Harvard University Press Blog

Human Rights and the Glamour of Dissent

In a recent NYT opinion piece sparked by the now-resolved international episode of the blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s escape from house arrest to American protection, Samuel Moyn considers the evolving implications of “human rights.” Moyn is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, in which he argues that the modern conception of human rights begins not with the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in the decade after 1968. In his op-ed, Moyn writes that what was initially an “uncontroversial effort to establish moral norms above the fray of the cold war’s ideological battles” has since become both more familiar and less clear-cut:

In reporting on Mr. Chen, most publications, including this newspaper, used the terms “dissident” and even “prisoner of conscience” to refer to him.

However, since the time Amnesty International and other groups popularized those phrases, human rights—a term that once meant the defense of individuals against the oppression of an unjust state—has come to imply other things, too.

Today, it is just as likely to be invoked by powerful states to wage war in distant corners of the globe, much to the chagrin of authoritarian leaders in wealthy rising powers like Russia and China, who see such “humanitarian interventions” as a violation of states’ sovereignty—not to mention a threat to their manner of rule.

Moyn goes on to detail how the concept of human rights has “lost some of its romantic appeal and moral purity” and become a political tool. Even still, he writes, human rights can be useful to “Chinese dissidents and their Western allies” just as they’d been to the “glamorous dissidents” who came before.

In describing Chen, Moyn knowingly evokes the codified concept of the dissident (“the lone icon speaking for moral principle against totalitarian rule, the anonymous but courageous network at home that sheltered him, the supporters abroad who rallied around his cause, and the governments that made their choices based on a difficult calculus of moral ideals and geopolitical interests”), but elsewhere uses “dissent” in a fairly straightforward fashion. A short op-ed can sustain only so much complication, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see the concept of dissent taken as stable in the course of a discussion of the evolution of human rights.

Jonathan Bolton’s Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism is another recent HUP book that deals with some of the same events and themes as does Moyn in The Last Utopia. Bolton’s book unpacks the myths and the glamour to show how the struggle against state repression was felt by those who lived it, making clear the messy humanity of dissent.

A Nation Among Nations

In his compelling new book, historian Eliga H. Gould argues that the United States at its founding faced a paradox that’s now rarely acknowledged. As Gould explains in Among the Powers of the Earth, the young Union’s desired state of independence could only actually be achieved by claiming—and being granted—full membership in the community of nations. “We think of the American Revolution as the moment when Americans began to make their own history,” Gould notes in the video below. “It actually would be much more accurate to say it’s the moment when we began to make the history that others were prepared to let us make.”

 

 

 

Gould makes the case that the Declaration of Independence and many of the other founding documents from the American Revolutionary period demonstrate that what Americans actually sought was independence under the law of nations, rather than some sort of complete freedom from external obligations. So, even in that moment when a budding nation was determined to free itself from the constraints of colonial rule, the American founders were conscious of the need to conform to what other nations deemed legal.

To Gould, even the United States Constitution should be understood as an attempt to secure international recognition, rather than just a document outlining American liberties and rights. And one of the fascinating implications of Gould’s argument is what this American conformity meant for the spread of what was previously a particularly European law of nations. In the course of staking its independence in the New World, then, the United States also served as a new outpost for and exporter of a distinctly European sense of sovereignty, which had tremendous global and local implications.

It says a lot about the United States as a nation that this early need for approval and membership is largely absent from the stories we tell ourselves about the country’s founding. It’s not surprising, of course, given the still-thriving streak of American exceptionalism that’s always characterized America’s conception of itself.

To Gould, though, Among the Powers of the Earth doesn’t simply force us to reconceive American origin stories. The book should also help to assuage some of the concerns of those made uneasy by the prospect of a world in which the United States is but a member nation, no longer a singular leader, master of its own destiny. “I think it’s comforting to know that the founders faced a very similar set of problems and that even though there were moments when they made missteps, that they also came through it. And certainly the hope is that we too, today, will find our way through it as they did then.”

From British Infrastructure to Net Neutrality

Most of us living in 21st century industrial societies take for granted that our towns and cities are connected by a sprawling network of roads, most of which are reasonably well maintained. But, of course, it wasn’t always thus. In Roads to Power, a book we published a bit earlier this year, Jo Guldi explains when, how, and why Britain invented the system of infrastructure that now crisscrosses modern lands.

In a recent interview with CBC’s Spark, conducted during the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Guldi explained how British infrastructure came to be transformed:

Around 1780 a group of Scottish and Irish landlords started to think hard about what they were reading in this new economist, Adam Smith. And what they realized was that a system of infrastructure on a national level could break down local monopolies, and it could mean that they too could participate in the wealth of the industrial revolution being then experienced in England. And so they set about trying to persuade Parliament to give them sufficient cash to build roads out – an inter-kingdom highway system connecting London with her former colonial capitals of Dublin and Edinburgh. They were successful, and the inter-kingdom highway system was built over the course of thirty years. Thousands of miles of perfectly paved roads: the first expert-built infrastructure system of its kind in the world. Infrastructure on a national scale, connecting all sorts of grids of streets on the local and national level.

It was utopian thinking in 1780. Nobody had ever come up with such an idea. It was a new idea about how capitalism could work, if capitalism were going to defuse the wealth from the few guilds and few metropolises where people were enjoying the industrial revolution to everyone. So, a new idea of capitalism that worked for everybody.

As Guldi explains in the book, the development of this national road system had profound and unexpected ramifications. When travel by road became less challenging, more people became mobile. This led to new groups of people coming into contact, more people from more places roaming the streets of London, and new ways of thinking about the meaning of crowds and about how to interact in a vast world of strangers. Groups realized that they could use the roads to launch political movements or to manage their organizations, with soldiers, Methodists, artisans, theatrical players, and ordinary working people traveling in greater and greater numbers.

Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam

The British Museum’s major new exhibition, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, is being hailed as a milestone in the “public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life.” As British Museum Director Neil MacGregor notes, the exhibition will “enable a global audience to deepen their understanding of the significance and history of the Hajj. In particular, it will allow non-Muslims to explore the one aspect of Islamic practice and faith which they are not able to witness, but which plays such a major part in forming a worldwide Islamic consciousness.”

As part of our ongoing relationship with the British Museum, we’ve just published the North American edition of the beautiful book designed to accompany the exhibition. Ventia Porter, the book’s editor and a Curator in the Museum’s Department of the Middle East, explains in her preface that the book is meant more as a companion to the exhibition than as a conventional catalogue:

Our intention has been to gather the history, the voices of pilgrims and the material culture associated with the Hajj together in one place. We felt this was greatly needed because the story of Hajj crosses so many very different disciplines, from religion, history and archaeology to anthropology, travel and art history, each of which often forms the subject of self-contained publications. We therefore brought together a group of distinguished scholars who themselves take us on a journey and help us delve deeper into the subject. Karen Armstrong invites us to look at Hajj within a broader context of pilgrimage; M.A.S. Abdel Haleem explains the rituals of Hajj and their meaning and also gives us an insight into the experience of a Hajj in rural Egypt. Hugh Kennedy explores the history of the Hajj in early Islam and then focuses on two key travellers. Nasir-i Khusraw and Ibn Jubayr, whose fascinating accounts provide such insight not only into the practicalities of the journey but the deeper meaning of why they undertook it. When you compare the writings of these early pilgrims with those of today it is clear that, although the method of travel and Mecca itself may have changed over time, the act of pilgrimage—that need to touch the holy place, the reactions to seeing the Ka‘ba at Mecca for the first time—have not changed at all. Robert Irwin picks up the history in the thirteenth century and, in a veritable tour d’horizon, he introduces us to more travellers and tells the story of Hajj during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, though into colonial times and up to the twentieth century. It then falls to Ziauddin Sardar to bring us up to the present day: he looks at how the enormous growth in numbers has changed Hajj in the modern era and demonstrates how it is organized today.

Running in parallel with the history of Hajj is the story of the material culture that surrounds it, whether paintings evoking the journey; archaeological finds from the Hajj routes; manuscripts, historic photographs and tiles illustrating the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina; certificates and pilgrim guides commemorating the direction of Mecca. In addition, there are the objects taken by pilgrims on Hajj or brought back as souvenirs, and the beautiful textiles made annually especially for the Ka‘ba. The works of photography, painting and sculpture by contemporary artists add a further dimension to the art of Hajj. All of these complement and personalize the history, allowing us to glimpse the experience through individuals, deepen our understanding and see how art has been used in the service of Islam. These objects, many of which are included in the exhibition, are illustrated throughout the book; some are highlighted in themed spreads on subjects such as “sacred geography,” the tiles of Mecca and Medina, the Futuh al-Haramayn manuscripts and the sacred textiles. There is also a focus on particular Hajj routes, with detailed maps: across Africa, from Syria and Cairo, and that remarkable endeavor, the Hijaz Railway.

You can get a sense of both the power and the beauty of the material included in the exhibition and book from this short video produced by the British Museum:

 

African Victory in the Age of Empire

In the late nineteenth century, when it seemed that all of Africa was destined to come under European colonial rule, Ethiopia succeeded in thwarting European conquest and preserving its own independence. The pivotal event in its resistance to Italian colonial advance from Eritrea was the Battle of Adwa, in which an army of black Africans under the leadership of Emperor Menelik decisively defeated the Italians. The Battle of Adwa, which marked the first time in the modern era that a non-European power had defeated a European power without the aid of a European ally, is considered one of the most important events in modern African history. In The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, historian Raymond Jonas makes the case for the broader global historical significance of the conflict. 

There are a number of complex reasons for Italian failure at Adwa. Italian leadership had assumed, wrongly but not without credibility, that it could play on factional conflict within Ethiopia. As a result the Italians were unprepared for the unity Menelik was able to inspire, and thus the Italians drastically underestimated the size of the Ethiopian army, and the firepower at its disposal. But Menelik’s forces didn’t merely outnumber the Italians; the Emperor also outmaneuvered them, in what Jonas describes as one of the great military campaigns of modern history.

Inevitably, Ethiopian victory was interpreted in racial terms, for not only had an African army defeated a European army, but a black army had defeated a white army. In the Jim Crow United States and elsewhere around the globe, Adwa gave the lie to the inevitability of European domination—both political and racial. We recently spoke with Jonas about the worldwide implications of what happened at Adwa in 1896. A bit of video from our conversation:

 

From the Protestant Reformation to the Failure of Modernity

Brad S. Gregory’s new book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, is very much in the tradition of and in conversation with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Both are large, sweeping books that change the way we understand modernity and the world in which we live. For Gregory, that new understanding comes from looking all the way back to the Protestant Reformation, and connecting all that’s come since in ways that scholars have thus far resisted.

He discussed the book with us in a recent episode of the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear or download via the player below.

During that conversation, he explained the ways in which he understands modern Western life as stemming from developments of the 16th and 17th centuries:

I don’t think anyone who’s self-reflective about it would deny the rather banal claim that the world that we’re living in today is the product of the past. The issue is what aspects of the past help us to understand and to explain the character of the situation in which we find ourselves. What’s unusual about my book is that it parts ways from the normal methods and the normal assumptions by which even professional historians tend to explain the present. That is, it tends to be assumed that we can account for the world in which we’re living today in the West—North America and Europe—this side, as it were, of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the French and American revolutions in the late eighteenth century. And, one of the central arguments I’m making in The Unintended Reformation is that that is not the case, and that all of those developments indeed are critical to understanding where we are today, but what we really need to understand are the religious disagreements of the Reformation era, and the unintended processes that they set in motion, without which we will not understand the character of the problems that we’re facing in the early twenty-first century.

It’s Gregory’s claim that the Western world today is “an extraordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Western Christianity.” Our failure to understand that lineage, he argues, prevents us from fully recognizing the disaggregation that our society has experienced. From The Unintended Reformation:

On the eve of the Reformation, Latin Christianity comprised for good or ill the far from homogeneous yet institutionalized worldview within which the overwhelming majority of Europeans lived and made sense of their lives. Diversely, early twenty-first-century Westerners live in and think with and even feel through the historical results of its variegated rejections and appropriations in such knotted ways that it is difficult even to see, much less to analyze, them. In getting from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century, this study develops the claim from my first book that “incompatible, deeply held, concretely expressed religious convictions paved a path to a secular society.”

Editing The Image of the Black in Western Art

This month marks the publication of the second and third parts of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art. As the fifth and sixth of an eventual ten books, these new releases put us past the halfway point in our work to complete this fascinating series, and so offer a nice occasion to reflect on the challenges that it presents. To that end, we invited HUP Production Editor Adriana Kirilova, one of the many people who have been dedicated to this project over the decades since its conception, to tell us a bit about her experience working on the books. Her piece is below.

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When two years ago my manager told me that I would be the production editor for The Image of the Black in Western Art series, I was thrilled to be a part of this monumental project. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have very much to do. The first four books were scheduled to come out in the fall of 2010, and three of them had been previously published as part of the first incarnation of the series. There was little new text to edit, and a media research company in London had been contracted to deliver the images. We just had to flow it all into the new design and redo the index. Easy as pie.

How naïve I was!

When Dominique de Menil first conceived of the Image of the Black project in the 1960s, she had assumed it wouldn’t take very long to complete it. She had not anticipated the astonishing wealth of material or the complexity of the iconography of blacks in Western art. Fifty years later, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Everyone at the Du Bois Institute and HUP was excited to renew the efforts to complete this monumental undertaking, but few of us were fully aware of its intricacies.

First and foremost, we had to contend with the passage of time. The very title of the series reflects how much has changed since the conception of this project. The Image of the Black in Western Art: the meaning of nearly all of those words has grown more complicated in the years that have passed. And, as we started to work, it became clear how much else had changed. There were references in the text to East Germany and West Germany, St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, Sri Lanka was still Ceylon.

Ensuring that the text accurately and consistently reflects today’s geopolitical map has been only one of the challenges, and not the biggest one by far. The real Herculean task has been locating all the art. Since the publication of the first edition, museums have disbanded, galleries have changed their names, manuscripts have moved from one library to another. Vases have disappeared. Inscriptions on tombstones have faded. Broken statuettes have been restored. Research from the past thirty years has shed new light on the dates and titles of artworks. Paintings that were previously accepted as the work of X are now believed to be by Y.

Producing these books sequentially would have been demanding. No book that includes 200 illustrations could ever be easy. Producing them in batches, as efficiencies in publishing demand, has come dangerously close to insanity. There are so many details to keep track of, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Even the most inconsequential decision becomes paramount when multiplied by ten books. Changes in one book usually necessitate changes in another. Many of our conversations about IBWA (our shorthand for the series) include the phrase “Wait, which volume are we talking about?” The six books that make up volumes I through III have more than 1,500 images total. To date, I have received about 4,700 emails about IBWA and I’ve sent about 3,800.

It’s hard to explain what it is that I do for this series. I’ve done some copyediting, a little proofreading, a lot of fact-checking. I also nag, beg, and bully everyone else on the team when the deadlines loom large in front of us. It’s a miracle my colleagues still talk to me.

Second Chances at First Impressions

Along with all of our new books, each season we release paperback editions of dozens of titles that were first published in cloth a year or two earlier. When a paperback comes out it can be a nice reminder of a favorite work from seasons past, but it can also be an occasion to take a new look at a book that may have escaped notice the first time through. For the books themselves it can be a second chance at a first impression. With that in mind, we’ve collected here the first crop of Fall paperbacks, and excerpted the first few sentences of each. Maybe you’ll find something you didn’t even know you’d missed.

Ian Almond, Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched With Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds

This book is a somewhat primitive book. It has a very straightforward purpose: to relate a selection of moments in European history when, in the very heart of countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece and Hungary, Muslims and Christians collaborated and co-operated with one another to fight against a common enemy–often an enemy also composed of Muslims and Christians. The book does not really do much more than this. It is not some vast overview of Muslim-Christian relations since 1100, nor an in-depth analysis of inter-cultural exchange between Islam and Christianity. It does not offer profound gems of philosophical insight into how human beings can learn to love one another, nor moving moments of idealism concerning the common humanity which can overcome all political/social/religious divisions, etc., etc. The book’s very modest aim, on the contrary, is to show how Muslims do not belong to an ‘other’ civilisation, but rather to the essence of a ‘Europe’ we are quickly in the process of forgetting.

Bernard Bailyn, Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830

Historical accounts of events and developments that took place in the Atlantic world began to appear almost as soon as contacts were established between Europe and the Americas in the late fifteenth century. But Atlantic history itself—that is, the evolving history of the zone of interaction among the peoples of Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—was first seen as a distinct and cohesive subject of historical inquiry in the years immediately after World War II.

Daniel Bodansky, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

One evening a few years ago, a volunteer for a well-known environmental organization rang my doorbell to solicit a contribution. I declined, saying that I disagreed with the organization’s positions on various issues. The volunteer demanded to know which ones.

Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome

The year was 1468. On Fat Tuesday, the last and most extravagant night of carnival in Rome, Pope Paul II sat attentively watching the races from his throne high above the boisterous crowd, when suddenly a scuffle broke out. The papal guards had stopped someone who was loudly insisting on speaking with the pope urgently about a matter of life and death. The man, his beard and dark eyes barely discernible under his hood, was dressed like a philosopher. Seeing that he had captured the pope’s attention, the “philosopher” broke free of the guards and intoned: “Holy Father! You are in great danger!” The pope sat up, leaned forward, and beckoned the stranger to approach and explain. What he heard made him tremble and turn pale.

Chrystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

This is a history of two southern women, Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) and Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), and the thousands of women who joined their campaigns against rape and for women’s rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the height of lynching in the American South. Felton was born in 1835 to a prosperous slaveholding family in De Kalb, Georgia. Wells, the daughter of slaves, was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Despite differences in their age, race, class, and status, they both, in very different contexts, took radical stances on rape and lynching. Together, their struggles against sexual violence—Wells advocated on black women’s behalf and Felton mostly fought for the protection of poor white women—brought to southern politics the concerns of women who historically had been excluded from debates about rape and protection. Although both campaigned for women’s safety, they confronted the problem of lynching in completely different ways. While Wells became internationally known for her radical anti-lynching crusade, it was Felton’s notorious plea to “lynch a thousand a week” that thrust her into the national spotlight. From different sides of the color line, Felton and Wells were women’s rights pioneers who negotiated and challenged the racial and sexual politics of the New South.

Deng Xiaoping and China's Rise

“I first visited China in 1979, a few months after our countries normalized relations. China was just beginning to remake its economy, and I was in the first Senate delegation to witness this evolution. Traveling through the country last month, I could see how much China had changed in 32 years — and yet the debate about its remarkable rise remains familiar. Then, as now, there were concerns about what a growing China meant to America and the world.”

That’s Vice President Joe Biden, from an op-ed titled “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise” that ran in yesterday’s New York Times. As Biden notes, 1979 was a turning point for China’s place in the world. The country was opening itself up, working to normalize its relations with other nations and finally bring its industry and economy into the twentieth century. All of the developments that Biden encountered on his recent visit were set in motion by those earlier changes. And no one was more responsible for those changes than Deng Xiaoping, China’s preeminent leader from 1978 through 1992.

In 1979 Ezra F. Vogel published a book, Japan as Number One, that helped prepare westerners for Japan’s surprising 1980s rise. After retiring from teaching in 2000, Vogel wanted to do it again, to write another book that would help Americans understand key developments in Asia at the outset of the twenty-first century. The biggest thing happening in Asia was China, as Vogel realized then and Biden affirms now. And the way to understand China was to understand Deng. So Vogel began the work for what became Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, a massive biography of a man who likely had as great an impact on the world’s course as any other twentieth century figure.

Deng led a long, complicated life that included time in France and the Soviet Union as a young man, years as a military leader and Communist Party official, and a long, fraught relationship with Mao Zedong, who twice purged Deng but never destroyed him. Vogel describes Deng as a pragmatic politician who led China’s embrace of technological innovation and worked to overcome the damage of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but who also approved the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He wasn’t usually the source of the ideas that were transforming China, but he was the only person equipped to implement them. 

We spoke with Ezra Vogel about Deng and the challenges he faced: 

 

The Bomb in American Memory

In this past Sunday’s Boston Globe Ideas section, a long piece by Gareth Cook considers the question of why Japan surrendered in World War II. The occasion for the article was the August 6th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, long-considered the pivotal event in the ceasing of hostilities. Cook’s article is built on an extended discussion of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and his book, Racing the Enemy, which we published in 2005.  As Cook details, Hasegawa’s revisionist work on the bombing’s part in the end of WWII forces us to reconsider much of what we’ve come to believe about that conflict and about the efficacy of nuclear weapons.  

The common conception and prevailing scholarly analysis have held that Japan surrendered in the face of the inconceivable devastation wrought by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hasegawa makes a convincing argument that Japan was in fact prepared to forge on even after the bombs, and that it surrendered only after the Soviets declared war on Japan several days after the bombing of Hiroshima. Hasegawa also argues that the level of destruction inflicted by the atomic bomb was not quite as singular as we’ve told ourselves. Indeed, as Cook explains in his article, the bomb’s technology was new but its effects were sadly familiar:

“In early March, several hundred B-29 Super Fortress bombers dropped incendiary bombs on downtown Tokyo. Some argue that more died in the resulting firestorm than at Hiroshima. People were boiled in the canals. The photos of charred Tokyo and charred Hiroshima are indistinguishable.”

The implications of Hasegawa’s work are wide-ranging. The perceived role of the atomic bomb in the halting of WWII has been a central factor in the international nuclear proliferation that has followed. What would it mean if the heart of the story that we tell ourselves about nuclear weapons is actually wrong? What would it mean for Japan to recognize that its leaders were actually prepared to fight on, despite the horrific employment of nuclear weapons against their people? And what would it mean for the United States to admit that its use of these terrible modern weapons was actually somehow peripheral to the war’s end, and thus perhaps even tactically unnecessary?

His treatment of all of these questions makes Hasegawa’s work not just a transnational history of military and political conflict, but also an important study of the role of memory in the formation of national character. In this sense, Hasegawa’s study of the aftermath of WWII and how it has functioned in our national consciousness belongs on a thematic shelf with work like David Blight’s ongoing investigation of the Civil War in American memory.