Stanford University Press Blog

Exit with Care

A pilgrimage through London reveals the beauty of the banal.

by J. M. TYREE

Photo by J. M. Tyree

What to do with your last day in London? After twenty years of visiting, my answer hasn’t changed. Walk along the river somewhere. You can never get lost if you steer by the water. I set off from the Charing Cross—London lore defines the city as any point within fifteen miles of the spot—and I begin my journey by replicating the viewpoint of Monet’s Houses of Parliament. I had just seen the famous painting in the National Gallery, where a woman’s voice had decried the tourists for taking pictures of the pictures.

“They won’t stop them from doing it,” she declaimed for all of us silly foreigners to hear, “Heaven knows why.”

In the galleries, I snapped a picture of someone else’s phone held aloft in front of Caravaggio’s Judith, the severed head on the platter miniaturized on the tiny screen. I wanted to preserve my own subjective experience of the museum, which was about jostling for glimpses while tour guides held forth and tourists snapped away.

Removing the Shroud of Oblivion

Recovering the cultural memory of Salonica’s Jewish community.

by DEVIN E. NAAR

A 1910 postcard from Salonica featuring a Jewish man and women in traditional Jewish clothing.

The dynamic port city of Salonica, once home to the Young Turk movement that overthrew the Ottoman sultan in 1909 and the city over which the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Ottomans fought during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, is today a largely forgotten corner of the former Ottoman Empire and the second city of contemporary Greece. Salonica and her Jews—who remarkably numbered half of the city’s diverse inhabitants a century ago—once played key roles in the region’s culture, politics, and commerce. But the historic significance of the city in modern times—and particularly that of its Jewish residents—has largely been excised from academic and popular consciousness, a veritable “orphan of history,” as one scholar put it.

The historic significance of Salonica in modern times—and particularly that of its Jewish residents—has largely been excised from academic and popular consciousness.

The city’s invisibility to the outside world runs counter to my own upbringing, which was filled with stories from my Salonican-born relatives, all centering around this vibrant place and its people. Enchanting tales were told of my great grandfather, a rabbi and kabbalist, walking down the streets of Salonica side by side with a priest and an imam, or composing protective amulets for farmers who repaid him with live poultry and fresh produce; or my grandfather and his brother riding their prized possession—a bicycle—along the sea with the White Tower in the distance; or my great uncle and his wife and their children remaining in the city and “disappearing” during World War II. But how exactly did they disappear? Just as importantly, how had they lived? I wanted to access this lost world of Jewish Salonica—both to understand the world from which my family came and to restore a voice to the city and its Jewish community.

The Art of the Author Event

Tips and best practices for authors with bookstore events and readings.

by LINNIE GREENE

A reading at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, Washington. Photo by Joe Mabel. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Congratulations! You’ve toiled and labored over a manuscript, found a publisher, and saw your project to fruition. It would seem, initially, like the hardest part is behind you, but before you collapse on your chaise lounge with a Manhattan, it’s my job to insist that there’s still much work to be done. As a marketer and former bookstore employee, I’m unabashedly biased when I say public appearances and readings are foundational to a book’s success. While the plan of attack will differ by genre (i.e. a niche monograph versus a trade-friendly title), suffice it to say that one of the best ways to put your product in people’s hands is to show up with it in person. That’s all fine and good, but it’s arduous to plan a book tour! Below you’ll find my tips on milking appearances for all they’re worth, from the booking process to the after-party.

The Singing Turk at Center Stage

How Europeans once saw themselves through Turkish eyes at the opera.

by LARRY WOLFF

Teatro Rossini. 2012. Photo by Lorenzo Gaudenzi. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

This summer the Rossini Opera Festival—dedicated to producing the works of composer Gioachino Rossini and located in the composer’s hometown of Pesaro on the Adriatic Sea—presented the comedy Il turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy), first performed in 1814 but nowadays rarely staged. In the Europe of 2016, deeply polarized over Middle Eastern Muslim refugees and the longstanding presence of Muslim immigrants, this light-hearted comic opera hits some very provocative notes: it tells the tale of a traveling Turk, the vocally glamorous, irresistibly seductive Prince Selim, who comes to Italy, as if on vacation. It’s an opera that, even as it entertains us, compels us to reflect seriously about the nature of our current cultural conflict and the very different sorts of imagined encounters that have formed a part of Western culture.

Under the influence of the Enlightenment Turks became figures of interest with whom Europeans could ultimately identify.

Operas about Turks were actually a staple of the performance repertory throughout the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century, when Rossini became the last important composer to feature singing Turks in his operas. Under the influence of the European Enlightenment Turks became figures of interest with whom Europeans could ultimately identify; they could recognize in Turkish scenarios their own political ambivalences (concerning absolute government), their own social anxieties (about the hierarachy of the sexes), and could even explore a European sense of self as mirrored in the figure of the singing Turk.

The Rivaling Narratives of WWII

Decades after the war’s end, Obama steps into Asia’s history debates in Hiroshima.

by DANIEL SNEIDER & GI-WOOK SHIN

Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and President Barack Obama shaking hands at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. May 2016. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Though the end of World War II may seem part of the distant past (Japan formally surrendered seventy-one years ago today) the cultural and political legacy of that conflict still looms large over the international stage, particularly in Asia. President Barack Obama’s visit this past May to Hiroshima did more than pay homage to the victims of the atomic bombing carried out by the United States more than seven decades ago. The President also stepped into the complex and often treacherous realm of wartime historical memory.

Memories of wartime events among the combatants of the war are fractured and contested.

Memories of wartime events among the combatants of the war are fractured and contested—Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Americans have formed almost distinct narratives of the war and its meaning. And even within those societies, there are rivaling accounts and understandings of the past. These divergent memories explain why wartime history issues remain a catalyst for conflict in the region, where political leaders use this history to mobilize nationalist feelings.

6 Picks from our Back-to-School Sale

A few must-reads—now 50% off through the end of this week.

 

Stuff your book bags with titles from our Back-to-School sale! Now through September 25th receive 35% off new and recent titles, 45% off on orders over $60. And now through the end of this week receive 50% off on featured sale titles, including all 6 listed below, and several others featured in our beach reads, summer picks, and gift book recommendations from 2015 and 2016.

 

1

Engines of Empire »
Steamships and the Victorian Imagination

by DOUGLAS R. BURGESS

RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
historians and steampunks

Following famous travelers like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Jules Verne as well as ordinary spectators, tourists, and imperial administrators, Engines of Empire offers a bold and wryly told account of the steamship and its outsized imprint on the cultural imaginary and imperial clout of Western society. Burgess reveals how steamships, which became the quintessential symbol of modernity, nationalism, empire, and civilization itself, offer an invaluable lens through with to consider (or reconsider) Victorian society. Offering a corrective for decades of hagiography lauding the technological prowess of the steamship, this book balances this narrative against the catastrophic consequences that the advent of the steam engine posed for subjugated peoples around the world.

“[Engines of Empire] barrels forth with creativity and character, to offer a voyage at once informative and thought provoking.”

—Glenn S. Gordinier, author of The Rocket’s Red Glare: The War of 1812 and Connecticut

Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 »

 

History and Literature Entwined

Foucault suggests that the relationship between the two subjects is more complex than we often think.

by ROBERT LEHMAN 

Public domain via Pixabay.

In The Order of Things, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, Michel Foucault describes the birth around the turn of the nineteenth century of two new epistemological or linguistic forms, forms, he suggests, that his contemporaries have taken for granted. The first of these, which pervades all of the soft sciences, is history, here the name not only for the awareness that events and our experience of events occur in time but also for the peculiarly modern belief that a thing’s most fundamental truth can be revealed through an interrogation of the temporal processes by which it came to be. The second is literature, now in the emphatic sense of the term as it unfolds from Hölderlin to Mallarmé, Roussel, and Beckett, a mode of language concerned not with adequation to reality but with its own intransitive existence: “a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.”

Foucault wants to show how we’ve moved away from an earlier moment guided by the rationalist ideal of clear and distinct ideas.

History and literature, then: two uniquely modern forms. Although expressed in the sometimes oracular language typical of his milieu, Foucault’s claim about the roughly coincident birth of these forms is not, I think, especially controversial. History was indeed “born” in the nineteenth century, not only in the grand sense that Foucault intends but also in the more prosaic sense that it was codified as a discipline almost simultaneously at the University of Berlin (1810) and the Sorbonne (1812), and very much in the wake of the French Revolution. And it was certainly present to the consciousness of the age. Literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, for example, could write in 1798 to his brother August that “I am disgusted by any theory that is not historical”; half a century later, Flaubert would write to the Goncourt brothers that “the historical sense dates from yesterday. And it is perhaps the best thing about the nineteenth century”; and Nietzsche’s warning in the second essay of the Untimely Meditations that “there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people, or a culture” would hardly have seemed as urgent a century earlier.

Why Manners Matter

Even if only a pretense, staying civil is in Donald Trump’s interest (and ours too).

by KEITH J. BYBEE

Donald Trump speaking in Washington D.C., 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

During the 2016 presidential election a great deal of attention has been paid to a single question: How should Donald Trump behave?

Even as Trump occasionally acted like a conventional candidate he also continued to flout proprieties.

From the first days of the campaign through much of the primary season, Trump appeared to specialize in defying conventional electoral etiquette. He said many inappropriate things. He called Mexican immigrants rapists, pointedly questioned the intelligence of one of his opponents, and condemned the esteemed veteran John McCain for having been a prisoner of war. Trump also mocked a reporter with disabilities, and he insinuated that the tough questioning he received at a debate occurred because one of the moderators was menstruating.

The outrageous comments and inflammatory insults were, as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski frequently observed, a result of simply letting Trump be Trump. Trump was his own man. He listened only to his gut, not to pollsters and consultants.

Trump’s authenticity won enthusiastic praise from core supporters. Yet as the prospect of Trump winning the Republican nomination became more certain, pressure mounted on Trump to change his ways. Lewandowski was pushed aside by a new campaign manager, Paul Manafort, a seasoned political professional who promised to pivot Trump toward a more conventionally presidential public style. “You can’t change somebody’s character,” Manafort observed shortly after joining the Trump campaign. “But you can change the way somebody presents themselves.”

Babies Across Borders

How adoption has become an integral part of China’s global agenda.

by LESLIE K. WANG

A young Chinese orphan boy fiddles with a volunteer's cell phone at Beijing's Shunyi Orphanage. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

At the outset of 2016 the Chinese government announced the end of its decades-long One-Child Policy. Introduced in the early 1980s alongside sweeping economic reforms, it was (and remains) the strictest fertility regulation in history, the goal of which—in the eyes of state authorities—was to cultivate a smaller, more competitive population that could help transform the nation into a global leader. After preventing roughly 400 million births and climbing to the top of the world economy, China has largely achieved these objectives. Yet, tragically, the combination of childbearing restrictions and parental preferences for healthy male heirs also led to the abortion and abandonment of countless female babies and special needs children, many of whom ended up in state-run orphanages. In a process managed by the Chinese government, over 140,000 of these children—primarily healthy girls—have joined Western middle-class families spread across 16 different countries through adoption.

International adoption has mushroomed into a multimillion-dollar industry.

International adop­tion can be controversial because it inherently mixes care with consumerism—at $20,000 to $30,000 US dollars per placement, it has mush­roomed into a multimillion-dollar industry upon which many Chinese orphanages and other service providers have become reliant. Typically, nations that allow outsiders to care for their most vulnerable children tend to be seen as lower down on the global hierarchy. When China first began its international adoption program in 1991, its economy was only beginning to transform, fitting the usual model in which babies tend to be sent from developing to industrialized regions. However, unlike other child “sending” countries, China has continued to place children abroad and accept foreign resources for its orphanages while enjoying unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. Why is the Chinese state allowing Westerners to assist and rear its most marginalized youth when it now has the ability to do so itself?

Max Weber As Told By Emojis

6 key sociological concepts from Weber’s oeuvre rendered in emoji-speak.

 

Max Weber, the author of such foundational sociological texts as Economy and Society and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, never held a professorship in sociology. Trained in law, and predominantly employed in academia as an economist, the closest Weber ever came to a post in sociology was an appointment to chair in social science, economic history, and economics at the University of Munich a year before his death. He himself, however, considered this to be an appointment as a “sociologist.” Today, many consider to be among the founders of the discipline writ large.

The Max Weber Dictionary » aid the reader in understanding Weber’s work.

Yet because Weber was conversant in so many different disciplines, navigating his work can sometimes prove difficult. He made pioneering contributions not only to sociology, but to the study of politics and government, economics, religion, and the philosophy of science as well. A polymath who wrote widely and at great length, much of Weber's work concerns and continues to shape how we understand modernity and its attendant phenomena: the rise of capitalism, the secularization and bureaucratization of society, and the emergence of the rational-legal state. The Max Weber Dictionary, the second edition of which publishes next month, aims to distill key terms and core concepts from Weber's vast and complex corpus into a concise guide. And to synthesize a handful of those ideas even further we've paired a few of the entries from the latest edition into a still more concise lexicon—one well-tooled for the zeitgeist of the digital age: emoji-speak.

National Belonging in South Korea

Migration and diaspora politics are challenging what it means to be “Korean.”

a Q&A with JAEEUN KIM and HAE YEON CHOO

Seoul, South Korea. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

South Korea, one of the standout economic success stories of recent decades, now boasts the 11th biggest economy in the world and has quickly become a destination for migrants from neighboring countries in East and Southeast Asia. Though today, migrants from China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere flock to the country in search of opportunity, up to and during World War II, Koreans sought opportunity outside of their now popular homeland, migrating en masse to Japan and Manchuria. Both those ethnic Koreans who remained in Japan and Manchuria after the collapse of the Japanese Empire and the ethnically non-Korean migrants settling in South Korea today have complicated questions of citizenship, belonging, and identity—namely, who is Korean and what it means in practice—throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

Jaeeun Kim and Hae Yeon Choo, both of whom have studied migration to and from Korea and the attendant issues of membership politics and nationalism, answer a few questions about the politics of migration, citizenship, and national belonging in the Korean context.

The Making of the Syrian Disaster

How state interests stoked radicalism and abandoned the moderates in the opposition. 

by GILBERT ACHCAR

Syrian soldier with a PKM machine gun. Public domain via Wikipedia.

There is a striking symmetry between the foreign policy agendas of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the Middle East: they produced similar results in opposite ways—military aggression in Bush’s case and denial of assistance in Obama’s. The symmetry does not stop at the devastation of both the countries affected, namely Iraq and Syria. It also concerns one of the dreadful consequences of this devastation: whereas the Bush-run US invasion of Iraq created the conditions that led to the emergence of the “Islamic State of Iraq” (ISI) that al-Qaida proclaimed in 2006, as well as to the expansion of the parent organization across the Arab region, the Obama-adjudicated denial of crucial support to the Syrian opposition created the conditions that allowed the ISI to develop in Syria and mutate into ISIS in 2013. This was followed the year after by the announcement of the “Islamic State” tout court as a successful franchise, opening branches in its turn all over the Arab region and way beyond.

Moderate factions were swiftly eclipsed by more radical elements that were in turn aided, directly or indirectly, by other states.

Robert Ford, who resigned from his position as US ambassador to Syria in February 2014 due to his disagreement with Barack Obama’s Syrian policy, very clearly attributed responsibility for this disastrous course of events to the US president. In an interview on PBS Newshour a few months after his resignation, he even issued a premonitory warning against future attacks on US soil, as was to happen with the ISIS-inspired shootings in San Bernardino and Orlando. Ford maintained that the US was too reticent in lending assistance to the moderate forces in the Syrian opposition who have, he says, “been fighting constantly with arms tied behind their backs, because they don’t have the same resources that either Assad does or the al-Qaida groups in Syria do” and who in Ford’s estimation “frankly, we have much in common with.”

Decolonizing Sociology

Since its inception, sociologists have unconsciously practiced a white sociology.

by STEPHEN STEINBERG

Image adapted from "School segregation protest" (public domain, via Wikipedia) and "15/365 Black Lives Matter" (CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr).

Just as sociology notoriously failed to predict the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s, it was unprepared for the eruption of racial conflict that spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. As before, dominant discourses complacently assumed that the nation had made great strides in “race relations,” highlighted by the election of “the first black president” in 2008.

Just as sociology notoriously failed to predict the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s, it was unprepared for the eruption of racial conflict that spawned the Black Lives Matter movement.

By uncanny coincidence, the 1963 meeting of the American Sociological Association occurred on the same day as the historic March on Washington. In his presidential address Everett Hughes posed the right question: “Why did social scientists—and sociologists in particular—not foresee the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American society?” However, Hughes was utterly incapable of providing an answer to his own question and drifted off into pedantic obfuscation.

Actually, there were some sociologists who did anticipate the racial upheaval that “exploded” in the 1960s. Chief among them was W.E.B. Du Bois who wrote in 1906, at a meeting of the Niagara Movement in Harpers Ferry that spawned the NAACP: “We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.” Du Bois was not alone. There was a cadre of minority and radical scholars who anticipated the civil rights revolution, precisely because it fit into their theoretical and political paradigm. But like Du Bois, they were regarded as substituting politics for science, and were ignored or marginalized.

A New Social Contract

To tackle inequality, businesses, workers, and the public sector need to come together.

by JODY HOFFER GITTELL and THOMAS KOCHAN

CC0 via Pexels.

Some see business primarily as a force for good, while others see it primarily as a force for evil. Some see labor and the public sector as impediments to innovation while others see them as the only avenues for hope. In a bitterly divided political era like the present, these narrow perspectives not only fail to find common ground, they reinforce the lack of trust in institutions that generate anger, frustration, and even violence in our world today.

We see less inequality and more robust democratic participation in capitalist economies that have greater engagement.

One of the key issues that divides us is what to do to stop or reverse the growth in income inequality that seems to be virtually unstoppable. While we all decry it to some extent, conservatives tend to blame growing inequality on excessive government, cycles of dependency and so on, while progressives tend to blame growing inequality on capitalist greed.

There are better explanations. We can see that inequality is increasing around the world in countries with capitalist economies like ours—but we see less inequality and more robust democratic participation in capitalist economies that have greater engagement and more respectful dialogue across business, government, labor, and education sectors.

Closing the Gender Gap in Business

How successful women entrepreneurs can pay it forward, balance the scales, and drive the economy.

by SUSAN COLEMAN

CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are roughly 9.9 million women-owned firms in the United States, representing over a third of all firms in the country—and the ranks of new enterprises with women at the helm are growing rapidly. Between 2007 and 2012, women-owned firms in our country grew by 27 percent compared to a growth rate of 2 percent for firms overall. But in spite of their impressive growth in numbers, the business ventures women are launching today continue to lag behind those launched by men in terms of revenues and employment. So while an increasing number of women can count themselves as entrepreneurs, many appear to be running into barriers, as the vast majority of their businesses remain quite small.

What’s holding women back? What’s capping their businesses?

What’s holding women back? What’s capping their businesses? A crucial pitfall is that women face unique challenges in their attempts to acquire financial capital. Growth-oriented firms typically require substantial investment—both in the form of bank loans and external equity in the form of angel or venture capital funding—to scale up. Meanwhile, a number of studies reveal that women entrepreneurs raise significantly smaller amounts of capital than men and face continued barriers in their attempts to secure external equity in particular.