Duke University Press Log

San Francisco Bay Guardian Reviews Slaves to Fashion, Glave in Out 100

Two nice bits of news today. First, Monica Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity is reviewed in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Reviewer D. Scott Miller says he will now "direct all queries" regarding black dandies to Miller's book, which demonstrates "uncanny feats of scholarship that illustrate ways in which the figure of the black dandy has been an elephant-in-the-room — albeit a particualrly well-dressed one."

We were also pleased to learn that Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, and quite a sharp-dressed man himself, was named one of Out Magazine's Out 100. Glave is praised for his short story collection, The Torturer's Wife, but it should be noted that he won his Lambda Literary Award for Our Caribbean!

Jayna Brown Wins ASTR Award

Jayna Brown, author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, has just been announced as the winner of the American Society for Theatre Research's Errol Hill Award for 2009. Congratulations, Jayna!

Duke Authors at American Studies Association Annual Meeting

We had a great time at the American Studies Association annual meeting in DC last week. Our staffers enjoyed getting to know authors new and old. Stay tuned for some YouTube interviews we did while at the conference.  

Scholars browsing at our booth.

 

Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (February 2010)

Colin Milburn, Nanovision: Engineering the Future (2008) 

Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (March 2010) 

Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity

Rebecca Hill, Men, Mobs and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (2008) and Sophia A. McClennen, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope

Daylight Podcast with Jennette Williams

 The folks over at Daylight Magazine have made a terrific podcast with photographer Jennette Williams, whose stunning platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul won the fourth Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. Williams says her goal was to capture women "living inside rather than fighting against their bodies." Her book The Bathers will be launched here at Duke tomorrow, with an artist's talk at Perkins Library. 

Sunday Times Returns to Java to Profile S. Ann Dunham

 The Sunday Times (London) sent reporter Christine Finn to Kajar, Java in Indonesia to revisit the site of S. Ann Dunham's research there. As you have read before on this blog, Dunham, who died in 1995, was President Barack Obama's mother. An anthropologist, she did her fieldwork on Javanese metal workers in the village of Kajar. Finn writes, "Dunham is still remembered in the central Javan hamlet of Kajar as a generous benefactor whose gifts of money, food and schoolbooks helped numerous villagers. Yet none of them had realised that the woman who paid several visits to research rural crafts in the 1980s had a son who was to become America’s 44th president." Duke will publish Dunham's dissertation, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia next month.

Thomas Glave Interviewed by Examiner.com

Thomas Chin, the San Francisco GLBT Literary editor for the Examiner.com, interviews Thomas Glave this week. Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, talks about writing, activism, and one of his other loves, watching ballet. Glave offers this advice to new writers: "I would say read as much as possible, as widely as possible -- and read books, not only periodicals. It is in fact ridiculous, and even arrogant, to expect to become a writer of any real merit if you don’t read. And if you don’t read, why would you expect people to read your work?"

Pittburgh Reporter Searches for Paris's Best Baguette

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Bob Hoover recently traveled to Paris in search of the perfect baguette. He took along Steven A. Kaplan's 2006 classic Good Bread is Back as his inspiration and guidebook. Kaplan, he writes, is known as "the world's authority on the social history of bread in Paris," but his critics sometimes refer to him as an "ayatollah." Hoover visits some of the bakeries Kaplan recommends and encounters "bread factionalism."

Lawrence Reviewed in Bookforum

Tim Lawrence's Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 is reviewed in the new issue of Bookforum. Reviewer John Rockwell praises Lawrence for writing "the broadest and most insightful study of the whole musical scene so far." He adds, "[E]ven if you didn’t know about Russell and are not yet persuaded to pursue him further, this is still a book worth reading. Psychologically, Russell emerges as indeed fascinating, more fascinating than his music, as a maverick without, Lawrence notes, the feisty self-righteousness such figures often embody."

Karadzic Trial Begins in The Hague

The trial of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who stands accused of genocide, began yesterday in The Hague. But the accused refused to appear, claiming he needed more time to prepare his defense. Karadzic's recalcitrance will remind many of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic made a mockery of the proceedings and died before a verdict could be issued. Next fall we will publish the definitive account of the Milosevic trial, Judith Armatta's Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Armatta, a lawyer, sat inches away from Milosevic throughout the entire trial as she served as an observer for the Coalition for International Justice, a human rights organization. Her book presents both a day-to-day account of the trial and analysis of its significance as well as personal accounts of victims of the Balkan wars. Armatta argues that the trial set an important precedence and that studying and understanding it is crucial to future efforts to bring war criminals (like Karadzic) to justice. After the jump, read an excerpt from this important forthcoming book.

Karen Ho in The Guardian

The Guardian's "Brain Food" column features anthropologist Karen Ho this week. Aditya Chakrabortty writes, "Anthropologists used to study the alien: pygmies in rainforests with blowdarts and more piercings than a knife-thrower's assistant. Nowadays, however, few societies are more foreign than that found on Wall Street. After all, what could be more outlandish than the tribes of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and the famously fierce Goldman Sachs – with their obscure tongue (CDOs, CLOs and the rest), their worship of gold and those grisly ritual cullings of staff?" Ho's book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street is an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers which shows how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed.