Harvard University Press Blog

Stanley Cavell, Philosopher Untamed

The great Stanley Cavell died late last month at the age of 91. Below, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters recalls what made Cavell so special.

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Why not use the word “star,” Stanley asked in his breakthrough book on movies, The World Viewed, why not “the more beautiful and more accurate word,” rather than actor or actress? In philosophy he was a Hepburn, a Brando, a Dean, a Bacall, stars into whose souls he gave us entryways. I always thought of him and Hilary Putnam as the “glimmer twins.” Time was on their side, for so many decades, thank the lord. And on ours, too!

We know he was here, and, alas, we know he’s gone now.

Stanley attended monthly meetings of the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics. He dressed beautifully to attend our meetings, and he did his homework for them carefully, and spoke articulately on behalf of the books we had asked him to report on.

And he would join the Press staff for ordinary/extraordinary events like the showing over bag lunches of Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter, a movie he’d pried open and made bloom in a chapter of his book Cities of Words, which we’d just published. A simple pleasure he shared with us on a summer day in the third floor conference room at 79 Garden Street.

He walked our earth, and we published many of his words once they’d started to flow from his pen, his typewriter, his word processor, when he’d overcome the long blockage wrought by his father’s wraith and wrath.

In the Camelot years, as I am wont to think of them, Stanley was a knight of the realm under the directorship of Arthur Rosenthal, serving at the Press Round Table for meetings with other nobles such as Helen Vendler, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Samuel Huntington.

That he was a wonder was proven, paradoxically, by the vehemence of those who strove to deny he existed, from his father to a host of pygmies in cinema
studies—a field he can fairly be said to have invented—and philosophy, two “professions” he offended deeply. And though a knight of Arthur’s table he was never cavalier: he shined his shoes and wore a tie to our Syndics’ meetings, but always chafed at the notion of belonging to a profession. Philosophy, truly, has always been untamed; as a human activity it predates all universities and all professions.

“Reminder: Race Is Not a Costume”

In an effort to help forestall the donning of racist Halloween costumes, Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. took the time last week to explain the painful history of blackface and minstrel shows. He was joined in that effort by none other than CUNY Professor Eric Lott, whose writing and thinking have been absolutely critical to our understanding of racial fantasy in American culture for decades, from 1993’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, to Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism, which we published this fall.

Have a look at Wood and Lott’s breakdown of the ways in which the mindlessly offensive racial costuming we see each Halloween is rooted in the history and politics of slavery:

In her 1993 review of the “terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely” Love and Theft, author and critic Margo Jefferson expressed the hope that Lott would pursue the threads of this American racial identity crisis into the twentieth century. With Black Mirror, that’s exactly what he’s done. In a series of chapters addressing such arts and artists as Mark Twain, film noir, Joni Mitchell, Elvis impersonators, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama, Lott explores the ways U.S. cultural institutions have relied insistently and repeatedly on racial symbolic capital—including and above all blackface—to reproduce white cultural dominance, threatening in the process to betray the racial hegemony that generated those institutions and that they exist in order to maintain.

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.

Deepwater Horizon's Parable of Risk

The big-budget Hollywood take on the 2010 explosion of the offshore drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon opens today. Directed by Peter Berg and featuring Mark Wahlberg, the film arrives as a star-driven disaster movie, suspensefully depicting events that included the deaths of eleven men, the destruction of a half-billion-dollar drilling platform, and the worst human-made ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history.

As is frequently the case with big productions, where the film ended up isn’t where it was always headed, and initial director J. C. Chandor had a different vision for the story before being replaced over “creative differences” with the studio. Chandor’s plan was apparently to tell the story from the perspective of “everyone that was on the rig,” with an ensemble cast of over one hundred people. It’s worth noting that, according to a new analysis of the disaster by two senior systems engineers, Chandor’s version was on the right track.

Earl Boebert and James Blossom use a systems model to investigate what happened at the Macondo well, focusing on the complex interactions of technology, people, and procedures. From their book, Deepwater Horizon: A Systems Analysis of the Macondo Disaster:

A system is a collection of components developed more or less independently—plus the people who operate them. Two things make it a system: it has an intended purpose, and it exhibits what systems engineers call emergent properties. An emergent property is something that arises from the interaction between components rather than from the behavior of a single one. Emergent properties are things like safety, security, and reliability. They are typically important and hard to quantify.

Emergent properties suggest the possibility of emergent events: events that result from a combination of decisions, actions, and attributes of a system’s components, rather than from a single act or from the failure of a single piece of equipment. The Horizon disaster was the very model of an emergent event.

A systems analysis resists the tendency to focus on a single cause, an urge so common, and so misleading, that it has a name: “root cause seduction.” That seduction, write Boebert and Blossom, “is typically at the heart of efforts to assign blame or liability rather than prevent future accidents.”

American Cinema, Lost and Found

In a few weeks the Museum of Modern Art will unveil a new installation titled “100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History.” The show’s centerpiece is seven reels of recently recovered footage shot in 1913 for a Bert Williams film project that was abandoned before completion. As detailed by the New York Times, the reels represent the earliest surviving footage for a feature film with a black cast, and also give insight into the production process itself. Below, Cara Caddoo, author of Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life, explains why the materiality of such films makes further discoveries less and less likely, just as we’re gaining a wider understanding of the workings and importance of early black cinema.

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Production still from Bert Williams Lime Kiln Field Day Project. 1913. Odessa Warren Grey and Bert Williams

Late last month, MoMA announced its curators had discovered footage from the oldest black cast film in existence. The previously unreleased 1913 film stars Bert Williams, one of the most popular stage performers of the day, and was co-directed by an African American. It’s a remarkable discovery, because only a handful of black-cast and black-directed films from the silent era exist today.

Unfortunately, this 1913 gem is probably one of the last films of its generation to have survived the century. Until the 1950s, most movies were shot on nitrate film, a fragile, highly combustible material that quickly corrodes without proper preservation. Less than 15% of the films made before 1930, including big Hollywood productions, still exist. Since time is the enemy of nitrate film, the prospect of recuperating lost films becomes more unlikely each year. As a consequence, most early black films will never be recovered.

The 1913 Bert Williams film has ignited interest in the diverse roles African Americans played in the making of modern cinema. But just as we are beginning to grasp the magnitude of these contributions, are the sources for accessing them slipping away? Is the history of black film lost to us?

Fortunately, African Americans left other records that can help us recover this history. Black newspapers, census reports, and church records offer ample proof of an important but forgotten past in which men and women were pioneers of the motion pictures. Before Hollywood, even before the nickelodeon theater, African Americans produced, exhibited, and watched films together.

They did so at a time when segregation divided the nation. Beginning in the 1890s, African Americans began to transform their churches, schools, and fraternal lodges into motion picture theaters during off-hours. They also produced films that celebrated the achievements of black leaders. Vibrant black film cultures blossomed across the country, from St. Louis, Missouri, to Jacksonville, Florida, and Washington, D.C. This wasn’t just by chance. At the turn of the century, these cities were attracting hundreds of thousands black migrants from the countryside who were eager to make the most of their lives as free people, and to claim, as WEB Du Bois once wrote, their “God-given right to play.”

Meanwhile, white theaters, even in the North, abided by the rules of Jim Crow segregation. They reserved only the worst seats of the house, known as the “buzzard’s roost” or “nigger heaven,” for black audiences. In these theaters, films that depicted black characters as violent, ignorant, and less-than-human were especially popular.

Such films, and their racist, degrading images of black characters, have been most likely to survive over subsequent decades. It’s partially a matter of scale; black filmmakers had limited resources and produced fewer films. But for most of the past century, film archivists and collectors focused on preserving the “classics,” films such as D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, which retold the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction by recasting the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of the South.

For this reason, MoMA’s discovery is all the more exhilarating—an artifact that has survived more than a century against all odds. Yet although the survival of this 1913 film is exceptional, our emerging understanding of early-twentieth century black film culture proves that the contributions of its black cast and director were not unusual. Even in the absence of reels of film and motion picture stills, we must celebrate these achievements. And the thrill of new discoveries should not let us forget the tragic forces that ensured the rarity of recovering such films. In short, both what we have lost and what we find are part of the longer history of American cinema.

The Image of the Belle

As film critic Manohla Dargis notes in her review, the new movie Belle is “enough of an old-fashioned entertainment that it could have been made in classic Hollywood,” save for the fact of its main character’s race. Belle, which opened last weekend in New York and L.A. and adds cities and screens throughout this month, is based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy officer and a black woman of uncertain status in 18th century England. The story presented by the film has much in common with an Austen novel, but with the added element of a heroine coming to terms with her race and its meaning in a slave society.

The film was inspired by a striking portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle with her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, a painting that—quite against custom—depicted no apparent subservience of its black subject to its white. The painting, the artist of which has been lost to history, features in the third volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, our nearly complete ten book series tracing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times.

In “Court and City: Fantasies of Domination,” an essay written by series co-editor David Bindman and Helen West, the painting is considered within the 18th century tradition of presenting black pages, grooms, and servants as status symbols for the white people who are the art’s ostensible subjects. In this case, though, and several other works that Bindman and West highlight, there’s a way of seeing the racial hierarchy as slightly undercut by a certain quality of freedom in the person of color found lacking in the white subject’s formal pageantry.

Here’re Bindman and West on the contrast drawn between the countenance and costume of Dido Elizabeth Belle and that of her cousin:

[A] relationship between liberty and formality appears in a later anonymous painting of Lady Elizabeth Murray, a niece of Lord Mansfield, the judge in the landmark Somerset case (so important in the history of abolition), who is accompanied by Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter by a black woman of Sir John Lindsay, a nephew of Mansfield. Dido seems to have had an ambiguous position in the household as both servant and family member, but in the portrait difference is emphatically signaled through skin color, dress, and demeanor. Though affection is expressed in Lady Elizabeth’s outstretched hand, her formality and bookishness is contrasted with the wild and exotically turbaned figure of Dido, whose fruits and branches and open smile make her a Caliban-like figure of untamed nature. Her position was unusual, for her parentage was evidently fully acknowledged; she was placed, like a free person of color in the West Indies, in an ambiguous position, treated with familial affection yet also evidently as a domestic servant, though Lord Mansfield left her an annual allowance on his death in 1793 and she was able to marry in the same year. In this portrait…we have come some distance from the earlier typology of such portraits, in which black servants were pets to the woman portrayed; now their “savagery” is to be envied rather than castigated.

The story told by Belle, even though padded by departures from the slim historical record of Dido, serves to remind us of the great many people presented in the thousands of works archived by The Image of the Black in Western Art, and the ways in which the series serves as a vital source in the history not just of art but of lives.

Greil Marcus on The Collaboration

On January 23rd the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco hosted Ben Urwand, author of The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, in conversation with Greil Marcus. During the event (which you can watch in full via the video below), Urwand presented on his research, discussed the book with Marcus, and took questions from the audience.

Marcus—whom we’ve also published several times—began the evening by addressing the controversy surrounding the book, which documents major Hollywood studios accepting direction from German authorities for a longer period and to a much greater extent than previously known.

We’ll pick things up with Marcus addressing the persistent calls for HUP to withdraw the book:

This book has been attacked because it is sensationalistic; because it’s one-sided; because it’s exaggerated. Well this is quite remarkable. Nobody asks that a book be withdrawn because it’s sensationalistic or exaggerated. The argument has also been made that, “Well, everybody knew this was going on. You could find it in Variety. There’s nothing new here.” You know, traffic accident, nothing to see, move along, move along. “But if there is anything new here it’s not important.” It’s like the argument that people made for generations about the Rosenbergs: “They didn’t give anything to the Soviet Union. And if they did it wasn’t anything important. It didn’t have any effect.”

Marcus went on to situate the response to Urwand’s book within a history of Jewish authors discussing Jewish matters and being met by outcry:

The campaign—and it has been among various people an organized campaign—against The Collaboration has been of such virulence and so hysterical, and with accusations that verge on the criminal, that it recalls other instances where Jewish authors have delved into forbidden material, and have come back with stories that a lot of people want to hear, and a lot of people don’t. When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem, and she argued that members of the Jewish councils in Eastern Europe worked with the Nazis to facilitate transport of Jews from the ghettoes to concentration camps, in hopes that the people they were supposedly representing would get better treatment, and that they would get better treatment. This was a small part of Hannah Arendt’s book, but it was an explosive argument. She was attacked by not only people in the press, but attacked my colleagues, attacked by lifelong friends. She was shunned. Her classes at the New School in New York were taken away from her. When Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, Gershom Scholem, the great Israeli historian, compared it to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Which I think no one has done of The Collaboration yet.

  

Solomon Northup as Primary Source

British filmmaker Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, an adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir of his abduction from the North and sale into southern slavery, opens today in limited release. The cinematic virtues of the film have been widely praised, and while its historical accuracy will surely—and rightly—be scrutinized, it was produced in consultation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and has earned the respect of Eric Foner. When considering the accuracy of the film, though, Foner cautions viewers to recall the original intent of Northup’s narrative, which was written “to persuade people that slavery needs to be abolished.”

Even still, Northup’s remarkable account has been critical to our understanding of the mechanisms of the slave trade, and was one of a handful of narratives that were essential to historian Walter Johnson in the writing of Soul by Soul, itself a now-essential work on life inside the antebellum slave market. In the passage excerpted below, Johnson draws on the narratives of Northup and others to convey a sense of how slaves assessed one another even while ostensibly functioning within the logic of the markets as pure objects of assessment.

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As the traders gathered the slaves they intended to sell, they brought together groups of people who were unknown to one another. Whether they were from all over Virginia, as were the slaves in the coffle that carried John Brown south, or from all over the South, as were the slaves Solomon Northup met in New Orleans, the slaves in the trade had been uprooted from the places and people that had defined their past identities. In the weeks and sometimes months between sale into the trade and resale by a trader, slaves built the broken pieces of old communities and identities into new ones. Like the communities they had left behind, these communities were shaped within the framework of the very structures they opposed—a back-and-forth relation which fused power and resistance into a single process. The traders’ fears, incentives, and threats—themselves responses to anticipated resistance—were woven into the very fabric of connection that bound slaves in the trade to one another.

For some, the sale into the trade was more than they could bear. Separated from the world that had given their lives meaning, some slaves were overwhelmed by the traders’ brutality, the numbing privation of the slow southward march, and the terrifying contingency of lives put up for sale. To the social death experienced by those torn from their histories and identities and the physical death they faced in the killing fields of the lower South must be added the psychic deaths—the “soul murder”—that left many of the trade’s victims with little will to resist.

Within the narrow parameters afforded them by the watchful traders, many others struggled on. The slim favors the traders granted the “trustworthy” provided some slaves a chance to say good-bye or to try to carry a piece of the past into the trade. Those who were given the opportunity took the time to pack things to carry south with them: clothes, shoes, bed rolls, blankets, and perhaps a memento of their past lives. The clothes that William Grose’s wife carried eight miles to give him as his coffle left for the south were a material reminder of the family and identity he had been forced to leave behind. The Reverend William Troy portrayed the cruel rapidity of the sale of Martha Fields by invoking the image of her left-behind possessions. Fields, he wrote, “was taken early one morning, without time to get her clothes, hurried off to Richmond and sold to the highest bidder.” Moses Grandy’s memory of being parted from his wife was similarly mixed with the memory of the change he had in his pocket when he met the trader at the head of her coffle “I asked leave to shake hands with her which he refused, but said I might stand at a distance and talk with her. My heart was so full that I could say very little . . . I gave her the little money I had in my pocket, and bade her farewell. I have never seen or heard of her from that day to this. I loved her as I loved my life.”

Catharine MacKinnon on Lovelace

The pornographic film Deep Throat, released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of the film.

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Q. You’ve noted that prior to the 1980 publication of Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal, you had no view of pornography one way or the other. For those unfamiliar with her story, who was Linda Lovelace?

“Linda Lovelace” was the fictional name of Linda Boreman, later Linda Marchiano, who was forced into captivity and made to perform fellatio and other sex acts by pimps, including organized crime, so that pornography, notably the notorious film Deep Throat, could be made of her. The film was instrumental in establishing pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. After her escape, Linda’s valiant opposition to the sex industry included chronicling her abuse in Ordeal and extensive public testimony. Her revelations enabled a change in the way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from morality to harm.

Q. This film comes decades after the landmark pornography civil rights hearings at which Marchiano testified, as documented in In Harm’s Way. Can you remind us what was at stake in those hearings?

The anti-pornography civil rights hearings collected in In Harm’s Way created a space for people victimized by pornography to speak about what had been done to them in its making or through its use.  Up to that point, the legal argument over pornography had essentially only considered the freedom of speech issues.

The hearings documented the inequality that is foundational to the industry: that the “speech” of the pornographers is the use and abuse of the bodies of mainly women, who were far from free and were not speaking for themselves. The consequences of the distribution and use of the materials was shown to be equally silencing and endangering to legions of women and children who are abused by its consumers.  Thus the sexual exploitation of women and children in making pornography is mass-produced through its consumers to become violation of other women and children.

The civil rights ordinances the hearings debated were passed several times, then found to violate the First Amendment on the theory that the more harm the materials do, the more protected as speech they are–an incorrect, indeed reversed, view of First Amendment law. The ordinances could still be passed and found constitutional today.

Cavell at the Movies

“Every teacher knows the excitement, and chaos, in learning about a subject by undertaking to teach it.” So writes Stanley Cavell of his decision in 1963 to teach a seminar on film. The idea struck him as pedagogically promising, in that all present would have memories of their experiences with movies, and no established body of criticism yet existed to distract them from the nature of those experiences. As Cavell recounts in The World Viewed, though, the seminar was a failure. “Or rather,” he writes, “what was learned was important enough, but it came from our failures.”

Each week I assigned one or two students the responsibility of opening the discussion by reading a two- or three-page description—nothing but description—of the film we all had seen. It turned out that the descriptions were never quite accurate, not always because some gross turn in the plot was out of order or an event had been forgotten, but often because more was described than had been shown. (For example, “The car followed her to the hotel.” But in viewing the film, we had not known until later that the structure was a hotel.) After that, I noticed that almost every summary statement of a movie, whether in newspaper “criticism” or in brochures for a projected series, contains one or more descriptive inaccuracies. Is that because summaries don't really matter? Or because it is unclear what one wants from them? Only about operas, certainly not about novels or stories or poems or plays, would we accept so casual and sometimes hilariously remote an account as we will about movies.

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Another failure in the seminar’s work was no less pervasive, and far more disheartening. The willingness to forgo theory and criticism was too proud a vow, particularly in view of our continuing inability to discover categories we had confidence in or to make comparisons (e.g., with the novel, plays, and painting) that really carried the weight we wished upon them. A frequent reaction to these dead ends was to start getting technical; words flowed about everything from low-angle shots to filters to timings and numbers of set-ups to deep focus and fast cutting, etc., etc. But all this in turn lost its sense. On the one hand, the amount and kind of technical information that could be regarded as relevant is more than any of us knew; on the other hand, the only technical matters we found ourselves invoking, so far as they were relevant to the experience of particular films, which was our only business, are in front of your eyes. You can see when a shot begins and ends and whether it’s long, middle, or close; you know whether the camera is moving back or forth or sideways, whether a figure brings himself into the field of the camera or the camera turns to get him; you may not know how Hitchcock gets the stairwell to distort that particular way in Vertigo, but you can see that he got it. Then what is the reality behind the idea that there is always a technical something you don't know that would provide the key to the experience?

The questions raised by the “failure” of the seminar stuck with Cavell over the next several years, and he describes their lingering effect as the genesis of The World Viewed, which was first published in 1971. The significance of that book, and of Cavell’s work on film more generally, is noted in two recent appreciations from the folks at n+1. In a piece earlier this month, Charles Peterson deems Cavell “one of the greatest American philosophers of the past half-century” but one who’d have become “little more than a curious footnote in American intellectual history” had he not turned to “the more practical concern of how to ‘reconstruct the everyday.’ ”