Oxford University Press's Blog, page 831

Discussing Josephine Baker with Anne Cheng

By Tim Allen

Josephine Baker, the mid-20th century performance artist, provocatrix, and muse, led a fascinating transatlantic life. I recently had the opportunity to pose a few questions to , Professor of English and African American Literature at Princeton University and author of the book Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface, about her research into Baker’s life, work, influence, and legacy.

Josephine Baker, as photographed by Carl Von Vechten in 1949. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Baker made her career in Europe and notably inspired a number of European artists and architects, including Picasso and Le Corbusier. What was it about Baker that spoke to Europeans? What did she represent for them?

It has been traditionally understood that Baker represents a “primitive” figure for male European artists and architects who found in Baker an example of black animality and regressiveness; that is, she was their primitive muse. Yet this view cannot account for why many famous female artists were also fascinated by her, nor does it explain why Baker in particular would come to be the figure of so much profound artistic investment. I would argue that it is in fact Baker’s “modernity” (itself understood as an expression of hybrid and borrowed art forms) rather than her “primitiveness” that made her such a magnetic figure.  In short, the modernists did not go to her to watch a projection of an alienating blackness; rather, they were held in thrall by a reflection of their own art’s racially complex roots. This is another way of saying that, when someone like Picasso looked at a tribal African mask or a figure like Baker who mimics Western ideas of Africa, what he saw was not just radical otherness but a much more ambivalent mirror of the West’s own complicity in constructing and imagining that “otherness.”

Baker was present at the March on Washington in August 1963 and stood with Martin Luther King Jr. as he gave his “I have a dream” speech. What did Baker contribute to the struggle for civil rights? How was her success in foreign countries understood within the African American community?

These are well-known facts about Baker’s biography: in the latter part of her life, Baker became a very public figure for the causes of social justice and equality. During World War II, she served as an intelligence liaison and an ambulance driver for the French Resistance and was awarded the Medal of the Resistance and the Legion of Honor. Soon after the war, Baker toured the United States again and won respect and praise from African Americans for her support of the civil rights movement. In 1951, she refused to play to segregated audiences and, as a result, the NAACP named her its Most Outstanding Woman of the Year. She gave a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall for the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality in 1963.

What is fascinating as well, however, is the complication that Baker represents to and for the African American community. Prior to the war and her more public engagement with the civil rights movement, she was not always a welcome figure either in the African American community or for the larger mainstream American public. Her sensational fame abroad was not duplicated in the states, and her association with primitivism made her at times an embarrassment for the African American community. A couple of times before the war, Baker returned to perform in the United States and was not well received, much to her grief. I would suggest that Baker should be celebrated not only for her more recognizable civil rights activism, but also for her art: performances which far exceed the simplistic labels that have been placed on them and which few have actually examined as art. These performances, when looked at more closely, embody and generate powerful and intricate political meditations about what it means to be a black female body on stage.

Did your research into Baker’s life uncover any surprising or unexpected bits of information? What was the greatest challenge you experienced in carrying out your research?

I was repeatedly stunned by how much writing has been generated about her life (from facts to gossip) but how little attention has been paid to really analyzing her work, be it on stage or in film. The work itself is so idiosyncratic and layered and complex that this critical oversight is really a testament to how much we have been blinded by our received image of her. I was also surprised to learn how insecure she was about her singing voice when it is in fact a very unique voice with great adaptability. Baker’s voice can be deep and sonorous or high and pitchy, depending on the context of each performance. In the film Zou Zou, for example, Baker is shown dressed in feathers, singing while swinging inside a giant gilded bird cage. Many reviewers criticized her performance as jittery and staccato. But I suggest that her voice was actually mimicking the sounds that would be made, not by a real bird, but by a mechanical bird and, in doing so, reminding us that we are not seeing naturalized primitive animality at all, but its mechanical reconstruction.

For me, the challenge of writing the story of Baker rests in learning how to delineate a material history of race that forgoes the facticity of race. The very visible figure of Baker has taught me a counterintuitive lesson: that the history of race, while being very material and with very material impacts, is nonetheless crucially a history of the unseen and the ineffable. The other great challenge is the question of style. I wanted to write a book about Baker that imitates or at least acknowledges the fluidity that is Baker. This is why, in these essays, Baker appears, disappears, and reappears to allow into view the enigmas of the visual experience that I think Baker offers.

Baker’s naked skin famously scandalized audiences in Paris, and your book is, in many respects, an extended analysis of the significance of Baker’s skin. Why study Josephine Baker and her skin today? What does she represent for the study of art, race, and American history? Did your interest in studying Baker develop gradually, or were you immediately intrigued by her?

I started out writing a book about the politics of race and beauty. Then, as part of this larger research, I forced myself to watch Josephine Baker’s films. I say “forced” because I was dreading seeing exactly the kind of racist images and performances that I have heard so much about.  But what I saw stunned, puzzled, and haunted me. Could this strange, moving, and coated figure of skin, clothes, feathers, dirt, gold, oil, and synthetic sheen be the simple “black animal” that everyone says she is? I started writing about her, essay after essay, until a dear friend pointed out that I was in fact writing a book about Baker.

Tim Allen is an Assistant Editor for the Oxford African American Studies Center. You can follow him on Twitter @timDallen.

The Oxford African American Studies Center combines the authority of carefully edited reference works with sophisticated technology to create the most comprehensive collection of scholarship available online to focus on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Discussing Josephine Baker with Anne Cheng appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesWomen of 20th century musicDirty South hip hop and societal ills in the former ConfederacyEscape Plans: Solomon Northup and Twelve Years a Slave 

Plausible fictions and irrational coherence

By Joseph Harris

One of the most intriguing developments in recent psychology, I feel, has been the recognition of the role played by irrationality in human thought. Recent works by Richard Wiseman, Dan Ariely, Daniel Kahneman, and others have highlighted the irrationality that can inform and shape our judgements, decision-making, and thought more generally. But, as the title of Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational reminds us, our ‘irrationality’ is not necessarily random for all that; in fact, there often appears to be something systematic and internally coherent about the sorts of mistakes that we make. For example, when we’re judging probabilities, we tend to vastly overestimate the likelihood of more dramatic outcomes (such as dying in an aeroplane crash) and underestimate that of less striking ones (such as dying of heart disease). Similarly, we’re very susceptible to whatever information is made ‘available’ to us. As Kahneman suggests, for example, we tend to typecast public figures like politicians as unduly prone to infidelity – not because of any solid statistical evidence, but because journalists’ exposure of such affairs makes the association spring to mind more readily. But our irrationality does not end there. In a further step, we often then compound our mistake by seeking to derive from it explanatory theories and narratives about, say, the aphrodisiac nature of power, and these explanations then help give credence and plausibility to our misguided assumptions.

This interest in the ‘cognitive biases’ of the human mind is nothing new. Long before psychology or behavioural economics developed as formalised disciplines, dramatists and dramatic theoreticians were keen to isolate and either exploit or overcome the predictable irrationality of theatre audiences. The so-called ‘father of French tragedy’, Pierre Corneille (1606-84), was particularly fascinated by the vagaries of audience response and eager to exploit his findings in his plays. Some of Corneille’s most interesting observations lie in the very area which has recently attracted Kahneman and others: our capacity to assess probability. This was a key issue for many seventeenth-century dramatists, not least because of the period’s insistence on aesthetic vraisemblance (‘verisimilitude’ — essentially, the dramatic fiction’s overall plausibility), as the backbone of dramatic illusion.

Corneille takes a similar observation to Kahneman and turns it into a sort of aesthetic principle. As Corneille notes, tragedians (like modern journalists) typically focus on the crimes and misdemeanours of the notable and powerful. Corneille’s explanation for this is simple: only famous people’s misfortunes and deaths are typically ‘illustrious’ or ‘extraordinary’ enough to have been recorded by history, and thus to have the external historical backing that otherwise implausible events require. Spectators, he claims, are quick to mistrust tragic narratives they do not already know – not so much because the tragic events are themselves implausible (although they may well be), but because it is implausible that such implausible events occurred without having already been brought to their knowledge. (In contrast, comic plots can be entirely invented because they focus on private, domestic events that escape the public radar.) So although Corneille’s spectators display a very patchy grasp of history, they cling tenaciously to what they do know — thus embodying what Kahneman calls ‘our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in’.

Does this mean that Corneille’s spectators deduce — as Kahneman suggests we do of politicians’ affairs — that such murderous deeds are more prevalent amongst kings and queens? Corneille certainly claims that ancient Greek tragedy played an important role in republican propaganda, fostering its audiences’ belief that kings were fated to lives of brutality. But Corneille uses a rather different logic when explaining the responses of his own contemporaries, those dutiful subjects of Louis XIV. Corneille, we remember, insists that our prior familiarity with historical narratives can win ‘belief’ for otherwise improbable tragic plots; the details of history have already won our belief, however implausible we recognise them to be. In other words, we tend to regard each tragic hero’s downfall as a discrete, one-off historical phenomenon – one chosen for the stage, indeed, precisely because of its uniqueness – rather than as something reflecting a more general propensity towards untimely or brutal ends amongst the upper classes.

Yet Corneille also implies that, despite recognising this uniqueness, we also crave to see a wider resonance and relevance in each tragic narrative. While watching a tragic hero’s downfall, he claims, we deduce that if even kings can be brought down by passions then lowly commoners like ourselves are at even greater risk of a misfortune proportionate to our station.

It seems, then, that however weak our own passions, and however little we stand to lose by being brought down by them, we commoners are actually far more susceptible to misfortune than the regal figures that appear so appealing to tragic dramatists. Strangely, then, Corneille takes a similar starting point to Kahneman, and shows a similar concern for cognitive biases, but ends up at a conclusion completely contrary to Kahneman’s – reminding us, in case we needed reminding, that there may be various different ways of being coherently irrational.

Joseph Harris is Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature (especially drama), and is the author of Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century France (Narr, 2005) and Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (OUP, 2014). He is interested in how early modern French theatre engages with such issues as gender, psychology, laughter, and spectatorship, and he is currently writing a monograph on death in the works of Pierre Corneille. He can be followed on Twitter at @duckmaus.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Image credit: Pierre Corneille, Anonymous artist, 17th century. Palace of Versailles. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Plausible fictions and irrational coherence appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesOvid the naturalistOne billion dogs? What does that mean?Reflections on Son of God 

One billion dogs? What does that mean?

By Matthew E. Gompper

As part of my recent research on the ecology of dogs and their interactions with wildlife I took the necessary first step of attempting to answer a seemingly simple question: Just how many dogs are there on the planet? Yet just because a question is simple does not mean we can confidently answer it. Previous estimates of 500-700 million dogs were rough calculations. I tried to do a bit better by pulling together hundreds of local-scale estimates and extrapolating across much larger regions. The result? One billion dogs (986,913,500 to be exact).

What are we to make of such a shockingly large number? The estimate itself is undoubtedly inexact, and in the future population demographers will likely improve on it, much as demographers studying human populations have increased the accuracy of human population size estimates. Maybe it is ten percent less than a billion. Maybe it is twenty percent more. Either way, it’s a massive number. There is something about hitting the billion threshold that makes one pause and wonder how to interpret such findings.

One way to ponder such numbers is to ask about impact. What is the impact of having a billion dogs on the planet? We tend to view dogs as benign commensals, and indeed, with only rare exceptions (such as Australian dingoes) that is the case. These billion or so dogs are entirely dependent on humans to survive. We shelter and feed them directly or indirectly ¬– the latter when dogs survive by feeding on the foods that humans have discarded. For the most part, individual dogs can’t make a living hunting wild prey. (In this sense, dogs are quite different from cats, which can survive just fine outside the bounds of human societies.)

But that doesn’t mean that dogs won’t kill the occasional prey if it has the opportunity. My dog, an Australian Shepherd that as I type is happily snoozing on the living room couch, will gladly chase any squirrel in sight even if his chance of catching it is close to nil. But ‘close to nil’ is not the same as ‘nil’, and to quote Hamlet, “ay, there’s the rub”. Occasionally, some dogs can catch the proverbial squirrel, and many dogs are better than that, regularly ranging into areas where animals are likely to be found and chasing or killing whatever they can. This ranging may be alone or with other dogs from the neighborhood; the dogs may also be accompanying their human companions. One dog doing this occasionally is not a big deal. But multiply that by a billion and we suddenly recognize the potential for dogs to be important drivers of the behavior of wildlife and important mediators of wildlife population dynamics.

Free-ranging dog in Great Indian Bustard Wildlife Sanctuary, Maharashtra, India. Such dogs have the potential to greatly influence wildlife in the region. Photo by Matthew Gompper. Used with permission.

Indeed, numerous cases have been documented showing how dogs interact with and cause problems for the surrounding wildlife. Dogs disturb or kill wildlife, compete for the resources that wildlife also need, and act as reservoirs for pathogens that cause epidemics in wildlife. Dogs even act as prey for some big species of wild carnivores such as tigers, leopards, wolves and bears, and in such cases draw these species into areas where conflicts with humans are more likely. The more researchers look into the issue of dog-wildlife conflict, the more they come to recognize both the importance of the issue for protecting species and environments of conservation concern, as well as the importance of recognizing just how little we currently understand.

For instance, it would appear that a simple solution would be to restrict the ability of dogs to roam in areas where wildlife exists. Since most dogs in the developing world are fed kitchen scraps and roam in search of additional discarded food waste, combine restrictions on roaming with a better diet for dogs, and everyone wins, right? Not so fast. Commercially-produced dog foods are in many ways nutritionally similar to human foods. Producing dog food requires agricultural lands above and beyond that required for food production for people. Indeed, back of the envelope calculations based on the caloric needs of dogs suggest that the agricultural production requirements to support dogs equates to 30-40% of that required to support humans. Where would that land come from? Putting more land into agricultural development might do more damage to wildlife conservation efforts than the direct impacts dogs are currently causing.

But maintaining the status quo of allowing dogs to roam widely interacting with species of conservation concern is not satisfactory either. Nor do the norms of society allow us to cull massive numbers of dogs or confine every dog to a small space. After all, we as a global human population, like our dogs. So what are we to do? I believe a necessary first step to reducing the extent of dog-wildlife conflict may lie merely in first getting the word out regarding the importance of such issues. Once people come to realize there is an issue, locally tailored solutions, whether they involve curtailing how far dogs roam, increased oversight of dog welfare and breeding, or expanding the space set aside for wildlife, are more likely to be found acceptable than any one-size-fits-all approach to reducing dog numbers or impacts. The end result would hopefully benefit dogs, wildlife, and people.

Matthew Gompper is Professor of Mammalogy at the University of Missouri. His research examines wildlife disease ecology, the biology of mammalian carnivores (both wild and domestic), and the effects of resource subsidies on animal ecology. Gompper is the editor of Free-Ranging Dogs and Wildlife Conservation.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only earth, environmental, and life sciences articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post One billion dogs? What does that mean? appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesWorld TB Day 2014: Reach the three millionThe Ukraine crisis and the rules great powers play by35 years: the best of C-SPAN 

An international law reading list for the situation in Crimea

With the situation in Crimea moving rapidly, our law editors recently put together a debate map on the potential use of force in international law. To further support the background reading that many students and scholars of international law need, we’ve compiled a brief reading list to better understand the context and application of international law, including concepts of sovereignty, international responsibility, the laws of war, self-determination, secession, and statehood.

Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law, Eighth Edition by James Crawford

Check Part III: Territorial Sovereignty, Part VI: International Transactions, Part IX: The Law of Responsibility, and Part XI: Disputes for overviews of the major issues in the Crimea crisis. Identify the different elements of the public international law system at play.

Documents on the Laws of War, Third Edition, edited by Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff

Review the core rules, protocols, and conventions governing rights, duties, protections, and applications in wartime. What guidance can they provide?

The Law of International Responsibility, edited by James Crawford, Alain Pellet, and Simon Olleson; assistant editor Dr Kate Parlett

With discussion in Europe and the United States about their obligations to Ukraine, it’s essential to understand what protections there are to offer – and what qualifications must be met before enforcement.

Contested Statehood: Kosovo’s Struggle for Independence by Marc Weller

What can we learn from the international attempts to settle the Kosovo crisis and apply these lessons to Crimea? What failures can be avoided?

The Foreign Policy of Counter Secession: Preventing the Recognition of Contested States by James Ker-Lindsay

Gain insight from interviews with leading experts on the territorial integrity of states versus the right to self-determination.

The War Report: 2012, edited by Stuart Casey-Maslen

Much of the actions that the international community may take are predicated on the definition of war — or at least aggressive action. If Crimea doesn’t undergo a seamless transition, will this conflict be included the the 2014 war report?

Robert Beck on Grenada and Georg Nolte on Intervention by Invitation from Wolfrum (Ed.) in The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law

Crimea has voted for annexation and invited Russia into the country. What lessons can be drawn from Grenada 1983?

A panoramic view from Çufut Qale (Chufut Kale) in Crimea, Ukraine. Photo by Sergiy Klymenko. CC BY SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Louise Doswald Beck’s “The Legal Validity of Military Intervention by Invitation of the Government” in The British Year Book of International Law

While scholars debate the meanings of the basic theoretical principles of international law, how do they compare to historical interventions?

Two approaches to South Ossetia: Philip Leach from Wilmshurst (Ed.) The Classification of Conflicts and Angelika Nussberger from Wolfrum (Ed.) The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law

In 2008, tensions between Georgia and Russia spilled over into an armed conflict. Are there lessons for Russia’s conduct — as well as the international community’s — for today?

Georg Nolte and Albrecht Randelzhofer on Article 51 from Simma (Ed.) The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary

There is no doubt the UN Charter will be invoked in the debates, so clear commentary is crucial to understanding it.

Both Stefan Oeter and Daniel Thurer on Self-Determination

If the people of Crimea choose to join Russia, who is the international community to stop them?

James Crawford on Secession from The Creation of States in International Law, Second Edition

What are the tests for international recognition now that Crimea has seceded?

Yves Beigbeder on Referendum from Wolfrum (Ed.) The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law

There have been a number of disputes over Crimea’s referendum — from lack of choice to intimidation at the polling stations.

Jens Ohlin on Aggression from Cassese (Ed.) The Oxford Companion to International Criminal Justice

Shots have been fired. If the conflict escalates, how and when does it qualify as aggression under international law?

Proportionality in International Law by Michael Newton and Larry May

With periodic incidents of violence and many military and civilian actors and targets in play around Crimea and at the Ukraine border, it’s important to understand whom can be targeted and with what level of force.

Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare by John Yoo

Does the UN system and international law in general act to unreasonably constrain states from intervening in international crises for reasons of general humanitarian concerns? Can Russia’s intervention into Crimea be justified on humanitarian grounds?

Russia, the West, and Military Intervention by Roy Allison

Russia has intervened in a number of international conflicts in the last 25 years; does Russia’s intervention into Crimea fall into a pattern regarding Russia’s relationship with former Soviet states on its periphery? How can we understand Russian political and diplomatic responses during international crises around major interventions?

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only law articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post An international law reading list for the situation in Crimea appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesIraq, detainee abuse, and the danger of humanitarian double standardsSovereignty disputes in the South and East China SeaThe Ukraine crisis and the rules great powers play by 

World TB Day 2014: Reach the three million

By Timothy D. McHugh

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease of poverty and social exclusion with a global impact. It is these underlying truths that are captured in the theme of World TB Day 2014 ‘Reach the three million: a TB test, treatment and cure for all’. Of the nine million cases of tuberculosis each year, one-third does not have access to the necessary TB services to treat them and prevent dissemination of the disease in their communities. The StopTB Partnership is calling for ‘a global effort to find, treat and cure the three million’ and thus eliminate TB as a public health problem. So is the scientific community making sufficient progress to realise this target?

Early diagnosis is a cornerstone of management of the individual and we know that as the disease progresses and the bacterial load and severity of disease increase, the likelihood of a poor outcome is exacerbated. It is important to distinguish between diagnosis of tuberculosis and detection, which is confirmation of the presence of mycobacteria. Diagnosis for the three million (and many more) is largely dependent on the clinical expertise of the healthcare worker, with minimal input from technology. Whereas detection requires input from microbiological services and the principal tool in this area is sputum smear microscopy. A sputum sample with no evidence of acid fast bacilli is the accepted predictor of low risk of transmission, and so early application is critical in the management pathway. With improvements such as the auramine stain and LED fluorescent microscopy, the smear remains a cost effective component of TB screening programmes. The emergence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis has accentuated the need for prompt confirmation of drug susceptibility and this is where molecular tools have potential impact. The WHO supported roll out of GeneXpert in resource poor settings is going ahead and we are seeing change in practice, but it is too soon to determine the public health impact of this innovation. The challenge for microbiology is not to get drawn into a ‘one size fits all’ solution. In many settings, the low technology, low cost and rapid screening of smears serves to break the chain of transmission of drug sensitive tuberculosis. Whereas, in areas of high endemicity of drug resistant TB, such as South Africa, an equally fast indication of drug resistance is essential.

Photo by WHO/Jean Cheung

Diagnosis leads to treatment. TB is curable but treatment regimens are long, toxic and complex to deliver. Following the stakeholders meeting in Cape Town in 2000 there has been a major effort to open up the drug development pipeline. There are two aspects to this, firstly new agents and secondly clinical trials. There is a new enthusiasm for exploring new compounds with action against TB and the publication of the whole genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis allowed the interrogation of its biochemistry, opening the door for medicinal chemists to contribute their expertise. The development of MDRTB has led us to reconsider compounds previously excluded as too toxic or too difficult to administer; these drugs, such as PAS and thioridazene, are now being re-visited or forming the basis of fresh iterations of chemical screening programmes. After 30 years of no new drugs for TB treatment, two phase 3 trials (RIFAQUIN and OFLATUB) were reported in 2013 and a third (REMoxTB) is expected to report shortly. These studies have shaken things up. They each have potential to make improvements in TB treatment. However, it could be argued that their real benefit lies in the development of a network of facilities capable of undertaking TB clinical trials, as exemplified by the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development and the EDCTP funded PanACEA consortium, and their contribution to the active debate about how to efficiently deliver clinical trials that have a real impact on individuals and populations. We are now looking outside the world of TB and to, for example, cancer trial methodology for innovations such as the multi-arm multi-stage (MAMS) approach. A significant challenge here is to convert the results of studies undertaken, with the aim of full regulatory approval, into the rather more complex environment of programmatic delivery.

The host-pathogen interaction for M. tuberculosis is manifest in the pathology of tuberculosis and has proven to be a fruitful area of immunological research. This, together with the (variable) success of BCG vaccination, has led us to the reasonable expectation of a vaccine for control of tuberculosis. There has been much innovation in this area and new studies are in the pipeline. The quest for immunological markers of disease continues. Useful diagnostic tools for latency have been developed in the shape of IGRA tests (Tuberculosis: Diagnosis and Treatment), but, more importantly, recent advances lead us to the idea that we may be able to define a host response signature to tuberculosis. If successful, this approach may allow us to select those patients for whom a shorter course of therapy is adequate. From the UK MRC studies it was clear that as many as 80% of patients would be cured with a four-month regimen; the difficulty was that they could not be identified in advance or during treatment. A host response biomarker may well enable us to address this issue.

M. tuberculosis is a fascinating organism with many features of its biology that are distinct from other bacteria. For this reason the TB research community has become rather insular, not necessarily drawing on the experience from the wider bacteriology community. This was further exacerbated by the apparent fall in incidence of TB through the 1960s and 70s. Complacency is the term that comes to mind. Despite the commitment of groups such as those led by Mitchison and Grossett, there has been very little innovation in detection and diagnosis, and no new drug introduced to first line treatment after the 1960s. The declaration by WHO of TB as a global health emergency alerted us to the need for new ideas and new tools to meet this challenge. Twenty years down the line, we have rolled out new diagnostics and a new drugs pipeline that flows with the first phase 3 trials reporting shortly. Similarly, innovation in vaccine design and application moves forward and importantly our understanding of operational and behavioural aspects of controlling TB increases. However, we must not become complacent again. M. tuberculosis is not just an academic challenge and as long as the three million exist, we need to focus all our knowledge to achieve a TB test, treatment and cure for all.

Timothy D. McHugh is Professor of Medical Microbiology at the Centre for Clinical Microbiology, University College London. This is an adapted version of Professor McHugh’s commentary for the Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene publishes authoritative and impactful original, peer-reviewed articles and reviews on all aspects of tropical medicine.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only health and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Image credit: From the TB in Brazil series by WHO/Jean Cheung. Via the Stop TB Partnership.

The post World TB Day 2014: Reach the three million appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesWill caloric restriction help you live longer?Fluoridation of drinking water supplies: tapping into the debateWhat Coke’s cocaine problem can tell us about Coca-Cola Capitalism 

Reflections on Son of God

By William D. Romanowski

2014 is being heralded Hollywood’s “Year of the Bible.” The first film to reach theaters is Son of God, a remix of material by the same producers of the History Channel’s successful miniseries, The Bible.

Still from Son of God via sonofgodmovie.com

It seems hardly a coincidence that Son of God opened on Ash Wednesday, ten years to the day after Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was released. The promotional campaigns for both movies relied less on broad market advertising in favor of creating grassroots awareness in religious circles. Reportedly, over half-a-million advance tickets were sold across the nation.

After a strong opening weekend of over $20 million however, box office fell by more than 50 percent, then dropped to just over $5 million in its third week of release. Unlike The Passion, which earned over $370 million domestically, Son of God looks destined for humbler commercial prospects.

A perennial problem for evangelical moviemakers is that their efforts to mass-market the Gospel have to please the palette of born-again moviegoers who, despite the movie’s evangelistic purpose, remain critical to the film’s commercial prospects. What distinguishes evangelical art from its secular counterpart is what I call its confessional character; to qualify as “Christian” a movie has to contain a clear presentation of the gospel message. Son of God certainly meets this criteria. The result however, is that movie ends up preaching to the proverbial choir.

What I find interesting is the way Son of God caters to the Christian faithful while also attempting to make the Messiah’s story appealing to nonbelievers. Movies have to rely on a common cultural cache—ideals, beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions—in order to connect with audiences. But the communicativeness of Son of God depends to a surprising extent on viewers having ample knowledge of the Christian Gospels.

The Son of God narrative lacks coherence and clumsily advances like a checklist of “the Messiah’s greatest hits,” as a Washington Post critic put it. Scenes are underdeveloped, but contain enough information to serve as prompts for those familiar with the Gospel accounts.

Consider Peter’s initial encounter with Jesus. As the scene unfolds, the lack of verisimilitude raises questions. Why would Peter, apparently an experienced fisherman, readily obey a complete stranger, set out, and cast his fishing nets again? And even after the astonishing catch, would Peter have not as much as a moment of hesitation when invited by the stranger to follow him? “What are we going to do?” he asks. “We are going to change the world,” Jesus replies. The cost of Christian discipleship is that simple.

However cryptic this encounter, there is just enough narrative information presented for a Christian viewer to “get” the significance of the scene by filling in any gaps with a mental flashforward: Peter, of course, is the rock upon which Jesus will build His church. Without such prior knowledge however, an uninformed viewer could easily find the scene contrived, puzzling, and even unbelievable.

Part of the power of this narrative viewpoint is that it shores up communal identity among the initiated who are aware that others won’t “get” these hidden meanings by virtue of being outsiders. To use a Biblical metaphor, the effect is akin to separating the sheep from the goats. The approach works as an extended metaphor with characters, like uniformed viewers, missing meanings to which only the faithful are privy.

During Pilate’s interrogation outside a prison cell, Jesus tells him, “My kingdom is not of this world.” On that line of dialogue, the Messiah’s head drops back and is engulfed in a ray of bright white light streaming down from above; the use of cinematography to make an all-too-obvious reference to Jesus’s “heavenly” kingdom. Before leaving, Pilate, looking perplexed, glances upwards at the light. The gesture is intended, I assume, to signify that the Roman prefect doesn’t “get” Jesus’s meaning (even if it looks more like he is wondering, as I was, about the mysterious light source in the otherwise dark dungeon). That Christian spectators do understand makes for a cinematic moment of solidarity.

Wrestling with the messianic character has been the raison d’etre of Jesus movies. The ascetic depiction of Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) leans on the divine side; Jesus being tormented with fear, doubt, and sexual fantasies in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) emphasizes the Messiah’s humanity. It is fair to expect any retelling of the Christ story to justify itself by offering a new perspective. The Son of God however, provides a straightforward, simplistic, and rather unimaginative version of the Christ story, representing Jesus as entirely free of any fear, temptation, reluctance, or uncertainty. In short, there is nothing thought-provoking about this movie’s treatment of God-become-flesh. (Although I do wonder why even the most reverent efforts ignore the prophet Isaiah’s description of the coming Messiah as having “no beauty that we should desire him” (53:2).)

Son of God is not meant to be great cinematic art. Apparently, the producers’ single-minded purpose is to provide a clear and unambiguous cinematic statement so that moviegoers “may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20: 31). Unfortunately, this approach leaves much to be desired aesthetically and religiously. As the Washington Post critic observes, “Son of God is nothing if not sincere, its earnest retelling of Jesus’s life story resembling a gentle, pop-up book version of the New Testament, its text reenacted for maximum reassurance and intellectual ease.” Even a reviewer for the evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today admits that “watching Son of God was not a dreadful experience, but it wasn’t a particularly inspirational or entertaining one, either.”

Others trace the film’s lack of originality to the merchandizing of The Bible miniseries, which is available on DVD now along with other inspired products. For that reason, Variety dubbed this theatrical spinoff “a cynical cash grab” and one religious reviewer took it to be more a “marketing ploy” than a movie.

Nevertheless, to the extent that Son of God was crafted as a matinee affirmation of the Christian faith, its success in that regard might well come at the expense of welcoming the uninitiated.

William Romanowski is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College. His books include Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture (a 2002 ECPA Gold Medallion Award Winner), Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in America Life, and Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies. Read his previous blog posts.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Reflections on Son of God appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesGrand Piano: the key to virtuosityGloomy terrors or the most intense pleasure?Leaning in 

The Ukraine crisis and the rules great powers play by

By Michael H. Hunt

Amidst all the commentary occasioned by Russia fishing in troubled Ukrainian waters, one fundamental point tends to get lost from sight. Like many other recent points of international tension, this one raises the question of what are the rules great powers play by.

The United States has championed a values-based approach with a strong missionary impulse behind it. Woodrow Wilson provided its first full-blown articulation, and post-World War II policy saw to its full-blown application. Holding a dominant global position, Washington sought with varying degrees of urgency and determination to advance a basket of ideological goods. US leaders have articulated these goods in a variety of ways such as “democracy,” “free-market capitalism,” and “human rights.” But underlying all these formulations is a strong and distinctly American belief in the autonomy of the individual and a commitment to political liberty and limited state power. In the rhetoric of American statecraft these notions are a leitmotiv. They have generally set the direction of US policy responses to problems of the sort that Ukraine poses.

This American approach contrasts with a core dictum of classic realism: great powers have fundamental security interests most often manifested territorially. The venerable term to describe this situation is “spheres of influence.” What happens near borders matters considerably more than what happens half a world away. Globalization has perhaps qualified the dictum but hardly repealed it.

Even American policymakers observe this territorial imperative in their own neighbourhood. Consider the continuing importance of the proximate in US policy: the persistent neuralgia over a defiant Cuba; military interventions in Grenada, Panama, and Haiti; recurrent covert meddling against troublesome governments south of the border; and the intense attention given Mexico. No US leaders these days invokes the Monroe Doctrine (or at least the robust Teddy Roosevelt version of it), but the pattern of US action reveals what they can’t afford to say.

Chateau Nid d’hirondelle, près de Yalta. Photo par Traroth sous GFDL. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

To be sure, Russian leaders would also like to have it both ways. They too have championed their own set of values though with less enthusiasm than did Soviet leaders, who in turn themselves fell short of the Americans in their commitment to missionary projects.

But Russian and Soviet leaders alike have given clear priority to the near frontier. The consolidation of control over eastern Europe after World War II reflected this concern. So too did the dramatic interventions of 1956 and 1968 to crush unrest and the constant string pulling by members of the Politburo assigned to keep a hawk-like watch over clients in the East bloc. The intervention in Afghanistan, shaped by a fear of Islamist unrest spreading into nearby Soviet territories, fits within this pattern. That Putin would now respond to, even exploit the political disintegration in Ukraine just as he took advantage of the disputes along Georgian border can come as a shock only to observers oblivious to the dictates of realist statecraft.

The Ukraine crisis is a striking reminder of the continuing, fundamental division over the rules of the international game. Do major powers have special regional interests, or are they tightly constrained by far-reaching standards posited and defended by the United States? The American answer doesn’t have to be the latter. FDR in his conception of the postwar order and Nixon in moving toward detente and normalization — to take two striking exceptions — recognized the need for some degree of accommodation among the leading powers. They accorded diplomacy a central role in identifying areas of accord while setting to one side knotty issues connected to lands that adjoined the major powers.

But on the whole US policy has downplayed diplomacy as a regulator of great-power relations by often making capitulation the precondition for any opponent entering into talks. Real diplomacy would get in the way of the overriding preoccupation with holding in check regional powers whether China, Iran, Russia, or India that might pose a challenge to the United States. (The EU occupies an ambiguous position in this list of regionals as a powerhouse that hasn’t yet figured out how to realize its potential and for the moment speaks through Germany.) This US approach, most forcefully articulated by the Cheney doctrine at the end of the George H. W. Bush administration, is a prescription for unending tension, with the US policy a source of constant discord at one point and then another around the world.

It is hard to imagine a more misguided basis for policy, especially for a once dominant power steadily slipping in clout. The foundations for a better managed, more peaceful, and even more humane international order is more likely to emerge from great-power negotiations and compromise. Promoting a sense of security and comity among the dominant states may in the bargain discourage rough stuff in their neighbourhoods far better than confrontation and high-minded if hypocritical blustering.

This article originally appeared on Michael H Hunt’s website.

Michael Hunt is the Everett H. Emerson Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The World Transformed, 1945 to the Present. A leading specialist on international history, Hunt is the author of several prize-winning books, including The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914. His long-term concern with US foreign relations is reflected in several broad interpretive, historiographical, and methodological works, notably Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy and Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy: An International History Reader.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only current affairs articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post The Ukraine crisis and the rules great powers play by appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related Stories35 years: the best of C-SPANRab Houston on bride ales and penny weddingsGrand Piano: the key to virtuosity 

35 years: the best of C-SPAN

By Kate Pais

The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, better known as C-SPAN, has been airing the day-to-day activities of the US Congress since 1979 — 35 years as of this week. Now across three different channels, C-SPAN has provided the American public easy access to politics in action, and created a new level of transparency in public life. Inspired by Tom Allen’s Dangerous Convictions: What’s Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress, let’s take a look at the most notable events C-SPAN has captured on film to be remembered and reviewed.

Jimmy Carter opposes the invasion of Afghanistan

President Carter denounces the Soviet Union and their choice to invade Afghanistan in January 1980 as a warning to others in Southwest Asia.

The start of Reaganomics

Known for his economic influence, this is Ronald Reagan’s first address to both houses in February 1981.

Bill Clinton: “I did not sleep with that woman”

Slipped into a speech on children’s education in January 1998, this clip shows President Clinton addressing allegations about his affair with Monica Lewinsky for the first time.

Al Gore’s Concession Speech

After the long and controversial count during the 2000 Presidential Election, candidate and former vice-president Al Gore concedes to George Bush on December 13, 2000.

George W. Bush addresses 9/11

President Bush speaks to a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001 about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon nine days prior.

Kate Pais joined Oxford University Press in April 2013 and works as an online marketing coordinator.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post 35 years: the best of C-SPAN appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesRab Houston on bride ales and penny weddingsWhat Coke’s cocaine problem can tell us about Coca-Cola CapitalismWill caloric restriction help you live longer? 

Rab Houston on bride ales and penny weddings

While each couple believes their wedding to be unique, they are in fact building on centuries of social traditions, often reflecting their region and culture. Throughout England, Scotland, and Wales, these celebrations served not only the families but their communities. We sat down with Rab Houston, author of Bride Ales and Penny Weddings: Recreations, Reciprocity, and Regions in Britain from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries, to discuss the creation of modern marriage ceremonies.

How did you encounter this subject?

When I first started my career as an historian, I came across Scottish penny weddings in my documents. Lively, open events where guests paid for their own entertainment and gave money to the couple, they evoked a strong sense of community. That provoked my curiosity and they have been in the back of my mind ever since. Then, when researching my last book, I found similar sorts of marriage celebration in both Wales and the north of England. That made me even more curious, because the parts of Britain that shared these ‘contributory weddings’ were so very different in other ways. Then it dawned on me that the north and west of Britain had many social and cultural characteristics in common, like a sense of egalitarianism and trust, which went beyond conventional territorial boundaries and which made them very different from the south and east of England. I wanted to understand regional variations in social values.

So you believe that an understanding of our history and culture is crucial to a sense of identity?

It is absolutely vital. To be alive is to be touched by history. However much we think we live in the present and hope for a better future, we are our memories and our history. Knowing where we come from and why we are the way we are gives us identity. But understanding ourselves in both time and space also makes us better at dealing with the profound changes that are affecting Britain now.

What are the implications for the current debate on regional devolution and even Scottish independence?

National frontiers are important in many ways, but they often draw arbitrary lines, which meant little to people in the past and may be exaggerated for us. I think the people of north and west Britain always have had different social priorities from those in the south and east. To me this is the fundamental division within Britain: not any political dividing line between Scotland and England.

Celebrating Women’s History Month 

The Normans and empire

By David Bates

The expansion of the peoples calling themselves the Normans throughout northern and southern Europe and the Middle East has long been one of the most popular and written about topics in medieval history. Hence, although devoted mainly to the history of the cross-Channel empire created by William the Conqueror’s conquest of the English kingdom in 1066 and the so-called loss of Normandy in 1204, I wanted to contribute to these discussions and to the ongoing debates about the impact of this expansion on the histories of the nations and cultures of Europe. That peoples from a region of northern France should become conquerors is one of the apparently inexplicable paradoxes of the subject. The other one is how the conquering Normans apparently faded away, absorbed into the societies they had conquered or within the kingdom of France.

In 1916 Charles Homer Haskins’ made the statement that the Normans represented one of the great civilising influences in European – and indeed world – history. If, a century later, hardly anyone would see it thus, the same imperatives remain, namely to locate the Normans within a context in which it remains popular to write national histories, and, for some, in the midst of debates about the balance of the History curriculum, to see them as being of paramount importance. The history of the Normans cuts across all this, but is an inescapable subject in relation to the histories of the English, French, Irish, Italian, Scottish, and Welsh. Those currently fashionable concepts – and rightly so – ‘The First English Empire’ and ‘European change’ are also at the centre of the debates.

As a concept, empire is nowadays both fashionable and much argued about, a universal phenomenon of human history that has been the subject of several major television programmes. It is a subject that requires a multidisciplinary approach. Over the last two millennia, statements by both contemporaries and subsequent commentators have often set a proclaimed imperial civilising mission as a positive feature against the impact of violence and the social and cultural subjugation of the subjects of an empire. Seen thus, the concept of empire has an obvious relevance to the subject of the Normans. And, in relation to the pan-European expansion of the Normans, and, in particular, to the creation of the kingdom of Sicily, the term diaspora, as it is understood in the social sciences, constitutes a persuasive framework of analysis. Taken together, the two terms empire and diaspora create a world in which individuals and communities had to adapt rapidly to new forms of power and cultures and in which identities are multiple, flexible, and often uncertain. For this reason, the telling of life-histories is of central importance rather than simplified notions of social and cultural identity. One consequence must be the abandonment of the currently popular and unhelpful word Normanitas. The core of this book is a history of power, diversity and multiculturalism in the midst of the complexities of a changing Europe.

The use of terms such as hard power, soft power, hegemony, core and periphery, and cultural transfer can be used to frame interpretations of many national histories, including Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, as well as English. The crucial points in all cases are the mixture of engagement with the dominant imperial power and the perpetuation of difference and diversity through the exercise of agency beyond the core. The framework is one that works especially well in relation to the evolving histories of the Welsh kingdoms/principalities and of the kingdom of Scots. It also means that the so-called ‘anarchy’ of 1135 to 1154, the succession dispute between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda becomes a civil war which needs to be set in a cross-Channel context and through which there were many continuities. And Magna Carta (1215), of which the eight-hundredth anniversary is fast approaching, becomes a consequence of imperial collapse. However, a focus on England and the British Isles just does not work. Normandy’s centrality to the history of the cross-Channel empire created in 1066 is of basic importance. Both morally and militarily the creation of the cross-Channel empire brought problems of a new kind that were for some living, or mainly domiciled, in Normandy a source of anguish. The book’s cover has indeed been chosen with this in mind. It shows troubled individuals who have narrowly escaped disaster at sea, courtesy of St Nicholas. But they successfully made the crossing. And so, of course, did the Tournai marble on which they are carved.

Professor David Bates took his PhD at the University of Exeter, and over a professional career of more than forty years, he has held posts in the Universities of Cardiff, Glasgow, London (where he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research from 2003 to 2008), East Anglia, and Caen Basse-Normandie. He has worked extensively in the archives and libraries of Normandy and northern France and has always sought to emphasise the European dimension to the history of the Normans. ‘He currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship to enable him to complete a new biography of William the Conqueror in the Yale University Press English Monarchs series. His latest book is The Normans and Empire.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.


Image credit: Section of the Bayeaux Tapestry, courtesy of the Conservateur of the Bayeux Tapestry. Do not reproduce without permission.

The post The Normans and empire appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesBritain, France, and their roads from empireWhat Coke’s cocaine problem can tell us about Coca-Cola CapitalismGloomy terrors or the most intense pleasure?