Columbia University Press

This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a guest post from Professor Katerina Kolozova, in which she discusses what she sees as the state of The Real today and outlines some ideas in her forthcoming book Cut of the Real, to be published by Columbia University Press in the Fall:

What Baudrillard called the perfect crime has become the malaise of the global(ized) intellectual of the beginning of the 21’st century. The “perfect crime” in question is the murder of the real, carried out in such way as to create the conviction it never existed and that the traces of its erased existence were mere symptom of its implacable originary absence. The era of postmodernism has been one of oversaturation with signification as a reality in its own right and also as the only possible reality. In 1995, with the publication of The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard declared full realization of the danger he warned against as early as in 1976 in his book The Symbolic Exchange and Death. The latter book centered on the plea to affirm reality in its form of negativity, i.e., as death and the trauma of interrupted life. And he did not write of some static idea of the “Negative,” of “the constitutive lack” or “absence” as conceived by postmodernism and epistemological poststructuralism. The fact that, within the poststructuralist theoretical tradition, the real has been treated as the “inaccessible” and “the unthinkable” has caused “freezing” of the category (of the real) as immutable, univocal and bracketed out of discursiveness as an unspoken axiom.

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This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a Q & A with Professor Jeffrey Robbins, in which he discusses some of the essential components of the Insurrections series and their importance today.

Question: Clayton Crockett wrote that insurrectionist theology is not politically neutral and is critical of corporate capitalism. Can you elaborate on the insurrectionist critique of contemporary corporatism?
 
Jeffrey Robbins: Perhaps it is important to distinguish between insurrectionist theology as named and employed by Crockett (together with myself, Creston Davis, and Ward Blanton), and the Insurrections series.  An insurrectionist theology, as we conceive it, is a materialist political theology that takes seriously the emancipatory potential of religion.  Instead of relying on the concept of transcendence or the notion of a transcendent God, it accepts Wittgenstein’s maxim that “the world is all that is the case,” and thus expresses itself in the form of an immanent critique. 
 
Beginning from this point, we can say of the insurrectionist critique that contemporary corporatism is today’s undeniable hegemon.  Consider the story from today’s New York Times:  After protests erupted in Cyprus over the European Union’s planned austerity measures that would seize funds from individual Cypriot savings accounts, Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth, offered its own private bailout to rescue the Cyprus economy.  As the story puts it, “The fate of this proposal is uncertain. . . But it illustrates how a sprawling, wealthy company so deeply entwined with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that it is often called a state within a state is willing to seize an opportunity and exploit weaknesses and divisions within Europe to cement its position and power.”
 
While certain corporations operate as a state within a state (consider here, as well, an entity such as the company formerly known as Blackwater whose CEO admitted it worked as a “virtual extension of the CIA”), marshaling the mechanisms of the state for its own private gain, there are others operating as transnational corporations without respect to national boundaries.  At a minimum, this suggests a new, alternative form of political sovereignty.  Further, when the flow of capital is not only global, but instantaneous, this demands new forms of political organization and new means of political resistance.  And finally, contemporary corporatism’s reign can be considered complete when it becomes the logic—or better, the rubric—by which we determine even educational and philanthropic success.

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This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a guest post from Professor Santiago Zabala, in which he discusses the unique nature and success of the Insurrections series, and its significance in critical studies today.

In order for any scholarly series to work there are three indispensable components: a distinguished academic press, a long-term philosophical project, and, most of all, passionate editors. CUP’s Insurrections series not only has all of these, but also has become a model for series from other presses. A few weeks ago I was at a conference in New Delhi called On World Religions: Diversity, Not Dissension (which took place at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and was organized by the distinguished Indian philosopher Anindita Balslev and attended by intellectuals from all over the world, including the His Holiness the Dalai Lama). I was asked by a group of students whether I knew what would be the next titles in Insurrections. I must confess I was not completely surprised to be asked because these researchers, in keeping with the intellectual environment of the event, were already interested in the intersection of religion, politics, and culture. However, the series is known not only within the intellectual circle of political theology as I have discovered elsewhere in Asia and South America over the past years. I’m not interested in writing a report on the series’ editorial success, even though it’s clear the editors (Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey W. Robbins) have managed to create a true editorial insurrection, but rather in pointing out the ontological nature of the series. In order to do this, it is first important to understand who these editors are.

The four editors of Insurrections are truly postmetaphysical philosophers, that is, concerned with what Michel Foucault called the “ontology of actuality,” where existence is not given beforehand but rather disclosed through its own historical disruptions. This is evident not only in the work of Slavoj Žižek but also in that of the other three editors, who merit as much attention as the Slovenian philosopher. While Creston Davis, a long-time disciple and collaborator of Žižek, has been articulating a refreshing materialist-immanent theology for years now, Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins have contributed in a unique way to political theology’s democratic effort to overcome conservative theological articulations (unfortunately expressed by the newly elected Pope Francis in Rome). What unites these editors and what they bring to the intersection between politics and theology is the vision that the truth of political theology in the twenty-first century can no longer be imagined through liberal reforms or anarchic events but only by reconsidering democracy as a form of religious practice and political thought. This new democracy is not simply unconstrained by modern liberal capitalism but actually its greatest enemy, that is, a true insurrection. The fact these editors have so much in common is perhaps the reason why the series, only seven years after its inception, is so successful. Certainly, the books in the series have sold, which is important, but much more significant are its consequences, that is, the issues it has given form to.

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This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala.Throughout this week, we will be hosting a number of posts and interviews from the editors and authors of the Insurrections series, and we will also feature the series on Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

The Insurrection Series is on Pinterest! Take a minute to browse through the titles and covers, and maybe even our page devoted to the life and works of Alain Badiou, a prominent author in the series.

One of the most significant things you’ll learn from Jonathan Kahn’s new book, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, is that racial discourse surfaces within most all of the vertically integrated components of the medical industry, from research grants to drug advertisement and sales. In the following post, Kahn focuses in on one of these components: the acquisition of medical patents, and provides some provocative evidence of how racial categories continue to be manipulated within the patent process.

A review of recent patent applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has uncovered a highly problematic new practice: PTO examiners are requiring applicants to include racial categories in the claims sections of some biotechnology patent submissions, where they provide the basis for subsequent research, development, and marketing of products developed from the patent.

This phenomenon first came to light in a December 2008 presentation by PTO Quality Assurance Specialist Kathleen Bragdon titled “A Look at Personalized Medicine.” Taking an example of a treatment for breast cancer, the presentation argued that in cases where effectiveness for all races was not established, “a scope of enablement rejection must be considered.” The message here was that a patent only covered those racial groups included in the underlying study, implying that race must be considered a genetically salient factor in biotechnology patent applications.

The critical responses Bragdon’s presentation prompted could have led the PTO to reconsider the relevance of race to biotechnology patent claims. But despite the push-back, the PTO’s practice of requiring race continues, apparently unabated. This matters a lot – not only to inventors seeking to draft viable patent applications, but more broadly for our understandings of how racial categories are coming to play an increasingly significant role in biotechnology research and development. It also casts light on a great irony: As we claim to be making progress toward a promised land of personalized medicine, group categories of race seem to be gaining salience in both law and science.

The presentation involved only a hypothetical, but at the very time it was being made, a number of cases quite similar to it were making their way through the PTO process. One, pending before the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI), was contesting a patent examiner’s race-based rejection of an application covering a method of screening for a gene mutation that indicates an increased risk for prostate cancer. In that case the examiner had rejected an application, among other things, for failure to “enable the full scope” of the claimed method because it “has not [been] shown that the correlation between the claimed mutations and the risk of both sporadic and hereditary prostate cancers is significant in all populations.” This finding, in turn, was apparently based on the application’s disclosure that one of the relevant mutations was found in Caucasians, while another was found African Americans.

For the examiner, this meant that the same level of risk was not present in all racial populations, hence a lack of enablement. The examiner rejected the patent claims because they did not differentiate risk by racial group but simply covered “a method of screening a subject.” This is a real-life example of the exact same logic evident in Bragdon’s presentation. The examiner here was denying a patent application for its failure to use race as a biological construct. In order to succeed, the applicants would either have to add race in a manner they did not think valid, or take the time and money to appeal the decision. In this case, they appealed – and won.

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Earlier this week, we posted on BiDil, the first FDA-approved drug with a race-specific indication on its label. In the following interview with Columbia University Press, Jonathan Kahn, author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, places BiDil in context. He provides some compelling examples of how “personalized” medicine is being “racialized” and makes an argument for why this needs to be stopped.

CUP: Generally, can genetics be reliably used to determine the efficacy of a drug?

JK: Using genetics to determine the efficacy of a drug is very different from using race. A lot of progress has been made in using genetics to identify how a person may metabolize a particular drug. This is not quite the same thing as efficacy, but it is important. There are several steps to using a drug to treat a disease. Once you decide that a person needs a drug, you then need to determine what the appropriate dose is for that person. Many factors can influence this – height, weight, age, and, of course, genetics. You would not want to give an infant the same dose of Tylenol that you would give an adult. Similarly, some people have genetic variations that make them metabolize certain drugs more quickly or more slowly than others. If you are a slow metabolizer, then the drug is going to present in your system for a longer time, and you may not need as a high a dose as someone who is a faster metabolizer, and so forth. Many of these variations have been identified and can be tested. In some circumstances this can improve treatment outcomes; in others, it does not seem to be significantly more effective than the old-fashioned way of having your physician monitor your response to a particular dose and adjusting as needed.

Some significant advances have also been made in targeting drugs to treat some cancers based, not on the genetics of the person, but of the cancer itself. Thus, for example, there are certain types of breast and lung cancer that respond particularly well to certain drugs. To determine whether the drug will work, doctors test the cancer cells to see if they have certain genetic variants that will make them susceptible to the drugs. In all cases, whether drug metabolizing genes or cancer genes, the relevant genetic variants are not specific to particular racial groups.

CUP: Could you define your use of the term “unstated white norm” in the book?

JK: In the realm of biomedicine, the “unstated white norm” is the common practice of thinking about the health status or conditions of white people as the normal state of affairs from which people of color are seen somehow to deviate. It becomes manifest in such practices as algorithms that use race as a variable in calculating the proper dose of a drug for a given patient. Some of these – even those using genetic information – include values for being “African American” or “Asian American” but not for being white. The idea here is that if you are white you get the “normal” dose that does not have to be adjusted for race. It is similar to the idea that somehow whites do not “have race” – only people of color do.

In the case of a drug like BiDil, the idea of the unstated white norm becomes manifest in the logic of its approval by the FDA. The approval was based primarily on data from a drug trial that enrolled only self-identified African Americans. The FDA approved BiDil with a race-specific label based on the idea that since it was only tested in African Americans it should only be approved for African Americans. But the fact of the matter is, most of the drugs on the market today were approved based on data from similarly race-specific trials – trials conducted only with white people – but these drugs were not designated as “white” drugs, nor should they be. One unfortunate implication of this dynamic is the FDA sending a message (unintentionally to be sure, but a message nonetheless) that drugs tested in black people are only good for black people but drugs tested in whites are good for everybody – that is, that whites are somehow more fully representative of humanity than are blacks.

CUP: What are your views on the future of racialized and personalized medicine?

JK: I consider racialized medicine to be the inappropriate use of racial categories in medical practice and drug development. It often involves constructing practices around mistaken assumptions of some innate genetic difference among racial groups. For me, the important issue is not whether to use race in biomedicine, but how to use it – and when. There are very real health disparities in the country that are based on a long history of social, economic, and legal practices that have consistently and deliberately subordinated groups of people based on their race. As a social and historical phenomenon the health impacts of race are very real and can only be addressed by taking race into account. The key is to recognize that in these contexts it is the social and historical practices of racism that have become manifest in racialized bodies as the very real biological differences of health disparities. That is, it is history and culture that has created these biological differences in the incidence of disease across racial groups – not genes.

The future for personalized medicine should be to focus on specific genes for disease and drug response and use new knowledge to develop more effective therapeutics. My hope is that a better understanding of the relationship between race and race-based health disparities will lead to rejection of racialized medicine and an embrace of broad-based approaches to addressing the persistent social and historical determinants of health in our country.

Hamline University Law Professor Jonathan Kahn has become a prominent critical voice in the last decade on the controversial injection of racial discourse into American medical practice (particularly in the realm of genetically tailored drugs). In the following post, he gives us a helpful overview of BiDil, an FDA-approved drug that has in many ways become the face of this issue.

The story of BiDil begins in the 1980s when a group of researchers hypothesized that combining hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate together might be an effective treatment for heart failure. They conducted two small, federally supported clinical trials and concluded that, indeed, the drugs did work – for everybody. At this point race was not a part of the picture. In 1989, the researchers obtained a patent on the use of the two drugs together – soon to be named “BiDil” – to treat heart failure. Again, there was no mention of race in this first patent. Patent in hand, they licensed the rights to a small pharmaceutical company, which took the necessary steps to bring the drug to the FDA for approval. In 1997, the FDA denied approval, citing inadequate statistical support from the data in the first two, small trials. Importantly, many cardiologists on the advisory committee stated clearly that they believed BiDil worked, but that they could not recommend approval because of the regulatory criteria for statistical significance in the data. The FDA said it believed the drug was approvable if a properly designed follow-up clinical trial were conducted.

Clinical trials, however, cost a lot of money. At this point the small pharmaceutical company dropped BiDil and it seemed dead in the water. By now, nearly half of the twenty year life of the first patent had elapsed. A follow up trial and return to the FDA for approval might take several more years, effectively eating up almost the entire value of the patent. It was here that race entered the picture for the first time. The researchers broke out the original data by race and argued that the BiDil combination seemed to work particularly well in the 49 African Americans place on the BiDil combination drugs in the first trial. So well, in fact, that they filed for a new race-specific patent based on using the drugs only in African Americans. This patent was granted in 2000, effectively extending monopoly control over the drug by thirteen years, until 2020. This patent was then licensed to NitroMed, which conducted the new race-specific trial that provided the basis for the FDA approval in 2005.

In order for the race-specific patent to pay off, NitroMed had to get a race-specific label approved by the FDA. If the FDA approved BiDil for use in the general population regardless of race then any pharmaceutical company would be able to market BiDil after the original patent expired in 2007. In my book, Race in a Bottle, I argue that these legal and commercial considerations drove the framing of BiDil as a racial drug – shaping which questions got asked and how the answers were interpreted and presented to the public. It is in exploring these intersections of law, commerce and science that the story of BiDil illuminates the complexities of how and why race is being used in biomedical research, practice and drug development.

Look for more posts about Kahn’s new book, Race in a Bottle, this week on the Columbia University Press blog!

In the following post, Mike Chasar, author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, explores the ways in which a poem related to a Coca-Cola holiday promotion exposes how the commercial and non-commercial aspects of the holidays are intertwined. (This post was cross-posted on Mike Chasar’s blog Poetry and Popular Culture (P&PC))

Nothing dogs the Christmas season at P&PC so much as the clash between the holiday’s commercial and non- commercial aspects—between shopping and spirit, getting and giving, worldliness and wonderment, materialism and, well, something more. This clash dogs the season’s poetry, too, as the oftentimes utopian (or at least not uniformly materialist) sentiments voiced by the season’s popular verse forms get standardized, mass produced, boxed, wrapped, shipped, and sold in and on any number of greeting cards, ornaments, advent calendars, and novelty items like the funky oversized matchbook from Hallmark (see above). For every excuse that the season offers to poetically express feelings one might view as suspect or inappropriate the rest of the year—you know, faith in ideals like love, peace, family, compassion, giving, forgiveness, and the pursuit of something other than the cynical status quo—there’s some Grinch waiting to package, market, and profit from it all.

But because we all know that the commercial and non-commercial aspects of the holidays aren’t inevitably partnered with each other—that’s not the way is has to be, right?—the marketplace has to continually entangle and re-entangle them, making the contradictions between them seem natural (even at times, like, totally fun), or else so interweaving them that it becomes nigh impossible.

It’s easy, perhaps, to see this logic at work in the big picture (“Welcome to the Spirit of Christmas Online Store!”), but it’s remarkable how much it sometimes governs—to quote Robert Frost, who for nearly thirty years partnered with printer Joseph Blumenthal to make Christmas cards for friends and associates—in a thing so small as the little artifact pictured here: a Santa “ring toss” game issued as a holiday giveaway by Coca-Cola in the 1950s that contains the following poem on its handle:

I am a Jolly old
“SAINT NICK”—
So, if you want a Kick,
Be the first to make
A “Hit – Smash”
By swinging the Ring
That’s on the String
on Santa’s Mustache

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“For that matter, Christian Grey of the Fifty Shades trilogy would be hard to pick out from a lineup of the ‘Opportunity Society’ wing of the GOP; I picture him with Scott Brown abs, Paul Ryan vocal inflection, and Romney hair.”—Whitney Strub

This is the second post from Whitney Strub on porn’s place in America in 2012. In his first post, Strub focused on pornography’s place in politics, here he turns to popular culture. Whitney Strub is the author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right.

I ended the first post with the suggestion that the political disinvestment in porn as a partisan issue had something to do with its cultural mainstreaming. And indeed, it’s hard to rail against obscenity when your suburban voting base is immersed in a trilogy full of spanking scenes and handcuffs and erotic shaving.

Of course, Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t the first time something vaguely smutty has carried mass appeal; Hugh Hefner was perfecting this trick over a half-century ago. And though occasional media stories highlight “new” aspects of the phenomenon, like the female audience (Candida Royalle was pioneering porn for women in the 1980s, not to mention those steamy Harlequin novels my good Catholic grandmother was always reading) or the central role of technology (Kindles and Nooks now, though VHS and Beta once before), probably the most interesting angle of the story was how Vintage Books managed to cash in on the free world of Internet fanfic that is often better written and more sexually explicit (full disclosure: it’s a pet peeve of mine when people pontificate about texts they haven’t actually read, so I bought Fifty Shades Freed, the third book and only one the South Philadelphia Target had, being sold out of the first two. I had every intention of reading it, and Reader, I tried, let’s leave it at that).

So this mainstream porn event is far from unprecedented. What’s more noteworthy is that the current scale of integration blurs boundaries until pornography itself becomes a less legible category (I can’t say less meaningful—it’s always been a semantic mess). If porn spent the last two decades of the twentieth century abandoning its outlaw status to learn the tricks of corporate capitalism, from product differentiation to branding, the twenty-first century mainstream cultural economy in turn simply absorbed pornography wholly. E.L. James’ Fifty Shades is only the most glaring recent example. Mainstream crossover, once rare, has grown commonplace enough to draw little mention. Where once Harry Reems lost a part in Grease on account of his smutty past, now porn phenom James Deen won a role alongside Lindsay Lohan in The Canyons precisely because of his. Of the two stars, he’s not even the most controversial.

It’s far from a foregone conclusion that smut challenges social norms. Fifty Shades’ (rather light) BDSM content might give it an edgy quality to some readers, but as Margot Weiss’ recent analysis of the San Francisco BDSM scene in her book Techniques of Pleasure argues, transgression is tightly bound (so to speak) with hypercapitalist tendencies. New forms of desire are always also new opportunities for monetization, and the chicken doesn’t always follow the egg. For that matter, Christian Grey of the Fifty Shades trilogy would be hard to pick out from a lineup of the “Opportunity Society” wing of the GOP; I picture him with Scott Brown abs, Paul Ryan vocal inflection, and Romney hair.

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“Obama is a figure with the screen presence of a film star (like Diana). Palin is not, she is the quintessential TV actor, from sitcom, talk show, reality TV.”—Daniel Herwitz

In the chapter, “Tocqueville on the Bridge to Nowhere,” from Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony, Daniel Herwitz turns his attention to how heritage has been employed in American culture and politics. In the following excerpt, he writes about how Barack Obama has drawn upon the image and iconic stature of Abraham Lincoln. Later in the chapter he compares Obama with Sarah Palin:

Obama was staged as Lincoln before, during, and after his inauguration, taller than his public, monumental, in communion with that oversized, larger-than-life Lincoln Memorial in Washington. There are three Lincolns in American history: the actual one, steering the nation through its darkest of times, writing the Gettysburg Address on the train, the one etched into the monument, larger than Lincoln himself, who was already larger than life, sculpted from marble, his immortal words made immortal by being scripted into that stone, then the Lincoln of the cinema, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, the Lincoln dark and dulcet, silver in the silver screen, glowing through the aesthetics of the medium. American heritage is all three: the man, the monument, the movie.

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In addition to Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony, we’ve been lucky enough to be be the publisher for other books by Daniel Herwitz. In addition to Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto, and The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera, which Herwitz edited, he is also the author of The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption.

In this video, Herwitz discusses The Star as Icon:

“Heritage began as a secular religion and is now a battleground between the forces of recognition, politics and commerce. It is where art, culture, history, politics and markets meet. Little could be more interesting than this.”—Daniel Herwitz

Here is the second part of our interview with Daniel Herwitz, author of Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony. (You can read the first part here):

Question: How then did the modern practice of heritage arise?

Daniel Herwitz: The modern practice of heritage arose with the modern European nation. Heritage picked out and exalted certain social values as time tested and time immemorial, representative of everything great in the new/emergent European nation. This is for-he-is-an-Englishman stuff, Gilbert and Sullivan stuff, Lady Diana stuff. Heritage converted past values into a special bank of (to pursue the example) Englishness, whose currency would forever appreciate in value, whose future would be assured through that currency. England thus demonstrated through its heritage bank longevity, futurity, superiority. The Institutions of the new state (courts of law, museums, universities) all collected and recited this patrimony.

At the same time heritage became understood as a common origin, partly obscured by the sodden character of modern life, a source which the likes of Matthew Arnold and Fredric Nietzsche believed had to be rediscovered, and reinvented for modern life to put modern life back on the right footing, insuring its destiny. This destiny was usually believed to be found in ancient Greece. And so heritage practice articulated a new link between origin and destiny for the nation.

Heritage justified empire: the nation would gift its culture to those otherwise unable to have it. The forcing of heritage onto the colony also served to dispossess the colony of its own past: Graft English heritage onto the colony while devaluing the colonial past and you have made the colony into your appendage, you have robbed the colony of its chance to find its own route to modernity in the light of its own past. Heritage making is central to decolonization because it gives the new nation the ability to imagine its own route to the future by giving it a sense of its own origin.

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“Through heritage, marketed in political campaigns and filtered through dense layers of American media both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin become celebrity figures gifted with special powers.”—Daniel Herwitz

In this first part of a two-part interview, Daniel Herwitz discusses one of the central questions regarding his bookHeritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony

Q: What makes heritage worth talking about?

Daniel Herwitz: Heritage may seem to some the stuff of bad PBS Documentary TV, bringing up images of stale tours of the great houses of Europe, dull paintings of bearded Presidents hanging on the walls of the White House, the Daughters of the American Revolution and their dance parties, programs and tours narrated by announcers with fake Royal accents. The valence of that brand of heritage is that of a particular brand. There are others: the “heritage Thanksgiving turkey”, old bonded bourbon, authentic backwoods banjos, over-priced organic local fruits and vegetables. Today the world of Ralph Lauren is one in which anyone can drape themselves in the heritage (read: aura) of Old England by purchasing the three piece hunting suit or the Ralph Lauren royal bed. Heritage is an advertising logo, a suit of clothes tailor-made for lawyers and stockbrokers, not to mention their six-year-old daughters clutching American Girl dolls bedecked in homespun Amish pullovers.

But heritage is also live action and especially for new/emerging nations: a tenebrous, rewriting of the past into a contentious common origin which gives the nation a sense of shared longevity and shared destiny. Heritage is the anvil on which a new and common citizenry is meant to be forged. Central to decolonization is this scripting of the past into a sign of uniqueness, dignity, and difference from the colonizer, into a source of future destiny and purpose. Often decolonization imagines a past prior to the rude entrance of the colonizer, a pre-colonial, idealized state which demonstrates that the emergent nation was always already in existence before its fall under the colonial yoke, and is ready to rise again. Heritage is the set of myths through which the new nation proclaims its longevity and futurity. It always leads to political controversy, since such myths inevitably favor this population over that, this group instead of that. Scripting the distant past is part of contemporary politics, a route to the power of some to speak in the name of all.

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“A work of ebullient imagination, zest, and wit, Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony explores the double life of heritage in the making of modern political identities.” — Jean Comaroff, Harvard University

This week our featured book is Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony by Daniel Herwitz.

To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony and we are offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.

Bringing the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist, and the experience of a public intellectual to the study of heritage, Daniel Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. He travels to South Africa and unpacks its controversial and robust confrontations with the colonial and apartheid past. He visits India and reads in its modern art the gesture of a newly minted heritage idealizing the precolonial world as the source of Indian modernity. He traverses the United States and finds in its heritage of incessant invention, small town exceptionalism, and settler destiny a key to contemporary American media-driven politics. Showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous heritage is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities, Herwitz captures its perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change.

“This collection was not conceived or published with a political agenda. In fact, it was refreshing to be able to think about Afghanistan outside the usual tropes and patterns. If there is any wider point to be made, it is simply that this is not a conflict that has a military solution. The war will end when the political conflict is tackled, which possibly must begin by challenging and questioning our stereotypes about the Afghan Taliban as well as Afghanistan as a whole.” — Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn

Monday, June 11th, The Atlantic ran an interview with Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, the editors of Poetry of the Taliban. The interview, conducted over email as both Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn are in Kandahar, addresses the war in Afghanistan, Afghan cultural tradition, and the controversy their collection of poetry has stirred up in the media.

Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn begin by discussing why Afghan culture is overlooked by the West:

A certain narrative of the war in Afghanistan, or of the country itself, has existed for a few years now. The groundwork was laid long before the events of September 11, 2001, in part by journalists who travelled in the country during the 1980s. But the main themes became very clear from 2001 onwards. As part of this, the focus has been on the foreign involvement in Afghanistan, rather than on Afghanistan itself (i.e. on its own terms).

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“From an intellectual point of view, hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretation, is a position that has widely benefited from the WikiLeaks revelations, because they have confirmed that truth is an effect of interpretation rather than its cause. Much more significant than a “truth” are its consequences, that is, how we deal with its revelations and what they are worth.” — Santiago Zabala

Recently, the Al Jazeera English website ran “Nietzsche on WikiLeaks,” an article by CUP author Santiago Zabala, in their Opinion section. in this article, Zabala, ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, author of, among other works, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics and coauthor with Gianni Vattimo of Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, looks at Julian Assange’s organization and the documents that it has published through the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Zabala begins by reasserting Nietzsche’s importance to modern philosophical thought:

Without him, we would not have had Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism, Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism, or Gianni Vattimo’s weak thought; for these and many other distinguished philosophers, Nietzsche’s idea that truths are “illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” brought about the recognition that we live in an age of interpretation where, as the German master himself stated, “there are no facts, only interpretations, and this is also an interpretation”.

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“[W]hat are the more concrete social and political consequences of Twitter, Facebook and so forth? How, for instance, are they changing right before our eyes such basic power relations as leading and following?” — Michael Marder

Social networks, most famously Twitter and Facebook, are changing the way that we communicate and connect with each other. While many thinkers have championed Twitter in particular for providing a means by which movements like the Arab Spring can spread, in a recent article for Al Jazeera, Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country and author of the forthcoming book Plant Thinking, claims that social networks are changing fundamental aspects of what it means to be a social human, taking the idea of “following” as an example. While the idea of following things of interest through social media seems at first glance to be a means through which one could assert one’s individuality, Marder believes that in the end following in social media is dominated by marketing forces rather than by individual choice.

Marder finds evidence for this domination in the way that ad campaigns frequently tout social media:

From every corner, one hears calls: “Follow us on [fill in the blank with your preferred social network]!” (Having banned such reminders from its airways, France is a notable exception here.) The implication of this appeal is, of course, that if you do not follow, you will be out of the loop and at a disadvantage, deprived of access to the valuable commodity that is information. But, truth be told, it is the number of virtual followers an individual or a company boasts that makes for its social capital, not vice versa. The initial order, “Follow!” betrays the tacit dependence of those who issue it on their present and future followers. It is, therefore, symptomatic of the workings of ideology in the digital age.

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American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908-1935, Ross Melnick’s biography of one of the most colorful characters in the entertainment industry in the early 20th century, has been generating a good deal of buzz, with great reviews in a number of important newspapers. We’ve collected excerpts from some of these reviews here. And make sure you don’t miss our interview with Ross Melnick on “Roxy” Rothafel, the art of presenting silent films, and what goes into writing a biography.

From the Washington Post’s Book World:

Such wizards gave 100 percent of themselves, and some, like Roxy, died early by doing so. Second only in prestige to Florenz Ziegfeld, Roxy micromanaged every detail of the theaters he oversaw, from the creases in the ushers’ trousers, to the hiring of talent, to the frame-by-frame editing of the films exhibited. When he clashed with corporate spreadsheets, censors or others, he simply quit and went on to exert his magic in a bigger theater — or on a radio microphone for a massive international audience, who considered his voice a balm to their harried souls. The Great Depression (and perhaps personal arrogance) finally blindsided him, but, as long as the ’20s roared, his name meant a standard of quality and cultural uplift in the forum of mass entertainment.

In this 52nd volume of Columbia University Press’s outstanding Film and Culture series, Melnick has placed his subject in a huge context, chronicling not only Roxy but also the movie and music businesses, the rise of radio, issues of anti-Semitism, the development of New York and much more during the first third of the 20th century. His writing clarifies, his judgments are eminently reasonable and his research is spectacular.

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This coming Sunday, May 13, is Mother’s Day. In honor of the occasion, we are featuring two guest posts this week discussing popular conceptions of motherhood. Today’s article is written by Julie Stephens, an associate professor in sociology and politics at the School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Victoria University, Australia, and author of Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care.

The gift-exchange that is Mother’s Day can provide insight into cultural meanings around the maternal, particularly at a time when there is so much anxiety around human dependency and care. It is easy to identify the obvious commercialism and sentimentality surrounding the day when public and private attention is supposed to be focused on mothers. Uneasy contradictions nonetheless emerge when the work of nurture, care, preservation and sacrifice is marketized and made visible in ways difficult to reconcile with the actual work of mothering. In this respect, both the giving and receiving of gifts that so clumsily attempt to symbolize a non-market relationship, can feel somewhat tainted.

Sara Ruddick, the feminist philosopher and author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, viewed mothering as ‘a work with ideals’. While depicting it as a strange mix of play, organization, attentiveness, panic, boredom, lack of attentiveness, infatuation and emotion, she also recognized mothering as a social process, involving moral and ethical thinking and decision-making. Accordingly, the practice of maternal care produces a form of moral reasoning and a different way of seeing, knowing and acting in the world. Such conceptions have little to do with the market, and indeed serve to complicate standard political divisions between public and private.

By contrast, Mother’s Day reinforces these divisions by bringing so-called ‘private’ caring relations into public view. The fact that it is celebrated as one ‘special’ day in the year also reproduces the fiction that on the other days, home is somehow separate from and uncontaminated by the ‘unfeeling’ market. This way of imagining home can be traced back to early capitalism. Yet such understandings of home, or of the maternal as situated in a pure and private affective domain, can only be sustained through cultural representations based on nostalgia and longing. Mother’s Day is a perfect vehicle for such representations.
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This coming Sunday, May 13, is Mothers’ Day. In honor of the occasion, we have two articles this week discussing popular conceptions of motherhood. Today, we are featuring an article by Kelly Oliver, the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and author of a number of books including the forthcoming Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films and Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media.

Twilight: Breaking Dawn continues a long line of horror films featuring women giving birth to otherworldly creatures. Bella, the teenage heroine of the Twilight series, is a modern day Rosemary’s Baby, whose pregnancy with a “demon” leaves her wasting away. While Rosemary drinks vile potions prepared by witches, Bella drinks blood out of kiddie Styrofoam cups complete with straw. She is further infantilized cuddled up on the couch under her childhood quilt, another nod to the childlike Rosemary. Whereas Rosemary’s Baby ends with a close-up of the demon baby’s glowing red eyes, Breaking Dawn ends with a close-up of Bella’s glowing red eyes, signaling her transformation into a vampire.

Another homage to Rosemary’s Baby is Bella’s nightmarish birth scene, shown through flashing images of a screaming Bella being drugged so vampires can remove the baby. Talk about extreme home birth! Edward delivers the baby by chewing through the amniotic sac. Not a very sterile operation, but it does the trick. Still, don’t try this at home! Never fear, the baby looks adorable after Edward’s “sister” cleans her…perhaps by licking off all that blood?
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