Michael Bernath in Harvard Magazine:

This is a dark book about a dark subject. Walter Johnson burst onto the historical scene with the 1999 publication of his influential Soul by Soul, which positioned the slave market as the central institution of the antebellum South, shaping not only the southern economy, but also white self-conceptions and black lives. With chilling efficiency, the book unpacked the practical and psychological difficulties in commodifying what should not be commodified. Johnson sought to reduce slavery to its basic equation—“a person with a price”—and to show how this omnipresent calculation permeated and undergirded every aspect of southern life. In River of Dark Dreams, Johnson deals with some of the same themes, but the Winthrop professor of history and professor of African and African American studies expands them outward in every direction. The new book, too, is rooted in an equation, or rather a conversion—“lashes into labor into bales into dollars into pounds sterling”—one that governed the lives of planters and slaves, shaped the land, development, and society of the Cotton Kingdom, and drove a global economy extending to banks in London and mills in Lancashire. The book is not simply the history of a region (the antebellum Mississippi Valley) or a work of political economy (what Johnson terms “slave racial capitalism”), though it is certainly both of these things. In a larger sense, it is the history of a mentality out of which would emerge a vision of global empire premised upon the commodification of cotton and the human beings forced to tend it.

…Throughout, Johnson seeks to stress the human and environmental resistance that always conditioned white ambitions, and to remind us that on the ground, “The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit.”

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Lu Yu (AD 1125-1209)

On the day of Lu Yu's last sickness
a thin coffin was ready,
and two quilts to cover him,
and the gravediggers paid
their work done.
Then he started to write another poem
a short time before death,
about drinking wine again in the village —
He was working on the poem when they buried him,
so that half a line protruded from the earth
in wind and weather's hearing —
With sunlight touching the first young syllables,
the last ones flowering from a dark coffin:
“marketplace the in/drink more One”
The first three words above ground
the last ones wine in the Red Dust.
Near the village of Shanyang
in Chekiang Province…
.

by Al Purdy
from Beyond Remembering-The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. 2000

William Dalrymple in the New York Review of Books:

Around 1600, a dramatic shift took place in Mughal art. The Mughal emperors of India were the most powerful monarchs of their day—at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they ruled over a hundred million subjects, five times the number administered by their only rivals, the Ottomans. Much of the painting that took place in the ateliers of the first Mughal emperors was effectively dynastic propaganda, and gloried in the Mughals’ pomp and prestige. Illustrated copies were produced of the diaries of Babur, the conqueror who first brought the Muslim dynasty of the Mughal emperors to India in 1526, as well as exquisite paintings illustrating every significant episode in the biography of his grandson, Akbar.

Then, quite suddenly, at this moment of imperial climax, a young Hindu khanazad (or “palace-born”) prodigy named Govardhan began painting images of a sort that had never been seen before in Mughal art. They were not pictures of battles or court receptions. Instead they were closely observed portraits of holy men performing yogic asanas or exercises that aimed to focus the mind and achieve spiritual liberation and transcendence. The results of Govardhan’s experiments in painting—along with a superbly curated selection of several hundred other images from the history of yoga—were recently on view in “Yoga: The Art of Transformation,”a remarkable exhibition at the Freer and Sackler galleries in Washington, D.C., which will travel next to San Francisco and Cleveland.

More here.

From BlackPast.org:

“I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can. No one understands it,” a St Louis man uttered after watching Blind Tom perform in concert in 1866. His mystification was by no means isolated. Few other performers on the nineteenth century stage aroused as much curiosity as “Blind Tom” Wiggins. Born a slave in Georgia in 1848, by the time he died Hoboken in 1908, he was an international celebrity and his name was a byword for inexplicable genius. From an early age, it was clear that Blind Tom possessed extraordinary musical gifts. He could imitate, either vocally or musically, any sound he heard. This, coupled with an encyclopedic memory and all-encompassing passion for music, meant that by the age of sixteen, he hovered somewhere between a respected concert pianist and glorified sideshow freak. For the following forty years, he toured the length and breadth of North America, soaking up the sounds of the Civil War and Gilded Age, then baffling audiences with his astonishing gifts. During the tumultuous election campaign of 1860, for instance, he was taken to a political rally in support of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Tom heard his speech and years after he would deliver this oration, capturing not only the senator's distinctive boom and mannerisms, but the crowd's heckles and cheers. Somehow he could recall the sensory snapshot of that moment with sparkling precision. One of his music teachers described how Tom, now a man in his thirties, learned Beethoven's 3^rd Concerto to perfection in the space of an afternoon. He then stunned her by capping off the lesson by turning his back to the piano and playing the bass with his right hand and the treble with his left hand. Somehow Tom could separate the treble from the bass as if they were detached, self-contained streams that were independent of one another. Tom's gravity-defying acrobatics were also cause for much bewildered comment. He would routinely stand on one foot, his body bent forward and his back leg raised to form a “T.” Then he would leap. “It makes one giddy to see him make these circuits,” noted one man, “he comes six inches of the wall but never hits it.” Eccentric, ebullient, and hugely entertaining, nineteenth century audiences did not know what to make of Tom but one thing was certain: the American stage had never seen anyone like him.

Yet today this remarkable pianist is virtually forgotten. His story comes as a surprise to many who consider themselves well versed in African American history. “How is it I've never heard of him before?” is a question often put to me. The answer, I suspect, is that for all his genius, Blind Tom falls short on what an African American hero should be. After emancipation, he remained loyal to his master, electing to remain with him. Even at the height of his career, black newspaper editors kept him at arm's length, thinking him a buffoon who perpetuated negative stereotypes about the black race. Most damning of all, his most famous composition, The Battle of Manassas, tells the story of the great Confederate victory at Bull Run in April 1861. With a track record like this, little wonder some condemned Blind Tom to the ranks of Uncle Tom.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Edward Frenkel at The New York Times:

Math is so effective in describing the world, he says, because physical reality is a mathematical structure. He calls it the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (M.U.H.). What exactly this means is a big question, which is never fully answered. Mr. Tegmark’s argument is that all physical properties of an electron, say, can be described mathematically; therefore, to him, an electron is itself a mathematical structure — as is everything else, including us. “You’re a pattern in space-time,” Tegmark says, and he is not just speaking metaphorically. Well, it’s true that the trajectory of a human is a pattern in space-time, but does it mean that a human is this pattern? What accounts for consciousness, for example? “I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways,” Tegmark says.

I tried to process this information, but didn’t feel much. Let’s go back to the notion of “mathematical structure.” We read in the book that it is a “set of abstract elements with relations between them,” like the set of whole numbers with operations of addition and multiplication. However, there is a lot more to math than such mathematical structures. Objects other than sets are necessary, and they have now become widespread. Moreover, there is an effort underway to overhaul the foundations of math in which set theory is no longer central. So mathematical structures constitute but a small island of modern mathematics. Why would someone who believes that math is at the core of reality try to reduce all of reality to just this island?

more here.

Al Gore in The New York Times:

Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.

Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages. In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality. For example, we continue to use the world’s atmosphere as an open sewer for the daily dumping of more than 90 million tons of gaseous waste.

More here.

Simon Schama at The Financial Times:

To those of us Jews whose identity and personal history are locked together with the fate of Israel, much of what Shavit unsparingly records makes bitterly painful reading, which is precisely why his book is not just enthralling, but morally dignified. The insomnia mission – keeping us up at night worrying open the scars that are more easily left untroubled – has been the historian’s obligation ever since Thucydides did a number on Athenian hubris. Our professional honour is preserved by such cold comforts, rather than the toasty pleasures of national self-congratulation. And it is just because Shavit’s pages are so full of unresolved conflicts, personal anguish and humane compassion for both suffering peoples, along with a brilliant gift for capturing the high voltage creative exuberance of an Israel living on the edge, that his book is, by some light years, the best thing to have been written on the subject.

Beginning with its title, which is at the same time spring-loaded with irony yet also innocent of it, Shavit has the rare gift of dual empathy. As you would expect, he conveys the anguish of Jews in the late 1930s and during the war, when they realised they had been abandoned by the rest of the world. That anguish reached its most acute moment in 1942, when at the same time, the killing centres opened for business in Poland and Rommel’s Afrika Korps stood poised to break through to Egypt and Palestine. But at no point does he ever look away from the magnitude of the Palestinian catastrophe. In fact, he seems all the more of an Israeli for being able to think and feel like a Palestinian.

more here.

Steve Donoghue at The Quarterly Conversation:

“Translation,” our translator tells us, “makes strangers feel familiar, but a good one should also allow us to sense something of the alien in our midst.” The care with which Rebhorn pursues this “clearly contradictory, indeed paradoxical” balance is downright charming, and it pays off: this is a Decameron at once elegant and effusive, as varied in its tones and moods as the original. It’s as bawdy and explicit as, say, Richard Aldington’s scandalous and much-maligned 1930 version; it’s as soundly researched as Nichols or McWilliam, and if it lacks the doyennish aura of command Frances Winwar was able to bring to her own 1930 translation (the only full version by a woman to date, it seems), it also lacks that version’s thee’s and thou’s, so lethal to 21st-century ears. Rebhorn’s Decameron will be the definitive one for a lifetime mainly because it manages the paradox he identifies: it sets this stranger down in our midst and proceeds to find our common dialects.

Evidence of his care and playfulness is everywhere, especially in the tell-tale details. This is amply true in such famous stories as that of the patient Griselda or the naive young woman Alibech and the randy monk Rustico (a tale so gloriously, sacrilegiously raunchy it cannot be bowdlerized and was simply omitted from many a pre-modern translation), but it also shows to keen effect in much smaller moments. Take as one example the tenth story of the third day: the Venetian cook Chichibio, in the employ of Florentine magnate Currado Gianfigliazzi, is cooking a crane in the kitchen for his master and his master’s guests when a girl he loves asks him for a thigh of the bird.

more here.

Louis Riel's Address to the Jury

Gentlemen of the Jury:
I cannot speak
English well, but am trying
because most here
speak English

When I came to the North West
I found the Indians suffering
I found the half-breeds
eating the rotten pork
of the Hudson Bay Company
and the whites
deprived

And so:
We have made petitions I
have made petitions
We have taken time; we have tried
And I have done my duty.

My words are
worth something.
.

by Kim Morrissey
from Batoche
Coteau Books, 1989

Louis Riel

Akshat Rathi in The Conversation:

The work of the Greek polymath Plato has kept millions of people busy for millennia. A few among them have been mathematicians who have obsessed about Platonic solids, a class of geometric forms that are highly regular and are commonly found in nature.

Since Plato’s work, two other classes of equilateral convex polyhedra, as the collective of these shapes are called, have been found: Archimedean solids (including truncated icosahedron) and Kepler’s solids (including rhombic polyhedra). Nearly 400 years after the last class was described, researchers claim that they may have now invented a new, fourth class, which they call Goldberg polyhedra. Also, they believe that their rules show that an infinite number of such classes could exist.

Equilateral convex polyhedra need to have certain characteristics. First, each of the sides of the polyhedra needs to be of the same length. Second, the shape must be completely solid: that is, it must have a well-defined inside and outside that is separated by the shape itself. Third, any point on a line that connects two points in a shape must never fall outside the shape.

Platonic solids, the first class of such shapes, are well known. They consist of five different shapes: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. They have four, six, eight, twelve and twenty faces, respectively.

More here.

David Graeber at The Baffler:

It’s not just that scientists are reluctant to set out on a path that might lead them to see play—and therefore the seeds of self-consciousness, freedom, and moral life—among animals. Many are finding it increasingly difficult to come up with justifications for ascribing any of these things even to human beings. Once you reduce all living beings to the equivalent of market actors, rational calculating machines trying to propagate their genetic code, you accept that not only the cells that make up our bodies, but whatever beings are our immediate ancestors, lacked anything even remotely like self-consciousness, freedom, or moral life—which makes it hard to understand how or why consciousness (a mind, a soul) could ever have evolved in the first place.

American philosopher Daniel Dennett frames the problem quite lucidly. Take lobsters, he argues—they’re just robots. Lobsters can get by with no sense of self at all. You can’t ask what it’s like to be a lobster. It’s not like anything. They have nothing that even resembles consciousness; they’re machines. But if this is so, Dennett argues, then the same must be assumed all the way up the evolutionary scale of complexity, from the living cells that make up our bodies to such elaborate creatures as monkeys and elephants, who, for all their apparently human-like qualities, cannot be proved to think about what they do.

more here.

Jeanine Basinger at The New York Review of Books:

Stanwyck became one of the greatest interpreters of female vulnerability the movies ever had. In Clash by Night (1952), she plays a former good-time girl trying to do right by her stolid husband, but she’s tempted by a sexy and knowing Robert Ryan. Alone in her kitchen, feeling the heat, she tries to pour herself a cup of coffee. Her hand starts to shake, the cup starts to rattle, and she just can’t do it. Finally, she gives up and breaks down weeping, the hardbitten woman showing the audience who she is, and doing it with nothing but a coffee pot.

Both actors could be dangerous on film. Gardner destroys men through sex and by being beautiful enough to drive them mad, but Stanwyck lifted male destruction to an art form. In Double Indemnity (1944), with nothing but an ankle bracelet and a blond wig, she lures Fred MacMurray to murder her husband. She’s both comic and cruel in The Lady Eve (1941) as she reveals past amours on her wedding night to the hapless Henry Fonda, and horrifically cruel in The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) when she jabs a cigarette lighter in Richard Rober’s eyeball. Late in life, when most stars had long since retired, she played a steely matriarch in The Thorn Birds (1983) on TV, and was unafraid to enact an older woman’s sexual desire.

more here.

Corey Robin in his blog:

Last year, I said, somewhat tongue in cheek, that socialism is about converting hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.

This is what I meant. Socialism won’t eliminate the sorrows of the human condition. Loss, death, betrayal, disappointment, hurt: none of these would disappear or even be mitigated in a socialist society. As the Pirkei Avot puts it, against your will you enter this world, against your will you leave it (or something like that). That’s not going to change under socialism. But what socialism can do is to arrange things so that you can actually deal with and confront these unhappinesses of the human condition.

I was reminded of that reading this wonderful piece by Anya Shiffrin about the death of her father.

Last spring, André Shiffrin, the legendary publisher, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (he died in December). A New Yorker through and through, he nevertheless decided to spend his last months in Paris, where he and his wife had an apartment and where he had been born. It proved to be a wise move, as Anya explains.

More here. Anya Shiffrin's article is here.

Jonny Thakkar in Aeon:

The faces and forms of oppression are many, but nearly all of them flow from injustice, the treatment of people otherwise than they deserve. It’s hard to say what exactly any one person deserves, of course, but in the modern world we tend to think that desert is somehow related to what people can control. The colour of your skin is not up to you, for example, so treating you badly on its basis is oppressive. The treatment in question doesn’t have to be explicit: a society that marginalises homosexuals might not be as oppressive as one that imprisons them, but it is oppressive nonetheless. Sexuality and race are fairly obvious fault lines for oppression, as are class and gender. But if oppression is treating people otherwise than they deserve, there’s another category that tends to slip under our radar, namely the oppression of the ugly.

We don’t choose the configuration of our facial features any more than we choose our skin colour, yet people discriminate based on looks all the time. As the psychologist Comila Shahani-Denning put it, summarising research on the topic in Hofstra Horizons in 2003: ‘Attractiveness biases have been demonstrated in such different areas as teacher judgments of students, voter preferences for political candidates and jury judgments in simulated trials … attractiveness also influences interviewers’ judgments of job applicants.’ From the toddler gazing up at the adult to the adult gazing down at the toddler, we ruthlessly privilege the beautiful. The ugly get screwed.

More here.

From BlackPast.org:

In the following article, James A. Banks, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Professor and Director of the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington, Seattle, describes his Arkansas community's reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision when it was announced in 1954.

I was in the seventh grade at the Newsome Training School in Aubrey, Arkansas when the Supreme Court handed down Brown vs. Board of Education on May 17, 1954. My most powerful memory of the Brown decision is that I have no memory of it being rendered or mentioned by my parents, teachers, or preachers. In my rural southern black community, there was a conspiracy of silence about Brown. It was completely invisible.

A conspiracy of silence
I can only speculate about the meaning of the silence about Brown in the Arkansas delta in which racial segregation was codified in both law and custom in every aspect of our lives. The only public library in Lee County was 9 miles from our family farm in Marianna, the county seat that had a population of 4,550. Although I was an avid reader, I could not use the public library. It was for whites only. The only time I saw the inside of the public library was when the choir from my all-black high school entertained a white civic group in the library. We had to see second-run movies at the all-black Blue Haven Theatre. To see first-run movies, we had to go to the white Imperial Theatre and enter the “Colored entrance,” which led upstairs where the projection room was also located. We could hear the rattle of the movie projector as we tried to concentrate on the movie. Marianna and Lee County, Arkansas epitomized the institutionalized discrimination and racism that existed throughout the Deep South in the mid-1950s. The conspiracy of silence about Brown in Lee County among whites was probably caused by fear that news of Brown might disrupt the institutionalized racist system of segregation that had been established in Lee County in the years after Reconstruction. That system was never publicly challenged or questioned by whites or blacks. Black resistance to racism was deep but covert. Blacks wore a mask as they feigned contentment around whites as their anger seethed below the surface, ready to explode. The statue of Robert E. Lee that towered above the park in the Town Square symbolized the racial oppression that gripped the community in which I, and many other southern blacks, came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. My teachers and preachers surely knew about the Brown decision and must have been quietly joyous about it. However, it must have also evoked fear in them as well, about losing their jobs and their schools. They must have quietly discussed Brown among themselves, out of the earshot of the children and certainly out of the earshot of whites. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the five cases that constituted the Brown decision to the Supreme Court. The white establishment throughout the Deep South regarded the NAACP as a subversive and dangerous organization. It was viewed with as much suspicion and animosity as was the Communist Party in the North. Black teachers were often fired by school boards in the South when it was learned that they were members of the NAACP. The white school boards controlled both black and white schools. Consequently, for black teachers to spread the word about the Brown decision, especially among students, would probably have been considered a subversive and dangerous act.

Picture: Segregated School in West Memphis, Arkansas, 1949.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Geoffrey Robertson in The Guardian:

On Valentine's Day 1989, the dying Ayatollah Khomeini launched the mother of all prosecutions against Salman Rushdie. As with the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, his fatwa was a case of sentence first and trial later. Rushdie's difficulties brought many of his north London friends into a closer and warmer contact with officers of the Special Branch than they might ever have thought likely. It was not long before a private prosecutor tried to issue a summons against the author of The Satanic Verses to attend, at the Old Bailey, his trial for blasphemous libel. The magistrate refused, so the prosecutor appealed to the High Court, where 13 Muslim barristers attempted to get the book banned, but their action forced them to draft an indictment against Rushdie and his publishers specifying with legal precision the way in which the novel had blasphemed. Their efforts convinced me that The Satanic Verses is not blasphemous. The book is the fictional story of two men, infused with Islam but confused by the temptations of the west. The first survives by returning to his roots. The other, Gibreel, poleaxed by his spiritual need to believe in God and his intellectual inability to return to the faith, finally kills himself. The plot, in short, is not an advertisement for apostasy. Our opponents could in the end only allege six blasphemies in the book, and each one was based either on a misreading or on theological error:

God is described in the book as “The Destroyer of Man”. As He is similarly described in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation, especially of men who are unbelievers or enemies of the Jews.

The book contains criticisms of the prophet Abraham for his conduct towards Hagar and Ismael, their son. Abraham deserves criticism and is not seen as without fault in Islamic, Christian or Jewish traditions.

Rushdie refers to Muhammad as “Mahoud”. He called him variously “a conjuror”, “a magician” and a “false prophet”. Rushdie does nothing of the sort. These descriptions come from the mouth of a drunken apostate, a character with whom neither author nor reader has sympathy.

The book grossly insults the wives of the Prophet by having whores use their names. This is the point. The wives are expressly said to be chaste, and the adoption of their names by whores in a brothel symbolises the perversion and decadence into which the city had fallen before it surrendered to Islam.

The book vilifies the close companions of the Prophet, calling them “bums from Persia” and “clowns”, whereas the Qur'an treats them as men of righteousness. These phrases are used by a depraved hack poet, hired to pen propaganda against the Prophet. They do not represent the author's beliefs.

The book criticises the teachings of Islam for containing too many rules and seeking to control every aspect of everyday life. Characters in the book do make such criticisms, but they cannot amount to blasphemy because they do not vilify God or the Prophet.

The case had one very satisfying result: the Home Office announced it would not allow further blasphemy prosecutions, declaring “how inappropriate our legal mechanisms are for dealing with matters of faith and individual belief … the strength of their own belief is the best armour against mockers and blasphemers”. Amen to that (Pussy Riot prosecutors please note). The crime of blasphemy has now been abolished, although this wretched legacy of English law still permits courtroom persecutions in Pakistan and some other countries of the Commonwealth.

More here.

Omar Waraich in Roads & Kingdoms:

When the British ruled India, they had a habit of establishing garrisons in towns across the subcontinent. One of these was located in the ancient town of Sialkot, which now lies in Pakistan’s Punjab province, just shy of the Indian border. To amuse themselves, British soldiers stationed there would, of course, play cricket. But they played football, too, on the many stretches of carefully watered and manicured grass that can still be found across Sialkot’s cantonment area.

According to a local legend, at around the turn of the twentieth century, the British officers managed to puncture their ball during a casual kick-about. Seeking a quick and cheap mend, they enlisted the services of a local Sialkoti cobbler, who readily agreed to try and restore the unusual object to its original full-roundedness. The
attempt proved successful, and the cobbler became a regular source for repairs.

Over time, the cobbler carefully studied the architecture of the ball. Using local leather and practiced knit-work, the enterprising cobbler made several attempts to create a replica. Eventually pleased with the results, he developed a football of his own. When the colonial football enthusiasts next paid a visit, as the local Sialkotis tell the story with relish, he floated a revision to the terms of their deal.

“Instead of getting me to just repair balls,” the cobbler is supposed to have offered, “why don’t you buy them from me as well?” Satisfied with the locally produced alternatives to the footballs they would order from England, the Brits readily agreed. There began the now bustling Sialkoti trade of manufacturing and exporting some of the finest footballs in the world.

Read the rest here.

(And check out Roads & Kingdoms' series on the global appeal of soccer ahead of the World Cup)