Stanford University Press Blog

Breaking the Power of Monuments

Is a new form of iconoclasm emerging?

by NATALIE CARNES

The Confederate Monument to Robert E. Lee is removed from its perch in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 17, 2017. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In a popular video circulating amidst the national debate over Confederate monuments, protesters chanting, “No KKK, no fascist USA,” throw a yellow rope around a statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina and wrench it from a pedestal. The statue twists and crumples as it hits the ground. The crowd cheers. Some come forward to take pictures with the toppled statue, which lay in its position of vanquish until hauled away the next morning.

The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.

The iconoclasm in Durham is both new—it speaks to the particular racial anxieties of our present moment—and also familiar. It echoes the French revolutionaries smashing signs of the old regime in their efforts to establish a political order of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It echoes, too, the early Protestants breaking, burning, and mocking the images in the Catholic Church that they had renounced. The images that worried early Protestants most were those depicting the divine, for such images, according to their detractors, falsely pretend to bear God’s presence. The Protestants defaced images of Christ to say—to prove—that God is not present in them. God, they insisted, is present everywhere, unbounded by materiality. These iconoclasts, then, broke images both to deny God’s presence and affirm it. A similar dynamic characterizes the iconoclasm of political revolutions. The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.

 

 

Everyday Forms of White Supremacy

When we see white supremacy only in its most explicit incarnations, we lose sight of how racism operates.

by MATTHEW W. HUGHEY

Protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia carrying Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, and a Nazi flag. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a University of Virginia alum. And for the past two decades, I have studied white racial identity as a sociologist-in-training and now as a Professor of Sociology. My research included a comparative ethnographic examination of a white nationalist and a white antiracist organization, which culminated in my book, White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race. Given this background, the events of August 12th unfolded into a spectacle that eerily resonates with the sociological findings of my earlier work, the title of which pays homage to master sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois. In his 1920 essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois asks a prescient question: “why will this Soul of White Folk,—this modern Prometheus,—hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past?” Nearly one hundred years later, I, like many, still struggle to answer this question.

I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a University of Virginia alum. And for the past two decades, I have studied white racial identity.

Yet, I do offer a tripartite riposte.

While both white nationalists and white antiracists hold deeply opposed political, economic, and social worldviews on a variety of topics, both groups hold aloft a similar ideal of white racial identity. That ideal form of white identity entailed differing performances, depending on the context: a kind of messianic or paternalistic savior to people of color; a creative and cosmopolitan “borrower” of the styles and traditions of people of color in order to alleviate the self-perceived dullness or emptiness of whiteness, and ultimately; a manifestation of biological or cultural superiority by virtue of their whiteness. That ideal white person is both a goal (in the sense of trajectory) and a potent cohesive and organizing force in their lives (in the sense in which Du Bois intended) and thereby provides a double entendre for “bound” in my title. This similarity is built on common assumptions about what “race” is—from its dominant social meanings to assumptions about its biological and cultural make-up. Members of both the nationalist and the antiracist groups I studied also expressed entitlement to all issues coded as “racial” and saw any white exclusion as “reverse racism.” In both groups, it was common to view people of color, as Du Bois put it, with “amused contempt and pity.”

Holocaust Memories On Camera

Survivors’ discussions of Schindler’s List variously affirm and challenge its narrative.

by JEFFREY SHANDLER

Over 53,000 Holocaust survivors have filmed their testimonies for USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive. Photo courtesy of the USC Shoah Foundation (used here with permission).

In 1997 I was attending a conference on responses to the Holocaust, when a man raised a provocative suggestion about video interviews of Holocaust survivors. At the time, the USC Shoah Foundation was in the process of making recordings for its Visual History Archive (VHA), now the largest collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, and other organizations had been making similar videos for over a decade. The man commented that a colleague of his had been watching videos of survivors and claimed he could tell what Holocaust histories or novels they had read and what films or television programs they had seen because these works informed the way the survivors told their stories.

These videos reveal how Holocaust survivors have reflected—in some cases, for decades—on what it means to recall this harrowing chapter of their lives.

This claim resonated with an observation I’d made two years earlier. A student told me that her grandmother was a Schindler Jew—that is, she was on the list of Jews Oskar Schindler had rescued from Nazi persecution during World War II. After the film Schindler’s List premiered in 1993, her family persuaded the grandmother to travel with them to Poland to see where she’d grown up and spent the war years. On the trip they made a video, which my student shared with me. I found it especially intriguing at one point, when the family visited the site of the Płaszów labor camp, where the grandmother had been a prisoner. She recalled worrying about being conscripted to work in Schindler’s factory, because every time her circumstances had changed, it had been for the worse. Then one of her sons asked: “That scene in Schindler’s List, when the Jews presented Schindler with a ring—was it really like that?” The grandmother replied that she didn’t know; she wasn’t there when it happened. Her son seemed disappointed and asked another question about the film; then a different relative asked another one. It soon became clear that, for some family members, the grandmother’s story did not stand on its own but was engaged in relation to Schindler’s List—not altogether surprising, given that the film had motivated the family’s trip to Poland to begin with.

Remembering Refugee Children

Life for Iraqi Jews in Israel was not easy, particularly for the youngest among them.

by ORIT BASHKIN

Displaced Iraqi Jews, 1951. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Between 1949 and 1951, some 123,000 Iraqi Jews who were denationalized by the Iraqi state migrated to Israel. These Jews, I suggest, were not native sons returning to their homeland, but rather immigrants arriving at a new location, where they encountered prejudice and discrimination. Most of them resided in transit camps, known as Ma‘abarot. Originally, these camps were perceived as sites in which Jewish migrants would stay for only a brief period of time, yet many Jews remained there for much longer periods (between one to seven years), living in tents, huts, and shacks where poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty, and neglect ran rampant.

The transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces.

 

Impossible Exodus » tells the story of Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel, who, faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, engaged in various forms of resistance.

My book, Impossible Exodus, sheds light on Iraqi Jewish life in the Ma‘abarot of Israel; on the communists and activists who participated in strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations, on the Iraqi mothers who managed to get their children out of the cycle of poverty, and on the teachers who, without state permission, organized classes and schools. The most difficult chapter for me to write concerned Iraqi Jewish children, not only because these children were the fathers and mothers of childhood friends of mine but also because of the resonance of their experiences with those of current refugee children, Syrian and Yemenite in particular, who, like the Iraqi children whose history I was reconstructing, lost a sense of home and normalcy—and also because it is always difficult to write about the sufferings of the most helpless and vulnerable.

Indeed, the transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces. Mothers aborted because ambulances could not reach these camps. Mice, rats, and insects threatened the children's health. In Jerusalem, land mines were found in the vicinity of one camp. In 1954, a child living in the transit camp at Holon was killed when he was playing by a dunghill, and an old shell exploded. As families were living in tents and shacks and lighting was mainly in the form of oil lanterns and candles, these temporary houses caught fire. A two-year-old baby was burned alive in one such fire; there were no water tanks to put it out and no phone with which to call the fire department. Near Haifa, three children met with the same fate when their tent caught fire. They were raised by their widowed father, who tried to commit suicide twice after the tragedy.

Experiments in Digital

Our aim is to establish a program for peer-reviewed, interactive, digital scholarship.

by ALAN HARVEY

Friederike Sundaram, Acquisitions Editor for digital humanities and computational social sciences, navigates Enchanting the Desert by Nicholas Bauch in the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. Enchanting the Desert (published in 2016) was the Press's first-ever born-digital publication.

We are now two and a half years into our four-year experiment in digital publishing. Our goal, to establish a program for the formal, peer-reviewed publication of scholarly works that are truly interactive, with no print counterpart, was an ambitious one, and the learning curve has been incredibly steep. But we’re now at the point where the lessons learned can be discussed in context and shared with the broader community.

We stepped into this experiment with the expectation that the primary difficulties would be technology-driven. Little did we know that much of the infrastructure we take for granted in the print world simply doesn’t exist within the digital. From the mechanics and processes of peer review, through the mundane aspects of copyright registration and library cataloguing, and on to the incredibly thorny issue of preservation, each step has been a challenge. And the challenge has been met across the Press, not simply by the four core team members of our Mellon-funded program.

Hands Outstretched

Sociology is driven by human interaction and a desire for social good.

by MARCELA MAXFIELD

The scallop shell emblem in a street along the Camino de Santiago in Logroño, Spain. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Just before joining Stanford University Press this past February, I decided to take the trip of a lifetime. I booked my ticket to Bordeaux, and plotted the route by bus and train to St. Jean Pied-de-Port—a small, medieval French town at the foot of the Pyrenees and famed starting point of the traditional pilgrimage across northern Spain, the Camino de Santiago. Six weeks from that point, I arrived at the lighthouse at the end of the world, in Finisterre.

For a trip so destination-oriented, the Camino had a strange muddling effect on any notions I had about the trajectory of my life. I had been working in publishing in New York City for four years before deciding that I would prefer to join the ranks of academics whose books I was helping to publish. That was the plan, at any rate, when I started across the mountain range that first day. I would spend my time contemplating my program of study in the days to follow, trekking among the vineyards, over highways, and through austere farming villages.

But instead of thinking about what academic track would make the most sense for me, I was distracted by the people around me—walking archives of tragedy, humor, nostalgia, and empathy—some of whom became like family to me for that relatively short span of time, and others with whom I interacted only once, maybe with just a passing smile. But even in those cases, their stories often wound back to me in the words of others. Over soup in a hostel one night I was asked, “Did you hear about the 87-year-old woman from New Zealand who is walking the Camino alone?” A face surfaced in my memory, smiling at me from underneath her pink knit hat as we waited in line for coffee, weeks ago. “She told me that her family is moving her into a nursing home next year and won’t let her travel on her own any more after this. She plans to throw her boots into the ocean at the end.”

Sociology’s terrain is vast and varied—possibly personified by the pilgrim stopping into a hostel and finding kinship among strangers.

Making a Home for the Disappeared

As the Peruvian state uncovers mass graves, relatives find ways to honor their missing loved ones.

by ISAIAS ROJAS-PEREZ

Photo taken by the author at the Museo de la Memoria, Para que no se Repita, established in Ayacucho by ANFASEP (Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos, y Desaparecidos del Perú).

An enlarged identity card photo of a boy wearing his school uniform alongside one of his class notebooks are among some of the most moving artifacts displayed at the Museo de la Memoria—the small museum that the Quechua-speaking mothers of the disappeared built in memory of their missing relatives in Ayacucho, Peru. The notebook displays what could be the work of any Quechua-speaking boy in a Spanish-speaking state institution such as the school: the unsteady lettering, the misspellings and grammatical errors, the playful drawings. It is the work of a joyful boy preparing to enter into adult society and the political community by mastering the state’s writing and reading practices. But at midnight on June 24, 1984, a military squad burst into his house and kidnapped him. He was never seen again. Only his class notebook and the enlarged identity card photo remain.

Pablo Gerardo Albites Pariona is one of the thousands of people “disappeared” by the Peruvian state during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru’s central southern Andes. In August 2003, at the end of its mandate, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR) compiled a preliminary list of four thousand “disappeared” people. In 2011, another state-sponsored institution, the Central Register of Victims, registered 8,661 cases. Yet, as the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances observed as recently as July 2016, the real figure may be much higher. Citing such institutions as the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, the UN Working Group considers that figure “to lie between thirteen thousand and sixteen thousand victims of enforced disappearance.” According to Peruvian human rights organizations, the actual figure may be as high as eighteen thousand disappeared.

Abstract figures tallying the number of lives lost cannot convey the visceral quality of the horror that families like Pablo Gerardo’s experienced.

Transcending Without Transcendence

A tribute to extraordinary scholar and Meridian series editor, Werner Hamacher.

Select titles from the Meridian series. Photo by Kalie Caetano.

 

It was with the heaviest of hearts that Stanford University Press learned of the death of Meridian series editor Werner Hamacher this past month. Professor at the University of Frankfurt, and founder of its Institute of General and Comparative Literary Studies, which he also directed, Hamacher was also the Emmanuel Levinas Chair and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at The European Graduate School.

SUP’s collaboration with Werner Hamacher dates back to 1991, when he and series co-founder David Wellbery (who served as co-editor until 2000) reached out to former Stanford editor Helen Tartar with the idea of forming a book series that would be a forum for work in literary and aesthetic theory, particularly that being done in France, Germany, and the United States. The series name was meant to pay homage to Paul Celan and his influential poetological statement of the same name, which was eventually published in a prizewinning translation in the series itself; but it equally referenced the editors’ desire to cross geographical meridians, to privilege internationality, and to foster work that remapped connections between disciplines, institutions, and national traditions.

Werner’s acumen as a series editors was unparalleled.