Invidious Distinctions Research Articles

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

<i>Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad</i> by Michela Wrong

The 2021 Veblen-Commons Award Recipient: Deborah M. Figart: Good Work

: COVID-19 has exposed underlying weaknesses in the economy, including the political economic institutions structuring work. The labor market has moved toward more precarious work, negatively affecting job quality and well-being. After a summary of the current context shaping work, I discuss a new, 2021 Top Ten list of policy proposals aimed at institutionalizing good work. This list revises ten public policies I proposed in 2003, and reconsiders how they might be updated given evolving economic structures and context. Theoretically, the article draws upon major concepts in institutional and heterodox economics: progressive institutional change, invidious distinctions, countervailing power, social balance, capabilities, caring labor, and social provisioning.

Feminist Institutionalism and Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is an ideology that requires the public/private split in human affairs to exist and to be perceived as normal and natural. This paper begins by looking at the feminist critique of dualisms, as developed by the feminist institutional economist Ann Jennings and feminist economists Paula England and Julie Nelson and then applies their critique of the public/private dualisms to neoliberal conceptions of agency and care. The paper argues that once dualism is exposed as an incorrect representation of existential reality, it becomes impossible to use for justifying the characterization of behavior, invidious distinctions, and the social valuations of human behavior it supports, thereby making neoliberal assumptions about normal behavior that support its policy prescriptions untenable. Finally, it explores the consequences of this critique of neoliberalism on the conceptualization of agency and the economics of care. HIGHLIGHTS Feminist economists and original institutionalists share aspects of their inquiry. Both approaches understand economics as the study of social provisioning. The public/private dualism is necessary to sustain neoliberal ideology. Discrediting the public/private dualism leads to rejecting neoliberal agency. Caring is inconsistent with neoliberal ideology.

So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa

So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa

The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater by Alyssa Quint (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater by Alyssa Quint Rachel Merrill Moss Alyssa Quint. The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 300 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000331 The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater is a welcome and important contribution to early Yiddish theater history. Alyssa Quint offers a new interpretation of, and appreciation for, Avrom Goldfaden's work and its influence on the formation of modern Yiddish theater—crucially including its participants—during its short window of development from 1876 to 1883. In doing so, Quint grapples with a legacy of criticism, rooted first of all in Goldfaden's own time, that turns on upholding invidious distinctions between "high" and "low" culture. Quint lays out her case against long-standing proclivities to confine Goldfaden's work and its impact to the folk artistic realm. This tendency has been reinforced in some ways by Goldfaden's own "distorted," hyper-self-critical memoirs, with such influences still to be found in contemporary scholarship. Early on in the book, Quint establishes the ways in which literary Yiddishists marginalized Goldfaden despite his quantifiable success and how that reputation has limited more nuanced cultural studies of his work—a task she then sets about correcting. Not only did the impresario Goldfaden enable Yiddish theater to be recognized in the broader sphere of Russian professional theater (if only a short time before its ban), but, as Quint explicates, Goldfaden's productions from that period also offer significant insight into the reciprocal levels of performance circulating on and off the stage: the social performances of Jewish actors and theater makers reflect and are reflected in the scripted performances Goldfaden staged. Quint is distinctively innovative in her incorporation of microhistorical methods into her study, drawing on no less than ten memoirs, placed in conversation with contemporaneous press. By bringing an examination of the place and practices of actors into the foundation of her study, Quint not only offers micro-level insights into the impact of the Yiddish professional theater of the late 1800s, but also beautifully brings contextual insight into the ways in which Jewish identity performance was itself being navigated in strategic and complex ways during that period. [End Page 455] With each chapter addressing a different historical angle on Goldfaden or his work, Quint dutifully brings together multilingual sources while artfully using Goldfaden's most successful libretti to structure her chapters. For example, in chapter 5, in which Quint discusses female characters in Yiddish theater and the professional development from cross-dressing male actors playing female roles to finally hiring female actors, Quint aligns her analysis through the similarly embodied dissociations of the highly spiritual titular character in Goldfaden's Shulamis: Or, the Daughter of Israel. Quint offers a close reading of the operetta's narrative, discussing how it provides insight into Goldfaden's general and ongoing ambivalence about the role of Jewish women, held in tension by his own bourgeois sensibilities. Within this same model, Quint's other chapters focus on Goldfaden's upbringing, the early days of the development of professional Yiddish theater in Romania, the audience for Yiddish theater, other Yiddish playwrights, and the fallout of the Russian ban on Yiddish theater in 1883, paired with in-depth, culturally situated analyses of Goldfaden's operettas, including The Sorceress, The Two Kuni-Lemls, and Doctor Almasada and the Jews of Palermo. The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater also boasts synopses of all of Goldfaden's operettas discussed throughout the book, as well as a new English translation of The Sorceress, based on the first edition of the play from 1878. Additionally, Quint includes a juicy translated excerpt from Avrom Fishzon's serialized Yiddish-translated memoirs in Morgan zhurnal (1925) from their original Russian. In it, Fishzon discusses how he and his collaborator, Yisrolik Grodner, ended up playing the eponymous roles in Goldfaden's The Grandmother and the Granddaughter, which adds delightful nuance to Quint's discussion in chapter 5 on the prevalence of men playing female roles in the early stages of the professionalization of the Yiddish theater. Since they struggled to find any woman suitable to take on the roles ("proper young ladies...

Elimi(Nation): Canada’s “Post-Settler” Embrace of Disposable Migrant Labour

This article utilizes the lens of disposability to explore recent conditions of low-wage temporary migrant labour, whose numbers and economic sectors have expanded in the 21stcentury. A central argument is that disposability is a discursive and material relation of power that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” Canadian settler-citizens (and candidates for citizenship) and the lack of worth of undesirable migrant populations working in Canada, often for protracted periods of time. The analytical lens of migrant disposability draws upon theorizing within Marxian, critical modernity studies, and decolonizing settler colonial frameworks. This article explores the technologies of disposability that lay waste to low wage workers in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant workers. The mounting evidence that disposability is immanent within low-wage migrant labour schemes in Canada has implications for migrant social justice. The failure to protect migrant workers from a vast array of harms reflects the historical foundations of Canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes in an “inherited background field [of settler colonialism] within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 14). Incremental liberal reform has made little headway insofar as the administration and in some cases reversal of more progressive reforms such as guaranteed pathways to citizenship prioritize employers’ labour interests and the lives and health of primarily white, middle class Canadian citizens at the expense of a shunned and racialized but growing population of migrants from the global South. Transformational change and social justice for migrant workers can only occur by reversing the disposability and hyper-commodification intrinsic to low-wage migrant programs and granting full permanent legal status to migrant workers.

Dualistic Discourse and Immigration Policy

:The central question in immigration policy is whether to support less immigration through more “restrictive” laws and procedures or whether to support more immigration through a “relaxation” of existing laws. Recently, however, a second debate has arisen on one side of this debate regarding the appropriate types of arguments that may be used to support “restrictive” immigration. Ross Douthat refers to this dispute as the “race versus economics” question: using “race-based” arguments is not legitimate; while an “economic” or a “fact-based” argument is regarded as legitimate. We argue that this distinction in anti-immigration rhetoric is more apparent than real. Using the two most common historical “tropes” in immigration policy, “criminal” and “worker,” we find that racist, anti-ethnic, and classist assumptions pervade U.S. immigration law and policy and have been far more influential in formulating actual policy than either economic or “fact-based” analysis. The central problem with restrictive immigration policy is that its primary purpose is to determine who is eligible to be an American, and who is not; in other words, immigration policy is, by its fundamental intent, invidious. The question is whether it is possible to exclude individuals on these “legitimate” grounds without relying on “illegitimate” invidious distinctions?

Invidious Distinctions: Hebraism and Hellenism in Heinrich Heine and Matthew Arnold

The distinctions between Hebrews and Hellenes, the Bible and Homer, Athens and Jerusalem are malleable, generalized, and often invidious. These dichotomies, rooted in classical antiquity, have been deployed by modern figures from Voltaire in the eighteenth century to Leo Strauss in the twentieth. This essay engages in a close reading of two paragraphs that did much to forward the antinomy of Hebraic and Hellenic: the first, from Heinrich Heine's Ludwig Börne (1840); the second, from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869). In the case of Heine, I emphasize his flight from Jewishness, his situating of Jews between Protestants and Catholics, and his wrestling with the Bible as a literary classic. In the case of Arnold, I explore his promotion of Heine as the synthesis of Hebrew and Hellene, his growing appreciation of the Bible, and his increased interest in English Jewry. In both works we witness a distinct slide toward the philosemitic that contradicts the authors' avowed preference for the Hellenic. I conclude with a call for the deconstruction of a pernicious dichotomy.

Introduction: The Film and History of Selma, Alabama, 1965

Introduction:The Film and History of Selma, Alabama, 1965 Lamont H. Yeakey (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. May Stevens, White Only, c. 1963. May Stevens. Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York. [End Page 159] I This Close-Up is devoted to the film Selma (2014), directed by Ava DuVernay and produced by Christian Colson et al.1 Selma won the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Original Song in Music ("Glory," written by Common and John Legend) and was also nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Selma is a cinematic portrayal of arguably the most important episode in the twentieth-century civil rights movement, when African Americans campaigned for the right to vote. The film portrayed an event of enormous significance for the nation; indeed it was a major affair of state not seen in over a hundred years since the end of the Civil War when slavery was abolished, black people acquired citizenship, and men secured the right to vote.2 Historically, Selma, Alabama is the city where a struggle of epic proportions occurred in 1965, involving African Americans and their "allies for freedom" (mostly but not exclusively white people), who campaigned to get black people registered to vote in municipal, county, state, and federal elections. This site became the setting for their heroic effort to have the right to participate openly and freely in the society that governed them, to free themselves from the shackles of political exploitation, to eliminate racially based registration and voting restrictions, and to advance democracy in America. In seeking to exercise the democratic franchise, they were violently opposed by white segregationists, who were determined to do everything they could to stop black people from voting. The civil rights activists were savagely attacked, met police brutality, and had their advocates gunned down and murdered. Racist white people were determined to demonstrate to black people that they had no authority over their economic, social, and political affairs.3 The extent to which black agency manifested itself, if at all, would be restricted to intrapersonal affairs with friends, family, and in the rearing of their children. [End Page 160] The white dominance of black people was formally codified in law, reinforced with the brutal application of police power, and cemented with tradition and custom, termed "the etiquette of race." The peaceful nonviolent advocates of universal suffrage were guided by a political concept which maintained that the right of leaders to rule was derived from the governed, which meant that black as well as white citizens should have the opportunity to decide policies and determine who should govern by participating in free, open elections in Alabama as well as anywhere else in the United States of America. Selma, the seat of government for Dallas County, on the banks of the Alabama River, was the location for a cruel, brutal, bloody struggle for democracy having enormous consequences for a numerical minority of corrupt, though formidable, segregationists pitted against a majority of politically excluded people who sought to end political racism and democratize a region of the county that constituted the most pervasive and visible internal government crime of the American body politic. This conflict resulted in a victory for the advocates of civil rights and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that aimed to eliminate invidious distinctions erected to stop black people from exercising their Constitutional right to vote.4 DuVernay embraced a daunting task in making a film fraught with much dissuasion. First, for courageously taking on a project of such physical magnitude and sociopolitical significance as the Selma campaign without having the vast material resources of a Cecil B. DeMille of yore or a Steven Spielberg of today, she invited cinematic limitations from the outset. The director's initial difficulties in resolving a host of matters involving Pathe UK, the overseas distributor, DreamWorks SKG, and Warner Brothers, along with an inability to secure the full use of Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers from the King estate among other matters stifled the project. Finally, Paramount Pictures agreed to the distribution of the film in Canada and the United States...

Power Enumeration and the Silences of Constitutional Federalism

Enumerating power by subject is a familiar feature of federal constitutions that aspire to apportion power among governments. Long-serving federal constitutions seem to say a lot more about how power to govern their communities should be distributed among their governments than about how those governments should treat each other. Yet those texts come no closer to supplying actual answers to disputes about power distribution than they do to disputes about institutional independence. Power enumeration is indeterminate not merely because subjects of power are abstract, but because federal constitutions are silent about aboutness. Federal drafting conventions that resorted to the judiciary to enforce power enumeration seemed to assume that the range of rationally conceivable ways to decide whether laws are inside or outside specified subjects of power (the range of rationally conceivable tests of aboutness) would generally yield the same answers. The assumption is false; laws do not have single subjects. Laws are almost always susceptible of more than one characterization, almost always about more than one thing. Power enumeration defaults to constitutional dispute resolvers an open discretion to decide what to make of it, and an adjudicative necessity to develop a law of aboutness. In deciding disputes about power distribution, as surely as in deciding disputes about intergovernmental independence, constitutional courts have unavoidably responded to constitutional silence with court-created core constitutional law. That law of characterization has sometimes deferred to rational legislative judgment, and sometimes not.Power enumeration was pioneered at the United States Constitution’s Philadelphia drafting convention against the wishes of key nationalist proponents of the Virginia Plan. Power enumeration was an initiative of localist delegates, who relied on a precedent that proved a poor fit for the compromise system that in fact emerged. Their precedent was the specification of subjects in treaties, and in particular the subject specification in the then-operative Articles of Confederation. Power distribution under the Articles was policed by the member states themselves, through their direct control of Congress. Under the localists’ New Jersey Plan, that would have stayed true, and required no judicial enforcement. The Connecticut Compromise maintained this localist vision by constituting the Senate as a true states’ house that resembled the existing Confederation Congress. Even after losing the final vote on the compromise, nationalist delegates bitterly opposed this outcome, until they realized that through a subtle and carefully-timed amendment they could make equal state representation in the Senate about the vocational interests of small-state political leaders rather than about preserving a federal balance. That change, which has received little analysis in the leading historical scholarship, turned the Senate back into the independent, elite institution that nationalists had wanted all along and stopped the Senate from becoming a reliable political safeguard of federalism. Immediately thereafter, the convention referred the task of enumerating Congress’s powers to a committee of detail. Edmund Randolph’s preliminary draft of the committee’s enumeration explicitly linked power enumeration to an arbitral role for the Supreme Court. Having adopted the New Jersey Plan’s vision of enumerated national powers but discarded that plan’s vision of a reliable political mechanism to keep Congress within those powers, the convention backed into depending on the courts to make power enumeration meaningful. Late in the convention’s life, delegates coalesced around explicitly committing to the Supreme Court jurisdiction to decide all cases arising under the Constitution.Power enumeration affords constitutional courts adjudicative discretion that may be exercised to promote not only a federal balance, but individual rights too. Courts could read down constitutional delegations to legislatures so as not to reach valued liberties and not to permit invidious distinctions, much as some common law courts read down statutory delegations to executives. In this way, courts could vindicate the Founding-era Federalist claim that, for example, a law about interstate commerce cannot also be about freedom of speech. A constitutional court could construct a whole implied bill of rights to limit a government of enumerated powers.

RELIABILITY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF TESTIMONY

AbstractWhat is at the center of the epistemology of testimony: reliability or knowledge? This is the key question that Elizabeth Fricker takes up in her “How to Make Invidious Distinctions Amongst Reliable Testifiers.” In particular, Fricker argues that there are several important reasons to favor understanding testimonial knowledge in terms of the speaker being a knower rather than merely a reliable source of information. In this short response, I raise problems for Fricker’s view and the arguments put forth to support it. I conclude that contrary to Fricker’s thesis, the epistemology of testimony should focus on speaker reliability rather than knowledge.

Jobs and justice: fighting discrimination in wartime Canada, 1939-1945

Introduction PART ONE: Invidious Distinctions * Employment Discrimination and State Complicity PART TWO Discrimination Is Sabotage: Minority Accommodation, Protest and Resistance * Jews * Other Racialized Citizens * The Disenfranchised PART THREE: Ambivalent Allies: Anglo-Saxon Critics of Discrimination * Mainstream Critics and the Burden of Inherited Ideas * Labour and the Left PART FOUR: Anglo-Saxon Guardianship * Anglo-Saxon Guardianship Conclusion

SHOWING THE FLY THE WAY OUT OF THE FLYBOTTLE: THE VALUE OF FORMALISM AND CONCEPTUAL REASONING IN ADMINISTRATIVE LAW

When the holders of endowed chairs give inaugural lectures it is common for the lecture to begin with a respectful tribute to the achievements of the distinguished scholars in whose shoes the incumbent now stands. In the case of a personal chair this is obviously not possible. It is appropriate, though, that I should none the less acknowledge here the intellectual debts that I owe to others. But those who might be mentioned are very numerous. And in order to avoid having to draw invidious distinctions and being bound to offend someone, by commission or omission, I will mention only two giants of scholarship who have both had a profound influence upon me. They are both no longer with us but they remain influential in the work of others including myself.

Travels and Travail

Travels and Travail Ed Minus (bio) Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge by Roxanne L. Euben (Princeton University Press, 2006. x + 314 pages. $29.95) Roxanne Euben's Journeys to the Other Shore is one of those books that could have been thoroughly engaging and informative had it not been infected by the dread virus theory (in a literary context, a self-inflicted state of mind that no longer admits lucid definition). Nevertheless it is by no means an unimportant book. Professor Euben is acutely aware of, concerned about, and knowledgeable about some of the world's most essential and complex problems. She analyzes and examines these problems in the light of travels and travelers in general, and from the perspectives of three pairs of travelers in particular, each pair made up of a Muslim and a westerner. Throughout the book, which spans twenty-five centuries, travel is understood primarily as a quest for knowledge, a quest limited to no particular time, place, culture, race, religion, or gender. Euben challenges the simplistic view that "Muslims gather factual information about the unfamiliar for purely instrumental purposes," reserving their curiosity "for the fantastic," whereas "the pursuit of knowledge about others for its own sake—knowledge which is . . . scientific and ennobling—is a distinctively European phenomenon." Were one obliged to choose the predominant theme from among a conglomeration, it might be that travel can be blinding as well as broadening. The first specific works Euben deals with in detail are Herodotus's Histories (fifth century bce) and the Rihla of Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth-century Moroccan who established the genre of travel writing known as rihla, a pious work concerned with holy pilgrimage and foreign travel. Herodotus traveled throughout the world of the eastern Mediterranean and was among the first to lay claim to the values of autopsy, seeing something for oneself, with one's own eyes. He recorded for his fellow Greeks, Athenians in particular, his impressions of the Egyptians, the Scythians, the Persians, the Assyrians—none of whom measured up to the Greeks' standards, and some of whom fell far short. Euben draws a clear parallel between Herodotus's view of non-Greeks and Ibn Battuta's even more extreme view of the foreigners he encountered in his far more extensive travels: some seventy thousand miles over a period of thirty years. Battuta, a Sunni Muslim, was especially intolerant of Shi'ite Muslims, Christians, and Jews—except on those occasions when they received him with impressive ceremony and generous gifts. He did not, however, make invidious distinctions on the basis of race or skin color, though he spent little effort on understanding unfamiliar African cultures and customs. Like other Muslim travelers Euben has studied, Battuta became most vehemently hypocritical with regard to women: "Delighted to benefit from women's sexual services in private, [he] heaps disdain on those people, places, and cultures whose women exhibit what [End Page lix] he regards as immodesty, ambition, or inappropriate levels of public autonomy and control." Unlike Herodotus and Ibn Battuta, Euben's second pair of travelers were contemporaries. In 1826 a twenty-four-year-old Egyptian man embarked for Marseilles as part of a student mission to Paris. Five years later a twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat boarded an American ship bound for New York, so that he could study the American penal system. Their names: Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi and Alexis de Tocqueville. The former wrote a rihla titled The Extraction of Gold from a Distillation of Paris, and the latter wrote Democracy in America, which has been called "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." Both were intent on gaining knowledge that could be used for the improvement of their own countries. Even at the start Tocqueville's interests went well beyond prisons and incarceration, and although al-Tahtawi's ostensible motive, religion, continued to concern him, he noted many other facets of life in Paris. He regretted that the French were either infidels or Christians, one as bad as the other; and like Ibn Battuta he deplored what he saw as both...

Dangerous and Endangered Youth: Social Structures and Determinants of Violence

Structural violence is violence that is permissible, even encouraged. It refers to the invisible social machinery of inequality that reproduces social relations of exclusion and marginalization via ideologies, stigmas, and dangerous discourses (such as "youth violence" itself) attendant to race, class, sex, and other invidious distinctions. Structural violence "naturalizes" poverty, sickness, hunger, and premature death, erasing their social and political origins so that they are taken for granted and no one is held accountable except the poor themselves. Structural violence also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable (even those from their own class and community) into expendable non-persons, thus allowing the licence--even the duty--to kill them. I exemplify this through two ethnographic critical case studies: the operation of a virulent death squad in Northeast Brazil that mobilized the support of ordinary people in an almost genocidal attack against Afro-Brazilian street kids and young "marginals"; and the uneasy truce with, and incomplete integration of "dangerous and endangered" youth still living in squatter camps and shack communities of urban South Africa.

Marching with San Miguel: Festivity, Obligation, and Hierarchy in a Mexican Town

In an attempt to demystify the postrevolutionary Mexican state, this article examines the role of religious confraternities in the formation of a new hegemonic order. Based on ethnographic and historical research in Maxcanú (a mestizo town in Yucatán), I argue that religious confraternities not only helped revive invidious distinctions between groups following the demise of the Porfirian state but sanctified them within a field of custom, festivity, and communal obligation. Although participation in these confraternities (gremios) is voluntary, the linkage between gremio activities and public acts of contrition made participation in Maxcanú's hierarchically ordered confraternities a virtual obligation. Finally, while noting that the town's religious hierarchy has undergone important changes in recent years, I argue that the most prestigious gremio still serves as a vehicle through which upwardly mobile residents shed their parvenu status and fashion a more respectable past.

Labor Market Policy: One Institutionalist’s Agenda

Institutionalists have taken the position that advocacy is consistent with the writings of foundational thinkers such as Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Karl Polanyi (Hayden 1989). What is distinctive about an institutionalist approach is the contention that the normative must be explicitly grounded in core cultural values and dominant social beliefs. F. Gregory Hayden, example, has contended that criteria stand between beliefs and interpretations of policy (1995, 362). In his book The Discretionary Economy, Marc Tool proposed instrumental efficiency as the criterion normative and theory. Instrumental efficiency is achieved by policies and practices that provide for the continuity of human life and the noninvidious re-creation of community through the instrumental use of knowledge (2001, 293). Daniel Gimble argued that Tool's imply labor markets in which work fosters individual creativity, self-motivation, human development, human dignity, self-fulfillment, noninvidiousness, and nonalienation in the work process (1991, 638). Restructuring labor markets according to these would be a long-term process. In the short run, however, there are a number of proposals currently under discussion that would further the end of instrumental efficiency. In particular, I emphasize policies that would foster the elimination of invidious distinctions between workers based on position and status. I In this article, I discuss those social and institutional contexts of contemporary labor markets that perpetuate invidious distinctions by class, gender, and race-ethnicity. I offer a Top Ten list of labor market policies that could be adopted in order to eliminate invidious distinctions. If these policies are out of the margin at the federal level, perhaps it is up to individual U.S. states to take the lead, as some already have.

Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

Certainly one of largest, and probably most important, recent works on Victorian is A Companion to Victorian edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, a compilation of thirty-one substantial essays by established scholars on a wide variety of forms and issues. The Companion is an embarrassment of riches for a reviewer since many of essays call out for extended individual attention, but I will focus my attention here on structure and achievement of volume as a whole. Considering both difficulties of articulating a fixed canon of Victorian poets and limitations of looking at poets in isolation, editors have chosen wisely to eschew usual practice of commissioning essays on individual poets, and have instead commissioned essays on wide ranging but more or less discrete topics: genres (from epic to nonsense), traditions (classical and medieval), schools (Tractarian, Spasmodic, and Pre-Raphaelite), market for poetry, and intersections of with elements of Victorian culture (imperialism, nationalisms, religion, science, gender, and sexuality). Obviously parceling out essays to a variety of scholars might lead to artificial boundaries among diverse but connected topics, but editors have trusted various authors to negotiate debatable borders of their topics, with result essays fruitfully overlap, providing coherence and continuity without redundancy. Conspicuously missing from list of topics are poetry by women, Queer Poetry, and and Ideology, but, again, editors have wisely chosen to leave treatment of such concerns to emerge from manner of treatment of topics. As editors point out, absence of a chapter on women poets suggests that work of women poets no longer needs special defence (p. ix). As a result of editorial procedures and consistently high level of authorial contributions, Companion provides myriad critical perspectives and contextualizations of a very wide range of poets and poems, and constitutes an invaluable resource for students of period. Without making invidious distinctions or odious comparisons, and without providing analysis and commentary various chapters deserve, it seems fair to point out some of highlights of volume. Herbert Tucker's discussion of epic calls attention not only to usual suspects, but also to a surprising number of fascinating, though justly neglected, contenders, and Matthew Rowlinson, in his chapter on lyric, offers a compelling argument about how the genre of lyric is in Victorian for first time fully implicated in production of print text as a commodity (p. 60). The volume also contains authoritative yet suggestive essays on Tractarian by Stephen Prickett, on Spasmodic by Cronin, on poetic marketplace by Lee Erickson, on and religion by W. David Shaw, and on and science by Alan Rauch. Surprisingly, Companion rewards careful reading from cover to cover, though it will surely be more valued as a reference text for bringing readers up to date on current thinking about particular topics. A somewhat more specialized topic, not undertaken by Companion, is explored in Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry by Emily Haddad, who offers an ambitiously revisionist view of literary history of nineteenth century as she attempts to show orientalism's centrality to evolution of and poetics in France and Britain (p. 2). More specifically, Haddad argues nineteenth-century aestheticism constitutes Islamic Orient in particular as a fundamentally site (p. 3), an other to European conceptions of nature as object of mimetic representation. Examining both French and English of Romantic and Victorian periods, Haddad traces an engagement with Islamic orient from romanticism of Southey, Shelley, Byron, Hemans, and even Wordsworth in England and Hugo and Musset in France through an increasing emphasis on it as a source and object of aesthetic experimentation with amimetic poetics in Theophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Alfred Tennyson, and, more dubiously, Matthew Arnold, and finally to a culmination of orientalist poetics as aestheticism or art for art's sake in Oscar Wilde's theory and practice. …

Introduction

In 1961 I was introduced to the invidious distinctions of race in America at the Sears and Roebuck store in Miami, Florida. I was seven years old when the babysitter took me shopping, spicing up the offer by promising some of those hot cashews whose aroma wafted through the deliciously cool air at Sears. While Myrtle browsed, I spotted a diversion that promised even more variety than the retail behemoth's tentative steps into fashion wear: it was a water fountain. There were two, actually, but the one I set my sights on was labeled “colored.” With thoughts of rainbows and Maypoles whirling through my mind, I headed straight for this ingenious invention that would soon quench all the shades of my thirst. Why hadn't I ever seen multicolored water before? Myrtle's guttural report aborted any further speculation. “Stop,” she boomed from oversized lingerie. Then something very strange happened. Myrtle ran. I had never seen Myrtle move quickly, let alone run. I froze. She grabbed my hand, suspended just inches from the cool silver handle and white porcelain basin. “That's dirty,” she grimaced. “It's for colored people.”

Thinking Women/Women Thinking

Thinking Women/Women Thinking Mary Kelley (bio) Charles Capper. Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. Volume 1: The Private Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xv 423 pp. $39.95. In the earliest of the biographies of Margaret Fuller, Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled that during his days as a student at Harvard College he had “seen Miss Fuller sitting, day after day, under the covert gaze of the undergraduates who had never before looked upon a woman reading within those sacred precincts.” 1 The image of a solitary Fuller sitting amid books at America’s most famous seat of learning tells us much about a century in which an intellectual woman was considered an oxymoron. It also signals an approach that has been typical since Higginson’s volume appeared in 1884. In a biography published in 1940, Mason Wade approvingly cited Van Wyck Brooks’s patronizing comment that Fuller was “not so much a great writer, but a great woman writing.” Casting Fuller in the womanly role of the muse, he described her as a “whetstone of genius.” Fuller, Wade said, “possessed the gift of bringing out the brilliance of her friends, and where they lacked talent she made them rise above their natural limitations.” 2 Two decades later Perry Miller took a slightly different tack. He acknowledged Fuller as the equal of male intellectuals in antebellum America. Yet he simultaneously insisted that she could not be “dissociated from the hyperbolically female intellectualism of the period, the slightest invocation of which invites our laughter.” Miller’s disparaging statement had a still nastier edge. If the intellect was blemished, so too was the body. Fuller, in fact, was “monumentally homely.” The evidence was there for all to see: “her hair was stringy and her neck abnormally long.” 3 Charles Capper’s Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life takes us well beyond these still familiar stereotypes. There are none of the invidious distinctions that measure intellectual women as lesser. There are none of the reckonings that made Fuller a deviant. Instead, this subtly nuanced biography presents Fuller in her many dimensions. The sharply edged wit, the gift for friendship, the passion for matters intellectual and cultural, the intense ambition, the lingering insecurity, all that complicated Fuller are here. In the first of his two-volume biography, Capper explores these dimensions in the [End Page 33] context of Fuller’s exceptionally demanding education, the strategies she invented to support herself with teaching, Fuller’s apprenticeship for a career as a woman of letters, and the opening chapter of that career with her decision to edit the Transcendentalist journal, the Dial. Simultaneously, Capper locates Fuller in her larger historical context. In this richly textured narrative, he interweaves Boston’s standing in America’s literary life, shifting gender roles, European Romanticism, teaching as a woman’s profession, social reform movements, and Transcendentalism. Born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts in 1810, Fuller was the eldest of Timothy and Margarett Crane Fuller’s seven children. Each of Fuller’s parents came from relatively modest circumstances. Nonetheless, Timothy was sent to Harvard College. He then pursued a career as a lawyer. Elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1813 and to the House of Representatives five years later, he also served four terms in Congress. Margarett, a teacher at a local school before she married Timothy in the spring of 1809, brought a lively intellect to her marriage. That intellect, and a passion for gardens filled with flowers, were placed in the service of her family. Margaret Fuller’s father and mother had a decidedly different impact on their daughter. Timothy Fuller, who developed an unusually strong and intense involvement with his children, took responsibility for his daughter’s education. Instructing her as if she were a son preparing for his alma mater, Timothy began schooling her in English and Latin grammar at the age of six. Three years later she was reading Virgil, Cicero, Horace, Livy, and Tacitus. Greek grammar was added to her studies, as were French and Italian. Simultaneously, Fuller read widely and deeply in the volumes of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Smollett, Fielding, and Scott that lined the shelves of her father’s library. Margarett Crane Fuller...