Today marks the 54th anniversary of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - the landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.
In honor of this historic event and current trends, we invite you to explore Transition Magazine’s 1972 conversation with James Baldwin, and a discussion of more than five decades of black action in St. Louis, from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.
Although the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X continues to receive the most attention, Fredrick Harris argues that James Baldwin is better situated to explain why black Americans continue to be pressed to the margins of American society.
History tells us that it takes, and that it will take, generations of striving, organizing, and mobilizing to fight for the kind of world that we want to see. And these distinct generational approaches play out in all of your work within the black liberation movement. The following excerpt is taken from a panel discussion at Harvard University on December 3, 2015 organized by The Charles Warren Center with support from the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute. Moderated by Professor Elizabeth Hinton, panelists Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, George Lipsitz, and Jamala Rogers examine the achievements and challenges of more than five decades of black activism in St. Louis, Missouri.
Exploring the statistical link between blackness and criminality, Michael Ralph reviews Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2011).
The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972 by Hugh Davis Graham. Reviewed by Robert C. Smith.
Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. Transition is a publication of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente.
Today marks the 54th anniversary of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - the landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.
In honor of this historic event, we invite you to explore Indiana University’s Black Film Center / Archive, home of Black Camera, the international film journal.
The exploration and research of black history, the study of the documentary genre, and the use of film as teaching aids (for Indiana University faculty) are just some of the contributions made by documentaries in the BFC/A collections. Spanning from the 1890s to the present day, our documentaries tell countless stories about the black experience. Because the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the mid-20th century are pivotal areas of study in the field of black history and are the subjects of frequent requests, we have compiled the following list of documentaries in the BFC/A collections that explain aspects of these movements.
The Rosa Parks Story (2002) belongs to the wave of civil rights films that emerged in the 1980s and was dedicated to recounting the fight for desegregation in the southern states. Rosa Parks quickly became an icon of collective resistance by famously refusing to forfeit her seat to a white passenger on board a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. In this made-for-television biopic, director Julie Dash strives to retrace Rosa Parks's personal and political journey to emancipation. This article considers the constraints the director had to negotiate while recounting the story of a national icon for television. Not only did the weight of legacy bear on the project, but so did the conventions of the biopic as a genre that stresses the personal rather than the political. The historical narrative of the civil rights movement is simplified into a story that reproduces stereotypes popularized by both race melodramas and mainstream media.
The independently made 1964 film Nothing But a Man is one of a handful of films whose production coincided with new civil rights insurgency and benefited from activists' input. This essay argues that the film's unusual attention to labor and gender politics as key elements both of racial subordination and liberation resulted from an unusual and productive, though not egalitarian, collaboration across racial lines. The white and Jewish filmmakers recognized the black freedom struggle in the U.S. South as part of World War II–era mobilizations against fascism and postwar challenges to colonialism around the world.
Black Camera is a journal of black film studies, edited at the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University-Bloomington, and engenders an academic discussion of black film production, including historical and contemporary book and film reviews, interviews with accomplished film professionals, and editorials on the development of black creative culture.
In honor of Women’s History Month, enjoy some of our journals’ most recent contributions to the exploration of women’s issues across wide-ranging subject areas!
Black Camera is a journal of black film studies, edited at the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University-Bloomington, and engenders an academic discussion of black film production, including historical and contemporary book and film reviews, interviews with accomplished film professionals, and editorials on the development of black creative culture.
This essay explores the contributions of Beyoncé to what I call “the New Niggerati,” a cadre of Black cultural producers engineering American popular culture. Their promotion of individual economic improvement is a discursive shift in Black music, a “dap” to advanced capitalism. Beyoncé's hegemonic power to move the culture places her at the apex of the New Niggerati. With the simultaneity of her privilege and a perceived Black southern realism, she represents a new frontier for Black feminist cultural studies. I examine a selection of her work to demonstrate the complicated nature of her manipulations of protest iconography within an apparatus of capital designed to suppress revolutionary consciousness. Beyoncé's fetishized Black feminist radicalism has transformed the politics of social movements into a set of commodities that ultimately sustain her personal empire.
Published continuously since 1905, the Indiana Magazine of History is one of the nation's oldest historical journals. Since 1913, the IMH has been edited and published quarterly at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Finding payroll records containing the names of hundreds of nineteenth century women wage-earners. Opening a fascinating women’s manuscript collection that no one has researched. Reading a book about a woman in another state and wondering if any Indiana woman had the same experience. Running into a student or colleague and bemoaning the fact that women’s historians in Indiana never meet to discuss their findings. All of this, and more, led to the January 14, 2014, meeting at which Marcia Caudell of the Indiana State Library, Nancy Conner of Indiana Humanities, Dani Pfaff of the Indiana Historical Bureau, Jeannie Regan-Dinius of the Indiana Women’s History Association and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, and Elizabeth Osborne of the Indiana State Supreme Court set in motion the first conference devoted strictly to the history of Indiana women.
The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion is a channel for the publication of feminist scholarship in religion and a forum for discussion among people of differing feminist perspectives and analysis in the service of the transformation of religious studies as a discipline and the feminist transformation of religious and cultural institutions.
Jan Willis is professor emerita of religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and visiting professor of religion at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She is author of The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (1972), On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi (1979), and Enlightened BeingsL Life Stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition (1995); and editor of Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet (1989).
There will be a time, in most of the world, when the last well goes dry. And this is because so much of the world lives already on the brink of a dreadful thirst, a life only made tolerable because women travel great distances to find the wells or the rivers or the ditches, scoop up the water, and bring it home. They carry it on their backs, or their heads, or on their hips, like a child. In Africa alone, women walk forty billion hours a year to bring this water home.
Meridians provides a forum for the finest scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in U.S. and international contexts and recognizes that feminism, race, transnationalism, and women of color are contested terms and engages in a dialogue across ethnic and national boundaries.
Over the past few years, right-wing political groups in France have made sexuality a focus of their concerns. Since the debate about political lesbianism in 1980, feminist research on sexuality in France has been markedly limited to research on abortion, contraception, and sexual violence. In this article, I look back at the US feminist “sex wars” as a crucial turning point in feminist thought on sexuality and examine different aspects feminists address when speaking about sexuality. I argue that the multiplicity of levels of thinking sex brought up by US feminists opposes a structural- and an individual-based perspective. These multiple levels crosscut on the topics of sexual practices, identities, and morals, the very themes of the sex wars. Together they compose the technology of power (Foucault 1976) that has been constructed under the name of sexuality in the nineteenth century. The contributions of the US feminist debate on sexuality help to broaden an understanding of sexuality in today's politics in France. But in taking a closer look at the US feminist sex wars, it appears that they actually coincide with the US construction of French feminism and French theory. The trajectories of Monique Wittig's and Michel Foucault's works provide examples of the productivity of translations. They also stand for different feminist strategies of thinking sex that after a closer examination do not seem so radically opposed any more. Through this analysis the deconstruction of sexuality as an entity is suggested in re-embracing the critical questions set by the authors of the sex wars.
Nashim provides an international, interdisciplinary academic forum in Jewish women's and gender studies and includes articles on literature, text studies, anthropology, archeology, theology, contemporary thought, sociology, the arts, and more.
Kidushin—betrothal—the central legal act that creates a binding relationship between a Jewish man and a Jewish woman, is ritually and legally a unilateral act, performed by the male participant, and the inequity of Jewish divorce law (the get process) is a function and mirror of this imbalance. In this article, I will consider and provide a halakhic analysis of the following questions: Can kidushin be reformed to become an egalitarian, or more egalitarian, process? Could we, from within the current halakhic structure, address and change the unilateral nature of kidushin and its undoing—divorce? If that is not possible, could Jewish law provide for, or at least accommodate, alternative means of marriage and divorce that sidestep kidushin? If so, what mechanisms might we find within the traditional legal sources for structuring an egalitarian marital commitment between two persons and for undoing such a commitment? What kind of ceremony would create such a commitment, and how would such marriage be terminated? I will survey a number of proposals, encountered in my research or through personal connections, that I believe offer plausible alternatives to kidushin and get, from both a legal and a ritual point of view.
Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. Transition is a publication of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente.
This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.
Towards the beginning of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie Phantom Thread — perhaps after we had seen the eccentric couture designer Reynolds Woodcock throw one of his breakfast fits, claiming that particularly runny pastries or the sound of toast being buttered were enough to disrupt his focus for the entire day — my movie-going companion leaned over and whispered, “Was he based on Charles Worth?” The answer is no — Worth, though also British, lived and worked in 19th century Paris rather than 20th century London — but the question makes a lot of sense. The subject of my 2014 article “A Wizard of Silks and Tulle,” Worth is often credited with essentially inventing the system of haute couture fashion production; in addition to innovations like seasonal collections shown by models, he was one of the first fashion designers to become a celebrity in his own right, his lavishly expensive designs sought after by wealthy clients all over the world not only for their beauty and luxury but also for the allure of the House of Worth name. He was also one of the first men (since the 17th century) to break into the world of women’s fashion design, causing something of a scandal. He was referred to as a “man-milliner” in the English press, where well-known authors including Charles Dickens published satirical pieces questioning the propriety of this gender-role transgression as well as mocking Worth’s well-established (and, it seems, justified) reputation for arrogance, obsessiveness and fussy, bizarre habits — all qualities amply displayed by Reynolds Woodcock in Anderson’s film.
My article takes up a collection of anecdotes about Worth and his atelier from both suspicious (mostly male) journalists and from his clients, women who depict the same difficult, sometimes infuriating character, but show a great deal of patience, affection, and even love for him. One of the things that especially irritates the journalists is the adoration of the clients, their willingness to put up with his condescending and often rude behavior. Those clients, however, like some of Woodcock’s, tend to see themselves as comrades and collaborators, not merely mannequins, though at the same time they clearly enjoy the peculiar pleasures of being “worked on” by a demanding, autocratic man whose interest in the shapes of their bodies is very intense but decidedly non-sexual. Unraveling some of the complexities of that dynamic, I make the argument that Charles Worth embodied a kind of queer masculinity based in unconventional cross-gender relationships with women and feminine objects. He also, I think, initiated the idea of the couturier as a queer man, which is now so common that it is seen as a stereotype, but is more than that: in fact, although there is no evidence that Worth himself was homosexual (he was married and had two sons, though very little else is known about his personal life), the vast majority of high-fashion designers who followed in his steps throughout the 20th century and into the present have been gay men.
Reynolds Woodcock is not a gay man. Though it partakes of tropes and semi-coded language affiliated in 19th and 20th century literature with closeted homosexuality — he is a “confirmed bachelor”; women are continually frustrated by their inability to hold his romantic “attention”; scenes of dress-fittings take the place of sex scenes — Anderson’s script does not suggest even for a moment that his erotic interest might turn towards men. At least one critic has taken issue with this, claiming that portraying Woodcock as heterosexual erases gay men from their own history. Indeed, it’s a fair point: almost all of the designers who Anderson and his collaborators have cited as inspirations for Woodcock’s character — Charles James, Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Norman Hartnell — were gay, and as I and other scholars have argued (see, for example, the catalogue for the FIT Museum’s 2013 exhibit “A Queer History of Fashion,” edited by Valerie Steele), the queer contribution to fashion is an extraordinarily rich and very often overlooked or dismissed arena of cultural and aesthetic history. A different Phantom Thread might have shown this; a Woodcock who becomes entranced by a young waiter named Albert rather than a waitress named Alma, who then tries to make a place for himself in to the rarefied, sanctified, troubled world of the London townhouse that is both couture house and haunted home. That film — or, perhaps, one that will be made in the future — might movingly portray the way that both closeted and open homosexualities seem somehow to have acted as catalysts for reimagining the ways that clothes might look.
But that is not the movie that Anderson made: instead, we have a love story between a man and a woman, but one that is — like Charles Worth — abundantly queer, if we take the term in the expansive theoretical sense that incorporates not just same-sex desires (and identities) but those that defy or exceed norms and conventions of all kinds. And comparing the two men lets us put the fictional Woodcock into a historic lineage of queer artists that begins with Worth in the mid-19th century. Woodcock’s strange, even bad, behaviors then become part of a cultural tapestry, in which the eccentricities and outsized personalities of designers (which often, though not always, have resisted various expectations of masculinity and femininity) take on meaning as threads, so to speak, in the art of fashion. Conversely, the film, as fiction, can take us places that historical records almost never do; it imagines for its central character an erotic life and psychological depths that illuminate, with detail both shocking and tender, the links between desire and design, between the body and its supplements.
In my article, I describe the relationships between Worth and his clients/muses as “controlling but also collaborative,” exasperating but weirdly tender, colored by a “variety of love that does not preclude prickly strains of rivalry, coercion, criticism, demand, and aggression.” But the film goes a lot further than this. Twisting in wildly unexpected directions in its latter half — please note that spoilers follow! — it shows us the unbelievably kinky erotic textures of the relationship between a designer and a muse, or rather a woman who begins as muse and then becomes many other things. A partial list: mistress, employee, collaborator, adversary, victim, caretaker, wife, surrogate mother, tormentor, dominatrix, and finally, it seems, soulmate. One way to think about the film would be a kind of narrative of the revenge of the muse: Reynolds Woodcock treats Alma quite wretchedly much of the time, demanding that she be subservient, physically and emotionally, to the vagaries of his needs. When we discover her using a carefully measured dose of poisonous mushrooms to make him sick and weak enough that he becomes utterly dependent on her, it seems that she has upended the power balance in their relationship, and in such a way that her monstrosity suddenly and vastly outdoes his. But the film does not end there. In the very last act, the final surprise is that he likes it: he becomes a willing participant in this dangerous play with vulnerability and strength, illness and recovery.
Some critics suggest that where things end up means that the film was never really about fashion in the first place, but I don’t think that’s right. Poisoning, which Oscar Wilde called a “subtle and secret” art, comparing it (archly) to both writing and drawing, is also the double of fashioning. Both practice the intricate, minutely calibrated manipulation of the body: Reynolds boasts, during their first dress fitting, that his skillfully constructed dresses will give Alma breasts, “if I choose to”; Alma in turn tells him, as he eats the first bites of her skillfully poisoned omelet, that he will not die, but may wish that he would. She will give him symptoms when and how she chooses to. Now each can break down and rebuild the other. Reynolds, in addition to finding erotic satisfaction in yielding to her perverse caretaking, also seems to admire Alma’s mastery of an art that perversely mirrors his own. Is the lesson, then, that fashion is deadly, or poisoning beautiful? The film does ask us to pursue these darker meditations. But it also gives entrancing life to an idea that I try to point towards in my article: that of high fashion as a queer place; one where the most inventive visions of human beauty can be materialized, and the strangest people can — whether in the brief moment of a fitting or the long one of a romance — find themselves reflected and remade in one another’s singular gaze.
Abigail Joseph is a Language Lecturer at New York University, and holds a PhD in English from Columbia University. Her writing on fashion history has appeared in Victorian Studies, Public Books, and the edited collection Crossings in Text and Textile. She is currently working on a book about the relationship between gay identity and material culture in nineteenth-century England.
This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.
By the early 1850s, tables and chairs in British households were making an array of unpredictable movements and noises. The mania for table-turning and rapping had migrated from the United States to England following the widely publicized case of Margaret and Kate Fox, two young sisters in Hydesville, New York, who in 1848 claimed to have communicated with spirits through knockings in their house and furniture. After emigrating to London in 1852, the American spiritualist Mrs. Hayden instilled a passion for séances that was soon fueled by other mediums. This “epidemic” (“Spirits and Spirit-Rapping” 30) was well established in Britain by 1853, when communing with the dead through objects became all the rage.
Whether solicited through an organized séance led by a (more or less) professional medium or acting of their own volition, domestic things suddenly, and often erratically, became animated. As an article from the Westminster Review describes the state of affairs:
[T]here is hardly a piece of domestic furniture that does not perform the most extraordinary and equally well-attested feats. Tongs and pokers leave their places, and pile themselves on the tops of beds; plated candlesticks, bent upon suicide, beat themselves to pieces on the floor; in a bedroom, to which no one is supposed to have access, lay figures are found made up of articles of clothing, stuffed to represent men and women in different positions, some with bibles in the attitude of prayer; brushes and tumblers of water rise from their places, dash through the window-panes, and fall in the street. Such movements, in many cases, are quite spontaneous, no one demanding or expecting them. Sometimes they seem to arise from mere superabundance of energy, as when a lamp jumps from the mantelpiece to the middle of the floor; sometimes from a love of practical joke, as when pitchers full of water pass through rooms, and empty themselves into beds, or when a tea-kettle goes and hides itself in a cellar; sometimes, as if from a frenzy of drunken violence, as when saucepans and broom-handles, without the slightest provocation, make desperate assaults upon bedsteads, not always a very gentle race, as we have just seen, and come off with fractured limbs for their pains. (“Spirits and Spirit-Rapping” 43)
Such accounts of spirit mishaps, whether delivered with skepticism or belief—or, as was often the case, with a little of both—depict the chaos that ensues with the animation of household objects. Haunted things misbehave. They throw interiors into disarray, pull juvenile pranks, irreverently mimic human behavior, and, in the case of the suicidal candlesticks, self-destruct. These “freaks of furniture,” as an article from Punch refers to them (“Clerical Table-Turners”), attest to the dangerous energy that could be released from ordinary objects.
My essay contends that the animation of manufactured things became central to discussions about labor in the mid-Victorian period. Drawing from contemporary debates on spiritualism, design reform, commodity production, and energy conservation, I argue that believers in ghosts and skeptics generated a productive framework to come to terms with the fraught labor histories hidden in everyday objects. This piece is part of a book manuscript, titled “Impossible Ghosts: Material Culture at the Limits of Evidence,” that examines several contexts in which materiality at once tests and upholds the Victorian belief in spirits. In addition to the topic of this essay, animated furniture, I explore spectral gifts brought during séances, spirit hands, ghostly clothing, and phantom transportation as important focal points in understanding the surprisingly substantial world of nineteenth-century spiritualism. It is one thing to believe in ghosts, but quite another to prove that they can bring gifts of food or flowers, wear clothing composed of tangible fabrics, touch the living with warm hands, or ride in spectral carriages and coaches. At the same time, these material phenomena provided tactile, and often portable, evidence for believers of the existence of an afterlife. My book project studies the arguments of believers and skeptics alike, arguing that at their intersection there emerge discussions of material culture and political economy that illuminate the everyday (but no less elusive) world of Victorian England.
Works Cited
“Clerical Table-Turners and Spirit-Rappers.” Punch 31. December 1853: 266.
“Spirits and Spirit-Rapping.” Westminster Review. January 1858: 29-66.
Aviva Briefel is Professor of English and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. She is author of The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Cornell UP, 2006) and The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2015), and coeditor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (U of Texas P, 2012). She is currently working on a manuscript titled “Impossible Ghosts: Material Culture at the Limits of Evidence.”
As an embedded journalist in Afghanistan, Douglas A. Wissing wanted to know the ground truth about the war. What he discovered was that in contrast to the victory narrative US officials were trying to spin, America's strategy in Afghanistan was failing. His most recent book Hopeless but Optimistic: Journeying through America’s Endless War in Afghanistandetails the greed, dysfunction, and waste that he witnessed.
Wissing's book concludes that the US should end its involvement in Afghanistan and let the Afghan people run their country as they see fit. But just last Thursday, Army General John Nicholson's told Congress he needed more troops in Afghanistan.
We asked Wissing to share his thoughts about General Nicholson's request for additional troops, what mistakes the US has made in the Afghanistan War, and why he wrote Hopeless but Optimistic:
Why did you choose to embed in Afghanistan, not once, but three times?
I initially embedded in 2009 with an elite team of Indiana National Guard farmer-soldiers, who were on a WHAM (military-speak for “winning hearts and minds”) mission in insurgency-wracked Khost Province, located in the volatile eastern Afghanistan borderlands. Their agricultural development mission intrigued me. Could you actually do development work in an active warzone? And would the US counterinsurgency strategy with its richly funded aid, development and nation-building component prevail against a traditional tribal society that has a storied thousand-year history of defeating foreign invaders?
I already had some experience in central Asia from my research for Pioneer in Tibet, a biography of a famous American missionary-ethnologist who lived in a wild part of Tibet during the Great Game era. A few years before 9/11, I had also traveled through northwest Pakistan’s restive tribal regions, where I garnered some understanding of the obdurate nature of the Pashtuns, who were then fighting the Soviet-backed Afghan proxy government. So I knew the US was facing a tough challenge.
During my first embed, soldiers revealed to me that the US counterinsurgency was grotesquely wasteful and riddled with corruption—so dysfunctional that our money was also financing the Taliban. We’d be out on missions in Taliban country and soldiers would be telling me, “We’re funding both sides of this war.”
I returned home and began digging through a mountain of reports while interviewing hundreds of people, from generals and ambassadors to combat soldiers, government bureaucrats and contractors. After a lot of deep diving, I realized there was a toxic network that connected ambitious American careerists, for-profit US corporations, greedy Afghan insiders—and the Taliban. I went back to Afghanistan, embedding with a number of units to confirm things. One day on an embattled forward operating base in Laghman Province, a smart intelligence officer said to me, “It’s the perfect war. Everyone is making money.”
That research resulted in Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban, a meticulously footnoted critique of the counterinsurgency, which came out in 2012. Got media attention and had an impact on DC policymakers. But the war went on. Despite the clear indication that the Afghan insurgents were winning, the US government persisted with troops and goat-choking appropriations. Increasingly cynical soldiers on the ground repeatedly told me, “The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”
As the US began reducing troop levels, I was struck with the writer’s delirium: I wanted to know how the story turned out. After all the revelations, the congressional inquiries, the damning indictments, I wanted to know if the system had reformed; had there been any lessons learned? And I wanted to know how American soldiers on the ground maintained their honor and cohesiveness fighting in a lost war. I wanted to know the ground truth.
So I went back to Afghanistan for the third time, embedding in the war zones of the east and south, then researching in Kabul, the besieged capital. I wanted to tell a broad audience of Americans what it is like to be in a failed war. What the waste of American blood and treasure looks like. To show the terrible prices of war. To rebut the happy stories told from podiums in Washington and Kabul that bear no relation to the reality on the ground. And I wanted people to know about the courageous and resilient Afghans, who are perfectly capable of making their own way in the world. The result is Hopeless but Optimistic: Journeying through America’s Endless War in Afghanistan.
When you were in Afghanistan, you discovered that the situation was far worse than what US officials were telling the American public. Give us some examples of the contradictions you saw in the official narrative versus what was happening on the ground.
The phrase “truth deficit” describes much of what the US officials promulgate about the Afghanistan War. In some cases, “alternative facts” and “fake news” are also appropriate. One reviewer compared my tales of government untruths in Hopeless but Optimistic to 1984. I can say there were definitely times when it felt Orwellian.
To give an example: Just before I left for my third set of embeds, marine commanders in Helmand directed a public affairs officer to write an article for Foreign Policy entitled “We are Winning the War,” which was quite simply not true. Saying it didn’t make it so. There were clear indicators to the contrary: insurgent attacks had increased year after year; the number of insurgents had grown each year since the US invaded; the Taliban-led insurgency held increasing amounts of territory, including a substantial part of the countryside; the Taliban shadow government operated in virtually all of the provinces, and essentially controlled many. The marines in Helmand had just suffered a Taliban attack on Camp Leatherneck that resulted in the destruction of six fighter jets worth $200 million, the biggest loss of marine aircraft since the Vietnam War. And as I am sure the marine commanders knew the long-promulgated Special Forces dictum: If an insurgency isn’t shrinking, it’s winning.
Despite the US officials’ flack-spin, the US government’s vastly expensive nation-building campaign is close to a total loss. When the US invaded in 2001, Afghanistan was a basket case of a country, at the bottom of virtually every human development indices: life span, infant mortality, electric generation, literacy, etc. Beginning in about 2005, an avalanche of US development money, eventually more than the Marshall Plan, flooded into Afghanistan, a country of about 30 million people with a per capita income of about $400 a year. Most of the money was wasted or stolen. Phantom aid, critics call it. Despite countless (and wildly expensive) rule-of-law and nation-building programs, the US-backed Afghan government ranks among the most corrupt government on the planet—a feckless propped-up proxy government. And fifteen years later, after hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars were spent on development, Afghanistan remains at the bottom of virtually every human development indices.
Your previous reporting on Afghanistan and your book Funding the Enemy criticized the US handling of the war. But ultimately, despite getting the impression that not everyone in the Pentagon was a fan of your work, the US military gave you approval to embed a third time. Why do you think journalists are allowed this kind of access?
Beginning with the invasion of Grenada, the Pentagon recognized they could shape media coverage if reporters were embedded with the troops. Firstly, the same intense small-group dynamics that bond warriors together also anneals reporters to the soldiers they cover. And the military can keep better tabs on journalists if they know where they are. Few people know the Pentagon has one of world’s largest public relations organizations, and the military’s control of information is legendary: the public affairs officers call the press briefings “feeding the chickens.” This skillful media manipulation unfortunately often results in coopted coverage. All too commonly, the Pentagon story becomes the unverified and uncorrected media story.
So why did the military let me back in for my third embeds after my critical coverage? Well, I can only conjecture, as those decisions are pretty opaque. I did get denied for embeds a number of times, and even had approved embeds later rescinded. After a while I let it be known that I was just going to fly to Kabul and try to get embed approvals there. I don’t think the military wanted me running loose, so the embed approvals came not long after. Secondly, I think people in the military knew the critical story I told in Funding the Enemy and other published articles was the truth. I have never had a soldier claim my reporting or analysis was inaccurate. To the contrary, soldiers were most often supportive of my work. I can say that once I was embedded, they were professional, and except for a few naughty (and scary) incidents, were as respectful of me as I was of them.
In your opinion, what are the US's biggest mistakes in Afghanistan?
Changing the mission from defeating the Taliban government to eliminate Al Qaeda safe havens to completely reconstituting the Afghanistan government with the aim of reshaping Afghan culture and society into a Western-modeled one. It was arrogant and doomed to fail.
Also, privatizing the war and its attendant development schemes. The post-9/11 wars became corporate profit centers. The US has never privatized a war to the extent it has in these post-9/11 wars. And the result has been disastrous. The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is approaching $5 trillion, not including the decades of interest on the immense public debt. And despite the horrific waste of money and lives, the US has failed to accomplish its stated military or diplomatic goals in these countries.
Despite the seriousness of its subject, parts of your book are rather funny. How did you manage to find humor in war?
Black humor is certainly a part of any war, as MASH and Catch-22 can attest. Some of the funniest banter I have ever heard came over the intercom as we rolled through “Indian country” (Taliban-controlled territory) in giant armored MRAPs with machine gunners up in the turrets. Relieves the tension, and highlights the surreal disparities between policy and reality.
There’s a chapter in the book entitled “Shitholes,” which depicts the often-humorous toilet challenges faced by soldiers in a primitive, war-torn country. I confess, the chapter is potty humor. There are tales of poisonous vipers, hyenas and giant jumping camel spiders at the Porto-Potties; the marine ban on audible farting because of the dire political implications; discussions of front-line latrines built extra big so soldiers can defecate wearing their body armor; FUDs (female urinary devices) so female soldiers can use their “artificial weenis” to STP (military speak for “stand to pee”).
One dark morning on a hardscrabble forward operating base in Taliban-dominated Zabul Province, I was in the immaculately clean and brightly lighted latrine, a vivid contrast to the grim reality right outside. There were two young soldiers shaving at the long line of sinks and mirrors. One said, “Man, I had a dream last night I was in the shithole.” His buddy retorted, “What do mean ‘dream?’”
What common experiences do you believe soldiers of all wars go through?
While Hopeless but Optimistic is about the Afghanistan War and America’s 21st-century way of war, it is also about the universal experience of war: humans going to battle, learning to love and hate, keeping it together when all is going wrong, the terrible prices they pay, physically, psychologically, spiritually. It’s about humans in extremis; what we learn about others and ourselves when we go to war.
Why should the American public pay attention to what's going on in Afghanistan even if, as you write in Hopeless but Optimistic, “it's a war that [they] increasingly want to forget”?
Fifteen years after the US invasion, there are still almost 10,000 US troops on the ground, as well as over 26,000 highly paid Department of Defense contractors, and thousands of uncounted contractors working on development contracts. Additionally, there are large contingents of Spec Ops soldiers cycling through that are seldom included in the counts.
And the mission is again expanding. The US is now back to bombing; 300 marines are headed back to Helmand, where they shed so much blood during the surge. The Pentagon is now requesting “a few thousand more troops” to attempt to break the “stalemate,” the PR term that the military is using to describe the failed war. They want to continue the Forever War.
The Pentagon and Dept. of State are requesting about $44 billion for the Afghanistan War for Fiscal 2017, by far the largest part of the war-related budget. In contrast, military operations against ISIS in Syria are only budgeted for $5 billion. The Afghanistan War budget request is bound to go up if the additional troop request is granted. The $44 billion is a lot of money, which will also go to no good end. It is, as the soldiers say, pouring more money into the Afghan sandpit. Americans have far better uses for the money.
Beyond the monetary waste, there are the horrific human costs of the endless war. America’s military sons and daughters are being ravaged by the war. The VA is overwhelmed with record numbers of brain trauma injuries. There were over 1,700 amputees from the wars. PTSD is rampant among vets. And the burden of care most often falls on our military families, who struggle to assist vets wounded in body, mind and soul.
Caught in the crossfires and bombings, Afghan civilians are dying in increasing numbers. The UN recently reported that in 2016 3,498 Afghan civilians died from the conflict, and 7,920 were wounded, including 923 children killed and 2,589 wounded.
So that’s why Americans should pay attention to Afghanistan. A congressman told me that sometimes citizens have to shame their representatives into doing the right thing. This may be one of those times.
What do you think about Army General John Nicholson's recent request for more troops in Afghanistan?
General Nicholson’s recent request for “a few thousand” more troops seems to be the Pentagon’s opening gambit to get the Trump administration to commit to continuing the Afghanistan War. At this stage, President Trump’s plans for Afghanistan are very unclear. As a businessman, Trump certainly understands the dangers of a sunk cost bias. Why throw good money after bad?
What does the future hold for Afghanistan after the US leaves?
Many knowledgeable people, both Afghan and international, tell me they see a period of upheaval as the now-conflicted Afghan interest groups sort out their differences. There is consensus that the Taliban and other allied insurgent groups have to be part of the overall agreements. I find few who speak highly of the current Afghan government leadership. And even fewer who speak positively about the US counterinsurgency, which has so obviously failed.
The title of your book comes from a conversation you had with an Afghan government official. We’ve covered the hopeless part, so what is there to be optimistic about in Afghanistan?
The title, Hopeless but Optimistic, came from a meeting on a cold gray day in Kabul. I was interviewing a suave Afghan official in his gloomy office, which was sequestered behind high-security walls. His life seemed to embody Afghanistan’s turbulent recent history: His family fled in the 1980s to escape the US-supported mujahideen war against the Soviets and the subsequent 1990s civil war. Like so many educated Afghan exiles, he returned to Afghanistan after the Americans invaded with their troops and endless development money. He’d witnessed the corruption and violence that followed. Sitting dapper in his government sinecure, the perky technocrat was weighing his options as the American commitment waned. When I asked him about the future, he looked me in the eye and confidently said, “I am hopeless—but optimistic.” Another government minister wryly told me, “We are optimistic. We’re Afghans. What else can we be?”
Through my experiences with the Afghans, I believe they will work it out in the Afghan way if greater powers don’t continue to use their country as a place to wage proxy wars. This is a valiant people with ancient traditions, a beloved religion and a vibrant culture. They deserve some peace. As I have reported in Hopeless but Optimistic, I have witnessed sustainable, Afghan-appropriate aid and development projects done by relatively low-cost organizations with long experience in Afghanistan. Good work can be done to help Afghans improve their lives. There are alternatives to self-serving phantom aid that mainly benefits the already rich. Like the Afghans, I am hopeless, but optimistic.
Watch Douglas Wissing discuss Hopeless but Optimistic in this book trailer:
This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship in the articles and issues of IU Press journals. Posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article and are primarily written by journal editors and contributors.
Some twelve years ago I was engaged in a small study of the work of William Crotch, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford for most of the first half of the nineteenth century. Crotch had left records of lectures given at the University during the period 1799-1806, but what fascinated me was the audiences for his lectures: rather than a cohort of undergraduate students, Crotch was lecturing to local well-to-do women, musical amateurs, and some of his teenage piano students. Music students were conspicuous by their absence. It was clear to me that music in higher education took a completely different form from the modern day subject, and I have spent much of the time since then investigating the different ways in which music was taught, studied and examined at British universities during the nineteenth century, and the ways in which this contributed to and interacted with music’s status in society.
One of the key points at which the identity of music as an academic subject became problematic was at the University of Edinburgh during the 1850s, when a breakdown in relations between the Music Professor and the University’s governance led to an investigation into music teaching at the Higher level. I decided to focus on this incident and to add a new angle to my work by publishing outside my usual sphere of the historical journal, making a foray instead into the philosophy of music education. My historical work has always found much interest among fellow academics and this was an opportunity to find another wider audience. In addition to the historical narrative, I was fascinated to read some of the contemporary debates about the status of music as an academic subject, and the relative merits of performance, composition, and theory. At the same time, I hope to have raised with PMER readers some of the big questions about music’s place and identity in higher education and opened the floor for further debate.
Publishing in PMER has invited me to pin down the kind of comparisons between historical and modern-day circumstances that had remained unwritten, though often the subject of conference conversations. Much is being written and discussed on the subject of music’s form and identity in higher education; few scholars know that these same (or very similar) conversations were taking place up to two hundred years ago. It is my firm belief that studying the past offers the opportunity for new light on modern ideas, perhaps illuminating fundamental assumptions that would otherwise go unchallenged. From my perspective as a scholar in the UK, the wide spectrum of music courses available forms a stimulating starting point, but I would be equally interested to hear from international colleagues who can offer further reflections.
This month, we continue the celebration of our state's literary heritage with a new post by James H. Madison in our Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf blog series. This series is written by Hoosier authors about their favorite Indiana books and writers.
So many books, such fond memories. The favorites in my study are underlined and have notes scribbled in the margins. Some I’ve pulled off the shelf dozens of times, returning to old friends.
How can any reader select a favorite? Much depends on my mood and the particular subject on my radar. I read lots of contemporary fiction, including mysteries, but most of my favorite books have some connection to the past.
My list begins with Ernie Pyle. Before my sixteenth birthday I’d read the collections of his World War II columns, part of my effort to understand a father who served in combat in Europe in 1944. Pyle made it impossible to forget that war and eventually spurred me to teach the subject regularly as part of my day job. World War II is also part of the reason Kurt Vonnegut became so important to me. I heard him speak twice, both talks among the most memorable of my life.
When it comes to Indiana fiction I just love Edward Eggleston’s Hoosier School-master. Published in 1871, the book is so old-fashioned and yet so modern in getting the reader inside the one-room schools and the culture of early Indiana pioneers. And then there is Booth Tarkington, especially the Magnificent Ambersons. I learned a lot thinking about the arrogant George Amberson Minafer asserting that “automobiles are a useless nuisance...They had no business to be invented.” Tarkington reminds us that the world is always changing. This simple truth informs my understanding of the struggles Hoosiers have had through two centuries of change and tradition.
Among my non-fiction favorites are the two Middletown books. Two social scientists with humanities tendencies, Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd, came to Muncie in the 1920s to find a typical American town. The Middletown volumes are full of juicy details about marriage and child rearing, religion, work, social class, and so much more. And, like Tarkington, the Lynds open up the on-going challenge of living in changing times.
I’ve never gotten over reading the journalist John Bartlow Martin. His book Indiana: An Interpretation, published in 1947, displays some affection for Indiana, particularly ordinary Hoosiers. But unlike most Hoosiers of his day, Martin wrote with hard edges. He didn’t duck the state’s tendencies toward ignorance and denial that times were changing. He criticized Hoosiers for hiding behind a screen of rustic contentment in order to ignore pressing social and economic challenges. Ray Boomhower’s recent biography of Martin brings home his skills of connecting past and present.
Pushed to select a favorite Indiana book it has to be Emma Lou Thornbrough’s The Negro in Indiana Before 1900. Thornbrough’s meticulous account of nineteenth-century African-American life starts with a foundation of deep and thoughtful research in primary sources and adds careful, understated, but powerful writing. Only a few specialists noticed the book when it appeared in 1957. The civil rights movement was just becoming visible. But as Indiana and America changed the implications of Thornbrough’s scholarship became apparent. For young historians like me, eager to find a past that was connected to our present, this book with the dull, old-fashioned title gave us the foundation to tell the stories of African American Hoosiers. Not only my own book, A Lynching in the Heartland, but almost everything I’ve written in the last four decades has caused me to pull this little volume off the self and read it again. It’s simply the most important Indiana history book published in the twentieth century.
I’m influenced too by knowing Professor Thornbrough and her life beyond scholarship. Born in Indianapolis, she was by the time I knew her a distinguished historian at Butler University. Always carefully dressed and exceedingly gracious and modest, she eventually displayed some of the fire within. When I was preparing to do research in the NAACP Papers at the Library of Congress, she gave me the research notes she had gathered from that magnificent collection. And she quietly mentioned that she was a member of the Indianapolis branch of the NAACP in the 1950s, a time when the city was deeply segregated. At some NCAAP meetings she the only white woman in the room.
So many books. So many great books, so many that prove Milton’s seventeenth-century assertion that "A good book is the precious lifeblood of the master spirit."
James H. Madison is the Thomas and Kathryn Miller Professor Emeritus of History, Indiana University Bloomington. His most recent book is Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana (2014). That book served as the inspiration for a four-part documentary, Hoosiers: The Story of Indiana, produced by WFYI and showing on Indiana PBS stations.
Earlier this month, Independent Publisher named the medal winners in its 20th annual IPPY Awards. These awards were established to bring more attention to the important work published by independent authors and publishers. We're pleased to announce that four IU Press books won IPPY Awards, including:
The medal-winning books will be celebrated May 10 during the annual BookExpo America publishing convention in Chicago.
Independent Publisher prides itself on "Recognizing Excellence in Independent Publishing," and we think these titles are excellent as well! Congratulations to our authors and their great books!
Happily Ever After The Romance Story in Popular Culture Catherine M. Roach
"Roach's attempt to do emotional justice to the genre should satisfy academics and fans alike." —Publishers Weekly
Catherine M. Roach, alongside her romance-writer alter-ego, Catherine LaRoche, guides the reader deep into "Romancelandia": the land of the romance fiction, a women-centered multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon that creates national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars.
Congress, Presidents, and American Politics Fifty Years of Writings and Reflections Lee H. Hamilton
"Hamilton provides a solid look at the thinking, actions, and failures from the Lyndon Johnson years to the present. . . . Hamilton's views on politicians might just renew some readers' faith in our elected officials. At once encouraging and enlightening, his writings stir hope, and what he says is still important all these years later. . . . The book—essentially an encapsulation of the author's philosophy of politics and politicians—is a good choice for those who want to believe in government again." —Kirkus Reviews
The Dead Sea and the Jordan River Barbara Kreiger
"A rare natural, political, and human history . . . Remarkable and timely." —Booklist
"Students of the Middle East will doubtless find this exhaustive report on the history and geopolitical details of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River indispensable." —Foreword Reviews
The natural and human history of these storied bodies of water, drawn on accounts by travelers, pilgrims, and explorers from ancient times to the present.
Kaveena Boubacar Boris Diop Translated by Bhakti Shringarpure and Sara C. Hanaburgh Foreword by Ayo A. Coly
"A dark, ferocious novel that you won't put down unscathed, and certainly not any more confident in the goodness in the hearts of humankind." —Maurice Mourier, La Quinzaine Litteraire
In a civil-war torn nation where powerful men use others as pawns in a real-life violent chess match, the murder of six-year-old Kaveena and her mother’s quest for vengeance that brings about a surprise reckoning.
Utter Chaos Sammy Gronemann Translated by Penny Milbouer Foreword by Joachim Schlör
"First published in 1920 and set 17 years earlier, Gronemann's newly translated novel blends satiric humor and an eerie sense of foreboding in relating the efforts of European Jews to assimilate at a wildly contentious and confusing time. . .A free-wheeling Jewish comic novel before its time, this artfully contained commentary on Jewish life in Europe in the early 1900s makes a welcome reappearance." —Kirkus Reviews
The Tortoise in Asia Tony Grey
Based on a popular legend in Gansu, the far western province of China, The Tortoise in Asia recounts the exploits of Marcus, a young Roman centurion schooled in the Greek classics who, after a devastating loss in a battle with the Parthians, is taken prisoner, marched along the Silk Road, and pressed into service as a border guard on the eastern frontier.
1915 Diary of S. An-sky A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front S. A. An-sky Translated from the Russian and with an Introduction by Polly Zavadivker
In 1915, An-sky took on the assignment of providing aid and relief to Jewish civilians trapped under Russian military occupation in Galicia. The diary fragments within are vivid firsthand descriptions of civilian and military life in wartime.
Comrade Huppert A Poet in Stalin's World George Huppert
"Of interest to scholars of Austrian literature and history." —Kirkus Reviews
A historian details the life and work of Austrian communist and writer Hugo Huppert, a Jew, perhaps a relative, who embodies a distinctly central European experience of his time, of people trapped between Hitler and Stalin. Huppert tells a story of displacement and exile, the price of party loyalty, and the toll of war and terror on the mind of this emblematic figure.
Little Indiana Small Town Destinations Jessica Nunemaker
"Jessica Nunemaker has a gift for uncovering hidden gems in small towns across Indiana and bringing each community to life. The amazing stories and photographs in Little Indiana: Small Town Destinations will entice you to explore the Hoosier state and ensure you know the best places to stay, play, eat and shop in each town." —Ken Kosky, Indiana Dunes Tourism Promotions Director
Riley Child-Rhymes with Hoosier Pictures Indiana Bicentennial Edition James Whitcomb Riley Illustrated by Will Vawter Introduction by Norbert Krapf, former Indiana Poet Laureate
A must-have for Riley enthusiasts everywhere, this classic book has been faithfully reproduced for Indiana’s state bicentennial. Now with an introduction by lifelong Riley enthusiast and former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf, this charming book contains 39 of James Whitcomb Riley's signature poems.
American Shame Stigma and the Body Politic Edited by Myra Mendible
Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America’s discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors.
The Well-Dressed Hobo The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains Rush Loving, Jr.
"Loving’s sweeping and grand epic on the renaissance of American railroading during the last 40 years and the characters, both wise and foolish, who helped make it a reality should be on the bookshelf of anyone who loves railroading as much as its author." —Frederick N. Rasmussen, The Baltimore Sun
Now in paperback In the Shadow of the Shtetl Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine Jeffrey Veidlinger
Winner, 2014 Canadian Jewish Book Awards, history category
"Hitherto the story of the Holocaust in the Eastern European shtetl has been told by those who left—on behalf of those who did not survive. What do we learn from these stories told from the shtetl itself? In the Shadow of the Shtetl restores horror to the setting in which it occurred: at home, among familiar people and places. . . . In their accounts the everyday and the extraordinary, the innocuous and the gruesome are continually intertwined" —New York Review of Books
Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging Tatjana Lichtenstein
"It has long been known that unlike elsewhere in East Central Europe, for census purposes, Jews in Czechoslovakia were recognized as a separate nationality as well as a religious group. Tatjana Lichtenstein explores the ramification of this distinction for Zionists and their interactions with this state in important study of Jewish nationalism." —Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Temple University
Now in paperback Oscar Micheaux and His Circle African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, Editors and Curators
"The 14 essays cover a range of topics, from overviews of black American performance and cinemas, to detailed analyses of Micheaux films, to thoughtful discussion of the work and impact of other groups of African American performers and filmmakers. The essays are lively and readable, casting light on an underrepresented fact of American film history.” —Library Journal
Expressionism and Film Rudolf Kurtz Edited with an afterword by Christian Kiening and Ulrich Johannes Beil Translated by Brenda Benthien
Expressionism and Film, originally published in German in 1926, is not only a classic of film history, but also an important work from the early phase of modern media history. Written with analytical brilliance and historical vision by a well-known contemporary of the expressionist movement, it captures Expressionism at the time of its impending conclusion—as an intersection of world view, resoluteness of form, and medial transition.
Speaking Pictures Neuropsychoanalysis and Authorship in Film and Literature Alistair Fox
"Very rich argumentation that progressively constructs its object, shifting with much skill from the conceptual elaboration of its global perspective to the various concrete examples of works approached so to give it flesh and blood." —Raymond Bellour, film critic, theorist, and author of The Analysis of Film
Music of Azerbaijan From Mugham to Opera Aida Huseynova
"In each chapter Huseynova combines historical context, cultural insights, and musicological analysis to create a study of musical and cultural fusion that is as compelling as it is informative. She rounds off the work with the re-staging of the Uzeyir Hajibeyli’s first mugham opera, played on the world stage with Alim Gasimov and Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble—a triumphant testimony to the power of cultural fusion." —Anna Oldfield, Coastal Carolina University
Accompanying audio-visual materials available here
A History of the Harpsichord Edward L. Kottick
A History of the Harpsichord brings together for the first time more than 200 photographs, illustrations, and drawings of harpsichords in public museums and private collections throughout Europe the United States. Edward L. Kottick draws on his extensive technical knowledge and experience as a harpsichord builder to detail the changing design, structure, and acoustics of the instrument over six centuries.
Writing Jewish Culture Paradoxes in Ethnography Edited by Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran
"With its diverse chorus of academic voices, this anthology of new work on the cultural and literary history of Jewish ethnography is an extraordinarily rich, thoughtful, and engrossing text." —James Loeffler, author of The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire
Power and Change in Iran Politics of Contention and Conciliation Edited by Daniel Brumberg and Farideh Farhi
"By a wide margin, this book is the most sophisticated treatment of the internal dynamics and paradoxes of Iranian politics that I know of. The nuance, precision, insight, and details of the ebb and flow of the Iranian public sphere are what make this book truly unique. . . . The introduction is magisterial in terms of its depth, scope and objectivity. . . . The chapters flow well together and they are organized in an effective manner." —Nader Hashemi, co-author of The Syria Dilemma
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