ACLS Fellows' Publications

London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race

by Kennetta Hammond Perry F'12. Now available from Oxford University Press.

This book:

• Rethinks traditional historical accounts about the significance of the Windrush generation that focus on the perspective of policy-makers.
• Departs from previous scholarship by centering black Britons as political actors as they made claims to citizenship and challenged the state to guarantee their rights.
• Situates race politics in twentieth century Britain within the context of empire and transnational race politics.

Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture

by Phillip Brian Harper F'06. Now available from New York University Press.

In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character.  Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation.

Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aestheticsdisplaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation.

When Christians First met Muslims

by Michael Penn, Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars Fellows.
Now available from University of California Press.

The first Christians to meet Muslims were not Latin-speaking Christians from the western Mediterranean or Greek-speaking Christians from Constantinople but rather Christians from northern Mesopotamia who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Living under Muslim rule from the seventh century to the present, Syriac Christians wrote the first and most extensive accounts of Islam, describing a complicated set of religious and cultural exchanges not reducible to the solely antagonistic.

Through its critical introductions and new translations of this invaluable historical material, When Christians First Met Muslims allows scholars, students, and the general public to explore the earliest interactions between what eventually became the world’s two largest religions, shedding new light on Islamic history and Christian-Muslim relations.

Grants for Conferences/Workshops in China Studies

The symposium “Ideas of Asia in the Museum” took place on January 23-24, 2015 at the Doheny Memorial Library at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Brown Auditorium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Scholars of Asian art and Asian studies from around the world, as well as colleagues from local and national museums, held multi-disciplinary discussions on a wide array of topics related to Asian art collections worldwide. The event celebrated a new partnership between a university, USC, and the Pacific Asia Museum.

“The symposium offered a uniquely Pan-Asian context within which to understand the representations of China in museums across the globe,” reported Sonya Lee, the organizer of the conference.

The event was funded by a grant from the initiative on Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society, which is supported financially by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies. This program is part of the ACLS Programs in China Studies.

For information on the current competition, please visit:
http://acls.org/programs/chinese-culture/.  Grants are available for planning meetings, workshops (for sharing work in progress in a seminar setting), and conferences for more formal presentation of research.

ACLS also offers Collaborative Reading-Workshop Grants in China Studies for intensive interdisciplinary reading of texts.

The deadline for applications is November 4, 2015.

The Physicist & Philosopher

by Jimena Canales, Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowships.
Now available from Princeton University Press.

On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson’s theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein’s theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today.

Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period—such as wristwatches, radio, and film—helped to shape people’s conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival’s legacy—Bergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion.

The Physicist and the Philosopher reveals how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.

Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres

by David C. Albertson F'13, Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowships
Now available from Oxford University Press.

This book uncovers the lost history of Christianity’s encounters with Pythagorean religious ideas before the Renaissance. The writings of Thierry of Chartres (d. 1157) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) represent a robust Christian Neopythagoreanism that reconceived the Trinity and the Incarnation within the framework of Greek number theory. Platonist theologies of the divine One and the decad had developed slowly between the Old Academy and Plotinus and were preserved in different ways in late antique Neoplatonism. By reading Boethius and Augustine in radically new ways, Thierry activated a suppressed potential in ancient Christian traditions that harmonized the divine Word with notions of divine Number. Although he was influential in his lifetime, his ideas remained outside the mainstream in subsequent centuries. When Nicholas of Cusa encountered fragments of Thierry’s works—and those of Thierry’s medieval readers—he drew on them liberally in his first major mystical treatise. Yet tensions within this dossier of Chartrian sources spurred Cusanus to find ways to reconcile their competing understandings of Word and Number. In this way over three decades, Nicholas demonstrated how to articulate Christian doctrines within a Neopythagorean cosmology, or mathematized nature. These two examples of mathematical theologies challenge contemporary assumptions about the relation of religion and modern science and about the nature of modernity itself.

Related Links:

• David Albertson receives a 2014 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award.
  

The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea

by Hyun Ok Park F’01, ACLS Fellowship Program.
Now available from Columbia University Press.

The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for the global order, but this book argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. As Hyun Ok Park demonstrates, rather than territorial integration and family union, the capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration of the Korean peninsula and the Korean diaspora as a new democratic moment.

Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research in South Korea and China, The Capitalist Unconscious shows how the hegemonic democratic politics of the post-Cold War era (reparation, peace, and human rights) have consigned the rights of migrant laborers–protagonists of transnational Korea–to identity politics, constitutionalism, and cosmopolitanism. Park reveals the riveting capitalist logic of these politics, which underpins legal and policy debates, social activism, and media spectacle.

While rethinking the historical trajectory of Cold War industrialism and its subsequent liberal path, this book also probes memories of such key events as the North Korean and Chinese revolutions, which are integral to migrants’ reckoning with capitalist allures and communal possibilities. Casting capitalist democracy within an innovative framework of historical repetition, Park elucidates the form and content of the capitalist unconscious at different historical moments and dissolves the modern opposition among socialism, democracy, and dictatorship. The Capitalist Unconscious astutely explores the neoliberal present’s past and introduces a compelling approach to the question of history and contemporaneity.

Rituals of Ethnicity Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India

by Sara Shneiderman F'08, Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships.
Now available from University of Pennsylvania Press.

Rituals of Ethnicity is a transnational study of the relationships between mobility, ethnicity, and ritual action. Through an ethnography of the Thangmi, a marginalized community who migrate between Himalayan border zones of Nepal, India and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, Shneiderman offers a new explanation for the persistence of enduring ethnic identities today despite the increasing realities of mobile, hybrid lives. She shows that ethnicization may be understood as a process of ritualization, which brings people together around the shared sacred object of identity.

The first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, Rituals of Ethnicity is framed by the Maoist-state civil conflict in Nepal and the movement for a separate state of Gorkhaland in India. The histories of individual nation-states in this geopolitical hotspot—as well as the cross-border flows of people and ideas between them—reveal the far-reaching and mutually entangled discourses of democracy, communism, development, and indigeneity that have transformed the region over the past half century. Attentive to the competing claims of diverse members of the Thangmi community, from shamans to political activists, Shneiderman shows how Thangmi ethnic identity is produced collaboratively by individuals through ritual actions embedded in local, national, and transnational contexts. She builds upon the specificity of Thangmi experiences to tell a larger story about the complexities of ethnic consciousness: the challenges of belonging and citizenship under conditions of mobility, the desire to both lay claim to and remain apart from the civil society of multiple states, and the paradox of self-identification as a group with cultural traditions in need of both preservation and development. Through deep engagement with a diverse, cross-border community that yearns to be understood as a distinctive, coherent whole, Rituals of Ethnicity presents an argument for the continued value of locally situated ethnography in a multi-sited world.

Related links:

• Photos of Professor Sarah Shneiderman’s book discussion at Social Science Baha in Nepal.
• Rebuilding Thangmi Communities after Nepal’s 2015 Earthquakes.
  
  

An Ecology of World Literature

by Alexander Beecroft F'11, Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowships. Now available from Verso Books.

What constitutes a nation’s literature? How do literatures of different countries interact with one another? In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Beecroft develops a new way of thinking about world literature. Drawing on a series of examples and case studies, the book ranges from ancient epic to the contemporary fiction of Roberto Bolaño and Amitav Ghosh.

Moving across literary ecologies of varying sizes, from small societies to the planet as a whole, the environments in which literary texts are produced and circulated, An Ecology of World Literature places in dialogue scholarly perspectives on ancient and modern, western and non-western texts, navigating literary study into new and uncharted territory.

See the latest cohort of Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellows here. Read more about this program  here.

Humanistic Confluence: Essays from the African Humanities Program

Modality and Explanatory Reasoning

by Boris Kment F'11. Now available from Oxford University Press.

Since the ground-breaking work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis and others in the 1960’s and 70’s, one dominant interest of analytic philosophers has been in modal truths, which concern the question what is possible and what is necessary. However, considerable controversy remains over the source and nature of necessity. In Modality and Explanatory Reasoning, Boris Kment takes a novel approach to the study of modality that places special emphasis on understanding the origin of modal notions in everyday thought.

Kment argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originated as useful ancillaries to a common type of thought experiment—counterfactual reasoning—that allows us to investigate explanatory connections. This cognitive routine is closely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science. Necessity is defined in terms of causation and other forms of explanation such as grounding, a relation that connects metaphysically fundamental facts to non-fundamental ones. Therefore, contrary to a widespread view, explanation is more fundamental than modality. The study of modal facts is important for philosophy, not because these facts are of much metaphysical interest in their own right, but because they provide evidence about explanatory relationships.

Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination

By Gaurav Desai F'07, Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars.
Now available by Columbia University Press.

Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a surprising, alternative history of Africa’s experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean’s fertile routes of exchange.

Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi’s southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attention to lives and literatures long neglected by traditional scholars, Desai introduces rich, interdisciplinary ways of thinking not only about this specific region but also about the very nature of ethnic history and identity. Traveling from the twelfth century to today, he concludes with a look at contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggle to decide how best to participate in the development and modernization of their postcolonial nations without sacrificing their political autonomy.

See the latest cohort of Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellows here. Read more about this program here.

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

by Johnson, Walter F ‘01, ACLS Fellowships.
Now available from Harvard University Press.

Soul by Soul

tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold,

Walter Johnson

transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.

Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution” in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.

See information about the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars here.

 This author is represented in the 

ACLS Humanities E-Book

collection.