Congratulations to Titas Chakraborty on her recent publications!

Abstract

“Nederlandse slavernij in Zuid-Azië “(Dutch Slavery in South Asia) in Staat en Slavernij, eds, Rosemary Allen, Matthias van Rossum, Esther Captain, Urwin Vyent (Athenaeum, 2023) 

This chapter provides an overview of the nature and impact of slavery and slave trade as carried out by the Dutch East India company in South Asia. The chapter was part of a book commissioned by the Dutch Ministry by the Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), as a direct result of a motion filed by Dutch parliamentary Don Ceder which asked the Dutch government to present the results of independent national research into the history of slavery and into “what took place at the time of slavery, on behalf of whom and how” before the end of 2023. The publication of the book accompanied the King of Netherlands’ public apology for the Dutch state’s involvement in slavery and slave trade.

“Slavery in the Indian Ocean World” in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery, eds, Damian Pargas and Juliane Schiel (Palgrave MacMillan 2023)  

This chapter provides a comprehensive history of various forms of slavery in what came to be known in historical works as the Indian Ocean World, or a specific zone of multi-regional connections through maritime practices. It explores the dynamics of enslavement including the trade in slaves, the range of work that enslaved men and women performed, and the possibilities of social mobility for slaves and ex-slaves. In doing so, the chapter familiarizes readers with three major historiographical debates in the field, namely, who/what constituted the figure of a slave; the relationship between slavery in the Indian Ocean world and other forms of bondage such as the Atlantic slavery and indentured servitude; and the relationship between abolition and colonialism in the Indian Ocean world. 

Biography

Titas Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of History. Her work focusses on slavery, labor, migration and gender in South Asia and the Indian Ocean World.

Congratulations to Caio Yurgel on his recent publication!

God, a Metaphor: A Meditation on Alejandra Pizarnik’s ‘Awakening.’ TEXT 27 (Special 70): 1–14. 2023.

Abstract

Alejandra Pizarnik’s life was a long preparation for suicide. But instead of letting the Argentine poet’s death define her legacy, this article will focus on her intellectual sparring with the notion of God – and her ultimate strategy of turning God into a strawman for her own processes of creation. In her diaries, Pizarnik vows – like a prayer – never to call on God, never to invoke him. This is, she writes, the ultimate test: her blood may boil, her screams may consume her, her veins may burst, but she would rather keep her mouth shut. Pizarnik couldn’t bring herself to believe in God – which means she couldn’t stop writing about him.

This article will centre its analysis on Pizarnik’s most famous poem, “Awakening,” in which she repeatedly invokes the Lord (“Lord / the cage has turned into a bird / and taken flight”) until she turns him into something else, something darker still. By resorting to her diaries spanning the late 50s until her death in the early 70s, as well as her connection to the oeuvres of Sylvia Plath, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jacques Lacan, this article will show how Pizarnik – labeled as a “gifted girl” – was placed (and placed herself) in the impossible position of being expected to be ambitious (because she was gifted) but not too ambitious (because she was a woman). “Awakening,” written and published between 1956 and 1958, articulates the turning point of Pizarnik’s extreme position toward God: how can someone who pushed herself so hard accept a God that would be willing to forgive anything? Continue reading “Congratulations to Caio Yurgel on his recent publication!”

Congratulations to Hyun Jeong Ha on her new article!

Klocek, J., Ha, H., & Sumaktoyo, N. G. (2023). Regime change and religious discrimination after the Arab uprisings. Journal of Peace Research 60.3: 489–503.  Continue reading “Congratulations to Hyun Jeong Ha on her new article in the Journal of Peace Research and the Excellent Academic Book Award”

Congratulations to Gürol Baba, Global Fellow of Arts and Humanities at DKU, on the recent publication of a special issue on the theme of South Asian Impulses in the Middle East: An Asymmetrical Transregionalism, in the Journal of Asian and African Studies, which he guest edited with his colleague Amit Ranhan. The issue features Baba and Ranjan’s introduction, as well as Baba’s research article Middle East–South Asia Relations: Transregional Minilateralism Cemented with Bilateralism.
Continue reading “Congratulations to Gürol Baba on his recent publications!”

Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Humanities, Caio Yurgel, on his newly published article in the Hispanic Review: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/880292/pdf Continue reading “Congratulations to Caio Yurgel on his new article in the Hispanic Review”

Continue reading “Congratulations to Stephanie Anderson, for her recent publications”

Gürol Baba, Jay Winter, “The Wilsonian Moment at Lausanne, 1922–1923”, Journal of Modern European History, 2022, Vol. 20(4) 536–553

Using Turkish, British, French, and Australian archival records, this article examined the background and diplomatic strategies of the Turkish delegation at the Treaty of Lausanne and its selective understanding of self-determination, excluding non-Turkic and non-Muslim people in Anatolia from the ‘self’ that has the right to determine its national existence. It also explored the reasons why the Allies acknowledged this exclusion in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923. The article borrowed from Erez Manela’s interpretation of the ‘Wilsonian moment’ to frame these diplomatic and political developments and to show how and why the democratic intent of Wilson’s idea of self-determination vanished in the framing of the Peace Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Continue reading “Congratulations, Gürol Baba and Jay Winter on their recent publication!”

Congratulations to Selina Lai-Henderson’s new publication! “Langston Hughes and the Shanghai Jazz Scene.” Langston Hughes in Context, ed. Vera Kutzinski and Anthony Reed. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Here’s the link to the book.

Biography

Selina Lai-Henderson is an Assistant Professor of American Literature and History at Duke Kunshan University. Her research and teaching are at the heart of transnational American Studies and literary history. Her major intellectual theme revolves around locating works of American literature in twentieth-century China and in translation. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford UP, 2015), and have published in PMLA (forthcoming, 2023) and MELUS, among other places. She is currently Chair of the International Committee at the American Studies Association, and co-directs Freedom Lab at the Humanities Research Center at DKU. She is on the Editorial Board of Global Nineteenth Century Studies, and I am a Senior Associate Managing Editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies.

HRC is proud to announce a new special issue from Positions, which came out of an HRC sponsored workshop.

Issue editors:
Nellie Chu – Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University (DKU)
Mengqi Wang – Assistant Professor of Anthropology at DKU
Ralph Litzinger – Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University
Qian Zhu – Assistant Professor of History at DKU

Positions – August 1, Volume 30, Issue 3