Indiana University Press Journals Weblog

Feminist Receptions of Biblical Women

Carol Hamoy © 2012

In an installation entitled The Invisible Part of the Children of Israel, Carol Hamoy moves the Bible’s ancillary women out of the margins to the textual center. Cutting the names of biblical women from letterpress-printed books, she simultaneously excises them from their scriptural context to stand starkly alongside their own self-definitions, crafted from the biblical text: “I am the youngest daughter of,” “I am the wife of,” “I am the mother of.” Hamoy gives the biblical women voices but only has them use their voices to signal how they stand in relation to others. Their lives, histories, hopes, desires and motivations are still unknown to us, and so, in coming to know them as names in relationship, we are made more keenly aware of how little the Bible allowed us to know them. Hamoy’s work, featured on the cover and in Judith Margolis’s essay in the latest issue of Nashim 24: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, is concerned with “recovering the histories of lives and women long unmentioned.” An outstanding example of the critical reception of biblical women in modern feminist art, it provides a visual entry into the subject treated by five scholarly contributors to this issue of Nashim.

In recent decades, reception history has gained an increasingly prominent place in biblical studies. Concerned not with how scripture came to be but with the influence it has come to have, this branch of the discipline attends to the ways that the Bible has been read and interpreted throughout time. Reception history examines the use of the Bible in faith communities and in secular culture; its role in the evolution of religious beliefs and practices; its impact on later social and political developments; and its recastings in post-biblical literature, art, music and film. Some of the most important work done in Bible studies and its subfields in the past 30 years has deployed feminist theory in the service of literary, anthropological, socio-historical and contextual analysis of the Hebrew Bible. However, few venues have been dedicated to feminist work in reception history. This issue of Nashim provides that venue.

The essays by Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, Inbar Raveh, Kristine Henriksen Garroway, Erica Siegel and Wendy Zierler in Nashim 24 illuminate ways in which the stories of biblical women have been read and reread, told and retold through the centuries. Each foregrounds the feminist concerns involved not only with the biblical texts it treats but also with the ways the texts have been handed on. These feminist concerns are not small ones: there is a significant political dimension to each of these readings. At the same time, the contributors offer nuanced, perceptive readings of the biblical texts themselves, and, thus, these essays represent a convergence of fields. Not only do they make a solid contribution to the reception history of the Bible and a very welcome and much-needed contribution to its feminist receptions; they also contribute notable—and delightful—literary readings of the Bible.

From the Introduction to the issue by Consulting Editor Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg

Carol Hamoy’s works may be viewed on her website: http://carolhamoy.com/. 

ANONYMOUS NO MORE: CAROL HAMOY’S VISIBLE WOMEN by Judith Margolis, Art Editor: Nashim

Measuring Time: Karin Barber and the Study of Popular Arts in Contemporary Africa

Research in African Literatures, Vol. 43, No. 4
Measuring Time: Karin Barber and the Study of Everyday Africa
Onookome Okome and Stephanie Newell, Guest Editors

The essays in this volume celebrate the depth, scope and ambition of Karin Barber’s 1987 essay, “Popular Arts in Africa, “which sets out to open and solidify the study of popular arts in Africa."

Barber’s essay continues to be regarded as groundbreaking, incisive, decisive, and the most influential work on African popular arts in African studies scholarship. A cursory database search proves this fact: it is one of the most referenced essays within African studies and perhaps the most eloquent essay to date on the subject.

The essay’s foundation was built on solid field research and thoughtful, inspired analysis, the kind of which we can only compare to a few other scholars in the field. It brought order and some measure of respectability to the study of African popular performance in its broadest sense.

Published twenty-five years ago, “Popular Arts in Africa” has influenced the work of a generation of Africanists in Africa and all over the world. Going back to this essay reminds us that a lot may have changed since it was published, but the desires and methods of expressing want, deprivation, happiness, hope, and aspiration on the streets of the continent are more or less the same as they were twenty-five years ago.

The contributors therefore implicitly testify without exception that the definitional ground has been adequately covered by Barber’s essay. What these contributors do bring newly to the table as they examine the cultural changes and social transformations that matter to popular Africa—especially those that have to do with the transition from old media to new forms is their interrogations and novel interpretations of the modalities of change in the popular arts that have emerged or are emerging since the publication of Barber’s essay. They show how new technologies have helped to recast and rephrase narrative styles, themes, audiences, and the city in these art forms.

The essays in this volume also demonstrate how media interacts with new modes of artistic production and consumption in contemporary Africa. It means then that the first major aspect we find in these essays is that they proclaim the veracity of Barber’s argument in all its complex manifestations. It is used to read and probe the saliencies of the new art forms that have emerged in the last twenty five years. This makes the eloquent point that Barber’s intervention was as relevant when it was first published as it is now.

Excerpts from the Introduction by the guest editors.

For more information on Karin Barber: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/cwas/barber-karin.aspx

To subscribe to Research in African Literatures or to purchase a single issue, visit http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=reseafrilite.

Modernist Texts-CFP

The Journal of Modern Literature, a leading scholarly serial in modernist studies, has extended the deadline for its call for papers on “The Pedagogy of Modernist Texts” to July 1, 2013.

JML is interested in receiving informed critical analyses of the challenges and opportunities involved in teaching modernist movements, figures, and texts, with particular focus on important questions of historical, political, theoretical, and/or formal contexts and concerns.

Papers should conform to the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7^th edition, and should be accompanied by a 100-150 word abstract and 3-5 keywords. Submissions should not exceed 9,000 words for the entire submission package. JML does not consider manuscripts that are under review elsewhere or that have been previously published.

Submit electronic copies of anonymous manuscripts (in Word or RTF format) via e-mail to: Laurel Garver at  jml.editorial@gmail.com. Submissions must be sent by July 1, 2013, to be considered for this special cluster.

The Muddy Flow of African/American history

In Transition 108, our authors take "the long view from the levee" and survey the muddy flow of African/American history. From the banks of the Mississippi to the back roads of Ivory Coast, manmade dams and barricades block access to our homelands. But the past has a way of leaking through: West African aesthetic forms in the work of an American sculptor, old soul food joints in the New Newark,  the scars of racism in contemporary Cuban art, and the sweet sound of the Gospel Train replaced by Soul Train, a form of secular testifying that taught us to moonwalk down the line.

CONTENTS

The Long View from the Levee —New Orleans is famous for its wild river and creolized culture. But over time, has the unpredictable flow of blood resulted in more fear than freedom? Shirley Thompson charts the course of racial mixture through the city’s history from the banks of the Mississippi.

“Love, Peace, and Soul” —In decades publicly defined by race riots, police brutality, and the crisis in Vietnam, Don Cornelius and his troops of young dancers used the power of black celebration to stage a celebration of black power. Laurence Ralph joins the Soul Train.

Race and Racism in Cuban Art —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. engages curators Elio Rodríguez Valdés and Alejandro de la Fuente in conversation about Queloides, an exhibition that explores the social and cultural scars of racism in contemporary Cuba.

The White Year · Poetry by Mara Jebsen

Last Van to Korhogo—By the end of 2004, Ivory Coast’s civil war had cooled to a simmer, but the country remained split in two, with a rebel-held north and a government-held south. What do these divisions mean to people on the move, late for christenings, doctor’s appointments, and dinners with friends?  Siddhartha Mitter recalls a slow road trip to Korhogo.

Creating a New Negro Art in America—How did a major university come to sell a 22-foot-long panel by a celebrated African American sculptor for the chump change of $150? Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, at work on a book about Sargent Johnson, knows that the answer to this question lies deep in the institutional history of the “new negro art.”

Names of the Dead · Fiction by Émille Hunt

Split Palate —Though seduced by the jazz, mojitos, and upscale funk of the “new” Newark, journalist Reniqua Allen develops an appetite for the soul food of the city’s Central Ward, and the undersung history of “old” Newark’s middle class.

“Tense and Tender Ties” —Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, Kimberly DaCosta close reads Janny Scott’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.

Cover Image: Soundsuit. © 2009 Nick Cave

Transition 108 will ship in June, 2012. Visit the journal's IU Press Transition website to subscribe. Print single issues may be ordered directly from IU Press customer service: 800-842-6796 (inside the USA) or 812-855-8817 (outside the USA).

Find and Friend: JML on Facebook

The Journal of Modern Literature now has a page on Facebook that includes information on submitting, subscribing and advertising. If you have a Facebook account, please go to this link (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Journal-of-Modern-Literature/254345014644623) and click the "like" button. Please encourage your colleagues and students to do so as well.

The page will enable us to quickly and easily share the latest JML news on forthcoming issues and calls for papers. It is also a forum for you to give us feedback and network with other scholars.

Poets and Writers

Today’s Crop of International Literary Magazines

Sixty years ago Americans were introduced to the work of authors from around the globe in the pages of New World Writing, a “new adventure in modern reading,” published biannually from 1952 to 1959 by New American Library. During its seven-year run, the journal highlighted literature out of Argentina, Ghana, Japan, and elsewhere alongside poetry and prose by influential American authors, setting the stage for today’s crop of international literary magazines. Transition (dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition-magazine), founded two years after New World Writing ceased publication, recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. READ MORE.

Victorian Studies, a leader in multi-disciplinary approach

Contributed by Ivan Kreilkamp, editor, Victorian Studies

When Victorian Studies was founded in the 1950s, its interdisciplinary approach to the study of a particular period, publishing the work of scholars of literature, the fine arts, history, the history of science, political thought, among other topics -- was groundbreaking and influential, part of the birth of what became Cultural Studies. And although interdisciplinarity long ago become a buzzword and a familiar method in the academy, Victorian Studies remains a leader in offering an intellectual and institutional space for a creative, imaginative, and rigorous inter- and multi-disciplinary approach to the study of nineteenth-century Britain. Simply to scan the contents of a given issue's book reviews always sparks new lines of insight and connection for me, as work on poetry, popular science, utilitarian philosophical thought, media history, the Crimean War, Pre-Raphaelite painting, working-class ballads, music history, and so on, lies cheek by jowl. I was trained as a scholar of literature with a strong interest in cultural studies and other forms of interdisciplinary work, but editing Victorian Studies (and therefore reading each issue very carefully!) over the past decade has vastly enriched my understanding of the ways any given event, art work, cultural production, historical fact, or piece of discourse will variously signify within, to to the side of, and across traditional disciplinary categories.  Even as I retain a healthy respect for the specificity of disciplinary training and the value of focused expertise -- sometimes it does take a scholar of poetry to explicate a sonnet most resourcefully, or a historian to offer the deepest analysis of a cultural turning point -- I love the way Victorian Studies invites and generates opportunities for surprising and mind-expanding affiliations, crossing-points, conversations.

I'm especially proud of the book forums we occasionally organize, in the place of a more typical single review, for work of particular interest and importance. We recently asked, for example, a social historian, a political theorist, and a literary scholar to discuss Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain by Elaine Hadley, a literary scholar; and a historian of science, a historian who specializes in science and visual culture, and a philosophically-inclined literary critic to evaluate Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, two prominent historians of science. In such forums, the Victorian Studies ideal of cross-disciplinary exchange is especially visible, as a given book forum -- including a response by the book's authors -- always exceeds the sum of its parts by showing how variously a given methodology, argument, or interpretation will communicate in different disciplinary contexts.

A similar buzz is generated by our annual issues containing papers originally delivered at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference. For these, we typically ask two or three senior scholars from different fields and disciplines to choose three papers from the conference that they found especially strong and interesting, embodying emergent ideas and issues. We then publish these papers as a group along with a response from the senior scholar; the results have often been memorable, including major assessments of the state of the field by such eminent figures as Mary Poovey (English, NYU), James Vernon (History, UC Berkeley), and Tim Barringer (Art History, Yale). Part of what makes these forums so lively is their mixture of established and newer voices; it's always exciting to see a rising graduate student or new assistant professor step forward to make a compelling statement in this context, in conversation with some of the best-known scholars in his or her field (and elsewhere).

With the help of IUP, Victorian Studies is extraordinarily well-produced, with vivid cover art drawn from the contents of a given issue and, often, beautifully illuminating illustrations to articles. I like to think that the respect we pay to the visual, and to the production values of our print (and online) publication more generally, is one seemingly small but crucial element in our recognition of the richness and multivalence of scholarship and of culture itself. The Victorians certainly knew that no word, image, object, event, or statement contains or confers its own meaning in isolation: a rich interpretation or analysis of any aspect of art, thought, or culture needs to consider it in the widest context, as part of an endlessly complex totality.

Ellen Cronan Rose, PhD, co editor of JML since 2002

Ellen Cronan Rose, PhD, co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature since 2002, succumbed to cancer on October 10, 2011.  Her achievements include: professorships at Dartmouth and Haverford Colleges, MIT, UNLV and Drexel University; a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge University; books, papers and articles on Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing and feminist literature – several with collaborator Carey Kaplan; National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Conference Committee Chair; President of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages; Modern Language Association (MLA) Delegate Assembly, reporting on Women in the Profession; and President of the Doris Lessing Society. 

A tribute to Dr. Rose’s life and work will be published in JML 35.2 (Winter 2012).

Asian African Literatures

Research in African Literatures Volume 42 Number 3, Asian African Literatures, Special Guest Editor, Gaurav Desai

Citing the long history of the presence of peoples from the Indian sub-continent in Africa, the National Museums of Kenya sponsored, in 2000, a special exhibit on the "Asian African Heritage."  This special issue of Research in African Literatures follows the lead of this exhibition by bringing together new essays by some of the leading scholars who have written on Asian African literatures in East and South Africa. The articles engage both with writers who are now considered canonical, such as M.G. Vassanji from Tanzania and Ahmed Essop from South Africa, as well as newer voices that have emerged over the past decade. A significant emphasis in the volume is on women writers who have traditionally been marginalized in such discussions. The volume is also interested in extending the discussion of Asians in Africa to include a consideration of Asian slavery in the Dutch Cape Colony which has, of late, received attention in the writings of Rayda Jacobs and Ishtiyaq Shukri. The editor’s introduction includes a genealogy of Asian African literary activity in the first half of the twentieth century as well as a bibliography of literary works by Asian African writers that will be of interest to readers new to the subject. Also included is an e-conversation between the guest editor, Gaurav Desai, and the award winning writer M.G. Vassanji.

Published nearly forty years after the world witnessed the mass expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin from Uganda, and a political context in which the Indian Ocean is increasingly seen to have become a center stage for international maritime policy, this special issue not only critically evaluates the historical and cultural legacies of Asians in East and South Africa, but also asks pertinent questions about citizenship, nationalism and diaspora.

Anthropomorphic Taxidermy and Fantasies about Imperial Expansion

Fig. 1. Photograph of Walter Potter’s “The Kittens’ Wedding” (1890) from Walter Potter and his Museum of Curious Taxidermy, by Pat Morris. Ascot: MPM, 2008. Used by permission of Pat Morris.

Victorian Studies 53.1 (Autumn 2010) includes essays by Conor Creaney, Michelle Weinroth, and Aaron Worth. Creaney explores the anthropomorphic taxidermy of Walter Potter — think kitten weddings and elaborate bird funerals, all staged with actual animal carcasses — using Potter’s disquieting tableaux as a way of thinking through the fantasies of representation at work in Victorian fiction, most notably in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Weinroth reconsiders William Morris’s Kelmscott Press—founded to refashion Victorian typography and to create beautiful books on the model of medieval manuscripts — in order to question the truism that political activism need be incompatible with beautiful art oriented toward the past. She argues for an understanding of Morris's work at the Kelmscott Press as a new form of socialist praxis rather than, as it’s usually seen, as a break with radicalism. Worth examines the role of information technologies in Victorian imaginings of imperial systems, using the fiction of H. G. Wells (with its heliographs, transport cylinders, and kineto-tele-photographs) as a test case for the anxieties and fantasies about imperial expansion that media helped enable.

In a review forum organized around James Belich's Replenishing the Earth, Dror Wahrman, Peter J. Cain, and Saree Makdisi each consider the implications of Belich’s account of the Settler Revolution — the process that brought huge numbers of Europeans to non-Europeans lands in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — and also of the model for interdisciplinary history that Belich’s book represents. In his response to these critical analyses, Belich addresses both the centrality of the nineteenth century to any critical narrative of modernity and the new models for constructing such narratives afforded by digital technologies. This issue also features 34 book reviews, including Matt Houlbrook on Anna Clark’s Desire: A History of European Sexuality, Leslie A. Hall on Charles Upchurch’s Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform, and Anne Janowitz on Mike Sanders’ The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History.

For more information and to subscribe to Victorian Studies visit our IUP/Journals site on JSTOR.