Oxford University Press's Blog, page 661

How well do you know Australia and New Zealand? [quiz]

We’re wrapping up Library and Information Week here in Australia, this year’s theme is “Imagine”. Help us celebrate all of the fantastic libraries and librarians doing great things over on that side of the world. Oxford University Press has put together a quiz about all things Australia and New Zealand. Once you’ve made it through the quiz, reward yourself with a dollop of Vegemite or catch a Russell Crowe flick to get your fix of the good old outback.

Explore more with Oxford Reference: recommend to your library, or if you are a librarian contact us to receive a free trial for your institution.

Quiz image credit: Saltwater Crocodile, Photograph Obtained from Molly Ebersold of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image: Sydney Opera House. CCO Public Domain via Pixabay.

The post How well do you know Australia and New Zealand? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

A picture of violence and degradation

Photographs are more than merely images of existing subjects. The photographer always makes decisions and has an enormous influence on what the viewer can see. The photographer can by no means exert control over everything, otherwise the photographs would be merely posed pictures. Photos of complex situations contain details that the photographer may not have intended to reveal at all. Photographs are extremely valuable resources, as they often contain information that is not available elsewhere. As Roland Barthes pointed out, the difference between photography and film with respect to other visual media, such as drawings, is that although a situation can be posed, it cannot merely take place inside the head of the individual who produces the image, but rather also must physically exist at some point in time.

It is absolutely essential to take a critical view of source material when it comes to violent images and war photographs. Photos taken by perpetrators are always an expression of a relationship that is characterized by an imbalance of power between photographers and their subjects. Prisoners in ghettos, concentration camps and extermination camps generally had no way of avoiding being photographed. Indeed, critics often point out that printing such photos runs the risk of reenacting the victims’ humiliation. In recent years, this has prompted writers to call on historians and publishers to give careful thought as to when and how they should display images of tormented people. Cornelia Brink uses a phrase to describe such images: “photographs against the will.”

Photograph from the collection of Dieter Schmid, courtesy of the Bremen Center for Political Education

The photo on the right does not show corpses or nakedness. Instead, it is a photograph taken by an ally of the perpetrators that shows a group of “normal” prisoners at work. At first glance, it is not shocking, yet it is without a doubt a “photograph against the will,” at least from the perspective of the prisoners. The picture was taken at the construction site of the gigantic “Valentin” submarine pen in Bremen-Farge, where thousands of civilian forced laborers, POWs, and concentration camp prisoners toiled. The Todt Organization commissioned a local photographer to document the progress made on this project and he took 968 photos. The photo stems from this body of work. The name of the photographer was Johann Seubert and he owned a photography studio in Bremen. He was also a policeman and was granted leave of absence from police duty to document progress on the project.

Interviews with former prisoners revealed an impression, however, that stood in stark contrast to the notion that the subjects see these images as reenacted acts of degradation. On the contrary, they felt that the photos failed to reveal the full extent of the degradation of the camps and the violence that was perpetrated against them. They said that they looked far too well fed and clothed, and that conditions had been much worse. Some even voiced their suspicion that the photos were staged and that the prisoners in the pictures were not even genuine, although this can be safely ruled out. With regard to the physical condition of the prisoners, it should be noted that most of the photos of the construction site were taken in the spring and summer of 1944. During that time, however, there was an extremely low incidence of fatalities in the camp, whereas it was exceedingly high during the winter of 1943/44 and the winter of 1944/45.

But what exactly can we see in the photos, and particularly in the image shown here? The photographs are generally of a professional quality and show that the photographer consciously selected his photo croppings and perspectives. He was primarily interested in the construction techniques. As a result, the laborers faded into the background as the photographer focused on the building methods. But the situation was not quite as clear-cut as one might think. The photographer granted the architects and the construction site managers a great deal of subjectivity and power in the photos. Their position of superiority is reflected in images where they interact with both the photographer and the camera, and strike various poses. The forced laborers, on the other hand, almost never look into the camera. This matches the photographer’s perspective. After all, he saw the prisoners not as individuals, but rather as cogs in a huge machine. The forced laborers existed only in their function as a workforce. The photo on the right stems from a series that shows how concrete was reinforced with steel before being raised to the roof of the bunker. This particular photo is unusual for this body of work because a concentration camp prisoner is clearly gazing into the camera.

The pictures of the construction site clearly do not aim to highlight differences between various status groups of forced laborers or between forced laborers and German workers. More importantly, there are no attempts here to portray concentration camp prisoners as “criminals” or as “subhumans,” as was often done with photo series from the early days of the concentration camps. Seubert photographed virtually all of the workers at the construction site in an equal manner, and he even took pictures of concentration camp prisoners in prominent positions. The visual emphasis and exultation of the architects directly matched the image that had come to be associated with this profession during the Weimar Republic. Seubert worked with image conventions that were by no means specifically associated with the Nazis. The reality of the construction site, though, was a specific expression of Nazi ideology: Thousands of forced laborers were coerced into building a submarine pen under German supervision. This is primarily reflected by the striped clothing worn by the workers. The other specific characteristic, namely the brutal force required to keep the prisoners working at a murderous pace, is blocked out of the photos.

Headline image: ‘Valentin’ submarine bunker by C.Mezzo-1. CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post A picture of violence and degradation appeared first on OUPblog.

FIFA and the internationalisation of criminal justice

The factual backdrop to this affair is well-known. FIFA, world football’s governing body has, for a number of years, been the subject of allegations of corruption. Then, after a series of dawn raids on 27 May 2015, seven FIFA officials, of various nationalities, the most famous being Jack Warner, the Trinidadian former vice president of FIFA, were arrested in a luxury hotel in Zurich where they were staying prior to the FIFA Congress. This was pursuant to an indictment that accused them, alongside five corporate officials, of using their positions within FIFA to engage in schemes involving the solicitation, offer, acceptance, payment, and receipt of undisclosed and illegal payments, bribes, and kickbacks. The defendants and their co-conspirators were also accused of corrupting the enterprise by engaging in various criminal activities, including fraud, bribery, and money laundering, in pursuit of personal and commercial gain.

The allegations relate in particular to the bidding process for the right to hold the World Cup. To the surprise of some, FIFA’s president, Sepp Blatter, was not included in the indictment, although further investigations, both in the United States and Switzerland, are ongoing, and calls for him to step down have been made, including by the British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Corruption, and its fellow traveller money laundering, tends to cross borders, and with an entity such as FIFA and an event such as the World Cup, it would be difficult to imagine that there could not be an international element to the case. But the indictment in one country of nationals of various countries, and arrests in another pursuant to an extradition request, have given rise to different conceptions of criminal justice: one internationalist, the other nationalist.

The former can be seen on the part of US officials, who, when announcing the arrests and indictments, thanked the government of Switzerland and other unnamed States for their ‘outstanding assistance’ in the investigation. Given that the conduct related in large part to money laundering into and out of the United States and to bribes that went through US banks and deposited abroad, it is no surprise that the cooperation of other States was required. What might be surprising though is that mutual legal assistance, at best a sclerotic system, seems to have worked in this case, although it was helped by guilty pleas by four FIFA officials including the ex-US member of the FIFA executive committee. It is notable that the rhetoric of the United States was very much of the internationalisation of the crimes and the effect they had in developing countries. As IRS Chief of Investigation, Richard Weber (clearly no stranger to a bon mot) described the charges, they relate to a ‘World Cup of corruption’.

Zurich, Switzerland – May 28, 2011: Entry to the headquarter of the world football association FIFA in Zurich, Switzerland. © thamerpic via iStock.

On the nationalist side, however, Russian President Vladimir Putin, perhaps not the most objective of observers, given that Russia obtained the 2018 World Cup from FIFA, criticised the indictments and arrest as:

“It looks very strange…. They are accused of corruption – who is? International officials.…it’s got nothing to do with the USA. Those officials are not US citizens. If something happened it was not in the US and it’s nothing to do with them…. It’s another clear attempt by the USA to spread its jurisdiction to other states.”

Leaving aside the fact that two of the defendants were US nationals, and one has been accused in the indictment of obtaining that nationality fraudulently, Putin’s comments can easily be refuted. In spite of the transnational nature of the crimes alleged and the international co-operation that they engendered, in fact the vast majority of charges relate to conduct occurring at one level within the United States, most particularly, New York and Florida, in that the money went through banks there, or related to conduct there. Owing to the principle of ubiquity of crime–i.e. that if any part of a crime occurs in the territory of a State, they have jurisdiction over it–the United States quite clearly has territorial jurisdiction in those cases.

It might therefore be thought that this simply makes it a national US matter. However, the picture is more complex. What this affair shows is the intermingled nature of even domestic crimes with territorial links, with international cooperation and activity. Frequently owing to their nature, such crimes require international cooperation and relate to conduct that crosses borders, which also leads to multiple investigations in different States, as the Swiss investigation shows.

What Putin’s comments also show, however, are the frequent charges of the politicisation of international criminal justice, understood in its broad sense. Putin has alleged that the timing of the arrests, mere days before the FIFA presidential election was ‘a clear attempt not to allow Mr Blatter to be re-elected as president of FIFA’. It is true that the timing could be seen as a remarkable political coincidence, the United States being no friend of Mr Blatter. However, as is often the case when dealing with large scale conspiracies and racketeering, it was useful to have as many of the alleged conspirators together at one time (in one country) to make for a maximally effective arrest operation, and to prevent collusion between them.

This is clearly one step in a very long journey in relation to the FIFA corruption allegations, but one that shows us a great deal about how in our interconnected world, it is no longer enough to think solely in terms of borders.

The post FIFA and the internationalisation of criminal justice appeared first on OUPblog.

Mentoring the next generation of oral historians

Ask anyone who has been to an Oral History Association annual meeting and they’ll tell you that one of the best parts of the conference is the people. The conference offers the chance to meet and learn from oral history veterans, as well as those just getting started in the field. This week on the blog, we’re highlighting the OHA mentorship program, which aims to help newcomers at the meeting to get the most out of the experience by partnering them with mentors. The program paired 47 mentors and newcomers at the 2014 conference, and hopes to connect even more people going forward.

Sarah Milligan, current head of the Oral History Program at Oklahoma State University, agreed to serve as a mentor during the 2014 OHA meeting. At the time of the conference, Milligan was working for the Kentucky Historical Society, and was matched up with Alise Hanson, a recent hire of the Minnesota Historical Society. The similarities in their backgrounds made their partnership fruitful from the start. According to Milligan:

I felt like I understood the infrastructure she was working within and the challenges and benefits that came with working in a state historical society. My focus with her was to speak with her early on in the meeting and get an idea of what her interests were, what her goals with the meeting and her career were, and help point her in the direction I would take at the meeting to best augment her current position needs and her future aspirations in the field.

Mentorship isn’t a purely one-way relationship, however. It offers a chance for established members of the field to hear about the exciting things that newcomers are developing.

I also just wanted to hear about the work she was doing. She was a working on logistics for some of their oral history projects—specifically dealing with immigrant groups. I have coveted Minnesota Historical Society’s ability to utilize specially designated funding to target immigrant groups in the state with a primary focus on oral history and storytelling.

Mentorship allows the mentor to help direct the mentee’s professional development, but it also gives both people a chance to connect with another oral historian on a more personal level.

Alise was great to spend time with. She was interested in the layout of the conference and how to get the most out of her time from a professional development standpoint and a personal growth perspective as well. She had a lot of great questions about the conference layout and who was doing what work. We walked through the conference agenda and talked about sessions that she might get the most out of, and we compared notes on kickstarting careers and our focus on oral history. After our initial scheduled meeting, we checked in a few times as we ran into each other in between sessions, had lunch with smaller groups of people, and met back up at the first time attendees breakfast. It turned out to be a comfortable and enlightening experience, I hope, for both of us.

Mentorship is a great opportunity, but we all know that conferences tend to zip by at the speed of light. Conference schedules make every hour precious, so it’s not surprising that potential mentors feel like they can’t afford to spare the time.

When the second call for mentors came out, I thought “okay, I can do this, I just hope they don’t have high expectations of what they are going to get from me.” Ringing endorsement, I know. I think I had this vague picture in my head of this huge time commitment during the conference, that the person I would be matched with would want to spend more time than I had to give, or that I wouldn’t be able to have the regular catch-up time with colleagues that is always so valuable, because I would be too committed to introducing someone the entire time. Whatever picture I had painted in my head turned out to be completely wrong. Out of the process, I ended up gaining a new friend and colleague who asked very little of me, other than to be interested (which I honestly was) and offer suggestions on people to talk to or suggestions on what not to miss. I enjoyed hearing her take on the meeting as it progressed and I enjoyed learning how OHA was working for someone just entering the field. I hope the experience was as useful for Alise as it was for me. I know I gained a renewed perspective of the conference and the participants and I look forward to checking back in with Alise at the 2015 OHA conference.

To learn more about the program, or to sign up as a mentor or mentee for the 2015 OHA conference, contact Ellen Brooks or Stephen Sloan of the OHA Mentorship Committee.

Image Credit: “Hold Hands” by Billy Simon. CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Mentoring the next generation of oral historians appeared first on OUPblog.

The 12 sweets you need to know about (and try)

Have you ever tried vinarterta? How about gugelhupf? Whether these are familiar or completely foreign to you, this list of sweets are a must for everyone with a sweet tooth. All the sweets, cakes, desserts, and treats on this list come from The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, so give them a go and try one, some, or all!

1. Cassata

A cassata is a lavish cake from Sicily, a complex concoction of layered liqueur-soaked sponge cake interspersed with sweetened ricotta cheese, fruit preserves and jellies surrounded by marzipan and decorated with Baroque garnishes and flourishes of marzipan fruits, rosettes, flowers, and curlicues.

2. Gugelhupf

A gugelhupf is a light, mildly sweet cake traditionally leavened with yeast and baked in a distinctive sculptural mold made of glazed earthenware, but also of metal, and even bronze or cast iron. The cake is popular throughout a wide swath of Europe encompassing eastern France, South Germany, Switzerland, Poland and regions formerly within the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is also a traditional cake among the Pennsylvania Dutch, who refer to it as Deitscher Kuche (Dutch Cake).

3. Rosogolla

A rosogolla is a popular Indian ball-shaped sweet prepared from chhana (fresh milk curd) soaked in sugar syrup. These moist treats are a common sight at sweet shops across the subcontinent.

4. Vacherin

A vacherin is a French dessert consisting of an elaborately decorated meringue shell filled with whipped cream, fruit, ice cream, or sorbet.

5. Whoopie pie

A whoopie pie is a treat formed from two palm-sized rounds of chocolate sponge cake filled with a white frosting, made either of confectioner’s sugar beaten with shortening, or marshmallow frosting. Whoopie pies are associated strongly with Maine and Pennsylvania, where they are sometimes called “gobs”.

6. Vinarterta

A vinarterta is an Icelandic rectangular delicacy comprised of five to nine layers of fruit jam and shortbread pastry, although contemporary versions incorporate baking powdered-leavened bread in order to achieve a lighter consistency. It is frequently iced with a simple sugar glaze that can be laced with vodka or bourbon. The dough is often flavored with almonds, and the fruit filling spiked with cardamom, vanilla, or red wine.

7. Tres leches cake

The pastel de tres leches is a sponge cake soaked in three milks (tres leches), usually condensed milk, evaporated milk, and cream. The immediate origin is almost certainly a recipe developed or at least disseminated by Nestlé in the 1970s or 80s in cookbooks and on the backings of labels on cans of La Lechera (“the milkmaid”) condensed milk.

8. Sticky toffee pudding

Sticky toffee pudding is a lightly baked sponge studded with chopped dates and topped with a butterscotch sauce.

Cassata & Malvasia. Photo by mat’s eye. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

9. Mochi

Mochi in Japanese, refers to rice cakes and other dumpling-shaped foods made from sticky substances. Rice cake mochi are made from polished glutinous rice, which becomes naturally sticky when steamed. Traditionally, the steamed rice is pounded in a large mortar with a pestle to form the cakes. Rice cakes can be formed into many shapes and are integral to ceremonies and seasonal observances.

10. Laddu

Laddu is a round, sweet ball, and is probably the most universally popular Indian sweets and one of the most ancient. The basic version (besan laddu) is made with chickpea (gram) flour, sugar, clarified butter, and cardamom powder. The flour is fried in the butter before adding the sugar and cardamom; when the mixture cools, it is formed into round balls around 1 1/2 inches in diameter.

11. Croquembouche

A croquembouche is a French dessert made by sticking together cream puffs with caramel. Croquembouche literally means “crack (or crunch) in the mouth”, due to the consistency of the hardened caramel.

12. Chiffon pie

Chiffon pie is a single-crust pie with a light, fluffy filling. This filling is generally a custard mixture lightened with beaten egg whites and/or whipped cream, with or without added gelatin, and flavored with an almost infinite variety of ingredients. The pie shell was originally made from pastry, but crumb crusts are now popular.

Headline Image Credit: CreamPuffs. Photo Breville USA. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

The post The 12 sweets you need to know about (and try) appeared first on OUPblog.

Facing the challenges of palliative care: continuity

The fifth edition of the Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine is dedicated to the memory of Prof Geoffrey Hanks, one of three founding editors of the textbook, who died in June 2013. With a legacy spanning almost four decades as a clinician, researcher, teacher, and editor, Geoffrey was a man of great compassion and wisdom. While we are greatly saddened by his death, we are inspired by his legacy.

The two decades since the first edition of this textbook have witnessed truly remarkable growth in palliative care. Such growth is challenging to master, and brings both uncertainties and optimism about the future. In this three-part series of articles, we’ll take a look at some of the complex and challenging issues of continuity, development, and evolution in the field of palliative care.

Palliative medicine asserts, boldly and optimistically, that even in the face of overwhelming illness, suffering can and must be relieved. This assertion is derived from a rights ethos. There may be individual barriers that patients or families bring to the clinical setting, or larger pragmatic, economic, or social reasons that make it difficult to provide palliative care, but none of these concerns undermine the duty to prioritize the relief of suffering for people with incurable illnesses and the families that support them.

The factors motivating palliative medicine practitioners are the underlying axioms of our professional endeavors. They should be clearly articulated, because they underlie the personal, professional and societal investments which address intense human suffering, in the context of both inexorably progressive illnesses, and impending death.

Care, compassion, empathy, and justice

Care is the recognition that the well-being of others is a matter of consequence. As an integral part of the human experience, it influences the nature and dynamic of interpersonal behaviours. Compassion is that aspect of care that recognizes the emotional dimension of human experience, and encompasses sympathy for another’s loss.

Empathy, the ability to perceive and understand the emotional experience of others, predicates care and compassion. In the clinical context, an empathic connection occurs when the clinician understands what their patient is experiencing, and successfully communicates that understanding. The empathic connection is often therapeutic in itself. Beyond that, it contributes to a bond which facilitates the trust necessary to forge an effective therapeutic relationship.

Care and empathy interface with the perception of justice. The claim that access to the means to relieve suffering is a human right derives from the empathic experience; i.e. that unnecessary suffering is a matter of consequence and therefore demands a constructive response.

Hands by Gaertringen. CC0 via Pixabay.

Resilience

In taking on the task of palliative care, a professional caregiver willingly accepts the role as first-hand witness to physical, emotional and existential distress. Caring for people at the end of life and their families in this context day after day challenges us as professionals and individuals. Each interdisciplinary team member brings personal needs and resources to the clinical experience, and the different stressors born by members of the team can strain even the best of collaborative relationships.

Resilience is the quality that enables professional caregivers to cope and adapt, continuing to give and grow despite the suffering we dare to confront. Resilience is buffered by skills acquired through years of training, and by dedication and good intentions. As teams, resilience is the binding matrix that keeps us working constructively together despite stress, which would potentially undermine our ability to deliver care.

Common experience suggests that resilience characterizes most clinicians who choose palliative care as a career. These clinicians are driven to develop the skills and relationships that support their ability to manage suffering. Not all who work in palliative care do so by choice, however. Interns, resident staff, nursing students, junior members of the allied health team, administrative and support staffs may find themselves addressing the problems of patients with advanced illness by consignment. For those without the resilience of the clinicians who seek to specialize in palliative care, this can only be endured in an understanding and supportive environment.

The patients and families we seek to help have not chosen their fate. How they cope, or are helped to cope, hinges on both the provision of meticulous care, and the fostering of resilience in the patient and the family unit as a whole. Some patients come with rich sources of personal and family resilience. Others are overwhelmed. Competent palliative care will always seek to support adaptive coping, and psychological and spiritual healing of both patients and families.

Courage

For the incurably ill, fear may be a part of life. There is just so much to fear: death, physical distress, and dependency, as well as multiple losses: control over biologic functioning, mental faculties, potency, beauty, and future hopes.

Courage takes many forms in the lives of our patients and the families who care for them. They need courage to seek meaning in a life that is now demonstrably finite, and to savour remaining life while grieving the hopes and dreams that cannot be fulfilled. They need courage to confront difficult decisions about treatment options that have the potential to improve quality of life, but also the possibly to undermine it. For many patients, consenting to even simple interventions requires great courage, and the need to believe that the recommendation is borne of both knowledge and compassion.

We often try to support our patients in a process that changes focus from ‘everything to live longer’ to ‘everything to live better’. We must acknowledge the great courage in forgoing or withdrawing treatment, sometimes an even braver step than the decision to undergo grueling intervention in the hope of prolonging life.

Sensitivity to differences

There is no one best way to deal with life-threatening illness, and cultural, religious and interpersonal factors strongly affect individual approaches. Individualized care is grounded in the recognition that human responses to the same event vary dramatically, and that only part of this variation is predictable.

Cultural sensitivity must also recognize the heterogeneity of different cultural and religious communities. Indeed, reductionist anthropological approaches that foster cultural stereotyping are best avoided in favour of an individualized approach, which explores the values and goals of the individual patient and his or her family, within his or her environment.

Trust

Through empathy, compassion, honesty, humility, sensitivity and diligence we aim to develop a bond of trust. We aim to build a trust that is sufficiently robust such that patients and their families feel secure in effective care planning, and develop courage and resilience despite the profound difficulties of their circumstances.

The post Facing the challenges of palliative care: continuity appeared first on OUPblog.

All about that Double Bass

Distinguished musicians Domenico Dragonetti (1763-1846) and Giovanni Bottesini (1821-1889) established a long-standing tradition of playing the double bass that was carried on into the 20th and 21st centuries. From the 1500s, this deep-toned string instrument has made its way from European orchestras to today’s popular music to retain a more natural acoustic sound in performances. If you’re all about that bass, check out these fun musical facts about the double bass and its history.

1.   The double bass is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra.

2.   The origin of the name of the double bass stems from the fact that its initial function was to double the bass line of large ensembles.

3.   This hefty instrument has several nicknames including contrabass, string bass, bass, bass viol, bass fiddle, or bull fiddle.

4.   It is a hybrid instrument influenced by the gamba and the violin family.

5.   The double bass can be played using two different types of bows. The French or ‘Bottesini’ bow resembles a cello bow but is shorter and heavier. The second type is the German ‘Simandl’ or ‘Butler’ bow.

6.   It is commonly used in jazz, dance music, popular music, and folk music. Military and concert bands across the globe use it.

7.   In the orchestra, the double bass supplies power, weight, and the basic rhythmic foundation.

8.   Mozart wrote and published one of the first brilliant double bass works to appear in print, the aria Per questa bella mano.

9.   Many double bass players can also successfully play the electric bass guitar.

10.   The double bass was the most popular and most frequently used bass instrument in the 1950s despite the introduction of the bass guitar at that time.

Headline image credit: Double Bass [cropped]. Photo by Rolle Ruhland. CC BY 2.0 via rollebassfire Flickr.

The post All about that Double Bass appeared first on OUPblog.

Exploring the final frontier

On this day in 1953, the New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary and Nepali-Indian Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest. In the following excerpt from his book, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2015), Stewart A. Weaver discusses why we, as humans, want to explore and discover.

In the winter of 1942/43, in Nazi-occupied Paris, Émile Gagnan and a ship-of-the-line lieutenant named Jacques-Yves Cousteau together developed the first modern prototype of the Aqua-Lung, or “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus” (SCUBA). Various sorts of diving bells and chambers had been around since the Renaissance, and in 1930 two Americans, William Beebe and Otis Barton, had made history’s first deep-sea descent off Bermuda in a hollow steel ball they called a bathysphere. But it was the Gagnan-Cousteau Aqua-Lung, allowing as it did for free range of movement, observation, and collection, that ushered in the brave new era of undersea exploration. In 1948, while Wilfred Thesiger was making his second crossing of the Empty Quarter in Arabia, Cousteau and a small team that included the explorer-photographer Marcel Ichac made autonomous diving excavations of the ancient Mediterranean shipwreck of Mahdia, thus opening the way for submarine archaeology. Two years later, having resigned his naval commission, Cousteau founded French Oceanographic Campaigns, converted a retired British minesweeper into the research vessel Calypso, and set out on his lifelong career as the world’s leading apostle of underwater discovery. The waters that compass us about, he wrote in 1959, are “the last frontier on our planet,” and to him they presented a challenge “larger and more mysterious than the terrestrial wilderness, the deserts, the peaks and the white wastes of the Poles.”

In writing thus of “the last frontier on our planet,” Cousteau acknowledged that others off our planet now beckoned, that the lowly earth could no longer contain human exploratory ambition.

Two years before he wrote, the Soviet Union had successfully placed an artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into elliptical low earth orbit, and two years after that, the Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey beyond the earth’s atmosphere into interplanetary space. A scant half-century after the race to the poles, the Cold War–inspired race to the moon was on. But was Gagarin actually an explorer in the same sense as Peary or Amundsen or their many earth-bound predecessors? Not once during his seventy-nine-minute near-orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961, did Gagarin touch the controls of his Vostok spacecraft. More passenger than pilot, he was simply along for the ride, a bit of flesh-and-blood cargo on an otherwise purely robotic and technologically driven venture. Subsequent cosmonauts and American astronauts had marginally more direct responsibility for the course and bearing of their crafts (from lunar landers to low-orbit shuttles), but still very little, none practically, compared with that of Columbus or Cook for theirs. And while space travel is unquestionably dangerous, as the American shuttle disasters prove, those who undertake it do not leap off into the unknown as daringly as the Vikings or Polynesians did. Rather, they set out on minutely programmed and computer-controlled courses for precisely fixed and perfectly located destinations. That is, they know to a scientific certainty where they are going and how long it will take them to get there. If the explorer by very definition has no precise or known destination, then astronauts are not explorers.

Image: Diver, by tpsdave. Public domain via Pixabay.

But neither, then, were Peary and Amundsen, both of whom had the mathematically precise destination of 90° latitude in mind when they set out on their polar journeys. And although they both had to rely far more on their own human energies and instincts to get there than Neil Armstrong had to rely on his to get to the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon, they too had technological tools at their disposal that earlier polar travelers did not and might thus be disqualified by absolute purists from the company of explorers. True, technology stifles romance, and by comparison with those earlier explorers who did not know what was over the next hill or around the next bend in the river, astronauts seem terribly spoiled. But so then does James Cook by comparison with the Polynesians who navigated the same seas without benefit of ship or sextant or magnetic compass. The differences here are matters of degree, not of kind. The real question is not how one travels but whether one travels to find the new. The point of the explorer’s journey is to see what has not been seen by anyone before, and in that respect no one in history was more of an explorer than Yuri Gagarin, who was the first human to see the bright blue orb of the earth set against the deep black immensity of space. Is space then “the final frontier,” as the famous title sequence to the 1960s television series Star Trek has it? If so, then it is an infinitely expanding one, and the work of exploration will never end as long as long as human curiosity endures. The particular geopolitical rivalry that drove the race to the moon ended with the Cold War, and the commercial usefulness of space travel has yet to prove itself as has the ambassadorial: we have yet to make any form of cultural contact out there. In other cultural and psychological respects, however, the exploration of space represents the deep extension of tendencies already evident in the earliest human migrations. The Romantics called it “wanderlust”—this innate human instinct for travel and original experience, this indefinable urge to see what lies over the next ridge or ocean. But it may be something more deeply wired than that. In looking into the riddle of human restlessness—no other mammal moves around from choice like we do— evolutionary anthropologists have identified a variant of the DRD4 gene, namely DRD4-7R, that in fact disposes some 20 percent of us toward curiosity, risk, movement, and adventure.

There is no such thing as the explorer’s gene: that vastly overstates 7R’s determinative significance. In accounting for the mystery of human exploration one has to consider means as much as motives, the ability as much as the urge. But where the urge is concerned, the familiar trinity of God, Gold, and Glory does not, it appears, tell the whole story. We need another “G” for Genes to explain why for thousands of years Homo sapiens, the “wise human,” has wandered the earth as Homo explorans.

“I suppose we go to Mount Everest,” George Mallory once said, “because—in a word—we can’t help it.” He spoke more truth than he knew. For all the different forms it takes in different historical periods, for all the worthy and unworthy motives that lie behind it, exploration, travel for the sake of discovery and adventure, seems to be a human compulsion, a human obsession even (as the paleontologist Maeve Leakey says); it is a defining element of a distinctly human identity, and it will never rest at any frontier, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial.

Featured image credit: Mountain peak, by Unsplash. Public domain via Pixabay.

The post Exploring the final frontier appeared first on OUPblog.

Reframing gangs

Picture the scene.

Scene 1: A group of wildly drunk young men smash a local business to smithereens, systematically destroying every inch, before beating the owner within an inch of his life.

Scene 2: A group of power-crazed men (and one woman), driven by an aggressive culture of hyper-competitiveness, commit economic crime on an epic scale.

Scene 3: A group of bored teenagers, clad in flares, chase another similar group over a bridge to the strains of T-Rex, brandishing knives and machetes.

What unites these images, and what divides them?

The first, and easiest, answer is that they are all scenes from American and British feature films of the last five years: The Riot Club (2014), Margin Call (2011) and Neds: Non Educated Delinquents (2010). The second, and more important, is that each depicts the creation of an insular, competitive, male-oriented subculture that results in horrifying acts of social and economic harm. From Oxford to Glasgow via Wall Street, each scene captures a struggle for status and reputation, brinksmanship and one-upmanship, and the will of the individual being keened towards the strange force of groupthink. A third perhaps less obvious answer is that each scene also demonstrates the way in which individuals become warped and damaged by such hyped-up environments, in the effort to live up to the intangible and mutable norms of the group. In each film, an individual trying hard to become an insider ends up on the outside, hurt and ostracised.

In their own way, each director – Lone Sherfig, J.C. Chandor, and Peter Mullan – is exploring the roots of seemingly senseless crime, and finding them in the ways in which social groups create forms of logic and values that gradually become untethered from, yet remain umbilically linked to, that of the law-abiding majority. At the heart of these very different scenes – spanning the violence of the streets, suites, and elites – we see striking similarities. Processes of group cohesion, masculinity formation and collective identity run like a bright red thread through divisions of class and geography.

‘the gang’ is a screen onto which our fears and prejudices are projected.

What divides these images, however, is not the action itself, but our reaction to them. The group of working-class youths in Mullan’s film are easily labelled – as ‘gang members’, ‘non educated delinquents’, or worse – while those in Sherfig and Chandor’s are less easily categorised. The group-oriented crimes of the students and the traders are no less the product of their environment, and of fundamental social processes, than that of the Glasgow teens; but there are no ready-made descriptors. Street-gangs are seen as a regular threat, while suite-gangs and elite-gangs are an aberration; a fact underscored in both Riot Club and Margin Call as almost all guilty parties escape legal censure. As William Chambliss discovered in his classic study of the Saints and the Roughnecks, those with cultural and economic capital are able to disentangle from the criminal justice system in a way that those labelled ‘gang-members’ cannot.

In a similar way, the academic study of gangs is often narrowly focused on questions of how and why ‘gang members’ differ from mainstream society. Like Officer Krupky in West Side Story, we see explanations roving from social to psychological, familial to environmental, economic to cultural. Such explanations, it seems, are often contingent on the eye of the beholder – ‘the gang’ is a screen onto which our fears and prejudices are projected. In the UK, ‘the gang’ is fast becoming the defining folk devil of the twenty-first century. Rather than casting our academic gaze downwards, however, we might turn it upwards – or, as Dwight Conquergood argues, we might turn it inwards, seeing gangs as ‘magnifying mirrors in which we can see starkly the violence, territoriality and militarism within all of us’.

In reframing the study of gangs, we would do well to engage with these insights – locating the particular forms of gang identity within their social and cultural context while considering the effect of our own academic and cultural ‘scenes’ in shaping responses to gangs.

Featured image: Promotional image from The Riot Club (2014). (c) Film4, HanWay Films, BFI, via The Riot Club Official Website.

The post Reframing gangs appeared first on OUPblog.

Julius Eastman: Gay Guerilla

“What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest—Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest. It is important that I learn how to be, by that I mean accept everything about me.”

Julius Eastman (27 October 1940-28 May 1990)—composer, pianist, vocalist, improviser, conductor, actor, choreographer, and dancer—has left a musical legacy worthy of special attention. Now is a prime moment to attend to Eastman and his work, as we recognize and honor the loss of this significant musical figure just twenty-five years ago from today. Eastman’s (self-aware) queerness and blackness, his provocative and engaging compositions, and his ability to traverse musical and performance styles, has made it a challenge to characterize and historicize him within the history of American experimental music. In an interview with music theorist Ellie Hisama, Eastman’s mother, Frances Eastman, notes that her son “…was strange. From an early age, I tried to understand this child. I knew he was strange from very young.”

In a brief exploration of Eastman’s “strangeness,” I’d like to interrogate the hyper, hypo, and queered frequencies of his music and life, in an attempt to aid in a hearing of Eastman’s contributions to art and life on his own terms, as well in relation to the history of American Experimentalism.

Julius Eastman was born in New York City. His mother raised him, along with his little brother, in Ithaca, New York. In addition to him being a “strange” or queer (outside of the norm) and precocious child, Hisama quotes Frances Eastman, as she notes that “From two I knew he was smart,” and as a young autodidact, he taught himself to play the piano and read music by learning Beethoven’s Für Elise. Although Eastman and his family faced financial hardships, his mother fed his musical talents by getting him piano lessons, and his advanced musical abilities gained him entry into the esteemed Curtis Institute as a piano student, graduating with a composition degree in 1963.

Julius Eastman. Photograph by Donald W. Burkhardt. Used with permission.

“…[T]he Creative Associates were [not] very creative anymore. I had no power to plan programs and none of the stuff that I suggested was taken up…I was a kind of talented freak who occasionally injected some vitality in programming.”

After Curtis, Eastman moved to Buffalo, New York, and later joined the Creative Associates (1969), a group of experimental composers that included Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Pauline Oliveros, and others who have often been discussed as part of the canon of American experimental composers—sans Eastman. As the discourse of American experimental music has focused primarily on white (male) composers, Eastman’s place in this group is unique, but not singular. African-American vocalist Gwendolin Sims was also a member of the Creative Associates, and Hisama also points to Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, and Charles Gayle as active performers and teachers in Buffalo at the time. (This cohort of African American experimental composers in the Northeast also developed alongside the Advanced Association of Creative Musicians—a group of Chicago-based African-American experimental composers that included towering composers and performers, such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and George Lewis).

Eastman became highly regarded for his abilities as a vocalist (also self taught) within the group, performing both common practice and experimental works. He is probably most known today for his virtuosic performance of Sir Peter Maxwell Davie’s experimental monodrama, “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” conducted by Pierre Boulez. Yet as the above quote suggests, his contributions as a composer were not fully recognized in this group, much like today, and it was after leaving the Creative Associates that Eastman penned some of his most provocative and stirringly reflexive compositions.

After a series of personal professional ups and downs—tenuous faculty appointments, co-director of Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert series with Talib Hakim and Tania León, serious financial set backs and drug-related addictions, touring vocalist with Meredith Monk—Eastman composed Gay Guerilla, and the explicitly titled work, “Nigger Series,” including Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, Dirty Nigger, and Nigger Faggot, in the late 1970s and early 80s. These “ecstatic minimalist” pieces, as described by Hisama, were highly controversial in their titles and performance, and prompted Eastman to make pre-concert statements on the political nature of the works.

“These names, either I glorify them or they glorify me. And in the case of guerilla, that glorifies gay…A guerilla is someone who in any case is sacrificing his life for a point of view. And you know if there is a cause, and if it is a great cause, those who belong to that cause, will sacrifice their blood because without blood there is no cause.” —Eastman on Gay Guerilla

Score to Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerilla (1979); Duplicated with permission from Mary Jane Leach (mjleach.com/Eastmanscores.htm).

“…they can be called ‘Nigger Series.’ Now the reason I use that particular word is because, for me, it has a…is what I call a basicnesss about it. That is to say, I feel that, in any case, the first niggers were of course field niggers. And upon that is really the basis of what I call the American economic system…And what I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, fundamentalness…” —Eastman on “Nigger Series”

Score to Julius Eastman’s Evil Nigger (1979); Duplicated with permission from Mary Jane Leach (mjleach.com/Eastmanscores.htm).

Eastman’s late works were composed for multiple (often unspecified) instruments, and he generally employed small cells of (minimal) notes to be repeated and gradually change over time, allowing the performer(s) the freedom to move between designated sections in an improvisatory-like manner, as they converge at certain minute markers, while they diverge in interesting ways throughout the piece (see above examples).

It is hard to imagine the dynamism of Eastman’s work without hearing their realization. In a 2008 performance of “Crazy Nigger” at the Atrium Stadhuis Den Haag new music festival, we get a glimpse of how Eastman’s aesthetic and compositional style unfolds in time—creating an “ecstatic” performance out of minimal musical material that is both organized and improvised at once.

Maybe it was the provocative titles themselves, the racial, capital, or sexuality topics that Eastman addressed head on, or his position as an African American (self-identified) homosexual within the “uptown” and “downtown” scenes of experimentalism that have led to Eastman’s low-frequency status in contemporary music and art circles. But as he begins to resonate in the higher frequencies of contemporary music making and scholarship, we should work towards developing queered listening practices that extend beyond formal modes of music analysis and construction, to deeply engage with the transformative repetition, communal improvisation, social innovation, and critical awareness at the heart of Eastman’s work. Such a development of this queered aesthetic might get us closer to interrogating and finding new ways to improvise through the difficult topics of homophobia, capitalism, and racism that Eastman himself dealt with throughout his life.

This is particularly resonant during our current moment of social and political unrest, where people of people of color, queered peoples, and lower and working class folk are constantly challenging and challenged by certain societal structures. Appreciating, interrogating, and performing Eastman’s music and aesthetics might encourage a different mode of listening and being. As he himself noted, “therefore that is the reason I use ‘gay guerilla,’ in hopes that I might be one if called upon to be one.” If we are called upon to be “gay guerillas” in our work, art making, and living, maybe Eastman will help us get there a bit quicker.

Headline image credit: Sheet music. Photo by rjasso via Pixabay. CC0 Public Domain.

The post Julius Eastman: Gay Guerilla appeared first on OUPblog.