Christopher Reed Research Articles

Recognizing the Authentic, Documented Middle West

Recognizing the Authentic, Documented Middle West Christopher Reed (bio) As an American historian, I view the Old West (and now the Middle West) as a place of diversity and contradictions, and as being a real place. In the historical mind, but perhaps more importantly, because of the documented record, the Old West/West/Middle West is as authentic as could be experienced, or even imagined. My personal recollection from the mid-twentieth century of the image of the Midwest is linked to an oft-told family story of how my mother's great grandmother "safely brought her little children across the mountains" into Ohio. This bit of oral history from the mid-nineteenth century, backed up by documentation in later years, depicted the Trail of Tears and left an imprint on my mind and in my imagination of the Middle West as a place of safety and security. The offshoot of this sojourner's trek as part of the displacement of the Cherokee nation eventually led to the enlistment of her offspring as combatants and participants in the liberation of an entire people by 1865. So, the Midwest carried a salutary image in my imagination despite its sometimes contradictory resistance to abolitionism counterbalanced by a willingness to embrace a civic nationalism to preserve the Union. This sentiment was embraced by many Whites despite their holding firmly to the notion of White supremacy as "White men fought a White man's war." Despite the current national rancor over censorship in all spheres of communication, the evolving world of academics allows for new interpretations to emerge as is exemplified in the foci of Imagining the Heartland on whiteness and imagination as negative influences. In this somewhat controversial piece, a coterie of writers has undertaken the task of exposing the supposed wholesomeness of the geographical Midwest as established in the popular imagination. Contributing to the latter [End Page 153] dimension, Hollywood with the Wizard of Oz, the media in its forms ranging from television to advertisements, politicians from Reagan to Trump, and leading literary publications have created an impression in the American mind of a nation with a pure regional environment that acts to both nurture and preserve whiteness. What our colleagues across disciplinary lines have advanced as a concept bears little resemblance to a provable theory. Rather than in the Midwest, White racism originated in the South as a justification for the subjugation and economic exploitation of African labor. Unfortunately, its pervasiveness is real and an integral part of the national fabric. Further, the element of racial purity had its roots in the earliest efforts at English settlement along the entirety of the North American coast. America was envisioned as a City upon a Hill, a new Jerusalem bestowed on God's favorites. This is the origin of some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness for it has led to a heritage for almost all non-Black groups, newly arrived or lengthily rooted, in which they locate cultural comfort. America's problem started with an aversion to anyone or any group unlucky enough to be considered an Other. So, it is not just the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. From opposition to a recognition of the humanity of Indigenous people, it spread to "Outlandish Africans." For the latter group, it produced an indelible stain that persists even today (even with a near national aversion to use of the "N" word publicly). From the hostility in the Midwest directed against darker-complexioned (and other complexioned) peoples, whether Indigenous, Hispanic or Chinese, it seemed a likely extension of New England coastal aversion to Anabaptists, Catholics, Quakers, and Jews which was aggressively held by Englishmen. With the advent of the twentieth century, a partial acceptance of the Irish within the body of Whites led to their partial welcome by the Second World War. For historians, beginning with the decline in acceptance of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis that featured the admirable and highly successive efforts of hardy White settlers civilizing a demographically empty land to be designated the Middle West with their muscles, good...

Christopher Reed, Bachelor Japanists, Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities

Christopher Reed, Bachelor Japanists, Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities

Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer ed. by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson

Reviewed by: Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer ed. by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson Daniel Shank Cruz (bio) Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer Edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson Palmer Museum of Art of the Pennsylvania State University, 2020. xx + 225 pp. $39.95 paperback. Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer is a hybrid exhibition catalogue and essay collection published to accompany a show of the Rohrers' work that was supposed to take place in several Pennsylvania venues in 2020, but has been delayed due to the pandemic. The book is edited by three scholars affiliated with Penn State: Julia Spicher Kasdorf, a Mennonite poet and essayist; Christopher Reed, an art historian and literary critic; and Joyce Henri Robinson, the assistant director of Penn State's Palmer Museum of Art, where the exhibition was scheduled to debut. The book celebrates the Rohrers, a Mennonite couple who have made significant contributions to their respective creative fields in both Pennsylvania and the broader world. Each was one of the first Mennonites to do so. Warren Rohrer was a painter (1927–1995) whose art has been exhibited in numerous prestigious venues such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jane Rohrer is a poet (born 1928) whose work appears in two collections, Life After Death (2002) and Acquiring Land (2020), as well as periodicals such as The American Poetry Review. The book contains reproductions of more than seventy of Warren's paintings sprinkled throughout, and the book's final section is a collection of thirteen of Jane's poems. Both selections span their creators' careers, and the book includes about a dozen photographs of the couple as well. Aside from the Rohrers' work, the book includes nine original chapters [End Page 232] plus the first examination of Warren's work in a mainstream art periodical, Steven Z. Levine's 1983 Arts Magazine essay. The chapters attempt to give readers a sense of the tension in the Rohrer's work caused by their sectarian religious background and their participation in secular, "worldly" fields by examining how the couple's work relates to these contexts. As Janneken Smucker writes in her chapter, "Neither Warren nor Jane found satisfying ways to negotiate the limits and boundaries that defined their [Mennonite] culture," but their art helped them to "survive" (79). Kasdorf and Reed begin the collection with an introduction that establishes the importance of Pennsylvania's geography, of the Rohrers' abandoned Mennonite faith, and of their collaborative marriage for their work. Following the introduction, there is a chapter by Reed that examines Warren's abstract painting within the broader context of the art world, focusing on the Modernist emphasis on the past that runs through his work, and a chapter by Kasdorf that recounts Jane's biography and describes how she began her poetic career in her forties during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Kasdorf highlights the importance of themes such as sexual desire, loss, and travel in Jane's work. The book's range of other contributors exemplifies its interdisciplinary nature. Historian Janneken Smucker examines Warren's work in relationship to Amish quilts, which utilize a similar plain aesthetic (the Amish split from Mennonites in 1693) and came to prominence as collectibles in the art world around the same time that Warren's work began gaining critical attention. Another historian, Sally McMurry, writes about changes in the farming landscapes of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania throughout the twentieth century. Warren grew up in the county and the Rohrers lived on a Lancaster farm for several decades of their marriage, and much of Warren's work references this space. McMurry quotes Warren's observation that "[t] he fact that my work looks different than most New York painters [sic] has to have something to do with the fact that what I see is different than what New York painters see" (98). Her chapter is one of the book's standouts because of how it treats the physical landscape that affects the emotional landscape of Warren's work, and to some extent...

Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities – Christopher REED

Bachelor Japanists offers readers an engaging and richly narrated look at Western “Japanism” of the 19th and 20th century—scholarly, collectionist, and creative engagements with Japanese culture, religion, art, and aesthetics—which, Christopher Reed argues, Western individuals and coteries used to construct queer “bachelor” identities, both male and female, eschewing marriage and evading the domestic norms of their day. The term bachelor, Reed underscores, is not [...]

4Visual Culture

Abstract This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2019 and is divided into three sections: 1. Race and Art; 2. Art and the Body; 3. Art in Eastern Europe The books under review cover a broad range of subjects within their specialities, but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section looks at two publications that deal with the black experience in art: Darby English’s To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror and The Place Is Here, edited by Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles. The second section examines books that see art through bodies: Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler; Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Jana Funke and Jess Grove; and Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, edited by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed. The third and final section looks at publications about art and eastern Europe: Marta Filipová’s Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art and Klara Kemp-Welch’s Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965–1981.

Patricia Jane Graham. Review of "JapanAmerica: Points of Contact, 1876–1970" by Nancy E. Green and Christopher Reed.

Patricia Jane Graham. Review of "JapanAmerica: Points of Contact, 1876–1970" by Nancy E. Green and Christopher Reed.

Editorial

Editorial Margherita Zanasi As I begin my tenure as the editor of Twentieth-Century China (TCC), I have come to reflect on the important role that this journal has played in the development of the fields of Republican and People’s Republic of China (PRC) history. When the first incarnation of TCC, the Chinese Republican Studies Newsletter, appeared in October 1975, it was the first journal to specialize in what was at the time a small, emerging field. The Newsletter represented the efforts of a few pioneers in Republican studies to bring together the small community of scholars who shared their research interests (Herman Mast III served as the first editor, followed by Barry Keenan and David Strand). Reflecting the fast growth of this field, in 1983, the fourth editor, Keith Schoppa, turned the newsletter into a full-fledged journal and changed its title to Republican China. In this new format, the journal continued to grow not just in readership but also in the scope of its academic interests. In 1991, Steven Averill, who had taken over the editorship, changed the journal’s name to Twentieth-Century China, signaling its expansion into the history of the PRC, previously the almost exclusive realm of political scientists. Today, TCC remains committed to exploring the history of the entire span of the long twentieth century, across the 1911, the 1949, and the Mao/post-Mao divides. TCC has come a long way since its pioneering beginnings. Today, the journal I am honored to join is firmly established as a leading publication for Chinese history, thanks to the intelligent management of the editors who preceded me—including Christopher Reed (who took over from Averill), James Carter, and Kristin Stapleton—and the support of both its active and engaged editorial board and its affiliated association, the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China. As the new editor, I look forward to continuing TCC’s tradition of providing high-quality articles to a lively international community of scholars. The five articles included in this issue share a similar interest in placing Chinese history within an international or transnational context. Peter Gibson and Simon Ville explore the role played in the development of Chinese industrialization by Australian exports of wool to China. They emphasize how, for China, cooperation with a late-developing economy was more beneficial than that with industrialized powers such as Britain and Japan, which aimed to turn China into a major market for their finished goods, in direct competition with domestic products. Australian imports of [End Page 263] high-quality raw wool, instead, were essential to the Chinese effort to mechanize its textile industry and thus complemented its import-substitution program. In her contribution to this issue, Soonyi Lee discusses Liang Qichao’s, Zhang Junmai’s, and Zhang Dongsun’s cultural conservatism. These intellectuals presented their conservative visions as a response to the moral decay generated by scientific positivism, which, they argued, was responsible for the horrors of the First World War. In this context, they revisited Confucianism, associating it with themes of Kantian morality. They thus assigned universal value to a Chinese philosophical tradition—contesting European philosophy’s exclusive claims to “universality”—and proposed it as a source of inspiration for reestablishing morality worldwide. Also exploring international connections, Marilyn Levine emphasizes the wide impact of Lenin’s political ideas and practices in the development of early Chinese Communist Party ideology. Levine follows the lives of two prominent Communist leaders, Cai Hesen and Zhao Shiyan, to understand how their upbringings and study-abroad experiences influenced their perceptions of Leninism. Despite marked differences in their personalities and leadership styles, Levine argues, they both came to support Leninism as the best solution for the betterment of the Chinese people. In the fourth article, Ying-kit Chan illustrates the complex relations among ideas of ethnicity, nationalism, and modern nation building during the Second Sino-Japanese War. As the Nationalist government established its wartime base in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the ethnic diversity of this frontier region—and the fact that it was subject to centrifugal trends inspired by Pan-Thai nationalism—challenged the Nationalist message of national unity. These circumstances engendered an intense debate among intellectuals and...

Namiko Kunimoto. Review of "Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities" by Christopher Reed.

Namiko Kunimoto. Review of "Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities" by Christopher Reed.

Japan’s Queer Modernity

Japan’s Queer Modernity Jos Lavery Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities. Christopher Reed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pp. 440. $105.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper); $34.99 (eBook). Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching. Carrie J. Preston. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. 352. $35.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper); $34.99 (eBook). Two excellent new books explore the impact of Japanese art and culture on the emerging gender formations of Western modernism. Which is already a little odd, since there have been, until the present, pretty much zero book-length studies of that theme, and there are a few more to come in the next few years—including (full disclosure and god willing) one by me. Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching by Carrie J. Preston and Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities by Christopher Reed together comprise a persuasive case that, in certain important respects, Western modernists learned their queer identity practices from their interpretations of Japan. These books bear a family resemblance to work published on modernism and China a decade ago by Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, Haun Saussy, Steven Yao and others in Sinographies: Writing China, which explored the imaginative, aesthetic, and (occasionally) political consequences of Orientalist writing, circumventing the pedantic objection that such interpretations were, by and large, wrong.1 Indeed, in certain ways these scholars sought to recover Orientalist wrongness itself as a critical tool to be wielded against the orthodoxies of Western-aesthetic chauvinism. Preston and Reed sharpen the point still further. Not only did major European modernists (such as Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin) turn to the Orient to shake off the fusty residues of Victorian rationalism, but a minor modernist tradition turned to Japan to subvert the Sinocentrism and masculinism of the main modernist stream. The two authors marshal different evidence towards a version of this argument. [End Page 193] Reed recovers a breathtakingly rich and original archive of artists, writers, and collectors proximate to, but just outside of, our familiar narratives (Henri Cernuschi, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Leach, and Mark Tobey are some of the most powerfully described). Preston, conversely, focuses on the queering and minoritizing consequences of teaching a more recognizable canon (Pound, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett) in such a way as to heighten its exoticism. Addressing overlapping but distinct archives, then, these two books also present two very different methods of assessing transcultural connections: labors of very different kinds of love. Learning to Kneel offers anecdotes both pedagogical and vividly personal: the author’s own body is frequently exhibited as a source of meaning and authority. Early on, Preston compares herself to the waki character in a noh drama, “persistently and self-consciously kneeling at the side of the stage, aware of my complicated position as a Westerner, woman, and scholar” (22). Each chapter includes detailed reportage from the author’s classrooms—both the ones she convenes as a professor of literature (whose students, indeed, themselves appear as recurring guest stars) and the ones in which she submits, in the pose that the book’s title describes, to the discipline of noh practice itself. Reed’s scholarly pose, if it makes sense to talk in those terms, is the much more familiar one of expertise, specifically here of three Western art scenes (late nineteenth-century Paris, turn-of-the-century Boston, and mid-twentieth-century Seattle), hubs of japoniste activity, sociality, and creativity. The microcosmic approach serves Reed well: Bachelor Japanists teems with suggestive detail, biographical narrative, and tittle-tattle, and artfully told history, and is by far the most thorough cultural history of modernist japonisme to date. There is a different kind of personal disclosure throughout: Reed’s own photographs, lovingly exhibited. And these books position themselves in relation to existing scholarship differently. The originality of Preston’s approach endows each of her readings with a powerful vitality, even at some distance from prevailing scholarly protocols; though more conventional in one sense, Reed displays an effective mastery of a scholarly field whose coordinates were set by Earl Miner. Indeed, by re-orienting the question of “modernism and Orientalism” back towards Japan, both...

Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities by Christopher Reed

Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities by Christopher Reed

Chicago and the Riddle of Race

Chicago and the Riddle of Race Amy Absher Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architecture of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 184 pp. $85, cloth. $25, paper. Christopher Robert Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920–1929. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 288 pp. $95, cloth. $32, paper. Christopher Robert Reed, Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. 390 pp. $52. Lionel Kimble Jr., A New Deal for Bronzeville: Housing, Employment and Civil Rights in Black Chicago, 1935–1955. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 200 pp. $35. Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers, ed., Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 276 pp. $95, cloth. $30, paper. Joseph Gustaitis, Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 368 pp. $25.89, paper. Mary Lou Finley, ed., The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 495 pp. $45. Natalie Y. Moore, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. New York: St. Martin’s, 2016. 272 pp. $28.99, cloth. $17, paper. The recent publications concerning the history of Chicago’s South Side all begin in much the same way. They note that Chicago is a city of neighborhoods; therefore, segregation became the defining historical [End Page 135] experience for the city’s inhabitants. Though segregation is not unique to Chicago, Chicago’s segregation is emblematic of the larger American history with race and urbanization. Why? Because segregation in Chicago has always been about more than housing. It haunts joblessness rates, shortened life spans, violence, policing, education, and gender. Segregation in Chicago did not end with the housing voucher programs or the election of Harold Washington. Likewise, segregation did not end in the nation at large with the integration of public schools or the election of President Obama. Currently, at the center of recent publications on Chicago history, is Christopher Robert Reed who demands we ask better questions. He wants readers and scholars to think carefully about segregation and how we book-end history. In The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis: 1920–1929, Reed begins by challenging Drake and Cayton’s seminal work, Black Metropolis. What if, Reed asks, this foundational text had focused on the 1920s rather than beginning in the 1930s? Questioning the canon and origin myths of Chicago history is essential to Reed’s work. Indeed, in Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919, Reed challenges the work of Allan H. Spear and Rayford W. Logan by suggesting that “voluntary clustering” was the first step toward segregation and that Black Chicago’s history is not the history of urban blight. His approach is purposeful. Reed must dislodge the established segregation narrative so he might free the history from its stultifying focus on resistance movements. Ultimately, Reed wants readers to go beyond understanding history as statistics and conflict so as to move toward appreciating the community’s humanity. Reed intends his recent work to be a synthesis and an introspective reinterpretation of the canonical sources. A comparison of Reed’s style of synthesis with Joseph Gustaitis’s Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City demonstrates just how varied the historical synthesis can be. With Reed there is a focus on argument. With Gustaitis there is a focus on details. Reed is able to remake and deepen our understanding of a well-traveled history. Gustaitis teaches his readers, but doesn’t challenge them to interpret. Furthermore, many new histories of Chicago are either imitating or inspired by the work of Christopher Reed. For instance, Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers, editors of Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago, focus on upending E. Franklin Frazier’s 1957 book Black Bourgeoisie, which refused to acknowledge the impact of slavery, Jim Crow segregation as well as mocked Black business [End Page 136] as a “myth,” and blamed business failure on the owners’ lack of acumen. By doing so...

Queer Embodied Absence: HIV/AIDS and the Creation of Cultural Memory in Gordon Armstrong’s Blue Dragons and Daniel Maclvor’s The Soldier Dreams

Following Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed’s warning against the gradual disappearance of HIV/AIDS from cultural and political agendas, this essay directs its attention to two Canadian plays that are concerned with the formation of memories at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis: the late Gordon Armstrong’s Blue Dragons (1993) and Daniel MacIvor’s The Soldier Dreams (1997). Both plays feature dead characters that make unexpected appearances on stage as living ghosts and active participants in the respective plots. What is the dramaturgical effect of these embodied shadow characters, and what are the political implications of these dead queer bodies coming alive on stage? Using the concept of ghosting as a theoretical guideline, the essay analyzes how the strategy of granting the dead person with HIV/AIDS a queer embodied absence on stage marks a dramaturgical and historiographical paradigm shift for queer theatre in Canada.

The Future Is Queer Stuff

In this review, I consider recent works by José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia), Judith (Jack) Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure), and Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (If Memory Serves) as investments in the politics of queer futurity. Collectively, I analyze these works as offering both theoretical mobilizations of and departures from traditions of critical utopianism. Analyzed together, they explicitly challenge theories of queer antirelationality and implicitly insist — in the face of queer theory's ostensible death — that the future is, and still must be imagined as, queer stuff. In contrast to the recent insistence on queer antirelationality and anticommunal modes of unbelonging, these books insist on the performative and political dimensions of critical futurity. Furthermore, I show how even as the preoccupation with a certain kind of idealism (what Castiglia and Reed call “ideality politics”) is mapped onto the present and future, the pull toward the past in these texts is equally palpable, as a structure of feeling as well as a critical method, appearing in the form of retrospective returns, activist legacies, spaces of memory, aesthetic blueprints, backward failings and feelings. Despite their distinct theoretical interventions, the mobilizations of critical utopianism and idealism in all three books further the conversations about queer historiography and temporality in dynamic and compelling ways.

If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia, Christopher Reed (review)

Reviewed by: If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia, Christopher Reed Thomas R. Dunn If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. By Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012; pp. 259, $25.00 paper. Now appears to be a timely moment to reflect upon the queer past. Every month, the media seems to herald another “historic” achievement for the gay and lesbian rights movement. Depictions of the queer past increasingly appear in public spheres, spaces, and screens few observers would have expected even a few years ago. Academics and artists have also become preoccupied with the queer experience of time, as concepts like temporality, futurity, feeling backwards, the death drive, and public memory continue to prompt intense intellectual investigations. It therefore seems appropriate that in If Memory Serves, Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed bring together a selection of their previous work on queer memory with new and revised chapters especially for this project. Within the book’s pages, readers will find moments of impressive historical, cultural, and theoretical synthesis, as well as pointed challenges to many of the most basic assumptions of contemporary queer culture and scholarship. At its core, the book puts forward two central claims. First, the authors suggest that in the wake of the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic in the gay community, “gay neo-cons” successfully called for the “de-generational unremembering” (10) of the promiscuous and experimental sexual culture popularized during the 1960s and 1970s. Characterizing this era as immature, whorish, and ultimately responsible for the virus and its destructive effects, the neo-cons encouraged gay men to reject the now-past sexual revolution and focus on building a more mainstreamed gay future marked by conventional goals like marriage, adoption, and military service. Second, the authors posit that this forgetting has done great harm to generations of gay men whom now live detached from their collective past and its communal values. As such, Castiglia and Reed argue that returning to memory and consideration of the pre-AIDS past may help ease existing traumas within gay life by inspiring alternatives for belonging and queer worldmaking in a new century. [End Page 221] In advancing these claims, the authors are largely successful. By analyzing a broad range of artifacts (films, novels, and visual culture) over several chapters, Castiglia and Reed demonstrate the pervasive nature of de-generational discourses. The authors also take a case study approach to investigate queer uses of the built environment, architecture, art, and camp dialogue, illustrating memory’s potential to suture persistent pains caused by the severing of queer generations. Throughout the book, the authors’ ability to skillfully navigate and synthesize dense theoretical arguments from queer theory and temporality studies is noteworthy, providing a relatively accessible point of entry to a conversation many readers might otherwise find impenetrable. Likewise, the authors continually attempt to engage both “high theory” and popular culture in their analysis, cognizant that the lines between these two areas of cultural criticism have increasingly blurred. In addition, the book itself functions as a queer archive, pointing to earlier discourses many readers may not have previously encountered. One of the strongest contributions of the project is the concept of ideality politics, identified by Castiglia and Reed as an alternative to discredited identity politics and the pervasive pessimism they see in much of queer theory. Turning to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of acedia, the authors posit ideality as a tool that fuses loss and idealism, defying the cynicism directed at each term individually. As such, ideality encourages “creating ideal images to forestall losses that have not yet happened,” through memory (184). In this way, returning to the past no longer needs to be traumatizing and the ideal need not be dismissed as mere utopia. Instead, preserving and protecting the past against (potential) future losses offers opportunities to make remembering a productive and rewarding undertaking. Nonetheless, for all that is to be commended in this book, some glaring concerns arise as the reader moves through the chapters. One of the most prominent is, ironically, time itself. At moments, the book feels outdated and...

Modernizing the Mikado: Japan, Japanism and the Limitations of the Avant-garde

Modernizing the Mikado: Japan, Japanism and the Limitations of the Avant-garde

‘The Phoenix of English Painting’: Figures of the Body in Duncan Grant, 1908–20

Evaluations of Bloomsbury painting have been growing in complexity of explanation over the last two decades and this article partly arises from points in the research of both Christopher Reed and Lisa Tickner in its emphasis on contemporary cultural concepts of the male body and influential elements from popular entertainment culture. The bodily codes of imperial Hellenism – a compound of body-building physique rhetoric and recollections of Greek classical statuary – are traced. Grant's portraiture, in the turn to ‘Neo-Paganism’ as a peculiarly distinctive brand of British primitivism in his portrait of mountaineer George Mallory, is considered. The Bloomsbury nexus between Lytton Strachey and Grant is indicated as the place for the transmission of a new enthusiasm for the vulgar, free bodily expressionism and ethnicity found in the fashionable Sicilian drama Malia, which Grant incorporated into his painting. Grant was a comic artist, with a grasp on the mode of the carnivalesque, which was complemented by a kind of colonial fantasy. Bloomsbury culture was embedded in Empire and oriented towards India; much of Grant's art relies upon what David Cannadine has identified as ‘ornamentalism’.

Introduction

Introduction Chris Castiglia (bio), Russ Castronovo (bio), Alan Nadel (bio), and Brian Thill (bio) What are our assumptions about the relationships among teaching, political position, and scholarly research? In exploring this question from different perspectives, this set of four related essays confronts the enduring assumption that within this professional triumvirate, teaching remains the least regarded. As the diminishing resources allotted to the humanities makes painfully clear, as students become indistinguishable from consumers, and as our own professional habits reveal, it is no doubt the case that this assumption is firmly grounded. Perhaps we have spent too much time teaching the conflicts, in Gerald Graff’s memorable phrase, and too little time examining teaching as conflict. Each of the following essays identifies a crucial tension or conflict within the current “common sense” of classroom praxis: aesthetic vs. social value, hope vs. cynicism, nature vs. culture, success vs. failure. These tensions produce pedagogies that, as each essay explicitly or implicitly argues, fall short of the tasks they set for themselves (or flatter themselves by claiming for themselves). What do we do with the quiet and unresponsive student? How do we respond to the student who claims a book just isn’t that interesting or good? Ought we convince students to surrender their faith in natural or commonsense constructions of culture? If students expect rewards for cynical critiques, how can we teach them to formulate hopeful readings, if indeed we should? The terms animating these questions—belief, evaluation, attitude, and participation—are arguably the cornerstones of pedagogical theory. And yet how often, as scholars and producers of narrative—do we take them up as serious points of conflict within our classroom practices? [End Page 165] More often than not, university and college teachers seem embarrassed by or unsure about these potential connections and contentions. Scholarly practice and political position are frequently interarticulated, while teaching remains the ignored stepchild. (When we ask colleagues “How’s your work coming?” we rarely expect an answer related to classroom practice). Why have we come to believe that any discussion of public political worlds can make the classroom into a private soapbox? Why do many in the humanities refrain from teaching their research as though such an endeavor would expose students to a tepid mixture of warmed-over liberalism and over-specialization? And why, when we do teach our research, do we so often fall short of the rallying effect we expect? In short, these essays probe the possibilities of a narrative of teaching that construes the intersection of our research and our political desires as a pedagogical opportunity. Each contribution addresses these questions in relation to narratives that inform classroom ethics and the efficacy of reading. Together, they explore the social and political consequences of how academics engage—and might link—narrative theory, cultural studies, and pedagogy. While referencing contemporary political horizons, the essays seek a commonality in their attempts to examine questions of value, especially as they touch upon students’ distance—and proximity—to the political and social content of scholarly objects of study. As the common invocation to “Teaching” that appears in each of the essay’s titles suggests, these contributions represent a concerted effort to bridge the often unspoken divide in which instructors teach everything but their research while downplaying their politics as inappropriate. At the same time, the different objects being taught—“the good” (Castronovo), “protest” (Thill), “culture” (Nadel), and “hope” (Castiglia)—readily reveal that there are different and conflicting approaches to bridging that divide. Coming at these problems from a variety of perspectives, this essayistic symposium constitutes an experiment in structuring the first exchanges in a conversation about the narratives that conjoin teaching, politics, and the production of knowledge. [End Page 166] Chris Castiglia Christopher Castiglia is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. He is author of three monographs, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Chicago, 1996); Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy (Duke, 2008) and (with Christopher Reed) If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (forthcoming, Minnesota). He is also co-editor of Walt Whitman’s temperance...

John R. Stomberg. Review of "A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections" by Nancy E. Green and Christopher Reed.

John R. Stomberg. Review of "A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections" by Nancy E. Green and Christopher Reed.

A Room of their own: the Bloomsbury artists in American collections

Although of another place and time, the Bloomsbury group confronted issues that are remarkably current: international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women's rights, environmental protection, and the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their art and their lives. A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections examines the group's responses to these issues, providing a valuable mirror on how people can address similar concerns today. A hundred years after the Bloomsbury group was established, their story still resonates and brings together a variety of interests across many artistic and intellectual pursuits. This catalog, the companion catalog to an acclaimed exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 2008, is illustrated with full-color plates of the two hundred exhibited works, as well as numerous color figures of comparative works and documentary photographs. It also features essays by several leading Bloomsbury scholars. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, author of a major 1995 Carrington biography, provides a personal overview of artistic Bloomsbury. Nancy E. Green, the Johnson Museum curator and organizer of the exhibition, explores the Victorian-era influence on sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Mark Hussey's essay discusses the cultural differences behind how British and American audiences experience Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group. Benjamin Harvey offers An Appreciation of Bloomsbury's Books and Blocks. Christopher Reed presents personal stories behind many of the prominent Bloomsbury collectors in North America.

Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 (review)

Reviewed by: Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 Anne Reinhardt (bio) Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. By Christopher A. Reed. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+391. $85/$29.95. The Chinese invented wood-block printing during the Tang dynasty (618- 907 C.E.) and enjoyed a sophisticated print culture well before Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press in Europe. In the nineteenth century, Westerners seeking profits and converts in China brought with them print technologies descended from Gutenberg's press. Christopher Reed's book examines the confrontation between these two print traditions in China's treaty ports during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Resisting the assumption that European-style printing presses would inevitably replace wood-block techniques, he investigates the accommodation [End Page 411] and adaptation of these technologies into a particularly Chinese form of print capitalism. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, Shanghai's printers adopted mechanized printing and modern organizational practices that allowed them to distribute new-style journals, newspapers, and textbooks to ever expanding audiences. The values and aesthetics of traditional Chinese print culture, however, significantly shaped their choices of technologies and techniques, and continued to exert an influence over Shanghai's printing and publishing, even into the twentieth century. Reed contends that Chinese print capitalism therefore represents a case distinct from both conventional histories of Western print capitalism and the best-known accounts of its development in non-Western contexts such as Benedict Andersen's Imagined Communities (1983). Reed first lays out the process through which Western print technologies were transferred to China. Western missionaries introduced a considerable range of such technologies to port cities in the early nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1870s that Chinese printers in Shanghai began to view the printing press as a plausible alternative to wood-block printing. At this time, Chinese printers found lithographic printing techniques best suited to reproducing calligraphy and reprinting traditional books in greater quantity and at lower cost than wood-block printing. By the late 1890s, these printers had begun to adopt letterpress printing to satisfy a rising demand for the quick delivery of news. By the first years of the twentieth century, Chinese-owned machine shops could repair and reproduce lithographic and letterpress printing machinery, breaking Shanghai printers' former dependence on foreign equipment and facilitating the diffusion of these technologies throughout China. Reed analyzes the social and institutional features of print capitalism that emerged among Shanghai's printers and publishers: the cooperation between reformist literati and industrial entrepreneurs as well as publishers' embrace of the trade association, the joint-stock firm, and intellectual property as ways to protect their investments in modern print technology. Finally, Reed examines the heyday of print capitalism in Shanghai through the activities of and competition among three of the largest publishing firms of the 1920s and 1930s. The focus on the technological, social, and business history of Shanghai's printing and publishing industries distinguishes Reed's book from a recent wave of studies of modern Chinese publishing that tend to focus on the cultural contributions of particular periodicals. His study is extraordinarily rich. Reed skillfully employs anecdote, fiction, and memoir to evoke the beliefs and dilemmas of those participating in Chinese print capitalism at all levels. Intertwined with his main argument are other narratives that underscore the ways in which the publishing industry was indeed a significant hub of multiple aspects of Chinese modernity. He considers, for [End Page 412] example, the significance of place in Chinese print capitalism by tracing the development of Shanghai's "Culture Street" (wenhua jie), where booksellers and publishers concentrated their businesses. He also traces the development of class polarizations in the printing industry, from evidence of exploitative relations between masters and apprentices in the early print-machine industry which anticipated the polarization of class relationships and the subsequent radicalization of print workers. One issue that is not fully addressed in this study is the relationship of Shanghai's print capitalism to the highly politicized terrain of Chinese capitalism under semicolonial conditions. Reed notes that publishing was the third largest area of Chinese investment after the cigarette and brocade-weaving industries...