Between Europe and America

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-285
Author(s):  
Arvind Rajagopal
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
University Of Berlin ◽  
Guggenheim Fellowship ◽  
The University ◽  
Intellectual Formation

Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American literature before it was thought to constitute a canon in the academy. Unlike many other scholars who shared his focus, he completed his education in postwar Germany. The title of his doctoral dissertation on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), completed at the Free University of Berlin in 1975, has a still-contemporary ring: “The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism.’” He taught at Columbia University, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and spent the bulk of his career in the United States. In this interview he discusses his intellectual formation and offers reflections on the development of his field, the evolving institutional culture of the university, and 1970s-era multiculturalism.

Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Egyptian Woman ◽  
University Of Massachusetts ◽  
The University ◽  
Modern Arabic

In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography,Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel,Siraaj: An Arab Tale,which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

Abdul R. JanMohamed

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Negative Dialectic ◽  
Archaeology Of Death ◽  
The University

Abdul R. JanMohamed (b. 1945) has made a seminal contribution to postcolonial and black studies since the early 1980s. JanMohamed was born and raised in Kenya and educated in Britain and the United States, receiving his PhD from Brandeis University. Since 1982 he has taught in the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and has also been Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University. He developed a body of Marxian-psychoanalytical criticism based on Marx, Foucault, Fanon, and Freud. Most of his important publications came out in the 1980s and 1990s, although he is continuing to write and diversify into other areas of postcolonial criticism like Subaltern and Dalit literature. In the 1980s JanMohamed started with analysis of the psychopolitical structures of colonial and African English novels written by Joyce Cary, Isak Dinesen, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Alex La Guma, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In the next phase of his writings, he critiqued the African American slave autobiography of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the novels of Richard Wright, which now constitute an ideological reference for all future criticism on the literature of colonized and marginalized peoples. His most important single-author publications include Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (1983) for which he was awarded the Choice book of the year award in 1984. The other crucial read is The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005) about which Rolland Murray insightfully commented in the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Murray 2006, cited under Book Reviews) that “Should African American studies continue in its pursuit of rendering the vagaries of death intellectually legible, the field should turn to this book as one of its signal events” (Exquisite Corpus, p. 302). JanMohamed considers racial lynching as the most fundamental mode of coercion. In his work on African American Literature, he develops a reflexive Marxian-phenomenological approach through which he deconstructs the feelings of marginalized protagonists who, faced with the threat of death by lynching, begin to contemplate the effects of that threat on their subjectivities. He suggests that the threat of death activates the death drive like a negative dialectic in subjects irremediably trapped between two cultures. In 1985, along with Donna Przybylowicz, he founded and edited the journal Cultural Critique, which at the time offered one of the very few venues for the theorization of postcolonial and American minority discourses. His recent works involve psychoanalytical studies of Dalit narratives of the Indian subcontinent. JanMohamed’s critical oeuvre has been acclaimed and translated into other Asian languages.

Paul Oskar Kristeller

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rocco Rubini
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The University ◽  
Intellectual Formation

Paul Oskar Kristeller (b. 1905–d. 1999) was a German-Jewish historian of philosophy and one of the most influential Renaissance scholars of the 20th century. Together with a short list of colleagues, Kristeller redefined Renaissance studies after the Second World War, at a time when the so-called problem of the Renaissance and its viability as historiographical category and autonomy as historical period, was acutely felt within what was then a much narrower field of specialists. He is best known for his attempts to dignify and distinguish historical “humanism.” He formally accepted the critiques of the medievalists who denied an enlightened break in the 15th and 16th centuries, and he proceeded to formulate and publish in 1946 a theory that was controversial at the time: that “humanism” was not the dawn of the new philosophy of man but a mostly academic and scholarly movement formally tied to the medieval traditions of ars dictandi and ars arengandi. Taken together, the studia humanitatis (whose focus was on grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and, to an extent, moral philosophy) amounted to an educational reform and, thus, to a reorientation of the medieval subdivision of the liberal arts into the Trivium and Quadrivium. Kristeller’s interpretation of humanism, which strongly emphasized a distinction between rhetoric and philosophy, was influenced by his intellectual formation in Germany and, later, Italy. Kristeller’s notably hard-nosed approach to scholarship was first honed at the Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin, were he met Ernst Hoffmann (his teacher of Greek), whom he followed to Heidelberg for his university career. Here he studied with Heinrich Rickert, a prominent neo-Kantian whose methodology in historiographical research Kristeller embraced, and Karl Jaspers, who introduced him to existentialism. Both influences are at play in Kristeller’s dissertation on Plotinus, published in 1929. Having received what he perceived as a less-than- excellent assessment of his dissertation, Kristeller moved to Berlin and trained to become a schoolteacher of Greek and Latin (with no less than Werner Jaeger, Eduard Norden, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and Richard Walzer). He subsequently returned his attention to philosophy and chose Marsilio Ficino as the topic of a Habilitationschrift advised by Martin Heidegger, whom he had met during a short stint in Marburg in 1926. Because of anti-Semitic laws enacted in Germany, Kristeller moved to Italy in 1934 and became the protégé of Giovanni Gentile, securing positions as lecturer of German at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and at the University of Pisa. In 1939, Kristeller was again forced to emigrate, this time to the United States, where he found a home at Columbia University in New York.

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi ◽  
Emily Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

scholarly journals Radical Togetherness: African-American Literature and Abolition Pedagogy at Parchman and Beyond

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Patrick Elliot Alexander
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Student Centered ◽  
Student Centered Learning ◽  
Conception Of Teaching ◽  
Prison Studies ◽  
The University ◽  
Educational Deprivation

This article makes the case that the student-centered learning paradigm that I have aimed to establish at Parchman/Mississippi State Penitentiary as a member of a college-in-prison program represents a prison abolition pedagogy that builds on Martin Luther King and Angela Y. Davis’s coalitional models of abolition work. Drawing from Davis’s abolition-framed conception of teaching in jails and prisons as expressed in her autobiography and her critical prison studies text Are Prisons Obsolete?, I argue that the learning environments that I create collaboratively with students at Parchman similarly respond to incarcerated students’ institution-specific concerns and African-American literary interests in ways that lessen, if only temporarily, the social isolation and educational deprivation that they routinely experience in Mississippi’s plantation-style state penitentiary. Moreover, I am interested in the far-reaching implications of what I have theorized elsewhere as “abolition pedagogy”—a way of teaching that exposes and opposes the educational deprivation, under-resourced and understaffed learning environments, and overtly militarized classrooms that precede and accompany too many incarcerations. As such, this article also focuses on my experience of teaching about imprisonment in African-American literature courses at the University of Mississippi at the same time that I have taught classes at Parchman that honor the African-American literary interests of imprisoned students there.

University of East Africa Conferences on Public Policy: II. East African Federation

1964 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-122
Author(s):  
Ronald Watts
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
London School ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Public Issues ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
London School Of Economics ◽  
The University

This was the second in a series of three conferences on public policy, organised by the University of East Africa and financed by the Ford Foundation, whose aim is to bring together policy-makers and academics for discussions on major public issues.In attendance were delegations, of at least a dozen each, from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanganyika, consisting mainly of Cabinet Ministers, parliamentary secretaries, other M.P.s, and civil servants, as well as representatives of public corporations, political parties, and trade unions. Small delegations from Ethiopia, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia, and Zanzibar were also invited. A group of 10 ‘visiting specialists’ from overseas with experience of federal systems and problems elsewhere were invited to take part. Among these were six economists: Ursula Hicks and Arthur Hazlewood from Oxford, Pitamber Pant of the Indian Planning Commission, Vladimir Kollontai from Moscow, Jan Auerhan from Prague, and Benton Massell (who was unable to attend but contributed a paper) from the United States. The others were a lawyer, S. A. de Smith from the London School of Economics, and three political scientists, Arthur MacMahon of Columbia University, A. H. Birch from Hull University, and myself. A group of a dozen ‘local specialists’ drawn mainly from E.A.C.S.O. and from the economists, lawyers, and political scientists at the University Colleges in East Africa also presented papers and played a significant role in the discussions. The total number of participants, including 22 observers, amounted to over 90.

scholarly journals Patron-Driven Acquisition of E-Books Satisfies Users’ Needs While Also Building the Library’s Collection

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Badia
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Research University ◽  
Standardized Test ◽  
The United States ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
Complete Collection ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
Library Catalogue ◽  
The University

Objective – To present the initial results of an academic library’s one-year pilot with patron-driven acquisition of e-books, which was undertaken “to observe how user preferences and the availability of e-books interacted with [the library’s] traditional selection program” (p. 469). Design – Case study. Setting – The University of Iowa, a major urban research university in the United States. Subjects – Original selection of 19,000 e-book titles from ebrary at the beginning of the pilot in October 2009. To curb spending during the pilot, the number of e-book titles available for purchase was reduced to 12,000 titles at the end of December 2009, and increased to nearly 13,000 titles in April 2010. Methods – These e-book titles were loaded into the library’s catalogue. The goal was for the University of Iowa’s faculty, staff, and students to search the library catalogue, discover these e-book titles, and purchase these books unknowingly by accessing them. The tenth click by a user on any of the pages of an e-book caused the title to be automatically purchased for the library (i.e., ebrary charged the library for the e-book). Main Results – From October 2009 to September 2010, the library acquired 850 e-books for almost $90,000 through patron-driven acquisition. The average amount spent per week was $1,848 and the average cost per book was $106. Researchers found that 80% of the e-books purchased by library patrons were used between 2 to 10 times in a 1-year period. E-books were purchased in all subject areas, but titles in medicine (133 titles purchased, 16%), sociology (72 titles purchased, 8%), economics (58 titles purchased, 7%), and education (54 titles purchased, 6%) were the most popular. Two of the top three most heavily used titles were standardized test preparation workbooks. In addition, 166 of the e-books purchased had print duplicates in the library, and the total number of times the print copies circulated dropped 70% after the e-versions of these books were obtained. The authors also examined usage data for their subscription to ebrary’s Academic Complete collection from September 2009 to July 2010, which consisted of 47,367 e-books. Together with the 12,947 book titles loaded into the catalogue for the patron-acquisition pilot, there were a grand total of 60,314 ebrary e-book titles in the library catalogue that were accessible to the Iowa University community. The study revealed that 15% of these titles were used during this 11-month period, and the used titles were consulted 3 or more times. The authors sorted the user sessions by publisher and found that patrons used e-books from a wide variety of publishing houses, of which numerous university presses together constituted the majority of uses. The five most heavily used e-books were in the fields of medicine, followed by economics, sociology, English-American literature, and education. Conclusion – The authors’ experience has shown that patron-driven acquisition “can be a useful and effective tool for meeting user needs and building the local collection” (p. 490). Incomplete coverage of academic publications makes patron-driven acquisition only one tool among others, such as selection by liaison librarians, which may be employed for collection development. According to the authors, patron-driven acquisition “does a good job of satisfying the sometimes unrecognized demand for interdisciplinary materials often overlooked through traditional selection methods,” (p. 491) and alerts librarians to new research areas.

scholarly journals The Portraiture of Stockholm Syndrome: Cultural Dislocation in Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry Collection and Selected African American Texts

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Adeniyi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Defence Mechanism ◽  
Hurt Feelings ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Stockholm Syndrome

One of the tropes that have often been glossed over in African American literature is the concept of Stockholm Syndrome. The syndrome emphasises irrationality and abnormal psychological or mental disposition of Stockholm Syndrome sufferers towards individuals responsible for their pitiable conditions. This article examines the conception and its nexus with slavery and the use of religion (Christianity) as an ideological tool for the indoctrination or brainwashing of African slaves and their descendants in the United States of America. I argue that the syndrome, though conceived as a correlate of Freudian ego-defence mechanism, operates like a psychedelic or hallucinogenic drug which, according to Karl Marx, dulls the reasoning capacity and cerebration of the sufferers and prevents them from thinking rationally. Besides, it alters their perception of reality forcing them to accept abnormality as normality in a bid to create an escapist route for their fears, hurt feelings and pent-up wounds.

scholarly journals Watching Time: James Baldwin and Malcolm X

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-125
Author(s):  
Mikko Tuhkanen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Temporal Mode ◽  
The Moment

Taking its cue from recent scholarly work on the concept of time in African American literature, this essay argues that, while both James Baldwin and Malcolm X refuse gradualism and insist on “the now” as the moment of civil rights’ fulfillment, Baldwin also remains troubled by the narrowness assumed by a life, politics, or ethics limited to the present moment. In his engagement with Malcolm’s life and legacy—most notably in One Day, When I Was Lost, his screen adaptation of Malcolm’s autobiography—he works toward a temporal mode that would be both punctual and expansive. What he proposes as the operative time of chronoethics is an “untimely now”: he seeks to replace Malcolm’s unyielding punctuality with a different nowness, one that rejects both calls for “patience,” endemic to any politics that rests on the Enlightenment notion of “perfectibility,” and the breathless urgency that prevents the subject from seeing anything beyond the oppressive system he wants overthrown. Both thinkers find the promise of such untimeliness in their sojourns beyond the United States.

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