Harvard University Press Blog

Honoring Latour

In awarding Bruno Latour the 2021 Kyoto Prize for arts and philosophy, the Inamori Foundation said he has “revolutionized the conventional view of science” and “his philosophy re-examines ‘modernity’ based on the dualism of nature and society.” Below is an excerpt from An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.

For more than twenty years, scientific and technological controversies have proliferated in number and scope, eventually reaching the climate itself. Since geologists are beginning to use the term “Anthropocene” to designate the era of Earth’s history that follows the Holocene, this will be a convenient term to use from here on to sum up the meaning of an era that extends from the scientific and industrial revolutions to the present day. If geologists themselves, rather stolid and serious types, see humanity as a force of the same amplitude as volcanoes or even of plate tectonics, one thing is now certain: we have no hope whatsoever—no more hope in the future than we had in the past—of seeing a definitive distinction between Science and Politics.

As a result, the touchstone that served to distinguish past from present, to sketch out the modernization front that was ready to encompass the planet by offering an identity to those who felt “modern,” has lost all its efficacy. It is now before Gaia that we are summoned to appear: Gaia, the odd, doubly composite figure made up of science and mythology used by certain specialists to designate the Earth that surrounds us and that we surround, the Möbius strip of which we form both the inside and the outside, the truly global Globe that threatens us even as we threaten it. If I wanted to dramatize—perhaps overdramatize—the ambience of my investigative project, I would say that it seeks to register the aftershocks of the modernization front just as the confrontation with Gaia appears imminent.

It is as though the Moderns (I use the capitalized form to designate this population of variable geometry that is in search of itself) had up to now defined values that they had somehow sheltered in shaky institutions conceived on the fly in response to the demands of the modernization front while continuing to defer the question of how they themselves were going to last. They had a future, but they were not concerned with what was to come—or rather, what was coming. What is coming? What is it that is arriving unexpectedly, something they seem not to have anticipated? “Gaia,” the “Anthropocene” era, the precise name hardly matters, something in any case that has deprived them forever of the fundamental distinction between Nature and Society by means of which they were establishing their system of coordinates, one step at a time. Starting from this event, everything has become more complicated for them. “Tomorrow,” those who have stopped being resolutely modern murmur, “we’re going to have to take into account even more entanglements involving beings that will conflate the order of Nature with the order of Society; tomorrow even more than yesterday we’re going to feel ourselves bound by an even greater number of constraints imposed by ever more numerous and more diverse beings.” From this point on, the past has an altered form, since it is no more archaic that what lies ahead. As for the future, it has been shattered to bits. We shall no longer be able to emancipate ourselves the way we could before. An entirely new situation: behind us, attachments; ahead of us, ever more attachments. Suspension of the “modernization front.” End of emancipation as the only possible destiny. And what is worse: “we” no longer know who we are, nor of course where we are, we who had believed we were modern…End of modernization. End of story. Time to start over.

Is there another system of coordinates that can replace the one we have lost, now that the modernist parenthesis is closing? This is the enterprise that I have been doggedly pursuing, alongside other endeavors, for a quarter of a century, and that I would like to share and extend through this book and its accompanying digital apparatus. I believe that it is actually possible to complement the starkly negative title We Have Never Been Modern with a positive version of the same assertion. If we have never been modern, then what has happened to us? What are we to inherit? Who have we been? Who are we going to become? With whom must we be connected? Where do we find ourselves situated from now on? These are all questions of historical and comparative anthropology that we cannot begin to approach without a thorough inquiry into the famous modernity that is in the process of shutting down.

Bruno Latour Wins Kyoto Prize

Congratulations to Bruno Latour for being named the 2021 Kyoto Prize laureate for arts and philosophy. To celebrate, here’s an excerpt from We Have Never Been Modern.

By claiming that the modern Constitution does not permit itself to be understood, by proposing to reveal the practices that allow it to exist, by asserting that the critical mechanism has outlived its usefulness, am I behaving as though we were entering a new era that would follow the era of the moderns? Would I then be, literally, postmodern? Postmodernism is a symptom, not a fresh solution. It lives under the modern Constitution, but it no longer believes in the guarantees the Constitution offers. It senses that something has gone awry in the modern critique, but it is not able to do anything but prolong that critique, though without believing in its foundations (Lyotard, 1979). Instead of moving on to empirical studies of the networks that give meaning to the work of purification it denounces, postmodernism rejects all empirical work as illusory and deceptively scientistic (Baudrillard, 1992). Disappointed rationalists, its adepts indeed sense that modernism is done for, but they continue to accept its way of dividing up time; thus they can divide up eras only in terms of successive revolutions. They feel that they come ‘after’ the moderns, but with the disagreeable sentiment that there is no more ‘after.’ ‘No future’: this is the slogan added to the moderns’ motto ‘No past.’ What remains? Disconnected instants and groundless denunciations, since the postmoderns no longer believe in the reasons that would allow them to denounce and to become indignant.

A different solution appears as soon as we follow both the official Constitution and what it forbids or allows, as soon as we study in detail the work of production of hybrids and the work of elimination of these same hybrids. We then discover that we have never been modern in the sense of the Constitution, and this is why I am not debunking the false consciousness of people who would practice the contrary of what they claim. No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world. The use of the past perfect tense is important here, for it is a matter of a retrospective sentiment, of a rereading of our history. I am not saying that we are entering a new era; on the contrary we no longer have to continue the headlong flight of the post-post-postmodernists; we are no longer obliged to cling to the avant-garde of the avant-garde; we no longer seek to be even cleverer, even more critical, even deeper into the ‘era of suspicion.’ No, instead we discover that we have never begun to enter the modern era. Hence the hint of the ludicrous that always accompanies postmodern thinkers; they claim to come after a time that has not even started!

This retrospective attitude, which deploys instead of unveiling, adds instead of subtracting, fraternizes instead of denouncing, sorts out instead of debunking, I characterize as nonmodern (or amodern). A nonmodern is anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns’ Constitution and the population of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate.

“A Masterpiece of Scholarly Production”

In the spring of 2016 we published a major new edition of Emily Dickinson’s verse, the only extant volume of Dickinson’s complete poems that distinguishes between those she delicately preserved in her storied fascicles and those she treated with somewhat less care. Painstakingly edited by Dickinson scholar Cristanne Miller, the book is also the first annotated reading edition of Dickinson’s poems, as well as the first edition to include the alternative words and phrases Dickinson wrote on the pages of many of the poems she retained.

To have produced such a lovely and invaluable resource is its own reward, but we’re nonetheless extremely pleased to share that the Modern Language Association of America has named Miller’s volume co-winner of its biennial MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. The prize committee’s citation for the book reads:

Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them is a masterpiece of scholarly production, from layout and design to content. Cristanne Miller demonstrates how engaging with the materiality of the poems leads to new knowledge about the poet and her work. The care and attention given to the intricacies involved in Dickinson’s textual productions are striking. The clean presentation of the poems on the page allows readers to see the alternative phrasings with ease, and the introduction presents a welcome overview of Dickinson’s writing practices and the ways in which her work has been edited in the past. This outstanding edition helps make clear the complexity of Dickinson’s habits and how they have affected our understanding of her poetry.

From the beginning, we recognized the value of placing this edition alongside the open access Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA), on which we’d partnered with Amherst College, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, and a host of other institutions. On our website, we produced an index to Miller’s volume from which one can jump directly to the high-resolution images of the fascicles presented at EDA, allowing readers not only to read Dickinson’s poems “as she preserved them,” but actually to see those preservations themselves.

Our congratulations to Cristanne Miller on this well-deserved recognition for her wonderful work.

“Genius Grants” for Sunil Amrith and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Among the twenty-four members of the 2017 class of MacArthur Fellows—recipients of the so-called “Genius Grant”—are two recent HUP authors: Sunil Amrith, whose Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants we published in 2013, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.

Here’s the MacArthur Foundation’s clip on Amrith, who was recognized for “illustrating the role of centuries of transnational migration in the present-day social and cultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia”:

And their spot on Nguyen, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, and honored by MacArthur for “challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced”:

Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Nothing Ever Dies are emblematic of concerns that’ve become central to our publishing program—migration, displacement, transnationalism, environmental history, climate change, and cultural memory, to name but a few aspects of these capacious works—and we’re thrilled to see this continued recognition for their authors. Congratulations to Amrith, Nguyen, and the rest of the 2017 class.

Recognition for Translators

Since 1986, the French-American Foundation has awarded annual translation prizes for the best translation from French to English in fiction and nonfiction. We’re extremely pleased to see the translators of three HUP projects among the five nonfiction finalists for the 2017 prize: Nicholas Elliott, for his translation of Michel Winock’s Flaubert; Catherine Porter, for her translation of Élizabeth Roudinesco’s Freud: In His Time and Ours; and Jane Marie Todd, for her translation of Olivier Wieviorka’s The French Resistance.

The Foundation conducted interviews with each of the finalists about the path that brought them to translation, their process for translating, and the life of the translator. Elliott, who shared the 2013 Translation Prize with Alison Dundy for their work on another HUP book, Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, spoke of the “lonely business” of translation:

The translator works alone and must aim to be invisible. Some of the books I translated have received long, glowing reviews that omit to mention the translation. I have come to accept that for a translator, particularly a translator of non-fiction, not being mentioned is equivalent to a good review. Most readers would prefer to pretend there is no translator between them and the author.

And of how translating Winock’s biography deepened his sense of Flaubert’s greatness:

His sentences can be difficult, his word choice occasionally obscure to the modern reader, but once I made my way through the thicket, often by consulting a nineteenth-century dictionary, I always found him astonishingly precise. I understood the famous stories about Flaubert agonizing for days over a single word and was thankful to him for the effort—I never had to guess at his meaning, which is the worst situation for a translator to find himself in when translating a dead or otherwise uncommunicative author.

Porter offered advice to aspiring translators:

Revise! And then do it again, and again, and again… Another piece of advice I’ve found myself giving to undergraduates who think they may be interested in translating fiction or nonfiction professionally is to read the New York Times and Le Monde (or comparable target and source language newspapers) every day. This usually surprises them, but I try to convince them that it’s important for translators to be informed about a wide variety of topics and to be familiar with the terms in which they’re discussed in both languages. 

And Todd, who was a co-winner of the 2010 Translation Prize for bringing Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon into English, described the fun and the challenge of translating wordplay:

There were a few plays on words, usually taken from pro-German or anti-German propaganda: for example, members of the Resistance said of Radio-Paris, the collaborationist station, “Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris est allemand,” playing on the verb for lying, mentir, and the word for German, allemand. I translated it as “Radio-Paris lies, Radio-Paris deceives, Radio-Paris is Germendacious.” On the pro-German side, it was said of those who listened to Charles de Gaulle’s broadcasts from England, “Le dingaullisme s’attrape, surtout, par les organes auditifs.” Dingaullisme is a portmanteau word, a combination of dingue, meaning “crazy,” and gaullisme, “Gaullism,” as in “de Gaulle.” I translated it as, “Dengaulle Fever is caught primarily through the auditory organs,” and was happy to learn that one of the symptoms of Dengue Fever is insanity.

This year’s winners will be announced  at an Awards Ceremony on June 8th. Our congratulations to Elliott, Porter, Todd, and the other translators and publishers recognized as finalists.

In Search of Bengali Harlem

Last week the Whiting Foundation announced the second class of recipients of the Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship, which celebrates and supports faculty in the humanities who embrace public engagement as part of the scholarly vocation. Among the 2017-2018 cohort is Vivek Bald, a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker who will use the time and funding granted by Whiting to continue his recovery of the stories of South Asian immigrants who quietly became part of some of the most iconic neighborhoods of color in the United States. He tells some of those stories in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, which we published a few years back, and he’s working now to complete a documentary titled In Search of Bengali Harlem, a collaboration with the playwright Alaudin Ullah and musician/composer Vijay Iyer.

Here’s the description of the project from the Whiting Foundation’s site, where you can also see a preview of the film:

One of the earliest groups of Muslims to settle in the United States risked their lives to come to the country amid the harsh restrictions on entry of the Asian Exclusion Era (1890-1940). South Asian men working under indenture-like conditions on British steamers jumped ship in northeastern ports and linked up with clandestine networks of their fellows to start new lives working in restaurants and factories across the country. Many made their way to Harlem, where they integrated through marriage into African-American and Puerto Rican communities, in effect “disappearing” into the neighborhood.

Vivek Bald will use the Fellowship to help complete a documentary film recovering the lost history of these men, their families, and their contributions to American urban life. The story unfolds from the perspective of Bald’s collaborator, Bangladeshi-American playwright Alaudin Ullah, who is in search of answers about his parents’ own path to Harlem. As the search ripples outward, the film illuminates a larger twentieth-century history of Bengali Muslim settlement, inter-marriage, and cross-racial community-making in U.S. cities. As part of the Fellowship project, Bald will also implement a digital crowd-sourcing project to collect and share more stories of the descendants of these immigrants.

Bald, who became a documentary filmmaker before pursuing his PhD, met Ullah in the 1990s. That encounter inspired the extensive archival research that culminated in Bald’s book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. The new documentary and website build upon this scholarly work, closing the circle to bring to life the family narrative that introduced Bald to this powerfully multicultural American moment.

The Whiting Foundation believes that “scholarship in the humanities is crucial in pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of the world,” and that “engagement with the humanities provides a blueprint for full, informed participation in civic life in a pluralist democracy; teaches the habit of thinking deeply and broadly, ensuring that we ask questions about history and context when making important decisions; and develops skills that allow us to contribute more to a productive economy, including analytical thinking, facility with complex ideas, clear and persuasive communication, and evidence-based decision-making.” We most certainly agree.

Unflattening Commended for Excellence in Humanities

Earlier this month, the Association of American Publishers announced the recipients of the 40th annual PROSE awards, which recognize the best works in professional and scholarly publishing. The submissions were judged on the noteworthiness and originality of their contributions to the professional and scholarly publishing world. Chosen to share the Award for Excellence in Humanities was Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis, which we published last spring.

As PROSE Awards Chairman John A. Jenkins noted in his address to the audience, “All PROSE Award winners from this year demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing the magnitude of professional and scholarly publishing through their pioneering works,” and Unflattening, an academic study in comic book form, is a testament to that commitment. Sousanis argues that we are taught to think in boxes and perceive ideas in a specific way, and Unflattening represents his effort to situate visual thinking in human experience in order to step outside the confines of thought prompted by written text. Addressing science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, Sousanis’s hand-drawn panels aim to show that perception is an active process of evaluating viewpoints. As editor Sharmila Sen explained to Inside Higher Ed, the book compels our brain to work on two planes, absorbing information sequentially and all at once, “push[ing] us intellectually, cognitively.”

This intellectual urging is representative of our efforts to explore new scholarship and give readers new ways of thinking about intellectual ideas. In an era when university presses seek to reflect the innovation that characterizes contemporary culture while still honoring our mission of disseminating thoughtful, scholarly works to the public, Unflattening represents a synthesis of quality scholarship and inventive thinking. The book has resonated widely, and was recognized by Forbes, The Independent, The New York Observer, Panels, and Print as one of the best books of 2015.

“For Achievement in the Study of Humanity”

Yesterday brought news that the Library of Congress has awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity to philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor. Describing the two as “brilliant philosophers and deeply engaged public intellectuals,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington lauded them for their “ability to address contemporary problems with a penetrating understanding of individual and social formations.”

It’s been our privilege to work with Charles Taylor for nearly three decades, a span that’s included the publication of seminal works like Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, and which continues with this year’s Retrieving Realism (co-authored with Hubert Dreyfus), and a long-gestating work on the full human linguistic capacity that we’ll publish next year.

From the LOC news release:

Born in 1931 in Montreal, Canada, Charles Taylor, like Habermas, ranks among the world’s most original and wide-ranging philosophical minds. Taylor was educated at McGill University and as a Rhodes Scholar, at Oxford University. Although Taylor has held affiliations at many major universities, his most enduring connection is with McGill where he is now Professor Emeritus. While schooled in the dominant tradition of Anglo-American linguistic analysis, his first book rejected positivist and behaviorist explanations of human action, insisting upon a purposive account as the only way to ground individual moral responsibility. As yet another example of his philosophical ecumenism, in 1975 Taylor published a major study of the German idealist, G. W. F. Hegel.

Taylor’s reading of Hegel, particularly in its insistence on the social nature of human existence, foreshadows themes that would become prominent in his most defining work, Sources of the Self (1989). In this masterful survey of moral vision, ranging from ancient Greece to the modern period, Taylor anchors a wide and deep contemporary consensus about core values: universal justice and beneficence, moral equality as a natural right, freedom and self-rule, and the avoidance of unnecessary death and suffering. More controversially, he then argues that purely humanistic, secular sources of inspiration are insufficient to secure these values. Rather, human beings require an intimate connection to something beyond, greater than the self.

As Taylor pursued these themes and their implications in later writings and countless public lectures, he continued to pursue pressing political questions from a deep philosophical perspective. Matters of multiculturalism and the management of national and ethical pluralism in the modern state have been of particular concern to him. Rejecting “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, Taylor has recognized the multiple interpretations and schools within Christian and Islamic thought, as well as within other major religious cultures.

“Charles Taylor is a philosopher of extraordinary eminence,” Billington said. “His writings reveal astonishing breadth and depth, ranging across subjects as diverse as metaphysics, modern culture, human conduct and behavior, modernization and the place of religion in a secular age. He writes with a lucidity that makes his work accessible to the non-specialist reader, ensuring that his contributions to our understanding of agency, freedom, spirituality and the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities will be of lasting import.”

The Kluge Prize was inaugurated in 2003 to recognize work in disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes. Taylor and Habermas now join previous winners including historian John Hope Franklin and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, while the Kluge will accompany the Templeton and Kyoto Prizes on Taylor’s crowding mantle.

Several Modes of Serpell

C. Namwali Serpell’s Seven Modes of Uncertainty has roots in her observation that while she found great pleasure in the experience of not knowing what’s really happening in a book, she hated feeling uncertain in her life. Seven Modes is an attempt to draw the uncertainty we recognize in stories into relation with the familiar uncertainty of life, and to consider whether literary uncertainty could perhaps help us understand how to actually live with the anxiety of not knowing.

Serpell argues that literary uncertainty affords diverse modes of experience with aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions, and that it emerges over time from a reader’s shifting responses to complex structures of conflicting information. Think of the destabilizing feeling of a shifting point of view, of hearing the same story from a different perspective, or of a scene repeating until what seemed normal grows dream-like, uncanny. She uses readings of books by the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and Tom McCarthy to show that novels are “structurally suggestive,” affording readings that in turn afford ethical experiences, positive and negative.

Fairly or not, this study of how literature can influence by disrupting what we think we know is itself given a hint of uncertainty when one learns that Serpell herself is actually a decorated writer of fiction. Indeed, this month her short story The Sack won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, awarded annually for outstanding English-language short fiction by an African writer. The Caine, which has been described as the African writing equivalent of the Booker Prize, carries a £10,000 award, a sum Serpell opted to share with fellow shortlistees Segun Afolabi, Elnathan John, FT Kola, and Masande Ntshanga. Serpell described the decision as an act of “mutiny,” and showed the capaciousness of her concern for structure in explaining that choice to Huck magazine:

Maybe it’s because I’ve been teaching about mutiny that that word is so present to me. It came from a sense that the prize itself is structured like a competition. Prizes are often competitions, but this particular prize brings the shortlisted writers together for a week before the ceremony. We did panels together. We did readings together. We hung out together. We drank together. We ate together and we talked about our families and our work.

When you spend that much time supporting each other, it felt horrible to be pitted against each other. You could feel the difference in the atmosphere when we would all be talking and hanging out and a stranger would come up and say: “Good luck,” or “Who do you think is going to win?” Suddenly the tenor would change. It’s so uncomfortable to be asked to compete with your friends. Writing to me has never seemed like a competitive sport.

The more I thought about it, I figured the reason the prize is structured this way is because of the money. The money has to go to one person and for people to be interested, we have to drum up this sense of drama. I thought instead of attacking the prize, which is a wonderful thing, I’ll go for the source of its structure, which, for me, seemed to be the money.

In the BBC Africa “Masterclass” video below, produced to mark Serpell’s Caine Prize win, she describes the power and possibility of short stories:

 

Readers can perhaps look forward to further ethically productive uncertainty at Serpell’s hand: she’s at work on a novel.

"I'm Trying to Answer the Same Questions as Karl Marx"

Last week at the annual Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) conference in Washington, D.C., Harvard University Press accepted the R.R. Hawkins Award for Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The Hawkins—the highest honor given by the PSP Division of the Association of American Publishers—recognizes the most exceptional professional, reference or scholarly work of the year. The book’s editor, Ian Malcolm, accepted the award on behalf of Piketty and the Press, and used his acceptance speech as an occasion to highlight some of the many people involved in the book’s success. A chance to pat ourselves on the back, yes, but also an opportune moment to acknowledge the unseen efforts involved in the publication of any scholarly work, and to remember that even the most singularly stellar of studies relies on a wide network of actors to help it realize its potential to “inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions,” the contributions that Piketty identifies in Capital as the critical role of expert analysis.

The text of Malcolm’s speech is below.

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HUP Editor Ian Malcolm Accepting the R.R. Hawkins Award

Thank you, on behalf of the author and on behalf of Harvard University Press. It’s a huge honour for all of us who worked on the book to win an award chosen by our peers in publishing, and to win it against such extraordinary competition.

I’ve been asked to speak for 5 to 10 minutes on the making of the book and why it’s an important contribution to scholarly publishing.

One of the joys of this book is that it has sold well and been reviewed widely. Many of you will already know what it’s all about.

So, thank you. I’ll sit down now.

Or so I’d like to conclude. But I’ll say a few things.

First, I want to pay tribute to the author. When I first met Thomas Piketty on a routine acquisition trip, I asked what he was working on.

“I’m trying to answer the same questions as Karl Marx,” he said, “only with better data and a clearer theory.”

Normally, that sort of grand claim is a cue for a quick editorial exit.

“Good luck! I’ll send you the email of an editor at Oxford University Press.”

But this wasn’t a normal author. Thomas was already a star in the profession. He had started thinking hard about the history and dynamics of inequality 20 years ago.