All posts by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D.

Stories of American Methodist Missionaries from Duke’s Korean Studies Collection, Part 1

This blog post by Miree Ku, Korean Studies Librarian, is the first in a series devoted to stories about American missionaries in Korea from Duke’s Korean collection and archives.

My interest in American Methodist missionaries in Korea was sparked by simple curiosity.  In 2007, when I first started working as a Korean Studies librarian at Duke University Libraries, I discovered that there was a library endowment called the Judy Fund, which was designated for the acquisition of and/or access to Korean materials in both paper and electronic formats. I was surprised to learn of the existence of this fund because it was established back in 1994, at a time when there was no Korean Studies program or faculty at Duke.  I wondered why some donor would set up a fund specifically for Korea, but at that point in time, I didn’t know Judy’s full name and was unable to find any archival records about him (or her?) in the library.

This curiosity returned to me a few years later when I received some boxes containing Korean materials gifted to Duke University Libraries. The boxes contained old Bibles, notes, diaries, calendars, and books published from the colonial period through the 1970s, in both Korean and English. According to the gift records, they were donated in 1999 but remained unprocessed for a long time because there was no one to manage Korean language materials. While sorting through the books one by one, I came across a very small red book titled Fifty Helps for the Beginner in the Use of the Korean Language (1911).  The first page of this book contained an inscription that reads: “Carl W. Judy.”  I was thrilled to see a familiar name and felt certain that these gift materials had been donated by the person who established the Judy Fund.

Baird A. L. A. (1911). Fifty helps for the beginner in the use of the korean language. Fukuin Print.

I was also surprised to see the names of missionaries associated with Duke’s Korean collection and archives appearing one after another. In the process of trying to identify these individuals I started researching the history and activities of foreign missionaries in Korea. The result of this research is my online library guide to the Carl Wesley Judy Collection, which is still on ongoing work as I continue to add his donated books. This guide describes the collection of materials that Carl W. Judy donated at the same time that he established the Judy Endowment at the Duke University Libraries. In addition to Judy’s own books, this guide also describes some of the books donated by other American missionaries to Korea, all of whom were either related to and/or worked alongside Carl W. Judy, including his father-in-law, Lyman Coy Brannon (Korean name 부라만, or 브라만), his wife, Margaret Brannon Judy (Korean name 주진주), Jack Aebersold (Korean name 이요한), and Roberta Rice (Korean name 나옥자).

Ku, Miree. “Carl Wesley Judy Collection.” Duke University Libraries.

In 2021, when I moved into the office previously occupied by Kristina Troost, the longtime head of the International and Area Studies Department, I discovered additional documents related to Judy. These included memoranda, letters from Judy to Duke University libraries, and acknowledgements from the Libraries. When I came across these documents, I was deeply moved by the story of Judy, his family, and other missionaries who ventured to a distant and unfamiliar country and dedicated their lives to serving the people of Korea. Even upon returning home to America, they held Korea close to their hearts.

Top: Memoranda (November 8, 1993 & January 28, 1994) Bottom (left): Carl W. Judy Korean Library Fund (Dec, 1993) Bottom (right): Carl W. Judy’s letter (and check) to Duke Libraries (Nov, 2001)

Carl Wesley Judy

Carl Wesley Judy (Korean name 주덕, also known as 주디 or 쥬디), the American Methodist pastor and Duke alumnus who established the Judy Endowment for the Korean collection at Duke University Libraries, spent nearly 35 years as a medical missionary in Korea (1948-1983).  During the course of his career, he worked with Korean villagers from the Kyungchonwon Leper Colony (경천원) in Wonju, provided scholarships to Korean high school and graduate students, and helped Korean pastors build or establish over 200 churches.

Left: a photo from the groundbreaking ceremony of Christian Hospital (the person holding a shovel in front is Rev. Judy), November 1957. Middle: Carl Wesley Judy. Right: Carl Wesley Judy & Margaret Brannan Judy. Source: http://www.wonjutoday.co.kr/

Judy was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on April 10, 1918, and graduated from the Divinity School of Duke University in 1943 with a B.D. degree. I found his bachelor’s thesis, titled Morris Harvey College as a Factor in the History of the Western Virginia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in the Duke University Archives. Morris Harvey College later awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity (1966).

Judy, C. W. (1943). Morris Harvey college as a factor in the history of the Western Virginia conference of the Methodist Episcopal church, South.

While Judy was working for the Western North Carolina Annual Conference in 1944, he met Margaret Taylor Brannon (Korean name 주진주). She was born in Wonsan, Korea, the daughter of Methodist missionaries Myrtle and Lyman Brannan. In 1944, Carl and Judy were married at the Central Methodist Church in Asheboro, North Carolina. In 1946, the Judys were approved as missionaries by the Methodist Board of Mission and assigned to serve the areas of Cheonan, Daejeon, and Jeolla Provinces. Two years later, Carl, Margaret, and their two children departed for Korea.

The outbreak of the Korean War, on June 25, 1950, forced the family to return to their home in New Haven, Connecticut. But the Judys were not done with their mission. Despite the ongoing military hostilities, the Missionary Board asked Carl to return to Korea and to help the Korean Methodist Church and its followers cope with the chaos of those traumatic days. This time, however, Carl was accompanied by his father-in-law, Rev. Lyman Coy Brannon, rather than his wife.  After the war, Margaret and Carl’s children returned to Korea and the Judys reopened a mission station in Wonju in April 1954.

Carl W. Judy and Margaret B. Judy assigned to Wonju Jeil Methodist Church in November, 1954.

In 1959, Rev. Judy, along with Dr. Florence Jessie Murray, a United Church missionary doctor from Canada, established the Wonju United Christian Hospital, currently known as Yonsei University Wonju Severance Hospital.  Following in the footsteps of Margaret’s parents, the Judys spent the rest of their time in Korea as missionaries. Carl and Margaret retired to Asheboro, North Carolina, in 1984.

Lyman Coy Brannan

Carl Wesley Judy’s father-in-law, Lyman Coy Brannan (1880-1971), was a well-known Methodist Church pastor.  Reverend Brannan (better known by his Korean name 부라만 or 브라만) began his mission to Korea in 1910.  In 1914, Brannon married Mattie Myrtle Barker in Korea.  Their daughter, Margaret Brannan, was born in 1916.  From 1937 to 1940, he served as the school chaplain of Songdo High School, which was originally established in Songdo by Yun Chi-ho in 1906.

Brannon worked in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province of Korea (which is now South Korea), and primarily in Wonsan and Songdo (which is now Kaesong in North Korea). One of the sites where he focused his missionary efforts was a very small church known as Munam Church (문암감리교회 in Korean), which he established in a secluded mountain valley in Gangwon Province.  According to local folklore, it was situated at this remote location because soon after he arrived to sow the seeds of the gospel, the young American pastor became trapped in deep snow in Munam Village.  Whatever the case may be, Brannon’s establishment served as a Methodist home church, a group of Christians who regularly gather for worship in private homes.  During the colonial period, it is said that some Korean patriots, who were fighting for independence from Japanese colonial rule, sought refuge in this church to evade the Japanese police and potential imprisonment. Despite the intense pursuit by the Japanese authorities, this remote village remained untouched.

Another one of the sites where Brannon focused his missionary efforts was the Donam-ri Methodist Church in Deokwon, South Hamkyong Province (which is now Wonsan, North Korea).  Donam-ri was the hometown of Yongsin Choi (1909-1935), a Korean Methodist preacher who became a pioneer in promoting the enlightenment movement for rural communities and whose life-story served as the inspiration for the famous Korean novel called Evergreen Tree (상록수) written by Sim Hun in 1936. Yongsin Choi was born and raised in this area and received education there. She attended Doonam Church, a Methodist church near her home, which provided medical and educational services, and it is possible that Rev. Brannon was one of the American Methodist missionaries who taught her.  This hypothesis is supported by the fact that in the early missionary era, there were no Korean language teaching methods or textbooks available for foreigners. However, Brannon achieved fluency in the Korean language through his tireless efforts and dedication to learning. In fact, among the early Methodist missionaries, only two were capable of leading revival meetings in Korean: Lyman Brannon and Harrison Stokes (another missionary connected to Duke University, who will be introduced in the next blog post in this series).

Reverend Brannan dedicated his life to serving his congregants and did not officially retire until after the outbreak of the Korean War.  In fact, according to a New York Times article from June 25, 1950, Brannon and his wife were among the eight American Methodist missionaries who found themselves in Kaesong on the very day that this city fell to the troops of Communist North Korea.

“War is Declared by North Koreans…” The New York Times (June 25, 1950)

The Judy Collection and the Study of Korean Christianity

When I first discovered a very small Bible with Rev. Brannan’s name among the materials donated by Carl W. Judy, I wondered who he was. While conducting research on Judy, I was deeply moved to learn that Rev. Brannan was Judy’s father-in-law and that his old Bibles and books had been kept by his daughter and son-in-law.  Besides such sentimental reasons, this item is also an example of the way the materials from the from the Carl Wesley Judy Collection can be used to understand the history of Christian, and particularly Methodist, missionary work in Korea.

Rev. Brannon’s hymn (From Judy’s collection)

Catholic missionaries were the first to bring Christianity to Korea in the late 18th century. In 1784, a Korean scholar named Yi Seung-hun made contact with Catholic priests in Beijing, China, and was baptized into the Christian faith. He then introduced Catholicism to a small group of friends and family, and the religion began to spread slowly. However, the spread of Catholicism faced resistance from the Confucian establishment in Korea, which viewed it as a threat to the traditional social order. In 1801, for the first time in the country’s history, more than 300 Korean Catholic converts were executed, and persecution of Catholics continued throughout the 19th century.

In the late 19th century, Protestant missionaries began to arrive in Korea, and their message of individual salvation and social reform resonated with many disillusioned Koreans who were dissatisfied with the traditional social order. Protestantism began to spread rapidly, and by the early 20th century—the time period when Brannon started his missionary work—it had become a significant force in Korean society.  As the materials from the Judy Collection demonstrate, American Methodists were crucial for the spread of Christianity in 20th-century Korea, and are one of the reasons why Protestantism is one of the largest religions in the country. The Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations together have a membership of over 10 million people, which accounts for about 20% of the population.

For more on the history of Christian missionaries in Korea, and the way the Korean collection at Duke University can be used to study this topic, check out the following list of recommended readings:

 

Defining and Measuring Research Impact in the Humanities

Post by Heidi Madden, Head, International and Area Studies & Librarian for Western European and Medieval Renaissance Studies.

Research impact is loosely defined as how broadly scholarly research is being read, discussed, and used both inside and outside of the academy. Metrics tools are firmly established in the sciences, but they are not designed to capture the impact of humanities research. That is why a recent blog post on “Duke’s Most-Cited — The Scholars Other Scientists Look To” did not even offer humanities data, a situation that left many researchers scratching their heads and wondering about alternative resources.

To address this hot-button issue, the International and Area Studies Department at Duke University Libraries co-sponsored a Franklin Humanities Institute roundtable on “Defining and Measuring Research Impact in the Humanities,” a recording of which is now available on YouTube (1:03:55).  The recorded talk reviews the evidence base for alternative research impact metrics for the humanities (HuMetricsHSS and Metrics Toolkit) and offers an opportunity to investigate and challenge the biases of Anglophone and science-based ranking systems.

The featured speaker at this event was Heather Coates, the Digital Scholarship and Data Management Librarian at the IUPUI University Library, Indiana University Data Steward for Research Data, and co-founder of the Metrics Toolkit.  During her presentation, Coates explained what is meant by metrics data, how such data are generated, and why the current application of metrics tools raises complex issues of equity, diversity, and accessibility.

The FHI roundtable on the responsible use of humanities metrics was moderated by Paolo Mangiafico, Scholarly Communications Strategist at Duke University, and Heidi Madden, Head, International and Area Studies & Librarian for Western European and Medieval Renaissance Studies.

The Popularity of Korean graphic novels and Webtoons

Post by Miree Ku, Librarian for Korean Studies

In October 2022, during the annual meeting of the Korean Library Association (KLA) General Conference in Seoul, Korea, I attended a session on the digital archiving of Webtoon (웹툰), an online platform that hosts webcomics originating from South Korea. The term “Webtoon” is a compound word formed from “website” and “cartoon.” This new form of comic publication has become a global phenomenon, particularly among members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and has been embraced outside of Korea. Additionally, Korean graphic novels, comic books, and webtoons are frequently adapted into films and TV programs, thereby impacting various aspects of Korean culture.

One of the presenters at the conference panel on archiving Webtoons showed a PowerPoint slide with examples of academic libraries in America, such as that of Columbia University, the University of Washington, as well as Duke University, and expressed her admiration for the fact that they collect Korean comic books and graphic novels (만화; Eng. Manhwa), which is not common practice among academic libraries in Korea. Afterwards, I told the presenter and attendees that I am a Korean Studies librarian from one of the American university libraries mentioned in the PowerPoint slide and confirmed that the library at Duke University does, indeed, collect Manhwa for teaching and research purposes. This was the moment where I felt the significance and value of developing a Manhwa collection at Duke University.

The Korean Collection at Duke University Libraries has recently expanded its offerings of Manhwas to those that delve into significant events and issues in modern Korean history. These new graphic novels cover a range of subjects and time periods, including “comfort women” (1938-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953), and civil rights movements (the April 19 Revolution in 1960, the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, the June Democratic Struggle in 1987).

Comfort Women

Duke’s Korean collection now includes several graphic novels about “comfort women” – a euphemistic term for women and girls from Korea, China, the Philippines and other occupied territories, who were abducted from their homes and forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army.  For example, the graphic biographical novel called Grass (), available in both the original Korean and in English translation, documents the life story of Lee Ok-sun (1928-2022), one of the few remaining “comfort women” when the book was published.  Lee, who was born in Daegu, Korea, was forced to become a sex slave for the Japanese military at the age of 16, and served in a brothel based in Manchuria, China, until the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945.

Figure 1: 풀 : 살아 있는 역사, 일본군 위안부 피해 할머니 의 증언 ” by 김 금숙 (2017)
Figure 2: Grass by Gendry-Kim, Keum Suk, translated by Janet Hong in 2019

The author of the graphic novel compares the comfort women victims to “grass,” stating that “it is a grass that rises up again even if it is blown down by the wind and stepped on.” These moving words pay tribute to all the victims of comfort women.

Lee passed away in 2022, leaving only 10 survivors out of 238 registered comfort women. Sadly, many individuals have not registered as comfort women victims due to their reluctance to disclose their past. The Song of A Butterfly or Butterfly’s Song (나비의 노래), a graphic novel by Kim Gwang-sung and Chung Ki-young, deals with one such case.  This Manhwa depicts the story of Ha Keum-soon, another sixteen-year-old Korean girl who was sexually enslaved as a comfort woman by the Japanese military. For 70 years, she lived with her pain in silence until she met Min Soon-ae, another survivor of the “hell” she endured, while passing by the Japanese embassy in Seoul. This encounter prompted her to confess her past to her family and participate in rallies to bring resolution to the issue of comfort women. Ha Keum-soon stated, “No one should be hurt like this. I will get rid of the nightmare. I will shake off everything and fly dazzlingly. I will sing a song of hope like a butterfly hatching.” The graphic novel was exhibited at the France’s Angouleme International Comics Festival in 2014, where it raised awareness of the issue across the world. It is one of several books about comfort women that have brought attention to this tragedy.

Figure 3:나비의 노래” by 정 기영, 김 광성 (2014)

 

Pro-democracy movements

Duke’s Korean collection now also includes graphic novels that focus on contemporary democratic movements in Korea. Among these is coverage of the Gwangju Uprising, which was a mass protest against the South Korean military government that occurred in the city of Gwangju from May 18 to May 27, 1980. This uprising was one of the most tragic and significant moments in modern Korean history.  The event is sometimes referred to as 5·18 (May 18), in reference to the date the movement began, and is also known as the Gwangju Democratization Struggle, the Gwangju Massacre, the May 18 Democratic Uprising, or the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement.

26 Years (26)” illustrates the military dictatorship’s brutal oppression of the 1980 popular uprising, shedding light on the families of the victims of the Gwangju Democratization Movement. The story follows five individuals—a sports shooter, a gangster, a policeman, a businessman, and a CEO of a big company—who consider themselves as some of the biggest victims of the massacre in Gwangju and who conspire to assassinate the person responsible for it. This work of fiction, published in 2006, reflects the times when discussing the uprising was taboo. However, it is significant that popular cartoonists have shown the possibility of addressing politically sensitive subjects. Originally published as a webtoon in 2006 and later adapted into a three-volume book in 2007 and a film in 2012, the story has helped people remember the Gwangju Democratization Movement.

Figure 4: 26년 (26 Years) by강풀 (2007)
Figure 5: Film version of 26년 (26 Years) (2013) produced by 조근현, based on a webtoon story

 

The graphic novel, Dobari (도바리), tells the story of a man who cannot escape the memories of May 18,1980. “Dobari” refers to college students who fled from the dictatorship and attempted to carry out democratization movements while being on the “wanted list.” The incidents of the ten days were recorded one by one, as if written in a journal. Ironically, the grandson of the late former President Chun Doo-hwan (1931-2021), who is the target of this novel as the dictator, recently alleged on Instagram that his family was living on illicit funds, committed crimes, and referred to his grandfather as a “slaughterer.”

Figure 6: 도바리 by 탁영호 (2016)

The graphic novel The Day of 1987 (1987 ) deals with another important milestone in the history Korean civil rights: the June Democratic Struggle (6월 민주항쟁), also known as the June Democracy Movement and June Democratic Uprising. The Day of 1987 depicts one year in the life of a group of young people who had to endure the harsh reality under the Chun Doo-hwan regime, struggling without a clear sense of direction or hope for the future.  This despair foreshadows the outbreak of the nationwide civil uprising that demanded democratization, including constitutional and government reform, with the goal of direct presidential election.

Figure 7: 1987 그 날 by 유승화 (2020)

Following this event, a wave of democratization and liberalization swept through Korea. The 9th Amendment to the Constitution of the Republic of Korea, which was enacted as a result of this incident, has become the foundation of Korean politics and law. Unlike other democratic revolutions, this civil uprising is highly regarded around the world because it ousted a military dictatorship through relatively peaceful demonstrations.

New Artwork at East Asian Collection

This blog post was contributed by Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, International & Area Studies Department, Duke University Libraries.

A beautiful silk painting has just been hung above the microfilm cabinet across from the Gillespie East Asia Reading Room.  The work of an unknown artist, this contemporary Japanese silk painting (16.5” x 48” with frame) is a replica of a famous Chinese painting called Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple (煙寺晚鐘圖) by the Chan Buddhist monk painter Muqi (Muxi) 牧谿 (1207–1291), who lived towards the end of the Southern Song Dynasty period (1127-1279). Muqi is the art name (Hao 號) of the monk’s Dharma name (Fachang 法常). He was initially from Sichuan and later moved to Hangzhou, the capital of Southern Song Dynasty. Although he was not very well known in his lifetime, he is today widely recognized as the predecessor of Chinese Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhist painting.

Art historians generally agree that Chan painting in China developed in the thirteenth century. Chan Buddhist painters used the same tools and techniques created and refined by generations of Chinese artists, but they applied these means in the Chan spirit, which could be explained as the abundance of emptiness or the nothing of Being.

Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple (煙寺晚鐘圖) by Muqi Fachang. Source: Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Fine Art

Muqi received a more immediate recognition in Japan. His works were collected and brought from China to Japan.  Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple is one of his surviving works from the original set of Eight View of the Xiao and Xiang River (瀟湘八景) paintings. It is currently housed at Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Fine Art (畠山記念館) in Tokyo, Japan. The painting is found to be listed in the Ashikaga Shugunate collection. The collector, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (足利義滿, 1358-1408), the military ruler in Japan, was passionate about Muqi’s paintings. His collection catalog listed 134 works of Muqi. Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple used to be displayed in his tea room. His seal as a collector (道有) shown below, is one important key to link this silk painting with Muqi’s original art work.

Collection Seal of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu

It is unknown exactly how the contemporary Japanese version of the Muqi painting arrived at Duke University, but we do know that it was most likely first hung in the office of University Librarian Jerry D. Campbell, who worked at Duke from 1984 to 1995. For a long time after Campbell’s departure, this objet d’art was housed in an office in Lilly Library, on Duke’s East Campus.

This Japanese silk painting is now located above the microfilm cabinet and next to the religion section of the East Asian collection, where books on Buddhism, Daoism, and other Asian religious forms and practices can be found.

Please stop by and take a look!

 

Exciting Times for Duke’s Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Studies Collections

This month witnessed two exciting developments in Latin American Studies at Duke University.

On August 4, 2022, Duke University Libraries welcomed Diego A. Godoy, the new Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latinx Studies.

A native Angeleno of Mexican parentage, Diego comes to Duke from the University of Texas at Austin’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, one of the premier libraries in the world for Latin America and Latina/o Studies. During his time at UT Austin, Diego played a pivotal role in initiatives to develop the Benson Collection’s digital holdings, while pursuing his Ph.D. in history.  His dissertation explored the influence of Lombrosian criminal anthropology and Freudian psychoanalysis on the life and thought of Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, a mid-twentieth-century Mexican criminologist (“an amalgam of Freud and J. Edgar Hoover”), who was responsible for championing penitentiary reform, tracking down international counterfeiters, and discovering the true identity of Leon Trotsky’s killer.  Diego is author, most recently, of the article “Inside the Agrasánchez Collection of Mexican Cinema,” which appeared in the fall 2020 issue of Portal.

As his previous experience and research suggests, Diego is broadly interested in Latin American intellectual and cultural history, particularly journalism, media, and film, as well as the role that cultural heritage institutions (museums, archives, and libraries) play in commemoration.  He is looking forward to working with faculty and students affiliated with Duke’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies as well as across the various departments (Romance Studies, History, etc.) that offer courses on this vibrant region of the world. Diego’s office is located on the second floor of Bostock Library, in the Department of International & Area Studies, and he can be reached at diego.godoy@duke.edu.

Diego’s arrival coincides with an announcement about the funding that the UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies has been awarded for the next four years by the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI program. In addition to graduate and undergraduate language fellowships (FLAS awards), language instruction, lectures, conferences, films, teacher training, and other programs, this money will provide additional support for expanding the Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Studies collections of both libraries.

Together, these two developments augur well for the future of Latin American and Caribbean studies at Duke University, an institution that prides itself on having a library collection that matches its century-long history.  If you are interested in reading more about the history of this collection, and the collaboration that went into building it, please consult the article co-authored by Dr. Holly Ackerman (Diego’s immediate predecessor as Duke’s Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latinx Studies) and Teresa Chapa (Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies Librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill), “Promoting and Maintaining Collaborative Collecting: A Case Study,” in Latin American Collection Concepts: Essays on Libraries, Collaborations and New Approaches (2019), 99-119.

A New Addition to Duke’s Uyghur-Language Collection

This post was co-authored by Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic Studies, Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, and Ernest Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

Many people in the West have heard about the sad fate of the Uyghurs, the Turkic-Muslim minority group that is being systematically persecuted by the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China. However, very few people know the backstory of this slowly unfolding genocide. And fewer still have access to relevant research materials, especially ones published in Uyghur (ئۇيغۇرچە‎), a Turkic language written primarily in a Perso-Arabic script (though Cyrillic and Latin scripts are also used by Uyghurs who reside in the countries of former Soviet Central Asia).

“Map of the Western and Southern Parts of Kashgariia” from B. L. Grondchevskii, Otchet o poezdke v Kashgar i iuzhnuiu Kashgariiu … (Margilan [Uzbekistan], 1888). Source: Gunnar Jarring Central Eurasia Collection, Swedish Research Institute.

The reason for this information gap is the colonialist past of the area of the world inhabited by the Uyghurs, who live on territories that stretch across the boundaries of different countries, primarily along the ancient Silk Road leading from China to Central Asia, and then heading west to the Middle East and Europe, and south to India and South Asia. For millennia, this region has been the epicenter of a global struggle between different colonial empires (most recently Russia/USSR, Britain, and China).  And the Uyghurs have been among their primary victims.  Since it is the victors who tend to write history, and to do so in their own language, it is not surprising that works in Uyghur are rarely represented in the library collections of imperial metropoles.

In order to redress this imbalance, and to contribute to the global effort to de-colonize the library collections of former (and current) imperial powers, the librarians of Duke’s International and Area Studies Department have been collaborating on acquiring materials about this part of the world in general, and the Uyghurs in particular.  This blog post is about one recent example of such cross-regional collaboration: the joint purchase of a rare*, early 20th-century Uyghur language book by Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian and Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic studies.

Title page and colophon of A Sequel to the ABC Books. Second Part (Kashgar: S. M. F. [Printing Office of the Swedish Mission], 1922). Source: Duke University Libraries. Photo by Johnny Shanahan.

This new library acquisition is a 111-page Uyghur-language manual called A Sequel to the ABC Books (ا ب کتسبى نينک تدريچى ايكنجى جز / a-b kita:bïnïղ tεdri:ʤi ikinʤi ʤůzε). It was published in 1922 by the Printing Office of the Swedish Mission in Kashgar, a city situated in what is today known as China’s Xianjiang Province.  As the title page indicates, the book is the “Second Part” of a primer first published in 1920 by the Missionary Press, which operated between 1901 and 1938.  As one would expect, the main focus of the Missionary Press was to disseminate translations of the Bible in an effort to convert Kashgaris and, more broadly, all the people of the region (including the Uyghurs) to Christianity. In order to accomplish this task, the Missionary Board in Stockholm sent a printing press and related printing equipment to Kashgar soon after the Swedes arrived in town, in 1894. The print shop contained the necessary equipment along with metal-type in Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin.

“The City of Kashgar,” 1915. Source: Lt. Col. Sir Percy Sykes photograph album, Duke University Libraries.

Although the Swedish Missionary Press was the first printing press in Kashgar, A Sequel to the ABC Books was itself part of a long tradition of Turkic-language instruction in the region.  In fact, one of the earliest such manuals, a comprehensive dictionary of the Turkic languages known as Compendium of the Languages of the Turks (Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk), was written as far back as the 11th century by Mahmud ibn Husayn ibn Muhammed al-Kashgari, an influential Kara-Khanid scholar and lexicographer from Kashgar.  As in other parts of the Muslim world, most instruction was conducted on a one-on-one basis, between a religious teacher and a cohort of young pupils, such as those pictured in this black-and-white photograph of a “Kashgar School.”

“A Kashgar School,” 1915. Source: Lt. Col. Sir Percy Sykes photograph album, Duke University Libraries.

This photograph comes from the early 20th-century album of Lt. Col. Sir Percy Sykes (1867-1945), illustrating the British officer’s travels through “Chinese Turkestan, the Russian Pamirs, and Osh,” between April and November 1915.  Sykes’ photo album was acquired last year by Duke University Libraries to complement its growing collection of Uyghur materials, including a few language manuals. Now Sykes’ photos of the city of Kashgar and its school serve as a primary source for understanding the historical context, and for visualizing the possible original users of the recently purchased copy of A Sequel to the ABC Books. Such cross-referencing is not only the product of thoughtful collection development and description.  It is also a concrete example of the way that the intervention of area studies librarians can help contemporary researchers read the imperial archive against the grain and, thereby, restore the humanity of marginalized indigenous groups who have been, or like the Uyghurs, are in danger of being erased from the historical record.

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*As far as we know, the only other existing copy of A Sequel to the ABC Books is held in the Gunnar Jarring Central Eurasia Collection and has been digitized by the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Turkey.

Further readings:

 

Just announced: Open Access South Asian Newspapers

International and Area Studies at Duke University LibrariesThe Global Press Archive and the Center for Research Libraries have just launched South Asian Newspapers, the sixth open access collection of titles digitized under their Alliance. This collection of South Asian Newspapers encompasses over 185,000 digitized pages from 10 publications, including: Dainika basumatī, Lahore Chronicle (founded in 1849 in Lahore), and Dnyānaprakāśa, among others.

 

Diversifying the Curriculum & Decolonizing the Collection

International and Area Studies at Duke University LibrariesPlease join us on Friday, April 22, 2022 from 2:00 – 4:00 PM for a discussion of how librarians are currently working to decolonize library collections and diversify scholarship in the curriculum.

Part 1: The Collector and the Collected (2:00 PM – 3:00 PM)

Anna Arays, Librarian for Slavic & East European Studies, Department of Area Studies and Humanities Research Support (DASHRS), Yale University, will discuss the results of her work as co-editor of The Collector and the Collected: Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship (Library Juice Press, 2021).

Part 2: Diversifying Scholarship in the Curriculum (3:10 PM – 4:00 PM)

Staff members of Duke University Libraries’ committee on “Diversifying Scholarship in the Curriculum” (Heather Martin, Amy McDonald, Jodi Psoter, Lee Sorensen, and Haley Walton) will lead a round robin about their committee report.

Both meetings are held at the same Zoom link:
https://duke.zoom.us/j/95268364809?pwd=eWlFQisyMWVxcGR6YjdrbFRNRFNIQT09
Meeting ID: 952 6836 4809
Passcode: 110684

This two-part event is organized by the librarians of the International and Area Studies Department at Duke University Libraries.  If you have any questions, please contact Heidi Madden, Ph.D., Head, International and Area Studies.

Resources on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

International and Area Studies at Duke University Libraries

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, on 24 February 2022, has quite understandably alarmed the international community.  This unprovoked act of military aggression against the territorial integrity of a neighboring sovereign state not only violates numerous international treaties and legal conventions.  It also recalls the immediate prelude to World War II, when Nazi Germany invaded the Second Polish Republic (1939), sparking a military conflict that led to the death of millions of people all over the world.  This time, however, the armed aggressor is not only a dictatorship headed by a white Christian nationalist, but also a major nuclear power, with the capacity to destroy all life on our planet.  Suddenly, to know something about Russia, Ukraine, and eastern Europe is in everyone’s interest – if only to figure out how to prevent immediate, complete, and total annihilation.

As Duke University’s Librarian for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, it is my professional responsibility to help patrons identify, locate, and access the scholarly resources that they need to study and teach about this region of the world.  As a native of Odesa (Ukraine), the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and a first generation American, I also feel a personal sense of responsibility for helping the citizens of my adopted homeland to appreciate the gravity of the situation and work towards the peaceful resolution of Russia’s war against Ukraine.  To that end, this blog post not only offers some basic starting points for comprehending the current crisis, but also offers suggestions for what Duke library patrons (and others) can do to stay well-informed and actively engaged.

Please note that this is by no means a complete list of resources on the topic, which is being covered by specialized centers, such as Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute, whose webpage on Russia’s War on Ukraine contains useful information and links to open access electronic resources; or the resource page on the same topic created by The Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US. Similarly, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta has a series of short videos called “Did you know?” that answers questions such as “Are Ukrainians and Russians the same people,” “Are Ukrainian and Russian the same language,” “Is the conflict in Ukraine an ethnic conflict?” And the Media Hub of Ukrainian Institute London has not only recordings of various talks on Ukrainian culture but also a video series called 10 Things You Should Know about Ukraine.  Also in the UK, Sheffield Hallam University is hosting Peripheral Histories’ guide to War in Ukraine: Resources for Researchers, Teachers and Students. (Thanks to Ksenya Kiebuzinskii, Slavic Resources Coordinator at the University of Toronto Libraries and  Head, Petro Jacyk Central & East European Resource Centre, and Jurij Dobczansky, Senior Cataloging Specialist, Germanic & Slavic Division, Library of Congress, for alerting me to some of these other, non-US-based initiatives).

News

Much of the international news coverage on the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be accessed via Duke University Libraries’ paid subscription to

To get a local perspective on the situation on the ground, without succumbing to either propaganda or disinformation (such as the kind associated with the hashtag #BlackinUkraine), you will need to consult trusted, independent, and alternative news sources from Russia and Ukraine proper:

Ukraine

Russia

You can also follow Ukraine-based journalists and correspondents on Twitter:

  • Terrell Jermain Starr, non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and senior reporter at the The Root, an English-language online magazine of African-American culture.
  • Olga Tokariuk, Kyiv-based independent journalist and non-resident Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
  • Christopher Miller, an American retired United States Army Special Forces colonel and former acting US Secretary of Defense.
  • Natalia Gumeniuk, head of Hromadske International.
  • Illia Ponomarenko, defense reporter with The Kyiv Independent.
  • Francis Scarr, reporter for the British Broadcasting Company.
  • Neil Hauer, independent journalist in country.
  • Shaun Walker, journalist for The Guardian.
  • Christopher Miller, correspondent for BuzzFeedNews.
  • OSINTtechnical, American blogger and freelancer at UK Defense Journal, who publishes open source imagery of fighting.

Scholarship 

Unless they are open access, most works of scholarship produced on the basis of primary sources can take some time before they are published. Consequently, there is a bit of a time-lag between current events and their scholarly analysis.  Nevertheless, it is possible to find numerous works on the history of post-Cold War world and the immediate causes of Russia’s war on Ukraine, which began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

To find books and monographs on the topic, conduct a “subject” search in the “Books & Media” tab of the Duke University Libraries’ online catalog for the following controlled vocabulary (Library of Congress Subject Headings):

To find scholarly articles on the topic, conduct a search in one of our research databases, which index or provide full text to journals in different academic disciplines, research areas, and world regions. For the topic in question, you might want to consult the databases in the following categories:

A curated list of relevant article databases can also be found on the “Articles” tab of the Duke University Library guide to Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

For documentaries, check out the offerings on Duke’s subscription streaming video platforms such as Docuseek, which includes the following Ukraine-related films:

  • Town of Glory (2020)
    Spotlights a small and prototypical provincial Russian town, where people admire Vladimir Putin for making Russia great again.
  • Nine Month War (2018)
    The experience of a young man in western Ukraine who is drafted into the Ukrainian army when Russia annexes Crimea.
  • The Gas Weapon (2014)
    Post-Soviet Ukraine’s (and Europe’s) dependence on Russian gas.
  • How Putin Came to Power (2005)
    Uses archival footage to trace the stunningly rapid ascension of a political unknown to leadership of the Kremlin.
  • The Democratic Revolutionary Handbook (2007)
    Includes interviews with the organizers of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.

Finally,  for award-winning Ukrainian feature films on the war in the Donbas, check out the following tiles:

  • Donbass (2022)
    Ukraine’s official submission to the 91st Academy Awards is a tale about the hybrid war in Eastern Ukraine, a world lost in post-truth and fake identities.
  • Bad roads (2022)
    Ukraine’s official Oscar submission for the 2022 Academy Awards is a collection of four short stories are set along the roads of Donbass during the war.
  • The Earth is blue as an orange (2020)
    A film about the daily trauma of living in a war-zone, in Donetsk, told from the perspective of a young mother and her children.

Activism

Here are just some suggestions for how you can get involved and stay active.

  • Attend/organize an anti-war rally, vigil, or teach-in
  • Write your elected representatives in Washington, DC and tell them to pass legislation
    • authorizing additional humanitarian, financial, and military assistance to Ukraine
    • setting up a UN-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine
    • expediting the immigration and resettlement of war refugees in the US
    • excluding Russia’s entire banking system from SWIFT international payment network
  • Donate to charities specifically seeking to ameliorate the human suffering caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A list of such charities has been compiled by several different organizations:
  • Learn a Slavic language, so you can increase your cultural literacy when it comes to Russia and at least some of the countries of Eastern Europe.
    • Duke University Libraries have online language guides for Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian.
    • Duke University’s Slavic and Eurasian Language Resource Center (SEELRC) has created a set of reference grammars for the languages of the entire region.

Hopefully, peace will prevail and nonviolent solutions will ultimately be found. Whatever happens, I will continue to fulfill my mission of acquiring relevant resources for Duke University Libraries’ Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies collection and assisting patrons in using it to better understand the current situation. That is the least I can do at this time. In the future, I plan to learn more about the process of decolonizing the academic library in general, and area studies librarianship in particular.  And to do a better job of foregrounding the voices of Ukrainians and the many other non-“Western” peoples who once inhabited or continue to find themselves living in the shatterzone of empires, a beleaguered region of Europe still known as the bloodlands.

If you have any questions about the resources mentioned in this blog post or have suggestions for other items to include on this list, please send them to ernest.zitser@duke.edu. Duke patrons with a NetID can also suggest a purchase by filling out this online request form.

War in Ukraine: Where do we go from here?

War in Ukraine: Where do we go from here?

March 1, 2022 – 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Social Sciences 139, LaBarre Auditorium and on ZOOM
REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6zY2tGzUGcQTyNU

Participants

  • Ambassador Patrick Duddy, Rethinking Diplomacy Program Fellow, Duke Center for International & Global Studies
  • Professor Charlie Becker, Department of Economics
  • Professor Simon Miles, Sanford School of Public Policy
  • Professor Michael Newcity, Deputy Director, Duke University Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies
  • Professor Gionvanni Zanalda, Director, Duke University Center for International and Global Studies

Moderator

  • Professor Edna Andrews, Director, Duke University Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies and Duke University Slavic and Eurasian Language Resource Center

Sponsored by Duke University’s Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies & the Slavic and Eurasian Language Resource Center (CSEEES & SEELRC).

Contact Cathy Lewis, c.lewis@duke.edu, with any questions.

Exhibit Opening: “Land of Lapis lazuli and Gold:  Afghanistan in the Collections at Duke University Library”

The opening reception for “Land of Lapis lazuli and Gold:  Afghanistan in the Collections at Duke University Library” is scheduled to take place in front of the International & Area Studies exhibit case, on the second floor of Bostock Library, on Duke’s West Campus, on Thursday, 3 February 2022, at 2-4pm.

This public exhibit is an attempt to offer a different perspective on Afghanistan’s history through the holdings from Duke University Libraries. While the sobriquet the “graveyard of empires” has recently gained primacy in discussions about Afghanistan, the reality is vastly different.  Over its long history, this mountainous south-central Asian country has actually been the cradle of a number of great empires, such as the Ghaznavid (Afghanistan), Timurid (Iran), and Mughal (India).

The country literally sits atop one of the world’s largest reserves of various metals and minerals, including gold and lapis lazuli.  Many of Afghanistan’s most important cities were once significant spaces for commerce as well as intellectual exchange, particularly along the fabled Silk Roads.

Culturally, Afghanistan has been the home for some notable persons such as Rumi, the 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic, who is still one of the most widely read poets in the world.  Moreover, while Afghanistan has become a predominantly Muslim country, there has always been a plurality of religious thought, from Buddhism to Christianity to Judaism as well as Zoroastrianism.

“Land of Lapis lazuli and Gold:  Afghanistan in the Collections at Duke University Library” is curated by the interim librarians for South and Southeast Asia from the library’s International & Area Studies Department and dedicated to the South Asian studies specialists who have helped to build Duke’s collection on Afghanistan.

This public exhibit will run from December 1, 2021 – December 31, 2022.

 

Just Launched: Uyghur Human Rights web archive

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of its collaborative Uyghur Human Rights web archive, preserving web resources documenting the displacement and repression of Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Tatars, and Kyrgyz peoples in East Turkestan/Xinjiang, in the People’s Republic of China.

Like other web archives, the Uyghur Human Rights collection seeks to preserve vulnerable information that may disappear from the live web and capture the ways in which selected websites have evolved over time.

The creators of these websites include but are not limited to:

  • Charitable trusts and associations
  • Educational institutions
  • Financial institutions
  • Government agencies
  • Individuals
  • News agencies
  • Non-governmental organizations
  • Political parties.

While the focus of the archive is East Turkestan/Xinjiang, the selected resources come from many countries and regions, e.g., North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia, and are in a variety of languages.

A collection-level catalog record for the Uyghur Human Rights collection is available in WorldCat, an online union catalog created and maintained collectively by member institutions. By uploading the catalog record for this web archive to largest and most comprehensive database of bibliographic and ownership information currently available will make the Uyghur Human Rights collection both findable and accessible to researchers from around the world.

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Collecting Program, of which Duke University Libraries are a proud member, is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research.  The Web Collecting Program is an initiative of the Confederation’s Collection Development Group, under the direction of the Web Collecting Advisory Committee.

If you have questions about the Uyghur Human Rights web archive, please reach out to ivyplusweb@library.columbia.edu

Celebrating Thirty Years of Duke’s East Asian Collections

This blog post was compiled from contributions by current (Luo Zhou, Miree Ku, Matthew Hayes) and past (Kristina Troost) East Asian Studies Librarians at Duke University.

From November 16, 2021 to April 14, 2022, Duke University Library will host an exhibit “Celebrating Thirty Years of East Asian Collections” in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery. The physical exhibit will be accompanied by a virtual counterpart, which will be published on the library’s Exhibits page. The exhibit opening will take place on Friday afternoon, November 19, with a special event organized by the Duke University Asian/Pacific Studies Institute and the Duke University Libraries.

“Celebrating Thirty Years of East Asian Collections” in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library

This exhibit is part of a commemoration of the founding of Duke’s East Asian Collection in 1990.  Collecting on East Asia in both Perkins and Rubenstein libraries predates the founding of the East Asian Collection, but it became a distinct focus in 1990 with the hiring of the first Japanese Studies Librarian, Kristina Troost, and then, in 1996, a Chinese Studies Librarian and finally in 2007, a Korean Studies Librarian.  The collection in Perkins has gradually grown from 20,000 to over 200,000 volumes in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s collection for East Asia also predates the founding of the East Asian Collection.  It has built on some areas of strength (e.g. history of medicine), but as the program has grown in recent years, it has added some new areas such as historical maps and Zen in America.  Materials from the seventeenth century to the present illuminate the cultures and societies in East Asia.  Some items, such as the personal papers of missionaries, businessmen, and diplomats, shed light on westerners’ understanding of East Asian cultures; more recent acquisitions (e.g. documentary photography, postcards, and other visual material) produced by East Asians themselves have been equally valuable for our understanding of this region.

Japanese collection

Ogata, Gekkō 尾形月耕, The Manners and Customs of Ladies (Fujin Fūzokuzukushi, 婦人風俗尽) (Tokyo, [1898]). Source: Edward James Parrish Papers.

Duke has the largest Japanese collection south of the Library of Congress in DC. Its strengths reflect the program’s focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has strong collections in modern art history, Buddhism, women’s and labor history, Japan’s colonial history, modern literature, manga and anime.  Some themes cross disciplines such as the colonial experience, disaster, including earthquakes, and LGBTQ issues.

The historical collection in Duke’s rare book and manuscript library includes reports from missionaries, early British diplomats to Japan, East India company papers, diaries and letters from merchants and seamen, as well as items in such collections as the Stereographic card and postcard collections and materials related to advertising in the Hartman Center.

The Rubenstein library also has strong collections in military history and the history of medicine.  For Japan, it has the papers of General Robert L. Eichelberger (1886-1961), who commanded all ground occupation troops in Japan (1945-1948). The sword in this exhibit was given to Eichelberger during the Occupation.

Titlepage of Johann Adam Kulmus’ Kaitai shinsho 解體新書 (1774). Source: Historical Anatomies on the Web (National Library of Medicine)

In addition to such standard Tokugawa medical texts as Kaitai shinsho (解體新書), Duke has 63 Edo-era medical manuscript volumes of medical lectures transcribed by students, which are included in this exhibit;  the papers of a Methodist missionary, Mary McMillan, which detail her services to the hibakusha (被爆者), the survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as her peace activism; and a collection of materials related to the effects of the atomic bombing.  This includes the papers of Hachiya Michihiko and Dr. Warner Wells, surgical consultant to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, as well as the Leon S. Adler papers, which document the destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa. The collection of photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki belonged to Dr. Wells.

Duke has also collected missionary papers and materials related to religion because of the Divinity School.  Duke holds the papers of Isaac Leroy Shaver (1893-1984), a Methodist clergyman and missionary to Japan from the 1920s to the 1960s.  But this interest in religion is also going in new directions; in response to programmatic changes in the department of Religious Studies, the special collections library has begun to build a strong collection on Zen in America, acquiring the Philip Kapleau papers and some documentary recordings of D.T. Suzuki, as well as the Reginald Horace Blyth and Norman Waddell papers.

In keeping with Rubenstein’s focus on visual materials, Duke has built a strong collection in photography, acquiring many iconic works.  In recent years, Duke has acquired several photographic collections, notably those taken by Sidney Gamble (c. 1917-1932), William Shockley (c. 1987-1905), Carl Mydans (c. 1941-1952) and Kusakabe Kimbei (c. 1885-1890), as well as Japanese photography of China during WWII.  It has also acquired other visual materials such as postcards and sugoroku (双六) game boards and materials relating to the Japanese student movement in the 1960s (Anpo tōsō 安保闘争), examples of which are included in the upcoming exhibit.

Chinese collection

“Knife Sharpener” from S. V. Constant, Calls, sounds and merchandise of the Peking street peddlers (1936).

Duke’s Chinese collection can trace back to the donation of the tobacco industrialist and philanthropist James Augustus Thomas (1862-1940), who left his papers, a collection of books mostly on China in English, some photographs and other artifacts – such as Chinese vases, robes, furniture, and even lotus shoes for bound feet – to the Duke libraries. The Chinese collection at Duke began to grow rapidly as a result of the expansion of Chinese studies program at Duke in the mid-1990s.  Duke began collecting Chinese materials that UNC was not collecting in depth, especially popular culture and contemporary social science. As the program has grown and changed, Duke has been acquiring materials in visual culture. Photograph collections, notably those taken by Sidney Gamble (c. 1917-1932), William Shockley (c. 1987-1905) and Lucy Calhoun (1886-1973), as well as photographic albums produced by the Japanese in 1920s and 1930s China, have all been acquired in the past two decades. Duke also has a small teaching collection of pre-modern Chinese medicine.

Manmo Ruins of old Summer Palace. Manmō inga shū.滿蒙印画輯 ([Dalian, China]: [between 1924 and 1944?])

More recently, the collection has focused on materials about the first thirty years of People’s Republic of China. Duke acquired the “Memory Project,” a collection of oral histories from survivors of the Great Famine that devastated rural China between 1958 and 1962, by documentary filmmaker, Wu Wenguang, and his team. The Chinese studies librarian has collected 350 titles anti-American pictorial books and Radio Free Asia’s Journal to the Soul complete program. Many of these are housed in The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and some have been digitized and published including the Gamble Photographs and the Memory Project collection.

Korean collection

“A Ride on a ‘Jiggy’” from Missionary photograph album (Seoul, Korea, 1921)

Korean studies at Duke is the only program and collection on this East Asian region in the entire Southeastern United States.  In 1994, the Carl Wesley Judy Korean Library Fund was established with the purpose of the acquisition of and/or access to Korean materials. Rev. Carl Wesley Judy, who graduated from the Divinity School of Duke University in 1943, made great contributions to medical missionary work in Korea through his entire life.  He was joined in this endeavor by his wife, Margaret Brannan Judy, and his parent-in-law, Rev. Lyman Coy Brannan, who also dedicated his entire life for the missionary work in Korea from 1910. The upcoming Rubenstein Library exhibit intends to show unique items related with American missionaries’ works in Korea during the colonial period. Just like the past 100 years of devotion and passion of missionaries who served for Korea, Duke’s Korean program and collection will continue to grow with the passion and deep commitment to our future Korean Studies researchers and students.

Korean village street scene. Colonial Korean Postcard collection (1893-2010s)

Duke’s East Asian collection is curated by subject librarians from the International and Area Studies department.  For more information about the collection that forms the basis of the  upcoming exhibit in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery, please contact Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, Miree Ku, Korean Studies Librarian, and Matthew Hayes, Ph.D., Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies Librarian.

Workshop: Delving for Memories

Workshop: Delving for Memories: an exploration of Wu Wenguang’s the Memory Project

Date: Oct.22 10:30am -12

Registration: https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0uf-2vqDsrGNTbBh-UhQVDtsXAofncBcKH

Sponsored by:
The Asian/Pacific Studies Institute (APSI), Duke University
Asian & Middle Eastern Studies Department, Critical Asian Humanities, Duke University
Duke University Libraries
Council of East Asian Libraries’ CCM Workshop Series on Digital Projects of Chinese Studies

The Memory Project was launched by Chinese pioneer independent filmmaker Wu Wenguang (吴文光) to document oral histories from survivors of the Great Famine that devastated China as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters”, and caused the death of between 20 and 43 million people. The interviews collected widely across rural China add intimate detail and humanity to the story of the deaths and starvation of millions of Chinese, providing a unique perspective on the unofficial history of the Great Famine. Duke University Libraries is the exclusive home for the project archives making raw footage available to students, researchers and the general public. The workshop will introduce the project, provide a tutorial on accessing archival materials and feature multiple filmmakers from China.

Speakers:

  • Guo-Juin Hong, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University, who introduced the project and the filmmakers to the Duke community, is also collaborator of the Memory Project archives at Duke University Libraries.
  • Zhang Mengqi, a Chinese documentary filmmaker and performer, who joined the project from the beginning, has developed a series of Self-Portraits in her father’s village.
  • Yu Shuang, a Duke graduate in Cultural Anthropology, who joined the project from winter 2019.
  • Gao Ang, a PhD candidate in documentary filmmaking at Newcastle University in the UK, who joined the project as filmmaker and researcher.
  • Luo Zhou, Librarian for Chinese studies at Duke University Libraries, who is also the curator of the Memory Project archive.

If you are interested in knowing more details about the Memory Project, please see Luo Zhou’s 2019 report in the Journal of East Asian Libraries.

Collecting for Global Diversity, Part 5

The fifth post in the blog series on the role of international collections and their collectors in promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion was contributed by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies, International & Area Studies (IAS) Department, Duke University Libraries (DUL), Library Liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Duke University.

We are all still processing the outcome of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white police officer who murdered George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, exactly one year ago.  Each of us is looking for ways to deal with the situation as best we can.  From the very beginning, my thoughts have latched on to the uncanny coincidence that the 21st-century American police officer shares the same surname as the 19th-century Napoleonic French soldier for whom “chauvinism”—the prejudiced support for one’s own cause, group, or sex—is named.

As one of the editors of the IAS blog series on equity, diversity, and inclusion in international area studies collecting, I have also been thinking about what Duke’s research librarians, in our official capacity as tillers in the grove of academe, can do to help bring about positive social change.  That line of thought has led me to focus on the similarities between two individuals who, at first glance, appear to have very little in common, but whose life’s work speaks precisely to the issues that we have been discussing in our blog posts: Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) and Pauli Murray (1910-1985).

Raphael Lemkin and Pauli Murray
Photos courtesy: US Holocaust Memorial Museum and The Legacy Project

Both the Polish-Jewish international human rights activist and the African-American civil rights leader were trained as lawyers.  Both arrived in Durham due to circumstances beyond their control: Lemkin as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe, thanks to his American friend and colleague, Professor Malcolm McDermott, of Duke University’s Law School; Murray as an orphaned child, who was taken in by her maternal grandparents and aunt at the age of three.

Despite their intellectual gifts and academic accomplishments, both Lemkin and Murray had a complicated relationship to North Carolina’s elite educational institutions. Lemkin spent fourteen months at Duke University in 1941-1942, but was never allowed to teach in the Law School of this predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, Methodist establishment, partly because this “white crow” could never successfully pass himself off as a full-blooded “Pole”—the citizen of a freedom-loving “republic” endangered by the forces of “totalitarianism”—rather than as just another refugee Jewish scholar.

Similarly, Murray applied and was denied entry to a Ph.D. program at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1938, not only because she was African American and, as such, proscribed by Jim Crow legislation from attending any public school that was not segregated by race; but also, if perhaps less obviously, because she lived as a (genderqueer) woman in a heteronormative, patriarchal society governed by the (un)written codes of what she later described as “Jane Crow.”

One of the qualities that makes Lemkin and Murray such extraordinary individuals is that they did not meekly accept the status quo but, rather, successfully used their unique skill sets to push back against the laws and attitudes that sought to marginalize them.  They did so in part by authoring books that changed the world. Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944)—available in both print and electronic versions at  DUL—coined the term “genocide,” provided some of the legal argumentation for the trials of Nazi war criminals at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (1945-1949), and ultimately became the basis for the United Nations’ “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” (1951).

Murray’s States’ Laws on Race and Color and Appendices: Containing International Documents, Federal Laws and Regulations, Local Ordinances and Charts (1950), also available in multiple copies at DUL, documented the injustice of the Jim Crow South, provided the legal reasoning for the team of lawyers that successfully argued the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and became, in the words of Thurgood Marshall (one of the members of that team, who went on to serve as the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States), the “Bible” of American civil rights litigators.

Despite their different backgrounds, both lawyers adopted a similar approach to the primary sources that served as the basis of their landmark scholarly publications. During his brief stay at Duke, Lemkin worked on compiling, translating, and contextualizing the racially based legislation imposed on the formerly free citizens of the European countries conquered at the start of World War II by Nazi Germany and its allies.

His analysis of German-language gazettes published by Nazi military governments—an impressive collection of which is available at DUL—demonstrated the existence, and deliberate implementation, of a formally legal, but (Lemkin argued) internationally criminal set of laws meant to expropriate, exploit, and, ultimately, exterminate an entire group of people (Jews) whom the Nazi’s defined as a subhuman “race.”

Similarly, Murray’s groundbreaking research boldly tackled the racially based legislation imposed on the formerly enslaved and only recently enfranchised citizens of the United States—including in her adopted home state of North Carolina—by the democratically elected representatives of the American people.

Her analysis demonstrated that from the very beginning of the post-Civil War “Era of Reconstruction,” the freely elected leaders of the formally democratic and egalitarian republic imposed a set of discriminatory laws explicitly designed to deprive African-American citizens of their constitutional rights, to institutionalize racial segregation, and to terrorize this racialized minority into submission to white supremacy.

The political significance of the works penned by Lemkin and Murray cannot be overstated, especially during the turbulent times in which we presently find ourselves.  In their professional yet impassioned writings, these two legal scholars showed that, regardless of whether it resulted from military conquest or the democratic electoral process, a racist legal system was ultimately based on the threat (and frequent application) of violence against the bodies and psyches of the members of the outcast group, rather than on the principles dictated by ethical conceptions of equity and human rights.  Furthermore, by their personal commitment to the cause of social justice, they demonstrated that scholarship was not divorced from real life and that “ivory-tower” academics had as much to contribute to positive change “out there” in the world as full-time political activists.  It is for this reason, as much as for their books, that Lemkin and Murray have become revered role models of the international movement for the rights of everyone—regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation—who has ever experienced the toxic effects of chauvinism.

From the perspective of academic librarians, the lives and works of Lemkin and Murray demonstrate the vital importance of our mission to collect, preserve, and curate the research material that serves as the basis of paradigm-changing scholarship. Neither Lemkin nor Murray could have done the research that informed their arguments were it not for the law books—both foreign and domestic—that were purchased and made accessible to these avid users of academic research libraries.  At Duke, this type of collecting for diversity continues, not only in the Goodson Law Library, but also in the other repositories that make up the university library system.

One prominent example of this collecting focus is provided by the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, which curates SNCC Digital Gateway: Learn From the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work, a collaborative project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Legacy Project, Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, and the Duke University Libraries.

Another example is the work of the library’s Human Rights Archive, which “partners with the human rights community to preserve the history and legacy of human rights around the world.”  Even a brief look at the Archive’s online guide, which now includes a link to a guide about Raphael Lemkin at Duke, demonstrates that collecting and curating materials on international movements for political, socio-economic, and racial justice is an important component of how Duke libraries seeks to support the university’s mission of fostering the kind of transformative scholarship that is exemplified by the works of Lemkin and Murray.

Like these other library units, the International and Area Studies department has eagerly taken up the challenge of creating a “supportive environment for research, learning, and academic community” and  “strengthening Duke’s capacity to address global challenges for communities across the world” (the third and fourth goals of the University’s academic strategic plan).  The international and area studies collections built and curated by IAS staff demonstrate that racialized judicial systems and the violence that they generate are located all over the globe and characterize all kinds of polities.  Ascribed definitions of social identity, the legal mechanisms that enforce them, and the civil rights activism that is required to reform systems of institutionalized discrimination and oppression are not the monopoly of any one country or political party.  Unfortunately, the contemporary United States is not the only place in the world to demonstrate the ease and rapidity with which conspiracy-minded, populist demagogues and their supporters (both in and out of the halls of power), can stoke the fears of an already-anxious electorate of formally democratic countries and channel these feelings into legalized expressions of xenophobia, discrimination, and violence.

The books on post-Communist Russia and eastern Europe that I collect, for example, offer plenty of evidence for the proposition that it doesn’t take much for the judicial system of a formally democratic country to fall into the clutches of a corrupt, conservative, political party bent on undermining the rule of law and institutionalizing policies that trample on the human rights of racial, religious, and sexual minorities.  These contemporary case studies also demonstrate the important role that concerned individuals, domestic civil rights groups, and international organizations play in holding oppressive and illiberal regimes accountable for their actions.  In so doing, the materials in Duke’s Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies collection not only inform students about international developments or provide scholars with the qualitative and quantitative data needed to conduct robust comparative and cross-cultural studies.  They also acquaint political activists with potential partners in the global struggle against all forms of oppression and provide strategies for pursuing a viable, international, human rights agenda.

Today, on the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, we still do not know whether Chauvin’s conviction is a milestone in the process of dismantling a racially based caste system that undergirds carceral capitalism in the age of surveillance or merely an exception that proves the rule.  What we do know is that the outcome depends on what we—all of us—do to ensure that chauvinism never trumps the rule of law.

Like other members of the Duke community, the university’s academic librarians are committed to supporting anti-racist scholarship, leadership, and service. As citizens of both the American republic and the international republic of letters, we also have the opportunity and the means (despite straitened circumstances) to make a difference on both the local and the global levels.  That is why I am so confident that the research materials strategically selected by Duke University’s archivists, curators, and international area studies librarians will make it possible for a new generation of Lemkins and Murrays to publish paradigm-shifting books that will help us to imagine, and work towards realizing, a more humane, equitable, and just world.

Collecting for Global Diversity, Part 4

The fourth post in the blog series on the role of international collections and their collectors in promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion was contributed by Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, International and Area Studies Department, Duke University Libraries.

Collecting for global diversity is more than a matter of identifying, locating, and acquiring distinctive, international and area studies materials for Duke University Libraries (DUL).  In order for these resources to be useful to students and researchers, foreign language materials must also be described and organized in a way that makes them comprehensible, accessible, and discoverable. Librarians from the International and Area Studies (IAS) Department collaborate closely with the catalogers, archivists, and metadata specialists in our Technical Services (TS) Department in order to make that happen as smoothly and efficiently as possible with finite financial and human resources at DUL’s disposal.

As the following description of the behind-the-scenes work that went into creating multilingual metadata for the digital collection of Sidney D. Gamble Photographs demonstrates, cataloging international materials poses not only a technical and linguistic challenge, but also an intellectual and ethical one. That is because the act of translation—in this case, from one format type (analog/digital) and language (English/Chinese) to another—requires the active intervention of a diverse group of library staff with both the subject expertise and the cultural literacy to provide just the right description at just the right time.

The collection of 4,700 black-and-white photographs and 600 hand-colored lantern slides amassed by the prominent Sinologist, sociologist, and amateur photographer Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968) depicts pre-revolutionary China’s urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s. Over the course of his long and illustrious academic career, Gamble published seven books on China and always used his photographs to supplement his narrative. He even created an index of roll numbers, exposure numbers, and brief captions, which usually included the place names and subjects depicted in his photos. This index functioned, in effect, as the analog version of the initial metadata that was used to describe the digitized version of Gamble’s photos.  But, as I will demonstrate below, this was only the beginning of the process of cataloging, contextualizing, and providing access to the images in the Gamble digital collection.

As Duke’s subject specialist on China, I started working on the black-and-white images in early 2008, when the Gamble collection first arrived at DUL’s Rare Book and Special Collections (now Rubenstein) Library. The original nitrate negatives had just been digitized and placed in cold storage, to preserve them in perpetuity. Gamble’s own handwritten and typed captions, which were digitized alongside these fragile negatives, were transformed into raw text using optical character recognition (OCR) software. The digital version of Gamble’s captions thus became the foundation for the image captions and geographic headings of the Gamble digital collection as a whole. The collection was published on the DUL website in fall 2008 and immediately attracted the attention of researchers worldwide. The hand-colored lantern slides were digitized and added to the digital collection in 2014. Another photo album, containing 170 images of Gamble’s first China trip with his family, was the latest item digitized and added to the database in 2019. The Gamble digital collection that now resides on DUL’s website and servers, therefore, is a careful compilation and comprehensive presentation of all his photographs and slides together with metadata in four different languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Creating bilingual geographic headings in English and Chinese

In 2008, the expert staff in DUL’s Technical Services department extracted out of the raw text from the digitized image labels a list of all toponyms (proper names of places) identified by Gamble. Removing the duplicates left a list of roughly 1,000 alphabetically organized entries for me to work on.  That is, I took on the task of adding the Romanized form of Chinese characters—a system of transliteration known as Pinyin—to these place names. After going through the spreadsheet and identifying (and excluding) duplicates, I was able to reduce the total list to about 500 relatively unique geographic place names.

Next, I grouped these Chinese place names into three general categories.  The first category consisted of the proper names of well-known and popular places that foreigners regularly visited in early twentieth century China. Gamble’s spellings of these place names—such as Hangchow (for Hangzhou 杭州) and Beijing’s Lama Temple (for Yonghegong 雍和宫)—relied on an earlier, popular, Romanization form of Chinese characters (known as Wade-Giles) and was relatively easy to identify for anyone familiar with the history of the transliteration systems used in the field of Chinese studies. The second, and much smaller group of Chinese toponyms, consisted of photographs depicting locations in neighboring Russia, Japan, and Korea; places with general, descriptive titles (“On the Sea”); and those that lacked any identifying information. The geographical heading assigned to this group usually just referred to the names of the countries that Gamble had visited on his various trips to Asia. The third, and most challenging, group consisted of toponyms for remote or lesser-known locations, as well as those known by a different geographical name than the one in use today. Gamble’s Romanization of these place names was inconsistent and often did not use the standard systems available to him. In fact, many of the geographical names in the last group could not properly identified until a year or two after Gamble’s photos arrived at Duke, sometime in 2009 or 2010, when I was able to do additional archival research about Gamble’s trips and his work in China. And a few were identified more than six years after the database was published when a Chinese blogger provided a clue.

Initially the digitized images and the typed image labels resided in separate locations on the DUL server. Since these items were not yet linked to each other in the database, it was impossible to compare Gamble’s photographs with the captions and geographic locations that supposedly described them. Luckily, after inspecting the physical materials, I realized that Gamble filed his negatives with roll number and exposure number in the order of his visits to different places. By arranging the photos by their roll numbers, I was able to reconstruct his trips in sequence. Inspecting the physical collection also led me to conclude that Gamble used two different photo cameras, which he called “Camera A” and “Camera B.”  The negatives of the photos produced by these cameras have roll numbers from 2A to 95A and from 1B to 77B. Later Gamble relied primarily on Camera A, so we have roll numbers from 96 to 663, which actually are 96A to 663A.

To give you an example of how I used these archival discoveries to improve the metadata for the Chinese place names used by Gamble, let’s examine the images in rolls from 2A to 95A and from 1B to 36B, which cover the places Gamble visited from May to October in 1917, when he arrived at Shanghai, before travelling up the Yangtze River into Sichuan (四川) Province. Since most of the photos from this trip were taken in Sichuan Province, the place name that Gamble assigned to Image 1 (Fu Chou in roll 21A) must be located somewhere in Sichuan, despite the fact that this place name also sounds very similar to FooChow (Fuzhou 福州), a city in Fujian (福建), which is an entirely different province. So it is reasonable to conclude that Gamble’s designation (Fu Chou) actually refers to Fuzhou (涪州), which later came to be called Fuling (涪陵), a city famous for its pickles (榨菜). In order to make this location more discoverable in the digital collection, the metadata for this geographic place name now includes both its modern name (Fuling) and its old name (Fuzhou).

To take another, somewhat more complicated example, let’s inspect the toponyms that Gamble assigned to the photo of the walking “spinner” (Image 2). This label confusingly refers to two different place names: Li Fan and Tsa Ka Lo. However, since this photo comes from roll B22, these places must also be located in Sichuan Province. Li Fan is clearly a reference to Lifan County (Lifan Xian 理番县), which changed its name to Li County (Li Xian 理县) in 1945. The County is in today’s Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture (阿坝藏族羌族自治州). The Chinese character 番 means “foreign tribe” while 理 means “to manage.”  People living in this region are mainly Tibetans and Qiangs, plus some Hui and Han Chinese. In the eighteenth century, Qianlong Emperor appointed rotating officials to rule this region as a way of incorporating minority groups living on the frontiers of the Qing Empire. The Chinese character for “foreign tribe” (番) was removed from the county name during the Republican era (1912-1949) because of its derogatory connotation, suggesting that the residents of this region were not Han Chinese. The county government sits at Zagunao Town (杂谷脑镇), which comes from Tibetan phrase for “land of good fortune,” as heard and spelled by the Han Chinese. It is not difficult to match Zagunao with Tsa Ka Lo, Gamble’s Romanization of the Chinese place name. The metadata for this place now includes both the old and the modern names (in Pinyin and Chinese characters), which makes it easier for users of this digital collection to match the image with other, textual sources.

Locating the actual place name for Gamble’s “So Village” presented a somewhat different challenge. That name appears on 85 photographs in rolls from both Camera A (44A to 51A) and Camera B (17B to 19B).  Judging by its location in the sequence of photographs, this village must also have been located in Sichuan Province, most likely somewhere in the triangle region formed by Mao County (茂县), Wenchuan County (汶川县) and Li County (理县).  Since there are also at least three different Chinese words for “village”—cun (村), zhuang (庄) or zhai (寨)—locating it in one of these counties required figuring out what Gamble meant by the word “So.”  My initial guess, which was based on the assumption that “So” referred to the name of the honored ancestor of one of the more prominent families in this village, led me to suggest that Gamble’s “So Village” was really called either Suo Cun (索村) or Su Cun (苏村).  Unfortunately, neither place name was found in that geographical area.

The actual name and location of Gamble’s “So Village” remained a mystery until a researcher in Sichuan brought my attention to a blog post from China in 2014. According to the Chinese blogger, the name of this agricultural settlement was the Village of Suo Chieftain (Suo Tusi 索土司), called Wasi Tusi Guanzhai (瓦寺土司官寨). With this hint, I went through DUL’s copy of the local gazetteer for the counties of Mao and Wenchuan and confirmed the blogger’s findings. The village of So is located in Wenchuan County and is populated mainly by Rgyalrong Tibetans, who moved to this part of China a very long time ago. Rgyalrong Tibetans believe that they are the descendants of the mythological “Great Peng Bird” (Dapengniao, 大鹏鸟) and therefore use a bird as their totem. Interestingly, one of Gamble’s photos (Image 3) shows a guardian statue on top of a gateway: it has a bird’s head and a human’s body and is holding a snake in its hands. This image from the Gamble collection matches the description of the village entrance in a local gazetteer published in 1997. And so, now, the metadata for “So Village” has been updated to read: Wasi Tusi Guanzhai (瓦寺土司官寨), located in Miansi Town (绵虒镇) of Wenchaung County (汶川县).

Adding Metadata, Adding Value

As these three examples suggest, identifying and assigning accurate geographical descriptions to the photos in DUL’s Gamble digital collection is as much an art as a science.  Usually, it depends on a knowledge of the language and history of China and a good bit of research.  But, sometimes, all you need is a helpful hint from a user located on the other side of the globe.  The fact that the blog post about the contemporary name of “So Village” would never have been brought to my attention if the digital collection did not include Chinese language metadata only serves to confirm the importance of creating bilingual geographic headings for digital collections of non-English materials.

The “added value” of revising metadata cannot be put into strictly monetary terms; nor can it always be counted, like the number of clicks on a webpage.  The value of including bilingual geographic headings, for example, is not merely a matter of convenience, i.e. the fact that it allows researchers who may be familiar with only one place name to identify all the photographs in the Gamble collection that are associated with this toponym. Revision of metadata also makes it possible to uncover the existence of suppressed, unknown, or undocumented subjects in DUL’s image collections (such as the Han Chinese of Zagunao and the Rgyalrong Tibetans of Wasi Tusi Guanzhai). But its true value lies in the intention to establish a meaningful connection between the international and area studies materials collected by DUL’s subject specialists and the researchers who use them, irrespective of where these researchers happen to live, what religion they practice, and what language they speak.  And it is precisely because of DUL’s commitment to such cosmopolitan values that the geographical headings in the Gamble digital collection will continue to be updated and revised as new research findings come out.

Collecting for Global Diversity, Part 3

The third post in the blog series on the role of international collections and their collectors in promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion was contributed by Heidi Madden, Ph.D., Librarian for Western European and Medieval Renaissance Studies, International and Area Studies Department, Duke University Libraries.

Muslims represented around 5% of the total European Union (EU) population in 2016, and according to the World Fact Book, the highest numbers of Europe’s Muslims reside in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The influx of refugees fleeing conflicts in the predominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East (and parts of Africa) and seeking asylum in the EU has prompted heated debates about immigration, social integration, security policies, and religious freedom. In response to these debates, governments in several different EU countries have passed legislation restricting religious expression in public places (especially schools) in an effort to maintain a strict separation between church and state and to foster religious pluralism without creating civil strife.

The headscarf (Arabic: حجاب‎ ḥijāb, “cover, wrap, curtain, veil, screen, partition”‎) traditionally worn by some Muslim women in the presence of people outside of their immediate family, has received negative attention in these debates because it is seen as a visible signifier of religious identity. The first major controversy about women wearing Islamic headscarves occurred in France, in 1989, when three female students were suspended from school for refusing to remove their head scarfs (the media coverage at the time can be followed in our French newspaper database Eureka). This incident sparked controversy about the extent to which government legislation should be used for negotiating culture clashes. In the end, France passed a law in 2004 banning ostentatious religious clothing or objects in public schools, including the Islamic head scarf, the Jewish brimless cap (Hebrew: כִּיפָּה, kippah, “dome”), and large Christian crosses.  Since then, several European Union countries introduced similar legislation. A 2017 European Commission report on “Religious Clothing and Symbols in Employment,” authored by members of the European Network of Legal Experts in Gender Equality and Non-Discrimination and freely-available on the website of the Publications Office of the European Union, describes the chronology in greater detail.

It is within, and in response, to this polarized political context that Ayşe Taşci (b. 1983), a Turkish-born (Aydin, Turkey), German-based (in Bonn since 2003) photographer organized ÇAPRAŞIK – Verwickelt, a well-received exhibit of contemporary photographs featuring ḥijāb-wearing women.

Source: Ayşe Taşci, Çapraşik–Verwickelt (Bonn, 2010)

The exhibit, which took place in 2010, asked the viewers to question how they look at a woman in a Muslim headscarf and what they see when they do so. The rich, multilayered meaning of the hyphenated exhibition title, which employed both the Turkish word çapraşık and the German word Verwickelt, explicitly evoked the sense of being tangled, wrapped-up, complicated, knotted, complicit, and involved. These are the perfect words to describe the questions raised by Taşci’s photo exhibit. What is the relationship between veiling and unveiling? Does the wearer of a ḥijāb  hide or reveal her (religious, cultural, gendered) identity? Is the Muslim headscarf oppressive or emancipatory? How does a photographer represent the woman who wears a ḥijāb ? And how does photography itself veil, unveil, or stage the identity of women wearing a head covering?

Source: Ayşe Taşci, Çapraşik–Verwickelt (Bonn, 2010)

For example, what happens to viewer’s expectations when a photographer chooses to represent an ordinary woman’s wig as a headscarf? In Turkey, until 2013, wearing the veil at university, and other places, was prohibited. In order to get around this law, Turkish women would wear a headscarf over their hair and then put a wig over the headscarf. Would the act of photographing this kind of life-hack advance or hinder women’s participation in the public sphere?

Taşci’s exhibit helped visitors examine the complicated dynamic between their own unexamined, and often prejudiced, way of seeing the ḥijāb. Viewers also became aware of the often-unacknowledged power wielded by photographers, and the mass media in general, in creating positive or negative discourse through the mobilization of emotive images. By this means, the exhibit “entangled” the viewer and created “a space for open discourse, controversial debates and dialog between photography, art and people.”

The exhibit ÇAPRAŞIK – Verwickelt was based on Ayşe Taşcis master’s thesis at Folkwang University of the Arts (Essen, Germany), which was published in a very small print run at the beginning of her professional career. Professor Claudia Koonz, a noted European Studies expert at Duke University, who discovered the exhibit, suggested that the library purchase Taşci’s Diplomarbeit, because it is an evocative example of the kind of visual materials often used as primary sources, both in student term papers and in academic research publications. The acquisition of this primary visual source strengthens Duke University Libraries’ collection on Turkish-German relations, Islamophobia, gender, visual, and migration studies in Europe.  It also contributes to the pedagogical mission of the university by emphasizing visual literacy— an increasingly important skill of critical thinking and an essential component of a 21st-century education—potentially serving as the library’s counterpart to the visual materials in How Do You Look?, the online portal for the promotion of visual literacy hosted by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Just as importantly, the acquisition of this rare publication, which at the time of this writing is still held only by Duke University Libraries, allows us to see the Muslim experience in Europe from Taşcis unique perspective.  The book thus serves not only as a physical reminder of our commitment to building collections of distinction, but also to the broader mission of collecting for global diversity.

Readers who wish to see more photos from Ayşe Taşci’s exhibit on the ḥijāb are welcome to check out her book, which is located in the Lower Stacks (LL2) of the Perkins & Bostock Library on Duke’s West Campus.  You can also can consult the online article about ÇAPRAŞIK – Verwickelt on the German website Art à la Turka, which contains a number of evocative images from the exhibit.

Collecting for Global Diversity, Part 2

The second post in the IAS blog series on the role of international collections and their collectors in promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion was contributed by Holly Ackerman, Head, International & Area Studies Dept. and Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino/a/x Studies.

The need to collaborate in collecting has risen swiftly on library agendas everywhere as a result of both the financial crisis accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic and the simultaneous rise in concern about promoting and augmenting diversity, equity and inclusion. Everyone is asking, “How can we collect and spotlight a wider range of voices, cultures, races, languages, genders, and cross-cutting themes even as our budgets stumble and fall?”

Here at Duke University Libraries, we are fortunate to participate in a long and healthy tradition of cooperation within the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), where the collaboration between Duke’s International and Area Studies Department (IAS) and UNC’s Global Resources and Area Studies Section (GRAS) is particularly vigorous. But other, lesser-known national projects have also steadily obtained unique, difficult-to-acquire, ethnically- and linguistically-diverse materials. One of these, which I will describe in this blog post, is the Latin American & Caribbean Distributed Resources Project (DRP).

Coordination of DRP is located at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago as part of their overall Global Resources Program and is now celebrating twenty-five years of systematically assuring deep collecting of culturally and linguistically diverse materials from the thirty-three countries in the region.

What is the Distributed Resources Project?

DRP is a pledge made by 35 university research libraries in 1995, to reallocate a portion of their collections budget for Latin America toward enhanced coverage of ‘non-core’ materials in order to collect more deeply in specific areas of institutional specialization. Each institution chose 1-3 subjects of particular strength at their university where other universities would have interest but probably lack funds to collect deeply. The project deliberately built on existing strengths, believing it would lead to long-range commitment. After 25 years it’s still working!

Chosen subjects included particular countries, geographic regions, or unique subjects such as the African Diaspora in Latin America (the U. of Wisconsin) or Indigenous Languages and Literature (Indiana University). Duke University initially chose to collect on Latin American & Caribbean Labor History and the struggles for justice that accompany labor organizing. In 2003, we added a second focus on Political Humor & Caricature.  Each institution began by diverting 7% of their overall budget for Latin American Studies to the selected resource area while relying on other institutions to pick up deep collecting in their chosen area. Each institution also pledged to rapidly process materials acquired by DRP so that they would be rapidly available to users everywhere via their institution’s interlibrary loan service.

Over time these small amounts have grown and in the last two annual reports (with only 25 of 35 members reporting) collective spending ranged from $400,000 to $500,000 per year. Over the life of the program, more than $10 million has been devoted to this deep collecting dive. Small initial steps have resulted in distinctive collections (in local languages) that are rapidly available, and, equally important, are known to Latin American Studies librarians everywhere.

How do we obtain the DRP materials?

First, you put on your walking shoes. I remember well walking the “miles of aisles” at Guadalajara, Mexico’s huge national book fair a few years ago, where hundreds of exhibitors offer limited-edition books in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages published throughout Latin America.

Guadalajara International Book Fair

Over 800,000 thousand people attend this fair annually. Schoolchildren from every part of Mexico are bused to the fair to encourage their interest in books and reading. The kids rub shoulders with world-class intellectuals who speak about their work. And, of course, Latin American Studies Librarians are there is such large numbers that they give us a couple of days before the fair opens to the public to be sure that the books make it into libraries throughout the world.

At each stand I routinely ask whether they have materials in our DRP collecting areas. One vendor pulled out a box that was not on display containing a series called The History of Graphic Humor (La historia del humor gráfico), in thirteen volumes, one on each major country in Latin America and Iberia. In order to feature local appreciation of humor in each country, the publisher engaged a well-known local historian of the subject as the author. The books contained history and illustrative examples of political satire and popular cartoons from colonial days to the present.

Three books from the series “The History of Graphic Humor = La historia del humor gráfico”

They had just one complete set at the fair and I got it. A great find for our deep collecting! Each year when students in Spanish and Latin American Studies courses ask me where they can find political cartoons and learn about the graphic artists, I see the value of that purchase. And those numbers are growing as more students include primary, graphic materials in their class presentations.

Another way to meet our DRP commitment is to couple conference attendance with book-buying. In 2018, I was able to participate in the annual Latin American Studies Association Congress in Barcelona, which is the publishing capital of Spain.  I extended my stay for a couple of days to go to over 20 specialized bookstores and publishing houses. Best known and unique among the bookstores is El Lokal, which is located in a section of town historically renowned as the site of labor-organizing and -protest. The district was the epicenter of resistance to the fascist Franco regime and you can feel history in those streets.

El Lokal Bookstore (Barcelona, Spain)

In a very small space, the book store carries a huge cross-section of Marxist, anarchist, Trotskyist and other leftist thought . And since El Lokal is also a publisher, the store is chock-full of books about everything related to the labor movement, from labor resistance in Spain to indigenous resistance to forced labor under Spanish colonization in what is today Latin America.

Two books on labor and indigenous resistance, published and sold in El Lokal Bookstore

In other words, this independent, specialized, local bookstore is a veritable treasure trove for a librarian tasked with finding and acquiring unique material on Iberian and Latin American labor history, politics, and theory. This sort of in-country “shopping” not only deepens our DRP collection but also saves money. Our regular Spanish book vendor worked with me to have all the books I selected (at a discount negotiated at each store in Barcelona) moved to their warehouse in Madrid and sent to Durham simply at the shipping cost. Those savings outstrip the cost of the book-buying trip itself.

These are just a couple of examples among many of how we in IAS cooperate with other libraries to be sure that collecting on unique and important subjects is systematically covered and not forgotten in hard times.

Dr. Deborah Jakubs, 2017, in conversation with Daniel Divinsky, founder and editor of the publishing house Ediciones de la Flor, on his radio program “Books Talk” at the University of Buenos Aires

The Duke University Libraries can also be proud of the fact that Deborah Jakubs, Ph.D. , Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian, Vice Provost for Library Affairs, and Duke’s former Latin American Librarian, was one of the founders of the Global Resources Program of which the DRP is a part. When asked how she and her colleagues came up with the idea for this exemplar of cooperative collection development she replied, “We were trying different ‘proof of concept’ approaches to sharing responsibility for collection building in area studies.” In difficult financial times such as the present, the DRP members have turned that proof of concept into a tradition assuring that diverse perspectives from Spain, Latin America, and the Caribbean will be represented in the distinctive holdings of Duke University Library and, thanks to interlibrary loan and resource-sharing arrangements with TRLN and the IvyPlus Libraries Confederation, in university research libraries throughout the United States.

Those wishing to read more about the Global Resources Projects on Latin America will want to consult the description offered by one of the founders of this initiative, the late Associate Librarian of Harvard College for Collection Development, Dan Hazen, “The Latin Americanist Research Resources Project: A New Direction for Monographic Cooperation?” ARL: A Bimonthly Newsletter of Research Library Issues and Actions (April 1997), pp. 1-6.

 

Collecting for Global Diversity

This prefatory blog post to a series exploring the role of international collections and their collectors in promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion was contributed by Sean Swanick, Luo Zhou, and Ernest Zitser, respectively the Chinese, Middle Eastern & Islamic, and Russian, Eurasian, & East European studies librarians, in the International and Area Studies Department of Duke University Libraries.

One can think of the variegated research materials (foreign-language books, journals, databases, photographs, postcards, etc.) acquired by the staff of Duke University Library’s International and Area Studies (IAS) department in at least two ways.  For some, they are the relatively poorly-circulating counterparts of the bread-and-butter titles in a predominantly English-language, general collection. For others, they are a unique, difficult-to-acquire, distinct, and special collection (with a small “S”) in its own right. However, regardless of how they are described, their provenance, or their eventual location within the library (on- or off-site, general- or special collection), international materials serve as conduits of ideas and identities across linguistic boundaries and cultural barriers. In this way, international collections are both transgressive and transformative.

This diversity applies not only to the material resources that IAS librarians collect to further the research and teaching of international topics at Duke University, but also to the core mission, organization, and composition of the department itself.  Not surprisingly, IAS is structured by geography and seeks to represent as many different parts of the world as possible: Asia (inclusive of the Middle East, South & Southeast Asia), Eurasia (Russia and former Soviet countries), Eastern and Western Europe, Africa (northern and sub-Saharan), as well as Latin America & Iberia. Nor is it surprising that IAS librarians are as diverse, multi-lingual, and international as the collections that they curate.  Only two of IAS’ current eight members were born in the US. All the rest moved from their home countries to work here at Duke University Libraries. Regardless of their differences—ethnic, linguistic, or religious—they all serve as intermediaries between one culture and another.  And they all share the unpleasant experience of dealing with border guards and customs agents, that is, the authorities who control the flow of goods and people into and out of a country and who are responsible for collecting government tariffs—the duties or taxes imposed on imported or exported goods and, before the abolition of the international slave trade, also on commodified human beings.

Smyrne, Les quais et le bureau des passeports = İzmir, the Docks and the Passport Office.
Smyrne, Les quais et le bureau des passeports = İzmir, the Docks and the Passport Office. İzmir (Smyrna) postcards and photographs collection. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

The French word for customs is douane—a variant on the Arabic word دیوان (dīwān), which likely came to Arabic from Persian/Farsi.  This word is thought to have arrived in France via the Mediterranean island of Sicily (the “toe” of Italy’s “boot”), which at one point in time hosted a significant Arab population. Although the etymology of the mellifluous-sounding French word hints at a process of cross-cultural fertilization (Persian to Arabic to French via Italy), in practice, a customs house serves as an architectural embodiment of the process by which established, governmental authorities label and domesticate the “Other.” A douane, in other words, is a stark reminder of the fact that you are crossing a demarcated border and entering a foreign country, a land where you do not really belong and where you are the unwelcome stranger.

Anyone who has ever travelled internationally knows that every time you enter a foreign country, you have to engage in certain social conventions: show a valid passport and (entry) visa, then explain why you are entering, why you left, where you went, and for how long. Even if you are just a librarian returning from an international book-buying trip or book fair, you are bound to be stopped at the border: “Welcome to the US, Mr. Swanick: Have you ever been to Yemen? When was the last time you visited Syria? And what was the purpose of your visit?” Or else: “I don’t recognize this visa, please come with me”—a phrase that sends chills up and down a global traveler’s spine, no matter which country’s customs agent pronounces it.  International borders, like the customs houses and checkpoints built alongside them, affirm your identity and nationality, whether you like it or not. They are meant to exclude the “Other,” to limit diversity, and to demonstrate your inequality vis-à-vis the natives of the country you are visiting. They are, in a word, the polar opposite of the global perspective cultivated by IAS.

Yichang (Ichang) Customs Station = 宜昌海关站 (1917). Sidney D. Gamble Photographs. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yichang (Ichang) Customs Station = 宜昌海关站 (1917). Sidney D. Gamble Photographs. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

As the international border-crossing experience painfully demonstrates, the world and its inhabitants could stand with a little less “othering” and a lot more diversity. But what does “being” diverse mean for the international and area studies specialists of Duke University Libraries? Over the course of the next several months, a series of blog posts by different members of IAS will attempt to examine how our work as builders and curators of the library’s international collections contributes to the on-going, campus-wide conversation about equity, diversity, and inclusion.  We hope you will read our entries in the spirit in which they were intended and contact us if you have any comments, criticisms, or (we hope) compliments.

Stay tuned!

Putting the ‘Global’ Back Into Global Pandemic, Part 7

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts on global pandemics written by the staff of Duke Libraries’ International and Area Studies Department.  Like the firstsecondthirdfourth, fifth, and sixth posts, it is edited by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D., Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.  The following post is written by Heidi Madden, Ph.D. , Librarian for Western European and Medieval Renaissance Studies.

Most of the pandemic reading lists that you will find online, such as the ones mentioned in my previous blog post, tend to feature modern or contemporary English language publications and (with very few exceptions, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron) to focus almost exclusively on Anglo-American literature. In this blog post, I want to highlight plague narratives of continental Europe and to present three pre-modern works from France, Italy, and German-speaking lands, which are beloved in their countries of origins, but are, for one reason or another, not as well-known abroad.

The Fables of Jean de la Fontaine

One of the ways pre-modern authors dealt with the Plague was to turn it into an allegory and use it for didactic ends.  That is precisely what Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) did when he composed a fable, in free verse, entitled “Animals Sick of the Plague” (Les Animaux malades de la peste), one of the required plague texts of early modern France.  This fable was one of the 239 published between 1668 and 1694, in 12 books of Fables, a publication that turned this French fabulist into one of the most widely read poets of the seventeenth century and a model for other writers throughout Europe.  Although La Fontaine’s fables were originally dedicated to the heir-to-the-throne (who was just 7 years old in 1668), they were by no means intended to serve merely as entertaining children’s literature (as they have come to be used today). La Fontaine culled his stories from both classical (Greek and Roman) fabulists and their “Oriental” (Persian, Indian, etc.) counterparts (at least those available in French or Latin translation). He then transformed them into memorable verses and infused them with the wit and wisdom for which he has become justly famous.  Indeed, to this day, you cannot truly be French if you are not able to recite from memory a poem by La Fontaine or quickly understand an aphoristic colloquialism that derives from his Fables.

Gustave Doré, Animals sick of the plague

Animals sick of the plague” (Fable CXXV) tells the story about a time when almost all the animals in the world had died from a terrible infectious disease. The Lion, king of the animals, declares that the plague was sent by the gods as a punishment for everyone’s sins. He decides that each of the surviving animals should publicly confess their sins and that the animal whose sin is the gravest should be sacrificed to atone on behalf of everyone else. The Lion confesses to killing innocent Sheep (and even the shepherd who tended them). When it is the Fox’s turn to confess, he succeeds in talking the Lion out of his guilt by describing the Sheep as inferior beings, who deserved nothing better. The other animals follow the Fox’s example and insist that they have committed no sins. Only the Donkey follows the Lion’s instructions to the letter and admits that he ate some delicious grass from someone’s property without permission.  Since he was the only one to plead guilty, the animals condemn the Donkey to death. The moral of the story is: “If you are powerful, wrong or right, / The court will change your black to white.”

This fable, with animals as stock characters, devoid of any identifiable social situation, and therefore universally true, speaks to us even after 400 years.  “Animals Sick of the Plague” addresses the age-old question: should political leaders surround themselves with yes-men, sycophants, and toadies or should they pick people whose moral character and commitment to truth trumps their loyalty to a single individual, political party, or special interest?  Although this poem merely references the plague, without describing the outbreak in any detail, the infectious disease serves as the litmus test for the king and his court.  La Fontaine’s ironic moral suggests that although this ruler and his cronies seem to succeed politically, they fail the real test of leadership that a pandemic demands from the holders of public office.  While the poet’s use of the words “black” and “white” reference a problematic and longstanding association of guilt and innocence with color, the French cartoon (above) represents a modern interpretation that makes this fable seem even more relevant, especially at a time when contemporary social movements seek to address the systemic inequalities — legal, socio-economic, racial — exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Betrothed of Alessandro Manzoni

The plague of 1629–1631, which killed 25% of the Italian population, serves as the backdrop of a historical romance called The Betrothed (I promesi sposi), one of the most popular Italian novels ever published and, today, one of the lesser- known bestsellers of the nineteenth century.  Originally published in three volumes between 1825 and 1827, the novel was the product of the pen of Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), a popular poet, novelist, and philosopher who was one of the cultural icons of the Italian nationalist revival movement (It. Risorgimento). The book was deliberately written in a clear, expressive prose style meant to be accessible to the broadest possible number of his fellow countrymen, which may explain not only Manzoni’s mass appeal during his lifetime, but also the reason why his prose became a model for many subsequent Italian authors.

Like the works of his European contemporaries, Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, Manzoni wrote novels firmly set in the turbulent history of the country that the author proudly claimed as his native land.  The Betrothed is set in Northern Italy during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and combines keen descriptions of characters, social class, and landscapes with a humorous, swashbuckling tone reminiscent of The Three Musketeers or Ivanhoe. The plot is as convoluted as it is predictable: two main characters, Renzo and Lucia, are engaged and are about to be married by the local priest. The priest, however, has been threatened by professional thugs, who work for a local lord; they prevent the priest from performing the wedding ceremony because the local lord has made a bet that he can seduce Lucia. The young peasant couple flees the village and the reader follows the pair of lovers through almost three years of war, social upheaval, and an outbreak of the plague in the city of Milan. In the end, their unshakeable faith in God and their devotion to each other conquers all earthly obstacles and the novel closes with their marriage.

G. Gallina, Accusing the anointers in the great plague of Milan in 1630 (Scene from ‘The Betrothed’)

While this happy ending may have been a traditional way to end a novel, Manzoni’s work cleverly flipped the perspective of the typical plague narrative: here the society is narrated as a society exposed by the virus, not to the virus. Some details of the inadequate response to the outbreak sound particularly familiar: the governor of Milan does not cancel the birthday celebration for the prince, and thus, creates a super-spreader event.  Even more poignant is Manzoni’s treatment of the role of rumors in the identification and targeting of scapegoats.  In the revised, final version of the novel, published in 1842, the author even went so far as to add an appendix about “The History of the Column of Infamy” (Storia della colonna infame).  This was a historical account of the infamous miscarriage of justice that occurred during the 1630 plague in Milan, when rumors about “spreaders” of the disease lead to the arrest, torture, and trial of several innocent men; a historical wrong that demonstrated, Manzoni argued, the inadequacy of the country’s judicial system.  One cannot read this appendix today without thinking of the way COVID-19 has exposed the (dis)function of our legal system.

The Black Spider of Jeremias Gotthelf

Say “Black Spider” to any contemporary German speaker, and they will vividly recall the first time they read The Black Spider (Die schwarze Spinne) by Jeremias Gotthelf, early modern Germany’s answer to Steven King or Edgar Alan Poe.  Gotthelf was actually the pen name of Albert Bitzius (1797–1854), a Swiss pastor who employed his considerable gifts as a writer to communicate his reformist concerns in the field of education and with regard to the plight of the poor.  The Black Spider, which has recently been translated anew into English, is perhaps the most famous example of the way this highly didactic author used fear as an educational tool.

Léo-Paul-Samuel Robert, Black Spider

A brief synopsis of the plot cannot do justice to the atmosphere of fear and horror that Gotthelf manages to create in the course of his novella.  The story within a story deals with a contemporary storyteller spinning a yarn about an abusive medieval knight-landlord who overtaxes his serfs to such an extent that they are forced to turn for help to the Devil.  A peasant girl named Christina, who serves as the village’s midwife, agrees to make a pact with the Beast, who disguises himself as a travelling huntsman.  The pact is sealed with a kiss on the cheek.  The kiss leaves a black mark that eventually takes on the shape of a black spider.  At a certain point this spider rises up on Christina’s cheek and gives birth to a swarm of creepy-crawlies that hurry from her face, over her body, and toward the town.  The swarm of spiders kills cattle and people alike; villagers sacrifice their lives to trap the black spider who gave birth to the swarm behind a black post of a window frame, but then the next generation once again, ignorantly and carelessly, unleashes the plague of spiders. Vivid images of horror upon horror make the listeners of the tale shiver in fear. And just when the contemporary audience thinks that the end of the story signals the end of the plague narrative to which they have been listening, they realize that the dreaded black spider of the tale-within-the-tale has been trapped in the old black post in the window frame of the very same house in which they are staying and is there, among them, at this very moment.

For all its drama and horror, Gotthelf’s novella raises themes that continue to resonate today.  Among these is the reminder that the continued exploitation of the poor and marginalized members of society is a danger to everyone’s well-being; and that neither hubris nor reckless ignorance are the right attitudes for confronting recurrent public health problems like global pandemics.  Sensible advice that could have real world applications.

So in what way are pre-modern literary treatments of pandemics, like the three Continental ones analyzed above, different from modern ones?  In the centuries leading up to the modern plague novel, literary authors stopped narrating the plague historically and turned the medical plague into a metaphor for the plague as a social and psychological phenomenon.  However, I find that pre-modern literature narrates fear and anxiety in a much more palpable way than modern plague novels, because they narrate fear at a time when medicine did not claim to have all the answers. That used to be a foreign concept to me.  Until recently, I, like everyone else, thought that a pandemic could never happen to us, moderns, and that pandemics belonged to the past. In reading pre-modern plague stories, I find that the raw emotions expressed speak to me; they help me deal with this feeling of endlessly waiting for isolation to end and for a vaccine to be found.

Putting the ‘Global’ Back Into Global Pandemic, Part 6

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts on global pandemics written by the staff of Duke Libraries’ International and Area Studies Department.  Like the firstsecond, third, fourth, and fifth posts, it is edited by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D., Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.  The following post is written by Heidi Madden, Ph.D. , Librarian for Western European and Medieval Renaissance Studies.

You have all probably seen them: online reading lists created expressly for the bored souls forced to stay indoors because of the restrictions on movement imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  (If not, check out the “Meta-List of the Books You Should Read in Coronavirus Quarantine,” created by the writers at Open Culture).  Some booklist-makers promise to provide prospective readers with cathartic relief from coronavirus fears through curative stories. Others focus on escapist fantasies that keep you sitting on the edge of your seat (Literary Hub Round).  Still others recommend plague novels that let us walk with our fears in virtual communities and to experience our common humanity through empathy. But no matter where you find them or who writes them, most online reading lists created during the COVID-19 pandemic—such as this piece in Vogue magazine, significantly entitled “Six Centuries later, The Decameron is Suddenly the Book of the Moment”—reach back to the Italian Renaissance and, more specifically, to Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and his Decameron (multiple copies of which are available in English translation, in both print and electronic format at Duke University Libraries).  In this blog post, I will try to provide some context for understanding this seemingly irresistible attraction to what more radical literary critics would dismiss as a canonic work of yet another dead, white, Western male.

Giorgio Vasari, Six Tuscan Poets (c. 1548-1570). Boccaccio (third from left) peeks out over the shoulders of Petrarch and Dante

First, let’s begin with some historical and biographical context.  In 1347, when the bubonic plague—or what Joris Roosen and Monica H. Green’s 2020 bibliography on the state of Black Death research in the era of COVID-19 called The Mother of All Pandemics—arrived in the port of Messina, Sicily, and quickly began to spread across the Italian peninsula, Boccaccio was a 34-year-old struggling writer living at home with his parents.  The illegitimate son of a prominent and prosperous citizen of the city of Florence, Boccaccio aspired to follow in the footsteps of his older and more famous contemporary, the great Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374), and their even greater role model, Dante Aligheri (d. 1321), the author of the Divine Comedy.  That is, Boccaccio wanted to become a “humanist,” i.e. a scholar-writer who used the classics of Greek and Roman literature to create a rich and vibrant, vernacular Italian language, in place of what he and his allies dismissed as the stilted, officious Latin tongue, the language of both Church and State.  In effect, to transform the irredeemably corrupt world that they had inherited from previous generations and to lay the groundwork for a metaphorical rebirth (It. rinascimento, Fr. renaissance) of the beauty and splendor that the humanists associated with the lost world of classical antiquity.

The Black Death in Florence. Decameron. BNF Fr. 239, f. 1r.

When the plague reached the city of Florence, in 1348, tens of thousands of people died of the deadly infectious disease, at least three times the number of those that had died of the same disease during an earlier outbreak back in 1340.  This time, Boccaccio’s father and stepmother were among the victims of the deadly infectious disease—a personal loss that also left the writer in possession of the family fortune.  Now that Boccaccio had the financial means to pursue an independent literary career, he embarked upon an ambitious, multi-year, book project, one that would eventually come to be known as his literary masterpiece.  The setting for this work, which was written between 1348 and 1353, was inspired, at least in part, by the author’s personal experience as an eyewitness and survivor of an outbreak of the plague.

Boccaccio, Decameron (Ferrara, c. 1467). MS. Holkham misc. 49, fol. 5r. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

However, the Black Death was more than just the immediate stimulus to Boccaccio’s most famous literary work.  It also served as the literary framing device for the 100 novellas contained in the anthology to which he gave an Italian name that he had coined, as one would expect of a Renaissance humanist, from ancient Greek (< δέκᾰ, “ten” and ἡμέρᾱ, “day”).  This was a reference to the number of days that the book’s main characters—consisting of a company of 10 young Florentines (seven women and three men, representing various vices and virtues)—spent in bucolic self-isolation, regaling each other with stories, while the pandemic raged outside the walls of their villa and all around them.

The description of the plague with which Boccaccio’s begins his book was not just an eyewitness account of the outbreak in Florence in 1348.  It was a mini-literary work in itself, inspired by the classic description of the plague of Athens in the History of the Peloponnesian War, written by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (460 BC to 400 BC).  Like Thucydides, Boccaccio’s description of the plague in the introduction to the Decameron offered a realistic account of the outbreak of the disease, its symptoms, and its impact on society; and like Thucydides, he focused on earthly matters rather than on supernatural powers.  In this, as in many other instances—for example, in many of the plots and themes of the novellas in the Decameron—Boccaccio reveals the humanist project of translating classical stories, motifs, and images into the literary language of the contemporary author and his era. In effect, Boccaccio can be seen as a node in a network of literary texts and their authors—both those that preceded him and those that followed him—and thus as part of a much more complex web of cultural linkages than is usually depicted in the old syllabi of Western Civ courses.

Connections between Boccaccio and literature before and after the publication of the Decameron

A striking visualization of the connections between Boccaccio and literature before and after the publication of the Decameron was created in 2016 by Kristján Hannesson, a graduate student in the UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature (you can download the full chart from Scribd).  Kristján was one of the grad students who took a course on Boccaccio taught by Duke Professor Martin Eisner, a renowned expert on the Italian Renaissance and an authority on Boccaccio.  Professor Eisner helped Kristján and the other students in the course to organize and curate an exhibit on Boccaccio and the Genealogy of Stories, which was held on July 20, 2016 – October 16, 2016 in The Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery at Duke University Libraries.  As the title suggested, the exhibit sought to show the genealogy of all of Boccaccio’s stories: where they came from and whom they influenced.

Each circle in the genealogy of stories corresponded to an exhibit case in the Chappell Family Gallery that allowed for the exploration of the texts found in beautiful rare editions held at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Boccaccio and the Genealogy of Stories Exhibit (2016)

The exhibit cases teamed with beautiful Boccaccio related editions from the Rubenstein Library.  One case, for example, displayed a painting and an actual potted plant next to a book showing the opening lines of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818), a narrative poem in which the English Romantic adapted the story of Lisabetta (Fourth Day – Novel 5): Her lover has been murdered and appears to her in her dreams; she goes to dig up the lover’s body and plants the head in a pot of basil that she tends to day and night.  Isn’t that romantic?

John Keats, “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil “(1818) uses the story of Lisabetta (Fourth Day – Novel 5)

Another exhibit case included a depiction of a (literally) heart-wrenching scene from the Decameron (Fourth Day, Novel 1): juxtaposing a painting (c. 1650) by Bernardino Mei (1612 – 1676) of Ghismonda, cherishing the heart of her murdered lover, Guiscardo, with a miniature on the same theme from one of the illustrated editions of the Decameron, held by the Rubenstein Library.

Ghismonda cherishing the heart of her murdered lover Guiscardo, by Bernardino Mei (Fourth Day –Novel 1)

As these two examples suggest, and as the prominence of female characters in the Decameron demonstrates, in Boccaccio’s case, the “human” in humanist explicitly included women.  As the compiler of an encyclopedia on the lives of famous women (De Mulieribus Claris, available in English translation)–the first in what became a literary genre that stretches from the 14th-century to the present–the Florentine author was acutely aware of the important role that women play in society, not just in traditional familial roles, but as free agents and independent thinkers.  Boccaccio’s recognition of the role of women in society and the importance of hearing their stories is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the Decameron appears so modern.

But perhaps the best explanation for the appeal of Boccaccio’s work is also the simplest.  The Decameron is an anthology of love stories, which are by definition based on perennial themes (jealousy, anger, fate, desire, hatred, lust, virtue) that change much more slowly than the societies around them.  Pandemics may come and go, but a good love story will always stick with you.

 

Farewell, Kristina Troost, and Thanks for a Job Well Done!

By Holly Ackerman, Ph.D., with assistance from Ernest Zitser, Ph.D.

On June 30, 2020, Kristina Kade Troost, Ph.D. will retire from the Duke University Libraries (DUL), after a diverse and distinguished career spanning 30 years.

Kristina (Kris) Troost

Kris will be remembered as much for the qualities of her character as for her innovative collection building, teaching, mentoring, and contributions to professional organizations. Margaret McKean, Duke Professor Emerita of Political Science, who first met Kris in 1977 and helped to recruit her to Duke, described her this way: “Kris is a gifted colleague-builder and a colleague-keeper; a friend-builder and a friend-keeper. She’s also an institution-builder who thinks big and thinks ahead.” Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian & Vice Provost for Library Affairs, who has known Kris for many years, agrees with this characterization, saying: “It is remarkable how one person can create a climate that produces outstanding results. Kris has done that with IAS [DUL’s International & Area Studies Department, which Deborah created and which Kris headed for over two decades] and as a mentor to students in the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute [where Kris served as graduate advisor from 2008 to 2020].”

Kris (in red jacket) at the Duke Asian/Pacific Studies Institute

Unlike many of her peers, Kris began her distinguished library career as a professional historian, rather than as a library school graduate.  The topic of the doctoral dissertation that she defended at Harvard University (1990)—the link between common property and community formation in self-governing villages of late medieval Japan—seemed to be about as far as one could get from the world of library science. And yet Kris could not hide her obvious love of all things related to Japanese Studies.  From 1977-1990, while starting her family and completing her dissertation, she participated actively in the community of Japanese Studies scholars in the Research Triangle.  Andrew Gordon, then a Duke Professor of History, noticed her interest in Japanese Studies and urged her to consider a career in librarianship. Thus began her transition to the field of library science.

In 1990, DUL hired Kris to serve, on a half time basis, as Duke’s first Japanese Studies Bibliographer.  Two years later, she received a promotion to the position of full-time East Asian Librarian, with the responsibility for building collections in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.  That experience taught Kris a valuable lesson about the need for language-specific subject expertise and the value of not spreading oneself too thin.  In 1998, after she became the head of IAS, Kris worked tirelessly to increase DUL’s capacity to provide support by subject area specialists who knew the language and culture of the world areas that they curated.  Under her leadership, the staff of IAS doubled in size and now includes specialists covering Africa, China, Russia & Eastern Europe, Japan, Jewish Studies, Korea, Latin America, the Middle East, South & Southeast Asia, and Western Europe.

Kris (second from right) with IAS staff, Nov. 8, 2013

Kris’ accomplishments are too many and varied to list in a blog post.  Instead, I have decided to focus on four key areas where she has made a difference: collections, teaching/mentoring/managing, service to the Libraries, and service to the profession.

Creation of DUL’s East Asia Collection

In 1991, Kris personally went through the Perkins stacks, pulling every book written in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese – a total of 20,000 titles – in order to form one, consolidated, easy-to-use East Asia Collection. Today that collection contains 200,000 volumes and is the single largest separately-organized and -maintained East Asia Collection in the Southeastern United States. Commenting on the value of that work, Amy V. Heinrich, the former Director of Columbia University’s C. V. Starr East Asian Library, points out: “Kris was a voice in national organizations advocating for libraries with small collections. She saw to it that they were included in discussions, obtained funding, and could grow.”

Teaching/Mentoring/Managing

Kris established and regularly taught a popular course on “Research Methods in Japanese Studies,” which was cross-listed not only in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, but also in Cultural Anthropology, History, Political Science, Religion, and Art History. She later adapted the course to cover multiple world areas, making it possible to co-teach it with her IAS colleagues. Kris helped draft the proposal for an MA in East Asian Studies and served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the program from 2008 until her retirement. Speaking of her role as a manager and supervisor, former Librarian for South Asian Studies, Avinash Maheshwary says: “She was an ideal manager who constantly moved you and your program forward without looking over your shoulder. She was a vital participant in creating a joint TRLN librarian position for South and Southeast Asian Studies  – the only one of its kind in the U.S.” Luo Zhou, DUL’s current Chinese Studies Librarian, echoes these thoughts: “She has given me a broad space to grow, supported my initiatives with advice and suggestions, and often gave me a pat on the back when I was frustrated and tired.”

Serving DUL as a whole

As President of the Librarians Assembly, Kris worked with the leaders of DUL and the professional school libraries to obtain a regular budget for Librarians Assembly, in order to establish and help maintain a speakers program, thereby expanding the substantive possibilities on offer to the group as a whole.  As a member of the Perkins Relocation Group, Kris helped to establish workflows for moving books to the Library Service Center and for initially identifying exactly what materials would need to be moved off-site. In 1997, her multiple contributions were recognized with the Florence Blakely Award—the highest staff honor conferred by the Duke University Libraries—which rewards extraordinary performance that far exceeds individual goals or expectations.

Serving the Profession

Kris has served as the President of both of the main organizations in her field, The Council of East Asian Libraries (CEAL) and the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC).  As Amy Heinrich points out: “She always came with a vision.” For example, when she chaired the NCC (1998-2000), Kris organized an annual conference that set the agenda for the first decade of NCC collaboration in the 21st century by agreeing on joint priorities for collection development, serials access, technical services workflows, and recruitment of new librarians.  Kris’ contributions to East Asian libraries/East Asian Studies and to CEAL were recognized in 2020, when she became the inaugural recipient of the Council of East Asian Libraries (CEAL) Distinguished Service Award.

No summary of Kris’ career would be complete without mentioning the potluck parties that she hosted in her lovely home, continuing an IAS tradition established by Deborah Jakubs. Deborah says, “Kris and I were lucky to come up in International and Area Studies at a time when it was communal and had deep engagement by faculty and librarians working so closely. We had a lot of fun together as well as many professional accomplishments as a group.”

Party at Kris’ house, Nov. 23, 2009

Best wishes on your next chapter, Kris! And thank you for leaving us with a strong foundation.

Putting the ‘Global’ Back Into Global Pandemic, Part 5

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on global pandemics written by the staff and affiliates of Duke Libraries’ International and Area Studies Department.  Like the firstsecond, third, and fourth posts, it is edited by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D., Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.  The following post is written by Rachel Ariel, Librarian for Jewish Studies.

Plague of Frogs

When I was asked to write a blog post on pandemics in Jewish history, after some hesitation, I eventually settled on the topic of the Ten Plagues of Egypt—Blood, Frogs, Lice, Beasts, Cattle disease, Boils, Hail, Locusts, Darkness, and, finally, Death of the First-Born—that are mentioned in Exodus (7:14–12:31), the second book of the Hebrew Bible.  This text, constituting the sacred scriptures of the Jewish religion, had circulated in oral form for centuries before it was finally written down, sometime between about 1200BCE and 165CE.  In other words, this is one of the earliest recorded instances of human thinking about plagues and infectious diseases, as well as the difficult choices that ordinary people have to make in order to survive in the face of such deadly, extraordinary, and seemingly inexplicable events.

Plague of Lice

The biblical story containing a description of the Ten Plagues may not have been intended as a realistic account of an actual historical event, but rather as a religious parable, with a didactic message.  The depiction of the Ten Plagues occurs in the context of a larger story of divine redemption and national liberation.  Anyone who has read the biblical narrative or watched the 1956 Hollywood epic, The Ten Commandments, knows that the plagues were visited upon the land of Egypt because of Pharaoh’s stubborn refusal to heed the words of God’s emissary, Moses.  As the mouthpiece of God, Moses had repeatedly implored the all-powerful ruler of Egypt to emancipate His chosen people—the Israelite slaves whom Pharaoh had used, abused, and planned to exterminate by ordering the massacre of all first-born males (Exodus 1:16, 22)—or else face His righteous wrath.  The freedom obtained by means of Divine intervention is precisely what is commemorated annually during the Jewish holiday of Passover (Heb.: פֶּסַח‎ , “He passed over”).

Plague of Wild Beasts

Traditionally, the Ten Plagues are recited during the festive celebration, called a Seder (Heb.: סֵדֶר, ‘order, arrangement’), on the first night (or first two nights) of Passover.  These plagues are listed in every Haggadah (Heb.: הַגָּדָה‎, “telling,” “narration”), which is the written service-book for the Seder.  Visitors to Capturing the Moment: Centuries of the Passover Haggadah, an online exhibit of illustrated Passover Haggadot (plural of Haggadah) from the collection of the Rubenstein Library at Duke University, can get a sense of what such service-books look like over the ages.  For the fact is, there is no standard version.  Illustrated Haggadot represent the time and place of their creation. While the textual elements (blessings, prayers, stories, songs) remain largely the same, the art in the Haggadah reflects the customs, fashions, landscapes, architecture, and artistic styles of the surrounding culture.

Plague of Cattle disease

Although images of The Ten Plagues often appear in Illustrated Haggadot, the 2017 exhibit on which the online version is based did not include any visual representation of these Plagues.  The more I thought about this omission, the more I realized that this was not a coincidence.  To be honest, the plagues that befell the Egyptians always made me somewhat uncomfortable. Were all the Egyptians to suffer because of their ruler’s actions? Were the innocent punished with the wicked?  Was this the reason I was so hesitant about writing this blog post?  Trying to understand my own feelings, I looked for answers in the traditional resources that I had encountered and found comforting throughout the years.  One of these texts, The Family Participation Haggadah by Noam Zion and David Dishon, invokes a line from the Proverbs of Solomon (Heb.: שלמה מִשְלֵ), a book in the third section of the Hebrew Bible, which addresses the moral unease that I was feeling.  During the Seder, while reciting the Ten Plagues, it is customary for the participants to take a drop of wine from their cup and let it fall on their plate as they say the name of each one of the ten plagues.  By doing so, say Zion and Dishon (101) “we acknowledge that our own joy is lessened and incomplete. For our redemption had to come by means of the punishment of other human beings.  Even though these are just punishments for evil acts, as it is said ‘At the fall of your enemy, do not be glad and when he trips, let not your heart rejoice!” (Proverbs 24:17)

Israelites’ safe crossing the Red Sea

Even more powerful for me is the biblical commentary (Midrash) authored by Rabbi Johanan bar Nappaha (c.180–279 CE), which appears in Tractate Megilah 10b of the Talmud (Heb.: תַּלְמוּד‎,”instruction, learning”), the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law and theology.  Although this commentary is not about the Ten Plagues per se, it also concerns an episode from the story of Exodus that teaches us that God does not experience pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction from witnessing the suffering of human beings, even those who deserve punishment.  As we all know from watching The Ten Commandments, after escaping from Egypt, the Israelites reached the Red Sea (or, more accurately, the Sea of Reeds), while the Egyptian Pharaoh with his army were chasing after them.  When Moses raised his hand, God parted the waters and the Israelites safely crossed the sea.  But when Pharaoh and his army attempted to follow after them, the sea waters returned, the Egyptians were drowned, and the Israelites were finally liberated from their bondage to Pharaoh. Rejoicing in this miracle, Rabbi Johanan wrote, the angels tried to sing songs of praise to God, but God immediately silenced them: “My handiwork is drowning in the sea and you sing songs of praise?”

Plague of Hail

In the twentieth century, during the Second World War, a Polish-born Hebrew poet living in Palestine wrote a poetry cycle called The Poems of the Ten Plagues of Egypt (Heb.: שירי מכות מצרים).  Nathan Alterman (1910-1970) was a modernist poet, playwright, essayist, and translator, who became one of the most revered poets of Israel.  He composed this cycle of poems between the years 1939 and 1944, while a war was spreading across the globe like a deadly virus, leaving millions of innocent victims—including six million European Jews—in its wake.  At the center of the cycle, Alterman devotes a poem to each of the Ten Plagues.  But in an interesting twist on the traditional story in Exodus, each poem is written from the perspective of the Egyptians and does not even mention the Israelite slaves or their struggle for freedom.  Nor is there any mention of the Jews of Europe or of the war against Germany (although their absent presence was apparent to Alterman’s contemporaries and was one of the reasons why this collection of poems caused such controversy when it was first published).

Death of the Firstborn

The focus of the action in Alterman’s Poems of the Ten Plagues of Egypt is on the drama that takes place in No-Amon, the greatest of the ancient Egyptian cities, whose magnificent structures now form the principal ruins of Karnak and Luxor.  During the course of the poetic cycle, this city becomes the symbol of human civilization as a whole, which is being battered over-and-over again by the plagues and by worsening catastrophes that are threatening to bring with them complete and utter destruction.  These cataclysms are a universal phenomenon, spreading over entire continents and being passed down through the generations.  But at the center of the suffering are an Egyptian father and his firstborn son, who are (in the words of the 1978 English translation) the “righteous and innocent” victims of the plagues:

The judgment of swords has no fault
but when shedding of blood is spent,
it leaves like a taste of salt
the tears of the innocent.”

Plague of Locusts

Nathan Alterman’s cycle of Poems on the Ten Plagues of Egypt raised moral questions of universal concern and called for compassion for all of God’s children at a time when it was nearly impossible not to see things in terms other than ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ ‘black’ or ‘white.’ Alterman’s courageous resolve to bring into the open the pain of the innocent and the injustice of the punishment inflicted upon those who did not sin brings his poems very close to my heart.  And strange as it may sound, they also help me to make sense of the present moment.

Image credits:
Miniatures depicting the Ten Plagues of Egypt and the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea come from the digital version of the medieval illustrated manuscript known as The Golden Haggadah (Barcelona, Spain, ca. 1320), folios 12v-13, 14v. British Library Add. MS 27210.

Putting the ‘Global’ Back Into Global Pandemic, Part 4

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on global pandemics written by the staff and affiliates of Duke Libraries’ International and Area Studies Department.  Like the first, second, and third posts, it is edited by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D., Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.  The following post is written by Heather Martin, Librarian for African and African American Studies.

Where do you begin when writing a blog post about global pandemics in Africa –the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent, containing over 60 sovereign states that claim to govern speakers of somewhere between 1200 and 3000 different languages?  And how do you choose from the many infectious diseases that have ebbed and flowed across the face of the continent over its millenia-long history?  If an undergraduate student came to me with such a broad topic for a term paper, I would advise them to focus their idea. Then I would work to help them come up with a topic that is still interesting, but much more manageable with the resources at hand.  That is why I have chosen to write a blog post about the effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Africa: a much more historically-delimited topic, which has received less scholarly attention (and is, therefore, of potential interest to other researchers); and a topic that can be addressed with multiple Africa-related print and online source available at Duke Libraries (and, is therefore, do-able).

To begin, it is necessary to point out that English-language academic monographs on the “Spanish flu” in Africa are practically nonexistent, possibly due to the challenges of conducting research of the scope necessary to produce a truly pan-African study.  Even scholarly journal articles about the topic typically have a narrow focus related to one aspect of the pandemic in a single country or geographic region of the continent. For example, K. David Patterson’s 1995 study of “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919 in the Gold Coast,” which was published in Transactions of the Ghana Historical Society (and is made available to Duke students, faculty, and staff via Duke Libraries’ subscription to JSTOR), focuses on the way the pandemic affected different socio-economic classes within the borders of that specific nation-state. But, as we all know by now, global pandemics respect no internationally-agreed-upon boundaries.

In order to get any sort of insight into how the 1918 influenza pandemic impacted multiple African countries, we need to turn to a working paper written by Jan-Bart Gewald, Professor of African History and Director of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands.  In an open-access publication entitled Spanish Influenza in Africa: Some Comments Regarding Source Material and Future Research (also available in print at Duke Libraries), Gewald “first draws attention to the social impact of Spanish flu in Africa” by reviewing articles that cover South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Rhodesia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia. He then illustrates how the British Colonial Office records available in the National Archives can expand on previous scholarship. For example, he uses the records to pinpoint the introduction of influenza into Sierra Leone via the warship H.M.S. Mantua, which docked in Freetown in August 1918. Workers who transferred coal to the ship became ill and the disease spread from there.  Finally, Gewald taps the Colonial Office records to provide insight on the influenza pandemic in Gambia and Nigeria as well.  Thanks to Duke Libraries’ paid subscription to Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966, a research database that provides access to the United Kingdom’s Colonial, Dominion and Foreign Offices’ confidential correspondence relating to Africa, patrons who wish to pursue the line of research mapped out by Gewald can examine these very same colonial records for themselves.

British colonial records provide one type of primary source about the influenza epidemic in Africa.  Another are the first person, eyewitness accounts by survivors, such as those collected in Howard Phillips’ In a Time of Plague: Memories of the ‘Spanish’ Flu Epidemic of 1918 in South Africa.  These recorded interviews of 127 South African survivors of ‘Black October’—so called because the flu epidemic claimed some 350,000 lives (or 5% of the population of South Africa) in six weeks in September-October of 1918—provide unique, intimate, first-hand accounts of what these men and women saw and heard, how they coped medically, materially and psychologically and what mark this experience left on their lives.

However, in order to form a complete picture of what happened in Africa at the time of the flu epdemic, it is not enough to focus on the records left by colonial administrators and white settlers.  It is also imperative to identify and utilize primary sources from indigenous Black Africans.  For example, in an article entitled “Global Explanations versus Local Interpretations: The Historiography of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19 in Africa,” from the journal History in Africa (available via Duke Libraries’ subscription to Project Muse), Matthew Heaton and Toyin Falola stress the importance of oral histories from indigenous Black Africans as an underutilized source base for countering the standard narrative about the 1918 influenza pandemic, which simply assumes that the Spanish flu in Africa followed the same course as it did in other countries.  Getting access to indigenous African oral histories is another question, however.  Luckily, a classic introduction to The Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan, is now available freely online thanks to Open Source Publishers.  The book’s bibliography includes a section on web-based reference material, with links to international scholarly organizations that hold recordings of original African stories and songs.

Although it cannot serve as a substitute for a primary source like an eyewitness account or a colonial government report, works of fiction written by Africans about the African experience is one way that readers can get a sense of what it may have felt like to be there.  For example, in Elechi Amadi’s novel, The Great Ponds (1969), the influenza pandemic of 1918 serves as a silent backdrop to the story of two native African villages that go to war, resort to kidnapping, and rely on religious ritual in a fight over fishing rights to a disputed pond.  While this story is not based on a documented historical incident, Amadi draws from oral traditions that form the collective memory of Nigerians’ experiences with the influenza pandemic.

Amadi’s novel is frequently cited as an example of African and indigenous experiences of the 1918 influenza pandemic. There are brief references to “slave raiders” of the past and to “trading with white men,” but the narrative focuses on the people of the rival villages and how their fight over ownership of a pond is minimized when influenza, which they call wonjo, ravages their area, causing mass death regardless of clan or village affiliation. In contrast to the British colonial records, The Great Ponds presents a more personal view of life leading up to the influenza outbreak in Africa.  As is the case with other great works of literature, its truth-value cannot be judged by the same standards as the works produced by professional historians.  Amadi’s novel strives for something both more local and more universal.  It is up to each individual reader to decide whether the author succeeds in achieving his goal.

 

Putting the ‘Global’ Back Into Global Pandemic, Part 3

This is the third in a series of blog posts on global pandemics written by Duke Libraries’ International and Area Studies Department.  Like the first and second posts, it is edited by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D., Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.  The following blog post is contributed by Carson Holloway, Librarian for History of Science and Technology, Military History, British and Irish Studies, Canadian Studies and General History. 

Until COVID-19’s arrival in the United States, Ebola, SARS, MERS, and Zika seemed like diseases of the ‘developing,’ ‘under-governed,’ and ‘less sanitary’ parts for the world.  Surely, none of these strange and exotic viruses could ever find a home here, on the soil of the sole remaining superpower, the 20th-century heir of earlier empires on which the sun never set.  The residents of late-seventeenth-century London—at the time, the bustling capitol of an up-and-coming maritime power, one that would eventually reach a territorial size larger than any other empire in history—undoubtedly would have agreed with such an assessment of the situation.  Deadly tropical diseases afflicted British colonies, not the metropole; and the bubonic plague was a relic of Europe’s ‘dark ages,’ not its enlightened present.  Although London did experience sporadic outbreaks of the plague earlier in the century, the residents of the City had been lulled into a false sense of complacency.  So it must have come as a great shock when, in the winter of 1665, the Plague re-appeared in the City.

In their engrossing account of what has come to be known as The Great Plague of London, historian A. Lloyd Moote and microbiologist Dorothy C. Moote estimate that between 1665 and 1666, the bubonic plague killed nearly 100,000 city-dwellers, or almost one third of those who did not flee to the countryside.  Those urban residents who remained in the City, however, did not panic or put themselves under quarantine.  Instead, they continued to fulfill their duties and obligations, keeping as many medical, religious, legal, and business establishments open as long as they possibly could, seemingly unaware that their very activity helped to spread the disease.  By using intimate letters and private diaries, and focusing on the personal experience of specific individuals, from all walks-of-life, the Mootes succeed in painting a compelling portrait of an early-modern city—the capitol of the British Empire—dealing (successfully, but at tremendous cost) with an outbreak of a deadly infectious disease.

Although the current COVID-19 crisis has limited our access to the Duke Library stacks, there are many resources, which can help fill the needs of students and researchers interested in learning more about London’s Great Plague.  Primary sources from the period are relatively scarce.  In 1665 there were no printed newspapers as we have come to know them; rather, information about the plague was spread by personal letter or by word-of-mouth, and, less often, by such ephemeral publications as broadsides or pamphlets.  Fortunately, Duke Libraries subscribe to such research databases as Early English Books Online (EEBO), which provides users with online access to almost all known English-language books and pamphlets published between 1473 and 1700.

Among the latter are such rare gems as Thomas Doolittle’s 1666 self-help book, הוהיל בישא המ [Heb. = “What shall I return to God”], or, A Serious Enquiry for a Suitable Return for Continued Life, in and after a Time of Great Mortality, by a Wasting Plague (anno 1665) answered in XIII directions, which claims to offer its readers instructions “on how to live life after a wasting plague.”  (Just imagine how much money a self-styled life-coach would make if s/he were to publish a 13-step guide to a better life after COVID-19!) Another subscription database, Medieval and Early Modern Sources Online (MEMSO), provides access to other types of English-language primary sources, including family papers and government documents from the period ca. 1100 and 1800, which users can consult in order to find additional contemporary references to the Great Plague.

In some instances, subscription-based electronic resources such as EEBO and MEMSO can be supplemented by those made freely-available on the internet.  For example, the Diaries of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), one of the primary sources that the Mootes used to such good effect in their book on the London plague, are now available in electronic format through Project Gutenberg, a digital library created in 1971 by volunteers committed to making books in the public domain freely available online.  Pepys was an energetic and talented man, who rose from modest beginnings to become the greatest naval administrator of the age, at a time when Britannia was just starting to rule the waves. The private diary that he kept from 1660 until 1669 is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period, providing a combination of frank personal revelations and detailed eyewitness accounts of important public events, including the Great Plague of London.  In the early 18th century, Pepys’ manuscript diaries, along with the rest of his personal library, were donated to Magdalene College, Cambridge.  But the diaries were not published until almost a century later.  And it took yet another century before technological developments made it possible not only to produce a digital version of Pepys’ text but also to publish it online.

Pepys’ eyewitness account of daily life during the plague year records observations and details that would have otherwise been lost to posterity.  The following excerpt from a typical day (Friday, 5 January 1665/6), for example, recounts what he saw while riding in a coach on the way to an event in the capitol, in the period immediately after the plague had begun to subside:

And a delightfull thing it is to see the towne full of people again as now it is; and shops begin to open, though in many places seven or eight together, and more, all shut; but yet the towne is full, compared with what it used to be. I mean the City end; for Covent-Guarden and Westminster are yet very empty of people, no Court nor gentry being there.

This version of Pepys’ text comes from Phil Gyford’s groundbreaking blog, which was created in 2003 as a daily transcription of a single day’s entry from the Diary, using the copyright-free text made available online by Project GutenbergAlthough the British blogger who created this site is not a professional academic — Gyford prefers to call himself an “actor, modelmaker, illustrator and futurist” -– he has created a platform that has attracted the attention of scholars and researchers the world over.  Since 2012, when Gyford completed his transcription of Pepys’ Diary, numerous experts have provided annotations to, or written in-depth articles about selected topics brought up in individual diary entries.  (For example, clicking the hyperlinked term “the City” in the daily entry quoted above opens a box with an explanatory note about the history of this geographically delimited section within Greater London).  Thanks to such contributions, Gyford’s site continues to evolve, thereby providing a good example of the value added by open access electronic resources, which do not lock away the results of scholarly research behind the ‘pay walls’ erected by monopolistic publishers.

Researchers interested in a more literary treatment of the Great Plague would do well to consult A journal of the plague year: being observations or memorials, of the most remarkable occurrences, as well publick as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665..., available online both via paid subscription to Thomson Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online and for free via Project Gutenberg.  This work was written by Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731), but published, without attribution (under the initials “H.F.”), in 1722.  The famed author of Robinson Crusoe (1719) was only about five years old when the Great Plague hit London, so he could not have remembered much of what he and his family had experienced at the time.  And yet Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is described on its title page as a never-before-published memoir by “a citizen who continued all the while in London.” Even the year of publication raises suspicions about the historical authenticity of this self-proclaimed memoir, since the book appeared during a period of high public interest in plagues due to a recent outbreak in France.  In other words, what we see here is Defoe in his role as literary entrepreneur, rather than as autobiographer.  And yet Defoe’s masterly combination of first-person narration and realistic description (apparently based on substantial historical research), has embroiled scholars in a century-long debate over the question whether Journal of the Plague Year was, in fact, fiction or something more like history.

Perhaps the best answer to that question is provided by “H.F.,” the anonymous author of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, who concludes his “account of this calamitous year …with a coarse but sincere stanza…, which I placed at the end of my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written”:

A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!

In the space of four short lines of verse, this brief meditation on mortality manages to encapsulate the complicated mixture of emotions that a survivor of a pandemic must have experienced upon learning the total death count.  A moment when the fleeting feeling of joy over one’s own salvation is leavened with grief, loss, and something even more insidious, viz., the nagging, unanswered question: Why was I spared, when so many were taken?

In other words, Defoe’s fictionalized account does not have to be true factually in order to capture and convey the experience of anyone who has ever lived through a catastrophic and traumatic event (such as the one we are currently in).  In that sense, A Journal of the Plague Year is as much of a must-read today as it was when first published.

Vignette and end engraving from A Journal of the Plague

Putting the ‘Global’ Back Into Global Pandemic, Part 2

Edited by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D., Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.

This is the second in a series of blog posts on global pandemics by the staff of and/or subject specialists directly affiliated with Duke Libraries’ International and Area Studies DepartmentAs is the case with the first installment of the series, the librarians who contributed the following entries seek to offer suggestions for further reading, not a comprehensive bibliography on the topicFor additional resources (visual or textual, analog or digital) on plagues/infectious diseases/moral panics from around the world, please contact the appropriate IAS librarian. And if you have any recommendations of your own, please “reply” to this blog post below.

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Danette Pachtner
Librarian for Film, Video, & Digital Media and Women’s Studies

Unless you are a die-hard fan of the genre, it may be too soon in our experience of COVID-19 to seek out movies featuring infectious diseases that inspire moral panic or plagues that end the world. And even hardcore fans might want to take a break from perennial favorites, such as The Andromeda Strain (dir. Robert Wise, 1971, U.S), 28 Days Later (dir. Danny Boyle, 2002, U.K.), Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006, U.S. & U.K.), Contagion (dir. Stephen Soderbergh, 2011, U.S.), or the cult classic (and my personal favorite) 12 Monkeys (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1995, U.S.).

However, as Duke’s Librarian for Film, Video, & Digital Media, it is my job to challenge patrons’ expectations of what/when/who is watchable by exposing them to visual resources that they might otherwise not know about or simply choose to ignore.  That is why I have compiled a short list of lesser known, but no-less-provocative foreign films that are all available, with English subtitles, in the Duke Libraries’ film collection. Precisely because of their variety of approaches—from bucolic (Wondrous Boccaccio ) to philosophical (The Seventh Seal) to apocalyptic (The Flu)—these films demonstrate that there are as many cinematic responses to pandemics as there are international movie makers and audiences. And these responses are as unique and culturally-mediated as the cinematic experience itself.

Wondrous Boccaccio

Wondrous Boccaccio (dirs. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 2015, Italy)
consumer streaming platforms | Lilly DVD 29001 | streaming in the Libraries [access requires Duke netid/password | licensed through 9-30-2020]
Based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s  Renaissance classic, The Decameron, this film follows the lives of ten young people who flee plague-ridden Florence in the mid-14th century, at the height of a pandemic that would ultimately kill over 30 million people, alter the European social structure, and influence the ideologies of those who survived. The Taviani brothers use Renaissance painting as a source of inspiration in their film. The cinematography evokes the vibrant colors of artists such as Botticelli in his scenes from The Decameron, as well as those of Masaccio and Giotto, moving from dark blacks in the plague-ridden city to vibrant colors of the countryside. The characters find refuge in an abandoned villa in the Tuscan hills and pass the time by telling each other tales of love, which range from the erotic to the tragic.

Image from film, Blindness
Blindness

Blindness (dir. Fernando Meirelles, 2008, Brazil & Canada)
consumer streaming platforms |Ford DVD #4943
Based on the bestselling novel by Nobel-Prize-winning Portuguese author, José Saramago, a city is ravaged by an epidemic of instant white blindness. Filmed on location in Brazil, Canada, and Uruguayalthough “the city” is never specifically identifiedthe story focuses on the behavior of  people who are losing their sight and are forced to survive in a sea of whiteness. The film depicts the ugliest side of human nature in a crisis; it offers a devastating portrait of institutional failure and government betrayal. The viewer can recognize chilling parallels with our current COVID-19 crisis, from the opportunism of corrupt governments to the neglect of the health-care system. Blindness is an end-of-civilization fable which is thought-provoking and topical in its indictment of declining social mores.

Image from film, The Hole
The Hole

The Hole (dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 1998, Taiwan) Lilly DVD 366
At the cusp of the 21st century, Taiwan experiences a torrential rain that brings with it a mysterious virus of epic proportions. Symptoms of “Taiwan Fever” include high fever and an acute sensitivity to light. Sections of the city are quarantined with essential services cut off by the government. The film is set in an apartment block in a quarantine zone where residents remain, against quarantine regulations. A plumber comes to fix a leak and instead leaves a gaping hole through which a tenant can see into his neighbor’s apartment below, and they develop a connection. The Hole presents a remarkable blend of aesthetic elements of science fiction, absurdism, and romantic fantasy, with musical sequences to boot. The film does not travel beyond the bounds of the apartment block. It explores the inward-looking aspects of an outbreakthe isolation it causes and how interactions with others become intensified.

Image from Seventh Seal
Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1957, Sweden) consumer streaming platforms |Lilly DVD 14846
Exhausted and embittered after a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight returns home to a land ravaged by bubonic plague. He encounters Death on a desolate beach and challenges him to a fateful game of chess. Focusing on issues of man’s relationships with death, life and God, Bergman’s story transcends simple metaphor in this now classic work rich in philosophical allegory that remains especially relevant today.

The Flu

The Flu (dir. Kim Sung-su, 2013, S. Korea) consumer streaming platforms | Lilly DVD 26447
This South Korean medical disaster film tells the story of panic, despair, and the desperate struggle for survival in a city that has been quarantined after the outbreak of a deadly virus.  The virus in this scenario is H5N1 influenza (commonly known as the ‘bird flu’) introduced by illegal immigrants from Hong Kong, arriving in a shipping container.  In order to prevent the spread of the virus worldwide, the government issues a national disaster and orders a city-wide lockdown. Citizens stock up on daily necessities, starting riots as mistrust of each other builds. In the meantime, politicians’ quarrels, powerless governments, and unwelcome U.S. involvement force the viewer to consider eventualities that might be even more frightening than a virus attack. Sound familiar?

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Miree Ku
Korean Studies Librarian

Aside from scientific articles in medical journals about the most recent outbreaks of new strains of influenza and coronavirus, the issue of pandemics on the Korean peninsula has only recently attracted the attention from the English-speaking scholarly community.  That is why most of the publications on the topic are currently in the form of scholarly journal articles, dissertations, and theses, rather than academic monographs.

Korea Journal

For example, in 2011, Chaisung Lim, then Assistant Professor at the Institute for Japanese Studies at Korea’s Seoul National University, published an article on “The Pandemic of the Spanish Influenza in Colonial Korea” in the Korea Journal, a quarterly academic publication founded in 1961 with the goal of promoting Korean Studies around the world.  By examining the Spanish influenza, which was widespread during 1918-1921, Lim sought “to elucidate the structural aspect of disease and death in colonial Korea” and to “explor[e] its socioeconomic effects.” The author focused on the public health policies adopted by the Government-General of Korea (GGK)—the Japanese colonial ruling organ from 1910 to 1945—and the degree to which these measures contributed to the mortality of the general population.  He further probed how GGK’s policies were differentiated by ethnic group (ethnic Koreans and Japanese), as well as how much access each ethnic group had to measures for medical treatment. His research revealed a significant difference in the fatality rates between the two ethnic groups—a conclusion that reminds me of the differential effects of COVID-19 on the health of racial and ethnic minority groups in the US. Interestingly, Lim’s study also posited that the social frustration caused by the pandemic and the ensuing economic hardships served as a source for the so-called March First Independence Movement in 1919, one of the earliest public displays of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule.

Pathogens from the Pulpit in DukeSpace

Another example of English-language research on the same topic comes from somewhere even closer to home.  Two years ago, a Duke undergraduate student named Alan Ko asked me, in my capacity as the Korean Studies Librarian, to assist him with his research on the Spanish flu during the colonial period in Korea.  He was then in the process of working on an honors thesis in the History Department and was looking for Korean-language primary sources.  Among other things, I suggested that he take a look at contemporary Korean newspapers, such as those made available in e-format by several different Korean newspaper archives.  He used those sources to examine how Western missionaries in colonial Korea perceived disease among the local populace and how public health efforts correlated with certain preconceived cultural and social factors.  Needless to say, it was very gratifying to learn that Alan not only went to graduate with honors, but that his honors thesis, “Pathogens from the Pulpit: Missionary Perceptions of Disease in Colonial Korea (1910-1940),” was deposited in DukeSpace—Duke Libraries’ online repository—thereby making the results of his research freely-available to other scholars.  It was also nice to see that the author publicly acknowledged the support that he received from Duke’s librarians, who not only helped him to locate “appropriate Korean language sources,” but also cheered him on with tea and pistachios, while he edited his thesis, during “work-study shifts” at Perkins library.

Plagues/infectious diseases/moral panics have also been a feature in Korean popular culture, appearing in several famous films, dramas, and novels.  One of the most recent films on the topic (The Flu) has already been mentioned above, in Danette Pachtner’s post on pandemics in international cinema.  Here, I would like to draw attention to another movie: “The Host,” a feature film directed by Bong Joon-ho—the Academy Award-winning director of The Parasite (2019).  Both The Host (2006) and The Flu (2013) were inspired by the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic of 2002-2004, which was caused by a different, but related strain of coronavirus than COVID-19.  Both films describe virus-related epidemic/pandemic situations and deal with the interplay between political and environmental issues. But only The Host has an American villain who is even more evil than the virus-spewing monster that he inadvertently unleashes upon the world.

The Host

The plot of The Host begins in a laboratory on an American military base in South Korea.  An American scientist working with dangerous chemicals orders his Korean colleague to dump them into the Han River, saying “who cares” and “it can’t really hurt anyone.”  Of course, turns out it can. The movie goes on to trace the havoc wreaked on Korea by a river-dwelling mutant created by the illegal dumping of chemical waste, as that monster begins to spread a deadly new virus, which can be transmitted (SARS-like) to humans through animals.

Despite its fantastic premise, this mash-up of medical disaster and monster movies actually has a basis in reality. In fact, the film was inspired by an incident from 2000 in which a Korean mortician working for the U.S. military in Seoul was ordered to dump a large amount of formaldehyde down the drain.  And, unfortunately, scenes from the movie have become an all-too-real part of our daily routine in the age of COVID-19.  In an eerie foreshadowing of the paranoia and anti-Asian racism that has attended the outbreak of the latest coronavirus pandemic, the movie depicts a world in which people who wear facemasks are so afraid of viral transmission that they come to suspect one another of deliberately, if not maliciously, hiding symptoms of the disease. The movie also highlights, if only by negative example, the critical role that the government can play during a national health crisis, portraying the South Korean government as bureaucratic, inept, and essentially uncaring.  Surely, there is no country in the world today where the government can be described in such unflattering terms. Now that is pure fantasy!

Putting the ‘Global’ Back Into Global Pandemic, Part I

This is the first in a series of blog posts on global pandemics, edited by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D., Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.

Pandemics, by their very definition (< Greek pandēmos = pan ‘all’ + dēmos ‘people’), affect everyone in the entire world.  They expose the permeability of border walls and remind us of the invented nature of all geopolitical boundaries.  They also provide us with an opportunity to learn something about the lived experience of people from around the globe, those external ‘others’ whom it is all-too-easy to stereotype as strange, exotic, or dangerous.  That is, pandemics invite us not merely to recognize the humanity of, and suffer alongside perfect ‘strangers,’ who speak ‘foreign’ languages and write in ‘squiggly’ scripts, but actually to draw lessons from the way human communities in other parts of the world are dealing and/or have dealt with the same issues as us.

In order to help foster a more informed and compassionate approach to the current global health crisis, the subject specialists of Duke Libraries’ International and Area Studies Department have decided to devote a series of blog posts to the topic of plagues, epidemics, and pandemics in each of the world regions for which they collect materials and about which they offer reference and library instruction.  Our goal is not to provide exhaustive coverage of the topic, but merely to suggest one or two resources—preferably those available online and in English—that each subject specialist has found particularly meaningful or useful in helping him or her to understand the role that infectious diseases have played in the countries, continents, and world areas for which s/he is responsible.

If you would like to get more information about a particular world region or recommendations for additional resources on the topic, please feel free to contact the appropriate IAS librarian.  And do let us know if you have your own recommendations!  Simply leave a reply in the “Comment Section” at the end of this blog post.

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Holly Ackerman
Head, International & Area Studies Dept. and Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino/a Studies

When the editors of the IAS blog proposed the idea of publishing a series of posts recommending readable, digitally-available, English-language resources on plagues/infectious diseases/moral panics in world literature and/or film, I approached the selection in my role as the Department Head, responsible for covering many world areas. I tried to recall a popular history with global reach that dealt both with politics and medicine. I wanted something that was deeply researched but also genuinely engaging.  And, perhaps not surprisingly, one that would also highlight the other role that I play in IAS, namely, the Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino/a Studies.

John Barry’s panoramic history of the so-called “Spanish” Flu of 1918—the ruthless influenza pandemic that is estimated to have claimed 50-100 million lives (adjusted for population, that would equal 220 million to 430 million people today)—came immediately to mind. I had read it back in 2004 when it first came out and was that year’s winner of the National Academies of Sciences prize for the best book on science or medicine. A re-read this week confirmed its currency.

Barry, a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, seems to be speaking directly to the present when he says that medicine and politics cannot be separated in a pandemic and one is as significant as the other. He describes political leaders in 1918 lying to the public about the severity of the situation in order to maintain the World War I economy and their control over the electorate.  And also of blaming a particular foreign country for being the source of the outbreak, in an effort to shift the blame for their handling of the public health crisis onto a foreign country.  Sound familiar?

The good news in Barry’s sweeping account is the role of medicine in developing vaccines, public health officials broadcasting simple preventive measures (posters read, “Wear a mask; Save your life), the rise of “modern” medical schools such as Johns Hopkins, and the organization of the Red Cross. He offers case examples of communities that suppressed the disease (e.g., San Francisco) and those that failed to do so (e.g., Philadelphia). The “winners” combined truthful leaders, inspiration in public messaging, and stern demand for compliance with best practices. The “losers” combined denial with blaming (calling it “just a common cold” as corpses outnumbered coffins, attacking immigrants as “natural carriers,” and demanding legislation for mass euthanasia of domestic pets).

Anyone wanting to see how pandemics change history will find much to admire here.

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Sean Swanick
Librarian for Middle East and Islamic Studies

The issue of plague in the Middle East context has not received the scholarly attention that it deserves.  However, there are some excellent books and works-in-progress out there for anyone interested in the topic.

For example, Christopher S. Rose, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, has written an article about how the Egyptian government handled a pandemic in the past, at least partly in order to contextualize the criticism of the way the current Egyptian government has handled the COVID-19 crisis. Rose’s article has been accepted by the Journal of World History, but is unlikely to appear in print until 2021; and Rose’s book will not be out until sometime in the next decade.  That is why it is so great that this young scholar is willing to share some of the results of his research in a WordPress blog post on The “Spanish Flu” in Egypt. Rose argues that “for most of the war, civilian medical needs were a far distant second behind military medical needs” of the colonial occupiers of this strategically-important British protectorate. Consequently, when the pandemic hit, the Anglo-Egyptian government was “caught with its pants down”: hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed; physicians (who were mostly Egyptians, Greek, or Syrian) were overworked; agricultural production (on which the entire economy depended) ceased; religious services were suspended; and at least 130,000 people died. The fact that the flu pandemic—the worst health crisis during World War I in Egypt—came after the end of the war made everything worse. Rose argues that this was one of the “non-political events” in early 20th-century Egyptian history that prepared the ground for the political changes in the years that followed the pandemic.

An even earlier period of environmental, epidemiological, and political history of what is today’s Middle East is the subject of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: the Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600, by Nükhet Varlik of Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina.  This thorough, ground-breaking book explores the impact of plagues on Ottoman lands beginning with the Black Death, which ravaged the world from 1347 to 1351. One aspect of the work I found particularly interesting is the development of public health vis-à-vis the state. The Ottoman state was very conscious of the need for clean drinking water, hence the development of fountains throughout the empire—including the imperial capital, Istanbul—and the imperative to bury those who had died of the disease outside the city walls, so as to ensure that as much clean air as possible circulated within the city. Varlik’s book is not only well-researched, but also provides fascinating historical insight into a topic that has contemporary resonance, not least because of its insistence on the Western origins of the Plague, as well as its discussion of the pandemic’s effect both on physical bodies and the body politic.  After reading this book, you might also want to visit the Ottoman History Podcast for a discussion on Plague in the Ottoman World, featuring Nükhet Varlık, Yaron Ayalon, Orhan Pamuk, Lori Jones, Valentina Pugliano, and Edna Bonhomme.

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Luo Zhou
Chinese Studies Librarian

William C. Summer’s book on the Great Manchurian Plague of 1910-1911, will be an enlightening (and inspiring) read for today’s audience. The Manchuria (Northeast China) plague, which broke out in fall 1910 and killed more than 60,000 people by spring 1911, was caused by transmission from marmots to humans. It spread quickly both among the native Chinese inhabitants and the Russian, Japanese, American, and British diplomats and administrators stationed in Manchuria, a new center of global transportation and fur trade that was of strategic importance to the world powers.  Summer demonstrates that geopolitics—China’s political weakness and Russian and Japanese colonial aspirations in the region—shaped how the plague was contained and managed.  He also highlights the work of individual medical practitioners, such as Dr. Wu Lien-teh—the first medical student of Chinese descent to study at the University of Cambridge—who led the Chinese effort to end the plague.  Dr. Wu promoted the use of cloth facial masks, which were to be worn by doctors, nurses, patients, and anyone else whenever possible: the very first time that such an epidemic containment measure had been attempted and proven effective in the field.  In the end, the “Great Manchurian Plague” highlighted the importance of multinational medical responses and helped to promote the (eventual) establishment of the World Health Organization – an unintended, but welcome by-product of the epidemic.

In order to get a sense of the lived experience of COVID-19 in China today, it is best to turn to non-traditional outlets (e.g. WeChat, Weibo, Twitter, Facebook) and freely available electronic resources.  For example, in The Virus Diaries (疫境日記), a 10-minute YouTube video (in Cantonese, with English subtitles), from late January 2020, ordinary citizens of Hong Kong share their experiences of life during quarantine.

For mainland China, the most obvious (and most controversial) choice is Wuhan Diary (武汉日记) by Fang Fang (方方), the pen name of Wang Fang (汪芳; born 11 May 1955), an award-winning, contemporary Chinese writer. Although this fascinating, first-person account of life at the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis is now available as an e-book, in an English-language translation by Michael Berry, Director of UCLA Center of China Studies, it began life as a series of posts on Fang’s social media page.  The author’s regular, daily entries on WeChat—a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media, and mobile payment app—offered her personal (and mildly critical) comments on the effects of the deadly epidemic during the government-imposed lockdown. Almost as soon as they were posted, however, each of Fang’s entries about the effect of the coronavirus on Chinese society was consistently deleted by China’s internet censors.  But usually not before the latest entry had itself gone viral, having been shared by millions of WeChatters, both within China and abroad.  That has not slowed Chinese government efforts to stop the spread of the virtual virus unleashed by Fang Fang’s media posts.In an effort to dissuade overseas readers from purchasing the diary, the Global Times—an English-language newspaper published under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily—claimed (falsely) that Fang “fell from grace in late March when many netizens and scholars began to question the authenticity of her diary.”  As if anticipating such politically motivated criticism, the last entry in Fang’s diary was entitled: “There is no tension between me and my country” (我和国家之间没有张力).