Columbia University Press

“On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, we should be hearing a lot more from them — and a lot less from the former American officials and pundits who got it wrong the first time.”—Marc Lynch

Amid the many discussion about the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Marc Lynch author of Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today, argues that:

one surprising detail about the flood of retrospectives: They have almost exclusively been written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans. Indeed, many Iraqis fail to see the point of commemorating the disastrous war for the benefit of the American media.

In What’s Missing from the Iraq Debate, written for his blog on Foreign Policy, Lynch cites some exceptions, including Mark Kukis’s Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 but argues that books and commentary on the invasion have been very American-centric. American discussions about Iraq have focused on U.S. strategy, often ignoring Iraqi politics and public opinion. Lynch discusses the implications of this:

Myopia has consequences. Failing to listen to those Iraqi voices meant getting important things badly wrong. Most profoundly, the American filter tends to minimize the human costs and existential realities of military occupation and a brutal, nasty war. The savage civil war caused mass displacement and sectarian slaughter that will be remembered for generations. The U.S. occupation also involved massive abuses and shameful episodes, from torture at Abu Ghraib Prison to a massacre of unarmed Iraqis in the city of Haditha. The moral and ethical imperative to incorporate Iraqi perspectives should be obvious.

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“The experience of the U.S. invasion and occupation scarred the country much more deeply than even I as a correspondent there imagined.”—Mark Kukis

Upon the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we are re-posting an earlier interview with Mark Kukis about his book Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 and the current situation in Iraq and future prospects for the country.

Kukis wrote the book to give Iraqis a voice as a way to counteract their under-representation in the U.S. media. He discovered that most Iraqis were genuinely glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein but fault the United States for many policies enacted during the occupation, particularly its disbanding of the Iraqi army.

Iraqis, Kukis believes now see many of the problems confronting the country as the responsibility of the Iraqi government even if they are a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. Here are some excerpts from the interview in which Kukis considers how Iraqis view their future:

What does Iraq’s near-term future look like to them? Do you agree?

The near-term future looks rather bleak to many Iraqis, mainly because of the persistently high violence. No nation can think of itself as normal or stable when bombs kill and maim hundreds each year in the biggest urban areas. I believe Iraq will grow economically in the coming years and return to its status as one of the most developed and wealthiest nations in the Middle East. You can have economic growth and high violence at the same time.

But most Iraqis I suspect will find little solace in economic gains so long as violence endures at the current levels, and there is little to suggest it will be easing. So, yes, I tend to join those in Iraq with a fairly dim view of the future given the violence.

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We continue our week long feature on the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq with a look at a recent essay by Paul Pillar, author of Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform.

In the essay Still Peddling Iraq War Myths, Ten Years Later, published on Pillar’s excellent blog for The National Interest, argues that:

[T]he anniversary retrospectives also give renewed exposure to those who promoted the war and have a large stake in still promoting the idea that they were not responsible for foisting on the nation an expedition that was so hugely damaging to American interests.

Pillar’s article was in part inspired by a recent event he participated in with former Bush administration figures the then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Douglas Feith, who as an undersecretary of defense was one of the most rabid supporters of the invasion of Iraq. Still maintaining that the war needed to be fought to protect the United States, Hadley and Feith suggest that if any mistake was made in deciding to go to war it was following bad intelligence. The lesson to learn is that administrations need to ask tougher questions about intelligence.

As Pillar shows, in what amounts to a devastating critique of the fallacy of Hadley and Feith’s position, bad intelligence had little to do with the Bush administration’s choice to go to invade Iraq. Bush and his neoconservative advisers wanted to get rid of Saddam and saw the post 9-11 atmosphere as giving them an opening. The administration backed intelligence when it supported their case (as with WMD’s) and discredited it when it challenged it (as with the lack of a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda).

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In recent article in Scientific American, Guobin Yang, author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, argues that twitter, microblogging, and other social media is changing China but doubts that radical political change will occur.

Yang cites a recent incident in China where protesters in Guangzhou went online and into streets to protest government censorship of a newspaper. The event did signal the rising power of online activism in China but the Chinese government has been equally adept, if not more so, at using the Internet to stem dissent and protest. Yang writes:

To contain Internet dissent and protest, China aggressively censors Web sites. New regulations or crackdowns are often implemented after new outbursts of online protest. This was the case when the first policy to regulate electronic bulletin boards took effect in 2000. When crude sanctions failed to curb online dissent, the government turned to a more subtle measure: sprinkling anonymous Internet commentators to promote the party line throughout the blogging community. According to a report issued by the official news Web site People’s Daily Online, more than 60,000 government accounts were active on Sina Weibo alone by the end of 2012. With its enormous resources, the government can have its Web sites pour out large volumes of information that serve to inundate dissent.

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“It was clear to most New Yorkers that Koch had a deep abiding love for his city. That reputation, that started when he was in public office, was solidified because he stayed in the public eye. He would exert political power, but it always seemed to be because he wanted to continue helping New York.”—Jonathan Soffer

Never is a biographer’s perspective more relevant (or sought after) than when their subject is finally laid to rest. Since the passing of larger-than-life former NYC mayor Ed Koch on Friday, Jonathan Soffer, author of Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, has been a central voice in the debate on what shape Koch’s legacy should take. In the following post, we bring you an amalgamation of Soffer’s latest commentary on Koch, one that highlights the author’s argument that the “King of New York” will be a man of many legacies.

A Legacy of Free (and Colorful) Speech

Koch was sometimes honest about his politics to a fault. I think, more than any other reason, he lost his chances for re-election to a fourth term when he said that Jews would have to be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson. He could not be deterred from saying things that were just excruciating. But paradoxically, it gave him a reputation for honesty.

~ From Soffer’s interview with TIME Magazine, for more click here.

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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!

“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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“People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world.”—Matt Taibbi

One of the more inspiring and effective relief efforts to emerge in the wake of Hurricane Sandy has been Occupy Sandy, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Undoubtedly, they’ve changed some skeptics’ minds who were wary of the movement’s seeming lack of specific demands.

One such skeptic was noted journalist Matt Taibbi. However, as he explains in How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests, included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2012, Taibbi saw the value in the movement’s desire for something different than the current corrupt economic system even if this was not articulated in a 10-point-plan.

In the following excerpt, Taibbi describes how he came to see the police, who had been deployed to monitor the protestors, as a symbol for larger problems:

The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government “committed” to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

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“That the conservative attack on birth control failed miserably, and set the stage for some Democratic congressional coups, hardly means porn won’t return to the table again; in fact, with the diminishing returns on the homophobia that the Right has utilized so effectively for the past 35 years, it might well be slated for a revival sooner than Fifty Shades readers think.”—Whitney Strub

The following post is by Whitney Strub, author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right. (You can also read an interview with Whitney Strub):

Where did the politics of pornography go in 2012? An initial answer might be, into remission. It certainly fell into the shadow of other big social issues of the moment, from LGBT rights to contraception. Yet the absence of overt political mobilization around the topic is itself revealing—one more pocket of social terrain where control seems to have slipped from government or activism to that totalizing force known as The Market. In this two-part blog post, I’ll review the partisan (non)politics of porn in 2012 here, then examine the cultural side of the issue next.

When Perversion for Profit went to press in 2010, Barack Obama had been in office just over a year, but it was already clear the politics of pornography had downshifted from the relatively suppressive Bush administration back to the more hands-off approach of the Clinton era. Indeed, much of Obama’s first term felt like Clinton redux; back came Rahm Emanuel, back came Larry Summers, back came neoliberal policy couched in a veneer of progressiveness on social issues—and with the latter, back came relative safety for pornographers, especially those in the kinky margins who had provided targets for the Bush Justice Department, which created an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2005. Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, disbanded it in 2011.

It’s not just the powers of the state through obscenity law that have withered. The social conservatism of Morality in Media, or its predecessor Citizens for Decent Literature, has lost significance purchase on the mainstream; the antiporn feminist movement of the 1970s and 80s has also lost much of its visibility and grassroots infrastructure as it’s been superseded by self-declared sex-positive, Third Wave feminists. This creates something of a vacuum, filled only by the reigning liberalism that imagines free speech as a cardinal virtue, merrily detached from power relations, institutional access, or other complicating factors—the same brand of liberalism that saw the ACLU and the reactionary Supreme Court on the same side of Citizens United. The governing logic here, of course, is the market—not so much that old 20th-century utopian marketplace of ideas as the more literal field of commodity exchange, which plays out through texts like Fifty Shades of Grey (to which I’ll return next round). In the wake of that disastrous Court opinion, voting with your dollars has taken ominously literal meaning, but it also serves as the central regulatory mechanism of contemporary smut.

Did the election of 2012 shed any new light on the politics of pornography and obscenity? Well, the Democratic Party platform said nothing direct on the topic, but declared President Obama “strongly committed to protecting an open Internet that fosters investment, innovation, creativity, consumer choice, and free speech, unfettered by censorship or undue violations of privacy.” This is in keeping with the general free-speech sentiments of Democratic Party platforms of the past forty years, and the party’s resolute disinterest in using pornography as a campaign topic. It’s less interesting for what it says about obscenity than the extent to which free speech has effectively been subsumed under consumerism.

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Congratulations to Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who have been awarded the 2013 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for their work on Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. From the official award announcement:

“The implications of their work are enormous,” said award director Charles Ziegler. “Not only do their findings validate the work done by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but they shed new light on the political change we’re seeing today, such as the Arab Spring process in Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations.”

The book by Chenoweth and Stephan also won the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for best book published in the United States on government, politics or international affairs.

UofL presents four Grawemeyer Awards each year for outstanding works in music composition, world order, psychology and education. The university and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give a fifth award in religion. This year’s awards are $100,000 each.

Again, congratulations to Professors Chenoweth and Stephan on this latest honor, and thanks to the University of Louisville and the Grawemeyer Awards judges for recognizing the hard work that went into Why Civil Resistance Works!

“If we are to have a life of the mind, we need carriers of this life. University presses perform that essential function.” — Jay Parini

Next week, November 11-17, 2012, is the first annual University Press Week. From the AAUP announcement:

Taking place November 11-17, 2012, University Press Week highlights the extraordinary work of university presses and their many contributions to culture, the academy, and an informed society. University Press Week promises special events and readings at universities and in communities across the country, as well as online galleries of selected titles and other features.

One of the parts of the UP Week celebration that we are most excited about here is the University Press Week Blog Tour. From Monday through Friday of next week (November 12-16), the blogs of 26 university presses will be coming together to explain the importance of scholarly publishing. Over the course of the week, each blog will post one official UP Week post. When all of these individual posts are read sequentially, they will tell the story of university presses and the value they have added to public and scholarly life in the United States. You can find the schedule of the UP Week posts here. Be sure to check out all the essays, especially the article to be posted here at the CUP Blog on Friday, November 16. Many of the 26 blogs (including the CUP blog) will also be posting additional UP Week content throughout the week.

Be sure to keep up with University Press Week events and articles through Twitter via the #UPWeek hashtag!

“[W]hat is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Keene is that Japan, a racially homogeneous nation that can be politely standoffish to non-Japanese, has embraced him with such warmth.”

Donald Keene began teaching Japanese literature at Columbia University in 1955. Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, he has written and translated over thirty books (many with Columbia University Press), has been awarded the Japanese Order of Culture (the first Westerner to be given this prestigious honor), and was an instrumental figure in bringing the classics of Asian literature to the attention of Western academia. Already a beloved figure in Japan, Keene earned “status approaching that of folk hero,” according to Martin Fackler in a profile in the Saturday New York Times, when he applied for and gained Japanese citizenship in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident after last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

Fackler and Keene agree that the most important factor in Keene’s popularity in Japan is his genuine affection for that nation:

Dr. Keene has spent a lifetime shuttling between Japan and the United States. Taking Japanese citizenship seems a gesture that has finally bestowed upon him the one thing that eludes many Westerners who make their home and even lifelong friendships here: acceptance.

“When I first did it, I thought I’d get a flood of angry letters that ‘you are not of the Yamato race!’ but instead, they welcomed me,” said Dr. Keene, using an old name for Japan. “I think the Japanese can detect, without too much trouble, my love of Japan.”

That affection seemed especially welcome to a nation that even before last year’s triple disaster had seemed to lose confidence as it fell into a long social and economic malaise….

BUT what is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Keene is that Japan, a racially homogeneous nation that can be politely standoffish to non-Japanese, has embraced him with such warmth. When he legally became a Japanese citizen this year, major newspapers ran photographs of him holding up a handwritten poster of his name, Kinu Donarudo, in Chinese characters. To commemorate the event, a candy company in rural Niigata announced plans to build a museum that will include an exact replica of Dr. Keene’s personal library and study from his home in New York.

He says he has been inundated by invitations to give public lectures, which are so popular that drawings are often held to see who can attend.

“I have not met a Japanese since then who has not thanked me. Except the Ministry of Justice,” he added with his typically understated humor, referring to the government office in charge of immigration.

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Critics have praised Siddharth Kara, author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery and Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia, for his integration of investigative narrative journalism and clear-sighted economic analysis. In this post, we highlight some of his estimates of the extent of bonded labor in South Asia, based on his research and careful analysis as well as some statistics he cites. Kara argues that knowing and understanding the numbers and economics of slavery is crucial in devising measures to end it:

* Total number of slaves in the world: 28.4-32.6 million
* Bonded laborers in South Asia (2011): 15-18 million
* Annual Revenues from Global Slave Labor: $164.7 Billion
* % of the Pakistan population who are bonded laborers: 1.3%
* Weighted avg. annual revenues per slave (sex work): $48,010
* Annual Return on Investment for forced labor: 398%
* People living on less than $1.25 per day in India: 437 million
* Total number of bonded laborers in India: 10.7-12.7 million

“Nonviolent resistance of some sort is almost always possible, and armed uprisings are never inevitable. Instead, violence may be a method people choose because they don’t know there is a realistic alternative.”–Erica Chenoweth

With a variety of protest movements erupting in the past couple of years, both violent and nonviolent, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan’s book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict could not be more timely.

In a recent essay for CNN’s Global Public Square, Erica Chenoweth summarizes many of the findings in their book and argues that civil, nonviolent resistance is far more successful than violent uprisings. Chenoweth and Stephan reached their conclusion after analyzing 323 different social campaigns from 1900-2006 ranging from the Indian independence movement of the 1930s and 40s to to the Serbian movement to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. In analyzing their findings, Chenoweth and Stephan concluded:

Countries experiencing nonviolent uprisings are much more likely to emerge from the conflicts democratic and with a lower risk of civil war relapse compared to places where insurgencies were violent. And we suspect that in most cases where violent insurgency has succeeded, a well-executed nonviolent campaign may have been equally successful.

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“But to focus on the short clip, posted online, that portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, pedophile, and general sex fiend, is largely to miss the point. The true animating cause behind the protests is power, that is, Western power to define the Islamic world in ways that undermine its values, aspirations, identity, and, ultimately, its autonomy and means of self-determination.” — Jonathan Lyons

Over the last couple weeks, there have been protests against the US throughout the Muslim world, ostensibly in response to the short film The Innocence of Muslims.

In today’s post, however, Jonathan Lyons, author of Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism argues that the motivation for the protests goes much deeper than an offensive film.

Islam, Violence, and the West: It’s not the Video, Stupid
By Jonathan Lyons

It may be tempting to watch the unrest unfolding in parts of the Muslim world and wonder what real harm could there be in a cheesy “desert saga,” replete with glue-on beards, stilted dialogue, and an over-the-top touch of melodrama? Or perhaps to take some refuge in an absolutist notion of free speech.

But to focus on the short clip, posted online, that portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, pedophile, and general sex fiend, is largely to miss the point. The true animating cause behind the protests is power, that is, Western power to define the Islamic world in ways that undermine its values, aspirations, identity, and, ultimately, its autonomy and means of self-determination.
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“What gives a tradition legitimacy is very often what works against its effectiveness. To be effective, a tradition must be able to depart from the particular historical circumstances of its legitimation and prove applicability to new occasions of time and space. In a sense, such resources can only become effective by losing their grounding in historical or textual precedent….” — Judith Butler

Our highlighted book this week is Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. You can enter our giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today we have part of the introduction of Parting Ways. In this excerpt, Butler explains “what it means to derive a set of principles from a cultural tradition” and then applies this explanation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can read the introduction to Parting Ways in it’s entirety on Scribd.

To Derive a Set of Principles

Let us reflect first on what it means to derive a set of principles from a cultural tradition and then move to the larger political issues at hand. As I noted, to say that principles are “derived” from Jewish resources raises the question of whether these principles remain Jewish once they are developed within a contemporary situation, assuming new historical forms? Or are they principles that can and must be, always have been, derived from various cultural and historical resources, thus “belonging” exclusively to none of them? In fact, does the generalizability of theprinciples in question depend fundamentally on their finally not belonging to any one cultural location or tradition from which they may have emerged? Does this nonbelonging, this exile, help to constitute the generalizability and transposability of the principles of justice and equality?
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So, on the one hand, Jews who are critical of Israel think perhaps they cannot be Jewish anymore of Israel represents Jewishness; and on the other hand, those who seek to vanquish anyone who criticizes Israel equate Jewishness with Israel as well, leading to the conclusion that the critic must be anti-Semitic or, if Jewish, self-hating. My scholarly and public efforts have been directed toward getting out of this bind. — Judith Butler

Our highlighted book this week is Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. You can enter our giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

The Theodor W. Adorno Prize is given every three years by the city of Frankfurt “to further and acknowledge outstanding performances in the fields of philosophy, music, theatre and film.” Past winners have included such luminaries as Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Jacques Derrida. This year’s prize is being awarded to Judith Butler. However, the Jerusalem Post recently published an article critical of Butler and the awarding of the prize, “Frankfurt to award US advocate of Israel boycott.” Monday, Mondoweiss published a letter from Butler herself responding to the criticisms she faced in the Jerusalem Post article on her stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Butler begins her letter by listing the three main criticisms leveled against her in the article in the Jerusalem Post:

The accusations against me are that I support Hamas and Hezbollah (which is not true) that I support BDS (partially true), and that I am anti-Semitic (patently false). Perhaps I should not be as surprised as I am that those who oppose my receiving the Adorno Prize would seek recourse to such scurrilous and unfounded charges to make their point. I am a scholar who gained an introduction to philosophy through Jewish thought, and I understand myself as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt…. I was taught at every step in my Jewish education that it is not acceptable to stay silent in the face of injustice. Such an injunction is a difficult one, since it does not tell us exactly when and how to speak, or how to speak in a way that does not produce a new injustice, or how to speak in a way that will be heard and registered in the right way. My actual position is not heard by these detractors, and perhaps that should not surprise me, since their tactic is to destroy the conditions of audibility.

Butler is particularly disturbed by what she sees as the silencing tactics of many of her critics.

It is untrue, absurd, and painful for anyone to argue that those who formulate a criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic or, if Jewish, self-hating. Such charges seek to demonize the person who is articulating a critical point of view and so disqualify the viewpoint in advance. It is a silencing tactic: this person is unspeakable, and whatever they speak is to be dismissed in advance or twisted in such a way that it negates the validity of the act of speech. The charge refuses to consider the view, debate its validity, consider its forms of evidence, and derive a sound conclusion on the basis of listening to reason. The charge is not only an attack on persons who hold views that some find objectionable, but it is an attack on reasonable exchange, on the very possibility of listening and speaking in a context where one might actually consider what another has to say.

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