Stanford University Press Blog

What Makes the Business of Writing So Interesting

Using fiction to realize a new mental architecture.

a Q&A with BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

Novelist Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, author of The Woman Who Read Too Much.

Q:

The Woman Who Read Too Much is set in 19^th-century Persia (now Iran) and is built in part on the life of a historical figure, the revolutionary female poets Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn. Am I right to think that you came to the idea of this novel initially through learning about her? 

A:

The general outlines of this story have been familiar to me since childhood. Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn was my ideal, the “heroine” I learned about growing up in a Baha’i family; she was the first woman to embrace the revolutionary teachings of the Bab, who was the prophet herald of the Baha’i Faith. An erudite scholar, a theologian as well as a poet, Tahirih understood, from her reading of the Quran, that religion, like all other human institutions, has a life cycle; Islam was in need not merely of reform but of renewal. This belief, based on the teachings of Ali Muhammad the Bab, pitched her into a headlong battle with the clerics of her generation, a struggle that is still raging in Islamic countries today.

I learned all this from history; her ideas and her ideals are well documented. But I discovered much later, as an adult, how little I actually knew about her as a woman, how little I could trust about what people have written of her life. It was because there were so many contradictions surrounding this woman that I came to the idea of writing a novel: it was precisely in order to contain all the contradictions and the paradoxes she symbolizes, that I chose fiction.

Signed Book Giveaway: The Woman Who Read Too Much

Enter to win a signed copy of a new novel chronicling one woman's luminous legacy.

Plots. Political intrigue. Treachery. The high-handed actions of omnipotent rulers. Death by decree. That’s the world that Bahiyyih Nakhjavani plunges readers into with The Woman Who Read Too Much: Persia in the mid-nineteenth century, a society that clings to the old ways even as the world around it is rapidly transforming.

A young Shah, personally and politically weak, sits on an uncertain throne, fascinated by modernity even as he fears the Western powers that would deliver it to his nation—for a price. When a female poet, based in part on Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn, a historical personality who was also a theologian and revolutionary, dares to reject the veil and begin agitating for female literacy, her campaign shakes the very foundations of Persian society. Nakhjavani tells the story of the poet’s campaign through the eyes of the women of Iran—officially excluded from power, yet finding unexpected, subversive ways to exercise it nonetheless. Through these women, we see a society on the brink of change—and the deadly political maneuvering and violence that will accompany it.

Enter your name and email below for a chance to win one of five author signed copies of the novel which Kirkus describes as a "haunting . . . expertly crafted epic" and, in 2007, was counted among the "best three books" of the year by the Time Literary Supplement (£). Winners will be randomly selected and announced on Friday.

Also see book tour details for Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's The Woman Who Read Too Much.

The Polarization of South Korea

The legacy of authoritarianism and people’s movements.

by PAUL Y. CHANG

South Korean citizens perform a card stunt for President Park Chung Hee on South Korean Army day, October 1, 1973. CC-BY-SA 2.5 via Wikipedia.

“Minjung Theology is dead.”

This obituary was whispered to me with more than a hint of regret by a third generation minjung theologian during a research trip to South Korea. The “minjung” (a term to denote the masses, or the “people”) was a hallmark of South Korea’s democracy movement. But as ubiquitous as the minjung sentiment was in the 1980s, manifest not only in political rhetoric but also in music, art, literature, philosophy, and theology, you would be hard-pressed to find remnants of it today in South Korean politics and society.

While some lament the death of the democracy movement—a “glorious” movement when the people rose up to fight tyranny and injustice—others see it as the natural trajectory of a nation that made the transition to democratic governance. Riding the “third wave of democracy,” South Korea reinstituted direct presidential elections in 1987 (rescinded in 1972) and today, enjoys a relatively stable democratic polity. The peaceful transitions of power between South Korea’s conservative and progressive parties are sure signs that South Korea is now a functioning, if not always peaceful, democracy.

Though the 1970s are considered by many to be the “dark age for democracy” in Korea, it was in the crucible of this repressive decade that a sustained movement for democracy emerged.

Competing for Global Talent

How South Korea can leverage brain drain to shore up its competitive edge.

by GI-WOOK SHIN

South Korean currency via Wikimedia Commons.

A war for global talent has been raging throughout the twenty-first century. The competition to attract highly skilled manpower is becoming fiercer and fiercer among countries, as well as among corporations. Economic globalization has facilitated the movement of skilled workers, and the demand for foreign talent is highest in the most advanced countries, due to their low birth rates and aging populations. Seldom is this truer than in Korea, which has one of the most rapidly aging populations and lowest fertility rates.

It is challenging for a country like Korea, with an ethnically homogeneous population, to attract foreign talent.

However, it is challenging for a country like Korea, with an ethnically homogeneous population, to attract foreign talent when compared with the more cosmopolitan settler societies who have broader avenues for immigration and assimilation. In addition, Korea sends many bright young people for study abroad (e.g., the third largest number of international students to the United States, after China and India), with some of them never returning home. This phenomenon has understandably provoked intense debate over the question of brain drain among Korean experts and policy makers. 

I, myself, am one of many Korean students who came to study in the United States and remained here well after graduation. More than three decades have passed since l left Seoul’s Yonsei University to pursue graduate studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. At the time, I had every intention of returning to Korea with an advanced degree. Yet I am still in the United States, teaching at an American college.

Am I a case of “brain drain” for Korea?

China’s Rise Is Over

While IR experts marvel at China’s growth, the PRC’s own elites take a more sober view.

by DANIEL C. LYNCH

Pudong is a district of Shanghai, home to the Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, the Shanghai World Financial Center, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

The Rise of China is over.

Note, by the way, that in saying the rise of China is over, I am not saying that China is on the verge of a collapse—I am not even certain what a collapse would look like. There are many people outside of China, portentously predicting a collapse, who evidently have in mind something like the disintegration of the Soviet Union—which, given the multiethnic, empire-like nature of the PRC, one could never rule out completely. But after poring over interviews, books, “internal circulation only” (neibu) policy analyses, and open source journals concerning what Chinese elites think the future holds, I found no suggestion that anyone of influence in the PRC expects a collapse—they do however, express anxiety over an impending “leveling off”.

Note, by the way, that in saying the rise of China is over, I am not saying that China is on the verge of a collapse.

Plateaus, while admittedly not as sensational as doomsday predictions, are nonetheless important in the case of China and its heretofore-meteoric ascension on the world stage. So great is China’s economic clout and attendant global power that an end to the rise would be big enough. It would be “ginormous,” as they say in the business and economics media. And while external specialists have cleaved to the narrative of China as being on a nonstop trajectory of sensational growth and expanding influence, government and business leaders within the PRC today take a much more sober view, challenging the dominant narrative of China as the ever-rising power. According to them, the end of the rise of China may well be in sight; the most important remaining question is how all of the key players, inside and outside of China, will adapt to this awesome, world-historical change.

AAS 2015: A Blog Series

On the rise of China, rethinking "brain drain", and South Korea’s democracy movement.

Three new books in Stanford's Asian Studies list » debuting this Spring.

In advance of the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting (kicking off this Friday), this week the Stanford Press blog presents a lineup of pieces zeroing in on recent scholarship in Asian Studies including a myth-busting piece on China’s rise, a reassessment of the “brain drain” phenomenon in the global competition for talent, and a reflection on South Korea’s democracy movement. Also see tips on writing vividly in academia from sociology and Asian Studies editor, Jenny Gavacs, who will be in attendance at the AAS conference and hosting an open hour from 1-2 pm on Saturday at the Stanford booth (#401), where you can also pick up new Asian Studies titles at a 20-30% discount.

 

China’s Rise Is Over ⇨

While IR experts marvel at China’s growth, the PRC’s own elites take a more sober view.

by DANIEL C. LYNCH

Tuesday

Competing for Global Talent ⇨

How South Korea can leverage brain drain to shore up its competitive edge.

by GI-WOOK SHIN

Wednesday

The Polarization of South Korea ⇨

How Korean politics and society evolved from solidarity to dissension.

by PAUL CHANG

Thursday

South Asia in Motion ⇨

A new book series aims to capture the tectonic transformations of the subcontinent.

by THOMAS BLOM HANSEN

Friday

So You’re Writing a Monograph ⇨

Our new sociology and Asian Studies editor on writing vividly in academia.

by JENNY GAVACS

20-30% Off New Asian Studies Titles ⇨

Who says you have to go to the conference to get the conference discount?

South Asia in Motion

A new book series aims to capture the tectonic transformations of the subcontinent.

by THOMAS BLOM HANSEN

The Taj Mahal next to the Yamuna River, India. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikipedia.

It is often said that South Asia is the graveyard of all universal theory. Everything that seems true in one part of South Asia is not true in another region of this densely populated part of the world. At one level this has to do with an extraordinarily old and complex fabric of overlapping cultures, languages, economies and religious imaginations. At another level, South Asia’s proverbial diversity is also a product of many generations of relative political and cultural freedoms. First emerging in the interstices of many fragmented and overlapping kingdoms and dominions and later entrenched by a relatively liberal British empire that encouraged formation of a vast range of cultural associations, and many vernacular public cultures—newspapers, educational institutions, standardization of scripts and expression, and much more.

While these liberal institutions and freedoms initially aimed at incorporating elite groups within the wider orbit of empire, they were gradually embraced and claimed by larger groups and communities in the postcolonial states across South Asia.

Ideals of dignity and equality, along with strong cultural nationalism and majoritarian chauvinism, have slowly spread and taken root throughout South Asia.

Groundwork

Interpreting human rights among the dead and disappeared.

by ADAM ROSENBLATT

Wola Ostrowiecka, Poland: exhumation in the place of a former school. Photo by Polish anthropologist Dr. Leon Popek. Photo CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Global Justice Workshop wasn’t what I expected. I had just arrived as a graduate student at Stanford after a series of jobs at nonprofit organizations, most of them in what could broadly be defined as the “human rights sector.” Eagerly joining a group of fellow graduate students and faculty to discuss scholarly articles, I soon found that global justice, and human rights, seemed to mean something very different in the seminar rooms of Stanford than in the offices of my former employers. My new colleagues could talk for hours about different accounts of the foundations of human rights, the varieties of liberalism and communitarianism, or the best theory of a just international order, often without specific reference to any real place, institution, or group of people.

Encountering theory for the first time, I was both intimidated and repulsed. This particular discourse of justice and rights seemed hopelessly disconnected from the realities to which I had been exposed: the photographs of mass graves, full of the commingled bodies of genocide victims, that I had organized into files as a research assistant to the forensic program at Physicians for Human Rights, the maps I had drawn in the South Texas “colonias” (unincorporated settlements) to show the floodplains where poor residents had been tricked into buying land, and the stories long-time human rights activists told me of receiving death threats in Guatemala or being cross-examined by Bosnian war criminals. 

People who spend their days conducting human rights work in the field have different priorities, vocabularies, and ways of thinking about human rights than people who spend their days writing and teaching.

Higher Ed Flies Under the Radar

Why has K-12 undergone waves of reform while higher education remains unscathed?

Public Domain image of St. Anselm College via Wikipedia.

When the Common Core debate crescendoed back around 2010, the education sector, the reformers, the public, and the policymakers regularly waged pitched battles over student outcomes, teachers’ job security, and the overall quality of public school education. Major national media offered in-depth investigations and passionate op-eds for and against, pushing the issue into the national spotlight and turning the contest into a political flash point.

How have colleges and universities escaped public scrutiny and the policymaking zeal so characteristic of primary and secondary school?

Common Core struck a nerve in the national discourse—as did President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act; as does the ongoing debate over the merits of charter schools. Today, primary and secondary education is a highly scrutinized industry, beset by ever-shifting public opinion and interventionist policymakers. 

This reformist impulse in the K-12 space is not new to the United States: it has been the focus of the last half-century of education policy. But while policymakers and primary and secondary school stakeholders take each other to the mat over how to best allocate resources, measure success, and help students achieve more, most higher education institutions operate in their own largely autonomous ecosystem, without much awareness of or engagement in state and federal policy.

How is it that colleges and universities have escaped the public scrutiny and policymaking zeal that has characterized primary and secondary schooling?

Deflating Colorblindness

How can racial inequality coexist with the prevailing narrative of “colorblindness”?

"Justice." Public Domain image via Pixabay.

Many have made the largely convincing case that “colorblindness” is the dominant racial ideology of the post-Civil Rights era in the United States. Whites tend to hold the opinion that “race does not matter that much today, so let’s move on.” According to this logic, everybody, should be colorblind and is already for the most part, and race should not be the basis of efforts to lessen racial inequalities. This perception of the state of racism writ large in the U.S. is ostensibly corroborated by the general declivity in anti-Black attitudes among whites over the past half-century.

In my estimation, “colorblindness” prevails as our national narrative because it operates at relatively shallow depths.

Yet the social position of Blacks relative to whites has not improved evenly or greatly, and in some respects has worsened over the past several decades. Literally from birth to death, Blacks continue to face vast inequalities. At birth, in 2007, Blacks could expect to live 4.8 years fewer than whites; while the infant mortality rates for Black babies was more than double the rate for white babies in 2005.

Residential segregation of Blacks, far more extensive than for any other racial category, persists at high rates, if declining slowly over time, while school segregation after a brief period of decline, has rebounded to the levels of the late 1960s. Meanwhile, unemployment rate for Blacks has been intractably around twice as high as that for whites regardless of the state of economy and the Black median household wealth is preposterously low—only 5% of the median wealth for white households as of 2010.

Dismantling the Racial Paradise

How migration to and from the U.S. is transforming notions of race in Brazil.

by TIFFANY JOSEPH

Governador Valadares, Brazil is the largest immigrant-sending city to the U.S. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikipedia.

I still remember my first trip to Brazil—I was amazed by the diversity of physical features I saw among the population, a continuous range of skin tones between what Americans think of as “white” and “black.” Everyone seemed to get along well; residential segregation levels were low and interracial couples, families and friend groups appeared to be the norm. It would have been easy to believe that Brazil was a racial paradise compared to the United States. However, as I learned Portuguese and spent more time in the country, I came to realize that Brazil was a country of racial contradictions.

Despite having seemingly more “cordial” interpersonal relations, Brazil has struggled with rampant social inequality, especially between lighter and darker Brazilians. While Brazilians espoused the beauty of its multiracial population, I was perplexed every time I passed stands full of Brazilian magazines and saw a sea of fair-skinned faces with blonde hair and blue eyes upheld as the ideal image of beauty. As a black American, I began to notice commonalities between the pervasiveness of structural racism in Brazil and the U.S. while being keenly aware of the different racial ideologies that characterized each nation’s history.

Ethical Witnessing In A Time of Racial Phobia

How participating in protest helps dispel reflexive racism.

by PAULA IOANIDE

Protesters carrying placards at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in New York City in November 2014. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikipedia.

Racial phobia is not responsive to reason. Nor is it receptive to factual evidence that reveals its baselessness. The City of Cleveland recently issued a statement concerning Tamir Rice’s death that illustrates this dearth of reasoning in the face of race-based violence. Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy killed by police officer Timothy Loehmann, was playing with a toy gun in the park when he was shot within seconds of the police arriving on the scene. In February the City of Cleveland released an incredulous statement in response to a federal lawsuit brought against Loehmann. In it, the City defended Loehmann’s actions by arguing that Tamir Rice’s “injuries, losses, and damages complained of, were directly and proximately caused by” Tamir Rice, not Loehmann.

Can we expect to obtain justice from the very state and legal institutions that deny the deathly realities of state-sponsored racial violence?

A video of the incident clearly shows that Loehmann fired virtually automatically. As is typical of embodied reflexes motivated by racial phobia, Loehmann never allowed for the possibility that a young black boy actually posed no threat. In the racially phobic structures that shape the skewed sight of vigilantes and many police officers, Eric Garner’s loose cigarettes, Tamir Rice’s toy, and Amadou Diallo’s wallet are converted into threatening signs that trigger deadly outcomes. Even defenseless limp bodies (Tanisha Anderson), bodies laying face down (Africa, Oscar Grant) or those holding their hands up in surrender (Mike Brown) are incapable of convincing those who are racially phobic that there is nothing to fear.

Time and again, communities of color who are systematically vulnerable to police officers’ and vigilantes’ reflexive racial phobias have attempted to obtain justice and recognition for what are conspicuous injustices. Time and again, these communities turn to the law with reasonable arguments and a preponderance of evidence. And time and again, state entities and the law respond to them with “not guilty” verdicts and failures to indict the officers and vigilantes who committed the crimes.

Comparative Race and Ethnicity: A Blog Series

Scholars discuss migration, #BlackLivesMatter, and "colorblindness."

Three new books in the Stanford Series in Comparative Race and Ethnicity » will debut this Spring.

Publics and intellectuals alike have struggled to reconcile racial histories with emerging moral paradigms calling for racial equality. The resulting cultural narratives, from Brazil's "racial paradise" to the United States's new era of "colorblindness," have since been fraught with contradictions, obfuscations, and naiveté, but scholars continue to interrogate these issues in hopes of dismantling their logics and discovering ways forward. This week the blog will feature authors whose books, debuting this Spring, are part of the Stanford Series in Comparative Race and Ethnicity. Previous books published in this series include The Ethnic Project by Vilna Bashi Treitler and On Making Sense by Ernesto Javier Martínez. Published in collaboration with the Stanford Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity, books in this series contend with questions of race and inequality in both national and transnational perspective.

 

Ethical Witnessing In A Time of Racial Phobia ⇨

How participating in protest helps dispel reflexive racism.

by PAULA IOANIDE

Tuesday

Dismantling the Racial Paradise ⇨

How migration to and from the U.S. is transforming notions of race in Brazil.

by TIFFANY JOSEPH

Wednesday

Deflating Colorblindness ⇨

How can racial inequality coexist with the prevailing narrative of colorblindness?

Thursday

Also read excerpts from
The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fictions Into Ethnic Factions »
&
On Making Sense: Queer Narratives and Intelligibility »

 

Higher Education in Flux

Community colleges and for-profit schools are the next frontier in higher ed.

Each year bright-eyed and bushy-tailed college freshmen arrive on campus and begin their four- to six-year trajectory through higher education. Rewarding though the experience may be for most, the attendant sticker price of a college degree has put it out of reach for many and made it a sizeable burden for those intrepid enough to follow through. The increasingly untenable demands that higher education makes on students and their families has raised profound questions about the current system’s sustainability, even prompting a radical federal initiative to offer free alternatives.

Remaking College » considers the changing context of postsecondary education.

Higher education in the U.S. was not always this troubled; beginning in 1945 the U.S. built the largest and most productive education system in world history in stunningly short order. Waning state support and ever-skyrocketing costs have since pulled this golden era in postsecondary education into steep decline. Such is the opinion of Professors Michael Kirst and Mitchell Stevens, editors of the new volume, Remaking College. 

Though the seismic changes rippling through college and university ecosystems may prompt feelings of nostalgia for a bygone era of higher education, the new landscape also presents the possibility of new paradigms—perhaps better ones. Kirst and Stevens note that the typical college student—“a student who enrolls in college full time, ideally resides on a physical campus, remains unmarried and childless while in school, engages in minimal paid work, and completes a degree within four to six years”—is essentially an endangered species. 

“One of the things that the book is trying to do is to encourage Americans to think about ways in which we can have college fit more comfortably into lives rather than having lives fit into college.”
—Mitchell Stevens, Associate Professor of Education