Judith Brown Research Articles

Dorothy Ayers COUNTS, Judith BROWN, and Jacquelyn CAMPBELL (eds.), Sanctions and Sanctuary, Cultural Perspectives on the Beating of Wives, Westview Press, 1992, $44.50 (paper)

Dorothy Ayers COUNTS, Judith BROWN, and Jacquelyn CAMPBELL (eds.), Sanctions and Sanctuary, Cultural Perspectives on the Beating of Wives, Westview Press, 1992, $44.50 (paper)

Glamour studies: The state of the field

This article, by the author of Glamour: A History in 2008, reassesses his own book and discusses the books of three other authors who in the last ten years have published analyses of glamour. Glamour in Six Dimensions in 2009, by Judith Brown, connects glamour to literary modernism, while Carol Dyhouse’s book Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2010) provides a social history of feminine glamour in Britain, mainly between the 1920s and the 1960s. In The Power of Glamour in 2013, Virgina Postrel attempts to theorize glamour as a ‘non-verbal rhetoric’ centred on dreams of escape and transformation. Postrel’s argument is judged to be flawed in part because it lacks the materiality of Brown, the sharp gender focus of Dyhouse and the class-based historical approach of Gundle. It is argued that studies of glamour must start from what has generally been understood by the term. Theoretical advances may be achieved when social theory and material cultural approaches are more systematically brought together.

Embodying Utopia in 1935: Poetry and the Feminized Nation

This article aims to highlight the significance of the gendering of the emerging nation that literature in India’s nationalist period generated, nurtured and reinforced. This article focuses on what Judith Brown (1985) identified as the ‘decisive decade’ (1930–1940) of the nationalist movement, when nationalist vision and imagery extensively penetrated people’s imagination. It will examine two contexts (Hindi and Bengali), which are certainly different but in some ways interestingly similar, through the works of two poets, both ‘independent’ of both literary movements and political parties. Besides having been published the same year, Harivansh Rai Bacchan’s Hindi collection Madhuśālā (1935) and Jibanananda Das’ Bengali poem Banalatā Sen (1935) are romantic works, somewhat distinctive to most literary production of this period, and both exploit in a rather similar way an evanescent female figure who continues to fertilize Hindi and Bengali imaginations. The purpose of this paper is to question the practice and the function of these romantic figures in nationalist imagination and to examine the issues of differences and similarities they raise regarding the vision of the utopian nation in both Hindi and Bengali contexts.

JudithBrown, AnthonyParel, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. James W.Douglass. Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth. Orbis Books, 2012.

Peace & ChangeVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 137-140 Book Review Judith Brown, Anthony Parel, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. James W. Douglass. Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth. Orbis Books, 2012. Richard L. Johnson, Richard L. Johnson IUPUI Fort WayneSearch for more papers by this author Richard L. Johnson, Richard L. Johnson IUPUI Fort WayneSearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 January 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/pech.12057Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume39, Issue1January 2014Pages 137-140 RelatedInformation

Grasping Glamour

Grasping Glamour Megan E. Williams (bio) The Glamour System. By Stephen Gundle and Clino T. Castelli. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 2006. Glamour: A History. By Stephen Gundle. New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. By Judith Brown. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2009. Glamour: Women, History, Feminism. By Carol Dyhouse. New York: Zed Books. 2010. “Never underestimate the power of glamour,” wrote journalist and style authority Lucia van der Post in Lessons in Grace and Elegance, her 2007 guide to chic living. “Even the plainest woman can be glamorous,” she assures her [End Page 41] readers. “It’s quite different from beauty.”1 Although writers seeking to vary their verbiage often use “glamour” interchangeably with “beauty,” glamour is different from beauty and, as cultural historian Stephen Gundle suggests, is “notoriously difficult to define” (2). Whereas excellent scholarly treatments of beauty culture abound, very little scholarship treating glamour as a cultural phenomenon existed when I started researching the significance of African American singer, actress, and activist Lena Horne—a woman whose name is synonymous with glamour—in 2004. Thankfully, within the past decade, scholars have published a handful of articles and the first, much-needed, book-length studies of glamour.2 These include Stephen Gundle’s The Glamour System (2006) and Glamour: A History (2008), Judith Brown’s Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (2009), and Carol Dyhouse’s Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2010). The author of several essays on the subject of glamour, Stephen Gundle offers two volumes, The Glamour System, co-authored with professional designer Clino T. Castelli, and Glamour: A History, which address the theory and history of this ever-present, yet elusive, phenomenon. In The Glamour System, Gundle is concerned with outlining the historical roots of glamour as “a structure of enticement” (16). In the first part of the book, Gundle traces the origins of glamour to early nineteenth-century Europe, when the bourgeoisie supplanted the aristocracy, and traces its production through the first half of the twentieth century. He explores the interconnection between glamour and modern nineteenth-century cities as sites of “social display” that promoted a culture of spectacle and consumerism, theatre and theatricality (22). Analyzing glamour as a gendered system, constructed as feminine, Gundle discusses four types of women—the high society woman, the courtesan, the actress, and the showgirl—produced as “bearers of glamour” by this “culture of display” (44). Following his analysis of glamour’s “lengthy formative phase” in Europe, Gundle contends that Hollywood refashioned glamour as a “cinematic phenomenon” during the interwar years (62). In the second half of the book, Gundle defines the glamour system as “a system of visual enchantment” that uses seduction to obscure its role in maintaining “the capitalist system” and bourgeois hegemony (86, 21, 14). He explores this structural phenomenon through eight “scenarios,” primarily imagined by Castelli, which emphasize the association between glamour and material culture (16). In an effort to further challenge notions of glamour as “a timeless phenomenon” with “the consistency and significance of candy-floss,” Gundle’s second book-length treatment of this topic, Glamour: A History, extends his earlier analysis of the changing implications of glamour for British and American women and men to the present (19, 6). He outlines the development of glamour, from its emergence in the literary works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron to the flashy magnificence of European royalty, the spectacle of the modern city, the emergence of the nouveau riche, and the courtesans—“the glamour queens”—of nineteenth-century Britain and France (78). As with his discussion [End Page 42] of the phenomenon’s evolution in The Glamour System, Gundle emphasizes the significance of stage actresses and showgirls as arbiters of early twentieth-century glamour and the importance of interwar Hollywood’s expertly fashioned film stars as “the most complete embodiment of glamour” ever constructed (172). In Glamour, Gundle broadens his study, moving beyond the Hollywood studio system of the twenties, thirties, and forties, to highlight the role of Parisian couture—especially Christian Dior’s “New Look”—in shaping fifties glamour. Likewise, he argues, Hollywood films set in Rome and the Riviera featuring...

Gazing into the Gorgeous Abyss: Judith Brown's <em>Glamour in Six Dimensions</em>

Judith Brown’s Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form examines artifacts, objects, celebrities and writers in an effort to understand how the early twentieth-century iteration of “glamour” was both a product of and a necessary contributor to literary modernism. Her analysis is grouped into six categories: perception, violence, photography, celebrity, primitivism and cellophane. Within these categories, she performs close readings of works by D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Nella Larsen and Gertrude Stein.

Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form, (Cornell UP, 2009)

Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form, (Cornell UP, 2009)

Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (review)

Reviewed by: Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form Siobhan Phillips Judith Brown. Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. xiv + 199 pp. As modernist studies continues to seek new approaches, it also continues to revise known categories: they are not outmoded labels to be discarded perhaps, so much as potential descriptions to be probed and recontextualized. In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown exemplifies this scholarly tack by looking again at the formalism so important to accounts of twentieth-century aesthetics. Her analysis uses the paradoxes of form, freshly situated, to clarify contradictory affinities in modernist culture. Brown does so through her chosen central term, “glamour.” In her book, this word does not chart an artistic history or recognize modernists’ self-description; rather, and more usefully, “glamour” theorizes a set of interests that unites commerce and art of the period. Glamour is both an ideal and a commodity, in Brown’s presentation; it “names [the] interrelation” of “literary form” and “modern mass culture” (8). Glamour indicates an attraction to what is “cold, indifferent, [End Page 663] and deathly,” a drive toward “abstraction,” and a preference for “blankness, the polished surface, the stance of impenetrability” (5): these are evident in the affective results of Hollywood stills, fashion magazines, and industrial plastics as much as in the poetic practices of Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Wallace Stevens. Glamour therefore refuses to separate cultural contexts from artistic methods, refuting old assumptions about modernism’s remove from markets; with these aims, Brown’s study furthers an important trend of scholarship that includes work by Aaron Jaffe, Douglas Mao, Michael North, and Lawrence Rainey, among others. Glamour marks a valuable extension of this strain, however, in its particular argument about form: “glamour emerges with the modernist attention to aesthetic form,” Brown explains, “and subsequently becomes visible, even most familiar, in the worlds of entertainment and mass culture.” “[R]eading glamour” thus “extends the power of the literary—especially in its attention to form—to translate the world around us” (8). This overview might benefit from a clearer characterization of “form” across the different genres that this book cites, though the omission is less troublesome in specific analyses. As they unfold, Brown’s various descriptions of glamour refute any limits to the possible manifestations of a modernist aesthetics—and resist any generalizations about something like a “culture industry” undermining that aesthetics. Glamour does not want its central concept to be “relegated solely to the service of capitalism and its system of commodity production,” as Brown explains. If it were, critics would “lose glamour’s aesthetic power, as well as its range of pleasures” (12). The power and pleasures are dangerous, often cruel. From ads for cigarettes to sentences by Stein, glamour flirts with “the suspicion of the nothing behind it all”—while turning that absence into “something that is seductive, powerful, and often simply gorgeous” (5). Brown’s study thus supports a detached, nihilistic, and antihumanist version of modernist art. To Brown, in fact, glamour offers a type of twentieth-century sublime: sustaining the attractions of negativity while replacing attention to nature with a focus on technology, preference for the infinite with an attraction to the regulated, and endorsement of transcendent reason with an “obliteration of the subject” (33). Yet if glamorous sublimity “courts danger,” in Brown’s words, it also “finds in it powerful creative potential” (13), and Brown shows that a seemingly indifferent or reactionary effect contains unexpected political possibilities as she articulates the breadth of its instantiation. One chapter, for example, relates T. S. Eliot’s theories of individual talent, Woolf’s ideas of character, and Hollywood’s starmaking apparatus; Brown demonstrates that Greta Garbo’s glamour depended on an impersonal personality akin to high-art aims (101). [End Page 664] The actor’s image, Brown argues, as it uses and indicts processes of technology, diagnoses a modern alienation that is sociologically, aesthetically, and commercially produced. Her discussion casts new light on modernist subjectivity as it articulates a specific relation between mass and high culture that is reductive to neither. Another chapter examines the appeal of “primitive glamour”—which could seem...

Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form by Judith Brown

MLR, 105.3, 2010 855 of such aminor quibble, this collection is aworthy tribute inprint and pictures to a great poet and artist. Northern Illinois University William Baker Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and theRadiance of Form. By Judith Brown. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. 2009. xv+i99pp. ?26.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-4779-2. JudithBrown's book is a stimulating contribution toNew Modernist studies, and is based upon work she did for her doctoral thesis, though in the interim she has, for example, published on Greta Garbo and also on cellophane, two of the topoi her book discusses. Glamour in Six Dimensions references post-structuralist theory, theories of race and gender, and queer theory, using these to illuminate the argument at appropriate points, and showing at all turns a restrained yet easy mastery admirable in a first monograph. This is the kind of study that isbound to spur other researchers, and the book points well beyond itself to a number of fields thatmight be developed. The six dimensions of the title refer to the Greek for six, namely hex; and by a neat sleight, this allows Brown to exploit the historical origins of glamour as a notion. One thinks here ofwitchcraft trial transcripts from an earlier age, inwhich the unfortunate accused would be charged with putting the glamour on someone's livestock, or fascinating his beasts. This notion is central to Brown's enquiry: what is the nature of the spell cast bymodern glamour, and in narrower cultural terms, what is glamour's specific relation to the fascinations ofModernism? In framing her enquiry, Brown enters upon six areas: perception, violence, photography, celebrity, primitivism, and cellophane. It is a productively eclectic approach. If it isnot immediately apparent that a connection exists between Chanel No. 5 and the poetry ofWallace Stevens, itwill be after reading Brown. She is also good on the kinds of emotional and spiritual vacuum which screen idols came to fill in theminds ofmany film-goers. For glamour 'is backed by absence, suffusedwith longing, and defined by the fantasy of distance'. As such, it cannot but foreground pure form at the expense of content; and in this it 'bears strong affinitieswith modernist literature' (p. 117). By bringing into her purview cultural manifestations both elite and popular?Josephine Baker and Bakelite along with Gertrude Stein and cellophane; or cigarettes along with T. S. Eliot's famously chemical poetic mind; or the violence inherent in Jay Gatsby's self-performance alongside something similar in aMansfield short story?she is able to render visible the deeper cultural undertow upon which those currents shift,and tomake sense ofwhat they throw up. To carry conviction, Brown's study depends on the cumulative force of its ar gumentation. In this broad aim, it succeeds. That need not mean, however, that each stage of itscumulative strategy is equally, or indeed actually, convincing. 'The reader', admits Brown, 'might find it at the very least peculiar to linkMrs. [sic] 856 Reviews Dalloway with photography (p. 71). This caution seems justified. Hence Brown tells us one could almost imagine the striking of Big Ben to be the click of a camera' (p. 75), which is a bit of a stretch. She is on stronger ground in claim ing that 'Woolf's method, while not mimicking photography, nevertheless shares attributes with the camera's product' (p. 76), namely the photograph's enshrining of the past experienced as significant present moment. Scrope Purvis's catching sight of Clarissa ismeaningful, we are told, because his name hints at voyeurism in its similarity to scope' and pervert' (p. 78). In the celebrated crocus passage, Clarissa's thoughts return to the banal, '[a]s ifrepeating the snuffingof thematch' (p. 82), an aspect of themetaphor not found in Woolf, but introduced by Brown. 'One senses that, ifpossible, Woolf would have written this book so that it took place in the course of a moment' (p. 89). Maybe so. But what one can almost imagine', and what one senses', cannot amount to argumentation, anymore than can over-reading ofmetaphor, or overdetermined reading of a minor character's name. Particularly in this interesting and important chapter, Brown tends to pro duce rhetoric instead...

Cellophane Glamour

Cellophane Glamour Judith Brown (bio) These new materials are expressive of our own age. They speak in the vernacular of the twentieth century. Theirs is the language of invention, of synthesis. Industrial chemistry today rivals alchemy! Base materials are transmuted into marvels of new beauty. —Paul Frankl, Form and Reform (1930)1 Under Cellophane Skies As the curtains opened on the avant-garde opera event of 1934, Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, the audience faced a vast sign of the production's cutting edge modernity: 1500 square feet of sky-blue cellophane was draped from the sides and ceiling of the stage, creating a semi-transparent cyclorama, glittering under bright white lights. The stark artificiality of the stage design proclaimed its relationship to the modern world and its unsurpassed hold on the new: "The cellophane set, brilliantly lit to evoke a sky hung with rock crystal, defied comparison to anything the audience had ever seen."2 The set and costume designer was Florine Stettheimer, a New York painter whose close friends included Marcel Duchamp and Carl Van Vechten, and whose paintings were characterized by their light-infused surfaces and whimsical approach to their subjects (her style was sometimes called "primitive moderne"3). Stettheimer had never ventured into the world of stage or costume design before Four Saints (and wouldn't again), but her efforts were met with critical acclaim for her spectacular vision: "some thought that [her] costumes outdid the Ziegfeld Follies, and one quipped that the sets were 'Botticellophane.'"4 Plastic, [End Page 605] that most twentieth-century of materials, here transformed the stage into a powerful blend of art, glamour, and the latest technology. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Decipher. Photographs of stage sets for Four Saints in Three Acts. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. We've lost, in the intervening decades, the ability to read the early-century semiotics of plastics, and particularly of cellophane. Stettheimer's stage today, rather than looking sleek and streamlined, appears hung with the cheap plastic that wraps mattresses or other bulky household items for shipping. But what did cellophane signify? Why was it taken up not only by Stettheimer, but by the designers of lavish Hollywood musical sets and their promoters? Cellophane appears throughout popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s, generally signifying the slickly modern. Cellophane tablecloths glitter in an upscale nightclub in the Astaire-Rogers blockbuster Swing Time (1936); cellophane also appears in an earlier Joan Crawford film, Dancing Lady (1933), in the transparent swags at the back of a dance set, and again in the Broadway musical staged within the film. Here, the cellophane appears in costume-form: a group of black-attired old women, complete with bonnets, lace collars, wire glasses, and bent-over backs make their way into a futuristic beauty parlor and emerge as modern bombshells, perfectly artificial with cellophane outfits and what might be plastic hair. Cellophane similarly appears in a swanky Chinese nightclub as the "The Girls in Cellophane" take the stage in W.C. Fields' International House (1933). Cellophane was chic and, above all, now. How could this plastic sheeting have connoted glamour for 1930s audiences? From its first American appearance in 1931 as the revolutionary new moisture-proof wrapper of Camel cigarettes, cellophane was an undisputed success, standing out "as the lone spot of brilliance in the otherwise dismal commercial landscape of the Depression."5 [End Page 606] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Dancing Lady, DVD, directed by Robert Z. Leonard (MGM, 1933; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 3. Dancing Lady, DVD, directed by Robert Z. Leonard (MGM, 1933; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video). Cellophane served as a cultural reference with greater significance than the mere freshness of cigarettes: it inspired a new packaging aesthetic as well as an intensified relationship of desire between consumer and product. And the aesthetic clearly went beyond the mundane glamour of such luxuries as tobacco products. Cellophane proved [End Page 607] to be a cultural force: besides appearing on the avant-garde stage, the MGM musical set...

The Disintegration of the British Empire and the Nationalist Cases of India and Israel: A Comparative AnalysisAllon Gal is Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History, and Co-Chairperson of the English-Speaking Countries Programme, Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Isaac Lubelsky teaches Modern Indian History at Tel Aviv University, Israel. This article is partly based on a paper presented by Professor Gal at the

The states of India and Israel gained independence in August 1947 and May 1948 respectively. Both pre-state communities were under British rule before independence, India for some two hundred years...

Fellow British Subjects or Colonial “Others”? Race, Empire, and Ambivalence in Canadian Representations of India in the Early Twentieth Century

early twentieth century, English-Canadian schoolchildren learned to divide British Empire into the man's and the coloured man's country. According to one geography textbook, India clearly belonged in latter category. In vast peninsula of India we find [a] ... coloured man's country, densely populated by nearly one fifth of world's whole population, all of dark skin, but varying in civilization from most degraded savage to highly-cultured Hindu. Following from this division, a region's facility for self-government was explained in terms. While all white man's lands of Empire have Parliaments of their own and a citizenry free to elect members of government, in the coloured man's country natives have no such rights, for in many cases they are mere savages, and in others they could not yet be trusted with such power. (1) The imperial logic that associated absence of home-rule in India with racial character mirrored broader currents of understanding in Canada. A strong affection for Mother among Canadians of British descent, and a firm belief in Britain's divinely inspired benevolence, fueled a racialized rhetoric of empire. According to a popular imperialist narrative, Britain had brought order, enlightenment, and civilization to a formerly backward territory of globe, and Britain's imperial project in India was an inevitable outcome of march of Anglo-Saxon race. (2) These depictions reflected intellectual and political trends in Britain. Quasi-scientific theories of difference--increasingly popular in Europe and North America in latter half of nineteenth century--combined with mythology surrounding Indian Mutiny of 1857 (British heroism versus Indian barbarism), confirmed British ideas about Indian inferiority. Such sentiments, as South Asian historian Judith Brown observes, bred an elaboration of stereotypes of Indians which helped to justify imperial rule.... Indians were, for example, often described as weak and effeminate, deceitful and deficient in character, and incapable of leadership: and thus needing and benefiting from rule by Anglo-Saxons displaying opposite and desirable qualities. (3) Coupled with Britain's considerable strategic and economic interests in region, these attitudes created tremendous obstacles along India's path to self-government. The political demands of India's growing educated classes from 1860s on, and work of Indian National Congress after 1885, brought some concessions, including limited enfranchisement, election to municipal government, and opportunities to join Indian Civil Service, if only as minor officials. (4) Yet by turn of century, scant gains had been made in direction of self-government, and Britain's grip on India showed few signs of faltering. This article explores discursive production of an imagined India in work of English-Canadian educators, intellectuals, politicians, and other public commentators in first three decades of twentieth century. (5) Intellectuals such as Alfred Baker, James Morison, George Wrong, J. Castell Hopkins, and George Sidney Brett, for example, wrote enthusiastically about Britain's imperial project in India. These men, and many other commentators, identified themselves as imperialists--or, at very least, loyal British subjects. Particularly influential were Wrong's various books on history of Britain and Empire (almost always including content about India), which circulated in public schools across Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in Manitoba and British Columbia during first half of twentieth century. The ideas of these authors, moreover, were generally disseminated through organizations and publications that were imperialist in orientation (or at least imperial-friendly), such as Empire Club of Canada, Globe and Mail, and Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs. …

Global South Asians: introducing the modern diaspora

By the end of the twentieth century some nine million people of South Asian descent had left India, Bangladesh or Pakistan and settled in different parts of the world, forming a diverse and significant modern diaspora. In the early nineteenth century, many left reluctantly to seek economic opportunities which were lacking at home. This is the story of their often painful experiences in the diaspora, how they constructed new social communities overseas and how they maintained connections with the countries and the families they had left behind. It is a story compellingly told by one of the premier historians of modern South Asia, Judith Brown, whose particular knowledge of the diaspora in Britain and South Africa gives her insight as a commentator. This is a book which will have a broad appeal to general readers as well as to students of South Asian and colonial history, migration studies and sociology.

Writing the Life of Manilal Mohandas Gandhi

Manilal Gandhi was the second son of Mohandas (later Mahatma) and Kasturba Gandhi. Unlike his father who spent just over two decades in South Africa, Manilal spent close to five decades of a life (which spanned sixty-four years) in South Africa. Most of these years, in particular, were lived at Phoenix Settlement in the Inanda countryside on the communal farm that Gandhi had started in 1904. For thirty-six years of his life (1920-1956) Manilal was editor of the newspaper Indian Opinion which his father had had a crucial hand in establishing in 1903. This Gandhi, however, is relatively unknown in South Africa. To remedy that I wrote his biography, published in 2004.1 Sufficient time has passed for me to reflect on the writing of the book, its objectives, the sources used, the reception of the book and especially its portrayal in the media in South Africa and in India. This reflection provides an opportunity for the historian to examine the practices of biographical writing but also to cast some understanding on what Judith Brown referred to as the “Gandhi phenomenon” that hit India in the 1920s but which continues to manifest itself world-wide despite the fact that the Mahatma died almost six decades ago.

Language and the History of Colonial Education: The case of Hong Kong

Judith Brown, in her Epilogue to Volume IV of The Oxford History of the British Empire (OHBE), states that of the legacies of the British Empire, the ‘most significant of all is the legacy of the school and the university’, and in particular the role of English as an international language. Brown's acknowledgement of the importance of colonial education renders all the more striking the lack of attention given to this subject in the OHBE as a whole. For example, while Volume IV contains chapters on ‘Gender in the British Empire’, ‘Critics of Empire in Britain’, ‘The Popular Culture of Empire in Britain’, and ‘The British Empire and the Muslim World’, education receives barely two dozen references, buried in the text of other chapters. These offer glimpses into the development of literacy in parts of Africa, the expansion of state educational provision in Ceylon, and the concern of Nigeria's colonial authorities regarding the socially and politically destabilizing effects of the spread of Western education; but taken together they provide no overall analysis of colonial education policies, systems of schooling or curricula. Notwithstanding what some have criticised as its ultra-orthodox overall approach, with regard to this particular field the OHBE more-or-less accurately represents the current state of research. Despite a number of interesting forays on the periphery, the history of colonial education remains a vast and largely unexplored field of enquiry: the dark continent of imperial historiography.

A Certain Laughter: Sherwood Anderson's Experiment in Form

Judith Brown (Indiana University - Bloomington) reads Sherwood Anderson's 1925 novel “Dark Laughter” in the context of the explosion of theoretical treatments of laughter that emerge in the early 1920s in the traumatic wake of the Great War. Recuperating the disruptive potential of modernist laughter, Brown reads the novel through the scene of redemptive collective laughter that concludes Preston Sturges' film “Sullivan's Travels” (1941). Whereas Sturges offers the salve of a collective laughter as a fantasy of nondifferentiation from laughing others, Andersons dark laughter preserves the uncertain play of difference, undermining the alleged superiority of the laughter.

Richard Borshay Lee: Selected Bibliography

Richard Borshay LeeFellow, The Royal Society of CanadaUniversity Professor, University of Toronto.Winner, 1980 Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association, for the best book of the year in English on Africa, for The!Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society.Books and MonographsJorgenson, Joseph B. and Richard Borshay Lee (eds.)1974 The New Native Resistance: Indigenous People's Struggles and the Responsibility of Scholars, New York: MSS Modular Publications, Module No. 6.Leacock, Eleanor and Richard Borshay Lee (eds.)1982 Politics and History in Band Societies, Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and La Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.Lee, Richard Borshay1965 Subsistence Ecology of!Kung Bushmen, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. (Available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI, #66-3636: 1-209).1979 The!Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.2003 The Dobe Ju/'hoansi, 4th ed., Toronto: Thomson Learning/Wadsworth.Lee, Richard Borshay and Richard Daly (eds.)1999 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Lee, Richard Borshay and Irven DeVore (eds.)1968 Man the Hunter, Chicago: Aldine.1976 Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the!Kung San and Their Neighbours, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Lee, Richard Borshay, Robert Hitchcock and Megan Biesele (guest eds.)2002 The Kalahari San: Self-Determination in the Desert, Cultural Survival Quarterly, Special Issue, 26(1).ArticlesLee, Richard Borshay1968 What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources, Man the Hunter, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore (eds.), Chicago, IL: Aldine.1969a!Kung Bushman Subsistence: An Input-Output Analysis, Ecological Essays: Proceedings of the Conferences on Cultural Ecology, D. Mamas (ed.), Ottawa: National Museum of Canada Bulletin 230: 73-94.1969b Eating Christmas in the Kalahari, Natural History, December 14-22, 1969: 60-63 (reprinted over 40 times).1972a Work Effort, Group Structure, and Land Use in Hunter-Gatherers, Man, Settlement, and Urbanism, Peter Ucko, Ruth Tringham and G.W. Dimbleby (eds.), London: Duckworth.1972b Population Growth and the Beginnings of Sedentary Life among the!Kung Bushmen, Population Growth: Anthropological Implications, Brian Spooner (ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.1972c The Intensification of Social Life among the!Kung Bushmen, Population Growth: Anthropological Implications, Brian Spooner (ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.1972d!Kung Spatial Organisation: An Ecological and Historical Perspective, Human Ecology, 1(2): 125-147.1973 Mongongo: The Ethnography of a Major Wild Food Resource, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 2: 307-321.1978 Hunter-Gatherers in Process: The Kalahari Research Project, 1963-76, Long Term Field Research in Social Anthropology, G. Foster et al. (eds.), New York, NY: Academic Press.1980 Is There a Foraging Mode of Production? Anthropologie et societe. Reprinted in Canadian Journal of Anthropology, 2(1): 13-19. 1981.1982 Politics, Sexual and Non-Sexual, in an Egalitarian Society, Politics and History in Band Societies, Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee (eds.), New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.1984 Ethnicity, Militarism and Human Rights in South Africa and Israel, Dialectical Anthropology, 10: 121-128.1985 Work, Sexuality and Aging among!Kung Women, In Her Prime: A New View of Middle-Aged Women, Judith Brown and Virginia Kerns (eds.), New York, NY: Bergin and Garvey. (Reprinted in 1990 by University of Illinois Press.)1986a!Kung Kinship, the Name Relationship and the Process of Discovery, Critical Reflections on!Kung Ethnography: Essays in Honour of Lorna Marshall, Megan Biesele (ed. …

Renaissance Women

Books reviewed in this article:Judith Brown and Robert Davies (eds), Gender and Society in RenaissanceItalyTrevor Dean and Kate Lowe (eds), Marriage in Italy, 1300‐1600Deanna Shemek, Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern ItalyPaola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation,Identity

The Rewards of Lesbian History

So states The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, a 1995 reference work notable for its thorough and scholarly treatment of a vast range of topics.' Unthinkable, silent, invisible: notwithstanding a significant body of work that has demonstrated the contrary, judgments such as these continue to deny the presence of lesbianism in Western European history.2 Authorized by the greater visibility of male sexuality as well as the presentist bias of much gay and inquiry, many responsible scholars have been content to treat the invisibility of lesbians prior to the Enlightenment as an unexamined commonplace. This critical cliche has held, despite the fact that in the 1980s Lillian Faderman briefly treated Renaissance images of lesbians in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women, from the Renaissance to the Present, Judith Brown published a history of the ecclesiastical trial of an Italian lesbian nun, and Harriette Andreadis offered a cautious appraisal of the sapphicplatonics of the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips.3 In the decade since this groundbreaking work, historical analysis of lesbianism and representations of lesbians, particularly in English Feminist Studies 25, no. 2 (summer 1999). @ 1999 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 363

Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy , and: Marriage in Italy, 1300-1650 (review)

Reviews 1 7 1 hated) speculation that the not infrequent substitution of V for 'n' and vice versa (a c o m m o n mistake in fifteenth-century printing) was not done in error. The outiining of editorial procedure is followed by a section which purports to be an analysis of the vocabulary, but which is in fact a partial list of emendations. Moreover, separated from the textby almost thirty pages, it offers nothing by way of textual apparatus. W h e n w e turn our attention to the text itself, w efinderrors and omissions in the transcription occur with disturbing frequency and the modernisation is inconsistent. Some obvious errors are not emended, and new errors are introduced. Attimes,too, the glossing i s either inadequate or wrong, and suggests a lack of familiarity with fifteenth-century English structures and forms. Inthe final analysis, then, it is disappointing that the very worthwhile preliminary material does not accompany a more reliable text. Peter Whiteford Department of English Victoria University of Wellington Brown, Judith C. and Robert C. Davis, ed., Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy ( W o m e n and M e n in History 3), Harlow, Essex/New York, Addison Wesley Longman, 1998; paper; pp. xi, 255; R.R.R £ 13.99. Dean, Trevor and K. J. P. Lowe ed., Marriage in Italy, 1300-1650 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xi, 304; R.R.R A U S $95.00. The history of women during the Italian Renaissance has come a long way since the publication of Joan Kelly's ground-breaking article of 1977 'Did W o m e n H a v e a Renaissance?'. The two 172 Reviews publications under review illustrate, in different ways, h o w far we have come since then, while both, in different ways, suggest new directions for future research. Brown and Davis's Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, writt with the general reader and student in mind as well as the scholar, i s an accessible contribution to thefield,covering a broad range of topics and approaches. Some attempt is m a d e to refer to cities other than the usual Florence or Venice (Milan and Bologna, for example) although this is somewhat constrained by the availability ofpublished material and the research interests of the contributors. The collection contains 10 chapters and an introduction as well as a glossary of terms and an annotated guide to further reading by Robert C. Davis. The introduction—written by Judith Brown—begins by reminding us of Joan Kelly's question and the argument of their 'perfect equality' with m e n put forward by the nineteenth-century Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, which she sought to rebut and challenge. The survey of the historiography on Italian Renaissance w o m e n in the twenty years since Kelly's pioneering essay is most useful for students—clearly and concisely written and well integrated with the discussion of the various essays which make up the volume. Brown's discussion of the possibilities of gender analysis and critiques of this approach is also well done (pp. 4-5). The introduction continues with a discussion of the various themes of the collection, h o w they relate to the different articles and the questions about gender and society and the continuities and changes over time that the various authors raise. Brown ends with the dilemma faced by one Italian w o m a n humanist, Isotta Nogarola, whose intellect and ability can only be conceived of as exceptional in a w o m a n and so she is gendered male by the man w h o praises her (p. 15). This ending highlights a puzzling gap in the collection. W h y is there no discussion of w o m e n humanists or Reviews 173 the gendering of humanist thought? Surely, given that the focus is on Renaissance Italy, a discussion of humanism and gender would have made an appropriate topic for the collection? Part One of the collection deals with the gendered city. First, Robert Davis discusses the gendering of urban space in Venice, how men sought to...