Anonymous birth: Biographical knowledge and dyadic coping in adoptive mothers and fathers

Research on adoptive parents of anonymously born children is still scarce. Open issues are (1) examining how much biographical information is available to adoptive parents, (2) considering differences between adoptive mothers and fathers, and (3) understanding what affects their dyadic coping. Hence, this study set out to compare adoptive mothers’ and fathers’ mental health, attachment styles, dyadic coping, and biographical knowledge, and to identify predictors of dyadic coping. 62 mothers and 40 fathers (mean age: 46 years) raising an anonymously born adoptee answered online or paper-pencil versions of the Brief Symptom Inventory, Vulnerable Attachment Style Questionnaire, Dyadic Coping Inventory, Child Behavior Checklist, and a checklist of biographical data. Descriptive analyses showed that biographical knowledge was generally low in adoptive parents. More information was available on the birth mother than the birth father, with letters being the most common memorial. Furthermore, student t-tests revealed few differences: adoptive mothers reported to be more anxious and rated their ability to communicate stress and common dyadic coping as higher than did adoptive fathers. Finally, a hierarchical linear regression identified knowledge of more biographical data, parents’ older age as well as child’s younger age and higher psychopathology scores as predictors of better adoptive parents’ dyadic coping. These findings highlight the difficult task of gathering biographical information whilst maintaining the birth mother’s anonymity. They also stress the need of further research which may inform policies tailored to the specific needs of adoptive parents in the context of anonymous birth.

Maruja Mallo and Rafael Alberti 1925-1928: New Evidence and Observations

This essay focuses on the years 1925-1928, the most important in the amorous relationship between the painter Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) and the writer Rafael Alberti (1902-1999). Although their relationship was well known among the couple’s families and friends, it was unrecognized for decades and undiscussed by critics and commentators. This essay seeks to advance our biographical knowledge of that period, from the first encounter to a significant rupture in 1928, which occurred in the midst of Alberti’s composition of Sobre los ángeles (published in 1929). By comparing a wide range of contemporary sources (newspaper reports, various sets of correspondence, etc.) with subsequent autobiographical writings, we can also identify a number of inaccuracies and distortions that have been introduced into later accounts of several key episodes dating from those years.

A love interrupted: A Tribe Called Quest’s resilient path of rhythm

In 2016, the rap group A Tribe Called Quest returned with their long-awaited sixth and final album, We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service. Behind it was a long and turbulent story without which the record’s full significance cannot be properly understood. In this longform critical essay, hip hop scholar and critic James McNally examines that history, drawing on an extensive archive of historic interviews and visual material to illuminate the impact this pivotal group made on hip hop’s golden age. It maps the disruption in music and values created by the freewheeling collective they belonged to, the Native Tongues; in particular the new, looser, more expressive modes of Blackness and everyteen vitality they injected into hip hop’s late-1980s moral and stylistic universe. Unpacking the tropes of familiality the Native Tongues promoted, the essay is drawn in particular to the de facto sibling relationship between Tribe’s two core MCs ‐ Malik ‘Phife’ Taylor and Kamaal ‘Q-Tip’ Fareed (born Jonathan Davis). It argues their friendship ‐ as ultimately embodied in the sound of Tribe’s music, but also, increasingly, as public biographical knowledge ‐ was central to the group’s appeal. Engaging with their fraternal ambivalence as well as their love, and with the group’s drawn-out implosion after 1998’s The Love Movement, the essay explores themes around masculine friendship and platonic male love, around estrangement, reconciliation and resilience, and, ultimately ‐ following the interruption of We Got It From Here… by Taylor’s untimely death ‐ the personal tragedy of loss. Bringing these themes together, ‘A Love Interrupted’ provides a critical reading of A Tribe Called Quest’s poignant final album.

Follow Lundh! Between Text and Context in a Photographer’s Archive

No matter how well documented a life is, only shards, bits and pieces remain of what was once a vibrant person, with purpose, memories, feelings, actions and ideas. For any historian, these slivers are what remains and what can be used to access a past. This article presents a case study where the photographs taken by the photographer Gunnar Lundh (1898–1960) are in focus. The archive contains next to no written sources, and the information about the motifs is scarce. This is in fact the fate of many personal archives, especially those containing few written sources. The contact sheets Gunnar Lundh used in his business as a photographer provide some mostly routine and brief information, usually the year and sometimes where the photo is taken, in “Denmark” or “Skåne”. A majority of them are picturing anonymous individuals. The lack of information makes the archive of Lundh, in a sense, silent or mute. The purpose with my research is to investigate what happens to a photograph or a set of photographs when more contexts are added. By adding biographical knowledge it is possible to read the photographs. In this, I am using the art historian Joan M. Schwartz’s ideas about functional context. The process of adding context to an archive is a negotiation of the past that will contribute new dimensions in our collective memory, and also generate new, additional archives. There are options other than silence, and the inevitable reversion and degradation into oblivion for those silent, or mute, personal archives in focus here. A biographical method can however operate in the area between text and context, joining them together and thus letting the material speak.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

Life cycle of a star: Carl Sagan and the circulation of reputation

It is a commonplace in the history of science that reputations of scientists play important roles in the stories of scientific knowledge. I argue that to fully understand these roles we should see reputations as produced by communicative acts, consider how reputations become known about, and study the factors influencing such processes. I reapply James Secord's ‘knowledge-in-transit’ approach; in addition to scientific knowledge, I also examine how ‘biographical knowledge’ of individuals is constructed through communications and shaped by communicative contexts. My case study is Carl Sagan, widely discussed – amongst scientists, media professionals and publics – for his skill as a charismatic popularizer, his perceived arrogance, his political activism, and his debated merit as a researcher. By examining how aspects of Sagan's reputation circulated alongside his scientific work – rather than existing as a static context for his scientific work – I show how different forms of knowledge (biographical and scientific) influence each other as they circulate.