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NO APPETITE FOR RACIST STEREOTYPES
8/17/22

By Karen Shih ’09

For Black Americans, the simple act of eating can be fraught. Gathering for a barbecue in a public park can lead to run-ins with the police. Dining on traditional dishes, developed through ingenuity and necessity out of generations of slavery and poverty, can lead to racist ridicule. In her latest book, “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America,” which is available in print this week, American studies Professor Psyche Williams-Forson breaks down how unfair scrutiny of what Black Americans eat keeps society from addressing systemic inequities.

Why did you want to write this book?
Shaming Black people for what and where they eat is not new. It began during enslavement; the ways farms and plantations were set up were about surveilling Black bodies. And it’s moved straight into the contemporary moment, such as the (2018) arrest of the young Black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. People feel they’ve been given permission to overcorrect Black people’s lives, from music to clothing to language to food, because these things go against the grain of whiteness and “correctness.”

We all need to eat, so it’s easy to dismiss the unseen power dynamics around food. But if we are going to have conversations about people’s freedoms, we need to talk about food.

What’s an example of how Black Americans are food shamed?
My book opens with the D.C. Metro worker who was eating on the train in uniform, when a woman took her picture and blasted it on social media. The employee was literally going from one part of her job to the next, trying to fit in a meal. She knew Metro was no longer issuing fines for eating so she did so. Then she has her life exposed.

What are some food misconceptions that you address?
People like to criticize fast-food restaurants, but they are major gathering hubs for the elderly and other people who are alone. Farmers markets aren’t utopias. If you don’t set up in Black neighborhoods, offer food that’s culturally relevant and accept Black vendors, people won’t feel welcome. Also, dollar stores can be important sources of food. If you’re on a fixed income, and you can go in and buy 20 items with $20, that can make a difference in people’s lives.

How can the conversation about Black food culture be harmful?
We hear a lot about Black people and their diets, and how they’re unhealthy and obese because of soul food—but you can’t blame ill health squarely on food. Look at “the stroke belt,” which stretches across the South. These are states with repressive policies and laws. There’s a lot of wage inequality, people who are unhoused, people who are unemployed. Society wants food to do the heavy lifting because it takes our focus away from systemic inequalities that keep people mired in oppression, which contributes to psychological and physical disease.

Book Launch: Lee Konstantinou, The Last Samurai Reread
Tuesday, January 31, 2023 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM

Join Lee Konstantinou as he discusses his most recent publication, The Last Samurai Reread (Columbia UP, November 2022) with Orrin Wang.

From the publisher's website:

“Black Lives Have Always Mattered in Black Music”

In 2020, the United States faced a cultural reckoning as the world stared down the start of a global pandemic. During a time of strife and death, a time that disproportionately affected people of color, the world watched along as continued police brutality reached a point that that triggered protests around the world. At the Journal of Modern Slavery we mourned and felt anger with those around us, and then we wondered what we could do, how we could actively support the movement for racial justice. The answer came in the form of a special issue of the Journal of Modern Slavery, designed to look deeper into the individual, social, and systemic injustices woven into the fabric of the United States, beginning with slavery. The issue of the journal grew into this book.

In Slavery and its Consequences: Racism, Inequity and Exclusion in the USA, the contributors tell rich narratives about how slavery and racial injustice, as well as the resistance to it, has shaped the country over centuries to become what modern America is today. Through various lenses, the book explores and celebrates Black American history as it is woven into the cultural and social structures of the country. Across centuries of change, this book weaves together the invaluable influence this history has had on music, sport, philosophy, literature, publishing, scholarship, politics, faiths, poetry, the church, photography, civil rights, peacebuilding, jazz and more as part of the struggle and the resistance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Dr. Tina Davis & Jodi L. Henderson

Introduction
Lawrence E. Carter

“We Knew”
Stephane Dunn

Black Lives Have Always Mattered in Black Music
Stephanie Shonekan

A New Look at Slavery – The “Peculiar Institution”
Charles Finch

American Slavery Historiography
Orville Vernon Burton

Racializing Cain, Demonizing Blackness & Legalizing Discrimination: Proposal for Reception of Cain and America’s Racial Caste System
Joel B. Kemp

Dealing with the Devil and Paradigms of Life in African American Music
Anthony B. Pinn

‘A Home in Dat Rock’: Afro-American Folk Sources and Slave Visions of Heaven and Hell
Lewis V Baldwin

Modern Slavery By Another Name: A Black Church Response to Gender Based Violence and the Human Trafficking of Black Women, Girls, and Queer Folx for the Purpose of Sexual Exploitation
Brandon Thomas Crowley

The Birth – and Rebirth – of Black Activist Athletes: They Refused To Lay Their Burdens Down
Ron Thomas

Occupying the Center: Black Publishing: an interview with Paul Coates & Barry Beckham
Jodi L. Henderson

Literary Review of the Woke 2019-2021
Leah Creque

Blueprints Towards Improved Communities
Dr. Tina Davis

To Hope, Fourteen Years Later
Naje Lataillade

The Sounds of Freedom: A dialogue on the poison of racism, the medicine of jazz, and a Buddhist view of life
Taro Gold withWayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock & esperanza spalding

10 award-winning short story collections worth reading
10/17/22

Review by Daphne Kalotay

Each year, among the new fiction collections fighting for attention are a handful published neither through mainstream houses nor the usual small press alternatives but via a third avenue: book prize contests.

Some of these competitions, such as the AWP Grace Paley Prize, have been around for 40-plus years and rely on coordination with university and indie presses. Others, such as the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, are held by the press itself. Monetary awards can range from $1,000 to $15,000, but what all winners share is the challenge, once their collections launch, of being noticed by the public. With that in mind, here are 10 notable prizewinning collections published in 2022.

Rich with dreams and ghosts, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes’s “Are We Ever Our Own” (BOA Short Fiction Prize) follows descendants of a Cuban family to America and beyond. Yet its true subject is female artists overshadowed by their male counterparts.

“You say my work is disappearing,” one character writes in a letter. “Turning in on itself — getting smaller and smaller. You say ‘domestic, tidy, craft.’ You don’t mean ‘craft’ in that nice way the boys upstate with their forged steel boxes do.”

In other stories, Fuentes adopts elegant expository summary that can create emotional distance, but immediacy returns whenever we hear these women’s voices directly. “Palm Chess” alternates between a screenplay and journal entries by a female filmmaker who has left her artist husband — movingly connecting the private and creative selves.

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Shay Hazkani Book Wins Korenblat Book Award
9/2/22

The Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel have announced that Shay Hazkani's recent book, Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (Stanford University Press, 2021), is the recipient of the 2022 Korenblat Book Award in Israel Studies.

From the award letter:

“Dear Palestine marks a paradigm shift in the study of the relations between Jews and Arabs. In an engaging and literary style, Shay Hazkani orchestrates numerous letters and diaries of Jewish and Arab soldiers during the 1948 War, in addition to military journals, pamphlets, and radio broadcasts of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab League’s volunteer army. This is a microhistory of the ordinary individuals who withstood indoctrination and cooptation, sometime against their best interests. It is a story that quietly defies monolithic and binary perceptions passed down by nationalist histories. In their stead, Hazkani offers a relational account that listens to a more nuanced human network which steers this commendable and unpretentiously radical book.”

The Korenblat Book Award in Israel Studies was established in 2021 by Dr. Phillip Korenblat to promote exceptional scholarly contribution in the field of Israel Studies, and honor each year a book of outstanding merit in either Hebrew or English by scholars at all stages of their career.

Green Light Ethics A Theory of Permissive Consent and its Moral Metaphysics
9/15/22

Hallie Liberto's book is about permissive consent—the moral tool we use to give another person permission to do what would otherwise be forbidden. For instance, consent to enter my home gives you permission to do what would otherwise be trespass. This transformation is the very thing that philosophers identify as consent—which is why we call it a normative power. It is something individuals can do, by choice, to change the moral or legal world. But what human acts or attitudes render consent? When do coercive threats, offers, or lies undermine the transformative power of consent? What intentions or conventions are necessary to render consent meaningful?

This book develops a novel theory that explains the moral features of consent in some of the most central domains of human life—but that also serves as a study in how to theorize normative power. It argues that consent is a moral mechanism with exactly the set of features that, when triggered, prevents another person's behavior from constituting a certain kind of wrongdoing. What kind of wrongdoing? It depends on what sort of permission is being granted. Sometimes consent permits others to enter, occupy, or act within some bounded domain wherein the consent-giver holds moral authority. In these cases, consent operates to prevent what the book calls: Invasive Wrongdoing. By identifying the moral features that underlie this special wrongdoing, we can learn what it takes to render consent.

Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters
8/22/22

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.

For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes, Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century.

Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers—landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners—sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.

Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?

Date of Event: 
8/17/22

In New Book, Professor Williams-Forson Over the Consequences of Food Shaming

Source: 
Maryland Today
Date of Publication: 
2022-08-17
News View: 
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Documentary Film: The Soldier's Opinion based on Dr. Shay Hazkani's book, Dear Palestine
8/6/22

The Soldier's Opinion premiered in Jerusalem's Film Festival generated much interest. The Soldier's Opinion Film

Photo credit, Tom Weintraub Louk (Shay Hazkani signing film Hebrew Poster above)

Shay Hazkani with Director, Assaf Banitt and Producer, Shahar Ben-Hur.

The Soldier's Opinion, is based on Dr. Shay Hazkani's research and book, Dear Palestine.  Hazkani is credited as a co-creator and script writer.  The film was was directed by Assaf Banitt and was produced for Israel's main cable network, Hot Telecommunication and will air on Israeli TV in November.  Screening is expected in the U.S. as well. 

The Soldier's Opinion

Israel 2022 | 55 minutes | Hebrew | English subtitles

Over the span of fifty years, the Israeli military censorship secretly copied soldiers' personal letters, extracting their views on the most contentious issues facing Israeli society. The findings were presented to leaders in a top-secret report identified as “The Soldier’s Opinion.”

Hazkani and film crew_ The Soldier's Opinion

Shay Hazkani with film Director, Producer, and Sound Designer, Erez Eyni Shavit. Photo credit Ben Tofach

Mircea Raianu's New Book on the Tata Corporation
7/26/22

Mircea Raianu's new book, "Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism," tells the story of a small business that, over 150 years, had both struggles and success as it grew to become one of the most powerful companies in India.

Nearly a century old, the grand façade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai. This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group, a multinational corporation that produces everything from salt to software. After getting their start in the cotton and opium trades, the Tatas, a Parsi family from Navsari, Gujarat, ascended to commanding heights in the Indian economy by the time of independence in 1947. Over the course of its 150-year history Tata spun textiles, forged steel, generated hydroelectric power, and took to the skies. It also faced challenges from restive workers fighting for their rights and political leaders who sought to curb its power.

In this sweeping history, Mircea Raianu tracks the fortunes of a family-run business that was born during the high noon of the British Empire and went on to capture the world’s attention with the headline-making acquisition of luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover. The growth of Tata was a complex process shaped by world historical forces: the eclipse of imperial free trade, the intertwined rise of nationalism and the developmental state, and finally the return of globalization and market liberalization. Today Tata is the leading light of one of the world’s major economies, selling steel, chemicals, food, financial services, and nearly everything else, while operating philanthropic institutions that channel expert knowledge in fields such as engineering and medicine.

Based on painstaking research in the company’s archive, Tata elucidates how a titan of industry was created and what lessons its story may hold for the future of global capitalism.

The book is available on Amazon here or on the publisher's website here.

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