. It was the noted commentator Charles Krauthammer who created the “crack baby” scare: part of a wider effort to paint blacks as subhuman, and a hoax.

The duke and the king provide Twain with an opportunity to poke fun at the awe with which their American cousins view European royalty. But even now, networks raise their ratings by appealing to the insatiable curiosity of Americans about the British royalty. Vanity Fair and other publications regularly feature royal doings for the entertainment of the upscale, white, second-generation Americans whose forebears were regarded as among the genetically damaged. In 2007, Helen Mirren received an Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II, and hours of television are still devoted to Princess Diana, who has been dead since 1997. The duke and the king, so successful in their impersonations that they are able to fleece wide-eyed Americans of their money, were merely there first—and they themselves are a mirror of the impersonation of royalty that was the antebellum South. “Col. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see,” we hear of one member of the Southern fake aristocracy. “He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family. He was well-born, as the saying is”—yet his family is meting out mindless violence to its enemies, the Shepherdsons, who are, like the Grangerfords, “high-toned, and well-born, and rich and grand.” In their dedication to murdering each other, both families have been nearly emptied of male members.