New Books in Literary Studies

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, actions and observations of the mission in great detail, in a daily journal that would become L’Afrique fantome. Leiris was both critical of and to an extent complicit in the exploitative encounter between French ethnographers and the colonized people they sought to study. His journal reveals the tensions between Europe’s claims about the superiority of its civilization and the violence and barbarity of colonialism on the ground. It also bears witness to the process by which some of the holdings in the Quai Branly museum in Paris today, were taken as booty (or in Leiris’ words, “butin”) from the African continent in the early twentieth century. Brent Edward’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) makes L’Afrique fantome available to English-speaking readers in its entirety for the first time. This translation presents an important and invaluable archive that documents the makings of ethnography as a field of study, as well its imbrication with colonial conquest and imperialism. In a thoughtful introduction that examines the historical context of Leiris’ journey, his personal motivations, his use of language, his triumphs and frustrations, Edwards clearly lays out the importance of this text for readers interested in anthropology, literary studies and the history of colonial encounters. Brent Hayes Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Phantom Africa. He is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellions in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 in Jamaica, and the Fenian Rebellion of 1867 in Ireland. The book argues that these rebellions—while arguably unsuccessful in their particular moments—signaled turning points in the management of labor throughout the British Empire. As the disciplinary methods used by imperial forces shifted in the nineteenth century—for example, the abolition of slavery and the rise of wage labor—so too did the resistive practices of the colonized. Drawing from a rich variety of primary sources ranging from political economic tracts to photographs and poems to novels, Reddy highlights the complex dynamic between laboring bodies and oppressive political and economic structures amid shifting forms of biopower. Sheshalatha Reddy is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Howard University in Washington D.C., where she teaches British and Anglophone colonial and postcolonial literatures. In addition to authoring British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjectsshe has edited Mapping the Nation: An Anthology of Indian Poetry in English, 1870-1920 (Anthem Press, 2012) and published articles in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Victorian Literature and Culture. Kathleen DeGuzman is an Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State University. Her teaching and research focus on Caribbean literature, Caribbean and British cultural entanglements, and the novel. She is completing Small Places: The Anglophone Caribbean, Victorian Britain, and the Forms of Atlantic Archipelagoes, a book project that aligns the Caribbean and Britain through their shared geographical reality as archipelagoes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native American students from across the United States attended federally-managed boarding schools where they were taught English, math, and a variety of vocational skills, all for the purpose of forcing their assimilation into white, American society. While enrolled at these schools, students also showcased their writing, editing, and printing skills by publishing school newspapers. In Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Assistant Professor of English Jacqueline Emery provides the first comprehensive collection of Native American writings published in boarding school newspapers, and demonstrates the ways in which students used these periodicals to both challenge and reflect assimilationist practices at the schools. The collection includes student-authored letters, editorials, fiction, and folklore, and examines the writings of Gertrude Bonin, Charles Eastman, and Luther Standing Bear, among additional, lesser-known writers. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his new book Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013)—in German: Moral und Literatur. Eine historische Typologie—Christian Kirchmeier, post doc at the University of Munich who is currently at Yale for a research stay, examines a change of different moral systems within the course of history. By looking at very many different German literary texts from different centuries he tries to find something which he calls “the historical grammar of moral judgments,” which basically means changes in morality on a structural level. Authors and works he therefore considers include Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, Andreas Gryphius’ Leo Armenius, Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Johann Christoph Gottsched’s Dying Cato, Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s The Island Felsenburg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Mademoiselle de Scuderi and Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities. For more information about Dr. Kirchmeier please check out: http://christian-kirchmeier.de/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Writers have long created networks and connections by exchanging letters or writing back to one another in their poetry and fiction. Letters between Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, attest to the rich world of intellectual exchange beyond the pages of published works. In Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Stephane Robolin examines the conversations between writers on spatial terms. Paying attention to the transnational crossings and circulations of African American and South African writers through their travels, correspondence and published works, Robolin’s study uncovers the metaphoric and sometimes quite literal grounds on which authors in different spaces contested the similar realities of racism and segregation that they experienced in South Africa and the United States. This study weaves together the voices of Langston Hughes, Richard Rive, Peter Abrahams, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Bessie Head and others in a larger narrative about the spatial dimensions of Black transnationalism in the twentieth century. Stephane Robolin is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University where he also directs the Center for African Studies. He teaches courses in African Literature, African Diaspora Studies and Postcolonial Literature and Theory. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Charm of Wise Hesitancy: Talmudic Stories in Contemporary Israeli Culture (Academic Studies Press, 2017), David Jacobson, Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University, offers an overview and detailed analysis of one of a most intriguing cultural phenomenon in contemporary Israel: A “return to the (supposedly religious) Jewish bookshelf” by both self-proclaimed secularist Israelis and orthodox Jews. Specifically, Jacobson is interested in Israeli readings of Talmudic narratives, and the way these readings reflect upon contemporary Jewish-Israeli identity. His book both situates the phenomenon in its socio-historical context, and offers a detailed analysis of the discourse on certain Talmudic narratives. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite writers go about crafting their written works, or if you’ve ever been interested in writing a book yourself, chances are you’ve wandered into a bookstore or a library, scanning the shelves for some kind of guidance. Books on writing typically fall into two camps: some are more centered on writing as philosophy, a way of life. Less about how to write and more about the author, and their specific writing journey, like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and Stephen King’s On Writing, which are both fascinating and inspiring, but not necessarily all that helpful if you’re looking for some quick and dirty tips on revising a story. Many other books on writing—I would venture to say even most—act as coaches: they preach writing regimens and keeping daily journals—finding the time and making the space. The strategy with these is often to write as much as you can as quickly as possible, because the goal is to get your foot in the door: to actually sit there and write something. But what comes after that? You’ve sat and written and maybe you have enough for a novel, or a memoir. The story is all there, but still somethings not quite right, and you cant be sure how to diagnose the problem. The characters don’t relate to one another like real people, the dialogue feels stiff, the sentences just don’t flow the way you’ve seen them do in your favorite Annie Dillard or Stephen King books, and maybe by now the self-doubt is starting to set in, and you’re wondering, am I really cut out for this? Enter Dinty W. Moore, the longtime editor of the online publication Brevity, a journal of concise literary nonfiction, and the author of numerous books on writing including his latest, called The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir (Ten Speed Press, 2016). Often, Moore says, when people write their stories, they tend to place the blame for the writings shortcomings on themselves. The Book Doctor, however, believes that whatever is ailing a novel or memoir in progress is not about the writer, it is about the story: how well we understand it, how well we tell it, and how well we enable it to come alive in the reader’s mind. With my cohost Eric LeMay and I today on the New Books Network is Dinty W. Moore, dispeller of the pervasive myth that good writing should be effortless, and a staunch believer that anyone is capable of writing, and, with practice, of writing well.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his new book Thieves: Stealing in Literature, Philosophy, and Myth (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016)—in German: Diebe: Die heimliche Aneignung als Ursprungserzahlung in Literatur, Philosophie und Mythos—Andreas Gehrlach, post doc at the Humboldt University of Berlin, explores theft from a cross-cultural approach. This includes a discussion of several key German philosophers, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Hans Blumenberg, Sigmund Freud and others. Therefore, Thieves can enable the reader to perceive German intellectual history from a completely new perspective. Since his childhood Gehrlach has been preoccupied with the topic of theft, thus turning an autobiographical aspect into this highly interesting and thought-provoking book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

J. Samaine Lockwood, Associate Professor in the English Department at George Mason University, specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. In an hour-long conversation, we discuss her new book Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). New England has long presented an idealized sense of its past. Restored colonial homes, antique shops, white picket fences around town greens—these are some features you may associate with a conservative, even blinkered view of the past. But the reality is otherwise. Lockwood shows how the story behind this burst of regionalist pride, much the product of the late nineteenth century, is queerer and more women-centered than you could possibly have imagined. In her book, Lockwood argues that nineteenth-century women writers, photographers, and colonial revivalists presented the queer, unmarried daughter of New England as a figure crucial to remembering and producing US history, crucial to that history itself. These women include Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, C. Alice Baker, as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, and many more. Their literary work, history writing, china collecting, and home restoration evinced a deep cosmopolitanism far exceeding the limits of any supposed provincialism of the New England spinster, both in their own time and in the past about which they wrote. We talk about how the late-nineteenth century New England regionalists aligned themselves with colonial forms of dissent against monarchical rule, but also rule by men. They followed the trails of colonial women who once manned garrisons in times of war, as well as women who, after capture, chose to stay living with Indians. Much of our conversation talks about how the later women regionalists found roots in the past for their own forms of living intimately with women in the present, including in romantic relationships. A large part of our discussion also focuses on how the knowledge they produced of that past was largely found through the use of their bodies as historical instruments in the care of objects and spaces of a home, the tending of gardens, the wearing of colonial dress. Their bodily sensorium revealed similarities of experiences across time, including feelings of intense sexual pleasure as well as gender-based oppression. Ultimately, this work attuned people to how affective ties and material forms of everyday life (which include nature, objects, the space of a town and its buildings) structure each other in dynamic relationship. The preservation of historic homes and other open to the public and welcoming visitors today owes much to these women. Throughout our conversation, Lockwood and I continue to return to the fact that new possibilities for the ongoing American democratic experiment were to be found in the past as much as the present. The same is true today—if you learn to open your senses to the world around you. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies