A Fugitive Ship and a Crisis in the Cruise Industry: A Guest Post by Eric Paul Roorda

A warrant has been issued for the arrest of the luxury cruise ship Crystal Symphony, 781 feet long, 99 feet wide, 12 decks tall.  It was last seen in Bimini, The Bahamas, hiding in plain sight.

            The COVID-19 pandemic mothballed the $90 billion global cruise ship industry for fifteen months.  It limped back to action last July. The first ship to return to sea was billed as “safer” for passengers than remaining on land. Since then, the über-contagious Omicron Variant has spurred an alpine surge in cases. The complicated system of keeping cruise ships free of disease became vastly more complicated, then proved to be ineffective.

            Crystal Symphony first fell prey to the immediate crisis of a COVID-19 outbreak earlier this month. I was a guest lecturer onboard, wearing a contact tracer device that looked like a wristwatch (but which did not tell the time). Day after day, an untold number of passengers and crew members disappeared from view into quarantine. The Cruise Director himself numbered among the missing, unseen for the last third of a ten-day voyage. I submitted to being tested on demand three times in five days, as the captain and his medical staff scrambled without success to contain the contagion. Jamaican authorities disallowed people from the ship from coming ashore. Shipboard amenities closed, one by one, until on the morning of disembarkation in Miami, a general eagerness prevailed among the ship’s passengers to get off the boat.

            Then Crystal Cruises itself succumbed to the long-term crisis that the pandemic has brought to the industry, when its parent company, conglomerate Genting Hong Kong Limited, lost its financial footing, and suddenly suspended operations of Crystal Symphony, and its sister ships Crystal Serenity, also running Caribbean routes, and Crystal Endeavor, a brand-new vessel customized for Antarctic Ocean cruising. Fuel providers in Miami, owed more than $1 million, sued the company, leading to the arrest warrant for the ship, which now is on the lam.

            If COVID-19-induced bankruptcy forces Crystal Cruises out of business, it could be a coalmine-canary moment. Other smaller players in the highly concentrated industry, which is dominated by three corporations—Carnival, Norwegian, and Royal Caribbean—may meet the same end.  If Crystal cashes out, it will be the last chapter of a story that began in 1885, when the formation of the new Japan Steamship Company—known by its Japanese acronym, NYK, for Nippon Yusen Kaisha—announced to the world that the modernized Empire of Japan would be a major player in geopolitics henceforth. NYK became the preferred way to cross the Pacific before WWII, like Cunard Line was on the Atlantic, with newspapers covering the passages of Hollywood movie stars from Los Angeles to Tokyo and Shanghai. But the war sent every NYK ship to the bottom, and the line was slow to rebuild, finally re-establishing passenger service with the creation of Crystal Cruises in 1995.

            The NYK connection ended in 2016, when Genting acquired the property to add to its cruise holdings in twenty countries around the world. Its European subsidiary, in arrears to German creditors, is the weak link in Genting’s maritime chain. Its dissolution, caused by COVID-19, could cause Genting to fold, taking Crystal Cruises with it. Will a tsunami of failures then ensue, as the pandemic rages on, and the business model of cruise ships, touted as being safer than real life, proves to be illusory?

Eric Paul Roorda is the editor of The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2020). His next book is The Dictator Stands Alone, which explores the symbiosis between tyranny and tourist development in the Dominican Republic, and is a sequel to The Dictator Next Door (1998). Save 30% off The Dictator Next Door with the coupon code E98RORDA. Read the Introduction to The Ocean Reader free on our website and save 30% on the paperback using the coupon code E20RORDA.

New Titles in Asian American Studies

We regret to announce that in the ongoing efforts to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we will be unable to meet with you during the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) conference, which has been cancelled.

We know that many of you look forward to stocking up on new books at special discounts at our conferences, so we are pleased to extend a 50% discount on all in-stock books and journal issues through May 1. Use coupon code SPRING50 to save 50% when ordering online. In addition, if you spend $100 or more, we are offering free shipping to U.S. addresses. Journal subscriptions and society memberships don’t qualify for the 50% discount, but they do count toward the $100 threshold.

Big congratulations to Renisa Mawani, whose book Across Oceans of Law is the winner of the AAAS Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History. The prize committee wrote, “Grappling with the interconnectedness of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans—and the ways in which Asian Indians navigated the reach of the British empire—Mawani shifts our perspectives not only from U.S.-centric histories, but also from terrestrially-bound histories. . . . Mawani is able to ground her conceptual insights, transforming what could have remained an abstract, legal history of maritime law into a richly materialized narrative of mobility, empire, and race.” 

Check out some of the other great titles we would have featured in our booth at AAAS. 

Nandita Sharma traces the development of the categories of migrants and natives from the nineteenth century to the present in Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants to theorize how the idea of people’s rights being tied to geographical notions of belonging came to be.

In a brilliant reinvention of the travel guide, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i, artists, activists, and scholars redirect readers from the fantasy of Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise and tourist destination toward a multilayered and holistic engagement with Hawai‘i’s culture, complex history, and the effects of colonialism. This volume is edited by Hokulani K. Aikau and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez.

Rick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students at the University of Washington as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence into a space based on meaningfulness, respect, and multiple notions of student success in The Ocean in the School: Pacific Islander Students Transforming Their University.

In Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania, Maile Arvin analyzes the history of racialization of Polynesians within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai‘i, arguing that a logic of possession through whiteness animates European and Hawaiian settler colonialism.

Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics and film from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present, Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal postsocialist China in Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility.

In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system that is entrenched in and reinforces racial capitalism and patriarchy.

Weaving U.S. history into the larger fabric of world history, the contributors to Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain de-exceptionalize the American empire, placing it in a global transimperial context as a way to grasp the power relations that shape imperial formations. This collection is edited by Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton.

Examining the work of writers and artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Allan deSouza, Kandice Chuh advocates for what she calls “illiberal humanism” as a way to counter the Eurocentric liberal humanism that perpetuates structures of social inequality in The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man.”

If you were hoping to connect with one of our editors about your book project at AAAS, please reach out to them by email. See our editors’ specialties and contact information here and our submissions guidelines here. We are now accepting submissions online!

Once again, we’re sorry to miss you in person but hope the 50% discount with free U.S. shipping on orders over $100 will make it possible for you to pick up some new books and journal issues. Use coupon SPRING50 at checkout and see the fine print on the sale here.

Cruise Ships Confront Coronavirus: Passing Panic or Depressing Portent? A Guest Post by Eric Paul Roorda

The Diamond Princess docked in Yokohama

There is a talented band named Wookie Foot, whose lyrics are quirky and insightful. Their song “Cruise,” from 2003, skewers the cruise ship experience with deft sarcasm. The closing words were prophetic:

“And in the end, you’re just a virus wearing shoes,
on a cruise.
A virus!”

(The whole hilarious tune can be heard here.)

Passenger ships have always had to contend with the danger of a disease breaking out onboard. Vessels packed with people on the high seas are like powder kegs for spark-like contagions, and potential vectors for pandemics, such as the plague known as The Black Death, which arrived in Europe from Asia by ship in 1347, then spread rapidly around the Mediterranean. In the 19^th century, a single incipient case of typhus or cholera among the immigrants crowded on a ship could grievously sicken and kill hundreds of them during the voyage. For this reason, quarantine regulations are among the oldest laws in human history.

In recent years, the cruise industry has had to fight Noro-virus, a highly contagious malady that causes a week of awful symptoms. But while Noro-virus is rarely fatal, the newest bug, Coronavirus, is a killer; about 2% of those who contract it succumb to its severe pneumonia. For cruise ships, and perhaps the entire industry, Coronavirus is a lethal threat.

The plight of two mega-vessels owned by Carnival Cruises is causing worldwide worry. Holland America Line’s Westerdam became a 21^st century Flying Dutchman for two weeks, turned away from one port after another because the Coronavirus has stowed away, until Cambodia welcomed the ship, allowing a thousand possible carriers to disperse across the globe. Worse, Princess Cruise Line’s Diamond Princess arrived in Yokohama with the Coronavirus raging among the ship’s company of some 3,600 passengers and crew, where Japanese authorities subjected them to a badly botched quarantine. According to a full-page exposé in the New York Times on February 23, Diamond Princess has become a “Petri dish” for the pathogen. While passengers gained egress one way or another, the crew remained in their densely packed quarters below the waterline, without meaningful efforts to segregate those who exhibited symptoms, working merciless hours to succor the paying guests, who were isolated in their suites. Only two cruise ships out of the 314 in the worldwide pleasure fleet have made the headlines—so far. But the dangers that Coronavirus present to the cruise ship could be general.

An observer may draw two tentative conclusions.

First, when transformational phenomena reach and disperse onto the Ocean, the Ocean exponentially amplifies the range of the changes. Examples of this include the spread of the new species H. sapiens after they learned to build boats; the impact of the new religion of Islam, which Arab traders brought to Indonesia and the Philippines, and which drew worshippers by sea to Mecca; the imposition of the culture of violent conquest that the new nation-state of Spain exported to the Western Hemisphere beginning in 1492; invasive organisms, which degrade the environments and damage the economies of the places they go; and viruses.

Second, cruise ships are like crowded pods of change. They impact the infrastructures, economies, environments, and cultures of ports of call, big and small, wherever they wander. The Coronavirus moment provides a lethal example.

The question remains, will the unfolding Coronavirus pandemic kindle suspicions about the whole cruise ship industry, which generates an estimated $126 billion in global economic activity and employs about a million people? Could it complicate the sans souci atmosphere that veteran cruisers expect and demand? Will it cause potential passengers to spend their vacation dollars some other way? Moreover, will the terrifying spread of Coronavirus, which is dragging down stock markets around the world as I write, trigger a series of agonizing re-evaluations of the cost/benefit ratio of the cruise industry’s impact on destinations around the world?

Eric Paul Roorda is the editor of The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics. He is a Professor of History at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, where he specializes in the diplomatic and naval history of  the Caribbean Sea. During the summer, he directs the Munson Institute graduate program in Maritime Studies at Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut. He regularly lectures on cruises on the Regent Seven Seas Voyager.

Save 30% on The Ocean Reader on our website with coupon code E20RORDA.

New Books in January

If one of your resolutions for 2020 is to read more books, we’ve got you covered. Ring in the new year with these captivating new releases!

In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, theorizing skin and skin color as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

Weaving U.S. history into the larger fabric of world history, the contributors to Crossing Empires de-exceptionalize the American empire, placing it in a global transimperial context as a way to grasp the power relations that shape imperial formations. This collection is edited by Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton.

Engaging contemporary photography by Sally Mann, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and others, Shawn Michelle Smith traces how historical moments come to be known photographically and the ways in which the past continues to inhabit, punctuate, and transform the present through the photographic medium in Photographic Returns.

Spanning the centuries between pre-contact indigenous Haiti to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the selections in The Haiti Reader introduce readers to Haiti’s dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of Haitians from all walks of life. This volume is edited by Laurent Dubois, Kaiama L. Glover, Nadève Ménard, Millery Polyné, and Chantalle F. Verna.

The contributors to Futureproof (edited by D. Asher Ghertner, Hudson McFann, and Daniel M. Goldstein) examine the affective and aesthetic dimensions of security infrastructures and technology with studies ranging from Jamaica and Jakarta to Colombia and the US-Mexico border.

Examining abjection in a range of visual and material culture, the contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death to theorizing how it has become a means to acquire political and cultural capital in the twenty-first century. This volume is edited by Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond.

Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga argue that border wall construction along the U.S.–Mexico border manifests transformations in citizenship practices that are aimed not only at keeping migrants out but also enmeshing citizens into a wider politics of exclusion in Fencing in Democracy.

In Politics of Rightful Killing, Sima Shakhsari analyzes the growth of Weblogistan—the online and real-life transnational network of Iranian bloggers in the early 2000s—and the ways in which despite being an effective venue for Iranians to pursue their political agendas, it was the site for surveillance, cooptation, and self-governance.

In Invisibility by Design, Gabriella Lukács traces how young Japanese women’s unpaid labor as bloggers, net idols, “girly” photographers, online traders, and cell phone novelists was central to the development of Japan’s digital economy in the 1990s and 2000s.

Presented in the context of the nonprofit arts collective More Art’s fifteen-year history, and featuring first-person testimony, critical essays, and in-depth documentary materials, More Art in the Public Eye is an essential, experiential guide to the field of socially engaged public art and its increasing relevance. This volume is edited by Micaela Martegani, Jeff Kasper, and Emma Drew, and we are distributing it for More Art.

Shana L. Redmond traces Paul Robeson’s continuing cultural resonances in popular culture and politics in Everything Man, showing how he remains a vital force and presence for all those he inspired.

In The Complete Lives of Camp People, Rudolf Mrázek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of internees of two twentieth-century concentration camps and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to and reveal the fundamental logics of modernity.

In Avian Reservoirs, Frédéric Keck traces how the anticipation of bird flu pandemics has changed relations between birds and humans in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, showing that humans’ reliance on birds is key to mitigating future pandemics.

Collecting texts from all corners of the world that span antiquity to the present, The Ocean Reader (edited by Eric Paul Roorda) charts humans’ relationship to the ocean, treating it as a dynamic site of history, culture, and politics.

The contributors to Blue Legalities attend to the seas as a legally and politically conflicted space to analyze the conflicts that emerge where systems of governance interact with complex geophysical, ecological, economic, biological, and technological processes. This collection is edited by Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson.

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New Books in November

This month, we’re offering a cornucopia of fresh titles in anthropology, media studies, sociology, history, native and indigenous studies, and more. Take a look at all of these exciting new books available in November!

What does it mean to be a decolonial tourist? We are excited to present our first travel guide book,  Detours, edited by Hokulani K. Aikau and Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez.  In the book artists, activists, and scholars redirect readers from the fantasy of Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise and tourist destination toward a multilayered and holistic engagement with Hawai‘i’s culture, complex history, and the effects of colonialism. We’ll have lots of copies at the American Studies Association meeting in Honolulu later this month.

Mark Goodale’s ethnographic study of Bolivian politics and society between 2006 and 2015, A Revolution in Fragments, reveals the fragmentary and contested nature of the country’s radical experiments in pluralism, ethnic politics, and socioeconomic planning.colonialism.

In The Politics of Taste Ana María Reyes examines how the polarizing art of Beatriz González disrupted Cold War aesthetic discourses and the politics of class and modernization in 1960s Colombia.

Nicholas D’Avella offers an ethnographic reflection on the value of buildings in post-crisis Buenos Aires in Concrete Dreams, showing how everyday practices transform buildings into politically, economically, and socially consequential objects, and arguing that such local forms of value and practice suggest possibilities for building better futures.

In his engaging and moving book, Honeypot, E. Patrick Johnson combines magical realism, poetry, and performative writing to bear witness to the real-life stories of black southern queer women in ways that reveal the complexity of identity and the challenges these women face. Johnson is on a book tour for Honeypot. Look for a post later this month with all the dates.

In Trans Exploits Jian Neo Chen examines how contemporary trans of color artists are tracking and resisting their displacement and social marginalization through new forms of cultural expression, performance, and activism.

 

In Punctuations Michael J. Shapiro examines how the use of punctuation—conceived not as a series of marks but as a metaphor for the ways in which artistic genres engage with intelligibility—in art opens pathways for thinking through the possibilities for oppositional politics.

In a meditation on loss, inheritance, and survival, The Unspoken as Heritage, renowned historian Harry Harootunian explores the Armenian genocide’s multigenerational afterlives that remain at the heart of the Armenian diaspora by sketching the everyday lives of his parents, who escaped the genocide in the 1910s.

Tyler Denmead critically examines his role as the founder of New Urban Arts—a nonprofit arts program for young people of color in Providence, Rhode Island—and how despite its success, it unintentionally contributed to Providence’s urban renewal efforts, gentrification, and the displacement of people of color in The Creative Underclass.

Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union’s pushback against the International Criminal Court in order to theorize affect’s role in shaping forms of justice in Affective Justice.

In Before the Flood, Jacob Blanc examines the creation of the Itaipu Dam—the largest producer of hydroelectric power in the world—on the Brazil–Paraguay border during the 1970s and 1980s to explore the long-standing conflicts around land, rights, indigeneity, and identity in rural Brazil.

In Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, edited by Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, the contributors examine the place and role of race in educational films, home movies, industry and government films, anthropological films, church films, and other forms of noncommercial filmmaking throughout the twentieth century.

Deborah A. Thomas uses the 2010 military and police incursion into the Kingston, Jamaica, Tivoli Gardens neighborhood as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and other post-plantation societies in Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation.

In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange traces the afterlives of slavery as lived in a progressive high school set in post-gentrification San Francisco, showing how despite the school’s sincere antiracism activism, it unintentionally perpetuated antiblackness through various practices.

In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho examines the U.S. Navy’s war crimes tribunal in Guam between 1944 and 1949 which tried members of Guam’s indigenous Chamorro community and Japanese nationals and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property.

Maile Arvin analyzes the history of racialization of Polynesians within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai‘i, arguing that a logic of possession through whiteness animates European and Hawaiian settler colonialism in Possessing Polynesians.

In his experimental ethnography, Ethnography #9, Alan Klima examines moneylending, gambling, funeral casinos, and the consultations of spirits and mediums to predict winning lottery numbers to illustrate the relationship between contemporary Thai spiritual and financial practices and global capitalism’s abstraction of monetary value.

In Biogenetic Paradoxes of the Nation, Sakari Tamminen traces the ways in which the mandates of 1992’s Convention on Biological Diversity—hailed as the key symbol of a common vision for saving Earth’s biodiversity—contribute less to biodiversity conservation than to individual nations using genetic resources for economic and cultural gain.

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Honoring Hawai’i on Statehood Day

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of Hawai‘i’s official admission into the U.S. as a state. While many tourists visiting Hawai‘i may commemorate Statehood Day by experiencing the astounding natural beauty and rich cultural traditions of the islands firsthand, anyone can devote some time to honoring Hawai‘i on this holiday by learning more about the archipelago’s complicated path to statehood.

We’ve highlighted several of our related titles below. By delving into historical issues of native sovereignty and popular protest against annexation, these books not only challenge wholly celebratory narratives of Hawaiian statehood but also illuminate the complex legacy of settler colonialism in contemporary Hawai‘i.

In the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1921, the U.S. Congress defined “native Hawaiians” as those people “with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.” In Hawaiian Blood, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui provides an impassioned assessment of how the arbitrary correlation of ancestry and race imposed by the U.S. government on the indigenous people of Hawai‘i has had far-reaching legal and cultural effects.

Kauanui is also the author of Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty, which examines contradictions of indigeneity and self-determination in U.S. domestic policy and international law. In this book, Kauanui shows how Hawaiian elites’ approaches to reforming land, gender, and sexual regulation in the early nineteenth century that paved the way for sovereign recognition of the kingdom complicate contemporary nationalist activism, which too often includes disavowing the indigeneity of indigenous Hawaiians.

In Unsustainable Empire Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state, showing that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism.

A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Noenoe K. Silva’s Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture.

Nation Within by Tom Coffman details the complex history of the events between the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1893 and its annexation to the United States in 1898. Highlighting the native Hawaiians’ resistance during that five-year span, Coffman shows why occupying Hawaiʻi was crucial to American imperial ambitions.

A Nation Rising, edited by Noelani Goodyear-Kaopua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaika′ala Wright, chronicles the political struggles and grassroots initiatives collectively known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, raising issues that resonate far beyond the Hawaiian archipelago such as Indigenous cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and demilitarization.

Are you planning a trip to Hawai‘i? If you’re interested in learning more about how to practice forms of socially conscious tourism during your visit, we recommend checking out our forthcoming book, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i, edited by Hokulani K. Aikau and Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez. In this brilliant reinvention of the travel guide, artists, activists, and scholars redirect readers from the fantasy of Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise and tourist destination toward a multilayered and holistic engagement with Hawai‘i’s culture and complex history. The essays, stories, artworks, maps, and tour itineraries in Detours create decolonial narratives in ways that will forever change how readers think about and move throughout Hawai‘i. Detours will be available in November.

Unpacking Tourism

Tourism shapes popular fantasies of adventure, structures urban and natural space, creates knowledge around difference, and demands an array of occupations servicing the insatiable needs of those who travel for leisure. Even as migrants and refugees have become targets of ire from far-right parties, international tourism has grown worldwide.

The most recent issue of Radical History Review, “Unpacking Tourism,” posits a radical approach to the study of tourism, highlighting how tourism as a paradigmatic modern encounter bleeds into diplomacy, militarism, and empire building. Contributors investigate, among other topics, how the United States has used tourism in Latin America as a tool of interventionist foreign policy, how Bethlehem’s Manger Square has become a contested space between Palestinians and the Israeli state, how Spain’s economy increasingly relies on northern European tourists, and how the US military’s Cold War–era guidebooks attempted to convert soldiers stationed abroad into “ambassadors of goodwill.”

Read the introduction to the issue, made freely available.

Stuart Hall’s First Encounter with London

In this excerpt from Stuart Hall’s new memoir, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, he describes his trip with his mother, Jessie, from Jamaica to the United Kingdom. Hall had earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University and the two traveled there together in 1951. Enjoy the excerpt and then buy the book for 30% off with coupon E17FAMST.

It is uncannily disconcerting to look back at my younger self, arriving in the port of Avonmouth in 1951, ready for a new life but absolutely unsure how it would happen, or what it would look like if it did. I was indeed elsewhere! I can say, however, that the colonial experience prepared me for England. Far from being an untroubled, innocent opportunity for me to step out into something new, this was an encounter which was mightily overdetermined.

My arrival preceded by some three months the general election in October in which the Conservatives ousted Labour and Winston Churchill regained the office of Prime Minister. After a short while I headed for Oxford University, into the very cultural heartland of England.

But this was an encounter which has not yet come to an end. It continues. It was, as Donald Hinds termed it a long while ago, ‘a journey to an illusion’ – or rather, a journey to the shattering of illusions, inaugurating a process of protracted disenchantment. I didn’t really know what I would find or what I would do with ‘it’ if I found ‘it’. I knew I didn’t want to be ‘it’, whatever that was. But I did want to encounter in the flesh, as it were, this phantasm of ‘other worlds’, swollen with – as it happened – false promise. What I really knew about Britain turned out to be a bewildering farrago of reality and fantasy. However, such illusions as I may have taken with me were unrealized because, fortunately, they were unrealizable. The episode was painful as well as exciting. It changed me irrevocably, almost none of it in ways I had remotely anticipated.

The whole experience was eerily familiar and disconcertingly strange at the same time. One can attribute this to the sense of déjà‑vu which assails colonial travellers on first encountering face-to-face the imperial metropole, which they actually know only in its translated form through a colonial haze, but which has always functioned as their ‘constitutive outside’: constituting them, or us, by its absence, because it is what they – we – are not. This is a manner of being defined from the beyond!

On the boat train to London, I kept feeling I’d seen this place somewhere before, as in a screen memory. It provoked a deep psychic recognition, an illusory after-effect. Had I been here before? Yes and no. I hadn’t anticipated what the English countryside would look like but, once I saw it whizzing past the train windows, I knew that this was how it should look: those proper, well-fed, black-and-white cows munching away contentedly in their neatly divided, hedgerowed fields surrounded by enormous, spreading sycamore trees. Everything I had read had prepared me for that. I knew, after all, the novels of Thomas Hardy. On the other hand, nothing had prepared me for the stark contrast between the sombre brick-and-cement hues and the well-disciplined dark, monotone character of London streets and the chaotic bustle of Kingston street life, with people shoving past one another on the crowded pavements, the handcarts and ice barrows with their rows of syrup bottles, the raucous hubbub and teeming vitality, provincial as it was.

London, when we got there, felt unwelcoming and forbidding. I guess my memories must have been infiltrated by what happened later, for what immediately comes to mind is the heavy, leaden autumn sky, the light permanently stuck halfway to dusk, the constant fine drizzle (where was the proper rain, the tropical downpour?), the blank windows of the square black cabs, the anonymity of the faces in the red double-decker buses, the yellow headlights glistening off the wet tarmac along the Bayswater Road. A dark, shuttered, anonymous city; high blocks of mansion flats,
turning up their noses at the life of the streets below. Everyone was buttoned up in dark suits, overcoats and hats, many carrying the proverbial umbrellas, scurrying with downcast eyes through the gathering gloom to unknown destinations. This was post-war austerity London, with its bombed-out sites, rubble and gaping spaces like missing teeth. A faint mist permanently shrouded Hyde Park, where ladies in jodhpurs and hard riding hats cantered their horses in the early mornings; the lights blazed in the Oxford Street department stores by three in the afternoon. There must have been bright and sunny days, for it was only the end of summer. But I don’t remember them.

Governor Jerry Brown, City Lights Bookstore, and a Bulgarian Adventure

Welcome to the University Press Week blog tour! Today we offer a guest post on the power of indie bookstores by Kristen Ghodsee, author of The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe (2015).

On May 23, 2016, I woke up in Helsinki to an email containing a voice to text transcript of a message from someone called “Kathy,” claiming to be based in the office of the governor of California.  I deleted the message.  It was election season and they were probably asking for money, I thought.  No one uses land lines unless they’re asking for money.

But the next message in my inbox was from my administrative coordinator back at Bowdoin College.  She forwarded me a message left on her voice mail from the same Kathy who stated that Jerry Brown “would like to speak with Professor Kristen Ghodsee.”  I did a quick Google search of Kathy’s full name, and found that she indeed worked in Sacramento for the governor’s office.

But why would the governor want to speak with me?  As a Californian and a product of two public universities in the Golden State, I wondered if this had something to do with projected changes to the UC system.  I grew up under Jerry Brown.  I was four years old in San Diego when he was first elected governor at the age of 36 in 1974.  He served as “Governor Moonbeam” until I was 13.  Many years later I was a doctoral student at Berkeley when he became the mayor of neighboring Oakland, but I had already relocated to Maine when he was sworn in for his third term as California governor in 2011, succeeding the “Governator,” Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He was serving his fourth term 2016.

Soon after, I received a direct email from Kathy.  I told her I was on leave in Finland, (ten hours ahead of Pacific Standard time), and asked what this was about.  She wrote: “Hello and thank you for your reply. I believe he was hoping to chat with you about “To the Left of History.” Would a phone call be possible? And if yes, could you please provide some possible times when you might be available?”

It turns out that Governor Brown hangs around the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and stumbled upon a copy of my book, The Left Side of History on a shelf there.  Intrigued by the title, he bought and read it and wanted to discuss the book with me.  Thus ensued a series of conversations that lasted for the next six weeks as Governor Brown and I corresponded by phone and email.  Once on a intercity train between Tampere and Helsinki, my mobile phone rang and I ended up having to sit in a cramped sound proof booth for an hour while the Governor and I discussed East European politics and his upcoming trip to Bulgaria.

Governor Brown would be traveling to the small Balkan country in early July with his wife and two friends.  He asked me to help arrange meetings for him in Sofia, but also if it would be possible for he and his wife to meet Elena Lagadinova, the 86-year-old protagonist of my book.  Lagadinova had been the youngest female partisan fighting against the Nazi-allied monarchy in Bulgaria during World War II.  My book was an attempt to recuperate the heroism of those who fought on the “left side of history:” mostly communist idealists who risked their lives to defeat fascism.

And so it was on July 8^th, that the sitting governor of California shared tea and cakes with Elena Lagadinova in Sofia, a meeting made possible through a healthy does of serendipity and the astounding power of university press books and independent bookstores to bring stories and people together despite the decades and oceans between them.

Now that you’ve read this post, please continue on the University Press Week blog tour. Head to University of Texas Press for Q&A with their sales manager about visiting indie bookstores along the West Coast  this fall. The University of Chicago Press blog features a day in the life of sales rep Mical Moser. Cornell University Press spotlights Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca’s cooperatively owned community bookstore. University Press of Colorado looks back on the past year’s author events at their two local indies, Tattered Cover and Boulder Bookstore. NYU Press features a re-cap of the Brooklyn Book Festival. McGill Queens University Press offers an appreciation of Canada’s independent bookstores. University Press of Kentucky will be featuring fun, revealing Q&As with indie booksellers across the state. University Press of Kansas showcases  The Raven Bookstore and KU Bookstore, two local, independent shops that carry and promote their titles. And don’t miss a post from one of the U.S.’s best indie bookstores, the Seminary Co-op, where they’ll highlight what’s on their front table right now.

Postcard from Columbus: Kendall McKenzie attends IFLA 2016

Library Sales Specialist Kendall McKenzie is attending the 2016 International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress in Columbus, Ohio, from August 13-19. We recently sat down with Kendall to chat about what she wants to learn from librarians, what she is excited to talk to attendees about, and what she is most interested in eating while visiting The Biggest Small Town in America.

What are the things you’d like to talk to IFLA attendees about?

I’m excited to talk about our two new e-book subject collections: the Latin American Studies collection and the Gender Studies collection. These subject collections are great resources for specialty schools or schools with a strong program in either Latin American studies or gender studies. I’d love to hear from librarians about their experience and thoughts when assessing a subject collection, and would appreciate any and all feedback. Oftentimes with our e-Duke Books and e-Duke Journal collections, we might be in conversation with universities, so I think we’ll have more chances to work with a full range of schools, including community colleges and specialty libraries.

What do you want to learn from librarians?

I’d like to talk about our open-access offerings, including Project Euclid, Environmental Humanities, and the Carlyle Letters Online. We want to learn what librarians would like to see for the future of open access in the humanities. I’d also be interested to hear about what kind of models for evidence-driven acquisitions (EDA) librarians have used and really like. And of course, I’d love to learn how international libraries are structured, and what kinds of content interests them.

What are you planning to do and see while you’re in Columbus?

I am most excited about walking around the city and taking a ton of photos. I like to try to be really subtle and not look like a tourist but still explore the city. I’m also really looking forward to the restaurants. I hear there’s a hot dog place that I have to try—Dirty Frank’s Hot Dog Palace—that has a hot dog called Sarva’s Tot-cho Dog. It’s smothered in tater tots, cheese sauce, jalapeños, and onions. It looks delicious. The German Village Historic District is close to downtown and is full of restaurants and bakeries—I hope to visit and walk around.

Will you be attending IFLA 2016? Stop by and see Kendall at Booth E107 in Hall D during the conference.

The World Library and Information Congress is held each year in a different region of the world. 2016 marks the congress’ return to the US for the first time since 2001. Follow along with the 2016 IFLA congress on Facebook and Twitter. We’re looking forward to attending IFLA 2017 in Wrocław, Poland next year!