A new exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh—”Samurai: The Making of a Warrior”—invites visitors to consider the original purpose of Japan’s material culture of war and see its connections to history, art, daily life, and politics. Photos courtesy of Matthew Hayes.
This year’s Emmy-winning megahit Shogun reintroduced American TV audiences to the romantic legend of the samurai. But a new exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh—Samurai: The Making of a Warrior—presents a more historically accurate portrait of the life and times of the legendary Japanese warriors, and it came together with the help of a Duke librarian.
Matthew Hayes is the Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies at Duke. He was also part of a team of scholars and experts who spent the better part of a year developing the new exhibit. The show features more than seventy samurai arms and armor from an exceptional private collection in Greensboro, North Carolina, along with a host of related artifacts associated with art, culture, and religion, including some borrowed from Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and a small collection of Buddhist books loaned by Hayes himself.
Hayes first learned of the collection from Chiyoko Lord, of the Japan-America Society of North Carolina, and Simon Partner, a professor of Japanese history at Duke. Hayes worked as an initial intermediary between the collector, Gary Grose, and Caroline Rocheleau, Director of Research and Curator of Ancient Art at NCMA, to establish a mutual interest in an exhibition. From there, Rocheleau expanded the team to include Morgan Pitelka, a professor and historian of premodern Japan at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Megan McClory, one of Pitelka’s Ph.D. advisees researching early modern Japanese sword culture.
What the team saw when they drove out to Greensboro in 2023 nearly floored them. Grose had amassed enough arms and armor to outfit an entire platoon of samurai, all of it historically authentic and meticulously well-preserved.
A small portion of the Greensboro collection owned by Gary Grose, from which over 70 historically authentic examples of samurai arms and armor were selected for the exhibit.
“What astonished me most was the comprehensive nature of the collection,” recalled Hayes. “It wasn’t just a few swords and a helmet, but nearly every bodily implement you can imagine, from tobacco pouches to religious talismans and everything in between. Taken together, it really communicates a full picture of the martial, social, and cultural lives of these warriors.”
Grose’s collection was so extensive and diverse, it practically begged to be shared with the public. The NCMA had prime exhibit space to offer. Rocheleau had the curatorial insight. Hayes, Pitelka, and McClory each had expertise to contribute and an interest in working together. And so a collaboration was born.
Grose’s collection wasn’t just “a few swords and a helmet,” says Hayes, “but nearly every bodily implement you can imagine, from tobacco pouches to religious talismans and everything in between.”
Months of prep work followed, including translating and romanizing Japanese texts and inscriptions, answering questions from museum staff about exhibit loans, writing labels and workshopping each other’s drafts, finalizing the exhibit’s overall flow and organization, and working with local cultural organizations like the Japan-America Society of North Carolina to develop public programs that would draw in community audiences.
With Rocheleau serving as lead curator, each team member focused on their own area of expertise—Pitelka on the historical and cultural context of the samurai, McClory on the material history of the arms and armor, and Hayes on the role of Buddhism in the lives of the elite warrior class. (Hayes and Pitelka are also giving a public lecture at the museum on November 24 about how the samurai engaged in new forms of cultural and religious patronage during the seventeenth century.)
“Samurai: The Making of a Warrior” offers a counterpoint to the stereotypical image we tend to have of samurai, which is largely the product of pop culture and entertainment.
Samurai: The Making of a Warrior opened to the public in mid-October and will run through February 2, 2025. It’s the first exhibit on East Asian material culture at the state’s flagship art museum in over thirty years, and it came together through the collaboration of community partners, including Duke and UNC. (Athletic rivalries aside, the two schools regularly partner across a range of formal and informal initiatives, to the benefit of both campuses.) The exhibit has also already benefitted individual students at both schools; Hayes has since shared the rest of his collection of Buddhist books with interested interns at Rubenstein Library, while Pitelka’s own undergraduate lab students participated in creating the chronology for the exhibit. The NCMA has even ensured learning opportunities for younger generations in The Triangle by including an interactive game, coded especially for this exhibit and available within the exhibit space, that allows players to test custom armor configurations to see if they’d be successful on the battlefield.
Asked what he hopes people take away from the exhibit, Hayes says it offers a counterpoint to the stereotypical image we tend to have of samurai, which is largely the product of pop culture and entertainment—Shogun being the most recent example. “While it may be the case that samurai were sword-wielding warriors trained in combat, there was much more to their lives off the battlefield,” he says. “They were culturally trained, religiously devout, and crucially supported by women within their family units. In fact, this exhibit even offers a glimpse into the lives of women who were samurai in their own right.”
Matthew Hayes (right) at the opening reception for “Samurai: The Making of a Warrior” with Chiyoko Lord (left) of the Japan-America Society of North Carolina, and Caroline Rocheleau (center), Director of Research and Curator of Ancient Art at NCMA and lead curator of the exhibit.
Not only that, but visitors will appreciate the rich educational offerings that can be found in their own backyard. “What is also remarkable about the exhibition is the collaboration with local collectors, museums, scholars, cultural groups, students, and librarians to showcase the material culture of Japan from our immediate community,” says NCMA’s Rocheleau. “Amazingly, 96 percent of the objects in the exhibition are from the Triangle and Greensboro!”
But even if you go just for the swords and armor, you’ll come away with a new appreciation for these multidimensional warlords, and for the pleasures of studying other cultures from around the world—many of which are represented here in the Triangle and throughout North Carolina.
Sunday, November 24
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
North Carolina Museum of Art
East Building, SECU Auditorium
How did early modern samurai reconcile their martial ethics with religion? How was this reflected in the rule of military government? Join Morgan Pitelka (UNC–Chapel Hill) and Matthew Hayes (Duke University Libraries) as they discuss examples of how samurai in seventeenth-century Japan reconciled their martial practice with Zen Buddhism, against the background of a strong warrior government and highly stratified social structure.
Exhibit poster designed by Janelle Hutchinson, Communications, Duke University Libraries
This exhibit seeks to educate visitors about the little-known Polish-Ukrainian roots of the author of The Heart of Darkness. Focusing on the family photo album that the orphaned victim of Russian imperialism carried with him into permanent exile, the exhibit explores the role of early eastern European photography in commemorating acts of political resistance and mourning the trauma of collective and personal loss. In doing so, it also provides the historical background necessary for understanding the present-day military conflict in Ukraine.
Exhibit poster designed by Kimberly Kresica and Janelle Hutchinson
During Thursday’s open house, the exhibit’s co-curators (Ernest Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at Duke University, and Kimberly Kresica, Records Description Archivist, State Archives of North Carolina) first thanked the exhibit sponsors (Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and Duke University’s Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies) and expressed their gratitude to the team of Duke librarians who digitized Conrad’s family photo album and who helped to make this exhibit a reality. They then went on to explain the reasons why they embarked on this project in 2024—a year that coincides not only with the centennial of Conrad’s death (1924) but also the tenth anniversary of the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine (2014), the land of his birth.
Professor George Z. Gasyna and the opening slide of his presentation. Photo by Luo Zhou
The other speaker at the exhibit opening was George Z. Gasyna, Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This invited guest lecturer explained how Conrad’s personal trajectory influenced the Polish-English novelist’s approach to literature in general, and the writing of The Heart of Darkness in particular. Professor Gasyna concluded his presentation by discussing the way Conrad’s critique of European colonialism in Africa resonates today, during Russia’s neo-imperialist war against Ukraine.
After being treated to a selection of eastern European delicacies—including Polish chocolates, Ukrainian bottled water, and Russian marshmallows—visitors were invited to tour the physical exhibit together with the event speakers.
Joseph Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “Graveyard” is on view in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery of Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library until April 5, 2025. A digital version of this exhibit is also available online on the Duke University Libraries Exhibits website.
This post was contributed by Renate Kwon, Communications Coordinator, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, Duke University. It appeared previously on the “News” page of the APSI website and has been republished with the author’s permission.
A new resource guide of open databases for China studies has just been published. Edited by Joshua Seufert, China Studies Librarian at Princeton University, and Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian and Coordinator for the East Asian Collection at Duke University, this guide is part of the Luce/ACLS Digital Archives Mapping Project, an initiative of the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies. ACLS Special Projects Researcher JM Chris Chang provided assistance to the editors.
“The list should be very useful to China scholars whether they are affiliated with a big East Asian Collection or not.”—Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian and coordinator for the East Asian Collection, Duke University
The aegis of the Digital Archives Mapping Project was consensus by a working group recognizing the need for an open database web directory. The group’s recommendation came in response to sustainability concerns about the field’s reliance on commercial database vendors as well as rising access barriers and external challenges to the study of China. The larger project aims to preserve and expand access to primary materials that are vital to the advancement of the China studies field. The new open database resource guide is merely the first step. The project website will launch in winter 2025 with an expanded directory and additional resources for researchers and librarians.
Duke maintains a repository of over 5,500 photographs and more than 20 films from Sidney D. Gamble’s (1890-1968) four trips totaling nearly nine years in China. Gamble, an avid amateur photographer, took the first of these pictures in 1908 during his a trip to China with his family. He returned three more times between 1917 and 1932 and continued photographing the daily life of Chinese people as well as capturing images from Hawaii, Japan, Korea, and San Francisco.
A sociologist and renowned China scholar, Gamble traveled across the country to collect data for socio-economic surveys, simultaneously capturing snapshots of urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countryside on film. Although Gamble used some of his images in his scholarly publications and lectures, the vast majority of his photographs were never published or exhibited during his lifetime.
The Memory Project
The Memory Project was undertaken by Wu Wenguang’s documentary film studio, Work Station, in 2009 to document life in rural China during the mid-20th Century. To date, this ongoing project has compiled 739 interviews of survivors of the Great Famine that devastated rural China between 1958 and 1961, capturing important regional variations in famine experiences and rural culture. More than 150 young Chinese filmmakers have joined the project; since 2010 they have visited 246 villages in 20 provinces and interviewed more than 1,100 elderly villagers.
Officially known in China as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters” or “The Difficult Three-Year Period,” the Great Famine caused the death of between 20 and 43 million people. More recently, the project has also covered the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960, the Land Reform and the Collectivization of 1949-1953, the Four Cleanups Movement in 1964, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
This blog post was written by Miree Ku, Korean Studies Librarian, Duke University Libraries
This fall semester, the first library session in Korean Studies at Duke was held on September 13 with Advanced Korean class students. It focused on resources related to Korean culinary culture and folk narratives from historical and transnational perspectives. After a brief introduction to Korean resources, we dove into the shelves for a fun, treasure hunt-like search for books. We explored novels, photo books, comic books, and more on the topics we were seeking. Some students speak Korean, but they still need advanced language skills to fully grasp Korean culture. While each student has a different level of proficiency, they all share a deep appreciation for Korean culture.
Korean 305: Advanced Korean Language Course, with major textbooks for the class
I have noticed some significant changes in the students over the last 18 years of conducting library classes. In the past, Duke’s Korean language classes were mostly attended by students with a biological connection to Korea, whether through themselves, their parents, or their grandparents. These days, more students without such backgrounds are enrolling, primarily because of their interest in or love for Korean culture, including its music, films, dramas, webtoons, food, and more. Their knowledge and language abilities truly surprise me.
My personal impressions are confirmed by recent reports about student enrollment in Korean language classes in U.S. colleges. For example, a report from Modern Language Association noted that, while overall enrollment in language classes has plateaued in recent years, U.S. college student enrollment in Korean language classes rose by 78% from 2009 to 2016, reaching 15,000. According to the most recent MLA report on ‘Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education’, released in November 2023, the comprehensive nationwide census reveals that Korean was one of only three languages that witnessed an increase in student enrollment (the others being American Sign Language and Biblical Hebrew). And a 2022 report from NPR news found that interest in Korean popular culture has skyrocketed over the past decade due to the popularity of such K-Pop favorites as ‘Gangnam Style‘ and BTS, as well as South Korea’s successes in film and TV, such as Parasite and Squid Game.
Here’s another indicator of local interest in Korean studies: for the 2023–2024 academic year, the Duke Graduate School awarded 65 Dean’s Research Awards for Master’s Students. Each award provides up to $1,000 to support a master’s student’s research and professional development. One of recipients was EAS-MA ’24 candidate Seulbin Han, who received the 2023–24 Dean’s Research Award for Master’s Students.
Han received this award to support a research project focused on analyzing the global success of Korean popular music, or K-Pop, with an emphasis on the phenomenon’s consumers. The success of K-Pop in recent years has not only drawn increased attention to the Korean music industry but has also contributed to the rapid expansion of South Korea’s economic, social, and cultural ‘soft power’ across unconventional boundaries. According to her project description, Han’s research explores whether diasporic consumers of K-Pop in the United States play a significant role in bringing global attention to K-Pop as a profitable music industry.
Han became interested in studying diasporic consumers of K-Pop and Korean culture because the influence of K-culture has expanded to non-Korean speakers. As I have observed through Duke’s Korean Studies programs, in the past, Korean language courses were primarily made up of heritage speakers looking to deepen their knowledge of Korean culture. However, with the rise of K-pop as a global phenomenon, these programs are now growing largely due to the enrollment of non-Koreans. As a result, Korean language programs are increasingly attracting non-Korean speakers who want to learn the language, culture, history, and more.
Once a semester, the Korean Studies Program at Duke University holds a ‘Korean Program Party,’ where all students taking Korean program classes come together to share the projects they’ve worked on in class, learn about the special programs offered by the Korean department, and enjoy fun Korean games, music, and dance performances by talented students. We also share delicious Korean food, sponsored by the Korean program and faculty.
This spring, the Korean Program Party was held on April 3, 2024. Every time I attend, I realize how much the students enjoy Korean culture and language through Duke’s Korean program. We always have a fun and joyful time together. I’m really looking forward to meeting new students in the Korean studies program and attending this fall’s Korean Program Party, which will be held on October 23, 2024.
This past summer I visited the Turkish city of Izmir on a book buying trip on behalf of Duke University Libraries (DUL). Located on the Aegean coast, Izmir is the third largest city of Turkey after Istanbul and Ankara with a population of over 4 million people. Part of the reason for visiting the city was to continue building upon DUL’s growing Turkish collections, in particular those documenting the so-called “Population Exchange” (Mübadele) between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Those collections will be exhibited in the Mary Duke Biddle Room, on Duke’s West Campus, in August 2025.
Lozan Kapısı (Lausanne Gate), Izmir. Photo by Sean Swanick, 2024.
Izmir was one among many cities, towns, and villages along the Aegean Coast to be dramatically impacted by the Mübadele, the largest mass transfer of humans in history. As a direct result of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) between the newly founded Republic of Turkey and the Kingdom of Greece, approximately 1.6 million people were forced to move from their homes and communities to new environments. The exchange entailed 400,000 Muslims in Greece moving to Turkey while 1.2 million Greek Christians moved from Turkey to Greece. The Mübadele represents the first mass expulsion of a people in the modern period and fully agreed upon by 2 sovereign nation-states. In today’s parlance, we may rightfully call ethnic cleansing. It became known as the ‘Lausanne Principle’, and influenced various other nation-states in their formation, e.g., India and Pakistan. During the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996) and the Serbian led war on Bosnia and Herzegovina, there was discussion of transferring various peoples to other parts of the Balkans due to the ethnical, religious, and linguistic diversity of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Izmir (ازمير), formerly known as Smyrna (Σμύρνα), is a multi-lingual port city bustling with activity from trade, imports and exports of goods, travellers from near and far, and an example of the Ottoman Empire’s diversity of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures. The city had witnessed terrific damage during the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922, including an enormous fire that ravaged the Armenian and Greek quarters of the city. After 1923, the city’s character, like much of Turkey and Greece, changed significantly. New populations were told to live in this foreign-to-them city, some of whom did not speak the national language (Turkish) or were familiar with the customs of their forcibly-adopted country (Turkey). And the same fate befell those people who were forcibly removed from Turkey to live in Greece.
Osmanlıca İzmir görüntülü Ege haritası ve Yunan adaları. Ottoman Maps Collection: https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/ottomanempiremaps.
One particular place of importance for this book purchasing trip was the Göç ve Mübadele Anı Evi. Located in the Buca district of Izmir Province, this house museum it is a short bus ride away from the centre of the Izmir. Buca, known for its many butcher shops (kasaplar) was once home to a sizeable Greek population.
Mural on the Göç ve Mübadele Anı Evi. The mural depicts a Muslim family about to board a ship from Greece to Turkey as part of the Mübadele. Photo by Sean Swanick, 2024.
The house once belonged to a Greek family who were forced to relocate to Greece. A few years ago, the Izmir Municipality Government restored the house and transformed it into a small museum. The objects in the museum come from local families who were forced to leave their homes in Greece, in particular Crete, and relocate to Izmir Province. With trunks, documents, and photos, the Museum provides a realistic feeling to the difficulties, the pain, and suffering the Mübadele caused. Families had become strangers in what the Greek and Turkish governments had decided was their homeland.
Turkish families having arrived in their new homeland. Göç ve Mübadele Anı Evi.
Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic Studies, Duke University.
Further reading
İzmir Sephardic Cuisine : With Its Lost and Existing 100 Recipes. 2012. Second edition. İzmir: Etki.
Eldem, Edhem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Alan Masters. 1999. The Ottoman City between East and West : Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tansuǧ, Feryal. 2018. İzmir/Smyrna 1862-1864 : Greek-Turkish Relations in a Late Ottoman City. Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH.
Yılmaz, Fikret, Sabri Yetkin, and Seyhun Binzet. 2003. İzmir Karpostalları 1900 = Izmir in Postcards 1900. İzmir: İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür Yayını.
Zandi-Sayek, Sibel. 2012. Ottoman Izmir : The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840/1880. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fall 2024 brings exciting changes to East Campus Libraries. Lilly Library is being renovated and our staff and services have moved!!! Our first collection spotlight of the year can be found in Lilly Library at Bishop’s House. Our spotlight features books and films that celebrate Hispanic creators and stories. This post, the first of two, highlights a selection of the books on display. Stay tuned for the movies. Come to East Campus, explore the spotlight, and say hello to Lilly staff in our new digs!
PART I – BOOKS
Yaguareté white : poems by Diego Báez
POETRY Yaguarete White: Poems Diego Báez’s debut collection explores the sense of alienation that accompanies those who hold multiple, sometimes contesting identities. A second-generation immigrant of mixed Paraguayan and white European descent, the American-born Báez wrestles with his heritage and with what it means to feel perpetually out of place.
FICTION Olga Dies Dreaming Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico’s history, Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife and the very notion of the American dream – all while asking what it really means to weather a storm. More fiction: Silver Nitrate Latin@ Rising: an Anthology of Latin@ Science Fiction and Fantasy
Razabilly by Nicholas F. Centino
MUSIC Razabilly: Transforming Sights, Sounds, and History in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly Scene Pairing a decade of participant observation with interviews and historical research, Nicholas F. Centino explores the reasons behind a Rockabilly renaissance in 1990s Los Angeles and demonstrates how, as a form of working-class leisure, this scene provides Razabillies with spaces of respite and conviviality within the alienating landscape of the urban metropolis. A nuanced account revealing how and why Los Angeles Latinas/os have turned to and transformed the music and aesthetic style of 1950s rockabilly, Razabilly offers rare insight into this musical subculture, its place in rock and roll history, and its passionate practitioners.
ART Metamorfosis – A major review of the career of Rafael Trelles (b. Puerto Rico) since 1992. Included are over 80 images of surreal, fantastical paintings and sculptures. Trelles has an international presence. He founded the group Delfín del Cielo and in Mexico he was one of the founding members of La Iguana Marina and in Puerto Rico, El Alfil.
NONFICTION LatinX LatinX has neither country nor fixed geography according to Duke professor, Claudia Milian. It is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian’s trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous “X” as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. LatinX sorts out and addresses issues about the unknowability of social realities that exceed our present knowledge.
Want to read some great works of world literature in English translation? Then check out this month’s collection spotlight, which is located on the first floor of Perkins Library, next to the Perkins Service Desk. The books listed below are examples of what you will find, organized by world region.
IAS Spotlight: Read Around the World Challenge
========= AFRICA ==========
No Edges: Swahili StoriesSan Francisco : Two Lines Press, 2023. (multiple authors and translators)
The first collection of Swahili fiction in English translation, No Edges introduces eight East African writers from Tanzania and Kenya as they share tales of sorcerers, Nairobi junkyards, cross-country bus rides, and spaceships that blast prisoners into eternity. Here we’re encouraged to explore the chaos of life on a crowded Earth, as well as the otherworldly realms lying just beyond our reach. Through language bursting with rhythm and vivid Africanfuturist visions, these writers summon the boundless future into being [From the Publisher].
Wole Soyinka. The forest of a thousand daemons: a hunter’s saga; being a translation [from Yoruba] of ‘Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale’ by D.O. Fagunwa; illustrated by Bruce Onabrakpeya. London, Nelson, 1968. This is a picaresque novel in which we follow the adventures of Adara-Oogun, the son of a witch and a brave hunter as he travels into a forest full of supernatural creatures. Praised as the first full-length Yoruba novel, it was originally published as Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale (Lagos, Nigeria: Church Missionary Society, 1938) [From Oxford Bibliographies: African Studies].
Balaraba Ramat Yakubu. Sin is a puppy that follows you home; translated from the Hausa by Aliyu Kamal. Chennai : Published by Blaft Publications in association with Tranquebar Press, 2012.
Beginning in the late 1980s, northern Nigeria saw a boom in popular fiction written in the Hausa language. Known as “love literature” (littattafan soyayya), the books are often inspired by Hindi films—which have been hugely popular among Hausa speakers for decades—and are primarily written by women. They have sparked a craze among young adult readers as well as a backlash from government censors and book-burning conservatives. Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home is an Islamic soap opera complete with polygamous households, virtuous women, scheming harlots, and black magic. It’s the first full-length novel by a woman ever translated from Hausa to English. And it’s quite unlike anything you’ve ever read before. [From the publisher]
======
CHINA
=======
The Rememberance of Earth’s Past Trilogy; authored by Liu, Cixin=刘慈欣; translated by Ken Liu=刘宇昆;
The trilogy, a hard science fiction, is widely considered “a mind-bending epic” and “wildly imaginative” by Barack Obama. It is also famous for its realistic depiction of the story’s backdrop from China’s Cultural Revolution era to contemporary China. The first book The Three-body Problem won the 2015 Hugo Award, the first Hugo novel winner penned by an Asian author. A Netflix Original Series based on this trilogy was released in March 2024. The publisher describes them as follows:
The Three-body Problem New York : Tor Books, 2014.
“Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.”
The Dark Forest . London : Head of Zeus, an AdAstra book, 2021. “Imagine the universe as a forest, patrolled by numberless and nameless predators. In this forest, stealth is survival – any civilisation that reveals its location is prey. Earth has. Now the predators are coming. Crossing light years, the Trisolarians will reach Earth in four centuries’ time. But the sophons, their extra-dimensional agents and saboteurs, are already here. Only the individual human mind remains immune to their influence. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a last-ditch defence that grants four individuals almost absolute power to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from human and alien alike. “
Death’s End . New York : Tor, [2016]. “Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.”
======== JAPAN =========
Mieko Kawakami. Breasts and Eggs; translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. New York, NY : Europa Editions, 2020. Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with growing up. Her silence proves a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and frustrations. [From the publisher]
Maru Ayase. The Forest Brims Over; translated from the Japanese by Haydn Trowell. Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint, 2023. Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband’s novels, depicted as a pure woman who takes great pleasure in sex. With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, she has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband’s art. When a decade’s worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui breaks away from her husband by growing into a forest—and in time, she takes over the entire city. As fantasy and reality bleed together, The Forest Brims Over challenges unconscious gender biases and explores the boundaries between art and exploitation—muse abuse—in the literary world. [From the publisher]
========================== SOUTH & SOUTHEAST ASIA ==========================
Perumal Murugan. One part woman; translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan. New York : Black Cat, 2018. Selling over 100,000 copies in India, where it was published first in the original Tamil and then in a celebrated translation by Penguin India, Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman has become a cult phenomenon in the subcontinent, captivating Indian readers and jump-starting conversations about caste and female empowerment. Set in South India during the British colonial period but with powerful resonance to the present day, One Part Woman tells the story of a couple, Kali and Ponna, who are unable to conceive, much to the concern of their families—and the crowing amusement of Kali’s male friends. Wryly amusing, fable-like, and deeply poignant, One Part Woman is a powerful exploration of a loving marriage strained by the expectations of others, and an attack on the rigid rules of caste and tradition that continue to constrict opportunity and happiness today.
Geetanjali Shree. Tomb of Sand; translated [from Hindi] by Daisy Rockwell.London : Tilted Axis Press, 2021. An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two. At the older woman’s insistence, they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist. Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree’s playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.
================= LATIN AMERICA =================
Juan Rulfo. The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings, translated from the Spanish, with an introduction and additional materials, by Douglas J. Weatherford. Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum Publishing, 2017.
The legendary title novella from one of Mexico’s most influential writers is published here in English for the first time on the 100th anniversary of his birth. This lost masterwork, collected with his previously untranslated stories, marks a landmark event in world literature. [From the publisher].
Jorge Edwards. Persona non grata: an envoy in Castro’s Cuba; translated from the Spanish by Colin Harding. London : Bodley Head, 1977. In 1970 Jorge Edwards was sent by socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende as his country’s first envoy to break the diplomatic blockade that had sealed Cuba for over a decade. His arrival coincided with the turning point of the revolution, when Castro began to repress the very intellectuals he once courted. In Kafkaesque detail, Edwards records the four explosive months he spent in Havana trying to open a Chilean embassy and his disenchantment with the revolution. His stay culminated in the arrest of his friend Heberto Padilla—the first imprisonment of a well-known writer by the regime—for giving Edwards a “negative view of the revolution.” In a menacing midnight political debate with Edwards immediately after Padilla’s arrest, Castro argued that in this phase of the revolution, bourgeois writers would no longer have “anything to do in Cuba.” Castro accused Edwards of “conduct hostile to the revolution” and declared him “persona non grata.” The winner of the Cervantes prize—the Spanish language equivalent to the Nobel Prize for literature—Jorge Edwards’ memoir splendidly recounts this time and the wrath of Castro. [From Nation Books].
============== MIDDLE EAST ==============
Adani Shibli. Minor Detail. translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2020. Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past. [From the publisher]
Laila El-Haddad & Maggie Schmitt. The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey. Charlottesville, Virginia : Just World Books, [2016]. This award-winning, full-color cookbook shares with readers the little-known but distinctive cuisine of the Gaza region of Palestine, presenting 130 recipes collected by the authors from Gaza. Featuring an enticing array of Palestinian dishes, The Gaza Kitchen also serves as an extraordinary introduction to daily life in the embattled Gaza Strip. It is a window into the intimate everyday spaces that never appear in the news.
David Grossman. A horse walks into a bar; translated [from the Hebrew] by Jessica Cohen. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. This novel about a cynical comedian who deals with childhood traumas and his family’s Holocaust memories during a public appearance won the International Booker Prize in 2017 — making Grossman the first Israeli author to win the prestigious literary award. “Continuing his investigations into how people confront life’s capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in questionable taste included).” [From the publisher].
================= EASTERN EUROPE =================
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights; translated [from the Polish] by Jennifer Croft. London, United Kingdom: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017. 411 pages : illustrations, maps ; 20 cm. This International Booker Prize-winning collection of fictional vignettes about what it means to be a traveler—”a body in motion not only through space but through time”—was written by Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962), one of Poland’s most acclaimed contemporary authors and the winner of the 2018 Noble Prize in Literature. Tokarczuk’s books available in English include the historical novel Primeval and Other Times, the murder mystery Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and her magnum opus, The Books of Jacob.
================= WESTERN EUROPE =================
Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation; translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. London: Portobello, 2010. Jenny Erpenbeck is a popular German author whose books held at Duke are frequently checked out. This brief novel, the translation of a best seller in Germany, covers the sweep of the 20th century through the story of a small piece of land bordering a lake outside Berlin. The tale’s origins seem folkloric but begin only 100 years before, when one of the landowner’s daughters goes mad and wanders shoeless along the shore. An architect purchases the property and builds a unique home with intricate closets, a painted antique door, and stained-glass windows. The house next door is owned by a Jewish family; caught up in the nightmare of the Holocaust, some escape, some do not. The house survives invading Soviets, but the Communist takeover, the moribund economy that results, and ownership disputes that leave the house empty and unmaintained for years finally destroy it and the family connections it forged. Review Author: Reba Leiding. Date: Sept. 15, 2010 From: Library Journal (Vol. 135, Issue 15).
Annie Ernaux. Happening; translated from the French by Tanya Leslie. New York, NY : Seven Stories Press, 2019. In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and single, realises she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague. Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep her child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. Abortion was illegal at the time and she attempted, in vain, to self-administer with a knitting needle and nearly died. An exceptionally moving account of a tragic experience.
Elena Ferrante, The lost daughter; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York, N.Y.: Europa Editions, 2021. Leda, a middle-aged divorcée, is alone for the first time in years after her two adult daughters leave home to live with their father in Toronto. Enjoying an unexpected sense of liberty, she heads to the Ionian coast for a vacation. But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family in this “arresting” novel by the author of the New York Times-bestselling Neapolitan Novels, which have sold millions of copies and been adapted into an HBO series (Publishers Weekly).
Interested in finding more book reviews of translated works from around the world? Then consult the following English-language literary journals, which regularly feature book reviews of world literature and are free to Duke University Library users with a NetID and password:
You can also consult one of the librarians of the International & Area Studies Department, who are responsible for curating the “Read Around the World” challenge.
This post was contributed by Luo Zhou, Librarian for Chinese Studies & Coordinator for East Asian Collection Management, Duke University Libraries.
Duke University Libraries has just published the first installment of the William Hillman Shockley Photographs, 1896-1922, depicting daily life in early 20th-century China, Russia, Korea, and Australia. These black-and-white photographs were taken by William Hillman Shockley (1855-1925), an American mining engineer and amateur photographer, during his international trips on behalf of companies interested in identifying favorable sites for the profitable extraction of natural resources. As such, these 4 x 6-inch prints serve as an important visual source not only for the history of these world regions, but also for the study of the global spread of extractive capitalism and its effects on the environment. When completed, this new digital collection will include over 2,200 prints and negatives (more than half of which depict people and places in late-19th-century Qing China).
The prominence of China in Shockley’s photographic archive explains why I was invited to help Duke’s Archive of Documentary Arts create the descriptive metadata for this digital collection —a process that took more than a year’s worth of work. Together with Paula Jeanet, Visual Materials Processing Archivist, who retired earlier this year, and Tiewa Cao, a visiting Chinese archivist, who joined the team for six months, I worked to identify the images of China captured by Shockley’s camera. As is the case in the following portrait of Shockley—who is shown sitting next to an iron furnace, his translator behind him, surrounded by local Chinese workers—half of these prints have captions on the back. Although very brief, Shockley’s hand-written captions provide unique information about the subject and location of the pictures. This is the information that went into the creation of the metadata for Duke’s newest international-themed digital collection.
Yu Hsien (Yu Xian 盂县), Iron Furnace, Shanxi Province (山西省)
The late 19th-century saw some very large mining concession deals between the Qing government and foreign companies. The Peking Syndicate Limited—a British-Italian company headquartered in London—was one such company and had a deal with rights to mine coal, iron, and petroleum in Shanxi Province in Western China. In 1897, William Shockley was hired by the Peking Syndicate to survey the mining resources in Shanxi. He arrived in Beijing in January 1898 and started a four-month survey journey that covered the Southeastern part of the province. The survey group had help from local government officials, but the mountainous roads were not easy to traverse in wintertime.
In 1904, Shockley published a detailed report about this trip to China in the flagship journal of the American mining and metallurgical engineering association (“Notes on the coal- and iron-fields of Southeastern Shansi, China,” Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers 34 [1904]: 841-871). Based on this report, I created a map showing the places in China Shockley visited between January to April 1898. All dots on the map are places the American mining engineer listed in his report.
In his capacity as a mining engineer, Shockley visited mainly rural China. This destination was very different from that of most other contemporary foreign visitors, who tended to stick to the big cities and the well-traveled roads. His camera captured images of the local people, their life and social events in villages and small towns. And this focus on rural life is one of the main reasons for the uniqueness of this new digital collection.
Another reason for the uniqueness of Shockley’s photos is their documentation of traditional mining technology, which predated the arrival of the American mining engineer. The earliest description of the Chinese iron making process (known as crucible iron making, 坩埚炼铁) appears in a mid-18th century local gazetteer (博山县志). However, this printed primary source does not include drawings of the crucibles (坩埚) or the furnace used to hold these cylinder-shaped containers, which are described in more detail in modern research papers. But even these publications lack visual evidence on how this local mining technology was used in real life. Shockley’s photos of the coal and iron mining facilities in Shanxi provide a visual supplement to Chinese-language texts describing traditional metallurgical process and tools. For example, the photo on the left depicts the iron furnace at Dayang (大阳镇), an important town for iron products in China (Shockley is the man standing at the right from corner, with crucibles on the left and the furnace behind the group); while the photo on the right provides a close-up of both the crucibles and the men responsible for manufacturing them.
Iron Furnace Ta Yang (Dayang 大阳镇); Making crucibles Yu Hsien (Yuxian 盂县)
The newly launched digital collection includes images not only from Shanxi and Shanghai (368 photos), but also Neimenggu, Henan, Hebei, Hubei, Northeastern China, as well as Bogoslovsk, Russia (52) and Korea (16). Photos of these other places, as well as additional images of Russia, will be digitized and made available in the near future. So stay tuned!
In the meantime, please check out the current version of Duke’s new digital collection, read the online archival guide to the Shockley photo collection, and email the Archive of Documentary Arts or me if you have any questions.
Related material:
1898, 一个美国工程师的山西之行，民间影像，8, 2018 (my Chinese-language article on Shockley’s travels in Shanxi)
The Handbook for European Studies Librarians, a practical guide for academic librarians, library professionals, and research scholars, is now available to read online as an e-book or to download as a PDF. Co-edited by Heidi Madden, Head, International and Area Studies & Librarian for Western European and Medieval Renaissance Studies at Duke University and Brian Vetruba, Librarian for European Studies, Jewish Studies, and Linguistics at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, this open-access book is published by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing Services.
With contributions from experts at more than 20 academic institutions, the 30-chapter Handbook not only provides authoritative guidance on finding and interpreting information from specialized sources (European statistical agencies, legal bodies, and archives), but also resources on underrepresented groups (black, queer, migrant). In addition, it includes up-to-date lists of core materials and country-specific vendors as well as strategies and materials for diversifying collections to support research.
This book will be a useful companion for academic librarians and library and information staff who work on collection development projects or answer reference questions from scholars researching topics about European history, politics, languages as well as area studies.
A brand-new exhibit on Humanistic Buddhism (人間佛教) has just opened in the IAS Office Exhibition Space, on the second floor of Bostock Library. This is a collaborative project between Duke University Libraries’ East Asian Collection and Fo Guang Shan Temple, located in Raleigh, North Carolina. The curators of the exhibition are Alexander Atkins, a PhD student at the Department of Religion; Master Miaozhou (妙舟), head of Fo Guang Shan Temple, North Carolina; Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, and Matthew Hayes, Japanese Studies Librarian.
Buddhism is a fast-growing religion in the United States, and the study of Buddhism in America has seen substantial growth since 1990s. A quick search of TRLN catalog for the Library of Congress subject heading “Buddhism-United States” found that 94 out of 108 books were published after 1990. The three main streams of Buddhism in the United States are the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. American Buddhist groups come from many national origins and ethnicities. The exhibit sheds light on a local Buddhism group and Humanistic Buddhism.
Below is the text of the introduction to the exhibit, written by Alexander Atkins:
Zen, Insight Meditation, and Tibetan Buddhism are all household names in the West, but few have heard of the massive global movement of Humanistic Buddhism (人間佛教 Renjian Fo Jiao). Humanistic Buddhism originated in the early 20th century Republic of China expanding through Taiwan into every continent. Its ideas are found within the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Chinese Buddhist Association, spread through Southeast Asian Buddhist groups, and many large Taiwanese Buddhist organizations in Taiwan such as Fo Guang Shan (佛光山), Dharma Drum Mountain (法鼓山 fagushan), and Tzuchi (慈濟ciji).
Taixu (太虛 1890-1947) is one of the most important Chinese Buddhist monks of the 20th century and founder of Humanistic Buddhism. He is best known for his attempts to reformulate Chinese Buddhism amidst the intellectual landscape of the newly formed Republic of China and the post-May Fourth era, a time when many academics and students sought a modern China to push out negative foreign influence and strengthen the country. Taixu sought to push against the academic trends of religion being irrelevant to science, modernization, and social improvement by presenting its importance and use through his formulation of Humanistic Buddhism. He actively argued that Buddhism was compatible with science while formulating monastic education to include science and humanities within the Buddhist curriculum. Though he judged his reform attempts as a failure and died too soon, his ideas continued to influence Chinese Buddhism throughout the world.
Ven. Master Hsing Yun (星雲 1927-2023), inspired by Taixu’s ideas, continued the Humanistic Buddhism movement as many Buddhists fled the newly founded PRC, founding Fo Guang Shan in southern Taiwan in 1967. Through Hsing Yun’s great gifts of organization and giving, Fo Guang Shan has now spread to around 200 countries. He viewed his work as carrying out the global vision for Humanistic Buddhism, making Buddhism’s benefits accessible to all. The closest temple to Duke University is North Carolina Fo Guang Shan (北卡佛光山 Beika Fo Guang Shan) located in Raleigh, North Carolina.
An introduction about the Venerable Master Hsing Yun (星雲) from Fo Guang Shan Temple, North Carolina:
Venerable Master Hsing Yun was born in Jiangsu, China in 1927 and entered a monastery near Nanjing at age twelve. He passed away on February 5th, 2023, at the age of 97.
For over 80 years, Venerable Master devoted his life to the propagation of Humanistic Buddhism, which takes to heart spiritual practice in daily life. He was a Buddhist monk, educator, author, and philanthropist.
In the past 56 years since the founding of Fo Guang Shan, he established more than 300 temples worldwide and founded five universities in Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines, and the USA, as well as the Buddha’s Light International Association, which is granted the NGO association status by the United Nation, with millions of members. Countless people have benefited from his compassionate endeavors.
Early on in his monastic career, Venerable Master Hsing Yun was involved in promoting Buddhism through the written word. He had served as an editor and contributor for many Buddhist magazines and periodicals, authoring the daily columns, and had authored books on how to bring happiness, peace, compassion, and wisdom into daily life. His writings have been translated into English and many other languages. As a lifelong prolific writer, he authored the Complete Works of Venerable Master Hsing Yun, totaling 395 volumes.
Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s life was a shining example of the teachings of Buddha. Throughout his lifetime, he dedicated himself to serving countless individuals, providing guidance and hope to Buddhists everywhere. His achievements have left an indelible impact on the world and will continue to inspire future generations. The legacy of Venerable Master Hsing Yun will live on and his unwavering commitment to propagating Humanistic Buddhism and delivering sentient beings will always be remembered.
The Humanistic Buddhism (人間佛教) exhibit is open to the public and will be up from now until the end of August. Please stop by and take a look!
Guest post by Gabe Cooper, a first-year student from Columbia, SC. He intends to major in Economics with maybe a French minor and an Innovation & Entrepreneurship Certificate.
A dynamic scene of a caiman holding a false coral snake in its mouth, from Maria Sibylla Merian’s Surinam Album.
I discovered this FOCUS cluster almost completely by accident. I came up to Duke to visit during Blue Devil Days and chose to attend a lecture about unraveling the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci, knowing I had enjoyed learning about the Renaissance in the past but also not really knowing what I was getting myself into. When I walked into the lecture room, I was greeted by an eccentric, wise person; the epitome of a college history professor—this is when I met Professor Robisheaux.
Gabe Cooper
I was expecting the mini lecture to be simple—a lecture where Professor Robisheaux talked to us about Leonardo da Vinci. Instead, he tasked the class of newly accepted Duke students to unravel the mystery of Leonardo ourselves. How was the world connected for Leonardo da Vinci? What did his artwork, architectural designs, and a piece of music have in common? All these questions Professor Robisheaux asked us, and all that we had to answer were primary materials and each other. Suddenly, I was in the position to be the one who investigated and be the historian; Professor Robisheaux was just a guide.
This experience during Blue Devil Days drew me to sign up for this MedRen FOCUS cluster because Professor Robisheaux’s teaching style was unlike anything I had ever experienced before, and the lecture made me rethink everything I knew about Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. I wanted to explore this cluster further, and I am so glad I did.
As a student interested in the sciences, what did studying the Renaissance in a humanities program like the MedRen Focus teach you?
The MedRen FOCUS taught me that the distinctions we make today between different subjects in the sciences and the humanities are not as strong as I previously believed. Almost all the figures we studied with Professor Robisheaux were polymaths: Leonardo da Vinci was an artist, scientist, engineer, and courtier; Maria Sibylla Merian was an artist, biologist, and explorer; Paracelsus was a physician who understood medicine and the human body through art and his religious beliefs. Everything was interconnected during the Renaissance, and by studying this period in history, I’ve been better able to see the interconnectedness of the world around me.
A busy scene of Huntsman spiders, pink toe tarantulas, leaf-cutter ants, and a ruby-topaz hummingbird, from Maria Sibylla Merian’s Insects of Suriname.
What was it like encountering early printed books from the Renaissance for the first time?
It was stupefying to encounter early printed books because time seemed to have collapsed. These books were a physical representation of time—they had survived centuries before me and would likely survive centuries after me. But at the same time, the books were just books. They looked ordinary and you could still understand their pictures and sometimes even what they were saying. It was a weird dichotomy between awe and ordinariness, and I would highly encourage anyone to explore the Rubenstein Library’s collection.
What was your topic for the final paper in Professor Robisheaux’s class? What did you choose to write about and why?
My topic for my final paper in Professor Robisheaux’s class was centered around the question “How did art become the pinnacle of subjectivity that we know today?” I came up with this question because throughout Professor Robisheaux’s course, a key theme that emerged in our discussions was the fact that art was viewed as mainly objective during the Renaissance, with very set guidelines and procedures. However, while looking at De europische insecten at the Rubenstein Library during class one day, Maria Sibylla Merian seemed to stand out as an outlier. All of her work had very little commentary, a sense of chaos, and focused on the subjective, individual experience of nature.
And perhaps the most exemplary in accomplishing this switch to subjectivity is Merian’s Surinam Album, which masterfully displaying the wildlife of Surinam in the eighteenth century. This album, full of vibrant colors, intricate details, and dynamic scenes, gives the impression that Merian is tasking the viewer with making sense of what these scenes in nature mean, as if she is rendering them the scientist. I wanted to dive deeper into these themes in my final paper, using everything I had learned throughout the course to try to become a historian.
Two Menelaus Blue Morpho butterflies fluttering around its caterpillar form on a Barbados Cherry, from Maria Sibylla Merian’s Insects of Suriname.
Any other things you would like others (especially future students!) to know about the FOCUS program or the Libraries?
One of the most valuable aspects of FOCUS is the relationships you make with fellow classmates and your professors. Meeting with Professor Robisheaux, Professor Kate Driscoll, Professor Roseen Giles, Dr. Heidi Madden, Ms. Rachel Ingold, and all of your classmates every week for dinner and field trips allows you to really get to know everyone in your FOCUS program. This is truly invaluable because when you take FOCUS as a first semester freshman, you are dealing with a lot of uncertainty. Who will be your friends? Are you going to achieve the same amount of success you did in high school? How do you deal with being on your own? Having a tightly-knit community that is provided by FOCUS makes the entire college transition much easier because you have professors and librarians that want to help you succeed and classmates who are going through the same challenges you are.
Post contributed by Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies
The Japan Times Archives offers a searchable collection of digitized issues of Japan’s largest and longest running English-language newspaper, covering the years 1865 through the present. The database also includes access to digitized issues of several subsidiary newspapers, including The Japan Advertiser, The Japan Times & Mail, The Japan Times and Advertiser, and The Nippon Times.
Why Should You Use This Database?
For faculty and students working in English, this database offers perhaps the most comprehensive cross-section of current events in Japanese history, society, and politics, especially as they relate to the international community. The chronological coverage is also unmatched as users can explore articles from Japan’s closed-country period shortly before 1868, through wartime and postwar periods of the mid-twentieth century, and beyond to Japan’s current moment.
Cool Features
The coolest feature of this database is the ability to run full-text searches in any issue. This is made possible through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. This means that if a user is looking for articles on a very specific topic—even a single keyword—during a narrow run of issues, they can have results in a few seconds. For example, if a user wants to gather articles on the Anpo protests, a series of massive and violent demonstrations protesting the United States-Japan Security treaty, and which were most concentrated in 1960, they might search for “protest” and narrow to the mid-year period of 1960, as below:
This search will return more than 500 results with the term “protest” either in the headline or article text. Users can then browse to find the article that suits their needs.
Database Tips
Don’t limit yourself to newspaper articles! Advertisements are also a great way to better understand the commercial and visual design histories of Japan. In addition to local products and events, many issues also advertised international products. If users are interested in how Japan participated in international commercial markets, or what types of appeals were made to local consumers, there are thousands of options here.
The International and Area Studies (IAS) Department is thrilled to formally introduce Adhitya Dhanapal, the new Resident Librarian for South and Southeast Asian Studies at Duke University Libraries. Adhitya is only the third South Asian studies librarian at Duke University, which recently celebrated its 60th anniversary of collaborative collection development via the South Asia Cooperative Acquisitions Program (SACAP).
Image courtesy: Princeton University Library Instagram
Adhitya Dhanapal, who is nearing the completion of a PhD thesis on the transnational history of the South Asian handloom weaving industry, is an enthusiast of textiles in both his academic and private life. Prior to commencing the Ph.D. program at Princeton University, Adhitya completed an M.A. in Arts and Aesthetics, followed by an M.Phil. in History, both degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India.
Adhitya Dhanapal and Ellen Ambrosone look over materials in Firestone Library. Photo credit: Sameer Khan, Fotobuddy.
Most recently, Adhitya served as a library fellow at Princeton University, working under the tutelage of Dr. Ellen Ambrosone, the Librarian for South Asian Studies. As the Graduate Student Assistant of the South Asian Ephemera Collection, he made initial selections and created related metadata for contemporary ephemera in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil. Having spent copious hours in numerous libraries, Adhitya “became curious to better understand the history of collecting practices and the creation of archives and other repositories.” Fortunately, Duke has a rich collection of South Asian materials for both Adhitya’s curiosities as well as the growing number of faculty and students interested in this large and diverse part of the world.
Adhitya officially started on the 1st of December and is settling-in nicely to his new digs. His office is located in the revamped and now, for the first time in four years, fully-staffed IAS suite, on the second floor of Bostock Library, on the West Campus of Duke. Please come on by and say hello!
Welcome, Adhitya, we’re fortunate and happy to have you!
This blog post was co-authored by Alaina Economus, Slavic Language Resource Description Intern, Resource Description Department, and Erik Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies atDuke University Libraries.
Is it true that Duke University Libraries hold the largest collection of Ukrainian language materials in in the southeastern United States? How do we know? And why does it matter? These are the questions that guided the collection analysis project that Alaina Economus undertook in the summer of 2023 as part of the Field Experience course for the Master of Science in Library Science degree at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), under the supervision of Erik Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Duke University Libraries (DUL).
Why Knowing About Duke’s Ukrainian Language Collection Matters
Although DUL has been collecting Ukrainian language publications since before Ukraine’s formal declaration of independence from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991, until now this research collection has not received a formal quantitative assessment. According to the existing library literature, doing a collection analysis is an important way of determining not only the size and focus of a particular academic collection, but also the extent to which it fulfills the research and teaching mission of both the university and the broader scholarly community. Unfortunately, relying on circulation statistics—the standard way of determining the “fit” between a collection and its users—is not very effective in the case of non-English (“foreign”) language materials. That is because such research materials support a relatively small, but select audience of specialists and, consequently, do not circulate as frequently as works published in the dominant language of most of the people who use the scholarly resources collected by American research libraries.
That is why, after conducting a literature review on the topic of collection assessment in general and Slavic language collections in particular, Alaina decided to focus not on the circulation of Duke’s Ukrainian language materials—whether among members of the Duke University community or between DUL and its interlibrary loan partners in the Triangle Research Library Network (TRLN) and Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation—but on the internal coherence of DUL’s Ukrainian collection as a whole, i.e., the extent to which these primary and secondary sources represent an interdisciplinary field of study (rather than one specific topic or area of focus) that can support at least the initial phase of a scholarly research project. For example, researchers specializing in contemporary Ukrainian literature must have access to a diverse range of works and authors. Additionally, they require a language-specific bibliographic index that includes journals not covered by English-language databases such as the MLA International Bibliography. Full-text access to major Ukrainian journals, as well as reference works and materials on authors, historical events, and cultural context (including works in English), are also necessary for the coherency and currency of this non-English-language circulating collection.
An analysis of the Ukrainian language collection at DUL is not only useful, but also topical, especially within the context of Russia’s ongoing, neo-imperialist war against Ukraine. Assessing DUL’s collection of Ukrainian language materials at a moment when Ukrainian cultural institutions (including libraries) are under direct military attack, gives Alaina’s project an added political dimension. From this perspective, this collection assessment project can be seen not only as a contribution to the decolonization of the (Russocentric) field of Slavic area studies but also to a broader dialogue about the importance of non-English language-specific materials in promoting bibliodiversity and supporting the cultural preservation of, and access to “at-risk” library collections.
The Current Composition of Duke’s Ukrainian Language Collection
A quantitative analysis of DUL’s Ukrainian language collection confirms that DUL does, indeed, hold the largest collection of Ukrainian language materials in the southeastern United States. Just as importantly, it also documents the effectiveness of the Slavic language cooperative collection development agreement between DUL and UNC-CH libraries, the two main institutions primarily responsible for collecting Slavic language materials in the Research Triangle.
At the time of data collection (July 2023), Duke University Libraries held 11,744 Ukrainian-language items. As Figure 1 demonstrates, the majority of these items were monographic (87%) and serial (12%) publications, with only a smattering of Ukrainian-language audiovisual and cartographic materials.
Figure 1: Formats
As of July 2023, roughly 6% of the collection had not received any Library of Congress call number or subject heading analysis, and approximately 12% were assigned either an obsolete (Dewey Decimal) call number, government document identification number, or another classification identification. In other words, almost 20% of the Ukrainian collection remained un- or under-cataloged. Consequently, the following description relates primarily to the remaining 80% of the collection (approximately 9,400 items).
As one would expect in a general research collection focused primarily on humanities and social sciences, an analysis of LC-subject headings (Figure 2) reveals that the DUL’s Ukrainian collection is lacking in materials related to science, medicine, technology, and music; however, except for literature, history, and social sciences, no other subject class makes up more than 5% of the overall collection.
Figure 2: LC-Subject Class Analysis
Over half of the collection (56%) is comprised of items assigned P (Literature) or D (History) call numbers, a majority of which are PG (Slavic languages, Baltic languages, and Albanian languages) and DK (History of Russia, Soviet Union, and former Soviet Republics) call numbers, respectively. As Figure 3 demonstrates, breaking down the PG class further shows that contemporary Ukrainian literature represents almost half of the total items assigned P call numbers. Approximately 11% of such items is Ukrainian-language literature that has been published after 2001.
Figure 3: Ukrainian Literature by Call Number
The Benefits of Collaborative Collection Development
DUL’s Ukrainian-language holdings compare favorably to those of other members of the East Coast Consortium for Slavic Collections (ECC), a library organization that was established in 1993 to “coordinate the activities of Eurasian area studies library collections located in the eastern United States and Canada.” Besides Duke University, ECC includes representatives from twelve other repositories of large Slavic collections: Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, New York University, Princeton University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, and Yale University. ECC members “work in concert with one another on the purchase of expensive resources…and cooperate on serial retention projects as well as duplicate exchange programs.” By means of “this type of coordination and cooperation each ECC member library can maximize its financial resources to meet the research, teaching and learning needs of their users.”
Figure 4: Ukrainian-language items at ECC Member Institutions. Source: OCLC WorldCat [*]
DUL’s contribution to this collective endeavor guarantees that students and scholars, both at Duke and nationwide, have access to “a full range of materials from and about this world area,” including from Ukraine. According to WorldCat data (which significantly undercounts the holdings in the library’s online public access catalog [*]), DUL has the eighth largest collection of Ukrainian-language materials in the ECC, with more materials than five other member libraries. Harvard University possesses the largest collection, with over 72,000 items. Dartmouth has the fewest with 286 items.
Since DUL and UNC-CH libraries are members both of ECC and TRLN, this quantitative analysis also sheds light on the effectiveness of the longstanding collection agreement between the Research Triangle’s two largest academic research libraries. Before the first decade of the 21st-century, primary responsibility for collecting research-quality Ukrainian language materials had belonged to DUL. Since 2010, however, DUL and UNC-CH have split the collecting responsibility between them: DUL now collects only Ukrainian-language materials published in the multi-national and multi-ethnic country that is post-independence Ukraine, while UNC-CH collects Ukrainian materials published in other languages, primarily Russian. As is the case with the ECC, such cooperation is intended to reduce duplication while increasing the number of unique items available in TRLN. By this logic, the number of shared items between the two institutions should be relatively low and should have declined in quantity since the mid-2000s. That is precisely what a quantitative analysis of duplicate Ukrainian titles between DUL and UNC demonstrates.
Figure 5: Duplicate Ukrainian Holdings: Duke and UNC, 2004-2023
According to Figure 5, from 2004 (the year DUL began to track items and functions via its current integrated library system) to 2022, there has been a significant decline in duplicate Ukrainian items held by both DUL and UNC-CH. While the decline began before the formal establishment of the present cooperative collection development agreement in 2010, the collaboration between the two institutions has succeeded in keeping duplicates down significantly (in the single digits) since 2015. This data speaks to the effectiveness of cooperation between DUL and UNC-CH in Ukrainian collecting, both to reduce costs for individual TRLN libraries, and to create a sound foundation for North Carolina-based students and scholars interested in conducting research on this region of the world.
The Distinctiveness of Duke’s Ukrainian Language Collection
One way of demonstrating the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian-language collection at DUL is to analyze its unique holdings. According to WorldCat, DUL possesses 73 unique Ukrainian-language items, and over a thousand items that are held by only two or three other libraries worldwide. These items represent a wide variety of formats, subject areas, and publication years. Of these items, we have selected two that showcase the uniqueness and breadth of DUL’s Ukrainian-language collection.
DUL is one of only four libraries in the world (and one of only two in North America) that hold any issues of Dnipro (“The Dnepr [River]”), a Ukrainian-language newspaper published in the United States by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church between 1921 and 1950. DUL holds seven unique runs of this historical newspaper for the period 1924 to 1942. These issues provide a glimpse into the world of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States, as well as capture the reactions and emotions of Ukrainian-Americans regarding events occurring in Ukraine itself. One example is the paper’s coverage of the man-made famine (Ukr. Holodomor, “death by hunger”) that killed millions of ethnic Ukrainians during the Soviet campaign to “collectivize” agriculture in 1932 and 1933, under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Throughout the early to mid-1930s, the paper reported extensively about the famine and related events, publishing written protests against the Soviet regime, appeals for donations to aid famine victims, and poetry from readers processing the horror at what they were reading in the paper.
Figure 6: Two issues of Dnipro(1932) from DUL’s American Newspaper Repository Collection
Dnipro contains important evidence not only the day-to-day life of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States, but also captures the ways in which this community maintained and celebrated their culture abroad amidst persecution and repression at home. Its coverage, thus, complements that of the three other Ukrainian diaspora newspapers in DUL’s American Newspaper Repository Collection, which holds many foreign language and immigrant papers, including those produced by immigrants and expatriates from twentieth-century Russia and Eastern Europe. As is the case with Dnipro, some of these newspaper runs apparently exist nowhere else in the original (paper) format, which makes this collection of American historical newspapers of the Russian and East European diasporas into a resource of major scholarly significance.
DUL is also the only library in the United States to have a copy of Oderzhyma svobodoiu: shliakh Heroïni Svitu Iryny Senyk, a 2017 collection of poems, correspondence, writings, and needlework patterns of Iryna Senyk (1926-2009), a nurse, poet, and Soviet political dissident who was a member of both the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Senyk was imprisoned for a nonconsecutive total of 34 years spanning from 1945 to 1983 for her persistent support of Ukrainian sovereignty, her outspoken advocacy for other Ukrainian prisoners, and her work to bring international awareness to the human rights violations perpetrated by the Soviet regime. This book, which was published by Discursus, a small publishing house in the western Ukrainian village of Brusturiv (Kosivs’kyi raion, Ivano-Frankivs’ka oblast’), places Senyk’s writings into a larger context of the fight for Ukrainian independence during the Soviet period and provides an important example of the role of women not only in the preservation and celebration of Ukrainian culture, but also in the international human rights movement. In this sense, this unique item from the library’s circulating collection complements the non-circulating collection of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Books & Special Collections Library’s Sally Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture and Human Rights Archive, extending their existing holdings to materials on non-Western women activists.
Conclusion
The preceding summary of Alaina’s research into the composition of DUL’s Ukrainian language collection showcases the importance of language-specific collection analysis in preserving cultural heritage and fostering academic research. Her work not only provides valuable insights into the composition, strengths, and gaps of the collection, but also speaks to the importance of accurate metadata to collection analysis projects. The comparison of DUL’s collection, specifically with the Ukrainian holdings of the UNC-CH library and other members of the East Coast Consortium of Slavic Library Collections, speaks to the utility and effectiveness of interinstitutional collection agreements. Finally, the unique materials presented as examples of the distinctiveness of DUL’s Ukrainian-language collection attest to its historical and cultural significance and, consequently, to its immense research potential for both current and future scholars.
The collection analysis project summarized in this blog post provides one concrete, practical example of the steps that library professionals can take to make the cultural products of formerly colonized nations like Ukraine more visible in American research repositories. The data collected during this study will be used to inform future decision about the DUL’s Ukrainian collection, including the kinds of materials we collect and the way these materials are described and made available to researchers.
For questions about the collection analysis project, please email alaina.economus@duke.edu. Inquiries about Duke’s Ukrainian collection more broadly can be addressed to ernest.zitser@duke.edu.
[*] The WoldCat data used to generate Figure 4 are only a rough approximation of actual institutional holdings and may significantly underrepresent the number of titles listed in each individual library’s open access online catalog (OPAC). For example, a search of the University of Toronto library’s OPAC demonstrates that this institution actually holds over 40,000 Ukrainian language titles (in all formats), nearly double the number listed in WorldCat. Thanks to Ksenya Kiebuzinski for this important clarification.
Guest post by Meg Brown, Head, Exhibition Services and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation Exhibits Librarian
Jerry and Bruce Chappell in the library exhibit gallery named in their honor, October 2015.
A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune of spending a magical evening with Jerry and Bruce Chappell, the namesakes of the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery near the main entrance of Perkins Library on Duke’s West Campus.
Jerry was a member of our Library Advisory Board for 12 years. She and Bruce have long been generous supporters of the Libraries’ exhibition program, and they have always been very kind to me personally. Sadly, Jerry passed away a few days after our visit, on November 6, 2023, and I’m so grateful to have had such a wonderful evening with an amazing, warm, loving woman.
I was there with Susan Berndt of Duke Alumni Engagement and Development. It was a beautiful night, and Jerry took us through her garden and shared stories of special people who taught her about plants. She spoke with gratitude of the time she spent with her mother in the yard. She asked me about my mother, and she listened with interest. She toured us through her book-filled home, including a room with an extensive genealogy collection. She spoke about researching her family history and how it was all intertwined with her studies years ago at Duke, and how she never lost her love of learning. She worried aloud about new generations of people who don’t appreciate books, and we commiserated about a future full of digital history. But together we tried to look on the bright side of all of the opportunities for research this might bring.
We all sat down and talked about the library, and about the future of the library exhibition program. Bruce and Jerry told us stories about what Duke had meant to them. They explained that it was fun, it was extraordinary, it was hard work, and it was family. One of Jerry’s favorite professors was Dr. Robert Durden, a professor of history and author of several books about the history of this institution. It turned out that Durden’s mother was also Jerry’s housemother when she was a Duke undergraduate in the Woman’s College. She spoke of how important those relationships were, and how she always felt welcome there. She spoke of Duke even today as an extension of her family, her sorority sisters, her classmates, her teachers, the new students and alumni she meets all around the world.
Jerry Chappell (née Perry) as a Duke undergraduate, second from left, from the 1960 Chanticleer yearbook.
That night, Jerry treated me like family. She asked me about my work, my kids, my passions. She hugged me when I left and she thanked me. She held my hand and I felt appreciated, like she wanted to make sure I knew I was doing good work. All that the Chappells asked of me that night was that I make the library a place where people feel inspired—and in Jerry’s honor, I hope I am able to always fulfill that request.
The next time you visit Perkins Library, I hope you will look up and see the Chappells’ name on the gallery near the main entrance. And I hope the exhibitions there will inspire you to feel that Duke is still a welcoming place.
The Making of a Poet is a Trent Grant and Laertes Press sponsored residency for Mohsen Mohamed and Sherine Elbanhawy. In 2021, Mohsen published his first book of poetry, مفيش رقم بيرد (Mafīsh raqam bīrudd)which won first prize for vernacular poetry at the Cairo International Book Fair as well as the Sawiris Cultural Award. He wrote the poems while incarcerated in several prisons between 2014-2019 as he notes, “poetry in prison is like dreaming; it’s an alternative space to live, experience, and see the world.” Written in Egyptian Arabic, his poetry oscillates between longing and loss, between the present and the past, and between optimism and despair.
Mohsen will be joined by Sherine who was inspired to translate Mohsen’s work after a chance meeting at a workshop. She read his poetry and noted that “[his] poetry is very much ingrained in the tradition of poetry as a voice of resistance.” Sherine’s translation was published earlier this year by Laertes Press, an independent press committed to literary translation based in Chapel Hill and is entitled No One is On the Line.
The Bedfellows Are Sleeping and I’m Whispering
Oh, what a story,
the story
of my oppression
الرفاق نايمين و أنا بهمس
يا حكاية ظلمي يا حكاية
Mohsen was born in Mansoura, a city in Egypt located along the Nile, and had been pursuing a degree in Business Administration. However, he was wrongly arrested in 2014 and spent 5 years incarcerated in 6 different jails. He currently lives in Oxford, England. Last year he was interviewed about his poetry and his time in prison (in Arabic). Some of the poems in No One is On the Line, as well as new poems by Mohsen will be published later this year in a new collection of Egyptian prison writings in the post-2011 period by the University of California press.
In the deafening
silence of the nights
in the colossal
isolating barrier,
I grappled with question and answer,
like a mute who strives
to interrogate someone sightless
في الليالي وصمتها القاتل
والجدار العازل الحائل
كنت أجاوب فيها و أتسائل
زي أخرس يسأل الأعمي
حطوا ليه على عينه غماية
Sherine Elbanhawy, is currently pursuing a MA in Islamic Studies-Women and Gender Studies at McGill University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She’s the founder of Rowayat, a literary magazine showcasing Egyptian and Arab/SWANA writers.
Fawzi
Running and fleeing at a protest
in a snapshot caught by a friend,
a taste of teargas,
and people making way for you
to revive a friend
suddenly passed out.
On the left side
of the photo
betrayers and decent people.
In the back,
a throng, seen and unseen.
فوزي
وكر وفر في مظاهرة
و صورة لقطها ليك صاحبك
بطعم الغاز
وناس توسع لك طريق
علشان تداوي رفيق
أغمى عليه فجأة
وناس في شمال الصورة كات خاينة
وناس صادقة
وناس في الخلف مش باينة
وناس في الخلف
Over the course of the 23-27 Oct. week, Mohsen and Sherine will participate in a number of events and we hope you’ll attend!
On Tuesday, we’ll visit with Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a reading and discussion with her students in her course entitled Iranian Prison Literature.
The next day, Mohsen and Sherine will present at the John Hope Franklin Centre as part of the W@C speaker series.
Knowledge
But I can still say
that I love, that I dream,
get inspired,
and get hurt.
The booming of the poem
vibrates inside iron bars,
but its wrists have never been shackled,
nor has steel ever muzzled its songs,
nor has the voice of an ode become hoarse.
المعرفة
لكني لسه بعرف أقول
وأحب وأحلم وانشرح
وانجرح
صوت القصيدة العالي يتسلل
بين الحديد أبو سلسلة ومعصم
الشعر عمره ف مرة ماتسلسل
ولا صوت غنا بحديد بتكمم
ولا عمر مرة قصيدة صوتها أتنبح
On Thursday evening, our esteemed guests will be hosted by Letters Bookshop in downtown Durham for a soirée of reading and translating. Sherine’s translation will be on sale and Mohsen and Sherine will be delighted to sign your copy!
Our final event, entitled Egypt’s carceral poetry and the public sphere will take place in Duke Libraries RL249 where Mohsen and Sherine will be in discussion with Duke University Professors Frances Hasso and Corina Stan. The hope is to extract commonalities and parallels that help us to understand the carceral experience with respect to care and caring, its reconfiguring of human distances, and its impact on human rights and the suppression of artists.
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).
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 Brannon Judy. Source: http://www.wonjutoday.co.kr/
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 Brannon. 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 Brannon
Carl Wesley Judy’s father-in-law, Lyman Coy Brannon (1880-1971), was a well-known Methodist Church pastor. Reverend Brannon (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 Brannon, 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 Brannon 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 Timesarticle 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. Brannon’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. Brannon 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:
Recent Duke doctoral graduate Joshua Shelly (Ph.D., 2023) won second prize in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest. (Image courtesy Joshua Shelly/Carolina-Duke German Studies Program)
Congratulations to Joshua Shelly, a newly minted Ph.D. from the Carolina-Duke German Studies Program, who just won second place in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest!
In recognition of his bibliophilic brilliance, he will receive a $1,000 cash prize (presumably to spend on more books!) and a trip to Washington, D.C., to represent Duke at a special awards ceremony on September 22 at 5:00 p.m. at the Library of Congress’s Whittall Pavilion. As his home institution, the Duke University Libraries also receives $500.
Joshua’s collection was inspired by an essay he came across while in an archive working on his dissertation. “Alte Bücher in Haifa” (Old Books in Haifa), published in Paris in the 1930s, captures the experience of a German-reading Jew seeking to rebuild his library through Haifa’s used book market. Joshua’s collection focuses on works important to German Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes, “Whether clicking through internet pages on the path to that one title, browsing Bücherschränke (little libraries) in Berlin, or else leafing through physical pages in a book shop in Jerusalem, my decision to add a book to my collection is shaped by factors such as the book’s physical condition, price—where relevant—and my own idiosyncratic literary taste.”
Earlier this year, Joshua took first place in the graduate category of the Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest, sponsored by the Friends of the Duke University Libraries, for his collection “Alte Bücher in Haifa: (Re)building a German Jewish Library in the 21st Century.” That earned him a $1,500 cash prize and the eligibility to compete on the national level.
Duke has been well-represented in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Competition. Past winners include:
2021 Winner, Essay Prize: Joseph E. Hiller,Como un detective salvaje: Gathering Small Press, Experimental, and Untranslated Latin American Literature
2015 Winner, Essay Prize: Anne Steptoe,Look Homeward: Journeying Home through 20th Century Southern Literature
2013 Winner, 2nd Prize: Ashley Young,New Orleans’ Nourishing Networks: Foodways and Municipal Markets in the Nineteenth Century Global South
2011 Winner, 1st Prize: Mitch Fraas,Anglo-American Legal Printing 1702 to the Present
Look for the announcement of the applications for the 2025 Nadell Book Prize in Spring 2025!
Post by Joyce Chapman, Assessment Analyst and Consultant; Sarah Park, Librarian for Engineering and Computer Science; and Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies
Duke students enjoy Holi, the Hindu holiday also known as the Festival of Colors. Photo by Jared Lazarus/University Communications.
How can the Duke Libraries better support the needs of international students at Duke? A team of library staff conducted qualitative research with international students over the past year in order to answer this question. This research was part of a multi-year effort at the Libraries to better understand the experiences and needs of various populations at Duke, including first-generation college students, and Black students.
Our final report discusses the full research process and our findings in more detail than that provided below, including a full list of recommendations resulting from the study.
We began by reading existing research on university and academic libraries’ support of international students and speaking with key stakeholders on campus. In fall of 2022 and spring of 2023, we conducted a series of discussion groups with both graduate and undergraduate international students. We also surveyed international students to better understand their library and campus experiences at Duke.
On the whole, participants express high satisfaction both with the Libraries and Duke University. In the 2023 Libraries Student Survey, international student respondents were more likely to report feeling welcomed at the Libraries and that the library is an important part of their Duke experience than domestic students. When asked in discussion groups what helps them feel welcome, international students discussed how the Libraries’ wide array of exhibits and events with international focus, as well as visible print materials in non-English languages, make the Libraries a welcoming space for them. Numerous students mentioned the positive impact of the Duke International Student Center (DISC) and a range of orientational programs, such as campus wide, program specific, and international student specific orientations, in fostering a sense of belonging and welcome at Duke. For undergraduates specifically, peers play an important role in making them feel welcome.
Studying for finals in Lilly Library on Duke’s East Campus. Photo by Bill Snead/University Communications.
Participants were also asked which people, services, and spaces feel supportive and safe at Duke University. For undergraduates, examples include Counseling and Psychological Services; Duke LIFE (Lower Income, First-Generation Engagement); the campus farm; Resident Advisor supervisors; advisors; fellow Duke students; professors and Teaching Assistants; the Career Resource Center; campus events; Duke health insurance; student clubs; and the campus gyms. For graduate students, supportive services primarily revolve around departments and programs, including departmental staff such as program administrators, Directors of Graduate Studies and Director of Graduate Studies Assistants, program advisors, career services teams within schools, and department coordinators. Graduate students also discussed fellow international students, upperclass students within their programs, instructors, and lab mates as sources of support.
Overall, international students at Duke feel welcome and supported by both fellow students and faculty. Participants also discussed aspects of Duke that have felt unwelcoming, including the additional stress of administrative requirements around acquiring healthcare, visas, driver’s licenses, social security numbers, and housing. Both graduate and undergraduate participants discussed how cultural differences can make students feel out of place. A few students shared their experiences of encountering microaggressions from some fellow students and faculty. These microaggressions often stem from assumptions made by the microaggressor based on the students’ nationality or from the microaggressor’s own U.S.-centric worldview, even in academic situations where a global perspective is expected. A theme among undergraduate students was the unwelcoming exclusivity of social groups and some clubs, which was described as a cause of social anxiety. For graduate students in particular, the cost of living, feeling unsafe off campus, and transportation are three of the least welcoming aspects of life at Duke. Some students additionally brought up the stress caused by the pervasive nature of academic elitism at Duke, an issue that would not be unique to international students.
Participants were asked who they turn to when they have questions. Undergraduates often turn to friends, upperclass students, advisors, student support offices, and even large chat groups used by their cohorts. Graduate students tend to rely more on formal entities such as advisors, graduate program offices, and faculty, though they also consult lab mates, upperclass students, friends, and their extended networks.
Duke students and alumni celebrate Homecoming Weekend on the Bryan Center Plaza. Photo by Jared Lazarus/University Communications.
Students reflected on what was most challenging for them when they first arrived in Durham or on campus. Literature reviews discussing the challenges international students face while studying abroad often emphasize language and communication barriers. However, challenges identified at Duke centered more on cultural and social interactions, with little mention of basic communication issues. Students expressed feelings of being overwhelmed with a bewildering variety of resources and facing challenges in navigating through available options. While such overwhelming feelings are not unique to international students, it is notable that their American counterparts are often guided by relatives who have experience with the U.S. education system. Additionally, many undergraduate students talked about differences in education systems and pedagogical approaches between their home countries and Duke.
We also asked participants how they use the Libraries at Duke and what works well for them. The overall attitude toward the Libraries is very positive. International students use and value the Libraries for its variety of study spaces, online resources, textbook loans program, interlibrary loan services, and research support. When asked what works well in the Libraries, the majority of comments focused on the ease-of-use of library facilities and spaces, as well as on the accessibility of library materials. Many students also appreciate the ability to use the Libraries as a place to relax and unwind throughout the day. Students praised the volume of Duke’s holdings, its networked relationship to other lending institutions, the ease of finding online resources, and the savvy work of librarians in assisting students during research consultations.
International students also identified several areas of the library that do not work well for them. Among these, students described their limited awareness of library services and librarian subject expertise. Many also commented on the crowded nature of study spaces, and the frustrating waitlist for carrels. While study rooms are highly valued by international and domestic students, we found that they are also one of the Libraries’ services for which students express frustrations and a greater need. We found that many undergraduate international students were unaware of the ability to receive personalized help from library staff, and that the Libraries’ support role is known only to small cross-sections of the international student population. When students learn of personalized assistance from librarians they often do not do so through the Libraries, but from professors and other students. Students praised information provided by librarians in their Writing 101 and English for International Students classes, but requested that the Libraries provide more outreach and information sessions extended over a longer portion of the student’s academic career at Duke. Some students expressed a strong interest in having tour opportunities, more library orientations, and greater awareness of the general services offered by U.S. academic libraries, with which many international students may be unfamiliar.
When asked what services and programs the Libraries could offer to further support international students, participants had several ideas. The overarching theme was a desire for enhanced communication and promotion of library services and resources. This could include promotion through the DISC newsletter and international student orientations. It could also include channels not specific to international students, such as professors, programs, program orientations, and increasing advertising about the Libraries on campus but outside the library buildings themselves. Students were also interested in the Libraries increasing its offerings of workshops and tours. Echoing findings from the Libraries’ 2023 Student Survey, a recurring request from international students in discussion groups was for increased foreign language materials, and in particular, leisure reading materials and current newspapers. Other ideas from students include increasing collaboration with DISC and other campus offices, and providing popular games from students’ home countries in a leisure area of the Libraries.
Getting ready for final exams in the Link at Perkins Library. Photo by Jared Lazarus/University Communications.
What’s Next?
These findings became the basis of 29 recommendations outlined in the Research Team’s full report. The Research Team will present this study at the Libraries’ all-staff meeting, and will share it widely with other units on Duke’s campus over the summer of 2023. We will also share the report within the library community to encourage other libraries to consider these questions and undertake similar work at their own institutions.
One of the report’s recommendations is that the Libraries’ charge an International Student Study Implementation Team in fall 2023 that will prioritize and coordinate the implementation of recommendations from the study.
For more information on this study, contact Joyce Chapman, Assessment Analyst and Consultant, at joyce.chapman@duke.edu.
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.
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 (풀), 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.
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.
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 (26년)” 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.”
The graphic novel The Day of 1987 (1987 그날) 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.
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.
On April 12, the Duke community will celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Grateful Dead concert at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Widely regarded as a top show that year, the band delivered smoking renditions of “Jack Straw,” “Bertha,” “Good Lovin’,” and “Eyes of the World,” as you can hear for yourself in the video above.
To commemorate this historic show, join us for a special panel discussion, selections from the remastered video recording, live music, and refreshments on Wednesday, April 12, at 6:00 p.m. in the Ruby Lounge of the Rubenstein Arts Center.
A panel of Dead experts will share their interpretations of the show, including Professor Eric Mlyn; show volunteer and former Duke University Union coordinator Peter Coyle; and John Brackett, author of the forthcoming book Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings and the Ideology of Liveness, coming out next fall from Duke University Press. The book will be the first in a new Duke University Press series, Studies in the Grateful Dead, in the fall of 2023.
Bridget Booher, Director of Duke WIN, will moderate the panel. Footage featuring selected songs from the concert will be screened. After the program, local Dead cover band The Loose Lucies will perform for an hour. Refreshments will be served.
Professor Mlyn teaches a first-year seminar about the Grateful Dead. His students researched the band’s performances at Duke from 1971 to 1982 and curated an exhibit in Perkins Library. According to Mlyn, “4/12/78 was a raucous and animated performance and has been widely recognized by Deadheads as one of the best shows that year. The band was preparing for a trip to Egypt and it was the last full year of shows for keyboardist Keith Godchaux and his wife Donna whose unforgettable vocals punctuated shows during that era.”
As part of our commitment to embody the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work, the Duke University Libraries are pleased to announce a new residency program for early career librarians, starting with two full-time positions.
The Duke University Libraries Residency Program will be a three-year program providing enhanced professional development and mentorship to enable two recent graduates of an MLS or related graduate program to gain experience and expertise in a highly specialized area of librarianship.
As a member of the ACRL Diversity Alliance, we are launching the Residency Program as part of our organization’s commitment to “diversify and thereby enrich the profession” and “to build an inclusive organizational culture supportive of Black, Indigenous and People of color (BIPOC).”
Two Residents will be hired in tandem to create a cohort experience every three years.
This program seeks to provide meaningful work placements in specialized fields of librarianship, aligning the professional goals of Residents with the strategic goals of the Duke University Libraries. While learning on the job, Residents will work with colleagues who are highly skilled in these specialized areas and receive relevant development and training.
To this end, the residency program will guarantee professional development funding to Residents to fund travel, conference attendance, presentations, etc., related to skill building and their ongoing career trajectories. Additional professional development will also be offered to Residents through both DUL and Duke-wide programming. Formal and informal mentorship opportunities will also be provided to Residents.
While an offer for regular employment is not guaranteed after the three-year program, Residents will be placed intentionally with the goal of their positions becoming regular, ranked librarian positions if successful during their three-year terms.
Resident Librarian for Resource Description
The Resident Librarian for Resource Description works collaboratively with the Original Cataloging Team and with other library colleagues to assist in the creation, management, and configuration of DUL metadata for description. The Resident Librarian will gain experience in applying international cataloging standards to resources in multiple formats and across all subjects in a way that promotes inclusive and effective access, with a focus on a language or languages from the following collecting areas—Middle Eastern (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Turkish), East Asian (Chinese, Korean), Central/South/Southeast Asian languages (e.g., Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Sanskrit, Uzbek, Kazakh), or Slavic languages (e.g., Russian, Ukrainian). The resident will gain experience working collaboratively on projects and utilizing open-source tools that support better discovery of library resources. See the full position description.
Resident Librarian for South and Southeast Asian Studies
The Resident Librarian for South and Southeast Asia serves as the primary liaison for faculty and users in the interdisciplinary fields of South and Southeast Asian Studies at Duke University. The Resident Librarian develops and manages the collections from and about South and Southeast Asia, and provides specialized reference assistance and instruction. The Resident will gain experience working collaboratively with library staff, students, and faculty through teaching, research consultations, outreach related to library collections, and other special projects. See the full position description.
Virtual Info Session: April 6
Please join us to learn more about these positions and ask questions before applying! We are offering an information session over Zoom where we will share more information about Duke University, the Duke University Libraries, and the two residency positions. No registration is needed. Just click the Zoom link below at the listed date and time. Participants can login as anonymous—attendee names only seen by panelists.
A new exhibit in the IAS Office Exhibit Space, located on the second floor of Bostock library, showcases recent acquisitions on East Asia. New Chinese-language arrivals provide a glimpse of perspectives surrounding female agency and subjectivity during major political shifts in contemporary Chinese history. New Korean-language publications (including graphic novels) focus on important historical issues and events, such as the experience and testimony of Korean women during periods of Japan’s colonial occupation, and contemporary social and political movements in 20th-century Korea. Finally, our existing holdings in Japanese have been enhanced by a major gift of volumes focused on Japanese religion, which provides new research avenues for scholars of East Asian Buddhism.
Chinese Women’s Liberation Luo Zhou, Librarian for Chinese Studies
Duke University Libraries has expanded its collection with over 200 titles, primarily published during the 1950s and 1960s in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These titles consist of original booklets and pamphlets that focus on women’s liberation and the promotion of the new Marriage Law, which was issued by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1950, only one year after the establishment of the PRC. The Marriage Law, which was the first fundamental law of the PRC, sought to provide a legal foundation for Chinese women to combat oppressive practices such as polygamy, widow chastity, child brides, and bride-wealth. The 1950 law was a significant legislative accomplishment for the CCP in terms of women’s liberation. The promotion of the new law was a nationwide effort, with numerous illustrated publications intended for women, 90% of whom were illiterate in the early 1950s. Concurrently, publications were issued to promote a new image of women as citizens capable of doing the same job, and seeking the same rights, as men. “Holding Up Half the Sky,” a slogan first introduced in the People’s Daily in the mid-1950s, best encapsulates the CCP’s goal of achieving two main social objectives: nurturing women’s individuality and their social productivity.
20th-Century Korean History Miree Ku, Librarian for Korean Studies
Duke’s Korean collection recently added new graphic novels (Korean manhwa), monographs, and biographies about important historical issues and events in 20th-century Korean history such as “comfort women, “the Korean War, and civil rights and pro-democracy movements.
Between 1932 and 1945, women from Japanese-occupied areas in Korea, China, and the Philippines were coerced or tricked into joining private military brothels. In some cases, women were kidnapped from their homes. Many of the new additions to Duke’s Korean collection focus on direct attestations of women, including oral interviews and letters, which provide a grim picture of violence against women during this period of Japanese colonial expansion. By preserving the physical record of East Asian female subjectivity, such accounts help researchers to understand not only the range of women’s experiences in colonial contexts, but also how direct testimony remains a valuable source of our historical knowledge. Additionally, the Libraries acquired several works covering contemporary democratic movements in Korea, especially the Gwangju Uprising (1980), which was a period of armed conflict between local citizens and South Korean military. Likewise, there are also new works on the June Democratic Struggle, which was a nationwide pro-democracy movement in South Korea that generated mass protests in the summer of 1987.
나비의 노래 (2014) https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE006150494풀: 살아 있는 역사, 일본군 위안군 할머니의 증언 (2017) https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE008113730
Japanese Buddhism Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese studies & Asian American studies
Finally, as part of a large-scale gift generously donated by Emeritus Professor of Buddhist Studies Paul Groner (UVA), Duke University Libraries received key works on Buddhism in East Asia. The work of Dr. Groner, who is a renowned scholar of Japanese Tendai Buddhism, has engaged disciplinary precepts and ordination, the status of nuns in medieval Japan, and later Buddhist educational systems in Japan. The first part of this two-part donation is comprehensive in scope, and includes biographical works focused on key Buddhist figures; expository and commentarial works focused on significant scriptures; philosophical works focused on concepts such as emptiness, non-self, the nature of the mind, and disciplinary ethics; as well as critical reference works. Duke’s current holdings tend toward contemporary Japanese Buddhist histories with a focus on the Zen sect. Dr. Groner’s donation thus fills a crucial chronological and sectarian gap in our current holdings and provides new and important resources for scholars working on East Asian Buddhist philosophy, philology, textual studies, commentarial traditions, law, or ritual. The second part of this donation will arrive in a few years, once Dr. Groner has completed the last of his projects, and will be of similar scale, but contain far more volumes in Japanese. Taken together, this gift will robustly support Buddhist Studies, and the study of East Asia more generally, among Duke faculty and students for decades to come.
最澄と天台の国宝 : 天台宗開宗: 二〇〇記念 https://www.worldcat.org/title/70254660APSI Spring Speaker Series talk by Dr. Groner; Image: Renate Kwon for APSI.
APSI launched its Spring Speaker Series by inviting Dr. Groner to give a talk, which was held at Duke Libraries on February 16th. He spoke about the nature of precept-taking in medieval Japanese Buddhism, after which attendees gathered to formally announce Dr. Groner’s donation to Duke Libraries. The exhibit showcasing these new arrivals to the East Asian Collection is on now through May 2023. Visitors to this exhibit space are encouraged to take a bibliographic guide to each title, located on the windowsill to the right of the exhibit case.
This post was contributed by Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies in the International and Area Studies Department of Duke University Libraries.
Duke University Libraries is pleased to announce the receipt of a large-scale gift from Emeritus Professor of Buddhist Studies Paul Groner. Dr. Groner received his PhD from Yale University, where he trained under Stanley Weinstein, and spent the majority of his career teaching at the University of Virginia. His research has largely focused on the Japanese Tendai school of Buddhism, which rose to prominence during the 10th century and encourages combinatory practice based on the Lotus Sutra, one of the preeminent scriptures in East Asian Buddhism. Dr. Groner has written prolifically even beyond this focus and has also conducted significant studies on disciplinary precepts and ordination, the status of nuns in medieval Japan, and later Buddhist educational systems in Japan. Dr. Groner’s donation to Duke Libraries reflects not only his rigor exercised across a career of scholarship, but also his ongoing support of the future of scholarship in Buddhist Studies and East Asian Studies.
Dr. Groner inaugurating the 2023 APSI Spring Speaker Series on February 16, 2023 with a talk on the observance of precepts in medieval Japanese Buddhism. Image: Renate Kwon for APSI.
Part I of Dr. Groner’s donation was physically received in March 2022 and consisted of nearly 1,200 English volumes, 600 Japanese volumes, and more than 100 Chinese volumes. Among the contents of this donation are biographical works focused on the lives and works of major figures across the Tendai, Zen, and Shingon schools of Japanese Buddhism, especially during the early medieval period. There are commentarial and expository works focused on concepts important to the study of East Asian Buddhism, such as emptiness, non-self, the nature of the mind, and disciplinary ethics. Likewise, while regional coverage of Dr. Groner’s donation is generally confined to East Asia, there are dozens of works related to religion in South and Southeast Asia. Part II of this donation will arrive in two years, once Dr. Groner has completed the last of his projects. This second portion will be similar in scale, though will contain far more Japanese volumes than in Part I and will focus more acutely on early medieval Japanese Tendai Buddhism.
From top: Saichō to Tendai no kokuhō: Tendaishū kaishū 1200-nen kinen 最澄と天台の国宝: 天台宗開宗: 一二〇〇記念, an exhibition catalog focused on images of Saichō, the founder of the Japanese Tendai tradition and focus of one of Dr. Groner’s major monographs, titled Saichō: The Establishment of the Japanese Tendai School (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000); Shōbōgenzō Eihei kōroku yōgo jiten「正法眼蔵」「永平広錄」用語辞典, a reference dictionary focused on key terms found in two seminal works by Sōtō Zen founder Dōgen; Sho, gaten sakuhinshū 書・画展作品集, an anthology of exhibit images showcasing religious calligraphy in various Asian languages. These and other selected items from Dr. Groner’s donation are currently on display in an exhibit on new arrivals to the East Asian Collection. The exhibit is located on the second floor of Bostock library, across from the International and Area Studies (IAS) suite. Images by author.
Taken together, both portions of this donation fill a significant chronological and sectarian gap in Duke’s current holdings and will help to elevate Duke Libraries as a major repository of East Asian Buddhist materials in the American Southeast. On behalf of Duke University Libraries, we look forward to future scholars benefitting from Dr. Groner’s generous bibliographic support of East Asian Buddhist Studies, and the study of East Asian religion more generally, for decades to come.
The situation in southern Türkiye and northern Syria is dire. On 6 Feb. 2023 , a significant earthquake of 7.8 Richter scale devastated this region with Kahramanmaraş being the epicentre. Since that first earthquake, there have been a number of earthquakes and aftershocks registering as high as 7.6 and earlier today of 5.4. The destruction and loss of life is enormous and is compounded by freezing temperatures with snow and rain.
Below are a few resources for those seeking to give donations. No donation is too small, everything helps. These are only suggested organisations and not meant to be comprehensive.
From Prof. of Ottoman History at New York University, Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer: is collecting donations directly to her account, so far raised about $12, 500.
Venmo: @AyseBrammer
Zelle: abb12@nyu.edu
The White Helmets are directly involved in the rescue in the impacted Syrian region. They are well-organized. You can easily donate to them with one click: https://www.whitehelmets.org/en/
Today, as inflation and economic uncertainty put severe stress on library collection budgets across North America, cooperative collection development is en vogue once again. Fortunately, librarians who collect for international and area studies have always been at the forefront of collaborative efforts to build robust and distinctive collections, even during tough economic times. One of the earliest and finest examples of such initiatives is the South Asia Acquisitions Program (SACAP), which this year celebrates its sixtieth anniversary.
The South Asia Cooperative Acquisitions Program (SACAP) was launched by the Library of Congress in 1962. This federal initiative was intended to foster the systematic and collaborative collecting of books, journals, and ephemera from this large, diverse, and multi-lingual region by research libraries right here in the United States. Recognising the importance of this field of study and the timeliness of this project, Duke University Libraries joined 10 peer institutions in agreeing to pay an annual fee of $500 USD—over $4,900 USD by today’s standards (according to the CPI Inflation Index)—in exchange for a selection of the latest South Asian publications. This collective investment in international collecting was an unparalleled success and SACAP continues to this day with Library of Congress field offices in New Delhi and Islamabad.
The materials on display in this 60th anniversary exhibition come from Duke University Libraries’ South Asia Pamphlet collection. Reputed to be the largest such collection in North America, it contains approximately 7,500 English-language pamphlets, with another 392 in Urdu and Bengali still waiting to be catalogued. The pamphlets cover a plethora of subjects: in addition to the items currently displayed in the Hubbard Case, there are pamphlets documenting tourism, economic development, arts, and refugees, among other topics. The collection comes from several South Asian countries: India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.
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.
This post was authored by Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies.
On September 9, 2022, Duke faculty, librarians, archivists, graduate students, and affiliates from the Manuscript Migration Lab gathered in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall at Smith Warehouse to discuss how incorporating cultural diversity can broaden humanities research in general and, in particular, the young and interdisciplinary field of “fragmentology.”
The disassembly of manuscripts into fragments is something that happens over time, whether by accident or design. Despite the fact that fragmentation occurs in every textual culture, however, scholars who study medieval manuscripts have tended to ignore the contextual and cultural diversity of fragments. As a result, their primary sources (and objects of discussion) have often been only manuscripts from medieval Europe, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. This symposium was an attempt to broaden our perception of the term “fragmentology” to include these often-ignored cross-cultural realities.
To this end, symposium attendees were asked to consider several guiding questions: Can we apply the term “fragmentology” equally to textual cultures well beyond medieval Europe? How might we define the production, use, and value of manuscript fragments in cultural contexts that may have very different considerations in the production, use, and valuation of texts as objects? And what broad conclusions can we draw from these comparisons with regard to the role of fragmentary manuscripts in Europe and parts of East Asia? Each of the three invited speakers sought to answer these questions from their own regional perspective.
Dr. Christopher Nugent, Professor of Chinese at Williams College, was the first speaker and focused on the example of the literary anthology titled Repository of Rabbit Garden Questions (Tuyuan cefu 兔園冊府). The content of this anthology is delivered in a question-and-answer-style model and annotations added later were meant to prepare individuals for civil service examinations. Yet, among those manuscripts unearthed at Dunhuang, they only contain the first fascicle of this anthology. Dr. Nugent highlighted the tension between, on the one hand, textual contraction by way of fragmentation and, on the other, textual expansion by way of annotation, and enumerated several issues that remained in conversation throughout the afternoon: Why were fragments important to premodern communities that engaged with them? What does the fragmentation of manuscripts tell us about their reception and reuse over time?
Dr. Nugent referring to one of the cave interiors at Dunhuang. Photo by the author.
Dr. Nugent’s discussion concluded with further provocations surrounding heritage and repatriation by focusing on the figure of the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot (pictured below), known for having helped to excavate the “Library Caves” at Dunhuang and for removing large caches of texts that are now housed in museums and libraries around the world. Considering the fact that premodern Dunhuang was a multiethnic region historically occupied by not only Chinese, but also Mongol, Tibetan, and Uyghur peoples, among many other groups, Dr. Nugent asked: To whom do we repatriate these fragments? How do we mediate between modern territorialities and the multiethnic realities of premodern eras?
Paul Pelliot at work in the “Library Caves” at Dunhuang. Wikimedia Commons.
Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis, paleographer, codicologist, and Professor of Manuscript Studies at Simmons College, was the second speaker and explored some of the common criteria for fragmentation in medieval European contexts, with a focus on the status of collections within the United States. With regard to common criteria, Dr. Davis gave an overview of the practice of fragmentation in the context of loose leaves and ornamental cutting, but also of in situ fragmentary reuse, such as in new bindings and paste-downs. In all of these cases, we can observe sets of social practices that differed markedly from those explored by Dr. Nugent.
Dr. Davis covering some examples of in situ uses of fragments. Photo by the author.
Like Dr. Nugent’s discussion of the exploits of Paul Pelliot, Dr. Davis also focused on an infamous figure in the world of “book-breaking” named Otto Ege. Ege spent several decades of the 20th century disassembling the pages of dozens of medieval illuminated manuscripts, which he reassembled into “portfolios” according to his own loose themes; two of these are held by Duke Libraries (see below) and Dr. Davis referred to both during her talk. As Dr. Davis described, Ege has been a major influence on the current state of fragmented manuscripts in the United States and worldwide; he has produced “portfolios” of unidentifiable provenance under disjointed themes and has misidentified or misdated dozens of the fragments therein. One positive outgrowth of Ege work, however, has been recent initiatives to digitally reassemble the leaves from the Ege “portfolios.”
The final speaker of the symposium was Dr. Akiko Walley, Maude I. Kerns Associate Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Oregon. Dr. Walley’s talk focused on the production and use of sets of sutra fragments (kyо̄gire 経切) and “mirrors of hands” or calligraphic fragments (tekagami 手鏡) in early modern Japan. Dr. Walley introduced these genres by first exploring the phenomenon of statuary and architectural fragmentation. As she described, whether in the case of the broken-off heads of Buddha statues or broken rooftiles, the fragmented pieces are representative of the larger whole. Art historians can study these fragments as a means of learning about the whole, but even Buddhist devotees will ontologically value the head of the Buddha just the same as they would the entire statue.
Dr. Walley opening her talk with reference to statuary fragments and restoration practices. Photo by the author.
Kyо̄gire and tekagami functioned similarly insofar as they are fragmentary, but were also valued as a representation of the complete source from which they derived; kyо̄gire represent the entire sutra and, ultimately, every word spoken by the Buddha, while tekagami represent the calligrapher’s entire corpus of written work. These fragments were assembled into albums and other ornamental collections and were often displayed as an object of appreciation beginning in the Edo period (1603-1868). In this way, Dr. Walley introduced us to yet another type of social practice surrounding fragments, which differed from the cases of China and Europe.
Dr. Walley presents an image of a burned fragment of the Daihōkō butsu kegonkyō 大方廣佛華嚴經 (Skt: Avataṃsaka sūtra). Photo by the author.
During the Q&A portion of the event, symposium attendees picked up on several threads from the speakers’ talks, especially about the role of technology in the reassembly of fragments, imperatives to repatriate manuscript fragments, instances of talismanic or religious uses of fragments, methodological approaches to Quranic manuscript fragments, and other varieties of social practices surrounding the use of fragments. The event concluded with a group-wide acknowledgment that events like this one, which appears to have been the first of its kind among the young subfield of fragmentology, is only the beginning of a much more comprehensive dialogue surrounding the effectiveness of the term “fragmentology,” what is meant (and not meant) by the term “fragment,” and how cross-cultural considerations can help us to better understand these issues in the context of textual studies, librarianship, and archival and museum practices.
“Two opposing leaves from Apidamo dapiposha lun” (“Great Exegesis of Abhidharma,” Rubenstein Library, Duke University). This is another example of Buddhist fragments and does not derive from Ege’s “portfolio.” Photo by the author.
The “Manuscript Fragmentations Across Cultures” symposium was sponsored by the Manuscript Migration Lab and the Franklin Humanities Institute. For questions about this symposium, please contact its co-organizers, Matthew Hayes (Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies) and Clare Woods (Associate Professor of Classical Studies).
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.
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.
Byler, Darren, Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere, and Andrea Pitzer. Xinjiang year zero (Canberra, ACT, Australia : Australian National University Press, [2022]).
Egypt, known in Arabic by its sobriquet “Mother of the World” (Umm al-dunya, أم الدنيا), remains the most important and -studied country and culture in the South-West Asian/North African region. A recently acquired collection of 163 postcards (dating from the 1880s to the 1930s) provides an immersive overview of some of the wonders and joys of Egypt, from the north of the country in cities like Port Said and Alexandria to iconographic places like Cairo and Luxor along one of the most important waterways in the world, the Nile River.
Cairo
Cairo (القاهرة- al-Qāhirah), the capital of Egypt, is a megacity, with a current population of more than 20 million people, or about one fifth of the country’s total population. This panoramic view of Cairo (French: Le Caire: Vue panoramique) depicts the city’s Citadel complex. Originally built in the 9th century, it has had many additions throughout its history. In the 12th century, Saladin (Salah al-Din, 1171-1193), the Kurdish-born sultan of Egypt and Syria, fortified the complex to stave off the attacks of the Crusaders. Successive Muslim rulers have since then added to the Citadel. The large alabaster mosque in the upper-right corner of this image is named after Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian-born Ottoman governor and the de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, who is considered the founder of modern Egypt. He is also credited with the development of the Bulaq (Bulak) Press, one of the most important printing press operations in the Middle East.
The Mogamaʻ (مجمع)
This striking image is a photograph of the Mujamaʻ, or Mogamaʻ in Egyptian dialect (مجمع التحرير). The Mogamaʻ stands over Maydan al-Taḥrīr (ميدان التحرير) in the bureaucratic centre of Cairo. The building was constructed on the orders of King Farouk and was designed by Muḥammad Kamal Ismāʻil, an Egyptian engineer and architect to be a government building—see this map for an overview of different offices. Ismāʻil also designed the expansion of the Great Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. The Mogamaʻ was completed in 1952 shortly before the ‘Free Officers’ coup and the rise to power of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It stands at 14 storeys as a towering figure over Taḥrīr square, its architecture garners many debates from those who consider it magnificent and those who object to its utilitarianism. For better or worse, the Mogamaʻ recently closed, in part due to its dilapidated state. It is now being refurbished and remodeled into a luxury hotel.
Maydan al-Taḥrīr, from where the Egyptian revolution of 2011 took place is in the foreground of the photo and to the right of the Mogamaʻ is the Omar Makram Mosque. Omar Makram was a political leader of the late 18th century, his mosque was designed by the Italian architect, Mario Rossi. Rossi designed or helped design several important mosques in Egypt.
The Nile
Cairo sits on the headwaters of the Nile River, which has provided the water for not only the capital but also the entire country from time immemorial. The importance of water and the Nile is apparent in the following postcard, which references to one of the historically more important jobs, that of the water bearer (saqa, سَقى). Water bearers, a profession dating back to ancient times were generally young, healthy men who, according to this al-yawm al-sābiʻ article had to prove their endurance and strength by carrying a 67-pound bag of sand for 3 days and nights without sitting or sleeping. Once passing this test, a saqa delivered fresh drinking water to the public water fountains (sabil, سبيل) for locals to drink freely. The profession no longer exists, at least in the traditional form due in large part to the founding of the Egyptian water company in 1865.
Qahwah (قهوة)-Kahve (Turkish)-Coffee
The fascinating history of coffee has been condensed by the rappers Omar Offendum & Thanks Joey suggest in this YouTube video, the Story of Qahwah ☕️ is the story not only of Egypt, but the entire Middle East.
This postcard depicts a typical Cairo street scene, showing men playing backgammon next to a large coffee stand manned by a young barista. The coffee stand includes a representation of a Turkish coffee pot (Turkish: cezve, Arabic: جذوة), a small, long-handled pot with a pouring lip designed specifically to make Turkish, Arab, or Greek style coffee. It is traditionally made of brass or copper, occasionally also silver or gold.
Duke University Libraries’ Egyptian Postcard Collection: https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/egyptpostcards includes many more fascinating images. For more information about the collection, contact Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic Studies.
The 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.
Please 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.
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.
Contributed by Matthew Hayes, Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies Librarian
Asian American history is part and parcel of American history. Asian American experiences emerge within an American context and in relation to the many other cultural, institutional, and political aspects that comprise contemporary life in the United States. And yet, beginning with the initial moments of immigration to the United States by people from Asia, large swathes of white Americans have deemed these histories and experiences as somehow un-American. Several historical moments have laid bare this tendency to distinguish Asian Americans as separate from or, in some cases, a threat to non-Asian Americans: the Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred citizenship, as well as the future entry, of Chinese immigrants; the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII; the post-9/11 prejudice and profiling of Arab and Muslim Americans; and sweeping incidents of anti-Asian hate, especially of East Asian Americans, following the emergence of the global COVID-19 health crisis. This is to say nothing of the countless examples of racism, prejudice, and exclusion that punctuate history between these more visible and widespread examples.
“An act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to the Chinese, May 6, 1882”; Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789-1996; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives
San Francisco, California (1942). Japanese Americans appear for registration prior to evacuation. Posted instructions for “all persons of Japanese ancestry” appear on the wall behind. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).
This collection spotlight offers a glimpse into the spectrum of Asian American experiences in the contemporary United States. There are four interrelated genres of writing represented here and all of them are meant to amplify one another. The first is historical writing, which captures not only the movements and moments that comprise Asian American social, political, and economic histories in several regions of the United States, but also traces the emergence of Asian American Studies as a crucial academic discipline that helps us to better understand American history. The second is social science, which provides several key theoretical frameworks for thinking through intersectional, postcolonial, and racial aspects of experience and meaning-making within Asian American communities. These titles ought to serve as theoretical tools for exploring how cultural relationships, bodies of knowledge, and identities form the basis of Asian American subjectivity, and how this subjectivity is continually undermined by policies and systems that seek to delimit the experience of these (and other) ethnic communities within the United States. The third genre is memoirs and personal writing, which captures that very subjectivity. As a complement to the first two genres, both of which provide a largely impersonal or abstract view of Asian American communities and their experience across time, memoirs allow experiences within those communities to emerge first-hand. The reader is therefore allowed a personal glimpse into how some of these historical and theoretical mechanisms operated within lives and experiences of Asian American authors. Finally, literary titles by Asian American authors offers a few examples of how the experiences and perspectives of Asian American writers translate to fiction, which often tackles the very social and historical motifs brought to light in the other genres included here.
This collection spotlight comes on the heels of a very exciting development within Duke’s Asian American and Diaspora Studies (AADS) Program, which has very recently announced a new minor degree option for undergraduate students. After decades of student activism pushing for a curriculum that reflects America’s broad range of diverse backgrounds and histories, students are now able to engage in a full course of study as part of their long-term education. Through the introduction of this new minor degree, the value of Asian American Studies has finally been formally recognized at Duke.
Cultivating a cultural literacy—especially of the domestic cultures with which we interact nearly every day—is crucial for the development of future American generations. This collection spotlight is a great place to start for anyone interested in learning about Asian American communities and the important role they’ve played in the course of American history.
You can find these titles in our Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins starting on April 11th.
Also, consider joining us on April 11th at noon in Perkins 217 to explore our Asian American Collection.
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.
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:
Agentstvo (in Russian) — independent investigative reporting from Russian journalists forced to flee abroad
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.
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 booksand monographs on the topic, conduct a “subject” search in the “Books & Media” tab of the Duke University Libraries’ online catalog for the following Library of Congress Subject Headings, which were revised after the invasion to better reflect the Russo-Ukrainian War and other Ukrainian historical subjects (as Jurij Dobczansky has pointed out in a 2023 article):
Ukrainian question [Here are entered works on Ukrainian national self determination and the existential threat to Ukraine’s statehood]
To find scholarlyarticles 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 databasescan 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 Colorand 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 Taşci’s 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 Taşci’s 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.
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.
“Created in March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic — and curated by 29 librarians throughout the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation and beyond — the Archive documents regional, social responses to the pandemic, which are critical in understanding the scope of the pandemic’s humanitarian, socioeconomic, and cultural impact. With an emphasis on websites produced by underrepresented ethnicities and stateless groups, the Archive covers (but is not limited to): sites published by non-governmental organizations that focus on public health, humanitarian relief, and education; sites published by established and amateur artists in any realm of cultural production; sites published by local news sources; sites published by civil society actors and representatives; and relevant blogs and social media pages. At the time of its launch, the Archive featured over 2,000 websites from over 80 countries in over 50 languages.”
This is the largest and most diverse Ivy Plus web archiving project ever created under the auspices of the thirteen-member library confederation. The Covid-19 web archive contains a multitude of materials—most of which are born digital—in all fields of research. The task of preserving such materialsis essential for future researchers. That is why the task has been assumed by the subject specialists of numerous research libraries, including here at Duke University. Four librarians from the International & Area Studies Department of Duke University Libraries are taking part in this digital initiative: Heather Martin, Miree Ku, Luo Zhou, and Sean Swanick. Each librarian also helped curate a subject guide hosted by Princeton University. The guide is divided by region and includes further information about the project and Ivy Plus Web Archiving.
Unfortunately, until the pandemic is over and some semblance of normalcy returns, this Ivy Plus web archiving project will continue to grow. If you have recommendations please send them along via this form.
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. 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
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.
Based at Columbia University, the Ivy Plus Web Archiving “is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research at participating Libraries and beyond. All Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation members participate in the Program.” Fitting well into this category, the newly launched Muftiships Web Archive project strives to preserve all known centers and websites producing and/or documenting fatawa (sg. fatwa), that is religious edits.
So, what is meant by muftiship? Columbia Professor Brinkley Messick in his The Calligraphic State on p. 140 defines muftiship as, “A mufti is a type of Muslim jurist who delivers a nonbinding legal opinion known as a fatwa, exercising in the process the form of legal interpretation called ijtihad. Across the Middle East and North Africa for many centuries, muftis great and small, official and unofficial have worked at the interface of shari’a text and practice. Analogues for the muftiship have been identified in both Roman and medieval Jewish legal institutions. [4] According to Weber (1978: 798–99, 821) and Schacht (1964: 74), the muftiship was originally a “private” institution that later became “public.” Schacht correctly adds, however, that the later official muftis “had no monopoly of giving fatwas, and the practice of consulting private scholars of high reputation never ceased.” As a consequence, a significant dimension of authoritative interpretation consistently eluded the purview of Muslim states.”
Currently the project documents some 100 websites and pages, the majority from the MENA region. In addition, the project has a special section on fatawa and Covid-19. Those links were provided by Dr. Adnan Zulfikar of Rutgers University and are part of his larger project, Mapping Covid-19 Fatawas. The project will continue to grow and be source for the study of Islam.
The project is lead by Gayle Fischer (Harvard), Guy Burak (NYU), Roberta (Robin) Dougherty (Yale), Peter Magierski (Columbia) and Sean Swanick.
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 first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixthposts, 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 ofJean 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.
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 first, second, third, fourth, and fifthposts, 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.
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.
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 first, second, third, and fourthposts, 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.
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.
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.
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 Gutenberg. Although 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
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 Department. As 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 topic. For 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.
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 Uruguay—although “the city” is never specifically identified—the 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.
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 outbreak—the isolation it causes and how interactions with others become intensified.
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?
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!
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 Journalof 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.
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).
Istanbul, also known as Der Saadet (Abode of Happiness), is a city unlike many others. Its very name evokes a mythical image of earthly paradise. And for those fortunate to have visited the Turkish cultural capital, whether for business (as I did during a book-buying trip) or pleasure, there are plenty of reasons why this is the case. Situated between the Black and Mediterranean seas, Istanbul has always been a picturesque city, brimming with diverse cultures, languages, ideas, and technologies. A collection of 174 Turkish postcards and photos from the late 1890s to the 1930s, recently digitized by Duke University Library, allows us to get a glimpse of this happy abode at the turn of the twentieth century, immediately before things went very badly.
Most of the images in the Istanbul postcards collection depict everyday life in Üsküdar, a historic neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul that was once home to thriving communities of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and other ethnic groups. Considering Üsküdar’s cultural and linguistic diversity, it is not surprising that this neighborhood was also commonly known as Scutari (in English and Italian), likely a diminutive of the Greek Skoutàrion (Σκουτάριον), the original name of the area.
The Istanbul postcards collection contains striking images that document everyday life, historic buildings and ports, various architectural features, and other topics that may be of interest to students and researchers of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Istanbul.
Perhaps one of the more iconic landmarks in Istanbul is the Kız kulesi (Maiden’s Tower)–also known as Leander’s Tower (after the Greek myth of Hero and Leander)–a lighthouse situated in the Bosphorus straits, between the European and Asian sides of the city. There have been several towers over the centuries, with the original wood construction dating back to 1110 CE. The one depicted in this postcard was restored only in 1725. Here the Tower is festooned with lights to celebrate the ten-year anniversary since the founding of the Republic of Turkey (1923), a vivid example of the government’s attempt to appropriate historical sites of memory for contemporary political purposes.
On the banks of the Bosphorus lies the impressive Beylerbeyi Sarayı (Palace), the historic building depicted in the postcard below. Completed in 1865, the palace was the summer home of Sultan Abdülaziz (1830-1876), the first Ottoman Sultan to travel to Western Europe. After Greek nationalist forces defeated the Ottomans in Selanik in 1912, Sultan Abdülhamid (who had previously been confined to the Villa Allatini) would be forced to move to this palatial residence. The embossed stamp (reading “Constantinople,” rather than Istanbul) on the bottom left corner of the postcard suggests, however, that the creators of this souvenir sought to emphasize the building’s status as a European-style architectural landmark, rather than its role as a place of political exile.The influence of France, and in particular the French language, was pervasive throughout the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth-century, especially among the literary elite. That is why, for example, many Ottoman-language journals (like the ones included in the recently launched digital project on the French Press in the Ottoman Empire), would often include a French translation or sub-title. To meet this growing demand, French educational entrepreneurs began opening schools in Istanbul. One of these schools, the Fransız Sainte Marie Okulu, is pictured in the postcard below. Note that although the writing on the back of the postcard is from 1933, the image of the school itself likely dates to the late nineteenth-century . Today, the historic building in which the school was once housed is part of a larger restoration project (Bağlarbaşı ilköğretim ve İş Okulu Restorasyonu).Another historic building depicted in the Turkish postcard collection is the Üsküdar Haydarpaşa Sultan tıbbiye mektebi (Üsküdar Haydarpaşa Sultan neighbourhood and Medical School). Built in 1827 as a military academy for the study of modern medicine, the school employed European and Ottoman doctors, who taught their students in French. The field of medicine was yet another example of the wide circulation of French (and, more broadly, European) ideas and practices in late Ottoman culture. You can learn more about the school and its place in Ottoman and European intellectual history with this recent publication.Another postcard on the theme of medicine and society is the one that portrays the Üsküdar miskinler tekkesi ve sebili (Üsküdar Leprosy house and water kiosk), the public health institution to which individuals suffering from this stigmatized infectious disease were confined and where they received such medical care as was available at the time. Although the term for this institution could also be translated as “lodges for the poor, helpless, wretched”—in addition to leper, the word miskinler, which is of Arabic origin with a Turkish suffix, also means poor, helpless, wretched; while tekke, a word borrowed from Persian but of Arabic origin, means lodge) —the miskinler tekkesi were colloquially known as tembelhâne, meaning “lazy houses.” Indeed, it is fair to say that rather than being sent for professional medical treatment, lepers were banished from society to live in miskinler tekkesi. For further information on Ottoman laws and debates about such matters see Studies in old Ottoman criminal law. And for further information about Ottoman disability studies, see Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800.A few images in the newly-digitized Istanbul postcard collection depict a very dark period of Turkish history, known as İşgal (the period of foreign occupation). After its defeat in World War I (1918), the Ottoman Empire was dismembered by the victorious military powers. As a direct result, British, French, Italian, and Greek troops moved into the former Abode of Happiness and took over the administration of the city. Istanbul and its residents were kept under strict watch, not least by means of naval vessels, such as the two steamships depicted, in the postcard below, patrolling the waters off Ortaköy with Üsküdar in the foreground. This tumultuous period witnessed the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and ended only with the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 (a defining political event that was celebrated as a national holiday in the abovementioned postcard of the Maiden’s Tower, and that continues to be celebrated today).Finally, I will end this short blog entry on Duke’s newly-digitized collection of Istanbul postcards with this fantastic image of an old pier in the Kandilli neighbourhood of Üsküdar. The steamship and other boats (depicted on the left and center of the postcard) illustrate the importance that piers and the Bosphorus have played in Istanbul’s centuries-long history, while also giving us a glimpse (on the right-hand side of the image) of the traditional yalılar (waterfront residences and mansions), which dot the Bosphorus coast. This is a reassuring image, which suggests that whatever political and name changes the city may yet to undergo, the Abode of Happiness will remain, first and foremost, a strategically located sea port in the very heart of Eurasia.Like the previously digitized Selanik/Salonica/Thessaloniki postcard collection, the Istanbul postcards collection adds depth to Duke University Library’s holdings on the Middle East and offers yet another electronic resource for scholars of many disciplines to use for research and teaching.
Please feel free to explore the digitized Istanbul Photographs and Postcards Collection, 1890s-1930s, and see what you can discover for yourself. The images are free to download and use for research, but please cite Duke University Libraries.
Should you have questions, please contact Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East and Islamic Studies at Duke University.
International and area studies librarians facilitate research not only about different parts of the globe, but also about different eras in time. A prime example of this historical orientation is the recently-acquired and-digitized Selanik/Salonica/Thessaloniki postcard collection. This new addition to Duke University Library’s already extensive International Postcard Collection consists of 208 images documenting the famous Aegean Sea port-city from the late 19th to the early 20th-centuries.
Thanks to its favourable location and its large and natural seaport, this ancient city hosted merchants from near and far. In part because of its function as an international trading post, the city’s population was a mix of cultures (Armenian, Jewish, Greek, Arab, and Turk) and religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). During the 20th-century, however, the formation of nation-states with regulated borders, the eruption of major wars in the region, and the consequent displacement of populations through both natural and forced migration, effectively destroyed the diversity of this multi-ethnic metropolis. The Selanik/Salonica/Thessaloniki postcard collection allows us to get a fleeting—and, therefore, all the more special—glimpse of the world that was lost as a result of war and genocide.
“What’s in a name?”
The Aegean port-city was founded in 315 BC and named after Thessaloniki (Greek: Θεσσαλονίκη), the wife of King Cassander of Macedonia and half-sister of Alexander the Great. When the Byzantine Empire – the Christianized successor to Alexander’s empire – fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1423, Thessaloniki’s days as a Greek city were numbered. In fact, just seven years later, the Ottomans captured the Aegean port city and changed its name to Selanik (Ottoman Turkish: سلانیك). The city would officially retain this name from 1430 until 1912, when Greek nationalist forces defeated the Ottomans and changed its name back to Thessaloniki.
During the long period of Ottoman rule, the city was also informally known as Salonica (Ladino: סאלוניקו). This toponym was the Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish variant of the Ottoman Turkish name for the city. Like the city itself, Ladino was a mix of cultural influences: “based in Spanish and other Iberian languages, with a strong Hebrew Aramaic component,” but also incorporating “many elements from the languages of the Mediterranean world, including Turkish, Greek, Italian, French, and Arabic.” The widespread use of the name Salonica is a reminder of the once sizable Jewish community of the Aegean port city. The Jewish population came to call Salonica home after the Reconquista and the Edict of Expulsion from Spain in 1492. However, in World War II the Jews of Salonica suffered dramatically during the Nazi occupation, which all but erased their physical presence and their role in the city’s history, save for some architectural achievements.
Wish you were here!
As the following selection of greeting cards from the digitized Selanik/Salonica/Thessaloniki postcard collection demonstrates, the creators of the images were very cognizant of the way they wished to portray their city and, therefore, very deliberate in their choice of subject matter. Everything was meant to leave the tourist who bought and sent the postcard with a positive memory of his or her visit to the city and the addressee who received it with a desire to visit it for him or herself.
The colourful postcard below, for example, displays a tranquil street scene from the usually bustling and crowded business district of Selanik. The street in question is not just any street, but the “Grand rue de la Banque Ottoman.” The influential Ottoman Bank (seen on the right) was built in 1903 by the Turkish architects Barouh and Amar with an eye to synthesizing local and European architectural aesthetics of the time. This attempt to appeal to multiple constituencies at one and the same time may explain why the title of the card is printed in both French and Ottoman.
Near the Ottoman Bank and its busy shops was the Allatini brick factory, which now sits abandoned. The brick factory was named after the family who founded it. The Allatini family was of Iberian Jewish heritage and had settled in Salonica in the early 16th century. The family would also open the Allatini flour mill, which is still in operation to this day, though now located in Sindos, a suburb of Thessaloniki. The Allatini family also owned the Villa Allatini, which is a historic building not merely because it was the family’s country estate, but also because it came to play a role in one of the most dramatic events in the history of modern Turkey. In 1908, a nationalist group called the Young Turks led a successful revolution to dethrone the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and restore the Constitution. The Sultan was forced to abdicate and was later put under house arrest at the Villa Allatini (depicted in the black-and-white postcard below).
Other building-related postcards in the digitized collection offer views, frequently only in passing, of architectural features that are no longer a regular part of the everyday modern life. One example are the images of the sahnisi (σαχνισί), or traditional protruding balconies, which were meant to allow sunlight into a specific space of a home (as seen on the right hand side of the next image):
And this image of a sünnet bayramı (circumcision festival), a ceremony regularly held and often documented in manuscripts known as Surname-i Hümayun.
The collection ends in 1917, the year Thessaloniki was ravaged by a tremendous fire. From the dramatic image on the following postcard, it is possible to get a sense of both the magnitude of the fire as well as the terror that must have overcome the locals. The Great Fire, as it came to be known, drastically transformed the layout of the city, adding yet another layer to the palimpsest that is the history of Selanik/Salonica/Thessaloniki.
Please feel free to explore the digitized Selanik/Salonica/Thessaloniki postcard collection, and see what you can discover for yourself. The images are free to download and use for research, but please cite Duke University Libraries.
Should you have questions, please contact Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East and Islamic Studies at Duke University.
This post is contributed by Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European and Medieval/Renaissance Studies.
The Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds the papers of Oskar Morgenstern, whose diaries span the years 1917-1977. The diaries were digitized, a few years ago, in a collaboration between the Rubenstein Library and the University of Graz, Austria, and can be seen at the Oskar Morgenstern Website. This 50-year-long personal archive of a renowned scientist is an ideal Open Educational Resource for teaching with primary sources. How can librarians help students use this wonderful material in courses at Duke and at other institutions?
An understanding of the historic development of German Script will show why the Morgenstern Papers are very approachable, even though they look difficult to decipher at first. The older, pre-1900 versions of German Script allowed for many individual and regional variations for forming letters. The chart below shows the many ways in which an individual writer might have shaped their letters in the18th and 19th century:
The reason why 20th century Script is easier to read is because, between 1910 and 1915, several regional German-language school systems simplified German Script to make it easier for students to learn. Ludwig Sütterlin, a graphic artist working in Berlin, designed a script for the Prussian educational ministry that became popular very quickly. This script was known as the Sütterlin Script (Sütterlinschrift), and became the handwriting taught in most German schools until 1941, including the ones attended by the young Oskar Morgenstern.
Taking a closer look at Morgenstern’s handwriting, it is interesting to compare the cover page inscription with the first page of the diary. It is immediately clear that the loose leaf inscription was added later, when Morgenstern’s handwriting had become more modernized. It would be totally possible for students to learn to decipher Morgenstern’ s hand (with some human help and some charts) during a session with these materials. Furthermore, as the team at the University of Graz continues their transcription, students can use the website to improve their German reading skills by comparing the scans of the original pages with the transcription, and they can copy and paste the plain text into a translating tool like DeepL.
German Script and Blackletter have an ideological association with nationalism in 1871 (see “Antiqua-Fraktur debate”) and a visual association with fascist propaganda under Hitler. It is understandable that American students associate Blackletter with fascism. In fact, today Germans themselves recoil whenever populists and rightwing groups use Blackletter in their event publicity. However, Nazi Germany did not invent these styles. The historical irony is that the Nazi government first embraced German Script and Blackletter typeface as “German” and then outlawed the styles in 1941 as “Jewish.” That is why it is important to teach reading German Script and Blackletter with circumspection and as an auxiliary tool of historical research.
While the styles have that tainted heritage, students should not forget that these styles were also used by diverse German-language communities across the centuries. Rubenstein Library has an amazing collection of German Studies materials and interdisciplinary materials in the German language across several of the Rubenstein Centers serve to prove this point. Outstanding collections in German Studies are German Americana, the Harold Jantz Collection, German Judaica and Religion, Alchemy, Science, and Medicine, World War II and National Socialism, and collections for the study of Germany in the 19th and 20th Centuries, including important literary editions, and editions that illustrate the history of printing. Other examples of German-language materials across the disciplines are the Heschel Collection, the J. Walter Thompson archives in advertising, and the Viennese Economists’ Archives. In fact, a search for German-language materials in the Rubenstein Collections comes up with over 300,000 hits. Our teaching with Rubenstein Library materials ensures that these archival collections never become a Library of the Unreadable. The Morgenstern example shows just what efforts and resources are needed for transcription and translation, as well as what treasures may be uncovered in the process.
What follows are some resources for learning to read and write German Script. The Geist Institute in Winston Salem, NC, offers a week long Script course every year. The course draws researchers and genealogists from across the country, as well as staff and volunteer researchers from the Moravian Archives in Winston-Salem, an archive for the local community of Moravians, founded by German protestants (the Herrnhuters) in 1753. Other German Script workshops in the US are held at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA. , and at the Center for Family History & Genealogy and Department of History at Brigham Young University, Utah, which also offers a thorough online tutorial, the German Script Tutorial.
The Geist Institute in Winston-Salem, NC will hold the workshop again this year, from July 25 to August 1, 2020. The workshop leader, Julie Tomberlin, Ph.D., recommends the following key resources to prepare and deepen the study of German Script:
Dearden, Fay, and Leland K. Meitzler, 2013, Deciphering Gothic records: useful hints for helping you read “Old German” script!, provides tables of Old German Script alphabet variations.
Digitale Schriftkunde, Bavarian State Archives, provides examples and transcription by century, and is a good addition to the the German Script Tutorial from the Center for Family History & Genealogy and Department of History at Brigham Young University, Utah.
Minert, Roger P. 2013, Deciphering handwriting in German documents: analyzing German, Latin, and French in historical manuscripts, provides a history of German Script, and gives many tips on best practices in reading German Script, including reference works.
Schober, Katherine, 2018, Tips and tricks of deciphering German handwriting: a translator’s tricks of the trade for transcribing German genealogy documents, provides a good starting point for understanding strategies for working on German Script documents efficiently. For example, a reader can start by looking at how a particular writer forms the common words like articles and question words, they can look for distinctly formed letters across several documents by the same writer, and build a register of how particular letters are formed.
Süß, Harald. 1991. Deutsche Schreibschrift Lesen und Schreiben lernen (2 volumes: Lehrbuch and Übungsbuch) Augsburg: Augustus-Verl., is a highly visual introduction to German Script together with many examples and detailed notes on stroke order. Learning the stroke order for each letter helps trace older more varied forms of handwriting when working with original documents.
Verdenhalven, Fritz, 1994, Die deutsche Schrift: ein Übungsbuch = The German script. Frankfurt/M.: Verl. f. Standesamtswesen, offers many examples of script and transcription side by side, which is very helpful in training the eye of the reader.
Digital Tools for reading Script are emerging. For example, the archive for German Colonial History has developed a reading tool called Old German Script-Typewriter (Kurrent-Schreibmaschine). You type in the letters you can decipher, and the tool looks in various historical dictionaries for a term that might fit. Another tool, Alte Deutsche Schrift allows you to enter words in plain text, and see the Script version underneath; this makes it possible to double check a transcription, by mapping every transcribed letter back to what the word should look like in Script. The site also helps to train the eye; enter your name in the text field and and click through results in several styles:
For more information about Script resources, especially more detail about the Geist Institute Script course in Winston-Salem, NC, contact Heidi Madden.
This post is contributed by Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European and Medieval/Renaissance Studies.
Documents in German Script (cursive handwriting) and books and pamphlets printed in Blackletter typeface (Fraktur) represent the lives of many diverse German-language communities from the 15th to the 20th century. However, as many scholars can attest, these Scripts are notoriously difficult to read. So how can libraries and librarians help students and researchers learn paleography?
Rubenstein Library (RL) has a very active instruction program and I frequently collaborate with Rubenstein librarian Elizabeth Dunn on teaching with materials in old handwriting, both in English and German. We work with faculty to “literally” help students read the Script and Blackletter. In fact, Elizabeth began building a small library of transcriptions that she sets up alongside the original documents. Students are always fascinated by the idea of immersing themselves in these unique materials, especially pieces of correspondence recounting private lives, which make the past come alive.
While brainstorming ideas about possible materials for a recent RL session, Elizabeth and I decided that making the Oskar Morgenstern papers more approachable could be a wonderful pedagogical project. Oskar Morgenstern was a German-born economist, university professor, and author in Austria and the United States. Together with John von Neumann, he founded the mathematical field of game theory and its application to the field of economics. The Rubenstein collection includes Morgenstern’s handwritten diaries, spanning the years 1917-1977. The diaries were digitized, a few years ago, in a collaboration between Rubenstein Library and the University of Graz, Austria, and can be seen at the Oskar Morgenstern Website.
German Script and Blackletter are notoriously resistant to machine reading, i.e. scanning with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. This means that all of the Morgenstern documents have had to be transcribed manually, word by word and letter by letter. A team of researchers at University of Graz has already transcribed entries from the late 1930s to 1976; they have also built an index of Morgenstern’s network of collaborators. However, the published results of their labor have appeared only in German. Nevertheless, this combination of unique , local, manuscript holdings and an active, freely accessible, digital project presented an ideal opportunity for creating a meaningful and memorable Rubenstein Library session.
Assuming that college students would relate particularly well to documents from the author’s early years, I decided to transcribe the inscription on the cover sheet and the very first page of the diary, dated March 14, 1917, and written when Oskar Morgenstern was just 15 years old. Here is an image of the inside cover page of Oskar’s diary:
Image Label: Oskar Morgenstern Diary entry from March 14, 1917.
After transcribing the diary entry, I translated it as follows:
March 14, 1917
“So, you shall be my diary, you shall hear all that is important to me and be a trustworthy keeper! On Monday the 12th my father brought home Gloy: Train your Memory. And I am very grateful to him. It is excellent, and I need to work through it. Tomorrow we have a Latin test. Schmitzi thinks it will be “child’s play,” but he says that about everything that he can translate. I have no confidence when it comes to this, and I just need to study so much harder, because I must get a C (3= Genügend). The German Emperor is right when he calls exams in Latin inane nonsense. Yesterday we were in the chemistry laboratory because the academic High School building saw a case of Scarlet fever, and the classrooms had to be disinfected. Today we were once again in the usual classroom.The idea of auto suggestion from Gloy is excellent. I must adhere to all instructions. I convinced myself that I would succeed in the Latin exam. Will that be of any use?
Thank God that the cursed exam is over. Of course Feldman is right again. I maintain that it is “patiaris” and he says “passiusis”. Wechs says I am right. But he won’t concede the point, stupid games. Tomorrow we will probably get back the math exam. How will it turn out? Let’s hope for the best. In Petersburg a revolution broke out, hopefully the French will imitate this, and hang all the crooked ones!!
I am going to train my left hand. I have to be able to write as well with the left as with the right hand, that will double the power of my brain. Why should I ignore that possibility, and not use it to my advantage? Enough for today, especially since I have nothing else to report, and I want to go to bed. I will wake up at 6 am. Auto suggestion.”
This is just the first entry in a diary spanning 50 years. Yet even this single entry shows how many questions one might pursue when working with students in a session on the use of primary (archival) sources. Putting aside young Oskar’s laudatory reference to the Russian Revolution of 1917, it may be best to focus on something smaller and closer to home. For example, the reference to training your memory is to Hans Gloy, Gedächtnis-Ausbildung, 1913. Gloy (born in 1888) was a German merchant, who also wrote advice pieces for trade journals. The table of contents of the Gloy volume shows that the book is a training manual, organized into daily exercises, spaced over the course of seven weeks. The training, however, is not physical, but intellectual. Indeed, Gloy’s manual is part of a long tradition of practical memory training (also known as mnemonics, memory sports, mental discipline, study skills, or cognitive learning,–) an area of study that is curiously located between Greek philosophy and self-help books. And now, thanks to our transcription and translation of Oskar’s first diary entry, we know that such mental gymnastics also informed the ideas of the man who invented game theory.
Image Label; Cover of the book by Hans Gloy Gedächtnis-Ausbilding. 1913, and biographical entry in Degeners Wer ist’s? 1935
In Part 2 “How Can Librarians Teach with Materials in German Script?” We will discuss the digitized Oskar Morgenstern diaries as an Open Educational Resource, and will offer some resources for teaching German Script for students and teachers at Duke and beyond. For questions, contact Heidi Madden
Dr. Kristina Troost, Duke University Library’s own Japanese studies librarian and the head of its East Asian Collections, is the inaugural recipient of the Council of East Asian Libraries (CEAL) Distinguished Service Award. This prestigious award honors an individual who has made significant contributions to East Asian libraries/East Asian Studies and to CEAL. Please see the official announcement: https://www.eastasianlib.org/newsite/kristina-troost-is-inaugural-ceal-distinguished-service-award-recipient/
Duke University Library’s collection of materials on East Asia began with a gift from James A. Thomas in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, when Duke faculty first started teaching courses on East Asia , the library systematically began to build an East Asian collection in English only. The postwar growth of area studies served as the initial impetus for acquiring materials in Japanese and Chinese languages. In 1981, the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute (APSI) was founded at Duke, and new faculty were hired to teach additional courses on the region. To meet the growing needs of APSI faculty and students, Dr. Kristina Troost was hired in 1990, first as Japanese studies bibliographer, and then, in 1992, as the East Asian librarian responsible for building collections in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. In 1996, Dr. Troost invited an external consultant to review the Chinese collection, which resulted in the hiring of the first full-time Chinese studies librarian at Duke in 2000. Duke’s Korean studies program expanded as well, and in 2006, Dr. Troost invited an external review of the Korean collection, as a result of which Duke hired its first Korean studies librarian in 2007. Under Dr. Troost’s leadership, Duke‘s East Asian collection has grown rapidly. Today, Duke University Library’s East Asian Collection is one of the major East Asian Collections in North America.
The Hong Kong publishing market may be smaller than that of mainland China or Taiwan, but its annual book fair— which is organized by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council and held every summer at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center—is definitely a must-see travel destination. And not just for the East Asian library specialist. Book lovers of any subject can find something of interest at this yearly event.
I first started attending the Hong Kong book fair out of a sense of professional necessity. For several years, political events in Hong Kong had been having serious repercussions on the book trade (and, thereby, on Duke University Libraries’ acquisitions of Chinese books published in Hong Kong). Following the 2014 “Umbrella Movement” – so named because the protesters who occupied the city for 79 days while calling for electoral reform had used umbrellas to protect themselves from the pepper spray employed against them by the police – it became increasingly more difficult for bookstores to conduct business as usual. In 2015, one of the Hong Kong-based book vendors with whom Duke Libraries had worked for a long time was forced to close its doors. Later that same year came the shocking news of the disappearance of the manager of Causeway Bay Books, an upstairs bookstore in Hong Kong that is famous for selling works on topics considered politically-sensitive (and therefore banned) in mainland China. It was later confirmed that the manager, along with four other staff members from the same bookstore, were being held in police custody in Guangdong, China. The Library has another book vendor in Hong Kong, but after evaluating their catalogs for one year, I was concerned that many books that we would have liked to purchase for our Chinese collection were not included in their list of offerings. I felt that I needed to be on the ground in order to see how I could rectify the situation.
Selected books acquired from the fair on display on top of EAC microfilm cabinet East Asian Collection, second floor of Bostock Library
During my first visit to the Hong Kong book fair, in 2017, I made contact with publishers with whom I was barely familiar or did not know at all and asked for their catalogs. It was mostly a study trip and I purchased only a small number of books. I also visited a few upstairs or “second floor” bookstores: smaller shops, packed with shelf-after-shelf of books, from floor to ceiling, and usually located on the second or third floor of a building, where the rent is much cheaper.
In 2018, I visited the fair in the company of the Assistant Fung Ping Shan Library Librarian for Collections of the University of Hong Kong Libraries (UHKL), who attends the Hong Kong book fair every year and regularly acquires books there. With the guidance of this local expert, I gained more knowledge about the publishers and vendors at the fair. I also learned that for many independent and/or small publishers, the fair is the most important place to distribute their books, which are often printed in small numbers and difficult to acquire outside the fair.
My latest trip to the Hong Kong book fair occurred in the summer of 2019. That year’s event was especially festive because it marked the 30th anniversary of the Hong Kong book fair. The theme of this fair was “Sci-Fi and Mystery”, but the tagline “Reading the World” http://hkbookfair.hktdc.com/tc/About-Book-Fair/Previous-Fair/Theme-Of-The-Year.html, pointed to more global aspirations. There were a total of 686 exhibitors and close to one million visitors. Besides the usual plethora of seminars by local and international authors and scholars, the fair had its own Art Gallery, which exhibited photos from the archives of past fairs. Other highlights included the distribution of limited-edition bookmarks created for Hong Kong author Xi Xi’s The Teddy Bear Chronicles; and photographs of Louis Cha, one of the giants of martial arts literature, visiting the Book Fair. I managed to purchase a good number of books (that we would never have acquired otherwise) at the fair. I also visited a mini fair organized by several independent bookstores outside the grounds of the convention center, and held on two floors of an old, narrow building in Wai Chai, Hong Kong. The building’s small and shaky elevator could only take about three to four people up at a time. There was a good number of people at each of the two floors and payment was by cash only. And yet, the sense of being at an exclusive book store, one not frequented by many Chinese booklovers, much less other US-based East Asian library specialists, was priceless.
An Indie Bookstore Poster
To get some sense of the variety of books purchased at the 2019 Hong Kong book fair, check out selected items on display on top of the microfilm cabinet at the East Asian Collection on the second floor of Bostock library. As the brief annotations written by me and two of my Chinese-speaking student assistants show, these books encompass numerous topics, themes, and media. This sample display demonstrates the vibrancy of the Hong Kong book market and the value of collecting materials from this part of the world.
Hundred Year of Colonial Impressions
A Hundred Years of Colonial Impressions by Otto C.C. Lam. 300 black and white photographs documenting Hong Kong from 1860 to 1960 in 13 chapters. The baby on the cover is Ian Kreft, 18 months old, at Southampton, England, waiting for the ship to take him and his mother to Hong Kong to reunite with his father, who served at Royal Engineers.
Umbrella Movement
Umbrella Chronicle by Simon Chow: 248 black and white drawings documenting and chronologizing incidents in the “Umbrella Movement.”
Wakened by 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident
Awakened by 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests by Liu Ruishao. As a witness of June 4th Incident and a Hong Kong citizen in the face of impending pressure from the Mainland, the author shares his immersive experience of the turning point in Modern China’s history. This book offers an opportunity to look into the dynamics of democratic movement and political struggles across 30 years in Greater China from Hong Kong’s perspective.”
No Trump No New China (US-China) Trade WarXi Dada
Dark Soy Sauce China by Zunzi. Bo Yang a Chinese historian and poet, describes Chinese culture as a “soy sauce vat”—in contrast to the organic fluidity of a river, with thousands of years of precipitation, China, and especially Chinese politics, has become as dark and stinky as a soy sauce vat. The book’s author, Zun Zi, one of the most famous comic artists in Hong Kong, ironically names his two newly published comic books as Dark Soy Sauce China and Soy Sauce Hong Kong to unveil the genealogy of Chinese politics.
Explore the history of cigarettes in the United States, from their initial unpopularity, to their emergence as a ubiquitous element of American life, to rise of vaping today. Tobaccoland examines the role that tobacco marketing, branding, and nicotine addiction have played in twentieth-century American history. The National Cancer Institute estimates that by the 1950s, as many as 67 percent of young adult men smoked cigarettes. But as smoking rates spiked, so did illnesses associated with cigarettes. In the past sixty years, anti-smoking campaigns, lawsuits, regulations, and public smoking bans (like Duke’s pledge to be smoke-free by July 2020) have led to a drastic reduction in the numbers of Americans who smoke. Still, cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States.
Following World War II, the number of smokers in the U.S. reached unprecedented levels. The 1950s saw a boom in tobacco advertising. Ads featuring film and television stars and athletes became commonplace alongside tobacco-sponsored television programming and advertising at sporting events.
The exhibit is divided into several sections, including early cigarette marketing innovations, moral opposition to tobacco, targeted marketing to women and youth, the U.S. Surgeon General’s 1964 report linking cigarette smoking and cancer, the search for new markets, government regulation and industry response, e-cigarettes, quitting and prevention, and the complicated legacy of tobacco in building the Duke family fortune and, ultimately, Duke University.
Tobacco was the foundation of the Duke family fortune. And the foundation of Duke University is inextricably tied up with the Dukes’ tobacco wealth.
Tobaccoland was curated by Joshua Larkin Rowley (Hartman Center Reference Archivist), Meghan Lyon (Head, Rubenstein Library Technical Services), and Amy McDonald (Assistant University Archivist).
Exhibit Book Talk: Please Join Us!
Date: Friday, February 7 Time: 3:00 p.m. Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room (Rubenstein Library 153)
Dr. Sarah Milov, Professor of History at University of Virginia, will discuss her recently published book, The Cigarette: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2019), in conjunction with the exhibit.
This post is by Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European and Medieval/Renaissance Studies, and Sarah How, European Studies Librarian at Cornell University.
The Frankfurt International Book Fair is a trade event that attracts professionals from many countries and nearly all segments of the publishing and information science worlds. This includes academic librarians from the US. Every year members of the European Studies Section of the American Library Association (ALA) team up to get as much out of the Frankfurt Book Fair events as possible; they spend evenings pouring over the programs, and record what they want to report back to colleagues at the next ALA conference, including recommended readings published during the fair. For 2019, the responsibility for this task was assumed by Heidi Madden (Duke) and Sarah How (Cornell), both of whom attended the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair and who have collaborated on the writing of this blog post.
Trade publications issued around the fair provide excellent reading for librarians. Expert White Papers (free, but registration is required for download) help visitors familiarize themselves with issues and trends before the Fair. What follows below are a few examples of our required reading for 2019.
The “Frankfurt Magazine German Stories 2019” focuses on contemporary literary markets from a trade perspective; this issue also includes a literature review on Artificial Intelligence as a topic in both in fiction and non-fiction titles.
The “Buchreport” magazine for October 2019 (free during the fair, now available for purchase), provides a statistical analysis of all major international publishing regions and identifies salient region-specific issues and trends.
Publishing Perspectives is a good journal for reading about the publishing industry year round; their daily updates distributed at the Fair are not to be missed.
As is apparent from this list, digital publishing was one of the overarching themes of the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair. Those fairgoers who attended the sessions on publishing in the digital age were invited to enter the “VUCA World.” The VUCA world is not some happy, imaginary planet, but rather the confusing information landscape in which we all currently find ourselves: the letters of the acronym stand for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Visitors to the 2019 Fair had many opportunities to hear international experts speak on issues connected to this theme, which ran like a red (read) thread through many of the presentations. For this blog post, we have decided to focus on two of the more substantial “hot topics”: the availability of new subscription models for journals and e-books and the concept of e-books as an accessible digital ecosystem.
Library administrators and researchers from across Europe presented on Plan S, an initiative launched by Science Europe in September 2018 for making open-access science publishing a foundational principle of the scientific enterprise. There was also discussion of Project DEAL, an initiative by a consortium of German university libraries and research institutes to re-negotiate large contracts (“deals”) with the major publishing houses of e-journals, which are usually the biggest line item in any research library’s acquisitions budget. In another forum, e-book vendors approvingly noted that newspaper publishers have created innovative business models that work on the Internet by devising formulas for offering just enough free content to trigger a sale of premium content. These vendors suggested that e-books, both fiction and nonfiction, could potentially be marketed using the same sort of model, that is, by offering a preview on the Internet extensive enough to trigger either a sale of an entire volume or a “subscription” to individual chapters, one chapter at a time.
Just when publishers appear to have figured out how to monetize premium content based on the free content that appears in an Internet search, legislation triggered by the new European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market appears to complicate matters once again. Certain aspects of the EU directive are popularly referred to as the “link-tax,” because they effectively mean that the makers of search engines can be fined for showing too much free content in the result list under a link to a content provider, especially for news content. The link tax issue is playing out in real time in France, where legislation based on the European Directive has already been introduced, and where a fierce debate between Internet giants (like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) and legislators will influence how the EU Directive is incorporated into the cyber-laws of other EU countries.
One of the most discussed topics at this year’s fair was the implementation of the European Accessibility Act, which was written on the basis of a directive by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). WIPO has 192 member states, and administers 26 international treaties, including the “Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled,” which was adopted in 2013. The European Union signed the European Accessibility Act in March 13, 2019. This act directs EU member countries to incorporate WIPO’s accessibility requirements into their national laws, and to be compliant by 2025. The European Accessibility Act applies to a suite of digital services, like computer hardware and operating systems, payment terminals, websites, and e-readers. In the context of accessibility, e-books are considered a service, and the act requires that the entire publishing chain, i.e. content producers, digital distributors, catalogs for searching, and e-readers participate in making content available to Print Impaired People (PiPs). In effect, the Accessibility Act creates a vision of e-books as part of a larger and more accessible digital ecosystem.
Exemptions are planned for art books, comic books, children’s books, and smaller companies with under 2 million Euros in revenue. The print segment of the market will continue to exist, but it must align with a digital edition. For this reason, there is a provision for third party “authorized entities” to produce accessible-format copies of non-compliant publications on a non-profit basis. The work of these entities will be instrumental for foreign publishers who market materials in Europe. Organizations like Fondazione LIA, the Daisy Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), EDRLab, and EDItEur are working to understand the implications of this act for the publishing industry and for libraries in Europe, and are helping to develop standards for born accessible publications and for converting non-compliant publications and back files.
Fondatione LIA presented their research at the 7th International Convention of International University Presses at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2019. The full report, co-authored by Gregorio Pellegrino, Cristina Mussinelli, and Elisa Molinari: “E-BOOKS FOR ALL.Towards an accessible digital publishing ecosystem,” can be downloaded (with free registration) at the LIA website.
In sum, although we continue to live in VUCA world, the Accessibility Act, along with advances in digital publishing, search and discovery (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, algorithms, complex metadata, voice search) promise to make electronic and audio books more accessible and more functional for every reader. And American research libraries are actively helping their patrons to navigate through this changing publishing landscape. The creation of digital publishing services departments, such as the recently-founded Scholarworks at Duke or Scholarly Communications and Open Access at Cornell, is one way of engaging with the general trends and developments in the new digital publishing ecosystem. Another is to anticipate these changes by incorporating some of the proposed solutions into libraries’ strategic plans, as has been done, for example, in “Engage, Discover, Transform: Duke University Libraries,” 2016-2021. Last, but not least, is support for librarians’ attendance at international library fairs (like the one in Frankfurt), which allow librarians to stay informed about the latest developments, learn about the looming challenges, and discover innovative ways to overcome them, and inspire practical applications in their institutions.
Many organizations publish informative white papers around the time of the book fair. Pictured is the cover of ”The Universe of Books,” published by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels in the “The Frankfurt Magazine. German Stories, 2019,” which captures the global book market.
About the authors:
Heidi Madden is the Librarian for Western European and Medieval Renaissance Studies at Duke University; she serves as Chair of the European Studies Section of the Association for College and Research Libraries.
This post is by Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European and Medieval/Renaissance Studies, and Sarah How, European Studies Librarian at Cornell University.
International book fairs provide great opportunities for librarians to discover new books and other media; learn of new trends in publishing, translation, design, and book production; and build personal connections that directly benefit both their own work and that of their home institutions. Being abroad, being there in person, immersed in the language and culture of another place, is in itself of significant benefit, although one that is difficult to quantify. That is why we are grateful for the opportunity afforded by this library blog to write about our experiences at the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair, and thereby to describe some of those benefits.
For international and area studies librarians, book fair visits are an essential component not only of professional development but also of collection development. That serious research libraries need materials that would not — could not, economically — be provided by our standard commercial supply channels is accepted wisdom in the profession. Book fair visits are an efficient way to address this need, since they make it possible to interact with many publishers at once, in a single exhibition space. In addition, cultural and linguistic immersion at international fairs strengthens the skills and knowledge that support research services and give academic librarians “street cred” with international students and faculty, as well as researchers engaged in foreign-language humanities, social sciences, and area studies. Visits to specialized bookstores, meetings with local librarians, and visits to local libraries and cultural institutions can be squeezed-in around a busy fair schedule for additional benefit. This is especially true for those librarians who are able to attend an international book fair in a place as rich in resources as Frankfurt, Germany.
The Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse), an annual international event for the publishing trade community, is the world’s largest book fair. This Fair is fundamentally a commercial event, focused as it is on the business of publishing and related industries. It is the place, for example, where publishers, agents, authors, illustrators, film makers, translators, printers, authors, media specialists, book distributors, and libraries negotiate and license rights for distribution, publishing, translation, and film and media versions of the items on display. However, the Frankfurt Book Fair is also the occasion for substantial programming related to contemporary literature and, as we shall see, can even serve as a forum for robust cultural and political debates. Similarly-designed book fairs, more regional in scope, are held in Paris (Salon du livre), Bologna (Bologna Children’s Book Fair), Madrid (Liber), Guadalajara (International Book Fair), Beijing (International Book Fair), Hong Kong (Book Fair), and Moscow (International Book Fair), to name just a few.
According to established tradition, the Frankfurt Book Fair lasts for 5 days, from Wednesday to Sunday. The first three days are usually focused on exhibiting books. On those days, a European Studies librarian can, for example, peruse the publishing program of dozens and dozens of publishers from every European country, including small, independent presses. On the weekend, the fair is open to the public, and books are sold directly to individuals. On those days the sections of the fair devoted to publishers of graphic novels, cookbooks, travel literature, zines, and German language fiction are jammed with people and cosplay participants. In October 2019, 302,267 individuals from 100 countries visited the Frankfurt Book Fair. There, they were met by 7,500 exhibitors and encountered 400,000 individual books, maps, manuscripts, visual materials, and digital media objects (audio and e-books).
The special exhibit of the guest country Norway combined nature imagery, mirrors, and book tables designed to represent poems in spatial dimensions. Norway also celebrated 500 years of the printed book (Nidaros Missal and the Nidaros Breviary, from 1519) in the exhibit.
Each year, Frankfurt hosts a “Guest of Honor” country: Norway was the 2019 Guest. The guiding theme for the Norwegian events and exhibits was “The Dream We Carry.” The theme title was inspired by the famous Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge, and his poem “It is that Dream.” Norway sponsored prominent Norwegian writers, who spoke and schmoozed with the attendees, while fair organizers produced a free bibliography of new publications from Norway in German translation to promote writers and publishers to the German reading public. Karl Ove Knausgård, a Norwegian author who has been described as one of the 21st century’s greatest literary sensations, spoke in several different settings, both about his own work and about his recent experience curating an exhibit on Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whose best known work, The Scream, has become one of the most iconic images of world art. In other interviews, contemporary Norwegian authors Erik Fosnes Hansen and Erika Fatland covered a diversity of topics, from the Oslo cultural scene to food science, which is at the heart of Hansen’s novel Et Hummerliv (“A Lobster’s Life”). Maja Lunde spoke about her forthcoming book The End of the Ocean, while Jo Nesbø was interviewed about Knife, the next installment in his Harry Hole series of crime novels. More highlights and full listing of authors can be found in the online program.
Karl Ove Knausgård amd Jurgen Boos (CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair)
Norwegian literature was represented by many authors reading from their work.
In addition to lectures and authors’ talks, the Frankfurt Book Fair also hosts special celebrations for the winners of the Nobel Prize, the German Book Prize, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Overall, ninety-three prizes were awarded by various organizations during the book fair in 2019. Polish-born 2018 Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk (awarded in 2019) spoke at the opening session of the Fair. Oddly, Austrian-born Peter Handke, the 2019 Nobel Laureate, was not present in person, and was only represented by his publisher’s special display. Handke’s absence did not prevent him from becoming the subject of intense controversy. Saša Stanišić, the winner of the 2019 German Book Prize, who fled to Germany with his Bosnian mother and Serbian father in 1992, was the most prominent voice at the book fair, taking Handke to task for his sympathetic attitude toward former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes.
World newspapers, including The Guardian, chronicled the Handke debate. One of its articles, entitled “A troubling choice: authors criticise Peter Handke’s controversial Nobel win. reported on the views of famous international writers, such as Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru and Slavoj Žižek who opined that the 2019 Nobel laureate “‘combines great insight with shocking ethical blindness’.” Another article, entitled “Peter Handke’s Nobel prize dishonours the victims of genocide,” referenced the Austrian writer’s stance on the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, which has been characterized by some critics as genocide apologism. At some point during October 2019, Peter Handke announced that he would no longer speak to journalists, so for now the debate will continue in literary circles, and will most likely re-emerge around the December 10, 2019 Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.
The 2019 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was awarded to Sebastião Salgado, the first ever photographer to receive this prize. During the course of several interviews, the Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist introduced his book Gold, which showcases haunting images of Amazonia taken in the 1980s. As with his other work, Gold highlights environmental and human rights issues by investigating habitats and communities with his camera.
Cultural events inspired by Norway as the Guest of Honor were only a fraction of the international author events and talks at the Fair and in the city of Frankfurt. The gala of literary stars included Margaret Atwood, Maja Lunde, Elif Shafak, Colson Whitehead, Ken Follett, and Jo Nesbø (video Highlights can be seen on the Fair’s website). More media outlets broadcast from the book fair than can be mentioned here. The two outlets with the most video content are ARD Mediathek and ZDF Mediathek, especially the venue “Das Blaue Sofa,” which gives access to 90 interviews with authors from the Frankfurt 2019 fair alone. Social media followed along under #fmb19, and have already transitioned to the hashtag for the 2020 fair, #fbm20, as planning for the next fair gets underway. Canada will be the Guest of Honor at the 2020 Frankfurt Book Fair.
On Saturday and Sunday, while the public floods into the fairgrounds, specialized, ticketed, professional events are held at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The two that we attended this year were the 7th International Convention of University Presses 2019, which focused on the European Accessibility Act, and an event for non-fiction editors. The non-fiction publishing event “Non-fiction Publishing: It’s a Women’s World,” consisted of a panel and discussion with female publishers from Morocco, Turkey, India, and Norway, who spoke about their experiences with producing important works documenting and giving voice to issues and experiences which might not find a home with large commercial publishers.
Look for more on Frankfurt hot topics in the next blog post on Welcome to the VUCA World! The Frankfurt International Book Fair 2019. Part 2
Frankfurt Book Fair 2019 publisher displays
On Saturday, cosplay fans come dressed as their favorite characters.
“Stellt das Buch her / Make the book”: three containers stacked on top of each other, with exhibits on each level in the courtyard of the book fair.
European Studies librarians in North America build collections from multiple countries in a variety of languages. How can they become acquainted with the networks of libraries, publishers, and vendors necessary to develop these collections, and to provide research support effectively? Studying the bibliographical guides to European Studies librarianship are, of course, an excellent first step. There is the classic text by Dan Hazen and James Henry Spohrer, Building area studies collections, from 2007, and the Suddenly Selector Series will include practice-based guides for European Studies in the future. A more general recent introduction is provided by Lesley Pitman in Supporting Research in Area Studies (2015), and the collaboration of area studies administrators on International and Area Studies Collections In the 21st Century, addresses mutual concerns in all area studies such as training, recruitment, digital content and finances.
Library and cultural heritage organizations nationally and internationally use acronyms as short hand for pointing to projects, standards and organizations. Outlining the basic organization of European Studies associations illustrates what a challenge it is to develop a deep understanding of each organization, its mission, and its audiences
“All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust. 1808.
The American Library Association and the German equivalent, Bibliothek & Information Deutschland (BID) e.V, decided to embark on an extended information exchange to provide the “tree of life” kind of learning needed for getting to know how our respective information and cultural heritage organizations operate. ALA and BID signed an agreement for the collaboration in 2014, and the exchange was set up to help a large number of subject librarians build a professional network both on the national and international level over three years, from 2016 to 2019. The many projects, meetings, and activities that resulted from the initiative demonstrate what it takes to explore issues and trends in librarianship in just one country, Germany, and can serve as a model for learning about other countries.
The article describing the exchange: “The American Library Association and German Library & Information Association Partnership: A Celebration,” was co-authored by Sharon Bostick (Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL), Fred Gitner (Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL), Hella Klauser (Internationale Kooperation, Deutscher Bibliotheksverband e.V. (dbv); Kompetenznetzwerk für Bibliotheken (knb), and Heidi Madden (Duke University).
The article appeared simultaneously in two venues, in the O-Bib, Das Offene Bibliotheksportal (Open Access Library Platform, Germany) and in International Leads (A Publication of the International Relations Round Table of the American Library Association).
If you want further information about the behind-the-scenes work in writing the article or European librarianship, email Heidi.
As this week is Open Access week, I thought it would be good to write a short post about OA resources for Middle East and Islamic Studies. Like many other disciplines, there are copious amounts of resources available in different formats from interviews to journals and ebooks.
Before listing those resources, I would like to draw your attention to this informative post from our friends at the University of Toronto: OA 2019: THE HIDDEN COST OF DOING RESEARCH. Yayo Umetsudo, Scholarly Communications & Liaison Librarian provides details of some UoT subscription costs.
For Middle East and Islamic Studies, there are a number of tremendous resources. Perhaps the most important is AMIR (Access to Middle East and Islamic Resources) which has been collecting OA materials since its founding by Charles Jones and Peter Magierski in 2010.
A relatively new OA digital resource is provided by the University of Bonn’s Digital Translatio project. The resource provides free access to rare or hard to find journals in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman. Check it out here. In a similar vein, أرشيف المجلات الأدبية والثقافية العربية, which translates roughly as the Archive of Arab literary and cultural magazines, provides terrific access to a large collection of Arabic journals. Check it out here. Announced yesterday, the important Istanbul Kadı sicilleri (Court records) is now freely accessible online in Turkish transcription from the original Ottoman. Check it our here.
A highly valuable lecture series is the History of Philosophy (HoP) podcasts from King’s College, London. HoP covers the Classical age, Later Antiquity and the Islamic World striving to seamless illustrate the evolution of ideas in different eras, epochs and religious vantage points. The Islamic World covers the idea of falsafah (philosophy) before moving on to some of the great proponents of philosophy in the Islamic World, e.g. al-Kindī, al-Fārābī and others. Each episode lasts for about 20-30 minutes and offers a bibliography of core texts.
Yale University has a number of series and lectures freely available. Included amongst these are some 20 lectures pertaining to different aspects of the Islamicate, Islam or the Middle East. Each one of these lectures is roughly 40-45 minutes and includes an assignment and often a mini-syllabus.
iTunes U offers a many freely accessible resources. One has to register with iTunes U but after that a number of valuable resources are available. A particularly delightful feature of iTunesU are the language courses, check out the Arabic one. These are great for the multi-tasker in you!
Finally, a very general resource of OA materials spanning multiple disciplines is Open Culture. There are countless resources available to the researcher from language classes to ebooks to short essays of interesting facts such as the last, known, hand-written newspaper Musalman.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the Ivy Plus web collecting project of which a number of DUL colleagues are active participants. See the list of projects here.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive but rather to peek your interest in some of the freely available resources. Happy OA week.
Katie Odhner was an intern in the International and Area Studies Department in the Duke Libraries. She has a B.A. in Chinese Studies and History from the University of Pennsylvania. She recently graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with a Master’s of Science in Library Science. The following post is written by her.
Over the course of this summer, I have been working with Luo Zhou, Duke’s Chinese Studies Librarian, and Will Shaw, our Digital Humanities Consultant, to create on a website showcasing the Memory Project digital collection, which went up on the Duke Digital Repository in July. Launched in 2010 by documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, the ongoing project has collected hundreds of oral history interviews from elderly Chinese villagers. The initiative was originally intended to document individual stories of the Great Famine, which caused the death of 20 to 43 million people between 1958 and 1961. It has since expanded to cover other movements in the early history of the People’s Republic of China, including the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960, the Land Reform and the Collectivization of 1949-1953, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
We had a number of reasons for wanting to create a website to feature this collection. Firstly, a website can provide additional context. Luo used TimelineJS, an interactive, open-source software to create a visual timeline of the period covered in the interviews. This allows users of the collection to examine the events and policies that underpin the personal experiences found in the oral histories.
Secondly, the website helps promote the collection. With more than 200 interviews, it can be difficult to find an entry point. We asked students and filmmakers who had worked on the collection to recommend one or two of their favorites. I created a tile lay-out on our WordPress page to feature these interviews, along with comments from the recommenders. One of my favorite parts of working on this project was looking through the featured interviews. They contain many tales of devastating tragedy and incredible courage that bring the bleak events in history books to vivid life. The website also provides a platform for advertising events about the project. Stay tuned for the visit of a number of the filmmakers in October!
Finally, the website provides new access points for the collection and a way of quantitatively visualizing the interviews via a map. The map was the most challenging element of the website to design. There is an abundance of mapping tools, both free and proprietary, so part of the difficulty was selecting the one that fit our needs best. Once this was accomplished, it took a great deal of time just to understand the capabilities of our chosen tool (ArcGIS Web Maps). Shout-out to Drew Keener and Mark Thomas, members of the library’s Data and Visualization Services Department who gave great GIS tips along the way. It was a fun design challenge to come up with a method that could allow the user to filter the interviews by topic, as well as link out to interviews for a given village in the Digital Repository.
After reflecting on the overall experience of building the website, here are some of my major take-aways for future digital humanities endeavors:
Decide on your priorities. I found that the tools I was using could not always achieve what I envisioned. Sometimes finding a solution was just around the corner, and sometimes it could mean getting sucked down the rabbit-hole for hours. Having an understanding of what is important in the long-run helps prevent wasted time.
Consult with colleagues. The excellent members of the Digital Scholarship and Data Visualization Departments provided lots of good advice and saved me from wandering around in the aforementioned rabbit-hole on several occasions.
Give yourself time to play around. I discovered some of the cooler mapping features just through experimenting with ArcGIS. Sometimes no amount of guide-reading can replace trying things out for yourself.
Working with digital tools was great, but the best part of the project for me was the opportunity to reflect on the aspects of the collection that are most valuable and how best to highlight them. The tools stand in service to providing alternative means of access to the collection, visualizing its scope, and bringing the human stories contained in it to a broader audience.
This post was contributed by Sean Swanick, the Librarian for Middle East and Islamic Studies at Duke.
This past summer I was fortunate to visit Turkey and Morocco. In my previous blog post, I documented some of my experiences sleuthing for books in the Maghreb. This post concerns my time in Turkey, where I was again on the lookout for books, ephemera, and related materials to enhance Duke University Library’s growing Middle East and Islamic Studies Collections.
Turkey is a remarkably diverse country with a population of some 85 million people. My purpose was to find (elusive) books, make new contacts, and to continue expanding my knowledge of Turkey, Turkish, Ottoman, and related matters to better help students and researchers.
In Turkey, I spent time wandering the many delightful sahaf çarşılar (second-hand book markets) of Istanbul, the country’s cultural capital city. This was followed by visits to Diyarbakır and Mardin, two smaller cities in the south.
When I arrived in Istanbul, a second mayoral election was in full swing.. There were lots of posters, booklets, and related ephemera for the major political parties. I personally was able to collect some of these materials, which will be added to our growing Turkish political ephemera collection.
Spray painted official ephemera for Mayoral candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu. Mr. İmamoğlu would eventually win the election. This was his campaign slogan and reads: Everything will be fine.
Besides visiting numerous sahaflar, I also went to a number of museums in Istanbul, such as the Pera Museum, Istanbul Modern, Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Museum of Innocence, Istanbul Photography Museum, Istanbul Research Institute, and the recently opened Yapı Kredi Vedat Nedim Tor Museum. At the Yapı Kredi there were two excellent exhibitions. The first concerned photographs of Ataturk called Hoş Geldin Gazi: Atatürk’ün İstanbul Günleri (1927-1938) (the catalogue will soon be at Duke Library for you to explore further). This was the first image of the exhibition:
It reads: Yaşasın Reis-i Cumhurumuz (Hooray for the President of our Republic.)
The other exhibition displayed the archive of Turhan Selçuk, aptly called Turhan Selçuk Retrospektifi. Turhan was a famous and influential caricaturist, who had a knack for finding humour or satire in most subject matter. We have many satirical journals for you to peruse, and two years ago I led the curation of Yasak/Banned, a Duke University library exhibit highlighting these collections. The Turhan exhibition had many highlights, including the following:
Istanbul is a city known as Der Saadet, an Ottoman-Turkish combination of an Arabic word (saadet) and a Persian word (der) together meaning the “Abode of Happiness.” Certainly, anyone who has visited Istanbul would agree. The city offers everything a curious traveler might want: books, diversity, museums, restaurants, spectacular views, incredible history…in short everything that is the abode of happiness.
So-called ‘umbrella-street’ in Beyoğlu, Istanbul.
From Istanbul, I flew to Diyarbakır in southern Turkey. Diyarbakır has witnessed inhabitation since at least the 1300 BC, during the time of the Assyrian kingdom. In its current conception, there are two cities: yeni ve eski (old and new). The old city contains the historic walls dating back to the 4th century, when the Romans colonized the city, while the new city contains shops, new housing, military barracks, and government offices. Diyarbakır is home to a wide variety of people, languages, foods, and traditions.
While the city structure, architecture, food (especially ciğer/ceger, or liver), and people are incredibly generous, thoughtful, and helpful, for me it is always about the books. There are several terrific bookstores in Diyarbakır, in both the new and old cities. In the old city, I spent several hours in bookstores while also taking-in some of the cultural activities, like visiting the Diyarbakır Dengbej Evi, Dengbej is a traditional form of story-telling. Two bookstores were of particular interest. Ensar Kitapevi holds an enormous collection in Turkish, Kurdish (Soranî and Kurmancî), Arabic, Persian and a few English titles. Subjects are as diverse as the languages represented: history, literature, cultural studies, language manuals, etc. But even more, the building was awe-inspiring with many reading nooks to sit and read at one’s leisure while also being offered local teas and coffees. Here’s a photo to entice you:
The other noteworthy bookstore in Diyarbakır, and the one with which Duke will be working closely to acquire Kurdish and Turkish materials is Pirtukakurdi. Based in the new city, the shop opened a few years ago. I spent most of a day with these bibliophiles as we discussed issues related to Kurdish languages and books. Here’s a photo from their warehouse:
From Diyarbakır, I hired a taxi to Mardin, a trip that should normally take one hour; my trip took a bit longer, since we stopped a few times to take-in the views and to help a fellow with a flat tire. A gorgeous drive through Mesopotamia on a new highway was enriched by conversation with the taxi driver and the radio playing Selda Bağcan.
Mardin is another city that divides the new from the old. The new city contains the famous state-run university, Mardin Artuklu University. The old city is built on a hill, a mountain really, overlooking the vast expanse of Mesopotamia and its farmland. Mardin is famous for a number of reasons, including its diversity, its Churches, Mosques, and formerly Synagogues. Süryani (Syriac language) is still spoken and taught here; in fact, the people of Mardin speak Süryani, Kurdish, Turkish, and Arabic, sometimes in the same sentence: a truly remarkable experience of linguistic diversity. There is certainly some truth in the Turkish proverb: Dil bilmek, bilgeliğe açılan kapıdır, which translates as “knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom.”
In addition to the cultural sites mentioned above, the Sakıp Sabancı Mardin Kent Müzesi museum is a tremendous resource, offering exhibitions of its permanent collections, Mardin city history, as well as travelling exhibitions, such as the one on modern photography, to which I was treated during my stay in Mardin.
Mardin is also near the Syrian border. Prior to 2011 and the pain and devastation that has been inflicted on the locals by so many domestic, national, and international actors, the border was open with more-or-less free passage, especially for the trading, bartering, and buying of goods and services. Those days are now long gone, replaced with a heavy military presence and ubiquitous checkpoints. Shortly after I visited the border town of Nusaybin, for example, a Church in neighbouring Qamishli, Syria was bombed. The ramifications of these actions are felt by many people, not just the victims.
On my last night in Mardin, I was able to meet with Engin Emre Değer, an incredible person, originally from Istanbul, who moved to Mardin a few years ago. Engin works with a theater troupe, whose main purpose is to help the many Syrian refugees living in Turkey, particularly children. Listening to his stories of the encounters he has had and the joy he hasbrought to so many was remarkable. One of Engin’s projects is the Flying Carpet Mardin Children’s Music Festival: https://muzikhane.org/fcf. The festival takes place over a few days with free music and a circus-like atmosphere.
This summer’s book buying excursion was full of remarkable experiences. The books Duke University Library is acquiring continues to enhance the reputation of the Library, as well as the scholars for whom it primarily serves. Over the coming months, I will highlight some of these collections while also providing suggestions and ideas on how to make the most of these unique materials.
Each year the UNC/Duke Consortium for Latin American & Caribbean Studies offers competitive fellowships for scholars who want to use our library resources. Priority goes to researchers from officially recognized Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Predominately Black Institutions, Minority Serving Institutions, and community colleges. Holly Ackerman talked with the two fellows selected by the Duke Libraries for 2019-2020. The conversations will be published in two parts starting with the exchange below with Professor Shearon Roberts.
Photo: Shearon Roberts, Ph.D. Summer 2019
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Walk us through your CV.
I teach both Mass Communication and African American/Diaspora Studies courses at Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically black university in New Orleans. I earned my doctorate from Tulane University’s Roger Thayer Stone Center in Latin American Studies where I studied Caribbean media, specifically Haitian media. Prior to academia, I worked as a reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. I research Caribbean and Latin American media, media discourse from the region, and media discourse on race and gender.
What was your research project this summer?
It is titled, “Learning the Black Diaspora through Latin American & Caribbean Media.” After leading four years of grant-supported student field visits to Latin America and the Caribbean, the number one feedback from participating students is how much people of the region consume media about African American culture and experiences, and how little access African American students have to media about communities of color in the Americas. I want to change that through my courses and through use of materials such as those at Duke.
For example, Duke University’s Robert Hill collection provided me with a wealth of teaching resources for African American students to discover how vast and how interconnected Black Diaspora movements were. Hill’s collection dates back to Marcus Garvey and the UNIA (founded in 1914), and he is also the executor for C.L.R. James’ (1901-1989) work. It was fascinating to see how closely Black movements in the Caribbean were intricately connected to African American movements and African movements. Hill also dedicated himself to the teaching of the Black Diaspora and within his collection are both his and his contemporaries’ syllabi – a valuable find for re-introducing materials out of print or that have been ignored in the teaching of the Black Diaspora in the Americas. Below are two sample teaching guides/syllabi I found in the Robert Hill collection at the Rubenstein that I will use for teaching my courses:
Source Citation: Hill Personal Box 14, Robert A. Hill Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
For my own research, Hill’s collection was invaluable in laying out Caribbean intellectual thought and movements and how Caribbean intellects connected to media and to the public. I originally applied for the College Educators Research Fellowship (CERF) to research the Radio Haiti Archive’s non-digitized records and I was not disappointed. The archive is not just a Haitian one, but a Caribbean one, and it provided a window on many of the movements taking place around the region. The Radio Haiti archives are impeccably well-cataloged, a nod to the archivist Laura Wagner’s hard work. Because of the archives’ detailed descriptions, I located a little-known dissertation from the eighties, well at least little-known to me, documenting press history in Haiti. I also discovered through this archive how regional in scope many important media outlets in the Caribbean were during this time.
Source Citation: Radio Haiti Box 14: Aux Origines De La Presse Folder, Radio Haiti Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
Both staff at the Rubenstein and the UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean studies were extremely helpful in shaping a successful visit to Durham this summer. Patrick Stawski pointed me in the direction of the Ecumenical Program on Central America and the Caribbean (EPICA) records and helped me to conceptualize a project from this collection that I had not conceived of prior to my time at the Rubenstein. Sara Seten Berghausen helped me navigate digital collections and took time to send me documents from digital collections for course teaching. Corin Zaragoza Esterra helped me think through the connections of my research projects and find my away around Durham during my stay. Natalie Hartman made sure that my access to Duke’s resources were seamless. I thank all the staff at the Rubenstein who worked with lightning speed to ensure I had access to every rare material requested during my stay. Finally, I am extremely grateful to Holly Ackerman for getting me to think across the collections and starting me off in the right scholarly directions before and during my stay.
How will the info you gathered at the Duke Libraries be used?
I have updated my coursework and course lectures to include materials I researched at the Rubenstein. I have incorporated materials from digital collections for course unit assignments. These range from sections of constitutions from the region to photographs showing civic activism in the region, and music and films from the region. My research, both current and those in development stages have been greatly enhanced by documents located in these collections. The manuscripts I am writing about Haitian media, Caribbean media and Caribbean movements will include documents from the collections of the Rubenstein.
Ernest (“Erik”) Zitser is the Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies (ICS) Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.
The newly launched Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Web Archive is a collaborative effort to build a curated, thematic collection of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research about this area of the world.
In recent years, this turbulent region has produced a significant volume of websites likely to be of value to contemporary and future humanities, social science, and history projects, and the archive was established as an attempt to identify, capture, and preserve this material.
The thematic and generic scope of the archive is deliberately broad, and includes websites published by political parties, non-governmental organizations and activist groups, artists and cultural collectives, as well as individual historians, philosophers, and other intellectuals.
Campaign Against Homophobia (Poland)
Memorial Society (Russia)
Party of United Democrats (Macedonia)
The Archive represents an effort to preserve research-valuable web content from Eastern Europe and the territories of the Former Soviet Union by a group of research librarians responsible for that part of the world. This cooperative collecting initiative was developed, and is being curated by Russian and East European Studies librarians at Columbia, Princeton, Yale, New York and Duke Universities, as well as the New York Public Library, as part of the Web Resources Collection Program of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation.
Know of an endangered website from the region? Please use this online form to nominate a website for inclusion in the Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Web Archive.
This post was contributed by Sean Swanick, the Librarian for Middle East and Islamic Studies at Duke.
This past summer I was fortunate to visit Turkey and Morocco. I was on the lookout for books, ephemera and related materials to enhance Duke University Library’s growing Middle East and Islamic Studies Collections. This post concerns my two weeks in Morocco. A second post in the coming weeks will detail my adventures in Turkey.
Egyptians make the claim Masr Umm al-duniyā (مصر أم الدنيا), Egypt is the Mother of the World. Moroccans have come to accept this but with a sense of humour add Masr Umm al-duniyā wa al-Maghrib abūhā (مصر أم الدنيا والمغرب أبوها), Egypt is the mother of the world and Morocco is the father.
While in Morocco I visited Casablanca, Rabat, Fes, and Tangier. I was able to meet with colleagues, visit some incredible museums, make a pilgrimage to the tomb of the famous world traveller Ibn Battuta and, of course peruse many, many bookstores.
Morocco’s book publishing industry is thriving with reportedly 6,000 books published in 2018. Books are published in Arabic followed by French, Amazigh and Spanish. For further reading about the Morocco’s book culture, Anouk Cohen published Fabriquer le livre au Maroc that explores many of these aspects. Duke’s collection though young contains approximately 3,000 titles from Morocco mostly in Arabic and French though we are working to acquire some works in Amazigh, especially language manuals. Amazigh is the language spoken by the Berber population of Morocco, which is approximately 10-12 million or 40% of Morocco’s total population. As the Librarian for Middle East and Islamic Studies, I strive to collect the documented heritage of all peoples who live within these boundaries.
My first stop was Casablanca, the capital. A visit to the Hassan II Mosque (cf. Elleh, Nnamdi. 2003. Architecture and power in Africa. Westport, CT: Praeger), the largest in Africa, is compulsory. Photos cannot translate its magnitude, though I have attached one that I took. It is set on the seaside with the calm sounds of the waves of the Atlantic Ocean crashing into the shore. The mosque fits some 100,000 worshipers, 25,000 of whom will be inside the mosque while the rest will be in the large adjacent courtyard. This is the only mosque in Morocco that non-Muslims are permitted to enter.
A large concentration of Casablanca’s bookshops is located in the Habous neighbourhood. Habous has an interesting history as Henri Prost, the famed French architect, redesigned it during the French Protectorate (1912-1956). Hosting suqs (Arabic for market or commercial place within an inhabited area) and cafes, Habous is also home to some 20 bookstores including the important Arab Cultural Center.
Casablanca also has the only Jewish museum in Arab majority countries. A terrific museum hosting a wide variety of cultural artifacts dedicated to preserving the history of Moroccan Jews. There remain approximately 2,000 Jews living in Morocco.
The next stop was Fes, founded at least in the 9th century during Idrisid Rule (788-974). Fes remains the intellectual capital of Morocco, with many schools, writers, and scholars calling it home. While all cities will contain a suq, Fes’s suq is a UNESCO heritage site. It is an amazing tour de force and nothing short of a labyrinth. Small alleys and corridors with high walls help the beginner become confused and even lost. Navigating the suq is best done by trial and error. After a few confusing moments, one learns the routes without the help of the local ‘guides.’ The suq is designed in such a way as to minimize direct sunlight – Fes in summer averages in the 40s Celsius (110s Fahrenheit). However, the reward of adventuring is an incredible array of crafts, arts, carpets, leather works, cafes, restaurants and historic sites like the University of al-Qarawiyyin (جامعة القرويين), considered the oldest center of learning. The traditional arts of mosaic tilework and leather production in the tanneries are ubiquitous.
While in Fes, I was also fortunate to meet up with fellow Blue Devils Profs. Mona Hassan and Mustafa Tuna and their family for a late afternoon lunch in the Rcif neighborhood.
From Fes I travelled by train to Tangier, the famous port-city that has been a point of cultural diffusion and trade since Phoenician times. Tangier is also home to the world traveler Ibn Batutah. Batutah traveled around not just Muslim majority countries but also to China and beyond. Unfortunately, his tomb in Tangier pales in comparison to his contribution to literature and knowledge. There are four tremendous bookstores in Tangier: Librairie des Colonnes, Les Insolites, ARTingis, and Librairie Papeterie Marocaine (المكتبة المغربية). Librairie des Colonnes was founded in 1949 and became the literary culture center with such characters as Jane and Paul Bowles, Samuel Becket, Jean Genet, Juan Goytisolo, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote as well as others who frequented, if not entrenched themselves in this beautiful landmark building. Les Insolites and ARTingis are relatively new stores with a nice variety of new, old, and popular works in French, Arabic, Amazigh, and English. Librairie Papeterie Marocaine is the largest of the stores containing almost exclusively Arabic publications from Morocco.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the historic and important Cinema Rif, perhaps the most important movie theater in Morocco. Its history is documented in this recent publication: Album cinématheque de Tanger by Azoury, Philippe, Yto Barrada et al., soon to be at your favorite research library.
My last stop was Rabat, which was hosting a small book festival with some 15 publishers and vendors displaying their materials in tents on Avenue Mohammed V and Rue Gaza au centre ville. There are three very important bookstores in Rabat: Dar al-Amane, Kalilah wa Dimna, and Librairie Livre Services. Dar al-Amane offers a terrific array of Arabic books on religion, philosophy, traditions of Islam, law, etc. while the other two shops offer books in Arabic and French on a wide variety of topics including literature, poetry, popular culture, photography, etc. Rabat also contains a variety of historic sites and a lovely suq, which is decorated in street art like this incredible mural.
There is much more I could say about this trip; Morocco offers a unique experience with its diverse population, climate, foods, and, of course, books. I would like to thank the Duke University Libraries for this opportunity. A special thanks to our esteemed Arabic cataloger, Fouzia el-Gargouri.
Come see a new exhibit from the International and Area Studies Department which displays anti-American materials spanning 130 years and four continents. Inspired by the recent acquisition of a Cold War-era comic collection from the People’s Republic of China, the exhibit expands to capture a broad range of responses to America’s presence on the world stage throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
The earliest materials on display date from the time of the Spanish-American War at the turn of the 20th century. These include famous critiques of American imperialism by Latin American thinkers like José Enrique Rodó and José Martí, as well as political cartoons from the period which reveal both Cuban responses to the war and dissenting voices from within the United States.
Moving through the 20th century, the exhibit features reproductions of Italian World War II propaganda posters which can be found in the Rubenstein Library’s Broadsides and Ephemera Collection. The bulk of the materials focus on the Cold War and the anti-American sentiment invoked by lingering U.S. military presence in East Asia. Highlights include the allusion-rich and satirically humorous Chinese comics from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as published photograph collections documenting anti-American protests in Korea and Japan.
From archival posters to reproductions found in secondary sources, the Duke Libraries’ collections provide a wealth of visual anti-American material to research and explore. Come to the second floor of Bostock Library by the Nicholas Family International Reading Room to view the highlights, and learn about the complex and competing narratives which have shaped international perceptions of the United States through the years.
Special thanks to Yoon Kim and to the Exhibit Services Department for their kind help in providing resources for the exhibit.
This post was contributed by Kristina Troost, the Japanese Studies Librarian at Duke.
In my job as Japanese Studies librarian, I often visit Japan. I do this largely to build ties to other librarians or vendors. There are many things that can be accomplished one-on-one that cannot be done remotely. These ties also stand me in good stead when I need to request favors. I think this is true everywhere, but personal connections matter a lot in East Asia. I also visit museums, temples and universities to deepen my knowledge of areas in which I support faculty and students. Personal conversations allow me to understand what is going on in Japan in ways not possible to achieve in the US.
My first day in Tokyo, I visited Waseda University library since my main contacts have retired, and we have relied on them in the past for special favors. Afterwards, I visited the Gender and Sexuality Center, the first such center set up to provide support and information to LGBT students and their allies at a Japanese university. It has several fully trained professional staff as well as a cadre of student volunteers.
The next day, I visited the National Women’s Education Center (NWEC). Established in 1977, it is dedicated to promoting gender equality. It has an extensive library of books and ephemera on women worldwide, as well as lodging for researchers if they wish to stay to use the material. While I have known about it for some time, since Women’s Studies has been a focus of our collection and the faculty I support, I had no idea of its size or the variety of its activities. Known for the databases they have created of their holdings and the digital versions of their ephemera, they also create exhibitions using those materials. The exhibit I saw was on Beate Sirota Gordon, who compiled the human rights clauses, particularly those concerning women, for the Japanese postwar constitution. I wasstruck by Article 23 and its emphasis on the equality of the sexes.
The study of modern Japanese art is a significant focus of the East Asian Studies program that I have supported for many years. This trip provided me an opportunity to visit several museums devoted to it. In Tokyo, I went to The Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and 21-21 Design Sight. The Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery had a special exhibit, “Tom Sachs Tea Ceremony” as well as selections from their permanent collection given by Mr. Terada. The Terada collection contains some 3,700 artworks with a focus on postwar Japanese art and is relatively accessible. The Tom Sachs tea ceremony, however, took me some time. He has been reinterpreting ‘chanoyu’ — traditional Japanese tea ceremony — since 2012 through contemporary elements, materials, tools, and techniques. After seeing the film that was part of the exhibit, it made more sense.21_21 Design Sight has a wonderful exhibit called Sense of Humor. One of the posters I liked best could not be photographed, but many of the exhibits had me laughing out loud.
My final exploration of contemporary Japanese art was on the island of Naoshima in the Inland Sea. In the face of declining population in rural areas of Japan and in the Inland Sea in particular, one industrialist purchased part of Naoshima and has established a number of art museums which hold art by both Japanese and Western artists. These museums have been designed by Tadao Ando to maximize the impact of the art.
For example, one museum has several of Monet’s paintings of water lilies. The number of people allowed in the room at one time is limited, and you remove your shoes before entering. The floor is made from tiny white tiles. There are paintings of water lilies on all four sides. As one of only two or three people in the room, I could appreciate them in a new way. In addition, there are a number of what I would call “installations”. Together they are known as the Art House project. Artists have taken empty houses and turned the spaces themselves into works of art, each of which are in separate locations and all of which are effective. One, Minamidera, entails walking into a darkened temple, holding onto a wall and then sitting very still. Eventually, as your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, you can see something across the room. I recommend, however, having younger eyes than mine. In another installation, the artist added a glass staircase to a shrine that was being renovated; it links the main building to an underground stone chamber, uniting the worlds above and below.
Each time I visit Japan, I try to explore new areas and go to museums and libraries I have not visited before. Both NWEC and Naoshima have been on my list of places to visit for some time and both exceeded my expectations. Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and 21-21 Design Sight were recommended this summer by a faculty member I work with. While my primary goal is to deepen my knowledge and extend my connections in ways that I know will support the students and faculty I work with, I usually find that I use the knowledge I gain in unanticipated ways.
Stayed tuned for our upcoming exhibit of anti-American materials from around the world! The display will feature historic Chinese comics from a recently-acquired collection. These visual propaganda pieces were published in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Cold War drove tensions between the two nations to new heights. The exhibit will also highlight materials from Europe, Latin America and the United States itself. Take a look below to get a sneak peek at two items which will feature.
Entitled “Be Clear about the Nature of American Imperialism,” this comic illustrates American hypocrisy. A serene President Kennedy poses like the Buddha. On his right, arms reading “The Peace Corps” offer gifts of harmony and prosperity, including a sack labeled “Food for Peace.” On his right, arms reading “Preparing for war against Cuba and Lumumba” wield tools of violence.
This comic, “Thus Is America,” vividly depicts the perceived vices of the United States, including the oppression of workers, the Ku Klux Klan, loose morals and international aggression. Can you spot General George MacArthur?
The exhibit will be displayed on the second floor of Bostock Library next to the East Asian Magazine Reading Room starting in July.
The photographs in Sir Percy Molesworth Sykes’ recently-acquired 1915 album capture a pivotal moment in what was then known as Chinese Turkestan (modern-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China). China’s Qing dynasty had collapsed only a few years earlier. It was an era of warlords, weak central government and competing external influences as Ottoman Turks, Russians, Han Chinese, the British and the region’s Muslim ethnic groups jockeyed for power in a complex geopolitical landscape. Lieutenant Colonel Sykes was dispatched to temporarily assume the role of Consular-General in Kashgar. He was stepping in for Sir George Macartney, a relation to the statesman of the same name who led the first British diplomatic mission to China in 1793. Sykes was accompanied by his sister Ella Constance Sykes, a prolific travel writer who may also have taken some of the photographs which appear in the album.
This Dungan general sits framed by banners in Chinese which prominently display his surname, Ma, along with information about his regiment.
In a region where history is intertwined with political legitimacy, the preservation and documentation of these photographs and others like them have an important role to play. Today as Muslim minorities in Xinjiang suffer under government-sanctioned suppression of their religious freedom and identity, Percy Sykes’ album affords us a further opportunity to study, appreciate, and critically engage with the rich heritage of the native peoples of this region.
To see the full digitized collection, check out the Duke Libraries’ Digital Repository. More information about the photographs can also be found in the collection guide. The album is available for viewing in the Rubenstein Library reading room.
Uyghur boys in Kashgar recite from the Quran.
Sources
Forbes, Andrew D. W. Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: a political history of Republican Sinkiang 1911-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Come explore the truly global popularity of graphic novels at the International and Area Studies exhibit on the second floor of Bostock Library, next to the East Asian Magazine Reading Room. The exhibit will be up through next Tuesday.
Since ancient times, human beings all over the globe have been bringing text and images together to tell stories. In this selection of graphic novels and cartoons from Duke’s collection, you will see retellings of classics and tales of adventure that have gained massive popularity in Japan and China. You will see stories of revolution and bold political movements from Russia, India, South Africa, and Colombia. You will see tales of atrocities, survival, and redemption in Germany and Israel. You will see humor, both lighthearted and political, in Turkey, Portugal and Spain, and everyday life in Korea and Côte d’Ivoire. This variety demonstrates the power of graphic narratives to reflect and lend new visual interpretations to all aspects of the human experience. We welcome you to explore one of the world’s most popular modes of storytelling in the Duke collection.
News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries
Free Exhibit Lecture
Cover image for Moustafa Bayoumi’s 
His analysis of German-language gazettes published by Nazi military governments—an impressive collection of which is available at 
