Lawrence Reviewed in Bookforum

Tim Lawrence's Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 is reviewed in the new issue of Bookforum. Reviewer John Rockwell praises Lawrence for writing "the broadest and most insightful study of the whole musical scene so far." He adds, "[E]ven if you didn’t know about Russell and are not yet persuaded to
pursue him further, this is still a book worth reading.
Psychologically, Russell emerges as indeed fascinating, more
fascinating than his music, as a maverick without, Lawrence notes, the
feisty self-righteousness such figures often embody."

Karadzic Trial Begins in The Hague

Excerpt from Twilight of Impunity by Judith Armatta. Copyright Duke University Press 2010.

For nearly three years I sat in a courtroom in The Hague, observing what was billed as “the trial of the century.” Slobodan Milosevic was accused of sixty-six counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide for his role in the decade-long conflict that tore Yugoslavia apart, leaving over 100,000 people dead, millions displaced, and a way of life destroyed. His path to the courtroom was one of power, carnage, and hubris brought low. Mine evolved over a five-year odyssey that began in Belgrade in 1997, when Milosevic was still Serbia’s president. I was sent by the American Bar Association’s Central and East European Law Initiative (ABA/CEELI) to assist a group of dissident judges establish an independent judges’ association and to support other rule-of-law efforts. A year after fighting ended in Bosnia and Croatia, Milosevic’s power was shaken by three months of Serbian demonstrations against his autocratic rule. After the democratic opposition squandered its victory through infighting, Milosevic reasserted authority by fomenting yet another war to drive the majority Albanian population out of Kosova. When NATO began bombing Serbia and Montenegro and hundreds of thousands of refugees poured over the borders, I left for Macedonia to document what was happening. The stories we gathered from refugees—of rape, murder, beatings, property destruction, looting, and forced deportation—formed part of the data used by the ICTY to indict and prosecute Slobodan Milosevic.
    When the war ended and Serb forces withdrew from Kosova, I returned to work in Montenegro, then went home to the United States for a respite that included my mother’s last year of life and her death. In the meantime the Serbian people ousted Milosevic from power and, one year later, their new, reform-minded prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, orchestrated his handover to the ICTY, responding to pressure from the United States. Milosevic would stand trial for the most grievous crimes associated with his ten-year reign of destruction. When the Coalition for International Justice, a human rights organization in Washington, offered me a front-row seat at his trial, I jumped at the chance to see law applied to the man who had used it as a tool to distort reality at great cost to people and to the rule of law itself.
    This book is my account of the trial, from the beginning to its bitter end over four years later. It is not the definitive trial record, nor entirely objective. Who we are—our values, interpretation, and worldview—determines what we see. My years in the former Yugoslavia inform my point of view. The trial of Slobodan Milosevic is more personal for my having lived under his rule and seen the havoc he made of people’s lives—Serbs as well as Montenegrins, Bosniaks, Kosovars, and Croats, friends and colleagues as well as strangers.
    In March 1998 I sat on a couch in Pristina, Kosova, looking at photographs of massacred civilians, men, women, and children, some horribly disfigured from being shot at close range. At a Women in Black conference I listened to Bosnian women from Gorazde describe how they survived a multiyear siege and bombardment of their city, Muslims and Serbs looking out for one another.1 In Belgrade I walked past a legless veteran who was no longer of any use to the army that left him to beg on the streets for survival. A friend in Montenegro told me of a woman badly beaten by her husband, who threatened to kill her when she confronted him about sexual assaults he had committed during the war. I saw the bullet-ridden skeletons of buildings and houses in Sarajevo, Vukovar, Mostar, and Dubrovnik; the yellow ribbons marking off areas still mined years after the war; soldiers carrying Kalishnikovs running in formation through the streets of Belgrade, just as they had walked the streets of Pristina to intimidate and frighten; UN tanks in the narrow streets of Sarajevo; people who feared crossing a border with the wrong license plate, or speaking the wrong dialect; the vacant eyes of those who had seen too much. On and on the images and words float in my memory.
    They brought me to The Hague, where people do not shoot guns to celebrate. Yet this placid Dutch city housed men accused of responsibility for the most heinous crimes imaginable. Among them was Slobodan Milosevic, for three years a man I would see more often than my partner, friends, and loved ones. I watched and listened as the famous and the common folk took the stand to describe how he had destroyed Yugoslavia and its tolerant, multiethnic way of life. The survivors confronted him with their very personal losses—of family, friends, and communities, of wholeness and peace of mind, of trust in their neighbors and humanity. Milosevic watched it all with no apparent remorse, sympathy, or compassion. He brought his yes-men (and a few women) to play the parts he had written for them, describing a fantasy world where Serbs were always and only victims, never causing harm. Milosevic attempted to manipulate and undermine the trial, at the same time that he used it to further the “myth of Milosevic,” which he himself had created. And then he died, robbing many, including me, of some hoped-for resolution. It would have to be enough that he spent his last years confined to a jail cell and a courtroom, compelled to listen as his victims recounted the suffering and loss that his obsession with power had caused. It is more than the vast majority of dictators ever face. And it is an important marker on the road to ending the impunity of powerful men who destroy hundreds of thousands of lives as if they were brushing off a fly. Is it the twilight of impunity, as the title of this book suggests, or is that merely a hope? Only time will tell, but I offer this book in an attempt to tip the scales a little more toward justice.

Karen Ho in The Guardian

The Guardian's "Brain Food" column features anthropologist Karen Ho this week. Aditya Chakrabortty writes, "Anthropologists used to study the alien: pygmies in rainforests with blowdarts and more piercings than a knife-thrower's assistant.
Nowadays, however, few societies are more foreign than that found on
Wall Street. After all, what could be more outlandish than the tribes
of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and the famously fierce Goldman Sachs – with their obscure tongue (CDOs, CLOs and the rest), their worship of gold and those grisly ritual cullings of staff?" Ho's book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street is an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers which shows how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed.

San Antonio Express-News Reviews Paredez’s Selenidad

The San Antonio Express-News reviews Deborah Paredez's Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Reviewer Yvette Benavides writes, "What is certain and undeniable about Corpus Christi's most famous
daughter is this: What we can now never know about Selena's rising star
reveals other truths after her death." She continues, "It is perhaps no coincidence that the decade in which Selena died is
the same decade that witnessed the so-called cultural and commercial
"Latin explosion." It is also perhaps no accident that a resurgence of
anti-immigration discourse and policy emerged with those same events. 'The fact that she died at a particular moment in American history is important,' says Paredez." Paredez will be reading from and signing her book tonight at 7 p.m. at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio.

Seminole Gaming in the News

After months of trying to agree on a gambling compact, it appears that Florida's Seminole tribe and its state government are at an impasse, reports the Miami Herald. At issue is the desire of some lawmakers to expand gambling throughout the state and the refusal of the Seminoles to give Florida $150 million a year in shared gaming revenue if the expansion goes through. But the even larger issue looming behind the dispute is that of sovereignty. The Seminoles claim that Federal law makes them a sovereign nation, not subject to the state of Florida's fines and rules. The Florida House of Representatives has asked the Federal government to step in and halt gaming on the Seminole reservations. These large issue of sovereignty are discussed in detail in Jessica Cattelino's High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. She argues that the Seminoles have used their vast gaming profits to shore up both their cultural traditions and their sovereignty, and that while states and the Federal government have both been happy to let tribes claim sovereignty when they were poor, the addition of huge gambling profits raises the stakes for everyone. When asked about the current impasse, Cattelino said she is "particularly intrigued by the
potential for the tribe to negotiate gaming terms with the federal
government and thereby cut out the state."

Village Voice Praises White’s Rumba Rules

The Village Voice looks to expert Bob White and his book Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire in an article about music in the Democratic Republic of Congo. White argues that "many linguistic complexities are rooted in the repression endured under Joseph Désiré Mobutu, a/k/a Mobutu Sese Seko, the CIA-installed despot who changed the country's name to Zaire for much of his 32-year reign (which finally ended in 1997)." Reporter K. Leander Williams especially likes White's chapter that analyzes "soukous lyrics by such stars as J.B. M'Piana, Koffi Olomide,
and General Defao to show that love paeans and praise songs are often
veiled cries for help, community, even power in a society gone awry."

Gender Not Always Clear Cut

The Washington Post has a thoughtful article today about how in athletics and other areas, it's not always easy to assign a gender to a person. The recent plight of runner Caster Semenya brought to the forefront the issue of competitors who have always identified as women, but who test genetically as male. Reporter David A. Farenthold writes that, with one in 100 people having a medical condition that might make gender assignment difficult, these issues extend far beyond athletic competition. Many people with these medical conditions identify as intersex. Katrina Karkazis's Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience is the first book to examine contemporary controversies over the medical management of intersexuality in the United States from the multiple perspectives of those most intimately involved (parents and doctors as well as intersex people themselves). It has been widely praised for its thoroughness and sensitivity. Check it out if you'd like to know more about this complex issue.

Weber’s Makeover TV featured in Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Chronicle of Higher Education chose Brenda R. Weber's Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity for their "Nota Bene" feature this week. Reporter Kacie Glenn finds that "Weber was drawn to the subject when, watching an episode of Extreme Makeover,
she was puzzled to hear a young woman who had just undergone cosmetic
surgery declare, 'I just don't care what people think of me anymore.' . . . Weber argues that it described a logical, if paradoxical, state of mind.
She theorizes that the woman, like many makeover participants, felt
empowered even as she submitted to society's ideals, because of the
show's insistence that until that moment, her true self had been
suppressed." In the book Weber is critical of the makeover shows, but remains a fan. "Call me a sucker," she writes. "But I like the quirky joy that's represented in such hopeful statements of transformation."

Stanley Fish at Duke Press Annual Meeting

Check out the second video in our Inside Duke Press series!

The Annual Meeting for Duke University Press took place on Thursday, October 8th. Our speaker for this
year's meeting was literary scholar, New York Times columnist, and
former DUP director Stanley Fish. He spoke about his time spent in the
English Department at Duke University and his time as the Duke
University Press Director. This video contains a portion of his speech.

Tim Lawrence’s Hold On to Your Dreams Starts Strong

It's barely been released from our warehouse, but already people are talking about Tim Lawrence's new book Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. Lawrence was in New York City last weekend for a conference devoted to Russell, attended by many music journalists as well as academics. And the book is already garnering rave reviews. Writing in The Wire, Ken Hollings calls the book a "sensitive and thorough biography" and adds, "with Hold On to Your Dreams, the outline of an outstanding and prescient artist can now be more clearly made out." (This review is not available online, alas.) In Time Out New York, Michaelangelo Matos calls the book "obsessively researched" and praises Lawrence's "overriding thesis—that Russell's boundary crossing was as important as the work he made." And a new review by John McLeod in Flagpole says, "Lawrence . . . is a wonderful writer, able to ruminate on music in a way that is deeply knowledgeable without ever losing the groove and the beat." We expect more great reviews to come!