Harvard University Press Blog

Honoring the Work of Patricia Williams

This Friday, Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law will host a day-long symposium honoring the work of Patricia Williams, the school’s James L. Dohr Professor of Law. Each year the symposium honors a senior scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the field of gender and sexuality law, and Williams now joins past honorees Martha Nussbaum, Judith Butler, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Upon granting her one of its fellowships (the so-called “genius grant”) in 2000, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Williams for having created “a new form of legal writing and scholarship that integrates personal narrative, critical and literary theory, traditional legal doctrine, and empirical and sociological research.”

We’ve twice published books by Williams, including her first, 1991’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights. From its very first lines, Alchemy announced itself as a deeply personal work, braver and far more vulnerable than most anything else on a university press’s law list:

Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you deserve to know that it’s a bad morning. I am very depressed. It always takes a while to sort out what’s wrong, but it usually starts with some kind of perfectly irrational thought such as: I hate being a lawyer.

That very incongruence—the disconnect between Williams’ writing and the impersonal analysis that would generally be expected from the work of a law professor—reflects the ideas of the book itself, run through with defiance of society’s need to limit by categorization.

In the book’s opening essay Williams recalls being pressed by her sister to explain what the then-in-progress Alchemy would be about. Her reply:

I am interested in the way in which legal language flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem; I am trying to challenge the usual limits of commercial discourse by using an intentionally double-voiced and relational, rather than a traditionally legal black-letter, vocabulary. For example, I am a commercial lawyer as well as a teacher of contract and property law. I am also black and female, a status that one of my former employers described as being “at oxymoronic odds” with that of the commercial lawyer. While I certainly took issue with that particular characterization, it is true that my attempts to write in my own voice have placed me in the center of a snarl of social tensions and crossed boundaries. On the one hand, my writing has been staked out as the exclusive interdisciplinary property of constitutional law, contract, African-American history, feminist jurisprudence, political science, and rhetoric. At the same time, my work has been described as a “sophisticated frontal assault” on laissez-faire’s most sacred sanctums, as “new-age performance art,” and as “anecdotal individualism.” In other words, to speak as black female, and commercial lawyer has rendered me simultaneously universal, trendy, and marginal. I think, moreover, that there is a paradigm at work, in the persistent perceptions of me as inherent contradiction: a paradigm of larger social perceptions that divide public from private, black from white, dispossessed from legitimate. This realization, while extremely personal, inevitably informs my writing on a professional level.

Her willingness to confront rather than conform to that “snarl of social tensions and crossed boundaries” gave the book a deep resonance while also establishing an interdisciplinary approach that became a model for generations of scholars. Alondra Nelson, of Columbia’s Department of Sociology and Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and a moderator of one of the symposium’s panels, recalled for us the book’s influence on her as an undergraduate: “As an aspiring academic, I was captivated by this book that featured its fearless black feminist author on the cover; she was a mentor from afar. I was forever transformed by the book’s equal measures of poetry and prose, erudition and plain-spokenness, wit and candidness.”

On a Desert Island, with Soup

Heard the one about the physicist, the chemist, and the economist on a desert island? If you work here you have; it’s been our favorite joke this year.

Goes like this:

A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island. One can only imagine what sort of play date went awry to land them there. Anyway, they’re hungry. Like, desert island hungry. And then a can of soup washes ashore. Progresso Reduced Sodium Chicken Noodle, let’s say. Which is perfect, because the physicist can’t have much salt, and the chemist doesn’t eat red meat.

But, famished as they are, our three professionals have no way to open the can. So they put their brains to the problem. The physicist says “We could drop it from the top of that tree over there until it breaks open.” And the chemist says “We could build a fire and sit the can in the flames until it bursts open.”

Those two squabble a bit, until the economist says “No, no, no. Come on, guys, you’d lose most of the soup. Let’s just assume a can opener.”

GET IT?

You can’t just assume a can opener and have it appear, obviously. But economists regularly rely on analogous assumptions of conditions that don’t actually exist in the real world. This is one of the fundamental ways in which economics differs from the hard sciences, even though economists often seek to present their views with the certainty of, say, a physicist or chemist.

In The Assumptions Economists Make, Jonathan Schlefer digs into this manner of assumption-based economic modeling that leads opposing economists to come to drastically different conclusions. It’s kind of like an outsider’s guide to economic thought, meant to help us understand just how ideologically determined an economist’s work can sometimes be, and also how shockingly wrong, as we all learned the hard way when the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008.

To Schlefer, it’s his own position outside the field that helps him to explain its workings:

Be warned: as a card-carrying political scientist, I may entertain a certain smoldering envy toward the imperialistic powers of the social sciences—namely, university economics departments. But my outsider’s perspective has its uses, since I am duly startled by features of the economics landscape that economists barely notice, so inured have they become to them. Moreover, I’m curious about economics. You need curiosity to write about anything you might criticize, because otherwise you never spend the energy and thought to figure out what it says in the first place. And sometimes when you figure out what it says, criticisms you thought you had evaporate, strengthen, or otherwise change.

Praise Be to Copying

Last week’s sensational book news was the revelation that Q. R. Markham’s Assassin of Secrets, the first in a new series of spy novels, contains dozens of chunks lifted from other books without credit. The scandal prompted Markham’s publisher, Little, Brown, to recall all 6,500 copies in print. They seem unlikely either to issue revised editions or to continue with the rest of the series.

Those who follow the book world are by now fairly accustomed to such developments. Whether it’s another memoir taking liberties with the truth, or a talking head’s new “history” book playing it loose with the facts, people in the trade are all too familiar with books not being what they claim.

But Markham’s is a particularly interesting case. The New Yorker Book Bench blog ran a post titled “Q. R. Markham’s Plagiarism Puzzle” that explores the possibility that Markham had intended his book as a collage, rather than a novel:

In the hundreds of newspaper articles and blog posts that have been published on the subject of Markhamgate in the past twenty-four hours, one question appears over and over: How did Rowan think he’d get away with this, especially in the era of Google? It’s the natural question, but in the spirit of playing detective I must ask: Is it the right one? We do not yet have all of the facts—Rowan and his agent have been silent since the scandal broke, and much of the book has yet to be mapped—but those we do have point to something much stranger and more richly textured than your run-of-the-mill plagiarism case.

Allow us to add a piece to the puzzle. Markham is a part owner of the NYC bookstore Spoonbill & Sugartown, which hosted an event for our author Marcus Boon last year, to celebrate the release of his latest book, In Praise of Copying. The event was billed as a “Borgesian Book Launch”:

Instead of reading from his book, as is traditionally done at a launch, Boon will read from books selected at random from the copious and wide-ranging shelves of Spoonbill, revealing the secret Borgesian omnipresence of copying in even the most obscure or popular places, recreating the argument of In Praise of Copying using materials found in the store.

Surely a coincidence. But, either way, hats off to the synergy.

On our website, you can read more about Boon’s book, and even download a free PDF. 

Long live copying.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the Schomburg Center

Last  fall, Khalil Gibran Muhammad was named the new Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This Wednesday evening, at a free public event presented in collaboration with the Harlem Arts Alliance, Muhammad will be hosting a kickoff to the new season at the Schomburg. Attendees can meet Dr. Muhammad, engage with Scholars-in-Residence, and tour the exhibitions on Malcolm X and Romare Bearden that are currently on display. In the exchange posted below, we asked Muhammad about his plans for the Schomburg Center and about the Center’s role in his own scholarship. His book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, will be available in paperback next month.

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Q. What was the role of the Schomburg Center in the research that you conducted for The Condemnation of Blackness? What particular sources in the Schomburg’s collections informed your work on the book?

The Schomburg Center has an extensive collection of the papers of social service and community organizations. Many of these organizations were pioneering in their efforts to assist African Americans and Black immigrants in New York during the early 20th century. The ravages of the industrial economy and the tightening vise of segregation created the need for organizations as varied as the YMCA, New York Urban League, Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, and the White Rose Mission and Industrial Association. The ideas and activities of talented black researchers and passionate grassroots activists are captured in the papers of these organizations. When I was a researcher at the Schomburg Center, I found the papers of two Urban League sociologists, George Edmund Haynes (1880-1960) and Ira De Augustine Reid (1901-1968), to be particularly helpful. They were both key voices in early debates about crime and policing in pre-WWII black communities.

Q. A place like the Schomburg is so valuable because it can be a resource for both the general public and for scholars. Can you describe the challenge of balancing the Center’s work on those two fronts?

I think of our mixed audience not as a challenge but as a real advantage in the marketplace of similar institutions. The fact of being the leading repository for black archival material within the New York Public Library, one of the world’s greatest library systems, means that academics and lay scholars will always find their way here. And with 120,000 annual visitors to the Center, we consistently have a broad and diverse public audience for programming, symposia, conferences, book talks, major historical and arts exhibitions, and performing arts. Open access to ideas is fundamental to democracy and to what we do. As a public research library we want as many people as possible to be inspired by and learn from the collection in the infinite number of ways human beings express and communicate knowledge. The challenge isn’t our audience. The challenge is finding the resources to fund our public mission at a time when funding for the humanities and the arts is declining.

Q. In general, what are your plans for the Schomburg Center?

David Blight's American Oracle

Those of you who follow this blog with any regularity know that we’ve been looking forward to the publication of David W. Blight’s American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. The book is finally here, and folks in the Boston/Cambridge area have the added excitement of getting to see Blight at this afternoon’s Harvard Book Store Friday Forum (3:00pm, free and open to the public, no ticket required).

Blight’s award-winning Race and Reunion, published in 2000, traced American memory of the Civil War in the fifty years following the conflict. This new book continues that study of the war in American memory by moving forward to the moment of the Civil War Centennial, when the war was commemorated in the midst of the civil rights movement. By the early 1960s, Blight notes, some Americans had “learned and accepted the idea that the war had been, in one way or another, caused by slavery and that its principle result had been the emancipation of four million slaves and the preservation as well as recreation of a new union.” The centrality of slavery and emancipation to the conflict had by that point emerged as a consensus in scholarship on the Civil War.

Public memory lagged behind, though, as is usually the case. From Blight’s introduction:

For the majority, especially of white Americans—even as they watched TV images of civil rights marchers being clubbed by police and bitten by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama—to claim the centrality of slavery and emancipation in Civil War memory was still an awkward kind of impoliteness at best and heresy at worst. In 1963, the national temper and mythology still preferred a story of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray to the troublesome, disruptive problem of black and white.

This book is about that disconnect, and about how the country went about publicly and privately commemorating a war whose meaning was still being debated.

And now, fifty years later, as we mark the Sesquicentennial, there is still much unsettled in the public memory of the American Civil War. American Oracle was written in an attempt to help us take stock. According to Blight we might best contemplate the memory of the war by exploring how American writers and readers were searching for the meaning of their history during the Centennial commemoration. “The best historical understandings often emerge,” he writes, “from a probing behind, into, and through how other thoughtful people have done the same before us.”

The focus of American Oracle is on four men who were among America’s most important writers on the significance and legacies of the Civil War during the 1950s and 1960s: Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. In the short video below, Blight explains the significance of each chosen writer:

 

If you can’t be at the Harvard Book Store this afternoon to hear more, you can see a full calendar of Blight’s fall speaking events on his website.

Fat Talk Revisited

About a decade ago, we published a book called Fat Talk by Mimi Nichter, currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. The book, which one reviewer called “a tantalizing glimpse into the intimate world of adolescent girls,” was the result of years spent interviewing hundreds of teenage girls about the ways that they think and talk about their bodies. Nichter and her colleagues found that girls didn’t so much diet as talk about dieting, engaging together in “fat talk,” an ongoing, ritualistic dialogue that served to build solidarity among them.

Last week, dozens of college campuses across the country took part in an organized event called “Fat Talk Free Week,” which Professor Nichter supported by offering “A Brief History of Fat Talk.”  We invited Professor Nichter to comment here on the movement and its reference to her work.    

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A couple of weeks ago I was walking across my college campus and a colorful poster on the side of a building caught my eye. It read “Fat Talk Free Day.” As I read on, I learned that there was an upcoming sorority event on the college mall where women could “Take the Pledge” to free themselves from fat talk. There was also a Dove “Real Woman” speaker who was coming to campus to speak about “Embracing Real Beauty.” How curious to find a term I had coined ten years back having a new life. What was this fat talk revival all about? Googling the event as I walked, I found that a sorority had adopted “banning fat talk” as their “activity of the year” in an effort to free women, at least those on college campuses, from this common ritual.

I tried to wrap my head around Fat Talk becoming a social movement among sorority girls. And why was it occurring now? It seems to me that fat talk is as common today as it was when my colleagues and I first conducted our fieldwork. I still hear it everywhere, in the high schools and college campuses where I continue to do research, and among my own friends and colleagues.

So what purpose does fat talk serve? By the time a white middle class girl reaches adolescence, she has become a competent participant in this fat talk discourse. Saying “I’m so fat” or complaining about specific body parts (“I hate my thighs,” “Can you believe how big my butt is?”) is really much more than an observation about how a girl looks or feels. It’s a call for support from her peers. Comments like these evoke a response that the girl is not fat, that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Fat talk is a kind of social ritual among friends, an attempt to create solidarity. Saying that you dislike your body makes it clear that you don’t think you’re better than your friends, even if you are thinner than them. When the statement comes before eating, it provides an apology or excuse for what you’re about to indulge in (“I know I really shouldn’t but…"). In the household, there is also a lot of fat talk exchanged between mothers and daughters.

Fat talk is a popular idiom which results in support from friends and family, but at what cost? While it may seem innocuous, fat talk can result in slippage from an initial place of gathering support from friends to a self-destructive space. Commenting in a negative way about one’s body can have a host of ramifications including the lowering of self-esteem and the development of negative self-concept. It reinforces the message that you are far from “perfect” and constantly need to monitor and work on yourself. Further, by engaging in frequent self-deprecation, one can lose sight of who they really are and the enormous potential beneath the surface.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart panel discussion at NYU

November 20, 4-8pm at NYU's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis:

A panel discussion and book party for Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (reviews: Bookforum, NYTBR, The Big Money) and Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century.

            

 

Host: Lisa Duggan (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU)

Kathryn Bond Stockton on The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, with comment by Professor José Muñoz (Performance Studies, NYU).

Bethany Moreton on To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, with comment by Professor Nikhil Pal Singh (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU).

Moderator: Michael Cobb (English, University of Toronto)

Books will be available for sale from Bluestockings Bookstore.

Co-sponsors: NYU Departments of Social & Cultural Analysis, American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, History, Performance Studies, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Greil Marcus - "Lipstick Traces Live" @ Columbia November 19

See Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, released this year in a new twentieth anniversary edition, as well as The Dustbin of History, In the Fascist Bathroom, The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books, not to mention co-editor of A New Literary History of America, out and making the rounds presently, deliver a "lecture as performance" live at Columbia University. "Lipstick Traces Live" is based on material from the book and will take place November 19 at 6pm, with a signing to follow.

click on flyer for full-sized image

More details here.

Pamuk delivers first Norton lecture; five more to come

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925 by C. C. Stillman to honor the university's first Professor of the History of Art. In accordance with Stillman's desire that "the term Poetry shall be interpreted in the broadest sense, including, together with Verse, all poetic expression in Language, Music, or the Fine Arts," Norton Professors have included not just poets in the narrower sense, but novelists, critics, musicians, and accomplished polymaths of all stripes, including Umberto Eco, John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Northrop Frye, Lionel Trilling, Jorge Luis Borges, R. Buckminster Fuller, E. E. Cummings, Thornton Wilder, and a host of others.

And so Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk delivered the first of his Norton lectures yesterday afternoon in Harvard's Sanders Theater. Pamuk, the author of The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name is Red, Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, The Museum of Innocence, and many others, spoke primarily of what makes the novel a unique form and how we are to determine what happens to our minds as we read them. Pamuk, who started out as a painter, elaborated on Schiller's distinction between the naive and the reflective poet as it applies to his own experience with novels, both the Turkish ones he read in his youth (he once "raged" against those naive, unselfconscious storytellers as Schiller raged against the serene, untroubled genius of Goethe) as well as the classics that have shaped him as a novelist and as a person (Anna Karenina is his all-time favorite, we learn; he quoted extensively from the passage where Anna reads an English novel on the train back to St. Petersburg). He offered as well a set of nine points on what distinguishes the novel from other forms, the last and most forceful of which being that novels offer (and we seek in them) "a secret center," a buried object that we feel compelled to search out via clues in the narrative. This, of course, provoked questions about where exactly lies the periphery and how are we to locate that bit (hey, it's an audience of academics!), which Pamuk, a self-described autodidact, promised to address in future lectures.

The lectures, we should point out, are free and open to the public, and there are five more coming; here's the schedule, courtesy of the Humanities Center (each lecture begins at 4pm):

Norton Lectures: Orhan Pamuk on "The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist"

Tuesday, September 22 - "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels"

Tuesday, September 29 - "Mr. Pamuk, Did You Really Live All of This?"

Tuesday, October 13 - "Character, Time, Plot"

Tuesday, October 20 - "Pictures and Things"

Monday, October 26 - "Museums and Novels"

Tuesday, November 3 - "The Center"

||| Norton Lectures at the Humanities Center (PDF link)

Reprise -- Kennedy, Dukakis, Patrick read the letters of John and Abigail

Since we're publishing this month a collection of the wit and wisdom of one of our most formidable and literate First Ladies, thought we would re-post a link to the video of an event we put on in 2007 to celebrate the publication of My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, in which we solicited the help of a few of Massachusetts's most well-known contemporary public servants, including Governor Deval Patrick, former Governor Michael Dukakis, and the late Senator Edward Kennedy, in sharing some of John and Abigail's most revealing and affecting correspondence. Video courtesy of Boston's WGBH.

||| The Letters of John and Abigail Adams -- Faneuil Hall, November 17, 2007.