Indiana University Press blog

Why I Wrote “‘The Secrets of Blood and Seed’: Primo Levi’s Poetic Emergence”: A Closer Look at JML 41.3

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. 

Barbara Estrin’s article, “The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Barbara explores a poet who struggles to end the conflict between knowledge and feeling.

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I have always demurred from Eli Wiesel’s pronouncement that “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later” (3). Nowhere did I find a better refutation of Wiesel’s assumption than in Levi’s own Collected Poems. The volume reflects what Levi emphasizes in The Search for Roots: the surprising realization that his “experiences in the concentration camp…weigh[ed] so little” (5) in the formation of his literary self. Most criticism of his poetry focuses on just four poems: “Buna,” “Shemà,” “Sunset at Fossoli,” and “For Adolf Eichmann.” Almost nothing has been written about more than 70 other pieces where he sought to realize himself in the full force of his creative capacity.

Those lesser-known poems place Levi squarely in the modernist context, along with other writers who began (as he did) in the European tradition and then questioned that poetic in their post-war work. These texts reflect a connection that many poets perceived between poetry and war. Especially striking to me was that Levi—a victim of that interface— categorized himself as a practitioner of the patterns that fed into the rhetoric of genocide.

I also wanted to puzzle the curious phrase in Levi’s Black Hole: “I write because I’m a chemist” (98). If that affinity formed the basis for Levi’s youthful work, this liaison would be explicitly challenged in “Memorandum Book” where the atomic bomb is linked to fourteenth-century art. Levi demonstrates that the possessive impulse in science and the poet’s “search…for the word that can contain the typhoon’s force” are both problematic (Collected Poems 72), thus exposing the downside of a reciprocity that had fueled his early poems. He cites an interdependence that Adrienne Rich emphasizes in her later work. In Midnight Salvage (1999), Rich graphically catalogues mid-twentieth century horrors, after which she overturns a younger poet’s faith in the healing of art: “Would it relieve you to decide / Poetry doesn’t make this [the Holocaust and Hiroshima] happen”? (29). In his late poems, Levi similarly “decides” that the poetics he had heretofore pursued had a bearing on the disastrous consequences of twentieth-century violence.

The model for “the sad crepuscular poems” described in The Periodic Table (128) shadows the Ovidian history—“sixty centuries old and always new” (Collected Poems 62)—to which he is indebted. Those poems turn life loss into verbal gain: the search for scientific mastery and artistic closure fuses with an aggression that applies to both love poems and scientific inquiry. As Jean-Paul Sartre writes about that conflation: “It is not enough that a certain picture which I have in mind should exist; it is necessary as well that it exists through me” (736). The denial of the other, the intractability of the material, whether in the Ovidian-Petrarchan complex or in scientific theoretical practice, will sustain the momentum to write and also engage with experiments.

Thus the “no” of resistance understood both as the sought-after other in the poetic tradition and the initial non-compliance of chemical substances in the research lab becomes the “yes” of a poetic and scientific desire to keep going. A productive absence determines lyric imagistic presence and methodically deductive experiment. Levi’s declaration in The Search for Roots that “there are no demons, that the assassins of millions of innocents are people like us. They don’t have different blood to ours” (207) can be understood in view of his two-pronged career. 

Refusing to exempt his own work from that indictment, Levi “decides” to follow a different road. His later poems reveal a poet who ends the conflict between knowledge, based on remoteness and the image of a grasping “I,” and feeling produced by a receptive rather than resistant other. His last poems echo Lucretius, a poet-scientist he admires because Lucretius rejoiced in “the body’s sense” of “touch” (Search 138).

As an example of the revisionist Levi, “The Work” centers on a poet who surrenders to, rather than usurps, the other, forgoing the mastery of the appropriative self for the modesty of his pleasure in the inspirational other: “the way a woman leads you to the dance” (Collected Poems 56). Through that new alliance, the poet moves through two states simultaneously; hence he feels doubly energized. In the late poems, Levi finds himself “lively as quicksilver” (ibid.), the chemical compound associated with the shape-changing Greek god Mercury who inspires the word-changing delight of collaboration. These poems reveal how Levi wished to be remembered.

Works Cited

Levi, Primo. The Black Hole of Auschwitz. Trans. Sharon Wood. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Polity, 2005.

---. The Collected Poems. Trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. Faber and Faber, 1992.

---. The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Schocken, 1984.

---. The Search for Roots. Trans. and Introd. Peter Forbes. Ivan Dee, 2003.

Rich, Adrienne. Midnight Salvage. Norton, 1999.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. Washington Square P, 1984.

Wiesel, Eli. “Con l'incubo che tutto sia accaduto invano.” La Stampa Turin, 14 Apr. 1987.

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Barbara L. Estrin is professor emerita of English at Stonehill College.

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More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.3

OTHER-LATE-META-MODERNISMS

The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Stephen Benz

Marianne Moore's Cabinets of Curiosity 
Sarah Berry

Lola Ridge, American Modernism's Forgotten Radical
Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese Svoboda
Review by: Joshua Logan Wall

 • READ FOR FREE • 
“The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence
Barbara L. Estrin

Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure
James Brunton

It is I: Robert Creeley's Deictic Subjectivity and the Sublime Self
Andy Weaver

Making Conjuncture
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley by Robert Creeley, Rod Smith, Peter Baker, Kaplan Harris
Review by: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Trailing through the Thicket
Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries by Mark Scroggins
Review by: Zhaohui Liu

Conceptualisms in Crisis: The Fate of Late Conceptual Poetry
Michael Leong

Career Windows
The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America by Jesse Zuba
Review by: Mike Chasar

A Book of Readings on Anne Carson
Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Review by: Calista McRae

ELIOT RETURNS

“The Eliot we have is the Eliot we make”: A Review of The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot
The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot by Jason Harding
Review by: Chen Lin

Ekphrasis, Cultural Capital, and the Cultivation of Detachment in T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
Frank Capogna

Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form
Matthew Scully

A Myriad of Critical Lenses on The Waste Land
The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land by Gabrielle McIntire
Review by: Ping Song

Living Dangerously: Reflecting on Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic”

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.

Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy,” from the Victorian Studies archives is available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, guest author Mary L. Mullen explores the essay with fresh eyes in anticipation of celebrating Freedgood’s extraordinary career.

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Elaine Freedgood has shaped the field of Victorian studies through her highly original thinking, meticulous research, beautiful, sometimes wry writing, and relentless work to support young scholars. Among other things, she has probed the shifting distance between the Victorian past and our present. In her groundbreaking book The Ideas in Things (2006), she argues for a practice of “strong metonymic reading”—or reading things in terms of their own characteristics, properties, and histories rather than as metaphoric objects subordinated to subjects—in part to acknowledge and theorize the “gulf of time and space” that separates us from Victorian readers (24). Strong metonymic reading does not simply recover lost meanings—the connections between Negro head tobacco and the elimination of Indigenous peoples, for instance—it demonstrates the very instability of interpretation: what we know, what we see, and how we read change over time.

More recently, Freedgood has been considering what Megan Ward calls the “historical middle”—the period between the Victorian past and the present we inhabit—to offer a stunning new account of the ways in which the embrace of classical realism as a coherent form has led us to forget the strangeness and messiness of the Victorian novel. In her forthcoming book, titled Worlds Enough, or Against Realism, Freedgood returns to nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism of the novel to question just when and how the Victorian novel became ‘great.’ Hint: only retrospectively. Reconceiving the history of the Victorian novel, Freedgood rethinks the politics of the novel, literary form, and literary history as she interrogates what it means to feel at home in ontologically-flexible novelistic worlds.

Given Freedgood’s own work to reinvigorate the past to reflect on what and how we read, it is my great pleasure to return to her essay “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy,” first published in Victorian Studies in 1995. I do so in anticipation of a conference hosted by New York University on September 21, 2018 to celebrate Freedgood’s extraordinary career.

“Banishing Panic” became part of the first chapter of Freedgood’s Victorian Writing About Risk (2000), a book that questions the desire for safety by showing how danger is always displaced. The article turns to Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy to argue that in a moment of social unrest and uncertainty, Martineau seeks to assuage anxiety by naturalizing the laws of political economy. She does not teach readers to accept risk but rather to eliminate it. Martineau thus deals with the uncertainty of modernity and capitalism by doubling down on the certainty of political economic laws, in Freedgood’s account.

Reading this article now, I heard echoes of Hannah Gadsby’s recent stand-up special, Nanette. In this wildly-popular comedy act, Gadsby explains how jokes produce tension and then relieve this very tension. Teaching the audience about this two-part structure, Gadsby then refuses to reproduce it. Instead, she introduces tension that she does not alleviate so that the audience better understands the tension that “not normals carry around inside of them all of the time.” Long before Gadsby’s act, Freedgood similarly questions who feels tension and anxiety, why they feel it, how it is alleviated, and to what end. Feeling anxiety about capitalism is utterly rational: it is a cruel system that depends upon and reproduces inequality. As Freedgood shows, even most theorists of political economy in the nineteenth century understand capitalism to be tragic: they lament the conflicts capitalism produces and its deadly effects even if they ultimately embrace it. Martineau’s writing, however, works differently: it assuages anxiety—eliminates risk—by transforming anxiety about an unjust economic system into a utopian myth about the happy endings that will result if one obediently follows economic laws. However, the ease with which Martineau alleviates tension for middle class readers—the way in which she combines realism and myth—is ultimately why her writing has less of an impact over time. As Freedgood warns, there is “a need for anxiety to be heightened before it is relieved: perhaps because of this temporary heightening, the relief is more intense and more lasting” (36). Banishing panic without grappling with people’s very real anxiety about capitalism ultimately provides only fleeting comfort. Tellingly, Martineau’s text wasn’t especially popular among working class readers.

In characteristic Freedgood fashion, this article is about much more than Martineau: it thinks about reading as an affective process, analyzes literature’s short- and long-term political effects, and examines the intersection of gender, political economy, and domestic economy as well as the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. Throughout, Freedgood warns against easy solutions to complex political problems: both Martineau’s work to banish panic without representing real anxiety, and realist novels’ work to express contradictions that cannot be entirely resolved. For although realist novels assuage anxiety by having readers feel it—readers of realist novels must spend more time dwelling with difficulty—they, too, ultimately produce an illusory sense of safety by displacing danger onto others. The challenge, it seems, is to recognize the anxiety and uncertainty in the world without attempting to render it safe through fiction, myth, or displacement.

We, too, live in a historical moment when capitalism produces a great deal of anxiety and panic feels like a reasonable response. Freedgood’s article encourages us to inhabit this historical moment and grapple with its complexity without too easily replacing real dangers with fiction’s comforting narrative structures. In turn, Freedgood’s actions—her support of young scholars, willingness to fight unjust professional norms, and commitment to rigorous research while imagining the university and the profession otherwise—suggest that acknowledging anxiety, panic, and danger not only leads to a better understanding of history in all its contradictions, but also enacts forms of social relationality and collective care that refuse to follow the logic of capitalism. Through her work on and off the page, Freedgood demonstrates that although we cannot banish panic, we do not need to face it alone.

Read Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy” for free on

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Mary L. Mullen is assistant professor of English and faculty member in the Irish Studies program at Villanova University. Her research examines theories of history, education, and empire in the context of nineteenth-century English and Irish literature.

An Antidote to the Myth of Historical Progress: A Closer Look at JML 41.3

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.

James Brunton’s article, “Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure,” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, James elaborates on poetry as an antidote to the noise of self-righteous social media posts and crisis-fueled cable news.

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I encountered the work of Harryette Mullen at a time when I had begun to grow cynical about the place of contemporary American poetry. It seemed that almost every new book or journal issue I picked up represented one of two extremes: the first, a plainspoken narrative aimed at the revelation of a universal truth through observation of, say, nature or some quotidian scene in a restaurant or on a city bus; the second, an academic-inflected descendant of Language poetry, with all the difficulty but none of the bite. This is an exaggeration, of course, but in light of the political landscape (the increased media visibility of police shootings of black citizens, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Donald Trump’s move from reality TV star to serious contender for the Republican presidential nominee), I felt that the poetry I was reading (and even the poetry I was writing) was talking past issues of urgency. Then I read Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary.

Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002) is similar stylistically to Mullen’s earlier Trimmings (1991), which mimics the formal experimentations of Gertrude Stein. But here, Mullen makes explicit the connection between our everyday lexicon and racism, showing, through her word play, how the language we inherit shapes our collective unconscious in ways that must be openly dealt with, even (and perhaps especially) in spaces that self-identify as politically progressive. The attitude of these poems reminded me of the work of Evie Shockley, another experimental poet whose work addresses US racism from a historical perspective. Like Mullen’s work, Shockley’s the new black (2011) and a half-red sea (2006) draw on the modernist tradition—most notably, of Langston Hughes—to contrast the beauty of poetry with the abject horror of racism.

Both Mullen’s and Shockley’s work fits the broad definition of “metamodern” given by Urmila Seshagiri and David James: contemporary literature that uses the formal techniques of modernism to critique the present. But much of the art and literature that has been labeled by scholars as “metamodern” is marked by a belief in historical progress, which Mullen and Shockley do not share. Their poems take precisely the opposite view, dwelling in moments of failure, whether at the interpersonal or the political level. My JML article unpacks how the techniques and perspectives of these two poets, who draw on the avant-garde strain within modernism, differ from other artists to whom the metamodernist label has been given and claims a place for Mullen and Shockley in metamodernist studies.

Mullen’s and Shockley’s poetry demonstrates that failure is our present reality, that the myth of historical progress is not worth salvaging, and that sharp-witted, adrenaline-fueled adaptation to ever changing circumstances—not congratulatory optimism—is necessary for our survival. Their poetry feels like a response and an antidote to, rather than a retreat from, the noise of self-righteous social media posts and crisis-fueled cable news. It is, I think, exactly the kind of engaged, self-critical aesthetic perspective that can help guide and sustain a political movement.

Ultimately, what I find most gratifying about these poems is their refusal to let us off the hook as readers. We don’t get to breathe a sigh of relief after reading the last line, resting assured in our own moral positions newly put to us through the beauty of poetry. What Shockley and Mullen offer is not revelation—they are not in the business of digging up the “hidden” evils of institutionalized racism, sexism, or homophobia. Rather, through recourse to avant-garde modernist techniques, they state the obvious yet unspoken failures of American democracy, pointing out how we are all complicit in systems of oppression through our very language, and leaving us to sit uncomfortably with that disavowed truth.

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James Brunton teaches critical theory in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.3

OTHER-LATE-META-MODERNISMS

The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Stephen Benz

Marianne Moore's Cabinets of Curiosity 
Sarah Berry

Lola Ridge, American Modernism's Forgotten Radical
Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese Svoboda
Review by: Joshua Logan Wall

“The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence
Barbara L. Estrin

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure
James Brunton

It is I: Robert Creeley's Deictic Subjectivity and the Sublime Self
Andy Weaver

Making Conjuncture
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley by Robert Creeley, Rod Smith, Peter Baker, Kaplan Harris
Review by: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Trailing through the Thicket
Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries by Mark Scroggins
Review by: Zhaohui Liu

Conceptualisms in Crisis: The Fate of Late Conceptual Poetry
Michael Leong

Career Windows
The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America by Jesse Zuba
Review by: Mike Chasar

A Book of Readings on Anne Carson
Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Review by: Calista McRae

ELIOT RETURNS

“The Eliot we have is the Eliot we make”: A Review of The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot
The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot by Jason Harding
Review by: Chen Lin

Ekphrasis, Cultural Capital, and the Cultivation of Detachment in T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
Frank Capogna

Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form
Matthew Scully

A Myriad of Critical Lenses on The Waste Land
The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land by Gabrielle McIntire
Review by: Ping Song

Reflecting on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with Transition Magazine

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.

James Baldwin, A Transition Interview / James Baldwin, 1963, and the House that Race Built 

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.

 

Generations of Struggle

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.

 

The Problem of Citizenship, the Question of Crime, and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

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).

 

"Hammering at the Truth"

The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972 by Hugh Davis Graham. Reviewed by Robert C. Smith.

 

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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.

Exploring Documentaries on the Civil Rights Movement with Black Camera and the BFC/A

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.

 
BFC/A Documentaries on the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements

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: The Making of a Civil Rights Icon

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.

 

Civil Rights, Labor, and Sexual Politics on Screen in Nothing But a Man (1964)

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.

 

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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.

Hope is Hard Work: A Closer Look at JML 41.2

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.

James Arnett’s article, "What’s Left of Feelings? The Affective Labor of Politics in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook," from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, James elaborates on why at this political moment, it is important for readers to read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

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Only a year and change into the 45^th presidency, and many of my comrades on the Left, of all stripes, are tired. Protests and letter-writing campaigns continue, as do marches. The Left is doing serious soul-searching, churning as usual in self-criticism. Many people – on the Right as well as Left – see this moment as an opportunity to live consonantly with their politics – or “getting woke.” As much as we’ve seen an explosion of discussion and public discourse about gender and race and sexuality on the left, we’ve also seen the galvanization of white nationalism (some of whom being for the President just “good guys”) on the right. Politics has never seemed like harder work. It feels, many of my peers would argue, exhausting. It is – because politics dissonantly occupies so many spectrums and registers of life.

Painfully, the register that is most visible, governance, is so far removed from the wishes of the majority. Governance at the highest levels, in America and elsewhere has many countries experiencing new, violent forms of reactionary populism, as in Hungary, the Philippines, and Israel. In my JML article, “What’s Left of Feelings? The Affective Labor of Politics in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” I argue that Lessing captures the labor of political feeling, and the feeling of political work, largely in an adaptation of the myth of Sisyphus that preserves optimism against cynicism.

It has become frightfully easy to become cynical, but we are also living, perversely, in an era of optimism. Not optimism as it might manifest rhetorically, speaking of resolution and progress and development, but rather, optimism as performed in the contemporary work of politics. People write letters, and call senators. Communities organize marches, and teens start lecture tours. Alliances are formed, nurtured, and critiqued. Any utopian bent seems stymied by the sheer weight of the darkness of the present.

Similarly, The Golden Notebook is about living with calamity: the calamities of World War II, of colonialism and the African colour bar, of global inequity and Communism and Stalinism, of patriarchy and personal dissolution.  At the very beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, it was widely circulated that The Golden Notebook was amongst his favourite books. The New York Times speculated that it was because it was about a woman’s effort to “articulate her own sense of self” (a rather bland evaluation of the novel). At the end of his presidency, as Malia headed off to college, he loaded a Kindle with books for her.  One of those selections, he explained to Michiko Kakutani, was The Golden Notebook, a book “that...[is] not on everybody’s reading list these days” and “which might not surface when she goes to college,” but which he remembers being powerful and affecting.

Admittedly, I rarely see it on colleagues’ syllabi, but I’ve taught the book twice, and students are challenged by its length and its nonlinear composition. But they’ve also found it really rewarding, and a touchstone, opening discussions about the vitality of female friendships, the unique challenges of mothering labor and work-life balance, as well as the tension between the individual and the collective.

Sometimes the work of the academic literary critic is far simpler than we’d like to admit: it’s a cry for others to read the things we’re reading, join in a conversation with us, and be affected like we were affected. And in moments of political crisis, we could do little better than harken back to writers like Lessing – or for that matter, Nadine Gordimer and Richard Rive – who represent ways through crisis and suggest paths that permit responsible hope that the forces of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia will once more be suppressed.

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James Arnett is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

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More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.2

ENVIRONMENTS OF INVENTION

Re-worlding the Mona Lisa: Nazim Hikmet’s Modernist Diplomacy 
Alice Xiang

Joyce Adapting Shelley: The Social Function of Lyric Form 
Tess McNulty

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Specters of Totality: Reading and Uncertainty in Joyce’s Ulysses and Borges’s Fictions 
Gabriel Renggli

“What muck & filth is normally flowing through the air”: The Cultural Politics of Atmosphere in the Work of George Orwell 
Edward King

 • READ FOR FREE • 
What’s Left of Feelings? The Affective Labor of Politics in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
James Arnett

Indigenizing Intertextuality: Literacy and Orality in Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli
Matthew Hayward

The Partial Postcoloniality of Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George
Ed Dodson

Psychopathologies of the Island: Curses, Love and Trauma in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her
Stefania Ciocia

Sinking, Shrinking, Satin Island: Tom McCarthy, the British Novel, and the Materiality of Shame
Cynthia Quarrie

BOOK REVIEWS

Expanding Modernism: A Review of Peter Kalliney’s Modernism in a Global Context
Review by: Scott C. Thompson

From Rupture to Mediation: Unmasking Modernism
Review by: Bi Yiqing

The Dirty Green: Joshua Schuster’s The Ecology of Modernism
Review by: Joshua Myers

Shy Formalism
Review by: Benjamin Kahan

Mansfield’s Journeys and Journals
Review by: Alex Moffett

Joyce/Shakespeare: A Room of Infinite Possibilities
Review by: Roy Benjamin

Decolonizing Music Education: A Closer Look at PME 26.1

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.

Burke Stanton’s article, “Musicking in the Borders toward Decolonizing Methodologies,” from the Philosophy of Music Education Review’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Burke elaborates on the ongoing struggle for decolonization and liberation in music education.

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The idea for writing “Musicking in the Borders: Toward Decolonizing Methodologies” germinated a little more than two years ago as my undergraduate senior thesis for DePauw University. I reworked that project significantly in the first months after my graduation and sent it to PMER. At that juncture, I left for Mexico in order to continue studying philosophies and histories I had recently discovered.  During my time at University, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico inspired my own research and journey. Travelling, studying, and collaborating in Chiapas provided the material counterpoint to research I began in the library. After participating in several months of Spanish immersion, I collaborated with two human rights organizations, learning much that the books had omitted.

Then, I received an email from PMER and found myself revisiting the prospect of publishing my article. Fortunately for me, I received illuminating criticism at every turn. Early on, this came from Dr. Elissa Harbert at DePauw who kindly supported and guided a project that was surely even more quixotic at that time. Later, the peer review process challenged and sharpened my thinking greatly. At the time of this writing, I’m beginning a guitar class as a volunteer facilitator at the Chicago-based Centro Autónomo/Mexico Solidarity Network where we will attempt to educate ourselves in part through musicking that navigates histories of resistance. I imagine that the young collaborating students will continue this trend and provide some of the starkest criticisms yet! (If you are interested in supporting us, we are seeking funds for instruments. Please go to https://ausm.community/payment/ under the “Speaking tour” option and indicate that the donation is for “Centro Autónomo- Clase de guitarra”).

This article should be approached as a reified snapshot of an ongoing process. The subtext navigates an ongoing exploration of my own positionality, subjectivity, and agency as a white cis man struggling for decolonization and liberation. As global elites opt for endless war at home and abroad while treating large swaths of the global population as a state-less surplus humanity doomed to navigate migratory and climate chaos without protection, the immediacy of embodied decolonial struggle has perhaps never been greater. I remain convinced that we can navigate the borders of our worlds to struggle for justice, transforming ourselves by cultivating critical consciousness and collective action. Decolonial musicking methodologies connect us to profound histories and can act as potent resources for forging new horizons of human flourishing.

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Burke Stanton is a scholar of decolonizing musicking methodologies and a volunteer facilitator at the Chicago-based Centro Autónomo/Mexico Solidarity Network. 

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More from the Philosophy of Music Education Review 26.1

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Musicking in the Borders toward Decolonizing Methodologies
Burke Stanton

A “Discomfortable” Approach to Music Education Re-envisioning the “Strange Encounter"
Juliet Hess

A “Sound” Approach: John Cage and Music Education
Stuart Chapman Hill

On Confucian Metaphysics, The Pragmatist Revolution, and Philosophy of Music Education
Leonard Tan

 • READ FOR FREE • 
The Nonidentical as a Problem of a Systemic Approach to Scientific Music Pedagogy
Stefan Orgass

IN DIALOGUE

A Response to Roger Mantie
Thomas A. Regelski

BOOK REVIEW

Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young
Review by: Amy Christine Beegle

Ten Years of Israel Studies with The Schusterman Center

Indiana University Press congratulates The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University on its 10^th anniversary and appointing new director, Jonathan D. Sarna. The Schusterman Center is a collaborating sponsor for Israel Studies, which presents multidisciplinary scholarship on Israeli history, politics, society, and culture.

The Center has been dedicated to promoting exemplary teaching and scholarship in Israeli Studies since 2007. As a scholar of American Jewish history, modern Judaism, and Israel studies, and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History, Sarna brings distinguished experience and knowledge to the Center’s mission of advancing knowledge and understanding of the modern state of Israel through training of scholars and teachers, and supporting research, publications, and conferences.

In celebration of the Center’s decade of groundbreaking work, enjoy a special issue of Israel Studies on us - download “Zionism in the 21^st Century” for free from JSTOR today.

Considering the "Nonidentical" and A System of Scientific Music Pedagogy: A Closer Look at PME 26.1

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.

Stefan Orgass’s article, “The Nonidentical as a Problem of a Systemic Approach to Scientific Music Pedagogy,” from the Philosophy of Music Education Review’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Stefan elaborates on the limits of a systemic approach in music education and research.

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In a world of an increasing influence of economy on life in general, practices of music education should recollect their primary sense which—above all—realizes in recollection by means of musical-aesthetical practices. The enhancement of these practices is the goal of practices of music education whose amelioration is the goal of research in music pedagogy. In this web of relationships “disciplinary identity” is at stake.

In order to strengthen this identity, a “disciplinary matrix” (Th. S. Kuhn) of scientific music pedagogy is established on the basis of reflection theory, founded by a four-dimensional sign. Its dimensions “constitution of an object,” “individual,” “interaction,” and “modification of sense” are constitutive of each other. It is used as a basis for the reconstruction of musical practices, practices of music education, interdisciplinary practices and research practices of music pedagogy. Reconstruction can also reveal neglected aspects and research gaps.

This systemic approach generates limits which become apparent by Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of the nonidentical. The meanings of this concept can be reconstructed in the aforementioned sense, as well as the categories Critical Theory applies for the description of societal practices: reification, alienation, totally administered society/culture industry and instrumental reason/context of delusion. In their negativity, these categories are particular and therefore not apt as principles of a holistic system. They represent a realization within this system built on the basis of reflection theory.

The article focusses not only on the relationship between the holistic system and its challenging by the nonidentical, but also thematizes several consequences of this relationship for practices of music education: “Disciplinary identity” should be regarded as a topic not only of science but of practitioners as well. This is why the reading public of this article should reach from students of music pedagogy through practitioners of music education to researchers.

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Stefan Orgass is a professor of Music Education and Music Didactics at Folkwang University of Art. From 2010 to 2016 he was the first chairman of the Federal Association for Music Education, and since 2011 has been a member of the advisory board for the European Music Exchange of the German Music Council. His research interests include development of the didactic conception ‘Communicative Music Didactics’; basic questions of music education, theory of musical importance, and research on teaching and science theory of music education.

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More from the Philosophy of Music Education Review 26.1

Musicking in the Borders toward Decolonizing Methodologies
Burke Stanton

A “Discomfortable" Approach to Music Education Re-envisioning the “Strange Encounter”
Juliet Hess

A “Sound” Approach: John Cage and Music Education
Stuart Chapman Hill

On Confucian Metaphysics, The Pragmatist Revolution, and Philosophy of Music Education
Leonard Tan

 • READ FOR FREE • 
The Nonidentical as a Problem of a Systemic Approach to Scientific Music Pedagogy
Stefan Orgass

IN DIALOGUE

A Response to Roger Mantie
Thomas A. Regelski

BOOK REVIEW

Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young
Review by: Amy Christine Beegle

Women’s History Month Spotlight: Read for Free from IUP

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!

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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.

Queen Bey and the New Niggerati: Ethics of Individualism in the Appropriation of Black Radicalism

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.

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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.

Taking Indiana Women’s History into the Twenty-First Century

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.

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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.

Interview with Jan Willis

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).

At the Last Well on Earth: Climate Change Is a Feminist Issue

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.

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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.

Sex Wars and the Contemporary French Moral Panic: The Productivity and Pitfalls of Feminist Conflicts

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.

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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.

“With Righteousness and with Justice”: To Create Equitable Jewish Divorce, Create Equitable Jewish Marriage

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.

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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.

Picturing Black Women

Photographer Abdi Osman examines issues of labour and aging in the lives of African and Caribbean women who arrived in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s.

Damned. Gifts.

“Missing mothers loom large. It took writing a poem for the mirror to finally reflect back and I saw Mama clearly.” A reflection by Wanjeri Gakuru.