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Memory studies and Gender studies link insights

JMEWS 8.1, Special Issue: Gendered Memory in the Middle East and North Africa: Cultural Norms, Social Practices, and Transnational Regimes

While memory studies have long excluded the Arab Middle East, many Arab countries have recently started to come to terms with their violent pasts. This special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, entitled “Gendered Memory in the Middle East and North Africa: Cultural Norms, Social Practices, and Transnational Regimes,” presents five case studies from Lebanon, Morocco, and Iraqi Kurdistan, where spaces have opened up for the production of alternative or counter forms of remembering. The papers brought together in this issue tie in with two different fields of research—memory studies and gender studies—linking theoretical insights from both fields to gain a deeper understanding of the ongoing processes of societal and political change in the Middle East and North Africa. The papers explore the tensions and interactions between different forms of memory politics. They seek to answer the question: To what degree did officially controlled efforts to process primary experiences, historiography, public images, and debates into a unified and simplified make-up of narrative, iconic, and ritual elements catered to the wider audience change over time? Introduced and edited by Bettina Dennerlein and Sonja Hegasy, this special issue addresses the broad spectrum of rituals and material manifestations of memory culture, which are a form of representation that gradually changes social orders, particularly in situations of accelerated transformation. Iraq, Lebanon and—the countries dealt with in research articles by Bettina Dennerlein, Susan Slyomovics, Karin Mlodoch, Andrea Fischer-Tahir, and Sune Haugbolle—provide strong examples of how political change is mediated through competing views of the past that always also interpret the present and constitute and prescribe models for the future.

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JMEWS, extremely timely and important

Marcia C. Inhorn, Ph.D,  William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University is the editor of the Journal of Middle East Womens Studies (JMEWS.) She spoke with us about the journal and its unique scholarly impact.

IU PRESS/Journals: What is it about JMEWS that energizes you the most as a scholar?

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS is now the major scholarly site for Middle East gender scholars across the globe. The journal publishes the work of senior feminist scholars, as well as many young scholars, who are pushing Middle East gender studies in fascinating new directions. The new work in this area is extremely timely and important, especially given events in the Middle Eastern region during the past decade and, most notably, during the past year.

IU PRESS/Journals: Why do you think JMEWS is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make? 
 

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS highlights the importance of Middle Eastern women throughout history and in the contemporary period. In addition, JMEWS is the only journal that actively welcomes contributions on Middle Eastern masculinities and sexualities. So much is changing in the Middle Eastern region, in terms of gender, sexuality, politics, social media, and the like. The gender studies scholars who publish in JMEWS are capturing these transformations in very nuanced fashion. The journal offers its readers a wide spectrum of issues to consider, and is truly eye-opening for those who are unfamiliar with the Middle East region.

IU PRESS/Journals: What influence or impact do you hope that your research has on the world and culture?

Marcia Inhorn: For the past 25 years, I have been following the gender impacts of infertility and the emergence of assisted reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), in the Middle Eastern region. I have explored the transformative effects of these technologies on women’s lives, as they search for solutions to their childlessness. In addition, I have explored the impacts of the newest assisted reproductive technologies to overcome male infertility, a condition that is a highly prevalent but hidden across the region. Men’s engagement with these technologies is the theme of my new book, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton UP, 2012), which explores the dynamic transformation of masculinity in conjunction with these new technologies.  The book is a humanizing portrayal of the joys and sorrows of ordinary Middle Eastern men, as they engage in assisted reproduction with the women they love. It debunks many stereotypes of “hegemonic” masculinities in the Middle East, as brought to us by both Western media and some scholars.

IU PRESS/Journals: How would it benefit scholars of different disciplines to read the work of scholars outside their field of expertise?

Marcia Inhorn: At the current historical moment, there is no world region more important than the Middle East. Readers of JMEWS will realize that the Middle Eastern region is not monolithic in its history, languages, religions, cultures, and many other important social attributes.The transformations continuously occurring in Middle Eastern women’s and men’s lives are important, and are part and parcel of the revolutionary protests being enacted across the region today.

IU PRESS/Journals: Who do you hope will read the articles in JMEWS?

Marcia Inhorn: Scholars in Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, Islamic Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Religious Studies, and History. Educated lay readers interested in empirically based knowledge about Middle Eastern gender.

IU PRESS/Journals: Is there anything else you would like to say to students in your area of research that would entice them to explore the articles in the journal?

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS has a fantastic new website, which provides visitors with excellent entrée into the journal, its editorial board, its authors, and its essays. Find it here: www.jmews.org.

Marcia also has a website: http://www.marciainhorn.com.

Peace, War, Folklore–700 Scholars from around the world

Between October 12-15, more than 700 scholars from around the world convened at Indiana University’s Bloomington campus to explore the theme “Peace, War, Folklore.”  Representatives from IU Press and the Journal of Folklore Research (JFR) were on hand to greet members of the American Folklore Society during the society’s 2011 Annual Meeting.  

At panels and plenaries, meeting participants discussed the ways individuals and communities use expressive culture to protest inequities, mediate trauma, or resolve conflict. And in the book room, attendees browsed past issues of the journal, which has regularly explored how people make war and peace. Relevant articles in recent decades include:

 · “The Role of Oral Traditions in the War of National Liberation in Zimbabwe: Preliminary Observations” (Emmanuel Chiwome, JFR Vol. 27, No. 3, 1990)

· “The Brotherhood of Timber Workers and the Culture of Conflict” (Jeff Ferrell, JFR  Vol. 28, No. 2/3, Special Double Issue: Labor Song: A Reappraisal, 1991)

· “Palestinian Humor during the Gulf War” (Sharif Kanaana, JFR  Vol. 32, No. 1, 1995)

· “World Trade Center Jokes and Their Hungarian Reception” (Lajos Csaszi, JFR Vol. 40, No. 2, 2003)

· “The Traditionalization of Women's Dancing, Hegemony, and Politics in Malawi” (Lisa Gilman, JFR  Vol. 41, No. 1, 2004)

· “Narrative in Times of Crisis: AIDS Stories in Ghana” (Kwesi Yankah, JFR Vol. 41, No. 2/3, Special Double Issue: Advocacy Issues in Folklore, 2004)

· “‘Life in the TV’: The Visual Nature of 9/11 Lore and Its Impact on Vernacular Response” (Rosemary V. Hathaway, JFR  Vol. 42, No. 1, 2005)

Those who stopped by the IU Press table also got a look at our most recent issue (JFR 48:2, 2011). In this issue, Gregory Schrempp compares the work of Richard Wrangham and Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the process challenging rhetorical tendencies to pit science against traditional wisdom. Two articles investigate cultural performances in Central Asia: Svetlana Adonyeva and Laura J. Olson discuss Russian stories about believed supernatural events (bylichki), suggesting how they help narrators interpret past experience, claim particular social roles in the present, and offer prescriptions for future action; Maureen Pritchard explores the changing contexts and meanings of koshok, a ritualized expression of grief in present-day Kyrgyzstan. Finally, Timo Heimerdinger introduces readers to the Schnullerfee, a fairy that helps wean children from pacifiers in German-speaking areas; Heimerdinger’s article places this current parental strategy for dehabituation in the context of contemporary medicalization discourses.

Many passers-by at the AFS meetings also entered their names into a drawing for a free electronic subscription to the journal. This year’s winners are: Erik A. Aasland, Michael E. Bell, Rebecca Wilso, John Summerlot, and Judith Cohen.

The book room closed Saturday afternoon to make space for the dinner and live music that capped this year’s AFS meeting, but we welcome continued virtual perusal of (and additions to!) the journal’s many offerings. To learn how to contribute to the Journal of Folklore Research, visit www.indiana.edu/~jofr. To subscribe visit http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress.

Figure 1. The dummy tree at the University Hospital Dresden, August 2010. Photo by Norbert Kaiser and made available on Wikipedia via a Creative Commons license.
Journal of Folkore Research 48.2, page 200, "Pacifiers and Fairies," by Timo Heimerdinger

A New Journal About Black Men

Despite the growth of black studies over the last few decades, no academic journal has sought to look across the full range of the contemporary lives and experiences of black men.

That is the thinking behind an ambitious new periodical, Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men. The new journal is set to debut in March, as a twice yearly publication from Indiana University Press. Developments in modern American life, and in the lives of black men around the world, make Spectrum timely, says one of its two editors, Judson L. Jeffries, a professor of African American and African studies at the Ohio State University.   READ MORE.

 

Reworking Race and Labor

John Trumpbour, guest editor of “Reworking Race and Labor” (Race/Ethnicity 4.2), is research director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. For this special issue, he has assembled essays that address the challenges of race and labor from a global as well as an American perspective and show how race mattered historically and still matters in the world of labor.

The classic piece, one of the distinguishing features of Race/Ethnicity and one that provides some grounding and familiarity for readers, is from Caste, Class and Race (1948) by the Trinidad-born sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox. Included as well are essays that fall into three parts: a focus on race matters in the rural world of work; an interview with Bill Fletcher, a long-time labor leader and former president of TransAfrica; and a historical and sociological analysis of African-American political, labor-market, and cultural interventions.

New Delhi-based economist Jayati Ghosh’s “Fear of Foreigners: Recession and Racism in Europe” is an overview of developments in Italy and the EU, and University of Calabria sociologist Alessandra Corrado’s “Clandestini in the Orange Towns” examines social structure and migration in Calabria’s countryside and Mediterranean Europe. Latin Americanist Aviva Chomsky reports on and provides an analysis of the US-Mexican border in “Today’s Deportees.”

San José State University historian Margo McBane takes up a critical moment in labor and race relations in Southern California in “Whitening a California Citrus Company Town.” Sharit K. Bhowmik, dean of the School of Management and Labor Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Studies in Mumbai, examines the persistence of bonded labor in India in “Ethnicity and Isolation: Marginalization of Tea Plantation Workers.”

In addition, Trumpbour interviews Bill Fletcher, long-time activist and the author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Towards Social Justice.

The last third of the issue tries to make sense of the African-American labor experience. Independent scholar Susan Roth Breitzer explores what is sometimes called Black Nativism: African-American antipathy to immigrants in “Race, Immigration, and Contested Americanness: Black Nativism and the American Labor Movement 1880-1930.” 

In “Black Professionals in Racialized and Community-Oriented Occupations,” University of Connecticut sociologist Maya Beasley argues that African-American professionals remain heavily concentrated in racialized service-sector jobs of modest remuneration. Finally, Binghamton University sociology student Matthew Birkhold delivers a cultural materialist exploration of the rise of hip hop in “ ‘If You Don’t Move Your Feet Then I don’t Eat’: Hip Hop and the Demand for Black Labor.”

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Eastern African Literatures and Cultures

Africa Today (57.3): Special Issue on Eastern African Literatures and Cultures

The articles in this special issue were part of a project that culminated in a major conference, held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, on 23 and 24 October 2009. The conference attracted scholars from institutions of higher education in Eastern Africa, East African scholars in the diaspora, and scholars whose research is rooted in the literary and cultural imaginaries of the region. Built around a broad thematic structure, “Eastern Literary and Intellectual Landscapes,” the papers were aimed at providing a critical reflection on cultural and intellectual legacies of the region through history. Not all the papers presented at the conference have made it into this volume, nor are the papers published here necessarily representative of the issues that the conference’s deliberations explored, but they are a distinct and important voice, emerging out of a region where cultural and intellectual traditions remain understudied. This volume is therefore an important portal on the region.  

Although concerned with disparate and often distinct issues, at least superficially, the papers are connected through strikingly similar tropes and concerns, in a tortured postcolonial context, which has given shape to issues with which these papers grapple. We use the postcolonial context to mean the totality and effect of the colonial experience from the moment of colonial penetration to the aftermath of political independence. A striking contradiction about colonialism is that it needed both to “civilize” its “others,” and to fix them into perpetual “otherness.” It is therefore unsurprising that a theme running through these papers is the colonial subject’s engagement with colonial modernity, quite often to challenge attempts to fix and consign the colonized to the status of the “other,” but equally to negotiate its own agency by appropriating and redefining received notions of “civilization.” The appropriation of colonial institutional structures such as education and the print media were central to this attempt to find a voice. Even the transcultural impulse, which underpins some of the papers in this volume, is very much part of that attempt to show how difficult it was to police cultural boundaries between people and to reinforce the fixity of identity that the colonial social order sought to impose on the colonized subjects, but it was also about what postcolonial modernity really meant in practice—which is to suggest that it was about collapsing boundaries, motion, and trafficking ideas back and forth across different cultural and geographical scapes. This motion, in the case of East Africa, was initiated by the Indian Ocean fortune-seekers from the Indian subcontinent, long before classical colonial modernity found its way into the continent. These global currents, best captured in the metaphor of Indian Ocean dhows and sails, would be accentuated by the colonial experience in East Africa soon after the partition of the continent into European spheres of influence at the Berlin conference of 1885.

The Berlin conference created putative, if often artificial, nation-states, which have remained some of the most significant sites of dispute in postcolonial writing in Africa. The connection between postcolonial writing and nation is possible only when we realize that a nation itself can be a site of difference and tension—a site for the competing imaginings of different ideological and political interests. Again, some of the papers in this volume return to this site to engage with these differences and concerns that relate to gender, class, ethnicity, and other issues. How power is engaged and deflected through struggles that are manifestly gendered and ethnic is at the heart of some of these papers. The mobilization of oppressive gender structures rooted in patriarchy and the use of politicized ethnicity by the postcolonial political class in Africa is a stark reminder that the imaginings of national communities in Africa remain profoundly gendered and ethnic.

Papers in this volume continue to privilege “texts” as important sources for understanding and analyzing historical processes and practices, but they nevertheless help us extend the idea of texts beyond literary texts in English to include a range of other cultural productions, such as indigenous music and musical instruments, and indeed the vernacular press, as legitimate sources of postcolonial discourse. What this process does is to broaden our reach of the sites of contestation of colonial modernity beyond the texts and institutions we have come to associate with “legitimate” discourse. Local agency for colonial subjects in Eastern Africa was negotiated, not simply through mainstream texts in English, but through cultural metaphors and signs that had their roots in local cultures and traditions. These metaphors and signs work through the process of translation and appropriation, which defies attempts to fix them, and by extension to fix the bodies and minds that use them. This is where the authority of texts as narrative comes in: to inhabit and colonize spaces that may be alien to it through translation and transformative strategies only open to narrative.

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2011 JMEWS Distinguished Lecture and Research Workshops

The the 2011 Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies Distinguished Lecture and Research Workshops will take place on Friday, April 15 at Yale University and will explore the topic of “Gender and the Middle East Uprisings.” The Distinguished Lecturer will be Dr. Diane Singerman, Associate Professor in the Department of Government at American University. Dr. Singerman’s research interests focus on political change from below, particularly in the Middle East, and more specifically in Egypt; her work examines the formal and informal side of politics, gender, social movements, globalization, public space, protest, and urban politics. Following Dr. Singerman’s lecture, afternoon research workshops around the conference theme will be held.  READ MORE.

Race/Ethnicity 4.1: Race & Gender

Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts Volume 4, Issue 1, The Intersection of Race and Gender, explores the varied ways that race and gender identities interact across the globe, to show some of the consequences that attach to those interactions, and to cast some explanatory light on those dynamics.

This issue's classic piece is “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan,” from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.  

Aino Rinhaug of the University of Oslo/University of London writes about the artistic aesthetic of Korean adoptees. In “Adoptee Aesthetics: A Gendered Discourse.”

The interview, “The Impact of Race and Gender,” is rich and varied thanks to the participation of several committed individuals who gave of their time and experience to answer our questions.

Anne Harris, lecturer at the school of education at Victoria University, explores these voices in "I Ain’t No Girl: Representation and Reconstruction of the 'Found Girls” of Sudan.'”

In “Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Informal Economy,” Juhu Thukral, director of law and advocacy at The Opportunity Agenda, examines the realities of women workers of color in the U.S. information economy.

Controls put in place by the Brazilian state were meant to create a homogeneous national body and identity, but anxiety over skin color and sexuality were hardly eliminated, as Lorraine Leu explains in “Performing Race and Gender in Brazil: Karim Ainouz’s Madame Satã (2002).”

The increasing visibility of multi-racial individuals prompted Andra Basu to examine the gender differences and similarities on campus. Basu presents her findings in “The Role of Gender in the Experiences of Biracial College Students.”

Kellie Bean’s “Twenty-Four Notes on Appalachian Women Blogging” discusses the “ethnicity that is not one” by examining the outputs and attitudes of women who self-identify as Appalachian. These woman write about what they hold dear, what they wish to rebel against, and what they reaffirm as residents of the long thin strip of often-forgotten America known as Appalachia.

In “Thoughts on LGBTI Activism, Race, and Gender in a Kenyan Context,” Akinyi Margareta Ocholla volunteers for Minority Women in Action (MWA), an organization that works for the rights of lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and intersex women in Kenya.

The thoughts and experiences of three women, collected in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) are offered. The narratives were collected as part of the Literary Narratives of Black Columbus, an ongoing project designed to collect, preserve, and share the rich history of individual black citizens’ literacy practices and values in their homes, families, churches, and community centers within Columbus, Ohio.

Included is a "Fact Sheet on Gender: Selected Comparisons", which draws from a variety of sources to try to broaden reader understanding of attitudes and facts about men and women around the globe.

Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 4.1 will ship in February. 

Memory and Sacred Space

Forthcoming special issue of History & Memory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space

In this special issue guest editor Katharina Schramm (Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg) brings together a number of scholars to reflect on a specific aspect of the relationship between violence, memory, body and landscape, namely, the dynamics of the sacralization of memorial space.

Careful not to attribute agency solely to the physical environment, the authors carve out the shifting interface between symbolic forms, narrative strategies and material practices that becomes apparent in the politically charged realm of commemoration. In order to account for the underlying complexity, this collection privileges a comparative and translocal perspective. It includes contributions from anthropology and comparative religion, with case studies from Croatia (Michaela Schäuble, Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg), Israel/Palestine (Jackie Feldman, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva), Ghana (Katharina Schramm) and Germany (Insa Eschebach, Ravensbrück Memorial Museum).

Schäuble examines the ways in which the commemorative landscape of the border region of the Dinaric mountain range, a site of historic battles and deaths, is currently being reappropriated in Croatian religious nationalism. Feldman also deals with a border situation: that of the Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine, which has profound impact on how various groups of Christian pilgrims perceive and construct the sacred landscape of the Holy Land. Schramm’s focus is on the Northern Ghanaian landscape that is currently being redesigned as a destination for African American pilgrimage tourists in search of the transatlantic slave trail, while at the same time serving as a reference to more localized (and religiously connoted) memories of the inner-African slave trade. Eschebach demonstrates how the seemingly timeless symbolism of ashes and soil at the former concentration camp Ravensbrück in eastern Germany is contested by different groups of survivors in shifting constellations of state memorialization.

Please access History and Memory at JSTOR, where you can purchase subscriptions or articles.