Indiana University Press Journals Weblog

The Hands

The cover of Nashim Number 18, a special issue about Iranian Jewish women (consulting editor: Farideh Dayanim Goldin), features “The Hands,” a painting by Iranian-Israeli artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik showing her own open palm above the folded hands of her mother, artist Rina Schmuelian. “The Hands” work belongs to Schmueli Buchnik’s “Pompei Persia” series, displayed recently in a solo exhibit at the Antea Gallery in Jerusalem.

Nashim’s covers are designed by art editor Judith Margolis with a view to creating a dialogue between the works of major feminist artists with the themes of each issue of Nashim. For more on the work of the Antea Gallery, Jerusalem’s only feminist art gallery, see the interview with Mendes-Flohr published in Nashim Number 14 (Fall 2007), a special issue devoted to women in the visual arts.

Below, in a text accompanied by several more images from the exhibit, curator Rita Mendes-Flohr describes Schmueli Buchnik’s interweaving of motifs from her Iranian background with Jewish themes, Islamic and Christian motifs, and western and classical traditions.

Pompeii Persia
On a visit to Pompeii, the artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik was struck by the similarities of the friezes running along the walls, and the Persian miniatures she knew from her own cultural heritage. The common thread in these works from cultures of plenty and often excess, she found in the small size, the framing with decorative borders, and the subject matter – scenes of courting and eroticism.

Her works in this exhibit, Pompeii Persia, bring together elements from the classic visual art of east and west, while Jewish themes intermingle with Islamic and Christian motifs – as she appropriates all these traditions as her own. There is a meeting between the artist’s training in western European art and her digging deeper into the cultural traditions from the place where she was born, Iran, but left when she was still an infant.

As if staging a play, the artist carefully searches for characters and details from all her sources and lets the actors encounter each other on the framed space, as they emerge from the darkness into the spotlight, tempting the audience into a magical, make-belief reality. Indeed, she is well aware of letting the paintings take on the role of seducer – by ornament and beauty ‐ and titled an earlier work Khanfanit – the Charmer – a painting exhibited in Antea’s exhibit “Achoti /Sister – Mizrahi women artists in Israel” – held at the Jerusalem Artists’ House in 2000. But beauty might be only a ruse to draw the viewer into a painting, in which critical readings of established religion and patriarchal relations are slowly discerned.

Often the artist casts herself into the characters she gathers from the different traditions, with eyes closed in devotion, waiting for a kiss; as a voluptuous oriental dancer; or an elusive temptress with a saintly halo – uniting the spiritual and the sensuous. In the portrait of her own hand, she vulnerably exposes her open palm, placed in a field of Rococo ornamentations, above the folded hands of her mother, the artist Rina Schmuelian ‐ hands that painted as well.

The depth, both spatial and spiritual, created by the darkness and light is achieved by a her technique of glazing ‐ derived from the classic Renaissance tradition of using a monochromatic underpainting, a grisaille, and slowly building up the work, layer by layer, with thin colored glazes, bestowing a sense of transparency and luminescence. Here, it is the painstaking process of layering from which the figures emerge on their stage, while at the Pompeii excavations, it is the taking out of the covering ash that reveals the life of a city that was caught in the middle of the act and stood still.

The artist starts out by painting her canvas black, then begins to draw out her composition in white chalk – like writing on a blackboard in school and connecting with the itinerant teachers in the contemporary Iranian film, Blackboards. Writing is a central element in the works in this exhibit – as it is in Persian miniatures. At times, her use of the Persian script is purely ornamental and the decorative quality is taken to the extreme by her writing in mirror image, thus neutralizing the meaning. In other instances, the text is hastily scribbled across the painting, like graffiti ‐ as if challenging the time‐consuming effort of the painted layering process as vanitas – a theme that appears in several of the works and again connects to Renaissance art.

Among the texts are lines from Jewish religious sources, translated into Persian ‐ such as Eshet Chayl, Woman of Valor, the liturgical poem that the Jewish man sings to his wife at the Sabbath table. Perhaps a critical reading is suggested, of the woman’s seduction, through praise and glorification, to be a faithful mother and housewife. Other texts are from the poetry of Oman Khayyam, who uses the rubaiyat, quatrain format precisely to break out of the square of prevailing norms and rigid enclosures, seeking to free spirituality from the monopoly of all religious establishments.

In the triptych “Khoda Negadar” (May God Protect) the artist juxtaposes herself as a full‐bodied dancer out of a Persian miniature, with a pious, similarly draped, but two‐dimensional figure from a medieval manuscript. In the middle panel is a catastrophic eruption ‐ a warning that all is vanity? Or is the artist spinning her magic tales, like Scheherazade, in an attempt to hold off, indefinitely, the moment of destruction?

Rita Mendes Flohr
Exhibit Curator and Antea Gallery Director

Kol Ha-Isha, founded in 1994, is a Jerusalem nonprofit organization (amuta), dedicated to promoting a multicultural feminist model of social change. Kol Ha-Isha provides the space for multicultural action of diverse groups of women in Jerusalem and speaks out in the struggle for equality and a just society, while running a variety of programs for women’s leadership, the advancement of women’s rights and the economic empowerment of women.

The Antea Gallery was established together with Kol Ha-Isha with the goal of creating a forum for the critical examination of issues related to women, art and culture and to advance the multicultural discourse of women and women artists in Israel.

Contact the artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik, Parvin105@walla.com.

Ronald Broude wins Jo Ann Boydston Award in Textual Cultures

The Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) announced on October 15th that its Jo Ann Boydston Award for 2009 has been presented to Ronald Broude for his article "The Gilbert & Sullivan Critical Edition and the Full Scores that Never Were." The award is presented every two years for an article that has been published during the preceding two years and that best addresses the aims and methodologies of sound documentary editing. Broude's article was published in Volume 3.2 of Textual Cultures, the journal of The Society for Textual Scholarship. It deals with the problems of preparing a full-score critical edition of an opera from a complex of sources, no one of which provides all of the necessary information. Broude expressed satisfaction that the award recognizes the unique problems posed by musical texts and that it has been presented to a piece in this relatively young journal.

War By Other Means

Special Guest Editors Adeleke Adeeko, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, and Natasha Barnes

“War By Other Means”, a special issue of The Global South, examines the (post)modern nature of war. Following Carl von Clauswitz, guest editors Mike Hill and Tom Cohen suggest that we can no longer see war only in terms of time or nations, but must understand it as omnipresent in every aspect of human endeavor. The editors and contributors, then, seek to recognize the pervasive fluidity of contemporary violence in both visible and invisible actions. Featuring essays by Jan Mieszkowski, Jason Groves, Jody Berland, Angela Mitropoulos, Henry Sussman, Kevin Bell, Randy Martin, Warren Montag, and Robert Marzec, the journal examines war from rhetorical, ecological, domestic, literary, financial, and political angles.

Find the special issue here.

Cultural Globalization

English Faculty Begin Journal's Third Year Responding to Literary, Cultural Globalization
Written by Edwin Smith  
09/15/2009

http://news.olemiss.edu/index.php/Ole-Miss-News/News-Releases/The-Global-South.html

OXFORD, Miss. - A scholarly movement addressing the impact of globalization on Southern societies around the world continues at the University of Mississippi with the research journal The Global South beginning its third year of publication. The interdisciplinary journal, started in 2007 by faculty in UM's Department of English, is published once each semester by Indiana University Press. It focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization.

The journal's editor, Adetayo Alabi, UM associate professor of English who teaches courses in Caribbean, African and African-American literatures, said the university is the ideal locale for the journal's headquarters.

"Being a major university in the South, we're located where the action is," Alabi said. "Also, having the Center for the Study of Southern Culture here on campus fits very well with what we do. The two entities complement each other well."

"Having The Global South (journal) here has helped put the university at the center of an important scholarly movement that studies the American South from multiple and transitional perspectives," said Ted Ownby, CSSC director. "Taking a global perspective is part of a movement that involves new conferences, new courses and new ways of teaching, along with some inspired and exciting recent scholarship."

Addressing such themes as the environment, poverty, immigration, gender, race, hybridity, cultural formation and transformation, colonialism and post-colonialism, and transatlantic encounters, the journal has experienced rapid readership growth. Each peer-reviewed volume logs approximately 1,700 subscribers to either its online or print version.

"Since assuming sole editorship of The Global South, Professor Alabi has kept the journal on the cutting edge of academic scholarship," said Ivo Kamps, UM chair and professor of English.

Other members of the journal's staff include Assistant Professor of English Sarah Lincoln, who serves as assistant editor, and graduate assistant James Christopher O'Brien of Memphis, who works as an editorial assistant.

Advisory editorial board members include faculty at the University of New South Wales, University of London, University of Macau, University of Nottingham, Delhi University, University of Wollongong and University of Western Australia, as well as those at several state and private universities in the United States.

Alabi said that from the North American South to the European South, Latin and Central America, Africa, Asia and Australia, the various Souths share comparable experiences that differentiate them from mainstream cultures.
"Findings indicate that while expansion and trade are generally beneficial for those living outside the South, those in the South don't always get the best of the pie," he said.

For example, globalization directs mass production of items manufactured by various industries, a change that usually causes the production of materials indigenous to the local citizenry to significantly dwindle, Alabi said. In another instance, the influx of textiles from China into Nigeria has adversely affected that country's own textile industry.

"The research shows that many of the Souths have not had a completely positive experience of globalization," Alabi said. "While they may not necessarily share a common wealth, they do intersect over various issues of marginalization and inadequate access to means of production and amenities under globalization.

For more information, call Alabi at 662-915-6948 or visit http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/gso/

Transition 101: Looking Ahead

From the issue:

“What is the community? is not a question that one can easily answer, and to make the community the bearer of human rights, and to define duties toward its preservation, predisposes one to an incarcerating conception of identity, one which eventually endangers the very notion of human rights.”
—Souleymane Bachir Diagne

“Democratic ideals must come to terms with economic ideals for the empowerment of the least among us. What is needed is less mysticism and more rational analysis of social situations—whether in Africa or elsewhere.”
—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

“Mr. George takes a fifty-euro note. It has some markings on it, reddish brown, above the stars of Europe. He wipes it down with a cloth on which he has sprinkled a transparent fluid. The note emerges pristine.”
—Petina Gappah

“In the same week that Luxolo came in, a teenager was stabbed in the heart with a screwdriver; a mother of three children was shot in the head by her boyfriend; a middle-aged man was attacked with an ax; and a teenager was beaten to death by his neighbors after having stolen a CD.”
—Rebecca Rosenberg

“Purging territory designated as home of outsiders appears to be the most decisive and only accessible expression of power available to people in desperate conditions seeking to regain control over their lives and the spaces they inhabit.”
—Moradewun Adejunmobi

Plus: Poems from Sonata Mulattica, by Rita Dove

http://www.transitionmagazine.com/index.html

To subscribe visit http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/trs.

Historical Scholarship in Post-Soviet Russia

History & Memory 21/2
Special issue: Historical Scholarship in Post-Soviet Russia
Guest editor: Gabriel Gorodetsky

This issue is devoted to a fascinating case study on the impact of political and social change on the writing of history: the changing trends in historical research in Russia following the demise of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Marxist ideological framework that had been imposed on historiography, along with the new access to previously closed archives and the freedom to discuss previously taboo topics, have led to the reassessment of central problems of Russian historiography and opened new fields of research. Following Michael Confino’s opening article on the current state of Russian historiography both inside and outside Russia, the following five articles consider the main issues occupying Russian historians today. Boris Kolonitskii examines the relations between the official “politics of memory” and historical research in the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia, with particular attention to the 1917 revolution, the founding myth of the Soviet Union. Teddy Uldricks explores the myth of the Great Patriotic War, which continues to be a key element in the national identity of the Russian people, including the conflicting interpretations of the role of the USSR in the origins of World War II. Vera Kaplan analyzes the changes in both the meaning and the role of the concept of socialism, one of the fundamental axioms of Soviet historical discourse, in post-Soviet Russian history textbooks. Victor Shnirelman continues the discussion of school history texbooks from a different perspective, examining the shift in emphasis from class struggle to nationalism and ethnocentrism. He demonstrates that the aspiration to depict Russia as a homogeneous civilization has led to the biased representation of certain non-Russian ethnic communities.  Finally, Yaacov Ro’i outlines Russian historiography on one of the most troubled episodes in Soviet history—the deportation of ethnic populations, the impact of which has continued to trouble Russian politics in the post-Soviet period, and to an extent also the politics of other Soviet successor states.

Table of Contents

From the Editor                                   

The New Russian Historiography, and the Old—
Some Considerations                                   
MICHAEL CONFINO

Russian Historiography of the 1917 Revolution                   
New Challenges to Old Paradigms?
BORIS KOLONITSKII

War, Politics and Memory                               
Russian Historians Reevaluate the Origins of World War II
TEDDY J. ULDRICKS

The Vicissitudes of Socialism in Russian History Textbooks       
VERA KAPLAN

Stigmatized by History or by Historians?                       
The Peoples of Russia in School History Textbooks
VICTOR  SHNIRELMAN

The Transformation of Historiography on the “Punished Peoples”           
YAACOV RO’I

To subscribe or purchase a single issue to History & Memory visit our website at http://inscribe.iupress.org.

2009 STS Conference

The biennial conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship took place on March 18-21 on the campus of New York University. Drawing on scholars and editors from around the world, STS conferences examine the interdisciplinary implications of current textual research.

The 2009 STS conference comprised 35 regular and four plenary sessions over three days, with 128 presenters total, including about 25 graduate students and about 25 international speakers.

The selection committee for The 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award, in recognition of the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during the preceding two calendar years, opted to recognize both an edition and a monograph this year.

The first 2009 Finneran Award was presented posthumously for Richard J. Finneran's 2007 edition of the manuscript materials for Yeats's The Tower, published in the Cornell Yeats series.  Professor Finneran's children attended the conference banquet to accept the award on their family's behalf.

The second 2009 Finneran Award went to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (U of Maryland) for Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, published by MIT in 2008.

Honorable mentions for this year's Finneran Award were presented to Archie Burnett of Boston U. for his 2007 edition of The Letters of A.E. Housman (Oxford UP); and to Dirk Van Hulle of the University of Antwerp for his 2008 study, Manuscritp Genetics: Joyce's Know-How, Beckett's Nohow (U of Florida P).

The 2009 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, for an outstanding essay in textual studies substantially published for the first time during the two years prior to the Society's biennial New York conference, was awarded to Gabrielle Dean (Johns Hopkins U.) for her 2008 essay in Modernism/Modernity, "Grid Games: Gertrude Stein's Diagrams and Detectives."

ALL memberships to STS include a subscription to the Society's journal, Textual Cultures, published at Indiana University Press/Journals.

British Women Writers Conference

The 17th Annual Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Association (BWWA) Conference took place at the University of Iowa, from April 2-5, 2009.  Papers, lectures, and conversations among its approximately 200 attendees focused on the theme for this year’s conference, "Fresh Threads of Connection."  

Co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Devoney Looser, was one of four scholars to speak on a plenary panel, "Refreshing Conceptions of the Other."  Devoney and fellow panelists, Looser (University of Missouri), Misty Anderson (University of Tennessee), Florence Boos (University of Iowa), and Shuchi Kapila (Grinnell College) offered their perspectives on how considering age, class, religion, and empire in new ways might revitalize scholarship on British women writers. The panel also discussed approaches for articulating this scholarship as fresh knowledge with likely broader appeal and deeper readership.

Since 2004, Devoney Looser has served as co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, published at Indiana University Press. She is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri.

She is also the author of Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2000; paperback 2005). The latter was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received honorable mention for the Outstanding Book of 2000 from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Looser has edited Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) and co-edited Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (U of Minnesota P, 1997).

Journals scholarship "like 'slow food' in a fast-food culture."

Ivan Kreilkamp, an associate professor of English at Indiana University at Bloomington and co-editor of Victorian Studies, appreciates the scholarly possibilities of Web 2.0. But he argues that the traditional humanities journal produces "dense, deeply researched, and extensively edited works of scholarship that have a depth and thoroughness that can't generally be found in the realm of blogs and listservs."

"You could think of our kind of scholarship," he said, "as something like 'slow food' in a fast-food culture."

Read more in the March 27 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education online on the topic, Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis.

How cultures shape the creation and understanding of texts

The biennial conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship will take place on March 18-21 on the campus of New York University. Drawing on scholars and editors from around the world, STS conferences examine the interdisciplinary implications of current textual research. The Society is dedicated to exploring how the various cultures of textual production shape the creation, reception, dissemination, and understanding of texts; how technologies alter and influence the experience of texts; and how changing conceptions of authorship and editorial practice operate in the making of textual meanings. The Society addresses questions--contemporary and historical, theoretical and practical--of how the material and social manifestations of textual cultures inform acts of interpretation.

This year's conference will focus especially on the following themes:
Textual production and the social sphere
Textual cultures
Digital editing and textuality
The production and editing of "minority" texts
Theoretical and practical intersections between textual scholarship and book history
Textual scholarship and pedagogy

Plenary speakers will include: Robert Scholes, Clifford Wulfman, George Bornstein, Hans Walter Gabler, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Laura Mandell, Joseph Viscomi, Darrell Moore, Jeffrey McCune, Donna-Dale Marcano, Randall McLeod, Cathy Phillips, David Greetham, and Muhammad-Reza Fakhr-Rohani.

ALL memberships to STS include a subscription to the Society's journal, Textual Cultures.