Left You Research Articles

Touching the Past: The Inscription of Trauma and Affect in Francophone Neo-Slave Narratives

Touching the PastThe Inscription of Trauma and Affect in Francophone Neo-Slave Narratives Lucia Llano Puertas (bio) Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, wherein he puts alms for oblivion. —William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 3:2:145 That night when I left you on the bridgeI bent downkneeling on my kneeand pressed my ear to listen to the land.I bent downlistening to the landbut all I heard was tongueless whispering.On my right hand was the sea behind the wallthe sea that has no business in the forestand I bent downlistening to the landand all I heard was tongueless whisperingas if some buried slave wanted to speak again. —Martin Carter, "Listening to the Land" Introduction The trauma of slavery and its emotional impact, or affect, on the lives of enslaved Africans in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean have remained "tongueless whisperings" for many centuries. Few alms have been preserved in time's wallet so that later generations could understand what their enslaved ancestors lived through; what we do have are in the form of the so-called "slave narratives," an account of slave life, written by former slaves—The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African is often cited—or transcribed by an amanuensis (European), as in the case of Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself. This genre developed under the aegis of the abolitionist movement in the Anglophone world. In the Francophone world, as a result of the dynamics of the French abolitionist movement and the infamous Code Noir's interdiction of literacy for slaves, "Il n'existe aucun récit similaire pour les colonies françaises" 'There exist no such narratives in the French colonies' (Régent, [End Page 78] Gonfier and Maillard 9).1 However, despite this lack, "French abolitionism helped . . . to produce texts of revolutionary dialogue with (former) slaves—political correspondence, manifestoes, treatises, and constitutions" where, as in the Anglophone narratives, one can hear what the former slaves experienced (Jensen 24).2 But these alms are few and far between; there is, effectively, an aporia in the inscription of the Caribbean's history and in that of modernity's, too. For, as Paul Gilroy notes, slavery is "deeply embedded in modernity" because it was upon the backs of the slaves that the modern European world was built (Gilroy 190). Yet who has really told this story from the slaves' viewpoint? In so many ways, their voices have been erased from history; there is, as Homi Bhabha describes it, a moment of "not-there," or rather, centuries of "not-there," where their tale has been untold, their lives unsung. It is this "not-moment" or "not-place" which "[Toni] Morrison sees as the stressed, dislocatory absence that is crucial for the rememoration of slavery" (Bhabha 254). However, these stressed, dislocatory absences, these floating islands of ideas and memories that are in so many ways the history of the Caribbean and its enslaved past are now, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, being written. Recently, this time of "not-there" has been invested by a rising generation of novelists, emerging in the wake of postcolonial independence and the Civil Rights Movement, who are starting to inscribe these voices and the trauma and affect of the enslaved Africans' lives, and to write them back into history (Rushdy 4). Given the dearth of Francophone slave narratives, I am particularly interested in how this is happening in the Francophone Caribbean. In this essay I will study how the enslaved Africans' lives have been inscribed in novels, also described as "neo-slave narratives," by two Francophone authors, Patrick Chamoiseau in L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse and André Schwarz-Bart in La Mulâtresse Solitude. In order to demonstrate the inscription of trauma and affect in these novels, I will start by outlining Homi Bhabha's ideas of time-lags, suturing, and the projective past as ways of re-constructing the discourse of modernity and reflect on how Chamoiseau and Schwarz-Bart "write into" the "time-lags" they know exist...

Raven Hair

Raven Hair Julie C. Day (bio) Spring You were the wolf, the witch, the unnamed monster in the woods. Instead of blood offerings, the townspeople left you woven baskets full of waxy red fruit. I left myself: red cape and fiery virgin blood. I was the one who lifted my hand and knocked. I had black hair, dark as a raven, and the dress my mother had sewn for me. You saw me just the same: my already curving hips, my waiting breasts. My wolf, my witch, my monster: you had yellowed teeth, crooked, with one pointed canine peeking out over your lip. Your clothes were white, crusty, and full of angry stains. You were pretty even so with your salt-and-pepper hair, the sunrise of wrinkles radiating from both eyes. Gray eyes, of course, except on your soulless days when your stare was as blue as an ice-bound ocean. On those days you begged me to be silent, breathless, mute. Trapped with all my unspoken words, I never felt quiet when I was with you. Summer Our bedroom was on the second floor. Next to it was your den, carpeted in gray with carefully whitened walls and a scratched closet door you told me not to open. "It's mine," you said. "A closed door means keep out." Some days the door's metal handle shook like a cornered snake. Other days it was silent. On your ice-blue days you roamed the woods while I watched from our bedroom window. Step after step, you bent to examine the forest's undergrowth, searching for the waxy white stalks and scaly leaves of your favorite corpse flower, the Indian pipe. Your favorite was just as elusive as you. I watched until your bent back disappeared into the trees, and then if the closet handle was silent, I stole into your den. You kept unspooled rolls of 8 mm film in dark green garbage bags stacked against the wall. Your film lacked the black glossy sheen of store-bought. Orangish-brown and subtly dimpled, each length contained a string of tangled images: a felt puppet on a twig broom, a seemingly unending line of girls with freckles or milky-tea skin and sharp-toothed smiles. And that one repeated image—a woman with wolf-grey hair—not you. Words were printed in precise block letters on the bottom of each frame of film, so small I couldn't yet read them. The lettering, I could tell, [End Page 41] took hours, a magnifying glass, a steady hand. It was fairytale time. I pretended the lettering, not the film, was your daytime passion. Your evening passions were easier to ken. Your evenings were spent with me. ________ I took my time, silent, lips soft against your stomach. Tangled sheets. My hands clutched your narrow hips, then slipped higher until I felt the outer edges of your breasts. I tasted the dampness trickling from between your thighs, salt and musk. Like 8 mm film, my movements took sixteen frames one slow second at a time. Afterwards, you held pieces of your special brown-orange film up to our bedside light, sharing your work. Each cell was marked, scratched, the original image buried somewhere underneath. Your art, you told me, was about transformation. Even then I made mistakes. Pointed out a slash mark, an odd corner of red. Left the ghost of a fingerprint behind. "Love me," I cried, finally deciphering the film's tiny words. The long L and five smaller letters suddenly clear. Yet another transformation: your gray eyes glared, now ice-bound blue. Head bowed, I whispered my own special words: sorry and sorry again while your head nodded its agreement. I was never as sorry as when I lived with you. ________ My fairytale monster. My lover. My witch. As with all witches, the kitchen was your domain: bones and gristle, amber syrup clinging to your lips, green herbs disfigured across the chopping board. On late afternoons heat and flames rose up against the slaughtered flesh. I never asked you where our meat came from, the brown-and-pink flesh so tender as it fell from the bone...

Two Poems

WORLDLIT.ORG 15 top photo : tanya hart haimovich photo : lioz issac Two Poems by Gili Haimovich Go Thee And the way you gathered up your excess soul before it spilled to the floor. At the end of the Hebrew-Yiddish-English poetry reading and you went to eat shawarma. The way you gathered up your soul, but didn’t hold it too tight, because too much of something isn’t a treasure, because your fatigue is also excess. And the music drilled too much into both of them, and your eyes became stars in the night of the assorted audience. Too many have left you, cities. You have no intention of loving this one too. You’re not enhancing the green twists and turns of her heart in your walk. Stomping on them. Go, go, after the words, the body too will become aerodynamic, a weightless airplane following after the weighty words. Go, move, fly or breathe, from your country, from your people, your fatherland, your mother’s language, so you become a great nation, a small blessing. Go, move, fly, roll away or breathe, from moving matter to thinning air. poetry Gili Haimovich is an internationally published poet and translator who writes in both Hebrew and English. She has six volumes of poetry in Hebrew and a collection of poetry in English, Living on a Blank Page. Her work is featured in numerous journals and translated into several languages. Dara Barnat’s poetry, translations, and essays can be found in numerous journals. She is author of In the Absence (2016), and holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University, where she is Writing Director in the Department of English and American Studies. The Female Of The beginning of spring A maple tree sighs (The despair blossoms) Chrysanthemums roar (“more, more”) The crow is so naked under his feathers, so naughty. The sky refuses to blush to the light of the eclipsing sun. Spring, the female of the cold, the Nakba of the winter. Author’s note: The Hebrew word for “female,”nekevah, and the Arabic word Nakbah are etymologically different but sonically similar. The Day of the Nakbah is marked in springtime on May 15. Editorial note: “Go Thee”is from Landing Lights (2017). “The Female Of”is from Baby Girl (2014). Translations from the Hebrew By Dara Barnat ...

Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation

Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation

From the associate editor-in-chief March 2016

There is nothing like a photo and a table to attract attention. I've got two photos here (and a table), so I know you will be reading this. On the left you see AESS ‘Junior’ Past President (2014–2015) Bob Lyons; and on the right we have ‘Senior’ Past President Hugh Griffiths (2012–2013). If you are involved in our Society you know them well. Colonel Lyons had a distinguished career in the military and has since served as consultant in a management role in many high-value DoD programs; and Professor Griffiths of University College London is a very senior academic with a radar signal processing resume that all would envy. The senior AESS editorial staff (that would be: EiC Maria Sabrina Greco, VP Publications William Dale Blair and I) is delighted at all the submissions of original content that we get. The table below gives the number of submissions to AESS over a rolling 12-month period ending with the indicated month.

An Insular Tahiti

An Insular Tahiti Paula Raimondo (bio) Tahiti. Your Emerson Melville Shelley on a stick. There is no place for Hegel. His and hers are the banks of the river which never touch, though the body of water knows them to be one the same as the left hand holds the right the foot of the island elided is reef. So green, you think, this is green’s green, all the otherartists will love it! Later there can be ecstasy, paradise, the moment. Anticipation for now— the noise the birds make in love with the mirror of the lake. Without end there is no delay. Without delay, thunder lies on light like a lover in a practical way. The island breathes and the trees receive it. All is sensible, even sensuality. Danger is accordingly everywhere and nowhere and that’s where he left you, alone with your baby, on the subway. [End Page 143] Paula Raimondo Bucks County Community College Paula Raimondo Paula Raimondo teaches composition and literature at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Copyright © 2015 College English Association

Question 1: Is ultrasound scanning as sensitive as CT in detecting skull fractures in children presenting following head injury?

An 11-month-old child is brought to the emergency department following a witnessed fall from a dining room chair. There was no loss of consciousness and only a single episode of vomiting immediately following the fall. Neurological examination is normal, however, there is a 5 cm bruised boggy swelling in the left parietal region and you suspect there may be a skull fracture. The child meets the criteria for neuroimaging with CT scanning according to NICE guidance.1 The parents express anxiety about radiation exposure (a young relative is currently being treated for leukaemia), in addition to concerns about the need for sedation. The parents ask you about possible alternatives to CT scanning, such as MRI or ultrasound, as they have heard these modalities to not involve exposure to ionising radiation. You wonder if ultrasound scanning is as sensitive as CT in detecting skull fractures. In children presenting with suspected skull fractures (patient) is the use of ultrasound (intervention) as sensitive as CT scanning (comparison /control) in detecting skull fractures (outcome)? ### Secondary sources A Cochrane library search was performed using the term ‘ultrasound’. No limits were placed on the search. One hundred and seventeen articles were returned, none of which were relevant. ### Primary sources Medline library was searched using the Pubmed interface employing the search terms ((head OR skull) AND (fracture OR injury) AND ultrasound AND CT AND (infant or child*)). This gave …

Fir game: Can real trees make a Christmas comeback?

If the rise of artificial trees has left you pining for the real thing, fear not, growers are not giving up without a fight

Humor and Politics through the Animal in Cervantes and Leopold

Humor and Politics through the Animal in Cervantes and Leopold

BUENOS AIRES, CITY OF STATUES

1 2 4 Y B U E N O S A I R E S , C I T Y O F S T A T U E S B O N N I E C O S T E L L O Everyone told me I’d love it – the dance, the food, the sports, the blend of cultures, the Old World charm, and the New World vitality. YetduringmytendaysinBuenosAires(anescapetosummerduring a paralyzing Boston winter) the city seemed strangely frozen, or at least immobile. This certainly had a lot to do with economic stagnation , corrupt government, stony bureaucracy, the eroding social institutions, neglected infrastructure, the spectacle of desperate poverty amid lavish, aimless wealth. Not to mention a heat wave that caused repeated power outages throughout the city. (The traf- fic lights would suddenly grow dark, creating gridlock and pedestrian paralysis on the Avenida 9 Julio, one of the widest streets in the world.) These are the conditions that drive so many Argentines to a feeling of bronca (the word basically means really frustrated and angry, or ‘‘pissed’’). But perhaps it was also the monuments. If you take the standard bus tour – the one that picks up tourists at six di√erent downtown hotels, moving less than a mile in thirty minutes until you finally head down to Libertador, where you could easily have walked in ten – the word you will hear more than any other from the guide with the microphone at the front of the bus is monument, or, as our particular guide pronounced it in 1 2 5 R Spanglish, muonoment, as in ‘‘on your left you will see a muonoment to Carlos Pellegrini,’’ without a word to enlighten us as to the backstory of this looming e≈gy. There are probably more statues per square mile in Paris, but somehow they make a stronger collective impression (as statues, not as commemorated persons) here in this so-called Paris of South America. Buenos Aires is cluttered with public monuments, and for the most part nobody cares anymore what or whom they honor. (Nothing unique to Buenos Aires about that!) Perhaps because it was the Christmas holiday and most of B.A.’s porteños (locals) who could had left the city, it seemed to belong to these forgotten memorials (and to the intimidating and ubiquitous street dogs). Anything can be a monument, of course. Buenos Aires has embraced the pop artist Claes Oldenburg’s blow-up scale, but without his irony. Still life is a favorite genre. One of the city’s most famous monuments is a giant flower, Floralis genérica, in United Nations Square, commissioned and paid for by Lockheed. The sixty-sixfoot -high piece of metal includes a light-sensitive element that causes the petals to open and close according to solar activity, turning pink at sunset. (Often the mechanism is out of order, however.) Does it stand for anything other than naturaleza muerta? Perhaps if we had thought about scale in terms of an aerial view (Lockheed’s), the flower would have seemed less grotesque. In Buenos Aires, the body itself is treated like a monument. There are more nip-and-tuck surgeons, lifting bottoms and enlarging busts, than anywhere else in the world. Argentina’s signature art form, the tango, brings dance very close to sculpture. Not surprisingly, Buenos Aires has many monuments to the tango legends. There are, of course, several statues to those who made tango famous: particularly Carlos Gardel, whose tango songs pervaded the radio in the twenties. He reaches out his hand in serenade to that remote and eternal beloved, the Audience. (This is a favorite pose as well of Argentine politicians – living and bronzed – Evita on her balcony crooning to the crowds.) The most famous statue of Gardel is the one in the Abasto neighborhood where he grew up. Mute though he is, he holds a cigarette burning between his bronze fingers – an ember ever replenished by admirers . Gardel died in an airplane crash at the height of his career (Lockheed again?) and was mourned as if he were Napoleon. 1 2 6 C O S T E L L O Y The city has recently erected a monument...

My affair with Stella

I shouldn't feel this way about you. I should give you up, turn you in. But I can't. You really shouldn't be here, you know. “And whose fault is that?”, you softly reply. You step out into the full sunlight and let me look at you, as you've done time and again. You flirt with me. But you trust me, and in giving your trust you become a trap more subtle than any laid to capture you. Do you remember the first time you showed yourself to me? You came out from between the roots of the old tree across the river from my secret fishing place. “I saw you many times before you ever knew I existed”, you whisper, “sitting motionless, staring at a porcupine quill float for an indication of a fish come your way”. I returned every one I caught to the water. Was it that which made you want to conquer me, which made you so sure you would? (a) Stella, the American mink (Neovison vison) who lives on “my” river, in Spain. (b) Looking for Stella along the riverbank. Yes, you let me see you, but you played hard to get. You crafted your seduction. For days you allowed me no more than glimpses. Later, you let me watch you longer, your indifference more than enough for me. But then came that evening when you looked at me, told me you knew I was there, and that you didn't mind. Do you remember the next day, how I returned to the river with a camera instead of my fishing rod? And how you couldn't resist playing to it? I moved slowly, trying to reassure you, but you showed no fear of me at all. I was worried that the camera click would send you running, but you posed and postured, looked straight into my eyes, and allowed me to come within a few feet of you. Later you beckoned me to follow you to your hideouts. Three dens you showed me, looking back all the while, making sure I was following. Are you mink or minx, Stella? My mustelid. Yet they call you an invader. They say your ancestors escaped, or were allowed to escape by people we call activists, from farms where...dare I tell you this?…we raised them to be killed for their fur. Most found that freedom simply meant starvation, but a few found their way to rivers and streams, where their ancient instincts awoke from deep sleep. Some say that our breeding of your kind left you with smaller brains, smaller hearts, even smaller spleens. But you have more than a brain, Stella, you have a mind, and surely your little heart has captured mine. Can there be no justice for you? We who brought you from North America to Europe to profit from your pelt now hunt you down as a pest. We call you a killer of birds, of water voles, of fish; a usurper of your European cousin's dominions; a fearful wreaker of havoc. I have heard you hunt many times, and you are terrifying. The awful squealing of the rabbits and other quarry you have chased down not a few feet from me, the way you drag them into the river (your faithful ally that fills lungs with water and stills them for you), and the silence that follows your attacks all testify to that. For this they say I should hate you, but I want you to survive. What confusion you cause me. Are you any more an invader than the common carp for which I fish? Asia is their home, but few raise a clamor to clear them from Spanish streams. Yet, as the law demands, I kill the wretched American catfish and pumpkinseeds that are driving our native fish to ruin. I am inconsistent. Should I not give you over to the gamekeeper's gun? But was it only for betrayal that you gave me your trust? Today, the winter past, I come again to the river, and you are here, although not alone. Who is he? Is he that fellow who lives on a lake a couple of miles away, the one who herds small carp into that single bunch of reeds? Silly fish, when he comes they flee onto the mud, and there he takes his pick, eating just their tasty heads. Is it him? “See for yourself”, you tell me. I sit, and you bring him to my very feet. You both rear up on hind legs and look at me. Are you asking my blessing, Stella? I give it when I know I shouldn't. You frolic together on the riverbank before you lead him into the warming water, and me deeper into my dilemma.

John Clare and the Ghosts of Natures Past

Alan Bewell, “John Clare and the Ghosts of Natures Past” (pp. 548–578) This essay seeks to read John Clare's poetry in terms of the poetry of exile. Clare directly confronted what it means to lose one's place in the world, to be exiled from a place not because you have left it, but because it has left you. No Romantic poet wrote more passionately than Clare about the joy of experiencing nature in all its immediacy, and no poet argued more strongly for its permanence and continuity across generations, and yet few poets have conveyed in more poignant terms what it means to lose one's nature for good. This paper considers Clare as a poet who writes about what it means to experience the end of nature and to live on long after the nature that one took to be basic to one's life was gone. Although for many people during the nineteenth century such an idea was unthinkable, for many others, especially in colonial contexts, it was a fact of life. Alongside the many new natures that were coming into being at this time, others were being destroyed or utterly changed. Clare's poetry gives us some insight into what it meant to at least one author to survive the death of one's nature.

Review Essay: “First He'll Kill Her then I'll Save Her”: Vampires, Feminism, and the Twilight Franchise

When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved? (Meyer, 2008, p. 2) As Elana Levine points out in her afterword to Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Vampire Franchise, female fans of romance genres (be they supernatural or not) have long been the “ultimate objects of scorn” (p. 281). The Internet has vastly expanded the reach of this loathing and derision of feminized cultural products, allowing misogynistic discourses about girl culture in particular to reproduce at an alarming rate. From the Facebook group TwiHATE, whose description reads “Because shirtless guys with abs is all you need for a ‘great movie’ for fat chicks to freak out over,” to the venom aimed at boy singing sensation Justin Bieber, to the Hannah Montana Haters Club, the products of mass-produced girl culture are hated on ad nauseam. Imagine a Facebook group organized around participants' abhorrence of Halo's Master Chief or thousands of antifans devoted to loathing Lost's Sawyer or Star Wars’ Boba Fett or Michael Jordan and you get some sense of the sexism directed at the mass-produced girl culture so many girls and women love.

The Madness of Now

The Madness of Now Rimi B. Chatterjee (bio) Escape. Manjula Padmanabhan. Picador India. http://www.macmillan.com. 418 pages; paper, Rs. 295. Every so often you come across a book with a rare quality of depth that sucks you in and holds you prisoner until the very last page. Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape is one such book. From an author who has been consistently producing good work for decades, and who has been unjustly neglected for most of them, this is the title that ought to set the world on its ear. It is a brutal, quietly vertiginous tale about a world of the future that may well be waiting for us just around the corner. Meiji is a little girl who has been brought up by her three uncles. She has rarely seen the sun, but that's okay because she has her friends Mister Froggie and Mister Piggie, who talk to her through mirrors. Her three uncles, her caretakers, are trying to get her married off. They have to do this in secret, because marriage is illegal. In fact, though Meiji doesn't know this, women are illegal and have been so since the Change twenty years ago. This is a topic that haunts India: Manish Jha's Mathrubhoomi: A Nation without Women (2005) explored it vividly. Escape imagines a world somewhat later than Mathrubhoomi, where the whole of India is womanless and ruled by a conglomerate of clones called the Generals. Society is feudal, with the Estate owners on the top of the heap and drones—deafmute subhumans gestated in animals—do all the work. Meiji's uncles are rich estate owners, and they keep her well hidden for years, feeding her herbs to delay puberty. They teach her and play with her in what they increasingly realise is a quasi-erotic ritual. Meiji cannot stay: she is a constant danger to them as her discovery will mean their ruin. Having debated their options, including the possibility of killing her, they decide to send her away in the company of the youngest brother, known only as Youngest, in the hope that a safe haven can be found for her on the edges of the Generals' realm. They set out, and thus begins the end of Meiji's innocence and her slow discovery of the true nature of the world she inhabits. As they travel, she comes increasingly to realise that she is different, a "monster," and that all those around her are profoundly incapable of helping her or guiding her: her tragedy is not only her difference, but her crushing isolation. She is alternately manipulated, bullied, and protected by Youngest as he Schwarzeneggers his way across the countryside, doing "what is best" in typically male fashion, and failing utterly to tell her "the facts of life"—her life or anyone else's—or make sense of the enormous crime that has produced his world. He is a man of his age and place; he cannot stand outside it and see it for what it is, even though Meiji can and will, as she must, to understand who she is. As the story unfolds, the true extent of the calamity at the heart of this world is revealed slowly, with infinite deliberation, until along with Meiji, you scream to know the truth. However, the real shock of Escape comes to you only when you stub your toe on the ending and realize just where the book has taken you and left you high and dry. In a city called merely the City, which might or might not be the ancient remains of Bombay, Meiji discovers that, freak as she is, she fits right in. There are women everywhere, teetering on high heels, flaunting their breasts...or are there? Women are dead, right—but Woman, the creature celebrated by the poets of patriarchy, is still very much alive and in business, and men do Woman better than anyone. So Meiji is doubly a freak, small and mousy like the makeup girl to a company of accomplished drag queens as she ponders her fate on the edges of the Generals' realm. Youngest isn't sympathetic. He tells her to get...

From Tokyo to Seoul (Tonggyŏng esŏ Kyŏngsŏng kkaji, 1917)

From Tokyo to Seoul (Tonggyŏng esŏ Kyŏngsŏng kkaji, 1917)1 Yi Kwang-su Translated by Ellie Choi (bio) First Letter I didn't feel good about the way I left you at the train station just now. You stood by on the platform waving your handkerchief until you could no longer see me, and I felt my eyes moisten. This shouldn't surprise me. How could we not be sad when you and I are like two halves of a whole, when I used to say you were the only one who truly understood me and I was the only one who truly understood you? I'm also distressed about leaving you when you're not in good health. Little brother (同生), please don't call me heartless (mujŏng). Of course I want to stay with you and comfort you, but we aren't people driven only by our emotions. It's our lot in life to be separated by great distances, shedding tears, but no matter when or where I go, I'll think of you. Every time I encounter anything interesting on my journey I'll share it with you, so please take comfort in this. Second Letter It's peak rice-planting season. Farmers in reed hats are bending their backs as they transplant rice stalks under the gently [End Page 337] falling rain. Of course for them this is a pretty busy time, but to someone like me observing from a distance, they look idyllic. I can even imagine throwing everything away and becoming a farmer just like them. But the more I think about it, this isn't a time for people like us to be concerned with our own fun and comfort. I couldn't tell in Tokyo if spring had gone and summer had arrived, but outside the city it's obvious that summer is well under way. From time to time you should also go outside to play and be close to great nature. When you get in touch with nature, not only will your heart feel open and refreshed, and you'll be able to forget all the small and petty things of this world, but you'll surely be able to appreciate life's joys. That you're alive, you're growing, you're flourishing, you're productive—not only the individual, but the whole minjok will realize with conviction that this is the way to live. Little brother, please live with vigor, hope, and energy. Third Letter The panting of the locomotive becomes more and more pronounced as we pass Kōzu. The clear, beautiful ocean with its calm waters begins to disappear but in its stead the mountains gradually come into view. The green mountains, washed clean by the summer rains, are swathed in twilight mists that seem to come from deep within the hills. The mists float as if emerging from the earth, from the luxuriant foliage, and even from the hidden spaces between boulders. And from the bottom of the mountains a stream looks very happy as it trickles down, creating little shoals. I can't believe how beautiful it is set against the verdant mountains. The surrounding scenery is completely steeped in twilight, and incomparably deep and warm. In its midst, our train laboriously makes its way up towards Gotenba Station in the Hakone Mountains. From Yamagita Station—famous for its silver trout—two locomotive engines front and back pull and push us up the mountain at such a slow pace that we could jump off: with one roar [End Page 338] we are over the railway bridge, and with another, through a tunnel. After we pass one tunnel, we approach another, and after one bridge, another. This area has the most tunnels in the whole Eastern Coastal Railway system. Coal fumes fill the railway car. Passengers hold their handkerchiefs over their noses and breathe, thinking that this area is made up entirely of tunnels, but if you really think about it there are actually more open spaces. Even before you can say there are tunnels everywhere, we are passing by all the caves and the huge Fuji Textile Corporation factory that...

Reflections on Science and Ethics

Reflections on Science and Ethics

The 'Mene Peuple' and the Polite Spectator: The Individual in the Crowd at Eighteenth-Century London Fairs

In an effort to memorialize Bartholomew Fair as it teetered on the brink of abolition, George Alexander Stevens, the author and actor most famous for his Lecture on Heads, composed a song in 1763. For the benefit of posterity he portrayed the fairground as ‘crowds against other crowds driving’ in a cacophony of noise from shows and rides, amongst a barrage of smells from the food stalls and the fair-goers.1 Full of attractions, the fair tempted people ‘By sound and by show, by trash and by trumpery, / The fal-lals of fashion, and frenchify’d frumpery’.2 To visit a fair was to be distracted by gaudy garments on sale in the fairground booths and worn on the bodies of gentlefolk who ‘strut in their silver and satins’ alongside ‘poor folks … tramping in straw hats and pattens’. Venturing into the fair left you at risk of being assailed mentally, as well as crushed physically.

Cosmopolitism and Issues of Ethical Identity

Y. A: What, if any, moral obligations are attached to our ethnic identity? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] KAA: I'm inclined to say that the most straightforward answer to your questions is: None. That's because I think it's not the ethnic identity itself but the particular features of the way it works in social and ethical life that is likely to generate moral obligations, not the ethnic identity as such. In a moment, I'll give you some examples of the sort of thing I have in mind. But first, I think it's important to distinguish between ethnic identities and national identities in approaching this question. By national identities, I mean, roughly, ethnic identities that are identified with a modern nation state. For national identities, the major obligations we have are in virtue of our shared citizenship: they are political obligations, civic duties. But where an ethnic identity is not a national one, where it is not associated with a state, the answers are more various, I believe, because ethnic identities are various and so are the relations of individual people to their ethnic identities. As you know, I am inclined to approach such questions from the perspective of the individual. So I would begin by saying that one of the central questions many people have, wherever they live, is they take their ethnic identity up as an important element of who they are. I don't say whether they chose to take their ethnic identity up, because in some contexts you may have little choice as to you take your ethnic identity seriously, because you live in a society where others will respond to you as a member of some ethnic group, you like it or not. What sociologists call ascriptive identities--like gender and, in may places, race-shape your experience of the social world because others are going to respond to you as a member of the group, whatever you chose. Of course, you still have choices to make, about how you are going to respond to an identity ascribed to you by others. But where your identity is a subordinated identity, so that powerful social groups are able to dominate people of your ethnicity, one natural response is to develop a norm of solidarity: we will work together to relieve our social burden. What sort of argument could you develop for the view that this might be not just a natural response, nor even just an attractive response, but an actual duty? Well, if there are other members of your group who are engaging in a social movement to relieve the burdens of ethnic oppression, and you are benefiting from their struggle, you might have a duty to bear your fair share of the burden of the struggle. After all, we normally suppose that we have a duty of fairness to share the burdens of sustaining institutions and practices from which we profit. (That's why we often condemn so-called free-riders: people who, metaphorically speaking, take the train but don't pay for the ticket.) These obligations go along with obligations that everyone has, which derive from considerations of justice, to work to undo social oppression. You might also think that where an ethnic group is carrying a particular cultural tradition that is of value, its members might feel they ought each to contribute to protecting that cultural tradition, as long as doing so doesn't place a great burden on them, something that will get in the way of their living a decent life. People who are especially well-placed to contribute to an important goal ought, generally speaking, I think, to pursue it if they can. So, against a particular background, I think ethnic obligations can arise, but, as I say, I think it does just depend on the background. And usually what sustains ethnic practices isn't duty but desire: people value some of the ways of doing things that they grew up with and they keep them going for that reason, not because they feel obliged. Even when they do feel obliged, it will often be an obligation of piety--a sense that you should do things for your parents and earlier ancestors, to sustain a legacy they have left you. …

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry L. Watson, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution Where music, dancing, and whiskey flowed, the dual demands of Sunday and Monday mornings seemed far away. “Moonshine,” dancing in the home of James Thomas’s friend, Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown, in 1967, photographed by William R. Ferris, courtesy of the William R. Ferris Collection in the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [End Page 1] Southern music is special. Everybody says so. The South is the home of blues, jazz, Cajun, zydeco, bluegrass, country, spirituals, gospel, and rock. A few other musical traditions that originated elsewhere—fife and drum music and shape-note singing come to mind—have flourished in the South after fading in their birthplaces. I’d go so far as to say that no major American popular music form originated outside the South until the recent rise of rap. And rap’s debt to other black music makes it a southern grandchild at least. What explains this rich heritage? You’ll hear a different explanation from everyone you ask, but all of them include tributes to the extraordinary musical heritage of Africa and the haunted ballad-singing of the British Isles, combined and pressure-cooked in the isolation created by racial oppression and economic backwardness. While other Americans were constantly moving, growing, absorbing, and assimilating newcomers—and forgetting their traditional music in the process—black and white southerners were drowning their sorrows in song. The result was an extraordinary musical richness that the rest of the country discovered after 1920 with the rise of the recording industry. But pointing to all the Historical Forces at work hardly begins to explain what really inspires southern music or what people take away from it. Here the answers splinter off in dozens of directions. Take the blues. In this issue, blues scholar William R. Ferris quotes Ralph Ellison in saying that the blues springs from the pain of racial oppression. Ellison calls it “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a haunted experience alive in one’s consciousness.” But Ferris also shares the thoughts of Delta blues master James “Son Ford” Thomas, who doesn’t say anything about race. “You’ll be thinking way back about how some woman left you,” he reflects. “You want her, and she don’t want you. That’s what the blues is about.” So what part of the soul do the blues really come from? The agony of collective oppression or the pangs of disappointed love? Torment unique to one people or pain that happens to everybody? You can find a cloud of witnesses on either side. Perhaps the final answer—if there is one—involves generous portions of both. And that would explain why the blues and the rest of the South’s music have such powerful ties to distinct people in specific places but also reach out to universal human experience. Whatever feeling you are looking to explore or express—misery, elation, spiritual ecstasy, or low-down lust—chances are that some southern musician has done it already, better that you could hope to do yourself. No brief sampler can illustrate the emotional work that southern music can do. This year’s music issue focuses on two: joyous celebrations of good times, inescapably tinged with the lure of sex, and feelings of social solidarity that range from outraged protest to poignant affirmations of identity. But just to show we know there’s more to southern music than just those two, we’ve also asked four great judges to share their personal “top tens” [End Page 2] with us: Charles Joyner on jazz, Jocelyn R. Neal on country, William R. Ferris on blues, and Joshua Guthman on rock. The results show that no pigeonhole is big enough to hold the South’s great musicians—and that nobody can try to pick the best ones without starting an argument with other fans. Click for larger view View full resolution The South’s music has powerful ties to distinct people in specific places but also reaches out to universal human experience. The unnamed strawberry picker, 1939, courtesy of the Collections...

Reverse Mentoring: An Effective Strategy for Career Growth

I'm beginning to feel technologically illiterate. When I see younger staff using wireless devices to access databases, update information, schedule appointments, and send messages to colleagues, I have no idea how they do so much electronically. Any suggestions? Has the information age left you behind? If you were educated before 1990 you've been challenged-and probably frustrated-by rapidly evolving technology. Few older pharmacists have had formal training in using new technology, and many have taught themselves by trial and error. This is a problem in all fields. One small study found that among senior clinicians using computers, only 36% received formal course training.1 Recognizing that their senior staff risked technological illiteracy, corporate entities have addressed this problem with "reverse mentoring" programs-a rare approach in health care-but one that can propel career development.