Category Archives: Politics

Persianate Universal Histories Turned Upside Down

by Kit Myers

With “Breaking Historiographical Boundaries: Early Modern Persianate Universal Chronicles,” Sholeh Quinn turns upside down the traditional way of examining universal histories of the Ottoman and Safavid empires. Most scholars have inspected these historiographies separately because this is still an emergent area of study. In particular, scholars have often been concerned with the last section of chronicles covering the newly established empire. Quinn’s presentation and broader research, however, turn way from atomized analysis of dynasties within this distinct genre toward an approach that investigates the entire chronicles in a comparative fashion.

Quinn’s paper illustrates the fruitful insight gained from—and broader importance of—comparative work. Such an approach makes us consider what part of the picture have we missed, and in what ways do our assumptions get turned upside down by using such an approach? Quinn’s preliminary research considers both the structure and content of four Persianate universal chronicles under the Ottoman and Safavid empires: 1) Mawlana Shukrullah’s (1459) Bihjat al-tavarikh, 2) Ghiyas al-Din Muhammad Khvandamir’s (1524) Habib al-siyar, 3) Yahya ibn ‘Abd al-Latif Husayni Qazvini’s (1542) Lubb al-tavarikh, and 4) Muhammad Muslih al-Din Lari Ansari’s (1566) Mirat al-advar.

Her analysis of universal history reveals that the four chronicles share numerous sectional and elemental components. Historians included portrayals of creation, biblical prophets, pre-Islamic Persian kings, the life of Muhammad and his immediate successors, subsequent dynasties, and lastly, the current dynasty. In looking at these universal histories, Quinn found that they were even less Ottoman- or Safavid-centric than anticipated. Thus, Quinn argues that they should indeed be considered universal histories rather than dynastic. Despite what one might expect, the authors of these universal histories did not explicitly disparage pre-Islamic figures and rulers. Instead, they narrated a shared or “universal” past, placing Islamic history within a larger historical context. Similarly, the authors were not simply Ottoman and Safavid historians because they in fact had varying roles for multiple dynasties, and thus, they were more accurately Persianate historians.

Indeed, the narratives are not entirely independent historiographical accounts but rather closely related and sometimes overlapping variations, revealing low and porous historiographical boundaries. Yet, Quinn’s close reading of the universal histories—such as the way in which Kayumars, who is said to be the first Persian king and first human, was included in the four texts—also illustrates that historians were not merely copying the first chapters of prior universal histories. Historians worked from previous sources but also inserted their own perspectives, making minor to significant revisions of prior accounts. Without a comparative analysis, scholars could easily miss the ways in which historians recorded universal chronicles that possessed shared and divergent pasts. What becomes clear is that studying universal chronicles not only requires understanding the historical context but also historiographical context.

 

 

 

Troubadours and the Production of Early Chicano Literature

by Dorie Perez

Pulling from a historically oral tradition, Chicano Literature sought to create and analyze texts of the Chicano cultural output that advanced during the social movements of the 1960s and into the 21st Century. Attempts to codify the literature of Chicano Studies into its own canon often sought to legitimize its study by turning oral tradition into the written word, the medium used most by the Humanities. This process of making “legible” work from Chicano scholars previously unrecognized by the academy framed such work as both cultural expertise and political argument.

The Center for Humanities’ final seminar for the Fall 2014 semester was led by Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez who presented his paper “Of Modern Troubadours and Tricksters: the Upside-Down World of José Inés García”. Martín-Rodríguez writes of the work of Chicano scholars in the 1980s to reclaim their discipline’s written past by doing literary “recovery,” looking for the beginnings of a Chicano movement found in works previously ignored in the development of the canon. Thus, literary histories of previous scholarship are vital to work to shift the analysis of academic literature away from its Eurocentric focus. The medium of such critique was the novel and social history, yet other genres such as poetry, letters and humor are where social commentary from the fringes are best received.

Understanding poetry as a medium – short pieces with big impact – is central to the analysis of José Inés García, whose work has been virtually ignored by Chicano scholars. In the vein of recovery and through the poetry, Garcia’s work is identified by Martín-Rodríguez as significant to the development of Chicano literature, voicing issues of identity and social tension that would serve as the core ideas of subsequent Chicano authors. This recovered history is remarkable – very few copies of García’s work exist. Other poets like Bartolo Ortiz and José Díaz from the same time frame (early 20th Century) often used self-publishing to produce their work, sold door-to-door by authors eager to seek an audience within their own community. The entrepreneurial schemes to get their work read and published show the innovative ways in which this early cohort sought recognition. Calling himself “El trovador moderno,” or the modern troubadour, García’s writing extended to journalism. He edited El Progreso and La Cronica, local Spanish-language newspapers in the American South West.

The inversions that make José Inés García’s work so compelling are contextual as well as literary; García suffered an accident in mid-life, leading to permanent blindness that did not hinder his work as editor, translator and poet in New Mexico. He was also raised Protestant in an ethnic enclave of New Mexico, something of an outlier in traditionally Catholic Hispanic circles. His winking inversions continue in his focus on trickster figures, a literary trope used often to make light of intercultural tensions and difference. The transformation of gender roles happening during a time of social upheaval also captured his attention, producing several works that play on themes of gender. Given such topics, the early date of such work remains significant in its analysis of social change. Martín-Rodríguez was able to capture this recovery, adding to scholarship on forgotten figures central to Chicano Literature’s literary corpus and style.

France Turned Upside Down

by Susan Amussen

I have been following the coverage of the shootings in Paris at Charlie Hebdo and the aftermath somewhat obsessively. But The New York Times headline jumped out at me.[1] We have spent the last year and a half in our seminar examining the idea of the world upside down in multiple forms. A few times we have approached the pain and grief that caused this exclamation, but as in most academic contexts, we tend to distance ourselves from it. It also stood out because when weighing whether to choose this focus for our first two-year cycle, I made the decision when I heard a reporter after another tragedy – the shootings of school children at Newtown, CT, in December 2012 – say, “The world is upside down.”

In sixteenth and seventeenth century England, the period I study, the phrase and concept of a world upside down has many uses. It’s used in comedy, in lawsuits, in politics. The idea of inversion, a world upside down, is everywhere. It happens when women boss their husbands around, when inferiors challenge their betters. Witches turn the world upside down, but it is not used for the impact of war, or natural disaster: these are visitations of God. The death of a loved one is a source of grief, but it is not evidence of an upside down world. An upside down world is, instead, the result of human beings who disrupt the natural order.

The two recent uses I’ve highlighted suggest that we don’t use it now for everyday life, but to respond to tragedies and disasters. An upside down world comes from crisis – events that turn our lives upside down. We may not have the same vision of a hierarchical society that made the world upside down so potent an idea in the seventeenth century, but we do have a sense of how life ought to go. The first page of the google books search for the term includes a book on children in war zones;[2] another on “the global battle over God, truth and power;”[3] one on the work of William Golding;[4] and one on globalization.[5] Globalization and war are turning things upside down. The last year of results for the phrase from The New York Times includes a book review that notes that Primo Levi “said that the concentration camp was ‘a world turned upside down,’” but also trailers for movies where love turns someone’s life upside down. [6]

It appears that we have come – at least in advanced industrial societies – to be insulated from certain kinds of tragedy. We don’t expect people to die young, or terrorists to shoot things up. We even seem to think that war is an anomaly. And those things now upend our understanding of the world, and force us to see things in a new way.

But the movie trailers which talk about people’s lives being turned upside down by love remind us that it is not only disasters that change how we see the world. And it raises a question for each of us to ponder: what have been the events, experiences, or maybe ideas that have changed the way we see the world?

[1] Erlanger, Steven. “Days of Sirens, Fear and Blood: ‘France is Turned Upside Down.’” The New York Times. 9 Jan. 2015. Web. 9 Jan. 2015.

[2] Neil Boothby, Alison Strang, and Michael Wessells, Eds. A World Turned Upside Down: Social Ecological Approaches to Children in War Zones. (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2006).

[3] Phillips, Melanie. The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. (New York: Encounter Books, 2010).

[4] Crawford, Paul. Politics and History in the Work of William Golding: The World Turned Upside Down. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).

[5] Jones, R. J. Barry. The World Turned Upside Down? Globalization and the Future of the State. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/books/review/martin-amiss-zone-of-interest.html accessed Jan. 15 2015: other references included a discussion of the Hunger Games, the Syrian war, and film reviews.

Humor and Transgression in Mexican Stand Up

By Dorie Perez

Dr. Raquel García, a newly minted doctoral graduate visiting Merced from our sister UC campus, UC Davis, presented work that was part of her recent doctoral defense and long-standing research project. She writes about the political nature of Mexican comedy as something transgressive, a newly popular form of entertainment that comes to Mexico by way of the traditional North American comic’s role as entertainer-come-social commentator. Yet the tropes of stand-up comedy that many American audiences are familiar with – the Jerry Seinfeld-style routine of humorous critique offered up to a crowd looking for both commonality and shocking amusement- are new to Mexican audiences, even in the boundary-pushing performance arts community within Mexico’s cosmopolitan districts. It is a testament to cultural diffusion and the growing space for social critique in a country with strict rules about private and public spheres that stand-up’s popularity as a medium is growing.

García identifies several key elements at play in her analysis. García discusses the role of performance as its own manifestation of transgression from socially-accepted norms in Mexican society. The play-acting, the “just kidding!” qualifiers that comedians add to their politically astute analysis of historical inequities in Mexican society are indeed played for laughs, but their meaning is clear. A strong critique of the role of political and governmental corruption in everyday life, including the dominant power regimes of the narcotic-trafficking cartels that run great swaths of Mexico’s countryside are main targets, even as the comedians themselves equivocate their jokes as mere humor. Comedians Horacio Almada, Manuel Nava and Jürgen Scritto are included in García’s analysis, and her observation of their practice adds an ethnographic layer of analysis to the discourse they have created that reads as a new modality of resistance. All three comedians are centered in Mexico City, and they maintain a social media presence as a way to both reach out to transnational audiences and re-inscribe their work as social commentary meant for both the Twittersphere and the political landscape they live in as Mexican citizens.

In a heavily Catholic country, Almada’s humor that centers on the dogma of the Church and its frequent hypocrisies is a high wire act, yet the responsive nature of his audiences (seen as Youtube footage in García’s presentation) shows that he’s struck a vein of truth that many share and are even eager to have deconstructed. In a passionate fury, he acts out both the argument of the devoted and that of the priest admonishing his flock, asking about heaven and hell and wondering where he will go if he refuses to commit murder but misses Sunday mass. García includes this bit as a moment signifying the comic’s role as arbiter of truth, or rather, a shared frustration, that many social-media savvy, contemporary Mexicans enact within the confines of a more traditional society. Through comedy, García  argues, the pressure valves of duty and propriety are released for both Mexican audiences and a socially-aware comic eager to showcase his vision of the world gone topsy-turvy.

“Unquiet Women” and the Act of Subversion

by Dorie Perez

The subtle differences between the terms inversion, subversion and perversion, presented by seminar discussant Matthew Kaiser, are usually glossed over in speech, terms used interchangeably to mean “othering” or change as a process of fragmentation. The idea of inversion as a movement, often smaller-scale acts than violent political upheaval, is an interesting take on social change and something Susan Amussen presented in her analysis of Early Modern historical works in late September 2014.

Amussen presented what will be one chapter of a book tentatively called “Turning the World Upside Down: Gender, Culture and Politics in Early Modern England,” which builds on the work of her late husband, the historian David Underdown. Continuing the topsy-turvy theme of the Merced Seminar in the Humanities series for Fall semester 2014, she writes of “unruly women” and other deviants who dared to challenge convention in Elizabethan England. “Mannish-women and womanish-men,” patriarchs that failed to uphold their place as lord and master, among other kinds of usurpation of male authority were targets of John Swetnam, a pamphleteer in 1640s England whose social critique often morphed into full-scale misogyny. Pamphlets were the blog post of their era, read and responded to by intellectuals of all stripes; Swetnam’s back and forth argument with other writers, including quite a few female intellectuals, has held up as an example of the transhistorical tension between idealized expectations of womanhood and the subversive play of gender politics in an increasingly changing world, continuing today unabated.

The global social politics of the Early Modern era were present in the Shakespearean play The Taming of The Shrew (1592), a prime example used in Amussen’s analysis of subtle inversions of gender roles that fueled a discourse of inversion from within a dichotomized world of male/female, rich/poor, and young/old – dichotomies first discussed by Mikhail Bahktin in Rabelais and His World (1965). A royal (or rather, royal-adjacent) sex scandal involving the dissolution of Frances Howard’s marriage to the Earl of Essex in 1613 and subsequent remarriage to the Earl of Somerset fueled fears of subversive female comportment, especially when the perversions of witchcraft were said to be involved. Witchcraft, excessive interest in fashion and makeup, as well as sexual desire, were acts by women to subvert their roles at home, in the streets and at Court. Dress was the process by which identity was encoded, and through that signification, the inscription of idealized roles and behaviors. Any subversive activities strayed into the grey area between the normative and empirical Woman, according to a Foucauldian analysis, destabilizing social norms by way of inversion, perversion and subversion.

Dress, and therefore, womanhood, came under intense scrutiny in the Jacobean literary landscape, where any sense of otherness – foreign silks, mystical allusions, ostentatious luxury- was regulated by social stratification. Yellow hoods, and the color itself, were the sign of prostitutes and other fallen women, using the identifiers of the day as an inverted ladder to another social role available to them. The gender boundaries Amussen analyzes are clearly bounded entities regulated by social interaction and royal decree, yet somehow simultaneously inverted on a daily basis in regular acts of autonomy. They, in turn, set the stage for social relationships and tensions that then spill into the geopolitical arena. Amussen’s analysis ultimately concerns these genre-crossing “disorderly women” and their “failed patriarchs,” by whom social norms were transgressed, even as they worked to upkeep them.

The Wisdom of Farts: Ethics and Politics, Carnival and Festive Drama in Late Medieval and Early Modern France

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin: Theater, Farce, 1907
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin: Theater, Farce, 1907

by Paola Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco

On December 4th, Noah Guynn shared his preliminary work on farce in late medieval and early modern France. This presentation is the first semester of seminars on our two-year research theme: “The World Upside Down: Topsy-Turvy.” In fact, Guynn’s essay, which is the introductory chapter from his book on politics and ethics in medieval and early modern French farce, impeccably shows how both literary works and theater have the power to challenge, change, deliberately reverse, and undermine expected order. In his essay, Guynn aims to theorize and historicize festive comedy, by demonstrating how farce confronts controversies of the day over ethics, politics, and power. Guynn’s exploration of farce questions the prevalent idea that festive misrule is a temporary inversion of social power and hierarchies, responding to a large body of criticism on Bakhtin’s work. Bakhtin describes Carnival as the “the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (9), standing in contrast with official feasts. Critics of Bakhtin see Carnival purely as an instrument of mass-control; this can be summarized by Eco’s words: “The prerequisites of a ‘good’ carnival are: (i) the law must be so pervasively and profoundly introjected as to be overwhelmingly present at the moment of its violation, [and] (ii) the moment of carnivalization must be very short, and allowed only once a year.” (6) Guynn finds a middle ground between Bakhtin and Eco, demonstrating how farce is open to plural readings that attempt to recognize all tensions, negotiations, and dialogues that were mediated by comic theater. Plural reading seems inferred in these plays by the fact that they were often performed in public spaces and accessible to large and diverse audiences (i.e., diverse in terms of age, gender, wealth, social status, education, vocation, etc.) (10).

In exploring this middle ground, Guynn engages with James Scott and his theories of infrapolitics and hidden scripts. Central to Guynn’s work is not only the analysis of scripts – which can only partially reveal the realities of performance and were probably censored before being printed – but, also, archival sources (e.g., formal bans on performance, writs of censorship, and legal records documenting investigations and prosecutions of actors), which give us insight on performers and show how all performances were subject to scrutiny from the elites, thus indicating that the ruling elites perceived theatre, farces, and more broadly festive comedies a potential threat to civic order. These archival sources also show how elites sponsored farces for propaganda in different ways. For example, while Louis XII understood the importance of farce to obtain information on social dissent, Francis I, who was also a patron of farce, controlled scripts, plays, and actors much more than his predecessor through censorship.

Here are a few of the questions I posed to Noah: 1. I would ask you to give us more information on your book project. Will you mainly focus on your archival study or also provide an analysis of some of the most representative scripts of that period? 2. How different were farces that were performed in other periods of the year from carnivalesque farces? 3. How many farces do we know of that were produced in late medieval and early modern France? Can they be grouped based on plot and social, political, gender issues they addressed? 4. Is there a difference between 15th-century farces and 16th-century farces? 5. How much does this genre retain of its ancestor, that is, the Latin atellan farce? Can we recognize in late medieval farce stereotypical traits that date back to the Latin masks of atellan farce? What is really original and innovative in this farce that makes it so contextual? 6. I found your focus on archival sources amazing. I am wondering if iconography can also tell us about the places where these plays were enacted and their audiences.

89@25: Views of the Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement as Experience, Event, Myth, Materials and Memory

by Robin DeLugan

Ed Lanfranco, a graduate student in the World Cultures Graduate Group and a 2013-2014 Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellow, shared his intellectual journey to design and frame a particular research project concerning the pro-Democracy movement in China—centered on the events surrounding the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square, Beijing protest—which next year will reach a 25-year anniversary. Ed has a unique connection to this particular history because between 1988-2009 he lived in China. While still a relative newcomer, he directly experienced the June 4, 1989 events—one of the most visible contemporary uprisings of citizens against the Chinese government. The government of China sent tanks and troops to restore order. The brutal dispersion resulted in death and injury. The world at large learned about efforts to squash China’s pro-democracy movement; meanwhile the Chinese government enforced a national ban on information about the event and its aftermath.  Ed, acting much as an ethnographer in the field, collected flyers, posters and other ephemera surrounding “June 4.”  Ed is researching official efforts within the People’s Republic of China to efface the 1989 Pro-Democracy Movement.  While desiring to write the history of 1989, the topic of the past in the present is central to his project.  When Ed inquires, “…are the Chinese aspirations in 1989 Beijing dead and gone, best forgotten there and by outsiders?”, he draws attention to the 25 years that have since transpired. The dynamics on the ground in China and elsewhere invite an examination of official silences; memories and counter-memories; and the forgetting that can surrounding the politics of the past.

Ed is responding to the milestone of the 25th anniversary of the events at Tiananmen Square through a series of activities that will bring scholarly and public attention to China’s past.  In addition to writing the history of 1989, Ed plans to develop the following: a UC Merced Kolligian Library exhibition “89@25”, a book for popular audiences, and a digital archive of the memorabilia he collected while in China. He also plans to travel in California and engage the pubic about the anniversary.

As a scholar who studies the role of academicians in memory work, in particular in memory work that challenges official silence about state violence and as someone who sees herself as one protagonist among others in the historical struggle for inclusion, human rights, and social justice, I pose to Ed the following questions:

a) To what extent do academics figure in your research?

b) What role do you see for yourself as a memory catalyst?

c) Beyond academicians, have you identified other collaborators or interlocutors inside or outside of China that are committed to commemorating the 25th anniversary? 

d) Are there networked domestic or international efforts taking place?  

e) Lastly, have you identified other collections or archives pertaining to 1989 that can be compared or contrasted with your own personal archives?

Ed’s research interests complement my own and I will look forward to learning more about this important and unique project as it continues to develop.  Important to the research will be what next year’s 25th anniversary commemorations reveal about memory and nation; about states and citizens; about memory and democracy; about China’s post-democracy aspirations; and about the global interest in this important anniversary.