Book Marks
Recent books by Indiana University faculty members and alumni as well as titles from the IU Press
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 21, 2009
Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945. Did Franklin D. Roosevelt turn a blind eye to the Holocaust, or did he make quiet efforts to rescue Jews who were threatened by Hitler? The question has long divided historians. A new book published by Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Museum supports the view that FDR was neither villain nor savior. Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945, recounts events from the perspective of McDonald, a Midwesterner and Indiana University graduate who served as League of Nations high commissioner on refugees and later chaired Roosevelt's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. Patricia Cohen writes in the New York Times that the book "upends a widely held view that (Roosevelt) was indifferent to the fate of Europe's Jews . . ." IU Press published the first volume of McDonald's papers, Advocate for the Doomed, in 2007. In the new volume, editors Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart (James G. McDonald's daughter) and Severin Hochberg write that FDR appears as "a man who gave considerable attention to refugee problems, but who publicly shied away from seeming to champion a Jewish cause, even when he took positive steps in 1938-1939."
The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb. Frances Trix's new book, The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb (University of Pennsylvania Press), tells the life story of Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans who founded the first Bektashi community in America. Through Bektashi stories, oral histories and ethnographic experience she acquired during her more than 20 years studying with Rexheb, Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader and the communities in which he lived: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. As a linguistic anthropologist, Trix taped 12 years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian and Arabic. She draws extensively on Rexheb's words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center. Readers come to know Rexheb's gentle way of teaching through example and parable, poetry and humor. The book also documents the history of the 700-year-old Bektashi order in the 19th and 20th centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America, attesting to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths. Trix is an associate professor of linguistics and anthropology at Indiana University and an ethnographer of Islam in Balkan immigrant communities. Her books include Spiritual Discourse: Learning with a Muslim Master and Muslim Voices and Lives in the Contemporary World.
Surfaces: Color, Substances, and Ritual Applications on African Sculpture. Six essays by distinguished African art historians explore the cultural practices associated with surface decoration, the practitioners responsible for the applications and the reasons for the use of specific materials in African sculpture in this new book from IU Press. Edited by Leonard Kahan, Donna Page and Pascal James Imperato in collaboration with Charles Bordogna and Bolaji Campbell, with an introduction by Patrick McNaughton, IU Bloomington Chancellor's Professor of art history, Surfaces is the first book to present a detailed study of what happens to African wood sculpture from its creation to its ritual use and "retirement." "Surfaces, like materials, can no longer be viewed as simply a subset of style; instead, to understand surface treatment is to reflect on belief, meaning, significance and function of art," said Nii Quarcoopome, curator of African Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. "The value of this book is that it forces the reader to begin thinking about diverse treatments of art surfaces as integral parts of the total symbolic structures encoded in African art objects. It opens up new avenues not only for reading African art but also for understanding the process of African art creation -- how art becomes art." Each piece of African woodcarving has an embellished surface, whether it is dyed, pigmented, refurbished or encrusted with sacrificial matter. Color and black-and-white photographs embellish the text and illustrate the power and potency of African sculpture; a comprehensive listing of colorings and raw materials is also included. Leonard Kahan is a certified appraiser of African art and curator for the permanent collection of African art at Queensborough College, CUNY. Donna Page specializes in restoring African wood sculpture and has curated the exhibition Surfaces at the Museum of the SMA Fathers in Tenafly, N.J. Pascal James Imperato is distinguished service professor at SUNY Downstate.
Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. Glamour is most readily associated with fashion, industrial design and Hollywood of the Golden Age -- and yet it also shaped the language and interests of high modernism. In Glamour in Six Dimension: Modernism and the Radiance of Form, Indiana University Associate Professor of English Judith Brown looks at the historical and aesthetic roots of glamour in the early decades of the 20th century, arguing that glamour is the defining aesthetic of modernism. In the clean lines of modernism, she finds the ideal conditions for glamour -- blankness, polish, impenetrability and the suspicion of emptiness behind it all. Brown focuses on several cultural products that she argues helped to shape the meaning of glamour: the most significant perfume of the 20th century, Chanel No. 5; the idea of the Jazz Age and its ubiquitous cigarette; the celebrity photograph; the staging of primitivism; and the invention of a shimmering plastic called cellophane. Alongside these artifacts, she takes up the development, refinement and analysis of glamour in Anglo-American poetry, film, fiction and drama of the period. Glamour in Six Dimensions asks its reader to see the proximity between the vernacular and elite cultures of modernism, and particularly how glamour was animated by artists working at the crossroads of the mundane and the extraordinary: Wallace Stevens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen and others.
Sensibility and the American Revolution. "Revolutions reinvent societies," writes Sarah Knott, associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington. "As Americans freed themselves from British imperial power and rejected monarchical authority, they directly confronted the question of how to reconstitute society." How they did so is the topic of her new book, Sensibility and the American Revolution, published by University of North Carolina Press. Knott paints sensibility as a political project whose fortunes rose and fell with the broader tides of the Revolutionary Atlantic world. Moving beyond traditional accounts of social unrest, ideology and the rise of the autonomous individual, she offers an original interpretation of the American Revolution as a transformation of self and society. Sensibility was a cultural movement that celebrated the human capacity for sympathy and sensitivity to the world. For individuals, it offered a means of self-transformation. For a nation lacking a monarch, state religion or standing army, sensibility provided a means of cohesion. National independence and social interdependence facilitated one another. "In tracing the arc of the history of sensibility, Knott gives us a new way of framing the cultural history of the American Revolution," writes Jan Lewis, professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark.
Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States. In Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Duke University Press), IU Professor Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between the two nations in the years between the World Wars and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee and dancing the "Brazilian tango," maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the "foreign" qualities of jazz, Seigel traces the culture back and forth. An assistant professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, she shows how race and nation were constructed together and driven by global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional and national ones. "Although participants in this sort of exchange reach and even yearn for each other across great distances, they do so not necessarily because they have anything in particular in common," Seigel concludes. "They sometimes hope they do and sometimes make it so with that hopeful reaching, but for the most part they come to these imaginative meetings on uneven ground and with grossly uneven resources -- so much so as to be virtually untranslatable into each other's terms."
Hikâye: Turkish Folk Romance as Performance Art. This book (published by Indiana University Press) is the result of a very personal research project spanning more than four decades. It is based on Ilhan Basgoz' participation in many performances of Hikâye -- an oral narrative of love and adventure, whose performance may last over several consecutive evenings -- in various Turkish cities between 1943 and 1982. Basgöz, professor emeritus of folklore and Central Eurasian studies at IU, presents vivid descriptions of the singers who perform the tales of this romantic tradition, which has cognates in Persian and Arabic tale-telling and links to European medieval stories. He also presents the performance venues, interactions between singers and audiences and the texts as artistic objects. "I did not participate in these social events as an outsider, a passive listener, but as an active member of the audience," wrote Basgoz. "The purpose of my research is to apply performance theory, which has dominated folklore research for at least four decades, to the Turkish hikâye in the actual field where it is narrated to a traditional audience by an asik."
Criminal Justice in China: A History. Indiana University historian Klaus Mühlhahn estimates in a new book that 10 percent of China's people were imprisoned in the 1960s, perhaps half of them serving lengthy terms in labor camps devoted to the "re-education" of those accused of counter-revolutionary activities. "I was totally unprepared for that," said Mühlhahn, a professor in the IU Bloomington Department of History, part of the College of Arts and Sciences. "Like most other China specialists, I didn't know how extensive this practice really was." Mühlhahn is the author of Criminal Justice in China: A History, published by Harvard University Press. The first comprehensive examination of the Chinese criminal justice system from late imperial times to the present, the book relies on unprecedented research in Chinese archives, including classified materials, and incorporates prisoner testimonies, witness reports and first-hand interviews. Mühlhahn said criminal justice -- while often ignored by historians -- reveals important truths about societies, including what life is like for populations that come into contact with the justice system. "Criminal justice is a significant aspect of history," he said. "It is one of the most powerful mechanisms by which societies and governments enforce values and modes of behavior."
A Russian Merchant's Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov, Based on His Diary. Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov lived the life of a typical Russian merchant of the late 1700s and early 1800s, but with a major difference -- he wrote it all down. Now David L. Ransel, the Robert F. Byrnes professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington, has used Tolchënov's detailed diary to produce a revealing book about a segment of Russian society that had been largely ignored by historians. A Russian Merchant's Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov, Based on His Diary, was published by Indiana University Press. The diary, which sat neglected for more than 100 years, recorded Tolchënov's daily comings and goings, his contacts with lords and laborers, and information about the education, work, business, civic and religious practices of the Russian merchant class of 200 years ago. "We really didn't know anything about the daily life of commercial people in Russia, and this diary has opened the door to that," said Ransel, the author of several books on Russian history, who complemented the diary with extensive research on documentary and printed sources in Russia.
