Harvard University Press Blog

The Lecture: Bringing to India the Best and Brightest on Ideas and Issues That Matter

 

HarperCollins and Harvard University Press have a new collaboration– The Lecture, a series of talks by writers and thinkers from around the world brought to Indian audiences. 

  The inaugural lecture –‘Vivekananda, Guru to the World’– by Professor Ruth Harris will take place at Delhi’s iconic India Habitat Centre's Stein Auditorium, on Friday January 27, 2023, 7.00 p.m.  The lecture will be based on Professor Harris’s definitive biography of Vivekananda, the Indian monk who shaped the intellectual and spiritual history of both East and West. Professor Harris is Senior Research Fellow at All Soul’s College, University of Oxford; Fellow of the British Academy; and Professor of European History at the University of Oxford. 

In her book, published by Harvard University Press, Professor Harris offers an arresting biography, showing how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist politics a century after his death. The iconic monk emerges as a counterargument to Orientalist critiques, which interpret East–West interactions as primarily instances of Western borrowing. As Vivekananda demonstrates, we must not underestimate Eastern agency in the global circulation of ideas. 

  George Andreou, Director, Harvard University Press, remarked, ‘We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Ruth Harris’s important book to a wider audience in India and to expand our critical partnership with HarperCollins.’ 

Speaking on the initiative, Ananth Padmanabhan, Chief Executive Officer, HarperCollins, said, ‘At HarperCollins we believe in the transformative power of words and as a publisher, through our books, we have endeavored to create a platform for ideas that spark conversations. We are delighted to partner with Harvard University Press, and begin this new series where we will host talks by some of the world’s brightest minds writing about people, ideas and issues that matter.’ 

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re showcasing titles that document the Asian American experience. This week we have an excerpt from Duncan Ryūken Williams’s Los Angeles Times bestseller, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. George Takei called it “A must-read for anyone interested in the implacable quest for civil liberties, social and racial justice, religious freedom, and American belonging.”

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents showed up at the Kimura family’s farmhouse to question her father. Nobuichi Kimura, Masumi’s father, was carrying a shotgun when he answered the door and, seeing the gun, the agents wrestled him to the floor. Minutes later, Masumi arrived home from school, only to find her father pinned down by one agent and another pointing a gun at her mother’s head. Her parents, who had immigrated from Wakayama Prefecture in Japan some years earlier, were trying in their broken English to explain the gun to the agents. Though terrified, Masumi’s English was better than that of her parents. She translated the agent’s questions to her father, who explained he had been preparing to shoot rabbits in the garden when they had arrived. Temporarily satisfied, the agents left. But in subsequent weeks they returned to the Kimura home to conduct further interrogations concerning Mr. Kimura’s leadership at the Buddhist association, which was seen as aligned too closely with Japan and potentially a threat to national security.

It was in this climate of growing suspicion and hostility that Masumi’s father decided to take steps to prove the family’s loyalty to America. One day shortly after that first FBI visit, Masumi was performing her daily chore of lighting the furnace next to their Japanese-style bathtub when her father entered the room. He was carrying items he had found throughout the house that had Japanese language inscriptions or “Made in Japan” written on them. Among them were Masumi’s precious Hinamatsuri dolls, which had been given to her on Girl’s Day. As tears rolled down her cheeks, she watched him throw the dolls and all the other Japanese artifacts into the fire.

Her father did not burn everything, however. He could not bring himself to destroy the bound edition of Buddhist sutras that had been handed down through generations of the family. Instead, he asked his wife to find boxes and some Japanese kimono cloth while he went outside and dug a hole behind their garage with a backhoe. After wrapping the Buddhist scriptures and the minutes of board meetings from the Madera Buddhist Association in the kimono cloth, he placed them in tin rice-cracker boxes, carefully lowered them into the hole, and covered them with dirt. By burying them next to the garage, he hoped to be able to find and recover them at some later date.

Shortly thereafter, in April 1942, the Kimuras were ordered to report to the Fresno Assembly Center, which had been set up at the local county fairgrounds. They ended up having to sell their farm to their neighbors for less than one-twentieth of its market value, and, after depositing a single suitcase of their most valued remaining possessions at the Fresno Buddhist Temple for safekeeping, they arrived at the center, where they were quartered in a horse stable designated Barrack E-17-2. They were however more fortunate than the majority of Japanese Americans. Instead of being transferred to one of the more permanent WRA incarceration camps, the Kimuras were among the handful of families approved to join work programs east of the military zone, so they ended up in Utah, where they worked as cheap farm labor for the duration of the war.

After the war ended, the Kimura family returned to Madera in the hopes that they would be able to buy their farm back and recover their home. But the new owners demanded a sum ten times greater than what the Kimuras had accepted for the farm three years earlier. They had also torn down the garage, making it impossible for the Kimuras to find the precious belongings they had buried near it. Their single suitcase of valuables, which had been stored away for safekeeping, had been lost as well when vandals ransacked the Fresno Buddhist Temple during the war. Unable to raise the money to buy back the farm, the Kimuras went to live with relatives in Los Angeles.

This story, told to me in the gardens of my advisor’s widow, has stayed with me over the years. Though just one among tens of thousands of stories of Japanese American Buddhist families during World War II, it encapsulates both the loss and the hope that made possible the birth of an American form of Buddhism. Though the Kimuras were willing to let go of their Japanese national identity by burning objects symbolically linked to Japan, the one thing they refused to erase was their Buddhist faith. Indeed, they ended up quite literally placing Buddhism into the soil of America for safekeeping. Like Senzaki and many others, their actions demonstrated their firm conviction that their adopted homeland would one day be a place where their faith could grow and flourish.

The Devil’s Playlist

Ministers denounced it from their pulpits. Sunday school teachers warned their classes of its demonic origins. Yet Christianity and rock ’n’ roll music were surprisingly intertwined from the time when the music first made national headlines in the mid-1950s, and have remained closely linked ever since. Historian Randall Stephens tells the tale of their relationship in The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll, new this month.

As Stephens shows, the long and complex affair between believers and pop culture has been a dynamic story of how the faithful encountered and reacted to the perceived moral chaos surrounding them. Here’s a bit from the book’s introduction:

Rock ’n’ roll’s exciting, unconventional mix of country, gospel, and rhythm and blues was first broadcast on the nation’s radio stations in the mid-1950s. What had seemed like an undeniable abomination would, after the 1960s countercultural revolution, appear less and less problematic. American Christians eventually made an uneasy peace with the pop music that they had once battled so relentlessly. With each passing decade, it had come to seem less and less threatening to the faithful. Pop genres would become key to American Christian identity and church growth, helping make evangelicalism the largest American religious tradition by 2008. As organs and pianos dominated religious music in earlier eras, guitars, drums, keyboards, and bongos were now typical in evangelical churches. Stripped-down praise choruses became the order of the day. Much of what animates evangelical churches in the twenty-first century comes directly from the unlikely fusion of pentecostal religion, conservative politics, and rock and pop music.

A book about music will of course arouse the ears, so Stephens pulled together a playlist of songs and artists that he considers in The Devil’s Music. Have a listen via the player below.

And, from Stephens’s own archive comes the following string of endorsements from some of the book’s key figures.

Jerry Falwell:

Jimmy Swaggart:

And the Beatles themselves:

Billy Graham’s Vietnam

The passing of the Rev. Billy Graham, who spent more than six decades as the nation’s most prominent Christian evangelist before retreating from the public spotlight in recent years, has occasioned both glowing appreciation for his life’s work and fierce condemnation of the social and political movements he led. One particular point around which that condemnation has clustered has been Graham’s support for America’s wars, and specifically the tactics he encouraged in Vietnam. In his authoritative account of Graham’s personal evolution and public significance, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, historian Grant Wacker writes that Graham “displayed an uncanny ability to adopt trends in the wider culture and then use them for his evangelistic and moral reform purposes,” but that he also “brought to the table a long list of liabilities: conventional beginnings, serious mistakes of judgment, mordant criticism from others, shifting public identities, and elusive mythic dimensions.” In the following excerpt from America’s Pastor, we see evidence of both in Graham’s views on communism and the Vietnam War.

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One of the most durable conventions about Graham is that he was a hawk of the fiercest kind. The convention bears a large measure of truth for the Graham of the late 1940s, 1950s, and most of the 1960s. To a great extent the early Graham defined himself not only politically but also culturally and even theologically as a warrior against communism. As with millions of Americans, Graham’s hatred and fear of communism was palpable, profound, and pervasive.

The story is long and complex. Before plunging into it, however, four generalizations are helpful. First, Graham’s attitudes toward communism not only changed but also zigzagged. The changes unfolded in different ways in different times and places. Second, Graham did not do it alone. The culture changed—and zigzagged—right along with him. Third, Graham and the West did not do it alone, either. The Soviet Union changed at the same time, and so did the Eastern Bloc nations, and, to a lesser extent, so did China and North Korea. Finally, Graham’s star remained high long after the Cold War died. The Cold War helped propel him into public visibility but it did not keep him aloft. Other factors, including the culture’s needs and his personal skills, did.

In the early years of his career Graham hammered the communist threat constantly. Next to the gospel message, by his own recollection, he preached about it more than anything else. In 1953 the Chicago Daily News dubbed Graham “Communism’s Public Enemy Number One,” a view echoed by Soviet newspapers. Graham famously ridiculed “the pinks, the lavenders and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle.” The alarmist words on the front page of a “News Letter” of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, mailed to listeners of the Hour of Decision in July 1953, represented hundreds if not thousands of paragraphs in Graham’s preaching and writing of that era. “This is no time to be lulled by the constant talk of ‘peace’ by the Communist spokesmen,” he cautioned. “Their program of world conquest is moving ahead at a steady pace.” British Guiana and Guatemala effectively have fallen, Graham warned. Communists intend “to bring Japan to her knees economically,” then all of the Far East. “Other countries are to follow. We are being gradually encircled.” Many of the most memorable lines Graham ever preached targeted the communist enemy: “Stalin’s fixed purpose is to holster the whole world for communism”; “They have knifed their way across Laos”; “Communism is a fanatical religion that has declared war upon the Christian God.” Communism framed his image of the world, aroused his listeners’ anxieties, and prompted them to take action.

The Meaning of Belief

In The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View, a short book recognized as one of the year’s best on religion, philosopher Tim Crane attempts an intervention into contemporary debates on religion, which he sees as only so much sequestered shouting, neither atheists nor believers moved by the stance of the other. Writing against the crop of anti-religious books typically grouped under the banner of “New Atheism,” Crane presents a view on the nature and meaning of religious belief intended both to help make sense of the current debate and to give atheists a better practical understanding of the phenomenon of religion. In the excerpt below, Crane offers an outline of what he means by “religion.”

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The reader may press me to define what I mean by religion. In a strict sense of “definition,” this probably can’t be done. Friedrich Nietzsche said that only that which has no history can be defined, and if he is right (which he surely is), then religion cannot be defined. For religion is so wrapped up with human history and prehistory that we should not hope for a sharp definition of the kind that we get in mathematics, for example, the paradigm of a subject matter (numbers, functions, sets, and so on) without a history. Rather than looking for a strict definition, we should seek “an understanding of religions by following the way they developed historically”—in Émile Durkheim’s words.

Most large-scale attempts to define religion will encounter some counterexample, in the sense that a religion can be found to which the definition does not apply, or that we will find something to which it applies that is not a religion. This is one reason that it has become almost a commonplace among those who theorize about religion that it is impossible to be defined. In his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James comments on the variety of definitions in circulation and concludes that “the very fact that these definitions are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word ‘religion’ cannot stand for any single principle or essence.” Some recent writers agree. Karen Armstrong observes that “there is no universal way to define religion” and argues that the concept itself is not obviously one that would have been recognized by more ancient societies: there is no single word in ancient Greek or Latin, nor in the Hebrew Bible, that we can translate as “religion.” In fact, the origin of the concept of the religious, as something opposed to the secular, is a matter of controversy and still somewhat obscure.

Nonetheless, if we are going to get a proper overview of our subject matter, we should try to specify as precisely as we can what it is we are talking about, even if we cannot answer the question of the historical origin of the concept, and even if what we come up with doesn’t amount to anything like a rigorous mathematical definition (after all, very few things do). James had the right approach: “Let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important in religion.” So I will start with my first attempt to identify these characters.

Religion, as I am using the word, is a systematic and practical attempt by human beings to find meaning in the world and their place in it, in terms of their relationship to something transcendent. This description has four essential elements: first, religion is systematic; second, it is practical; third, it is an attempt to find meaning; and fourth, it appeals to the transcendent. Let me say something briefly about these four ideas, whose exposition will be the substance of the rest of the book.

How Muslim Women Dress

Can a modest and religious woman also be fashionable and stylish? One’s immediate response to such a question can reveal quite a bit about their position in and perspective on the world. As Elizabeth Bucar shows in Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, there’s no inherent incompatibility between modesty and beauty, and modest fashion represents much more than social control or religious orthodoxy. Bucar’s ethnographic work in the stores and streets of Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul reveals the locally-determined moral and aesthetic values exemplified by Islamic dress, and the comparative design of the project serves to deepen our understanding of Islamic politics. Ramin Raza, a Northeastern University student who interned with us at HUP this summer, spoke with Bucar about the book and its conclusions; their conversation is below.

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Q: For many non-Muslims living in the West, the major source of exposure to Islam and to Muslim dress is through media outlets that depict women’s attire from a Western or even Orientalist perspective. From your time in three Muslim countries, how did your experience of “pious fashion” challenge these notions and highlight the varying expressions of piety through dress?

It’s a good question to begin with since I suspect many non-Muslims and Muslims alike view pious fashion—and a headscarf—as a sign of Muslim women’s oppression, that they don’t make their own decisions, that they are controlled by patriarchy in some way that is radically different from other women. That is just too simplistic a view. All women feel the effects of gender ideologies and this affects how we present ourselves in public—including our dress. But within these pressures and constraints we still have some degree of choice. Even in Tehran, where hijab is required, a woman has to decide every morning what to wear to abide by those regulations—and the options are endless.

Q: In Pious Fashion, you illustrate how a nation’s cultural and sociopolitical ideology materializes in women’s fashion, and consequently, falls on the woman’s body to reflect and uphold. Briefly, how do Muslim women in Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul navigate these structural forces and assert agency through pious fashion?

The three locations studied in my book are case studies to explore the specifics of how women’s dress can be seen as a response to and even critique of these ideologies. But I don’t think I can summarize each location in a pithy sentence. In fact that is part of the reason I wrote this book. Clothing everywhere can be read, and in our own culture we do it all the time. I might note how my student’s T-shirt, my colleague’s suit, or the height of my friend’s boots convey social privilege, gender norms, or power. But when we try to read clothing in other cultures, we often make mistakes because we base our interpretations on our own aesthetic and moral assumptions. So it is only by thinking about a particular trend or clothing item within a web of moral and aesthetic values that we can see how Muslim women can use pious fashion to express their individual taste, identity, cosmopolitanism, and even politics.

Q: You explain in the book that piety and fashion do not challenge each other, but rather inform one another to bring nuance and broader meaning to Muslim women’s dress. How, then, does pious fashion communicate in a way that is both Islamic and secular?  

We think there is a hard line between what is religious and what is secular. But in everyday life, that line is blurred. The same scarf I might buy in a hijab store in Tehran—which I must wear by law in that country as part of a governmental effort to make the public space more Islamic—I might buy in Urban Outfitters in Boston as part of my own effort to add some hipster vibe to my casual weekend outfit. The actual material items are not as invested with special meaning as we might think. And this winter we saw Shepard Fairey’s image of a woman in an American flag headscarf adopted as one of the most prominent symbols of the Women’s March in DC. Influence goes both ways. Secular trends effect pious fashion, but religious clothing makes piety fashionable in mainstream culture as well.

The Idea of the Muslim World

President Trump’s weekend address in Saudi Arabia, a centerpiece of his first foreign trip since taking office, was billed as an address to the “Muslim world,” much in the same way as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo. Though Trump’s focus on the threat of Iran undercut the notion of Muslim singularity, the speech was both presented and received in the context of an imagined global Muslim unity. In The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, Cemil Aydin asks how, despite “the obvious naïveté of categorizing one and a half billion people” as a single community, this idea’s become so entrenched. “How did we arrive at this point,” writes Aydin, “where a fantastical entity could be so present, so prevalent in political thinking? Why do so many Muslim and non-Muslim political leaders, intellectuals, and religious figures comfortably base many of their arguments and decisions on the idea of the Muslim world without reflecting on the accuracy of the generalization that this term signifies?” In the excerpt below, Aydin begins to trace the emergence of this imagined global unity during the peak of European hegemony in the late nineteenth century, when poor colonial conditions, European discourses of Muslim racial inferiority, and Muslims’ theories of their own apparent decline nurtured the first arguments for pan-Islamic solidarity.

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The idea of the Muslim world is inseparable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race. The distinction of the Muslim world and the Christian West began taking shape most forcefully in the 1880s, when the majority of Muslims and Christians resided in the same empires. The rendering of Muslims as racially distinct—a process that called on both “Semitic” ethnicity and religious difference—and inferior aimed to disable and deny their demands for rights within European empires. Muslim intellectuals could not reject the assumptions of irreducible difference but responded that they were equal to Christians, deserving of rights and fair treatment. The same conception of Muslim unity and difference justified appeals to Muslims as a global community during World War I and World War II. Racial assumptions also ensured that later subaltern and nationalist claims for rights would be framed in the idioms of Muslim solidarity and an enduring clash between Islam and the West, giving rise to the Islamism and Islamophobia of the 1980s and beyond.

It is thanks to this elaboration of both Muslim difference and Muslim unity that contemporary writing, scholarly and otherwise, tends to emphasize Muslim exceptionalism. The assumption is that Muslims, due to their piety and the nature of their faith, naturally resist the liberal international order of independent, pluralistic nation-states. Muslims’ attitudes toward politics are presumed different from those of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, whose societies need not be explained by reference to faith tradition or civilizational identity. However, this theory of Muslim exceptionalism is unsupported and unsubstantiated. The Ottoman Empire, Republican Turkey, British-ruled Indian Muslims, Afghanistan, the Saudi Kingdom, Pakistan, postcolonial Egypt, and Iran under the shah ardently supported the imperial and later nationalist world orders. The seeming importance of Islam in the contemporary politics of Muslim-majority societies derives not from theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety but from the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness and from the particular intellectual and political strategies of Muslim resistance to this racialized identity.

The geography and technology of empire were essential to these processes of racialization and resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century. New transportation and communication technologies such as steamships and the telegraph fostered unprecedented levels of connection among Muslims, naturalizing the geopolitical concept of the Muslim world in Europe and its colonies. The networks enabled by these technologies were the medium of pan-Islamic thought born of confrontation with imperial racism.

Imperial racism, but not empire itself. Muslim leaders and thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not, for the most part, anti-imperialists. Instead they sought fair treatment from the four major European empires: British, Dutch, French, and Russian. These were cosmopolitan arrangements, home to wide-ranging ethnic and religious groups. But racialized legal categorizations shared across European empires, the empowerment strategies of colonized Muslim subjects, and tactics employed in imperial rivalries confirmed rather than challenged Muslim difference, ensuring that Muslims would be a separate class within the imperial whole. The British ruled almost half of the world’s Muslims and therefore played an especially important role in guiding the development of pan-Islamic thought. British fears of rebellion and policies of oppression engendered specifically Muslim responses. At the same time, Muslims understood that their vast numbers and the reality of their overwhelming loyalty to the empire all owed them real clout.

Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility

Earlier this month, De Gruyter and a number of its partner presses—of which we’re one—launched a portal to provide educational institutions with free access to a collection of books and articles across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Dubbed “Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility,” the initiative is intended to help combat false news sources, to support reflection on the nature of truth and ethics, and to encourage understanding of the struggles facing all members of society.

“Public debates surrounding immigration policy, climate change, international relations, and constitutional and human rights are currently at the forefront of the national discourse, especially, but not only, in the United States. Together, De Gruyter and its partners are keen to support a thoughtful and informed debate on these sensitive and serious issues,” said Steve Fallon, Director of De Gruyter’s Publishing Partner Program.

The collection groups resources into eight topical areas:

• Constitutional History
• Dissent, Truth & Ethics
• Environmental Studies
• Gender Studies
• Geopolitics
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Urbanism
• Islamic Studies

The content includes more than 500 books and selected journal articles from HUP, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Transcript-Verlag, and De Gruyter. HUP titles on offer include Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, and Robert Wald Sussman’s The Myth of Race, among dozens more.

Register with De Gruyter to provide access for your library.

The Cross in Contemporary Culture

As Easter approaches, and millions of Christians around the globe prepare to celebrate one of their most important religious holidays, we take a look at the symbol at the center of it all: the cross. A defining symbol of the Christian faith, the cross is recognized globally as a sign of love, loss, salvation and gratitude, and is depicted in churches and in art around the world. In The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy, Professor Robin Jensen examines the two thousand year history of the cross as an idea and artifact—from the graphic images of the crucifixion in the late Middle Ages, to the rejection of imagery during the Protestant Reformation, up to the more recent discovery of the so-called “Ground Zero Cross” in the wreckage of the World Trade Center. As Jensen notes, “The cross’s story is neither simple nor straightforward. Whether as sign, artifact, instrument, or character, the cross has been cast into a myriad of roles.” What role does the cross play today? In the extract below, Jensen concludes her study with a look at the cross in contemporary culture.

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Both ubiquitous and tenacious, the cross turns up in the most mundane contexts. Roadside crosses set up by private citizens compete with advertising billboards and mark the sites of traffic casualties—a sobering reminder of the death toll on highways. Shrines with crosses fill the landscape in some parts of the world. A hill in northern Lithuania, completely covered with votive crosses and crucifixes is a testimony to the persistence of Catholic Christianity in this former Soviet-occupied country. The subject of an extraordinarily popular cult, pilgrims flock to this place, climbing the hill on their knees and praying the stations of the cross. At the other end of the spectrum, gaudy rhinestone crosses turn up on denim jeans, handbags, or leather jackets—a fashion trend that may have little to do with religion.

Crosses in the public square can be perceived as communicating Christian triumphalism or religious intolerance. The fiery crosses of the Ku Klux Klan are an extreme example of the symbol being used to terrorize victims, incite racial hatred, and widely regarded as an emblem of hate-based terrorism, especially (although not exclusively) against African Americans. Klan spokespersons have argued, however, that the lighted cross (versus the “burning cross”) is not intended as an act of desecration but rather as a show of allegiance to Christ. This intimidating symbol may have been borrowed from the fiery crosses burned by Scottish clansmen, used to rouse their countrymen to repel the English armies during the Jacobite rising. Its sympathetic portrayal in D. W Griffith’s 1915 epic film, The Birth of a Nation, may have encouraged the Klan’s embrace of the figure. Despite the Klan’s justification of its use, recent Supreme Court decisions have judged the display of a burning cross to be a hate crime rather than an instance of freedom of expression when expressly used to intimidate or if motivated by racial, religious, or gender bias. James Cone’s important work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, looks at the conflicted connections between the two powerful images of the cross and the tree, noting that some African Americans may find the cross to be a symbol of God’s solidarity with their suffering against the terrifying history of racial violence, perpetrated upon the “lynching tree.”

Jews objected to the placement of crosses at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in the 1980s, as they evoked painful memories of both ancient and modern persecution. Although the large cross at Auschwitz was originally set up for a convent of Carmelite nuns, and the subsequent placement of smaller crosses may have been intended to commemorate the death of Christians—including many Christian Roma—at that camp, Jews perceived their installation as profoundly disrespectful and demanded their removal. Conversely, the Chinese government’s removal of crosses from the exteriors of Chinese Christian churches, ostensibly only enforcing zoning ordinances, arguably has a different motivation. Journalists have reported that the authorities are targeting Christian churches because they regard their display of religious affiliation too excessive or “overly popular.”

Research Libraries, University Presses Oppose Trump’s Immigration Order

President Trump’s recent executive order temporarily barring entry into the US by individuals from seven countries is contrary to the values held by libraries and presses, and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) stand unequivocally opposed to this immigration ban.

The order blocks some members of our communities as well as students, researchers, authors, faculty, and their families from entering or returning to the United States if they are currently abroad or leave the country, even if they hold the required visas. The ban will diminish the valuable contributions made to our institutions and to society by individuals from the affected countries. This discriminatory order will deeply impact the ability of our communities to foster dialogue, promote diversity, enrich understanding, advance the progress of intellectual discovery, and ensure preservation of our cultural heritage.

The work we do—particularly the books we publish and collect—illuminates the past and sheds new light on current conversations; informed by this work we believe that the rationale for the ban both ignores history and places assumptions ahead of facts. More importantly, this decision will greatly harm some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. The United States should not turn its back on refugees who are fleeing their war-torn homes and have already endured long, extensive screening procedures in the relocation process.

Finally, while temporary, the ban will have a long-term chilling effect on free academic inquiry. This order sends a clear message to researchers, scholars, authors, and students that the United States is not an open and welcoming place in which to live and study, conduct research, write, and hold or attend conferences and symposia. The ban will disrupt and undermine international academic collaboration in the sciences, the humanities, technology, and global health.

ARL and AAUP have longstanding histories of and commitments to diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice. As social institutions, research libraries, archives, and university presses strive to be welcoming havens for all members of our communities and work hard to be inclusive in our hiring, collections, books and publications, services, and environments. The immigration ban in its current form is antithetical to notions of intellectual freedom and free inquiry fundamental to the missions of libraries and presses. By serving as inclusive communities, research libraries, archives, and university presses have deeply benefited from the contributions of students, faculty, staff, and scholars of all backgrounds and citizenships.

ARL and AAUP support all members of their communities and all students, researchers, authors, and faculty who are impacted by this executive order. The two associations urge President Trump to rescind this order and urge Congress to intervene on behalf of those affected by the immigration ban.