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The Muddy Flow of African/American history

In Transition 108, our authors take "the long view from the levee" and survey the muddy flow of African/American history. From the banks of the Mississippi to the back roads of Ivory Coast, manmade dams and barricades block access to our homelands. But the past has a way of leaking through: West African aesthetic forms in the work of an American sculptor, old soul food joints in the New Newark,  the scars of racism in contemporary Cuban art, and the sweet sound of the Gospel Train replaced by Soul Train, a form of secular testifying that taught us to moonwalk down the line.

CONTENTS

The Long View from the Levee —New Orleans is famous for its wild river and creolized culture. But over time, has the unpredictable flow of blood resulted in more fear than freedom? Shirley Thompson charts the course of racial mixture through the city’s history from the banks of the Mississippi.

“Love, Peace, and Soul” —In decades publicly defined by race riots, police brutality, and the crisis in Vietnam, Don Cornelius and his troops of young dancers used the power of black celebration to stage a celebration of black power. Laurence Ralph joins the Soul Train.

Race and Racism in Cuban Art —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. engages curators Elio Rodríguez Valdés and Alejandro de la Fuente in conversation about Queloides, an exhibition that explores the social and cultural scars of racism in contemporary Cuba.

The White Year · Poetry by Mara Jebsen

Last Van to Korhogo—By the end of 2004, Ivory Coast’s civil war had cooled to a simmer, but the country remained split in two, with a rebel-held north and a government-held south. What do these divisions mean to people on the move, late for christenings, doctor’s appointments, and dinners with friends?  Siddhartha Mitter recalls a slow road trip to Korhogo.

Creating a New Negro Art in America—How did a major university come to sell a 22-foot-long panel by a celebrated African American sculptor for the chump change of $150? Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, at work on a book about Sargent Johnson, knows that the answer to this question lies deep in the institutional history of the “new negro art.”

Names of the Dead · Fiction by Émille Hunt

Split Palate —Though seduced by the jazz, mojitos, and upscale funk of the “new” Newark, journalist Reniqua Allen develops an appetite for the soul food of the city’s Central Ward, and the undersung history of “old” Newark’s middle class.

“Tense and Tender Ties” —Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, Kimberly DaCosta close reads Janny Scott’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.

Cover Image: Soundsuit. © 2009 Nick Cave

Transition 108 will ship in June, 2012. Visit the journal's IU Press Transition website to subscribe. Print single issues may be ordered directly from IU Press customer service: 800-842-6796 (inside the USA) or 812-855-8817 (outside the USA).

Queering Middle Eastern Cyberscapes

Special Issue of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies
Queering Middle Eastern Cyberscapes  |  Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2012

Introduced and guest edited by Adi Kuntsman and Noor Al-Qasimi, this special issue, entitled “Queering Middle Eastern Cyberscapes,” fills in the gap in current scholarship where “queer,” “digital” and “Middle East” are seldom considered together. Five full-length articles and a unique Interventions section examine, empirically and theoretically, the conjunctions between sexuality and technology, queerness and the Middle East, and transformative politics and colonial and imperial legacies. The articles by Sima Shakhsari, Grant Walsh-Haines, Serkan Gorkemli, Rodney Collins, and Mathew Gagné share several common concerns: changes to queer identities and subjectivities across the region; local and global political forces within which queer bodies live and move; and questions of political organizing, on- and off-line. The authors pay careful attention to the ways the Internet offers possibilities for new identities and alliances, providing a platform for solidarity or offering an illusion of mobility. At the same time, they reject colonial and liberationalist perspectives of new media as inherently democratic and empowering and of the Middle Eastern sexualities as backward or oppressed and in need of saving. And while the authors describe substantially different uses of the Internet in Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and Lebanon, all agree on the close and complex connections between cyberscapes and material spaces – be it a space of a club or a meeting place; a space of a city, or a transnational space of diasporic movement and settlement. By doing so, they offer new ways of understanding the relations between bodies, politics and technologies, relations that are always placed and grounded, even when shaped by globalized forces. In lieu of book or film reviews, the Interventions section seals the issue by featuring artwork and other special pieces unique to this issue.

CONTENTS
Introduction, Adi Kuntsman and Noor Al-Qasimi
Chic of Queer and the Politics of Representation: Cyberspace, War on Terror, and the Hypervisible Iranian Queer, Sima Shakhsari
The Egyptian Blogosphere: Policing Gender and Sexuality and the Consequences for Queer Emancipation, Grant Walsh-Haines
“Coming Out of the Internet”: Gay Activism and the Hybrid Trope of the Internet in Turkey, Serkan Gorkemli
Efféminés, Gigolos, and MSMs in the Cyber-Networks, Coffeehouses, and “Secret Gardens” of Contemporary Tunis, Rodney Collins
(Online) Queer World-Making: The Participation in GayRomeo.com of Men Desiring Men in Beirut, Mathew Gagné

www.jmews.org

JMEWS 8.3 will be released in July.

Women, Gender and Violence in the Middle East

JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES  2012 DISTINGUISHED LECTURE AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP
“Women, Gender, and Violence in the Middle East”
Thursday, May 3, 2012  |  Room 202 * Henry R. Luce Hall — YALE UNIVERSITY
34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT

Panel I: “History, Gender, and Violence” – Moderated by Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar, Yale University

Panel II: “Gender, Violence, and Representation” – Moderated by Zareena Grewal, Yale University

Panel III: “War, Gender Violence, and the State” – Moderated by Sallama Shaker, Yale University

Panel IV: “Gender and Intimate Violence” – Moderated by Narges Erami, Yale University

This event is sponsored by the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, the Council on Middle East Studies, and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. For more information, visit www.jmews.org.

Meridians 11.1 The Politics and Pull of Memory

Holding Innocence, Photo Credit © Regine Romain, February 2010, Port-au-Prince, Haiti

MEMORY

This issue of Meridians is divided into two parts, linked by the politics and pull of memory.

The first part includes an essay that revises the Partition literature around the “honor” suicides of women during the 1947 violence in Punjab; a meditation on Korean cultural memory and its engagement with historical but unforgotten Japanese and U.S. colonial practices; and an analysis of the portrayal of the iconic South African activist, Winnie Mandela, in the U.S. popular press. This section is also graced by three poems: “Memory’s Muse,” by Sonia Adams and “So you Die Slowly” and “For the Lost,” by Kimberly Juanita Brown.

The second half of the issue is a special section on Haiti, edited by Gina Athena Ulysse, a Haitian American. She has gathered narratives, poetry, and photographs: remnants of the Haitian earthquake of January 2010 that come together to provide a moving testimonial.

Part I

In 1947, British colonialism ended in southeast Asia, and over twelvemillion people moved to and from Punjab, eventually settling into the modern states of Pakistan and India. Known as the Partition, the historical event was accompanied by eighteen months of genocidal violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that ended in 1948 with the Karachi Riots and the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. While feminist historiography has restored the previously under-acknowledged abduction and sexual assault of some 75,000 women that took place during the violence, revisionist scholars have also interrogated the meaning of the contemporaneous mass suicides of women who immolated themselves allegedly for the sake of the honor of their families. In her essay, “The Violence of Memory: Renarrating Partition Violence in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers,” Deepti Misri builds on the work of such scholars as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, who see such “honor” narratives as patriarchal misreadings that serve a male imaginary. Misri’s revision is posited through the novel What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin, with its allegories around gendered memory and retelling.

American and Japanese colonialism is a subtext of Jennifer Cho’s essay, “Mel-han-cholia as Political Practice in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” The author argues, through culturally specific and analytic theories of melancholy, that Cha’s text, with its protagonist’s recall of both Japanese dominion over the Korean peninsula (1910–1945) and of the American role in the Korean War (1950–1953), reveals that the intergenerational memory and grief of the traumatic past—even if suppressed—is clearly present in the diasporic Korean community and has the potential to become the basis of a collective identity.

When I interviewed Winnie Madikizela Mandela in Soweto in the 1970s, her then-husband, Nelson Mandela, was still in prison, and she had recently emerged from confinement and forced exile in the Orange Free State. At that time, as Linda Horwitz and Catherine Squires note in “We Are What We Pretend to Be…,” Mrs. Mandela, though a courageous anti-apartheid activist in her own right, was seen in the U.S. popular media mostly as a “rhetorical widow”: a woman whose authority is derived from a husband who is unable to speak for himself. The authors write about how this nationalistic and gendered identity construction has the potential to provide a voice for women leaders while at the same time disempowering them as mere stand-ins for male authority figures.

Part II

How do you put such a thing into words? When the ground doesn’t hold.

When the back of an invisible hand, unimpeded, sweeps the landscape and all that is above it. When loved ones, alive and talking and loving a minute, a hour, a day before, slip, suddenly and silenced, beneath the rubble?

It is mainly for them that words must be found. And in this special section of Meridians, Gina Athena Ulysse provides her own and those of others affected by the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 when at least 300,000 people lost their lives, thousands more lost limbs, and unknown numbers are now forced to cope with trauma of unfathomable magnitude.

These are words of loss and grief, witness, and anger at a government that never protected the people. But these are also words that glisten into poems, rise as remembrance, revise stereotypes of debilitation. They illuminate the kind of spirit that invents a name for the earthquake: “goudougoudou,” an onomatopoeia that reiterates the sound of the trembling edifices and that siphons enough fear to allow for a healing smile.

We feel the emotions in these narratives and poems, and we also see them in the photo essay that accompanies them. The images, photographed by Regine Romain, are meant to shift the gaze from the images of “inhumanity, disaster, and helplessness,” as Ulysse writes, toward dignity and “possibilities both beyond and through the horror.” In this, both the words and the images succeed.

Paula Giddings, Introduction, Meridians 11.1.

 

April 18 Teleconference with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

April 18 Teleconference with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

The teleconference will begin at 1pm (EDT) and end at 2pm (EDT).To register, e-mail the words “Register Me” to waterstaff@waterwomensalliance.org. You will receive the dial-in information.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is a co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and has been a founding co-editor of the feminist issues of Concilium. A feminist biblical scholar, Elisabeth is the Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. She was the first female president of the Society of Biblical Literature and has served on the boards of various other biblical journals and societies. In recognition of her pioneering work in biblical interpretation and feminist theology, she has received honorary doctorates from eight universities in the US and abroad, including the University of Würzburg (Germany) and Southern Methodist University (TX), and has received the Jerome Award of the Catholic Library Association. She is also part of the women-church movement and a longtime, valued collaborator in feminist Catholic struggles. Among her many published works are In Memory of Her, Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation, The Power of Naming, and Discipleship of Equals.

Her most recent book, and the subject of her teleconference, is Transforming Vision: Explorations in Feminist The*logy, a collection of essays on feminist theology focusing on the use of critical analysis of overlapping oppressions in the work of academic and ecclesiastical theologians. Join us on Wednesday, April 18th, 2012, at 1pm (EDT) to talk with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza about her work in feminist theology.

Israel Studies: 1948 War in Photography; Loyalty in relations between World Jewry and Israel

Israel Studies, 17.2 (summer 2012) has two special sections which should serve as important sources for scholars and students.

    The first section is The 1948 War as Witnessed by Photographers and a Poet. Nili Scharf Gold, “Portrait of Haifa in 1948: The Poet, the Bay and the Mountain” reveals the love letters of Yehuda Amichai one of the twentieth century’s (and Israel’s) leading poets sent from Haifa to New York during 1947–1948 in which he portrays the struggle of the Jewish city. Alon Confino, “Miracles and Snow in Palestine and Israel: Tantura, a History of 1948” accounts how the Arab inhabitants of Tantura faced the war from the Jewish occupation of the village, the expulsion to Furaydis of the rest of the population, via the second expulsion to Jordan, to the settlement of Kibbutz Nachsholim. It is accompanied by 23 pictures hitherto unpublished. Maoz Azaryahu and Arnon Golan, “Photography, Memory and Ethnic Cleansing: The Fate of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, 1948 — John Phillips’ Pictorial Record” argue that much of the recent academic literature on the 1948 war portray it a one-sided — and thus simplistic — ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine. Accordingly, the story of "the 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" excludes expulsion and massacres of Jews, the destruction of Jewish communities, and the erasure of the Jewish signifiers in the local landscape from the story. As made explicit in John Phillips' photo-reportage featuring the destruction of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine also involved the expulsion of Jews and the destruction of their communities – whenever and wherever military power relations were in favor of Arab forces.

    The second is a Roundtable on Loyalty and Criticism in the Relations between World Jewry and Israel based upon a talk given by Gabriel Sheffer, “Loyalty and Criticism in the Relations between World Jewry and Israel.” This served as a catalyst for Israel Studies to respond leading experts in the field and provides a unique collection of viewpoints on this pertinent subject which has accompanied Israel-Diaspora relations since the inception of the Jewish State. Yehezkel Dror, “Diaspora-Israel Relations: A Long-Term Perspective”; Leonard Saxe and Matthew Boxer, “Loyalty and Love of Israel by Diasporan Jews”; Daniel Gordis, “From a Jewish People to a Jewish Religion: A Shifting American Jewish Weltanschauung and its Implications for Israel”; Steven Bayme, “On Gabriel Sheffer’s “Loyalty and Criticism in the Relations between World Jewry and Israel”; and, Eliezer Don-Yehiya, “Jewish Orthodoxy and its Attitude to Israel.”

Find and Friend: JML on Facebook

The Journal of Modern Literature now has a page on Facebook that includes information on submitting, subscribing and advertising. If you have a Facebook account, please go to this link (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Journal-of-Modern-Literature/254345014644623) and click the "like" button. Please encourage your colleagues and students to do so as well.

The page will enable us to quickly and easily share the latest JML news on forthcoming issues and calls for papers. It is also a forum for you to give us feedback and network with other scholars.

Film History to be Edited at Indiana University

After being edited for 25 years by Richard Koszarski, Professor of English at Rutgers University, the editorial office of Film History is moving to Indiana University. Beginning with volume 25, number 1 (the spring 2013 issue), the journal will be edited by Gregory A. Waller, Professor of film studies in the IU Department of Communication and Culture. Published by Indiana University Press in cooperation with this department and the IU College of Arts and Sciences, the re-designed journal plans special issues on film distribution; digital resources and historical research; fan magazines; actors, acting, and performance; and film history and sound studies. 

In addition to submissions related to these topics, the editorial team encourages queries and submissions across the full spectrum of international film history, from pre-cinema into the 21st century, in and out of the commercial, theatrical mainstream and welcomes proposals for review essays and reassessments of classic texts in film history. 

Please direct all queries, proposals, and manuscripts to filmhist@indiana.edu.

Visit the Film History web page for more information.

A Collector's Item: Transition 106

Transition: An International Review (2011) A Special Double Volume 106. "Fifty Years-Transition Celebrates its Storied History" and "Transition-Reflections from Contemporary Uganda"

A collector's item has arrived. It is the new special double issue Volume 106 of Transition: An International Review. Those who know and appreciate Transition will welcome this unusual volume. It is much longer than normal, and laid out as two separate journals bound in one volume. The first part is Fifty Years - Transition Celebrates its Storied History. The second part is found with a flip of the wrist and on the reverse side, Transition - Reflections from Contemporary Uganda. READ MORE.

 

Gender and Jewish Identity

Nashim No. 22, Special Issue: Gender and Jewish Identity
Consulting Editors: Elisheva Baumgarten, Sylvia Barack Fishman

Gender scholarship, in both the social sciences and the humanities, shares many interesting parallels with identity studies. Both have been salient and productive areas of research within the various fields of Jewish Studies over the past three decades. The essays in Nashim 22 investigate a wide range of factors that affect women’s and men’s identities, social, religious, and political.

How did Jewish women leaders a century ago see themselves, and how were they seen by others? When 18-year-old women soldiers were sent to impart literacy skills to immigrant women on Israel's periphery, who were the learners and who were the teachers? Why would some ultra-Orthodox women take on standards of modesty going beyond the strict standards of their sects? Can women poets, writing in Hebrew, appropriate a stake in the world's literary and mythic corpus? What concepts of maleness and femaleness emerge when feminist analysis is applied to a famous Talmudic story? How are new roles emerging for women in the twenty-first century affecting the leadership of Orthodox Jewry? Can a biblical woman's voice emerge via the paintbrush of an Orthodox Jewish man? And, finally, whom do we call "mother"? These questions and more are addressed in Nashim 22.