Harvard University Press Blog

The Year We Blogged

Time again for the university to shut off the lights and turn down the heat, forcing us all to our homes for a bit of rest and reading. As blogging will be light for a spell, we thought we’d leave you with a look back at just some of what we’ve been up to this year; maybe you’ll see something you missed the first time through.

Way back in January, we shared an excerpt from our volume of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, in which the Nobel Laureate considered what takes place in our minds when we read novels.

Also in January, amidst the controversy of a publisher’s plan to release a censored version of Huck Finn, we posted the full text of Ishmael Reed’s New Literary History of America essay on Twain’s classic.

And we closed out the month with a trio of short videos featuring David Blight, who spoke with us about the enduring significance of the American Civil War, just as the nation began to mark the conflict’s sesquicentennial.

We heard from two long-time HUP Editors after the death of Daniel Bell, the pioneering social scientist who for years helped to oversee the Press. Michael Aronson wrote of his memories of Bell, and Lindsay Waters remembered Bell’s impact on the direction of HUP.

In February, as the world watched events unfold in Egypt, we looked back at a book by Timur Kuran titled Private Truths, Public Lies. Kuran, currently a professor of Economics and Islamic Studies at Duke, presented in the book a model for understanding the seemingly sudden process of social and political breakthrough. It’s a book we’ve thought back on many times throughout this year of global political uprising.

Also in February, as we began our celebration of the Loeb Classical Library’s 100th anniversary, we asked you to show us your Loebs. And you did! In May, and then again this week, we shared your pictures from all over the world.

We also heard from Nicholas Frankel, editor of our beautiful new annotated, uncensored edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, about the history of Wilde’s novel, and why it’s taken so long for this original version to finally see publication.

In March, we presented the Interlude from one of our best-titled books of the year, Seo-Young Chu’s Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation.

Also in March, after the entire Harvard community was saddened by the passing of Harvard Law School Professor William J. Stuntz, HUP Editor Elizabeth Knoll wrote about Stuntz’s work to finish The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, a book we proudly published in September.

In April, we shared an excerpt from Umerto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist, in which the not-actually-so-young Eco pondered why we weep for fictional characters.

Later in the month, HUP Editor Sharmila Sen marked the publication of The Essential Tagore with a story about the collection of Tagore’s poems that she carried with her as a child when her family moved to the United States.

May was busy! We looked at the Keynes-Hayek rap battle, noted the creation by Pitzer College of the nation’s first department of secular studies (and recommended some books for them), and marked the paperback publication of Paul Gilroy’s Darker than Blue by sharing a song that’s been on heavy rotation in these halls all this year and last.

And we rounded out May by posting our video of Martha Nussbaum discussing the Capabilities Approach to Human Development.

Of Color in America

In January, we’ll publish Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. The book examines a hidden history of transnational cooperation towards the freedom of the “colored world.” Below, Slate considers the role of that sort of solidarity within America’s evolving racial composition.

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Fifty years from now, the United States will no longer have a “white” majority. The significance of this demographic change will hinge on what it means to be non-white or, in an oft-repeated but ill-defined phrase, a “person of color.”

Take the case of Nikki Haley, the Indian American governor of South Carolina. In January 2011, Benjamin Jealous, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), challenged Haley to stop flying the Confederate flag in front of the state capitol. Jealous appealed to Haley as South Carolina’s “first governor of color,” referenced the history of linkages between the civil rights movement and the Indian freedom struggle, and challenged Haley to consider, “What would Gandhi do?” His historical references might have been different if Jealous had known that Haley, when asked to identify her race on South Carolina’s official voter registration card, had checked the box for “white.”

As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, for much of American history, immigrants from India had to claim legal whiteness if they wished to become citizens. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white persons.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, naturalization was expanded to those of African descent. All other ethnic groups were relegated to a gray zone in which citizenship rights depended on proof of whiteness.

Between 1908 and 1922, at least sixty-nine Indians gained United States citizenship by successfully claiming to be white. In Savannah, Georgia in 1910, Abba Dolla, a native of Calcutta, arranged for a doctor to testify to his “pure Caucasian blood.” The presiding judge described Dolla as follows: “The applicant’s complexion is dark, eyes dark, features regular and rather delicate, hair very black, wavy and very fine and soft.” Uncertain about Dolla’s racial identity, the judge asked him to pull up his shirt sleeves. Fortunately for Dolla, the judge concluded, “The skin of his arm where it had been protected from the sun and weather by his clothing was found to be several shades lighter than that of his face and hands, and was sufficiently transparent for the blue color of the veins to show very clearly.” Impressed, the judge granted citizenship.

The ability of Indians to gain legal whiteness ended in 1923, when the Supreme Court ruled against granting citizenship to a U.S. Army veteran, Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh American like Nikki Haley. After 1923, many Indian Americans came to connect their persecution as a racial minority to the struggles of other non-white Americans. Jagjit (J.J.) Singh, an influential Sikh businessman and the leader of the most prominent Indian American organization in the 1930s and 1940s, established close links with Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP. While Mahatma Gandhi inspired opponents of American racism, African American struggles attracted sympathy throughout India. Many Indians came to see themselves as part of a global struggle for the rights of “colored people.”

When, in 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” he globalized the color line, referring not only to the “millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands of the Sea” but also to “the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere.” Over the course of the twentieth century, immigration rendered Du Bois’s inclusive conception of color vital to understanding race within as well as beyond the borders of the United States. While the ethnic diversity of the United States has always exceeded the black/white dichotomy, rapid increases in the population of Latinas/os, Asian Americans, and other non-black people of color has made it especially important to understand the long history of relationships between minority groups. That history can help us understand the origin of tensions between ethnic groups. It can also remind us that inter-ethnic relations have been marked by cooperation as well as tension, cooperation inspired for many by a colored cosmopolitanism.

The racial ambiguity that marks the history of South Asian Americans also colors the history of other ethnic groups. For decades, immigrants from throughout the world struggled to prove their whiteness. Americans from as far afield as the Middle East, Mexico, and Japan marshaled notions of Caucasian identity or pointed to the bare fact of white skin. While immigrants no longer need to prove their whiteness in order to become citizens, the racial ambiguity of many immigrant communities complicates their relationships with each other and with an America struggling with persistent racial inequality and ongoing debates concerning the proper role of race in the public sphere. Will Barack Obama win the Latino vote? Should Korean Americans and Cambodian Americans be lumped together as “Asian Americans” for the purposes of affirmative action? Many of the most pressing issues regarding race in contemporary America relate to the vexed question of what it means to be a “person of color,” a question that hinges on how non-white Americans view each other. The history of colored cosmopolitanism offers hope for a solidarity between non-white Americans that is neither anti-white nor blind to racial inequality. It matters how Nikki Haley understands her racial identity. It matters what she thinks when she walks by that Confederate flag.

More Loebs!

Earlier this year we asked for you to help us celebrate the 100th anniversary year of the Loeb Classical Library by sending us pictures of your Loeb collections. We shared a batch of your pictures in the spring, and we’re back today with another bunch. Our sincere thanks to everyone who has sent in photos.

First up, a man we were thrilled to hear from, Mr. Charles Montgomery Burns, of Springfield. He keeps his Loeb volumes right by the hearth in his library. Here he is, pondering the classics with a nice snifter of something warm:

From Burns to the basement, for this shot from Seminary Co-op in Chicago:

And here, top to bottom, are the personal collections of Ralph Aulenta, Maddy Bowman, and Alan Steele, a British Army Chaplain, who says he normally takes a couple of Loebs with him when deployed to hot and dusty places.

Here’s the collection at P. Tombolini and Co. in Rome. Loebs in Rome!

Slow Violence and Our Better Angels

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that, despite the violence saturating our media, we are actually living in a time of unprecedented peace for humanity. We have inner motives towards violence, he explains, but also towards peacefulness, and society has been arranging itself in ways that allow the latter to prevail more and more often. The book has been one of this fall’s biggest, and its surprising argument has led it to be reviewed and debated widely.

Judging by the FAQ posted to Pinker’s website, a common concern among people engaging with The Better Angels of Our Nature is Pinker’s definition of violence. His explanation:

I use the term in its standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”) In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide, corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.

Another refrain among readers: what about more abstract forms of violence, like economic or environmental? Pinker responds:

The fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”

To which we say: fair enough. And yet some of the critique of Pinker’s book has put us in mind of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, a book we published earlier this year. Nixon’s book is driven by his conviction that we need to politically, imaginatively, and theoretically “rethink” what he calls “slow violence,” a class of violence that doesn’t align with what Pinker refers to as the “standard sense.” From Nixon’s book:

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.

Pinker’s violence is one dependent on intention to do harm, and one may argue that an absence of intention distinguishes Nixon’s slow violence from Pinker’s more traditionally understood forms. But Nixon begins his book by quoting from a confidential World Bank memo written in 1991 by Larry Summers that indicates that we’d be mistaken to assume that these slower forms of violence are free from malevolence:

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?

But Which Keynes?

During the economic meltdown of 2008, when politicians and pundits were casting about for explanations, it was far from certain that the ideas of John Maynard Keynes would come roaring back into public discourse. Just a few years earlier, Keynes was hardly mentioned in discussions of economic policy. But then down goes Lehman and here comes Keynes, back in the headlines. Then comes government spending, then government debt, then fear of default and aggressive partisan politics, and then it’s back to bye bye for Keynes. ‘Twas but a quick return engagement, a cameo based in caricature, say Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman, authors of Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes. This most recent appearance was only one of many such returns, they argue, each of which seems to have been based on a different version of the multi-faceted economist. From Capitalist Revolutionary:

The Keynes who was recently and so suddenly resurrected is far from being the only Keynes to have appeared in public debate in the last half-century. He is not the same person who was famous in the middle of the twentieth century, during what was widely called “the age of Keynes.” Neither is he the Keynes who was rejected so decisively by economists and politicians in the 1970s. Keynes and Keynesianism have been reinterpreted time and time again, both by those who seek to claim his authority for positions they want to adopt and by those who denounce him, using him as a foil against which they can present their own ideas. This repeated reinterpretation should not be a surprise. We now see the world differently from the way people saw it in the 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War; in the 1960s, when Kennedy and Johnson were trying to manage the economy; or even in the 1970s, when the current movements against “big government” and the welfare state were first getting under way.

One reason for seeing Keynes differently is that the world has changed. The trends that get swept into the category of “globalization” have transformed the world economy, just as the end of the Cold War and the end of Communism transformed the political climate. Present-day skepticism about whether politicians and businessmen can be trusted to do anything other than line their own pockets contrasts dramatically with the widespread confidence in government and planning found in the thirty years following the Second World War. These changes have had a profound effect on which Keynes people have been able to see. There is, however, another reason for seeing Keynes differently. Keynes and Keynesianism were multidimensional. Unusually, Keynes straddled the worlds of academia, journalism, government, and business, with the result that he cannot (or should not) be pigeonholed only as the designer of economic policies or just as an important economic theorist who sought the fundamental laws governing the operation of capitalist economies. He was both of these, and to leave out one or the other of them distorts our view of the whole. He was, moreover, also a philosopher who offered a moral critique of capitalism.

Just What They've Always Wanted

Here we are in gift-giving season, when lots of you spend time thinking about which books to give to certain people. Well, we spend a whole mess of time doing the opposite: thinking about which people are going to want certain books. So let us help you! Below we have a list of people-types and the books they want this year. So pull out your list, take a look at ours, and then match ‘em up. They’ll love the books, you’ll feel smart, we’ll feel helpful, and everybody’s happy.

Let’s get started.

For the Playfully Literary — Confessions of a Young Novelist, by Umberto Eco

Connoisseurs of Political Hokum — Common Sense: A Political History, by Sophia Rosenfeld

Diarists/Germanophiles — The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century, by Peter Fritzsche

Those Imagining a Just World — Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, by Martha C. Nussbaum

Literary Immersionists — The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty

Occupiers — Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past, by Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold

The Wilde at Heart — The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, edited by Nicholas Frankel

Seekers of Meaning — Justice for Hedgehogs, by Ronald Dworkin

American Historical Excavators — Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts, by Daniel K. Ricther

Birdwatchers, Bug-Lovers, Plant-Spotters, and Naturalists of Every Other Persuasion — Field Notes on Science & Nature, by Michael R. Canfield

The Quantum Curious — 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can’t See, by Kenneth W. Ford

World Trade Wonderers — Understanding Global Trade, by Elhanan Helpman

Nature/Nurturers — Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, by Niobe Way

Mischievous Romantics — Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of Ovid, translated by David R. Slavitt

Poetically Inclined Witnesses to Economic Turmoil — The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century, by Christopher Nealon

Cravers of Big, Deep, World-Explaining Biography — Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, by Ezra F. Vogel

Liu Xiaobo and the Transformation of China

The first page of our Fall 2011 catalog presents No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. The second page features Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, an impressively researched biography of the Chinese leader thought to have had as much impact on the world as any other twentieth century figure. The juxtaposition of these two books—the connection between these two men—is not lost on us. The actions of one can fairly be said to have created the conditions for the emergence of the other.

In December 2009, at the close of the trial for his involvement in the drafting and dissemination of Charter 08, a manifesto for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, Liu Xiaobo read a statement from which the title of this first English language collection is drawn. It began with his declaration that “June 1989 has been the major turning point in my life, which now is just over one half century in length.” It was in June 1989 that the world watched the massacre of demonstrators in Beijing at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere, and it was Liu’s involvement in those demonstrations and their violent end that set his life on a new course.

In the decades since, he has frequently written of the legacy of Tiananmen Square, and has also struggled to come to terms with his own role, and that of other leaders who, though forever marked by their participation, still escaped with their lives. The stories of 155 who died were told in a booklet, Witnessing the Massacre and Seeking Justice, produced by a group called the Tiananmen Mothers. In an essay titled “Listed Carefully to the Voices of the Tiananmen Mothers,” included in No Enemies, No Hatred, Liu details the cold violence of the military crackdown, and the shocking murder of many unaffiliated with the demonstrations. He describes his own reaction to the stories:

Guilt feelings stab at my heart like daggers as I read these transcripts, because it is clear that not one of the people whose lives were so cruelly snuffed out that night was among the “elite.” None of the conspicuous activists—like me—were killed. The victims ranged from a 66-year-old senior citizen to a child barely 9. There were people in their thirties and forties, the prime of life, a youngster of 17, another who was 20-something . . . But they were all just ordinary students and civilians, people who apparently wanted to live ordinary lives and to enjoy everyday sorts of happiness, and on that blood-soaked night they had made the mistake of acting on impulses of sympathy or of justice, and it had cost them everything.

He continues:

I am just trying to remind myself, as one of those “influential” figures, of the true facts of the Tiananmen Massacre. How was it that university students and high-level intellectuals led the 1989 movement, but when the dust settled all the people who were massacred, went out to rescue the wounded, or received heavy sentences were common people? Why is it that we scarcely hear the voices of the people who paid the heaviest prices, while the luminaries who survived the massacre can hardly stop talking? . . . To look squarely at the suffering of the ordinary people whose misery is recorded in the transcripts makes me feel that I am not qualified even to be called a “survivor.” It is true that I was one of the last people to leave Tiananmen Square on June 4th, but I did nothing to volunteer myself during the bloody terror of the massacre’s aftermath, nothing to show that a kernel of my humanity had survived.

A New Grammar of Political Disobedience

In October, Bernard Harcourt argued that the then-nascent Occupy Wall Street movement represented a political paradigm shift, one that demanded a new vocabulary. The protests signaled the emergence of a form of what he called “political disobedience.” He described political disobedience as a fundamental rejection of the “political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War,” and contrasted it with civil disobedience:

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

The movement exercises its political disobedience in part through its refusal to issue demands, Harcourt argued, and even well-meaning fellow travelers who attempted to steer Occupy toward articulate positions were “missing the point of the resistance.” Harcourt, chair of the political science department and professor of law at the University of Chicago, and author, most recently, of The Illusion of Free Markets, argued that protesters should continue to resist making explicit demands, because such demands would merely submit the movement to the partisan political sphere that Occupy is meant to resist. “Ultimately,” he wrote, “what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in,” and distilling themselves to a handful of demands would be conceding to the terms of the society that the Occupiers aim to leave behind.

This week Harcourt extended his analysis of the movement with a piece on Occupy’s grammar of political disobedience, suggesting that, if the new paradigm of political resistance calls for a new vocabulary, it also calls for an entirely new grammar:

The syntax that the critics and pundits are using no longer seems to work. Statements to the effect that Occupy Wall Street should get an agenda or, as the Wall Street Journal disdainfully remarked, should stop engaging in “days of feckless rage”, no longer fully make sense. It is as if these grammatical formulations cannot be “heard” properly given the leaderless paradigm of the new resistance movement. They sound like the inaudible noise in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – or, perhaps more familiarly, the “mwa, mwa, mwa” that adults make in Charlie Brown cartoons.

For Harcourt part of what makes such statements inaudible is a spatial matter: they cannot be “heard” by the movement “unless the speaker is physically occupying an Occupy space.” Again, this applies as much to those who side with the movement as those who oppose: “You can't ‘occupy’ while sitting at your computer or publishing an editorial. You cannot ‘occupy’ at a distance from an Occupy site.”