Rick Taylor

Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions

annette — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

African American literary contribution to the national conception of nature, in all of its symbolic ambiguity and historical twists and turns, is a subject that has been little studied. In fact, African American writers have contributed profoundly to our popular understanding of nature and to our ecological concern. Kimberly Ruffin’s book must confront the notion that modern ecological movements have been the exclusive province of privileged white people—that African American people have had little to do with the natural world as writers or advocates. To challenge this assumption, she redefines nature and ecological thought as it has applied to the experience of African American people throughout American history, as articulated by artists both well known and obscure.

This transformation in our understanding begins with a recent anecdote concerning the “Jena Six” incident in Louisiana in 2006. When high school students sought shade under what had been designated “the white tree,” they were subsequently threatened with nooses hanging from it. A tree is, indeed, a source of comfort, a sign of natural beauty with practical value. But it is also—sorry, Joyce Kilmer—emblematic of lynching and a history of terror aimed at African American people. The author points out that rather than preserving the tree as a “troubled relic,” school officials cut it down, presumably in an effort to prevent further trouble and to erase this living monument to racial injustice.

If many African Americans have felt estranged from mainstream environmentalism, Ruffin argues, it is because people themselves—“the most precious of natural resources”—seem to have been excluded from the discourse. The author cites Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement as a model for a new way of thinking about environmentalism, a “human-sensitive” activism that advocates simultaneously for people and the land. She argues that people of African descent have had both the burden and the blessing of being themselves seen as natural; whereas too often people of European descent have viewed themselves as radically separate from nature, a realm to be tamed and controlled or, later, to be visited for leisure.

Another critical point that she makes is that pre-twentieth-century Americans knew nature through work. The connection to the land was forged through labor, with both the body and the landscape part of the same “bioregion.” Similarly, nature has been inextricably involved in human efforts to achieve social justice and to escape from enslavement. She demonstrates that environmental degradation has disproportionately harmed the disenfranchised, but a detailed knowledge of the environment was instrumental, for example, in helping enslaved people establish routes to freedom. African American writing also reveals the extent to which the natural world provided sources of healing—the “wild-growing medicines” that are so much a part of cultural tradition and folklore.

Ruffin revisits the contributions of George Washington Carver, whose intense scrutiny of the natural world led to a unified view of science and religion, a balance between practical knowledge of the natural world and human spirituality. This balance is displayed in the myths written into the African American ecoliterary traditions about food and medicine and many different aspects of life, and they still are made manifest in community urban gardens, for example. The ultimate aim is an environmentalism that fully incorporates social justice as its aim, a natural world that includes humanity.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 17th 2011

Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China

annette — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Julie Y. Chu

Duke University Press

Residents of Fujian Province on the southeastern coast of China burn spirit money designed to resemble U. S. currency. That stunning confluence of traditional religious practice and modern dreams of western emigration stands as a kind of symbolic center of this book. In her ethnographic study of the people of this region, famous-or infamous, perhaps—for their involvement in “human smuggling” to the West, Julie Y. Chu asks why so many people would honor the dead with images of western materialism. The answers her subjects gave seemed evasive, dismissive: “because so many have relatives in the United States” or “they’re just being superstitious.”

In fact, the spirit money, modeled after American greenbacks, represents a powerful longing that has defined and transformed this region. Nowhere is this desire more obviously monumentalized than in the comparatively luxurious homes, built by “Overseas Chinese” as “vacation homes” or investments, that are springing up throughout the province. For many, those who have miraculously managed all the bureaucratic obstacles and nightmarish dangers to settle in the West have achieved a heroic status that is both idealized and destabilizing for those “left behind.” The culture Chu describes is one that keeps one proverbial eye fixed westward, the other on a provincial life that seems meager and transient. Bags are kept packed.

The book is replete with tales of those still waiting for the call from the “snakehead” (human smuggler) who will expect them to be ready at a moment’s notice to abandon their current lives and embark on a life-threatening journey. Because this activity has so profoundly defined the region and its people, Chu argues that it is part of a “politics of destination,” a pragmatic and forward-looking ideology governed by the prospect of mobility—both geographic and economic.

Because of the frequency of arrests and loss of life in transit, the area is notorious world-wide as a jumping off point for “human smuggling.” Perhaps the worst incident was a tragedy in June of 2000: fifty-eight migrants from Fuzhou suffocated to death in the back of a truck hauling tomatoes from Belgium to Dover. Indeed, the horrifying details of human smuggling bring to mind the inhumanity of the Middle Passage, with the obvious mitigating difference being the migrants’ belief that a better life awaits those who survive. The author writes, “One cannot easily forget the stifling darkness and pervasive disorientation of being crammed into the hull of a ship or into a steel shipping container for anywhere from fourteen to ninety days." She calls it a kind of “entombment at sea,” too literally the fate of many who have attempted the passage.

The tales of horror have done little to dampen the desire, but have only made legal or illegal “visiting” that much more difficult and risky. Residents still fervently study well worn copies of Practical English for People Working in Chinese Restaurants and wait for the call to action. The new foreign-owned homes, left mostly empty by their overseas owners, seem to be proof of a prosperity that, in spite of all obstacles, is still within the grasp of the most resilient.

The book ends beautifully with the clacking of mahjong tiles that, like the spirit money, captures something essential about the Fuzhounese. The author comments on the popularity of the game: “Though winning always entailed personal reward and glory, losing did not necessarily spell individual failure and shame... Sooner or later... the pendulum of luck would swing back in one’s favor.”

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 13th 2011

Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness

mandy — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Duke University Press

If the Asian American contribution to hip-hop has been largely invisible, South Asian American rap artists, here including those whose families came from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Fiji, have received a surprising amount of critical attention focused on re-conceptualizing race and the increasingly universal appeal of contemporary Black popular culture. On the heels of Ajay Nair and Murali Balaji’s 2009 study Desi Rap: Hip Hop and South Asian America comes Hip Hop Desis , an ethnographic analysis of a group of South Asian American rappers and the shared experience of those living in “racially marked bodies.”

The artists Nitasha Tamar Sharma studies “craft new ways of being desi, or alternative desiness, by drawing upon the concept of Blackness.” She follows David Palumbo-Liu and others in pointing out the dangers of the “model minority myth,” in this case the stereotypical “Asian traits” of respect for authority, cultural assimilation, and advocating education as a means to achieving the “American dream.” The stereotypical young South Asian American presumably is apolitical, white-identified, and non-agitating. Obviously, this conception denies the heterogeneity of desi experience, and these artists have rebelled against the expectations placed upon them and from which they were supposed to negotiate an identity.

Often lacking an ethnic network, many of these young people found a surrogate in African American communities and their artistic expression. Applying a rap technique known as sampling, the artists draw on the cultural currency of hip-hop to construct new, self-chosen identities. “Desiness,” here, signifies political activism, racial consciousness, and a diasporic sense of identity that appropriates the aesthetics and rebelliousness of African American hip-hop. In contrast to cultural expectation, desi emcees openly articulate their experiences with racism, exclusion, and their unique experience of otherness. While those in Sharma’s study typically are surprised to find themselves racially marked in school, the process of claiming a racial identity is deliberate: “as people of color undergoing discrimination, they identify with Blacks and form lifelong relationships with Black people.”

The introduction Sharma provides to these artists and groups offers a sophisticated glimpse at the complex processes involved in the formation of ethnic identities within a hip-hop framework. Unfortunately, for the initiate, examples of the music and performance are relatively difficult to locate online. Two of the featured groups, Himalayan Project and Karmacy, have several appealing and illustrative songs available on YouTube and MySpace. Perhaps the most intriguing artist, D’Lo, has posted three videos on his/her Facebook page, all of which illustrate the artist’s inclusion of the politics and semiotics of gender as a part of performance, and the theme of homophobia connected to racism in his/her music.

Sharma’s broader project, which she refers to as comparative racial studies, offers new insight into the nature of inter-ethnic sampling and influences. She warns that the “increasing gaps and conflicts among communities of color in the United States,” as well as the persistence of racism and inequality, make it urgent that we listen to voices such as those of the hip-hop desis.

Written by: Rick Taylor, January 25th 2011

Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century?: The Relevance of the Ancient Jewish Text to Our World

mandy — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Paul Socken

Lexington Books

Lending a somewhat contrarian voice to this collection of essays extolling the virtues of Talmud study, the rabbi Dr. Pinchas Hayman takes umbrage at the question Paul Socken poses in the book’s title: “Why should the indescribable depth, beauty, and challenge of authentic Jewish literature require apologetic essays?” He concludes with his own “more relevant” and “far more difficult” question: “Who needs the twenty-first century if one learns Talmud?”

For Hayman, and several of the contributors to Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century?, the life-long process of learning Talmud provides a safe haven against the threats and anxieties of contemporary life. Talmud study is, as Shaye J.D. Cohen puts it, “what a (male) Jew does.” For Cohen and others, the Talmud is a “feast for the mind,” a “brain teaser” that not only affords intellectual sustenance but also, in the process, constructs one’s Jewish identity. Another contributor, Michael Chernick, echoes Hayman in lamenting a “world focused on ‘now,’” one in which many Jewish people have found Talmud study “old-fashioned” and no longer relevant.

The first (and I believe most compelling) section of the book, though, is written by women who have taught and studied Talmud. As Chernick acknowledges, “patriarchal societies do not tend to preserve women’s thoughts and concerns more than they must,” and he acknowledges that while the view of Talmud as uniformly misogynistic is misguided, much of Talmudic law is problematic for women, to say the least. How do women devote themselves to the study of texts whose rules for women would seem to reverse what many who do live in the twenty-first century would deem desperately needed progress in the areas of women’s rights?

In responding to this question, Devorah Zlochower admits that Talmud study is “a mixed blessing as I find myself engaged in an impossible dance between delight in the tradition and its foundational texts and discomfort with its limitations and exclusions. It is essential for me to understand the texts of our tradition but I cannot do this without wrestling with the tradition simultaneously.” Her description of this uneasy dialog with the past is exciting and unsettling, and it is clearly informed by her twenty-first century feminism. In reading texts on marriage and divorce, and their asymmetric treatment of women, she refuses to ignore the “woman who is chained to a dead marriage by a husband unwilling to grant her a divorce.”

The most universally accessible part of this paean to these foundational texts of Judaism is the joyful and life-affirming process of study, the hard-won, patience-testing, identity-altering commitment to studying the Talmud, page by page, often in study groups and with a partner. The process teaches a tolerance for ambiguity, exercises the intellectual faculties in a way that is transformative, and places participants in a tradition that is thousands of years old. Devora Steinmetz compares the practice of regular study to prayer in a way that all those who interpret texts should be able to appreciate: “But study is different from prayer—or at least from the ways in which most of us experience prayer—in that in study I must open myself to the voice of the other.”

The book is intended primarily for Jewish readers. As Jane Kanarek puts it, “the Talmud gives me a place to be a Jew,” and the collection is a reminder of the “daily Sinai” of Talmudic study, a discipline that leads to revelation and, often, challenge to authority and received opinion. In their polyvocality and contradictoriness, these texts teach the kind of subtlety of interpretation, appreciation for challenge, and an awareness of the “minds of the past” that forged Jewish law and tradition. For non-Jewish readers, the sense of awe and discovery the writers describe as they relate their own experiences with Talmud study, even with brief examples of the kind of exegesis involved, must be taken largely on faith.

The reward for taking up this practice, according to several of the contributors, is a kind of direct access to the divine. While this sort of intense grappling with ancient and very difficult texts is not for the faint of heart, the rewards these writers describe are appealing to all who have felt the allure of textual criticism. Chernick writes, “There is a contemporary sense (malady?) that if a text is very old it must be irrelevant.” An even worse tendency is to view old texts—whether ancient sacred writing, Shakespeare, or the U. S. Constitution, for example—as inviolable, immune to multiple interpretation, subject only to some imagined “literal” meaning. This disciplinary model described here is one that promises to invigorate the study of virtually any challenging text.

As is often the case with such collections, the essays do not speak to each other very successfully, and the order of presentation seems somewhat haphazard. The pieces reflect many of the conflicts that have arisen between Reform and Orthodox Judaism, as well as the broader intellectual divisions of our time. But the book succeeds in making its invitation, and this ancient but vibrant dialectical tradition will surely endure.

Written by: Rick Taylor, January 24th 2011

No Silent Witness: The Eliot Parsonage Women and their Unitarian World

mandy — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Cynthia Grant Tucker

Oxford University Press

Group biography is notoriously difficult, for all the reasons that biography itself is hazardous, compounded by the number of people brought to center stage, and, in this case, the geographical and temporal sweep of the subject matter. To make a single life a coherent narrative with episodes that build systematically and climax, with a psychologically complex yet recognizably unified character, and with a sense of thematic consistency is to fashion something that life is not.

For projects such as Tucker’s to succeed, the author must create at least the illusion of a shared experience among a group of women traversing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the American landscape from Boston to St. Louis to Portland. They are connected genealogically—Abigail Adams Cranch (1817-1908) and William Greenleaf Eliot (1811-1887) and their descendants—and they are bound by their often contentious, often radical, and often underestimated participation in the history of Unitarianism in the United States.

In portraying the “full-throated wives and daughters” of the men who were most prominent in the Unitarian Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the author offers some sharply focused details about the challenges women faced and the different types and degrees of oppression they suffered as they struggled to be heard as members of their religious communities. As almost all nineteenth century memoirs and documentary accounts reveal, women’s lives were inevitably consumed by disease, the death of children, and the constraints placed upon them by marriage. That some of these women could become religious leaders, advocate for women’s suffrage, and defy even the expectations of their own congregations is a remarkable testament to their courage and resilience.

No Silent Witness is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the development of American liberal theology in its opposition to Calvinist Protestantism. But the author’s resistance to chronology and the multiplicity of characters that appear in this panorama mitigate against the reader’s strong desire to spend time with some of these women, to get to know them as they negotiated roles for themselves as ministers’ wives, and even, in a couple of instances, as preachers themselves.

One of the troubling through-lines in the narrative is Unitarian resistance to women’s influence in the church. Instead of celebrating the remarkable creativity and energy of the women who were such a central part of the early success of the Unitarian movement, leaders of the movement self-consciously sought to “masculinize” it by purging women preachers, downplaying women’s contributions, and appropriating rhetoric from the cult of masculinity that has loomed so large in the American lexicon. The result of this strategy was a near-catastrophic decimation in the church’s numbers by the turn of the century, with a large number of women permanently alienated and finding new homes in other emerging religious traditions or in a more liberalized “mainstream” Protestantism.

In the twenty-first century Unitarian Universalism (the name reflecting the merger in 1961 of two liberal theological traditions) is a relatively small liberal religious organization proud of its historical commitment to social justice and its rejection of doctrinal dogmatism. It is now, as in its formative days, a spiritual home for powerful and unorthodox women committed to social justice and to breaking taboos against women’s religious leadership. No Silent Witness is a helpful corrective to the tendency to romanticize Unitarian history and to offer hagiographic accounts of the early Unitarian leadership. Although this book is ostensibly about the contributions women made, it is also about the resistance they faced from their preacher-husbands and fathers and from their own congregations. Not surprisingly, the narrative is replete with the sort of fractious theological and denominational disputes, rivalries, and even scandals that seem inevitably a part of human experience and which we erase from our historical memories at our peril.

One editorial correction must be made for any subsequent printing of this book: the author writes about ministers’ wives complaining about being “gypped by their husbands’ low pay.” This is a stunning racist slur in an otherwise thoughtful and erudite book.

Written by: Rick Taylor, October 23rd 2010

Militant Women of a Fragile Nation

mandy — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Malek Abisaab

Syracuse University Press

This account of women’s central role in the industrial history of Lebanon adds another valuable title to Syracuse’s outstanding series of books on Middle Eastern history and culture, “Beyond Dominant Paradigms.” In stark contrast to images of women as helpless victims that pervade much of the depiction of the region consumed by the Western press, Malek Abisaab’s Militant Women of a Fragile Nation shows women’s transforming role in colonial and postcolonial industrialization, in the labor struggles and resistance to colonial rule, in the work of trade unions and the Arab Feminist Union, and in the modern Lebanese economy.

From the “silk economy” at the center of industrialization in the nineteenth century through the rise and dominance of the tobacco industry, women have largely negotiated and renegotiated their own position in industry. The author rejects the subaltern view of these women and their identity within the social and economic history of Lebanon: through active participation and protest, women have resisted exclusion from power and have contributed to a culture of changing alliances and class and gendered identities that are constantly in play. Through various power structures and economic models, women demonstrated, in Abisaab’s view, that “patriarchy cannot endure for long or unchangingly,” and that the women he studies are not “passive victims of capitalism” but strategically engaged in a resistance that has played a major role in shaping the modern economy.

Militant Women of a Fragile Nation begins with an account of the region known as Mount Lebanon in the later nineteenth century, and women’s involvement in silk production. As women moved into the workplace, they struggled against patriarchal control of their sexuality and an exploitative wage system that paid them half as much as men—whose work was gendered as “skilled” labor. As the silk economy declined, women dominated the “unskilled” part of the workforce in tobacco—and again earned subsistence wages while exposed to toxic chemicals in the factories.

During the period of French colonial rule of Syria-Lebanon, the French imposed the Régie, a monopolistic cartel governing tobacco production. It was during this time that women had a definable target for social action and struggled for improved conditions and resistance to colonial control. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Syrian-Lebanese “New Woman” emerged as a cultural phenomenon, and by the 1930s the Arab Feminist Union was organized to campaign against the Régie.

While there are differences in attitudes among women of different classes, the data the author accumulates shows a consistently remarkable level of women’s participation in the work force over the past 130 years. While women of the elite classes actively resisted colonial dominance, they tended to denigrate women’s participation in paid labor. “Factory women,” on the other hand, identified profoundly with their gender roles in the work place, and the factory became a site for active participation and reconsideration of their roles and identities. For both groups, women’s radicalism has had a shaping role in the economic history of the region.

Written by: Rick Taylor, September 8th 2010

Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music

mandy — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

By Eileen M. Hayes

University of Illinois Press

In her critical study of later twentieth century women’s music festivals, Eileen Hayes sets the tone and identifies her intended audience in a trenchant dedication, which really serves as an effective epigraph for her book:

_Some say feminism is dead. Others say black feminism stopped by but left in a hurry. A few claim that “women’s music” is dull; “Besides,” they say, “Bessie Smith is so last century.” Others don’t know any lesbians and would rather watch them on TV. It was chic to be lesbian—last year. They say you can’t be black, lesbian, and musical at the same time. Maybe you can be black, lesbian, and love music—but if so, you probably can’t dance, and if you can, you don’t care about social change.

Lots of folks say all these things. This book is not dedicated to them._

Songs in Black and Lavender is a book for those wanting a firsthand account of one of the most famous of these festivals, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (August 1995), which the author attended and for which she provides the “Diary of a Mad Black Woman Festigoer.” It is a book for those wanting to discover the music of Mary Watkins, the group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and the “Dreamgirls” who provided part of the raison d'être for the festivals. It is also for those studying the history of American feminism—and the women who lyricized the experience of radical separatist feminism in the later part of the twentieth century, and the complicated intersection of gender, race, class, and culture.

There is little treatment here of the well-known festival Lilith Fair, which has an inclusive admissions policy, but has been criticized for its lack of diversity. The festivals written about were deliberately exclusive, a feature that allowed for relatively sharp delineation of gendered and racial identity in the study. Famously, the Michigan Festival did not allow men and welcomed “women-born women of all ages and ethnicities”—the latter restriction a source of considerable protest. One of the products of this policy was an encouragement to freedom of expression and action and, as the author puts it, a “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” attitude. While the author celebrates this liberating experience, she maintains distance—as an ethnographic researcher and interviewer, as a woman of color at festivals attended mostly by white women—and later as a straight woman at festivals designedly for lesbians.

Most of the musicians featured in Songs in Black and Lavender are not well known, and many musicians, such as Nedra Johnson and Pamela Means, are represented online only by a couple of amateur video clips. Festival enthusiasts lament that early participants such as Melissa Etheridge, Michelle Shocked, and Tracy Chapman, who achieved mainstream stardom, “did not credit the community that gave them their start.” Another barrier to more widespread recognition of the artists associated with womyn’s music and the festival scene is an aesthetic that rejected the hype and glitz associated with popular music. As a result, the music—as well as the cultural experience of these festivals generally—has remained mostly outside of the public gaze.

Poignantly, the author describes how a flag that combined triangles of black and lavender resonated with some lesbian women of color more than the rainbow flag, a widely adopted symbol of the gay and lesbian nation. One of the author’s interviewees asked, “How come there is no black in the rainbow flag?” In terms of the unity of feminist activism, the old questions about class and racial awareness remain, and the Sweet Honey in the Rock song “Are We a Nation?” still has no clear answer.

Hayes makes a noteworthy semantic decision in the book by largely avoiding the term queer, which as she admits would have suggested commonality with the scholars and activists engaged in queer theory. She writes that the majority of women she interviewed for her study preferred the term lesbian and did not see the terms as interchangeable.

Songs in Black and Lavender asks powerful and often painful questions about the meaning of diversity, multiculturalism, and identity. The author chronicles a radically destabilized historical moment through the lens of these music festivals, one that is ignored in mainstream music history and is unreported in the “narratives of rich white feminists,” as the author puts it. Hayes’ study is provocative, but always respectful of its subject. She is positioned largely as an outsider at these exclusive events, giving her readers not a voyeuristic backstage pass but rather a kind of access to the power and meanings of these festivals that loomed large in the lives of the participants.

Written by: Rick Taylor, September 7th 2010

The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker: The Life Cycle of an Eighteenth-Century Woman (Abridged Version)

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:01:00 +0000

Edited by Elaine Forman Crane

University of Pennsylvania Press

The preface to this newly issued, abridged version of Elizabeth Drinker's diary, published originally in three volumes in 1991, reveals the sort of personal relationship the editor has formed with her subject over the past decades, an intimacy that forms often in historical scholarship, especially in single-author studies and even more so when the genre of focus is so inherently intimate, as the diary form certainly is. In this case, the diary is a record of fifty years in the life of an eighteenth-century Quaker Philadelphian.

The abridgement focuses on four phases of Drinker’s life: her youth and courtship (1758-61), which coincides with the Seven Years’ War (often referred to as the French and Indian War); her experience as a young wife and mother in the years leading up to the Revolution; her years of “crisis,” as Crane describes them, from 1776-93; and her final years as “Grandmother and Grand Mother” leading to her death in 1807.

Unlike narrative history or biography, the diary offers the reader a limited and often cryptic view of this woman’s experience. Few of the entries are longer than a typical Facebook update, and in many respects, they are of a similar quality: a quick memorandum selecting the day’s highlight (or, just as often, lowlight). Yet there is an enormous amount to be gleaned from the diary about the gender roles that dictated much of a woman’s experience, as defined also by class and profession of faith.

Seen as a kind of pointillism rather than as a realist painting, the work provides extraordinary access to life in the Philadelphia area, especially during the Revolution: to the experience of being Quaker during a time of war and social upheaval, of being a slave-owner who all too belatedly experiences a crisis of conscience (after she had already irretrievably sold the person whom she “possessed” via inheritance), to the grim facts of life and mortality in eighteenth-century motherhood, and to the tedium and suffering that provided the texture of most of her days.

The fact that this is the third form in which the diary has been published (a longer condensed version was published in 1994) provides evidence of its usefulness to historians, citing the diary in a wide variety of contexts. For example, it is an essential tool for those working on the history of American religion. The phrase “went to meeting” is probably the most often repeated in the diary, and readers get a sense of how prominent a role her participation in the Society of Friends played in her life. Concurrently, readers get a shocking sense of the thuggishness of the colonial revolutionaries, who exiled her husband for his refusal to enlist and support the war and who perpetrated all manner of cruelties on Drinker, her family, her neighbors, and her fellow Quakers. The conduct of the British occupiers was not much better. The City of Brotherly Love—Quaker City—treated members of the Society of Friends as if they were all treasonous, and many lost life, liberty, and property as a result.

Those interested in medical history will also find this work a treasure trove, albeit a gruesome one. There are accounts of yellow fever, of the mysterious illnesses that struck down child after child, of blood-letting and experiments with inoculation, and of Drinker’s persistent ill health that, because she was financially secure, gave her access to the “best” health care available, a decidedly dubious benefit.

One narrative thread resonates with a particularly visceral force: her record of dental problems. Toothache is a lifelong preoccupation, and each extraction or loss is recorded, as well as accounts of medical remediation. For example, we learn about attempts to “restore” extracted teeth to their original position in hopes that they will re-root themselves! The theme extends to her children—cutting the first tooth somehow symbolizes a child’s survival—and it’s a source of particular grief when one of her sons dies almost immediately after cutting his first tooth. At this level of human experience, along with all the meetings, all the teas with friends, all the gut-wrenchingly terse accounts of illness and death, the diary takes us deeply into a woman’s life and fleshes out a period too often obscured in patriotic and patriarchal myth-making.

Written by: Rick Taylor, July 5th 2010

Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Connie A. Shemo

Duke University Press

A great deal of important criticism has emerged recently in the area of women’s contributions to the history of evangelical Christianity, and this collection brings together some of the scholars largely responsible for this upsurge in interest. Among them is Jane Hunter (The Gospel of Gentility), as well as critics studying the records of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women working for missionary organizations and religious groups as they imposed and also perhaps transformed American imperialism. The somewhat sunny description of this project, an examination of “the work of American women missionaries in American cultural expansion,” might strike students of post-colonial theory—or even readers of fiction like Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—as strangely euphemistic.

It’s hard to read these accounts of women who traveled throughout the world and affected and were affected by the various cultures with which they engaged without remembering the outcome—that is, the devastating consequences of colonialism and the horrific exposure of the arrogant and naïve assumptions that underlay these “missionary” efforts. One of the mainstays of the archival holdings of my own institution is an enormous collection of missionary papers: letters, diaries, and other records kept by the legions of Christian women from the American southeast, sent on global missions to “convert the savages.” On the one hand, it’s extraordinary to follow these women, who had been bound by the conventions of domesticity, at once to view the world through their own apparently inflexible filters—and yet also be themselves changed by the experience.

The argument of Competing Kingdoms takes this observation one step further: women’s involvement in missionary work transformed the nature of American colonialism itself. Kingsolver’s missionaries are victimized by their cultural arrogance and ignorance, but they are ultimately transformed by this exercise in “cultural expansion.” And so readers here are asked to view the global efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), or of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), for example, as complex in their motivations and results. Amy Kaplan’s brilliant phrase “Manifest Domesticity” captures both the connection of these movements to aggressive American expansionism and also to the “sentimentalized domesticity” inherent in much of women’s religious practice which, by virtue of exposure to international travel and cultural difference, was itself altered. Hunter notes that the mission was to convert the “savage to homebody,” and of course the conversion experience operated on those doing the converting, as well.

Ian Terrell’s essay on the WCTU and Hunter’s treatment of the YWCA both suggest the possibility of further scholarship on the complex role organizations like these played in the lives of women and in the cultures they affected. The essays generally represent careful archival scholarship, admirable in scope, covering singular figures and particular cultural instances—in the Philippines, Congo, Egypt, India, Ottoman Empire, Rhodesia, China, Japan—although none representing Central or South America.

In studying African American missionaries in Congo, Sylvia Jacobs concludes that “mission ideology always assumed a negativism about the society in which missionaries worked” and that missionaries “could respect African culture, society, and religion but still want to change them.” The most compelling part of this story is the transformations that occurred within those who sought to transform others. Whether or not these women collectively mitigated the effects of American colonialism remains an open question.

Written by: Rick Taylor, July 2nd 2010

Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Catherine Adams, Elizabeth H. Pleck

Oxford University Press

That the past is never past is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates over efforts to celebrate “Confederate History Month.” Happily, critics responded to the omission of slavery and the suffering it wrought from the latest official commemorations, still and perhaps forevermore marinated in the intoxicating rhetorical liquor of the “Lost Cause.” And so the sobering scholarship of archival scholars such as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal records, family papers, genealogical studies, and often on the recorded words of enslaved people themselves is an urgently needed remedy.

Love of Freedom is grounded in two observations: that slavery was certainly not exclusively southern—that New England, too, had a terrible legacy of enslaving African people, although the circumstances of slavery in this region were distinctive in many respects. The second starting point is that while the people kidnapped and enslaved in New England were disproportionately male, African women’s experience of slavery and of the complicated legacies of African and colonial American patriarchy were similarly distinctive and should be studied independently.

Foremost, Love of Freedom is a thick description of the legal and social status of slavery in the northeastern American colonies and, as such, will serve as an important resource for anyone doing research in the field. The authors point out that the first kidnapped African people were taken to Boston only six years after its founding. Only five years later, in 1641, the Massachussetts Bay colony had the dubious distinction of becoming the first British colony to codify slavery legally. By 1700, the authors estimate a black population of one thousand, half living in Massachusetts. Fortunately for historians, the legal status of enslaved people, particularly women, seems to have been a source of continual legal challenge. The result is that we have a surprisingly rich record of direct testimony from enslaved women.

Directly from the voices of women such as Hagar Blackmore we get an account of being kidnapped away from her family in Angola, transported to Barbardos, and sold to a wealthy merchant in Cambridge. From this woman we learn of the vulnerability of enslaved women to rape, and we get some sense of what it meant to be a survivor. The authors point out that the principle of coverture, a convention of English common law in which women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands, further guaranteed the absence of any sort of reasonable legal protection for enslaved women—or even for free married black women.

As a part of laying to rest the myth of slavery in the north as a benign institution, the book illustrates one manifestation of the idea of coverture. A wife’s killing her husband was, because of established notions of hierarchy, worse than ordinary murder and was, in fact, given a special designation: “petit treason,” for which burning to death was the punishment. Killing a husband—or a master, in the case of enslaved people, was almost—if not quite—on the scale of regicide and was punished accordingly. The book lays out the grim details of human suffering: the archaeological evidence showing widespread malnutrition among black children in the region; the spinal deformations evident among women forced to do laundry, ironing, and household heavy lifting; the forced breeding.

Among the most important archival sources is the record of “freedom suits,” women “seeking possession of their liberty” through manumission or some sort of legal process. Through the testimony extant in these cases, the reader gets a powerful sense of exactly what freedom meant to these women—and what slavery meant. As the authors conclude from these records, “Being stolen from kin and homeland was the central wrong African men and women cited time and again.” And to rectify this crime entailed the re-possession of the self by its rightful owner.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 28th 2010

Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Jane Satterfield

Demeter Press

The poet and essayist Jane Satterfield writes a hauntingly discontinuous prose-poem about a sort of exile. To those of us with dual citizenship—or, perhaps, to those for whom home is two places, neither tidily reconcilable with the other—Daughters of Empire speaks poignantly to the longing for connection between past and present, mother and daughter, literary inspiration, and career frustration.

The author here teases us with the possibility of a conventional narrative of exile: what will happen when a woman who spent most of her formative years in the United States becomes pregnant and has a child while being cast aside by a prospective employer and emotionally abandoned by a narcissistic and controlling husband? Will she find in this land of her birth and ancestry an escape from the soul-deadening labor of fixed-term teaching in American institutions, and instead find joy in teaching Larkin and Plath and Heaney and Hughes to students who understand and appreciate the value of being taught by a working poet? Will she find in the geography of her own imagination the spiritual bond to the Brontë sisters that she seeks?

Our relationship to place is similarly discontinuous, and home, whatever that means, is an ongoing negotiation. Satterfield’s narrator is unstuck in time, just as she is unstuck geographically, so we get poetically rich spots of memory: “I stand on Charlotte Brontë’s front steps, thinking I’m going to be sick,” she tells us on the first page—either a vertiginous reaction to this confrontation with her nineteenth-century literary forbearer, or perhaps a bit of first-trimester nausea. And then suddenly it’s several years earlier, and she’s a different sort of exile, not quite fitting in to this group of students or that literary community brought together in American college towns. And then she’s a punk, a Johnny Rotten, but with much more ambivalent feelings towards Queen and country.

And then she’s in Corby, a “piss hole in the dead heart of England” where she was born, traveling with her mother through a reconstruction of her own ancestry and her mother’s shared dual sense of place. But then, heartbreakingly, she’s starving emotionally and perhaps physically as a mother estranged from her husband, whose Fulbright Exchange, in the mid-1990s, was in part responsible for this year in England which serves as a potent but unstable center of this narrative.

Because of the evocative power of her memory and the clarity of her language, she draws the reader willingly into this vortex. And yet, she resists closure. Does she find career fulfillment? Can she bridge the imaginative/historical gaps and construct a satisfactory home? Can she free herself from this dreadful relationship? The memoir asks instead that we participate in her desires, in her lyrical remembrance, in her evocative moments that shuttle back and forth through time, woven together by her search for identity, for her discovery of home.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 27th 2010

Cleopatra: A Biography

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Duane W. Roller

Oxford University Press

Cleopatra is a cipher, an enigmatic and historically remote figure reimagined until she has become, for much of the world and for much of modern history, the apotheosis of desire, representative of the potency of feminine allure. As with the search for the historical Jesus, separating the real figure from the myth is complicated not only by our fascination with all the artistic interventions and the millennia of (mis)representation but also by the paucity of hard evidence. The slender record that remains is complicated by the bias of her contemporary observers (mostly suspicious and resentful Romans) and the tangle of political agendas that surrounded her reign.

Distinguishing reality from the myth is Duane Roller’s project in his new biography of Cleopatra. He marshals the modest amount of fairly reliable biographical information, supplemented by a helpful sketch of the political and social world of Ptolemaic Egypt in the first century BCE. But was Cleopatra, well, Cleopatra?

Sources disagree about her physical attractiveness, although it seems likely that she was relatively short. The book offers an array of physical images from statuary and contemporary coinage, but there is little commonality among the images, so her actual appearance remains mysterious. The record of her ascent to the throne and involvement in Roman politics would seem to confirm her reputation as ruthless and Machiavellian, although her supposed suicide by snakebite is almost certainly fictional, as Joyce Tyldesley, who covers much of the same ground in her new book Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, has convincingly demonstrated.

Readers hoping to find some account of the controversy over Cleopatra’s racial identity, that has been such an exciting and often public part of contemporary academic discussion, will be disappointed. Further, Roller’s diction seems dated (“the marriage produced no issue” and his use of B.C., for example). What would solidly justify this project is a “new” Cleopatra, one firmly rooted in newly discovered or reinterpreted documentary evidence and grounded in the historical context in which she moved. The same constraint that excludes the mythic elements from this study also seems to prevent a newly and sharply imagined Cleopatra from emerging here.

The closest the author comes to a revisionary portrait is in his account of Cleopatra’s public oratory, and particularly in her apparent authorship of treatises on stunningly banal subjects such as treating dandruff or curing baldness. In 'The Cosmetics,' a collection of writing attributed to her, we see a leader not exclusively concerned with war and geopolitics, but also with the everyday welfare of her people.

Roller’s approach can tell us the types of boats that sailed on the Kydnos River and the apparel Egyptian queens would have worn. But it misses the spiritual force of that figure still resplendent and still threatening two millennia later.

Written by: Rick Taylor, March 4th 2010

Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Alison Piepmeier

New York University Press

In Girl Zines, Alison Piepmeier elegantly chronicles the emergence in the early 1990s of zines: a complex, multifaceted phenomenon aligned with third wave feminism, and a powerful and unruly articulation of the same cultural moment that produced riot grrrls. It may also have been the last gasp of the manuscript culture—since, some would say, eclipsed by the blogosphere and electronic media—as a pervasive form of underground radical expression. This study skillfully employs post-structuralist feminist theory, along with the implicit collaboration of the author’s students—generations of whom have been rediscovering the excitement and raw force of these documents, adding their own interpretive spin, and reproducing the zine in their own cultural moments.

She traces the rough avant-garde artistry of Tobi Vail in her work on Jigsaw through well-established magazines like Bitch and the literally thousands of feminist blogs that have established themselves in cyberspace. She traces the origins of such zines as Sarah Dyer’s Action Girl Newsletter back through the mimeographed feminist manifestos of the mid-twentieth-century, and even back through women’s scrapbooks made in the nineteenth century and preserved as a deceptively rich collage of women’s interactions with their cultural milieu.

Girl Zines conveys the brazenness of the zines, their “rhetorical excess and flamboyance” still outrageous and shockingly liberating. A wonderful example, “The Splendiferous Oath of Riot Grrrls Outer Space,” illustrates the tone: “I riotously swear to rage in glorious anger against everything that even slightly pisses me off. I swear to be loud, vulgar, obnoxious, illogical, and emotional whenever I damn please. As an Outer Space Riot Grrrl I will dream of impossible utopias, make up wild political theories, laugh at people who oppose me, and as much as I can, be full of supreme confidence and hellacious egotism.” The loud ripping sounds you hear are conventional gender expectations and forms of institutional oppression being torn to shreds.

Significantly, Piepmeier emphasizes the importance of the materiality of these artistic/political forms. Their textuality—the rebelliously crude printing and the hand-drawn visuals—conveys meaning. They are ephemeral—they share that feature with almost all newspapers and magazines from the time of their invention—but they are nonetheless tangible artifacts capable of being preserved, handed down, revisited, and revitalized. This materiality differentiates them from the creative work being done in the blogosphere, and it is a feature that still appeals to students newly introduced to them as physical representations of a spirit linking generations of women.

One wonders what these radical artists would make of finding themselves within the fairly conventional confines of a scholarly/academic history. And yet, clearly, they have generously supplied both material and narrative to the author, as she inscribes a thoroughly researched, tightly written, and highly respectful account of this phenomenon that needs to be a living part of a developing feminist legacy.

Written by: Rick Taylor, February 28th 2010

The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

By Terry Rowden

University of Michigan Press

Terry Rowden’s book is that rarest of gems, a work of critical theory that should appeal to a broad audience and that contributes simultaneously, in an original and exciting way, to the fields of Disability Studies, Ethnomusicology, and African American Studies. While more casual music fans might be tempted to turn immediately to chapters on Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, the initial chapters on the cultural politics of blindness and race in the nineteenth century represent a seldom viewed perspective on the nexus of racial and physical difference—and they are no less accessible nor original in their insights than the later chapters on more recognizable figures.

Rowden focuses first on the figure of “Blind Tom Bethune” as a product of nineteenth-century American preoccupation with “freakish attraction.” Bethune was marketed—enslaved, essentially, even after Emancipation, by his managers as a kind of idiot savant, but his popularity and reappropriation by African American folk musicians and poets in the late nineteenth century helped to transform him from a freakish sentimental figure to a more affirmative expression of African American creativity.

The book then traces a lineage of blind blues musicians: those for whom race, age, obscurity, and blindness become part of a musical aesthetic. A chapter on “The Souls of Blind Folk” shows a tradition in gospel and spiritual music that, unlike much of the composition by African American musicians, openly acknowledges the artists’ blindness, which becomes emblematic of the musician’s spiritual condition.

Rowden’s work on Charles and Wonder climax his study. He examines the “Rhetoric of Genius” surrounding Charles and some of his contemporaries, the prodigiously “gifted” artist who is legitimated for mainstream American audiences first by virtue of his physical attractiveness and second by his invention of the sunglasses as an iconic representation of the sightless performer. Wonder is presented as a musician who seemed to achieve “transcendence” over his blindness. He helped dispel the folkloric notion that blindness “was somehow a punishment for some kind of original sin.” His precocious rise to fame Rowden attributes first to excellent musical education and second to his being “cute”—both “little” and “a wonder”—and so unthreatening to the public. By sharp contrast to his forebears, Wonder grew up with what Rowden memorably calls “the cyborgean prosthestics of privilege”—an unprecedented access to technology and financial and personal support. Nonetheless, his career was eclipsed by the advent of MTV and BET and the “image-oriented” musical world of the 1980s and beyond.

The Songs of Blind Folk is both sensitive and provocative, a work of historical scholarship and applied critical theory, an accessible and original addition to ongoing discourses in a variety of disciplines.

Written by: Rick Taylor, December 13th 2009

Feminist Spirituality: The Next Generation

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

Edited by Chris Klassen

Lexington Books

Feminist Spirituality: The Next Generation uses the publication of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards in 2000 as its point of departure. The co-authors embodied a third wave of feminist activism, but according to Chris Klassen, that they neglected new forms of feminist spirituality provides a rhetorical opening for a book such as this one that tries to capture a generational shift in feminist spiritual practice. The narrative the editor supplies, however, is a narrowly construed one. Mary Daly, as second wave icon, rejects traditional Christian theology, and Cynthia Eller’s work in the early 1990s helps to crystallize a movement in “contemporary Paganism and Feminist Goddess Worship” that grew out of North American spiritual experimentation in the 1960s and early 1970s.

As Baumgardner and Richards began teaching forms of activism and encouraging and re-energizing feminists of all ages, a contrapuntal phenomenon—a feminist impulse that turns inward rather than outward—exploded in our consciousness, especially because of the development of sites of worship on the web. At a conference at which these co-authors spoke, I asked whether feminism might not ultimately become a discrete religious practice—a query dismissed by those for whom feminism is essentially a political practice and also rejected by those for whom feminism is a force for change within an established religious tradition.

One of the remarkable features of this blog is the chronicling of both strands, interwoven and yet separate, in feminist thought. The growth in scholarship connected to feminist spiritual practice has been particularly remarkable, notably Danya Ruttenberg’s brilliant collection The Passionate Torah about feminism and its challenges to Judaism, Rosemary Ruether’s comprehensive study Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, and a host of books representing women’s spiritual struggles both within and without established religious traditions.

In that context, Feminist Spirituality disappoints in its reductiveness. It identifies Paganism and Goddess Worship as centrally defining “third wave” feminist spirituality. Sarah Marie Gallant contributes the first essay, essentially a review of the writings of Carol P. Christ and Starhawk. Catherine Telford-Keogh uses the tools of queer theory to help reclaim witchcraft as a part of her spiritual practice. Anna Mercedes and Jennifer Thweatt-Bates reflect on the influence of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) as a harbinger of third wave spiritual practice. Gene Meldazy and Kate McCarthy reflect on the emergence of popular culture as a part of spiritual practice.

The essays, by and large, are predictable within the framework Klassen provides and offer neither the original insight nor the comprehensiveness to represent an important contribution to an amazingly fruitful discourse.

Written by: Rick Taylor, December 11th 2009