world history

Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Sapphistries is an epic journey through real and fictional love between women. It is so epic that the author, Leila J. Rupp, had to coin a new term to describe this type of book. It is not just a history; it is an interweaving of prehistoric musings, fictional accounts that draw on suppositions of what it must have been like in times when no evidence was left of when and where these kinds of love was forbidden, right up to the modern day. I say these kinds of love because Rupp has effortfully but effectively convinced me that I need to know about the whole she-bang. It’s not easy to keep track of lesbians throughout history when people didn’t self-identify as such.

This book takes in the whole gamut of potential interpretations of women-loving-women: social males, women who live as men but retained their female identity, third and fourth gender identities, women passing as men, two spirits, secret weddings, school girls having accepted but secret relationships as a cultural yet unofficial rite of passage in various modern cultures... as a run-of-the-mill modern lesbian, I was a little overwhelmed. This varied interpretation of ‘Sapphistries’ is extremely broad, and definitely widened my perspective on what I think the author would like me to consider a part of my culture.

Primary and secondary source material across the span of human history is combined with fictional accounts throughout the book. I personally found the interweaving of fictional accounts and historical details a little too seamless at first. I had to flip back and forth a few times mid-tale to remind myself which was which, but I eventually got the hang of it and had a much better contextualized grasp of what I was reading. I thoroughly enjoyed the re-tellings and re-imaginings of ancient women-loving-women. With Rupp's first-person interjections and a storytelling tone, the book reads like a long and enjoyable university lecture delivered by a witty, warm, and knowledgeable teacher.

I would recommend this book for women’s studies, literature, queer theory, or history syllabuses. I even suspect it would make for an excellent module on its own, with some supplementary reading thrown in. It’s no coffee table book—this is some serious reading and I personally would want a sherpa to guide me through it the next time I read it.

Sapphistries is particularly invaluable for queer theory because of the vastly broad picture it presents of the grand scope of women who love women—regardless of whether they identify as queer or not. This book opened my eyes to the many positive and negative perceptions and lifestyle choices of those who were a part of ‘Sapphistry’ in the past, and I look forward to seeing how it informs future study and thought.

Written by: Chella Quint, March 21st 2010

Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Michael Rothberg

Stanford University Press

In Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg offers an alternative to competitive memory, or the idea that the capacity to remember historical injustices is limited and that any attention to one injustice diminishes our capacity to memorialize another. Rothberg also disputes the idea that comparisons between atrocities erase differences between them and imply a false equivalence. In focusing on the Holocaust, Rothberg navigates between two extremes: the tendency to proclaim the Holocaust so distinct that it should not be compared to anything else, and the tendency to universalize the Holocaust, turning it into an abstract lesson about good and evil that can be applied to any and all atrocities. His solution is “multidirectional memory,” which describes collective memory as “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing; as productive and not privative.” In other words, comparisons can both aid in understanding and illuminate differences.

In part one, Rothberg explores the idea of “boomerang effects” found in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire’s works on colonialism and genocide. Through these works and many others, Rothberg examines how, prior to a full accounting for the Holocaust and its reinvention as a historically unique event, scholars such as Arendt and Césaire were constructing the Holocaust and totalitarianism as colonial practices, ideas and structures brought to Europe from the colonies. While Rothberg does a serviceable job of explaining and justifying the productive nature of the comparisons in the abstract, he glosses over the unfortunate concrete relationship between colonial genocides and the Holocaust, specifically Hitler‘s modeling of concentration camps after the North American reservation system and his co-opting of the language and tactics of the so-called Wild West. He mentions these links briefly, but so vaguely as to conceal them from any reader not familiar with the historical facts.

In part two, Rothberg focuses on the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, André Schwarz-Bart, and Caryl Phillips as they explore the light the Holocaust and anti-Semitism shed on the Black experience in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Here, the comparisons are limited to the abstract connections between the historical oppression of people of African descent (including slavery, colonialism, segregation, and genocide) and the Nazis’ racialization, ghettoization, and extermination of the Jews. This section also emphasizes both peoples’ histories with “ghettos, ruins, and other diasporic spaces.” This is perhaps the best example of multidirectional memory in the book.

In parts III and IV, Rothberg explores various works (both literary and cinematic) to examine the connections between the Holocaust and the Algerian War in the waning days of French colonialism and the opening days of the Eichmann trial that would transform the public discourse surrounding the Holocaust. Here, Rothberg does a better job of distinguishing the abstract connections between colonialism, racism, and the Holocaust from the concrete connections between French treatment of the Algerians and French complicity in the Holocaust. Perhaps most disturbing is the implication that a timely attempt to address French complicity in the Holocaust may have prevented many if not all of the atrocities committed against the Algerians, as both involved the same people, places, and tactics.

Overall, Rothberg does a decent job of showing how multidirectional memory can improve understanding through comparison; however, the book fails in a few places. By limiting himself to elite discourse, Rothberg underestimates the public’s capacity to undermine or diminish memory of one atrocity through competition with another as part of the self-fulfilling nature of competitive memory. He also doesn’t seem to fully explore how the taboo against comparisons in general and certain comparisons specifically undermines attempts to make such comparisons productive. Finally, his language is often so stereotypically academic that it may be inaccessible to non-experts. In the end, I am left uncertain whether to recommend the book or suggest that readers attempt to find some other work that addresses these concepts more clearly and completely.

Written by: Melinda Barton, February 12th 2010

Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster

admin — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 10:48:00 +0000

By Alison Weir

Random House

Mistress of the Monarchy is a biography of Katherine Swynford, the Duchess of Lancaster. Swynford was the long-time mistress and eventual third wife of John of Gaunt. She also became the ancestor of every English monarch since 1461 as well as such notable personages such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Franklin Roosevelt, Princess Diana, Sir Winston Churchill, and George Bush.

Author Alison Weir is a prolific historian who has authored many books, non-fiction and novels, about members of the royal family. Weir did a meticulous job in researching this book, but despite her efforts, little information about Katherine has survived. So she describes those who surrounded Katherine, including her brother-in-law Thomas Chaucer, and the particularities of the time.

The most interesting aspect of the book is the insight she provides into life in the 1300s. The cultural trends she describes, from the tendency to marry young (Katherine married between twelve and thirteen years of age and had her first child one year later) to the debilitating effects of the Black Death gives readers a vivid insight into the challenging environment people lived in at that time. Weir describes the vast wealth and luxury of the noble class, the resentment of the common people, the difficulties of battle, relations between states and high-ranking people, moral codes, lawlessness at the borders, the importance of religion and the roles of women.

The main details readers can infer about Katherine is that she was beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, discreet, good with children, didn’t abuse her influence and kept on good relations with people. While the book opens with an intriguing scene in which John of Gaunt rode around estates with mistress, holding her bridle in public (a public sign of his possession of her) and in the presence of his own wife, Weir doesn’t return to this sense of confrontational scandal later in the book. Besides the fact that the affair and the later marriage were scandalous, the focus remains on Katherine’s discretion and devotion.

Given the lack of information available about Katherine, the title used in the UK version, Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess, gives a more accurate impression of the book. The figure of John of Gaunt comes through more clearly than does Katherine, as do his first two wives and his dealings with various heads of state. Readers see his love for his first wife, his propensity toward promiscuity, his religious repentance and renewed devotion to his second wife, his bravado in battle, his relations with his relatives and children.

The strength of the book lies in the detailed historical research, the sense of place and time and the resurrection of a forgotten matriarch. Occasionally, the voice loses its vigor, descending into extensive genealogical information or architectural descriptions. Since Katherine’s main contribution to history was her romantic liaison and her descendants and the available details of her personal life are few, there is little narrative arc or tension to propel readers through the book. For those with an interest in the middle ages or in royal history, this is a valuable reconstruction of an overlooked woman and a fascinating historical period.

Written by: Jessica Jacobson, April 12th 2009