For a small, remote island uncomfortably close to the Arctic Circle, Iceland has a remarkable place on the map of global culture. This is due to its fascinating tradition of literature and folklore, a body of texts – the Eddas and Sagas – that serves as a veritable repository of Scandinavia’s rich mythological and historical corpus. Having been settled by Norse seafarers in the 9th century, Iceland’s location aided in the preservation and eventual collection of these stories which, in turn, became source material for many cultural projects of the modern age.

 
Richard Wagner

Nothing is more striking in this regard that Richard Wagner’s monumental Ring of the Nibelung. The operatic tetralogy, created between 1848 and 1876, ranks among the greatest achievements in the musical repertoire; and it drew heavily on Iceland’s Norse mythology, which Wagner regarded as a particularly pure articulation of Germanic cultural genius (needless to say, the political assumptions underlying such notions were deeply problematic).

Astrid Varnay as Brünnhilde and Bernd Aldenhoff as Siegfried

Brünnhilde and Siegfried, the heroes of the second, third, and fourth installments of the Ring, for example, are based on Brynhildr and Sigurðr, both figures in theVölsunga saga. There, the valkyrie Brynhildr intervenes in a fight between two kings, leading Odin (Wotan) to imprison her, in deep sleep, within a ring of fire until the arrival of a man who would rescue and marry her. That hero is Sigurðr, who, having slain the dragon Fafnir, awakens Brynhildr to an experience of connubial bliss, only to leave her, at which point he is bewitched and the inevitable tragedy ensues. Wagner played with some of the characters, but, yes – basically, it’s the exact plot of his masterpiece.

 
Otto Donner von Richter, "Siegfried Awakens Brünnhilde"

But Wagner has not been alone among modern artists in his fascination for the world of Icelandic mythology. J.R.R. Tolkin’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were directly influenced by Norse texts as were aspects of the world imagined in Harry Potter. And let’s not forget Thor, one of the most enduringly popular Marvel superheroes and the star of the upcoming movie directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Recently, Italy’s great Teatro di Piazza D'Occasione (or TPO for short) caught the Icelandic vibe. In Kindur, which means "sheep" in Icelandic, the company, renowned for its immersive multi-media performances, conjures three brave and curious creatures and follows them through the cycle of Iceland’s seasons. Through them, we explore the country’s Arctic landscape and forbidding settings, the very scenery that animates the great stories of Norse mythology. It is a truly innovative approach to theater and has taken an important place in the rich tapestry of modern culture connected to and inspired by the Nordic countries.

To help us appreciate the cultural universe entered by TPO, we enlisted the help of Marianne Kalinke, one of the world’s leading authorities on Norse mythology. A professor emerita at the University of Illinois, where she is also a Trowbridge Chair in Literary Studies and a member of the Center for Advanced Study, Marianne has published many of the definitive editions of Icelandic literature and undertaken the crucial scholarly work that set it in the context of other European literary traditions.

 
Marianne Kalinke

We were absolutely thrilled when Marianne agreed to present a lecture on the state-of-the-art of scholarship on Norse mythology. Her presentation will be anchored in an account of the material basis of the texts (yes, we’re talking animal hides) along with the complex history of their repatriation. It’s an amazing story that will illuminate Iceland’s great place in global culture and put us in the ideal Nordic mood to enjoy TPO’s Kindur.

UPCOMING EVENT

Lecture

Stories on Skins
Animal Hides and Iceland's Heritage

#205: Sat, May. 7 5:00 - 6:00 PM

In addition to these events, we have scheduled a remarkable program that explores the creative impulse of the body in confinement. The topic is Viktor Ullmann, one of the leading avant-garde composers of the early 20th century. Ullmann, whose prodigious talents gave him access to the musical circles around Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, was a member of the German-speaking community in Prague (like Franz Kafka). Jewish by background, although a convert to Roman Catholicism, Ullmann was deported to the concentration camp Terezin in 1942.

Viktor Ullman

That camp represented the height of Nazi cynicism. Billed and showcased by the Nazis as a model Jewish city (rather than the ghetto it was), it did afford its prisoners some degree of freedom. Ullmann took this opportunity to remain musically active, conducting an orchestra and organizing concerts. He even continued to write music, most famously the opera “The Emperor of Atlantis,” which has recently been rediscovered as a major piece of 20th-century classical music.

Less well known is the melodrama “Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornet Christoph Rilke” (The Chronicle of Love and Death of the Flagbearer Christoph Rilke), based on a text by Rainer Maria Rilke. Ullmann composed it in 1944, the last piece he created before his deportation to Auschwitz where he was murdered on October 18, 1944. The composition is the last piece of music composed in the concentration camps – and as such it is one of the most remarkable testaments to the endurance of the human spirit.

We will be able to hear this fascinating piece of music written in the most inhumane of circumstances. At the CHF, it will be performed by husband-and-wife team Philip and Christine Bohlman, both faculty members at the University of Chicago. Phil, one of the world’s leading ethnomusicologists, has had a long-standing interest in Jewish and Central European music, which he regularly performs with his New Budapest Orpheum Society. Christine, an accomplished pianist and piano teacher, will accompany him.

The program promises to be among the most memorable events of the fall.

Tom Boellstorff

As those of you reading this blog probably know, Second Life is a virtual world that allows users, called Residents, to interact with one another through avatars. Folks develop elaborate identities in this world, allowing them to socialize and participate in all kinds of activities with one another. Residents can even get rich – there is virtual property and virtual money. To those of us outside that world, myself included, it sounds completely fantastical – which, in a way, it is.

So Tom is an anthropologist – and he wrote the first book-length study of Second Life, or any virtual world for that matter. It is called Coming of Age in Second Life (which is a clever pun on Margaret Mead’s breakthrough book Coming of Age in Samoa) – and it has garnered a huge amount of attention.

Coming of Age in Second Life

At CHF, Tom will give a lecture on his work, focusing particularly on the question of the body in Second Life. Residents have control over the physical representation of their avatars; and that creates some pretty fascinating constellations in terms of body politics, including a rather fluid situation in regard to race, gender, and sexuality.

Tom will talk to us about this at CHF – but what is really incredible to the non-techies like myself is that his lecture will happen SIMULTANEOUSLY in Second Life. There, Tom’s avatar – Tom Bukowski – will give a lecture in one of Second Life’s many virtual meeting places. That lecture will be attended by Second Life Residents who will be able to interact with our “real” audience through some amazing devices that our tech wizards are currently developing (and which I am bound to never fully understand…).

But the upshot is this: Tom’s lecture will happen at one and the same time in First and Second Life, bringing the two together through the magic of CHF. Wow!

UPCOMING EVENTS

Special Event

The Virtual Body
Coming of Age in Second Life

#316: Sat, Nov. 6 2:30 - 3:30 PM

When I was in college, it was the local custom to assign all the undergraduates into one of two categories: techies and fuzzies. It will come as no surprise to those who know me that I was in the latter. Not only did I major in the ultimate humanistic discipline (what could be more pertinent, after all, than anthropology – literally the study of the human?), but I was supremely maladapted to handle any of the new electronic gizmos that were making the rounds in the early 1990s. I could barely handle my Macintosh Classic.

This is all to say that I’m as far from being an early adopter as it gets. I do have a cellphone, but it doesn’t get me on the web, my calendar is old-fashioned paper, and I still like my books between covers.

So until about three months ago, the furthest thing from my mind was Twitter. Sure, I had heard all about it. But to be honest, it didn’t make the slightest sense to me. Why, I thought, would anyone spend their time sending messages at the arbitrary length of 140 characters? Even more, why in the world would anyone read them?

This state of ignorant bliss lasted until the day our webmaster Matt Heinrich sat me down to explain what Twitter actually is: a supremely sophisticated and utterly novel communication tool – one, moreover, that can be adapted by all users to fit their specific needs.

And that’s when it hit me: here is a way to share what I am doing as Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival on a day-to-day basis with anyone who might be interested. What, after all, does it mean to curate a humanities festival? More than anything else, it means being in the know about what’s happening in the worlds of art and culture, both in Chicago and elsewhere. It means following the publishing industry as it releases what will become the next set of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award contenders. It means keeping up with the reviews of these books and the flame-throwing debates that ensue when they are negative. It means staying on top of the latest developments in the world of scholarship, whether it’s that new interpretation of Picasso or the discovery of a previously unknown manuscript.

This is, in fact, what I do for a good part of my day. And the results used to end up in my computer, in complexly organized files designed to maximize later retrieval.

What Matt showed me is that Twitter has changed this. What it allows me to do is to share all this work with you – instantly!

This is what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months. Matt set up a program that all of us in the office can use to send CHF tweets to our quickly-growing list of followers. And I’ve been going just a little crazy with it, sometimes sending as many as two dozen a day.

But it’s hard not to. As I spend my time researching the world of art and culture, I come across fascinating and important things all the time. And now, whenever this happens, I write a tweet! This morning, this included a note about the facticity of David Foster Wallace’s depiction of the IRS in The Pale King, another one on the artistic influences on Damien Hirst, another one on Cythia Ozick’s prospects of winning the Orange literary award, another one on Italian curator Antonio Manfredi’s decision to burn a painting in protest against arts funding cuts by the Italian government, another one on… Well, just see for yourself.

I love to share my excitement for humanistic practice this way. But it really doesn’t end there. Because, as I’m learning more and more, Twitter is not a one-way communication platform. On the very contrary, it is intrinsically designed to facilitate dialogue, whether by way of re-tweeting another’s message to one’s own followers, or by use of the built-in public reply system. What this means for my practice is most exciting. As I’ve been tweeting away on the curatorial themes of the Festival, our audience is weighing in, offering their enthusiastic perspectives or urgently disagreeing with mine.

I can’t begin to express how amazing this dialogue is! In terms of putting together the CHF, it gives me an immediate sounding board on the pertinence of issues. Even more, it is beginning to have a real impact on our curatorial choices. This nascent dialogue gives the research I do as Artistic Director an instantaneously communal dimension, bringing our audience into the very heart of the CHF’s process.

With all this, let me close with an invitation to you:

Follow us on Twitter and join the dialogue!

Dmitri Shostakovich

It was a truly rare occasion. The Nose, composed in 1928, is hardly ever performed. For one, it is a pretty radical work written by a fearless, young composer – Shostakovich was just in his early 20s – before being reigned in by the Soviet authorities. With jittery harmonies and no more than melodic snippets, it’s not the kind of music you leave humming after a glorious night at the opera.

Nikolai Gogol

And then there is the plot. Based on the famous short story by Nikolai Gogol, it is eccentric, to say the least: It is set in St. Petersburg where, for no apparent reason, the nose of government official Kovalyov goes missing only to reappear, with an apparent mind of its own, all across town. Kovalyov, understandably distressed about the situation, goes on a mad dash to retrieve the unruly organ. He fails to do so for much of the story, only to find the nose reattached one day, again without apparent cause, allowing Kovalyov to resume his previous life.

So far this would all be good absurdist fun, replete with some eerie forebodings of Kafka (Gogol’s story was written in the 1830s). What makes it so challenging as opera, however, is that the aggregation of scenes (the nose prancing around, Kovalyov seeking help in capturing it, etc.) involves dozens and dozens of separate characters, all of whom have little individual music. Think about this in contrast to the standard opera repertoire, say Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. There, you have six main characters, all of whom carefully developed in terms of musical profile and given several set pieces. An opera company can hire great singers for these parts (such as Deborah Voigt, who sang an amazing Isolde at the Lyric last year) and market them as the stars they are.

Not so in The Nose. Yes, Kovalyov has a lot of music. But even this main role is not a star vehicle, nor is “The Nose,” itself – did I mention that it sings too?

With all that against it, it is no wonder that The Nose is hardly ever staged. So the chance to hear it live would have been enough reason to go to New York

But what made the premiere the true event of the year was the production. In an inspired move, the Met had secured the services of William Kentridge, arguably the most influential visual artist of our time. Born in 1955 in Johannesburg and still residing there, Kentridge came to prominence in the 1990s with his animated films. Those decidedly low-tech affairs, based on Kentridge’s indelible charcoal drawings, present richly layered narratives that reflect, albeit obliquely, on the horrors of the twentieth century, including South African apartheid and the Holocaust.

William Kentridge

As it happens, Chicago played a crucial role in Kentridge’s career. His 2001 solo show at the MCA was his first survey exhibition in the United States; and the museum continues to present his work on a regular basis. Maybe, you caught the amazing installation that was part of “Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out,” a show that closed there only a few weeks ago.

With its basis in time-based visual narration, Kentridge’s work was also a natural for the operatic stage. An initial foray, a 2005 production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, became an international sensation. This, in turn, led to the invitation to stage The Nose at the Met.

The Nose

Kentridge’s aesthetic vision for The Nose was extraordinarily ambitious. Not only did he undertake the entire set design (featuring constant shifts between stages and sub-stages along with animated sequences in his characteristic style), but he embedded the entire project in a larger conceptual framework. Transposing the story from the tsarist 1830s to the Stalinist 1930s, he gave the farcical piece a very dark edge. Even more remarkably, he created an entire body of work – with films, sound pieces, collages, paintings, drawings, and prints – that explicated the operatic presentation. In New York, that work was presented concurrently with the opera in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Between the opera and the exhibit, there really was no doubt that this was Kentridge’s year.

And there is yet another Chicago connection. Given his complex working method, Kentridge relies on a small cadre of collaborators. One of them is Jane Taylor, who has worked closely with Kentridge for over twenty years. A key figure in the realization of The Nose, Taylor is also a visiting professor at the University of Chicago where she regularly teaches theater and art.

We are thrilled that Jane has agreed to take part in the CHF where she will discuss this remarkable project and share with us what went on behind the scenes. In this presentation, she will be joined by University of Chicago Professor David Levin, an accomplished opera dramaturge in his own right, who will moderate the event. I can’t wait for the fall to relive my New York moment!

Helen Levitt

Louis Faurer

Morris Engel

Weegee

Paul Strand

Robert Frank

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Louis Faurer

Paul Strand

Weegee

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Helen Levitt

Morris Engel

Robert Frank

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Helen Levitt

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Zoe Strauss

Morris Engel

Louis Faurer

Paul D'Amato

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Paul Strand

Weegee

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Robert Frank

Paul D'Amato

Zoe Strauss

Paul Strand

Louis Faurer

Robert Frank

Morris Engel

Weegee

Helen Levitt

Related Program 

 

The Iconic American City
Richard Gray Visual Art Series

701: Sat, Nov. 10 11:00 - 12:00 PM

The University of Chicago

Clarity came in a long conversation with my undergraduate mentor Arthur Wolf. The anthro bug had bitten me for real in a seminar he had taught on the history of 19^th century anthropology, which brought to life the sheer intellectual hubris of the discipline’s founding generations – the notion that scholars could somehow master the totality of human experience. Their encyclopedic, multi-volume tractates, which I gobbled up at the Stanford Library, were strange fun (as well as endlessly problematic). But what really hit home was the work of George Stocking. I devoured his books Victorian Anthropology  and Race, Culture and Evolution, brilliant historical treatises that situated the origins of anthropology in the political, cultural, and intellectual currents of its time. To me, they read like thrillers. Franz Boas and E. B. Tylor – the founders of American and British anthropology – were its compelling, yet flawed heroes as we joined them on their battles against racial prejudice and enduring superstition. This, all hubris myself, was the kind of writing I wanted to do, too.

“Why don’t you go study with George himself,” Arthur Wolf said to me in that long conversation in 1992, “after all, he created the history of anthropology.”

I knew that already. Arthur, in fact, had dropped a hint along those lines a few months ago, sending me scurrying to the library (this was so pre-Google…). There, I discovered that George Stocking had transformed the inquiry into anthropology’s past from self-serving histories of triumphalism (the kind that always ends with the work of the writer) into a systematic field of study. He had published the first books that brought true historiographical rigor to the subject and founded the defining periodical, a book series with a bland title –  “History of Anthropology” – whose content was anything but.

Knowing all this, Arthur’s suggestion struck me as entirely preposterous. Who was I to study with the great George Stocking, professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Chicago? It was as if Arthur had told me – upon learning I wanted to go into painting – that I should call up Jasper Johns to tutor me…

Victorian Anthropology

I didn’t understand it at the time. But one of the wonderful things about the Academy is that Arthur’s advice was entirely plausible. And once he talked me down from my awed intimidation, I contacted George, met him at a conference, applied to UofC, and became his student. Over the next years, I had the extraordinary privilege to learn from this great man and to see up-close what it means to be an intellectual trailblazer. I even lost my intimidation (George is too nice and easy-going for that); but what steadily increased was my awe for his ability to create and shape an entire scholarly field.

Cut to this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival and a scholar who – in so different a field, it seems – accomplished something very similar. To put it simply, Tricia Rose is the George Stocking of Hip Hop Studies.

Tricia grew up in 1970s New York City, witnessing the emergence of Hip Hop firsthand. And while she was not the first person to comment on the new cultural form in print (it preoccupied commentators and critics from its inception), she was the first to write a truly scholarly account of the phenomenon. And what an account it was!

Black Noise

Black Noise started out as Tricia’s dissertation. She had studied sociology in college at Yale and gone on to Brown to get a Ph.D. in American Studies. Today, that’s one of the most vibrant, interdisciplinary fields around. But in the late 1980s, it still harkened back to its post-World War II creation, when it originated as the academic pursuit of American exceptionalism. Brown’s department, for one, was still called “American Civilization,” suggesting just how radical Tricia’s dissertation project truly was.

Indeed, Black Noise turned on a number of daring propositions. For one, it announced Hip Hop as a meaningful topic for scholarly inquiry, on par with other quintessentially American political and cultural formations like the Constitution or Jazz. Nowadays, with Hip Hop’s mainstreaming (to say nothing of its global dissemination), that hardly seems controversial. But at the time, public discourse was dominated by tropes of urban violence and criminality, hardly the context inviting literary analysis of the art form’s aesthetics. But that’s exactly what Tricia did, proposing and executing the kind of interpretive approach that illuminates America’s other cultural traditions. Hip Hop, she argued persuasively, is a “contemporary amalgam of key stylistic elements in several earlier black musics,” citing the improvisational elements in Jazz, the narrative sense of place in the Blues, the oratory power of black preaching, and the emotional vulnerability of Southern Soul music.

Black Noise would have been a landmark if it had restricted itself to aesthetics. But it was just as concerned with politics, both internal to Hip Hop and vis-à-vis American culture at large. When the book was published in 1994, it had the subtitle “Rap Music and Black Culture in America.” Even clearer, though, was the original version of the 1993 dissertation which was “Rap Music and Black Cultural Resistance in Contemporary American Popular Culture.” To read Hip Hop in such political terms – against the backdrop of the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict for example – was intellectually galvanizing. So was Tricia’s highly differentiated stance on the question of Hip Hop’s sexism, which she neither defended nor dismissed as a pathology intrinsic to the art form. Instead, she developed a nuanced analysis that read Hip Hop’s aesthetics politically, its politics aesthetically, and the entire phenomenon as what we now realize it to be: the most important American cultural innovation since the creation of Jazz.

Tricia’s stature has only grown since the publication of Black Noise. As the doyenne of Hip Hop Studies, she now presides over a growing field that includes such entries as CHF fave Adam Bradley’s Anthology of Rap, which treats the art form in the manner of the Norton Anthology of Literature.

Even more importantly, she herself remains a key voice in the debates on Hip Hop. Her 2008 book The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters was a seminal reflection on Rap’s mainstreaming and argued that Hip Hop has, in fact, become the primary way in which Americans talk about questions of race.

German Rapper Bushido

More recently still, Tricia has turned to the transnational dynamics of Hip Hop. Now back at Brown University as Professor of Africana Studies – following stints at Rutgers, NYU, and the University of California-Santa Cruz – she has become fascinated by Rap’s global reach and its ability to address issues of justice and power across political and national boundaries. Having created Hip Hop Studies, Tricia continues to push its boundaries, in other words, and I, for one, can’t wait for the opportunity to hear this path-breaking scholar at the Chicago Humanities Festival!

Palenstinian Hip Hop Group DAM 

At the University of Chicago, I had the enormous privilege to study with one academic pioneer. Now, all of us in Chicago have the chance to learn from another one. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Tricia Rose at the CHF!

Related Program 

 

The Hip Hop Pioneer

408: Sat, Nov. 3 12:30 - 1:30 PM

How to explain the genius of Yo-Yo Ma? The basic facts are easy: he is, quite simply, one of the most famous musicians of all time, a global figure whose list of accolades – the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, honorary doctorates, and countless Grammys – puts him in a league of his own. And while his accomplishments could fill all kinds of blogs, a mere enumeration could never get to the heart of the matter. That lies, at least as I see it, in a unique approach to music-making as communal aesthetic and social project.

Yo-Yo Ma receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom 

Let me try to unpack that by going back to Sunday, March 18. I was, as is often the case, at Symphony Center. The afternoon program was billed, quite simply, as Yo-Yo Ma and CSO Musicians. That was an entirely accurate description for an event that featured work by Johannes Brahms and Bohuslav Martinů in addition to some contemporary composers.

But it doesn’t capture what actually happened on stage. There was Yo-Yo Ma, serving as MC and ambassador, chatting with the audience and bringing everyone into the experience. And there was Yo-Yo Ma, the musician, performing a breath-taking composition for two cellos with John Sharp, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal cellist. A treat to see two of the instrument’s greatest living masters performing together. A master class in technique and beauty of sound; but what I remember most vividly from Mexican composer Samuel Zyman’s piece is the communication between the musicians, a constant exchange of facial expressions, gestures, and musical lines. It was the same in the Brahms Quintet, which was anchored by Robert Chen, our orchestra’s supremely gifted concertmaster. The two instrumentalists were practically screaming the phrases at one another, producing a reading so intense I was literally at the edge of my seat.

I have heard my fair share of chamber music, both performed by long-standing formations like the Beaux Arts Trio or the Pacifica Quartet and such ad-hoc groupings as were playing that day. But there was something different about these performances, something I attributed to Yo-Yo Ma’s unique gift for talking with and through music. His music-making has an urgent, dialogical quality that draws you in. “This matters,” it says, not just in terms of the music itself, but as a collective act, a form of community formation.

Robert Chen (far left), Yo-Yo Ma, and other citizen musicians

It’s this commitment, I think, that has turned Yo-Yo Ma into an activist. His concept of the citizen musician expresses it perfectly. It takes music beyond a trivial sense of mere entertainment, treats it instead as a constitutive act of the social. Community, it says, starts by joining together in a common conversation – and music, both played and experienced, is the ideal-typical form of that conversation.

It makes me tremendously proud that our city is the hub for this far-reaching project, which Yo-Yo Ma is spearheading in his role as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant. If you haven’t done so already, please, check out the CSO’s Citizen Musician website!

Damian Woetzel

All of us at the CHF are thrilled that Yo-Yo Ma will grace our stage in an event organized and presented in partnership with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I can’t wait to hear the extraordinary musician perform with his colleagues. But I am most excited that he will share his vision of citizen musicianship with the CHF audience. He will do so in conversation with Damian Woetzel, former ballet star, Director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program, and a fellow member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. It is a powerful message, one that needs to be heard by as many people as possible!

Damian Woetzel and Yo-Yo Ma

Related Program

 

Yo-Yo Ma and Damian Woetzel: A Conversation About the Arts and Citizenship

108: Sun, Oct. 14 7:30 - 8:30 PM

Karen Ho

Daphne didn’t think about it in terms of Karen’s age (although she was the youngest anthropologist on the Minnesota faculty at the time). What she really meant was that Karen was doing a truly new kind of anthropological research. For her 2003 dissertation at Princeton, she had studied Wall Street. Yes, Wall Street! Just about as far as you can get from anthropology’s “traditional” subject matter. I knew exactly why Daphne was so delighted. Her entire career was about forging new territory for the discipline.

She, herself, had been a trail-blazer. When she started graduate school in 1988, she made the then rather controversial decision to become an anthropologist of Europe. In particular, she wanted to work in Germany, hardly the kind of place considered “proper” by her august faculty at the University of Chicago. True, a number of anthropologists had been moving into Europe or North America for their research. But it tended to happen later in a scholar’s career, after having cut one’s anthropological teeth in a non-Western setting – places some folks still called “primitive.”

Daphne, though, was keen to broaden the anthropological scope. She was convinced that the method of the discipline – the near-mythical practice of ethnography – had much to reveal about the societies of the “West.” But she did need to make concessions. Ethnography was codified by such anthropological titans as Bronislaw Malinowski and E.E. Evans-Pritchard as a form of participant observation undertaken in face-to-face communities. The researcher would spend a significant amount of time in one place – Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders; Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer and Azande – experiencing the totality of social life across the yearly cycle. In the process, the anthropologist would get to know a population in its entirety, charting interconnections through kinship diagrams and life histories. Eventually, the research would be written up in a way that revealed a culture’s enduring social structures – the kula system of exchange among the Trobrianders, the age sets among the Nuer, the conception of witchcraft among the Azande.

Daphne’s advisors were prepared to sign off on her research in Germany provided that she could replicate such an approach. Daphne, in other words, needed to find a village.

She did. A fascinating one.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

Geopolitical change was in the air in the late 1980s. And Daphne would go to village right at the inner-German border. Kella was located in the GDR, but so close to the Iron Curtain that a good part of the village had been declared a no-go zone. She arrived just after the Berlin Wall fell. And she lived there for nearly two years. During that time, she did all the traditional work that would satisfy her advisors, preparing kinship charts and recording oral histories. But she did so against a backdrop of massive political and social upheaval. And it was that transformation – the rapid shift from socialism to capitalism – that became the topic of her dissertation.

In the early 1990s, many scholars worked on the end of the Soviet bloc. But what made Daphne’s research so unique was her ability to tell the story from the perspective of people’s everyday experience. She had been hanging out with her interlocutors while they were learning their way around the new system. She would accompany them on first trips to West Germany, noting, for example, that they always asked the wrong questions in grocery stores: “Do you have bread?” instead of “Where is the bread?” They didn’t know about brand names either, looking for glass cleaner instead of Windex.

When Daphne published a book based on her dissertation – Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland – it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Widely considered to be the finest study of the socialist transition, it has become a staple of the anthropological curriculum. 

I had the incredibly good fortune of seeing all this up-close. When I arrived at the University of Chicago in 1993, Daphne had just returned from Germany and was in the process of writing her dissertation. She became a close friend and mentor. And she was instrumental in my decision to undertake research in Central Europe as well.

We constantly talked about what might be possible in anthropology, and standing on her shoulders, I ventured into the urban territory of Vienna (although I was always quick to tell people that the two groups I was studying – Jews and gays – were small and closely nit together, almost like a village).

At the same time, Daphne began to conceptualize a follow-up project to her dissertation. She, too, would move into the city – Leipzig, to be specific, where she would study the relationship between consumptions and new forms of citizenship in the unified Germany. And she received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to make that possible.

So I knew exactly why Daphne was so excited about the hire of Karen Ho. Not only was she a superb scholar with a PhD from a terrific institution, but she had pushed the anthropological project even further. In her research, Karen had found a way to deploy the ethnographic method in an unprecedented manner, exploring the local site of Wall Street in an effort to reinterpret the global dynamics of finance. This was an ambitious anthropology, unencumbered by traditional strictures and fully able to address some of the most pressing political and economic questions of our time.

It was a brilliant hire. The buzz in the discipline about Karen’s work was huge, and when she published her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street in 2009, she became a bona fide star. Her study was hailed as a “landmark in the burgeoning anthropology of money,” the book “many of us have been waiting for.” By “blending into the background, listening intently, in a non-judgmental way,” Karen had produced a “must-read for anyone contemplating joining one of the major global banks.” And the culture at large took notice, too. Karen even found herself on the pages of Time Magazine.

Tragically, Daphne was not able to cheer on her colleague. In late 2007, she lost her battle with cancer. Her death left a terrible void in anthropology. But her legacy lives on. Her work continues to inspire us – and so does her belief that anthropology needs to continue pushing against its boundaries.

Daphne Berdahl (1964-2007)

Because of that belief, Karen Ho is now a tenured anthropologist at the University of Minnesota and one of the most influential voices in the discipline. I am delighted that she will join us at the CHF to present her extraordinary research on Wall Street. Her presentation will be gripping. But Daphne will be on my mind as well.

Related Program 

 

Gentlemen Prefer Bonds

510: Sun, Nov. 4 2:30 - 3:30 PM

Ilana Gershon has had a similar trajectory, one I actually witnessed up close. As it happens, Ilana and I were anthropology majors together at Stanford and fellow graduate students at the University of Chicago. But whereas I had never heard of the discipline before college, she was anthropological royalty, the child of two prominent anthropologists of Africa. Ilana followed her parents into the field, but she was adamant about doing research elsewhere. Africanists, she once told me, might not be able to get beyond thinking of her as the small toddler who accompanied her parents to conferences.

Ilana Gershon

Instead, Ilana became an anthropologist of Oceania, writing a dissertation about Samoan migrants. Numerous publications on the topic followed.

But then, Ilana changed gears. Invoking the wonderful privilege we enjoy as anthropologists to go wherever our fascinations lead us, she became an ethnographer of contemporary digital culture. Fascinated by the ways new technologies are transforming our behaviors, she undertook research on social networking and its effects on romantic relationships. If people hook up on Facebook and break up via text message, what, she asked, did that say about Marshall McLuhan’s old adage that “the medium is the message?”

The result of Ilana’s research is a marvelous book, perfectly titled The Breakup 2.0. In it, she develops a truly illuminating analysis of the way we live and communicate now. Quite apart from the unanswerable question of whether new technologies are good or bad for us, she shows how they are actually functioning in the world, particularly among younger generations. Facebook, cell phones, and IMs are self-evident parts of their life, and Ilana has much to say about what this means for our culture, now and in the future. Sex and the City memorably dramatized the calamity of breaking up via post-it. But judging by Ilana’s research, that might have been so 2003…

With our theme of Technology, it was a no-brainer to invite Ilana to discuss her insights into our digital world at the CHF. And I was delighted when she accepted. I am thrilled, moreover, that the event will be presented in partnership with Indiana University’s College Arts & Humanities Institute. Ilana is a professor in IU’s Department of Communication & Culture, and her talk will be part of an entire slate of programming that will highlight the wonderful work being done across the Big 10.

RELATED EVENT

Ilana Gershon: The Breakup 2.0

UIC Forum - Main Hall C : Nov. 5, 11:30 AM

La Pietà

There are few religious traditions in which the physical embodiment of divinity is as central as it is in Christianity. Just think about the life of Jesus as it is reported in the gospels. His good works are related to bodily objects, from healing to feeding; and his sanctity is revealed through such physical acts as walking on water. Even his death on the cross is an eminently embodied experience, one, moreover, that is enshrined as Christianity’s key symbol. Relics attributed to Jesus dot Europe’s churches; and his body, at once divine and battered, figures in a rich tradition of visual representation, from the great Renaissance masters to Mel Gibson. And then, of course, there is the Eucharist itself.

All of this has been ample ground for historical and theological research – and it will be the topic of a much-anticipated CHF event. To me, it is the participation of Allen Callahan and Rachel Havrelock that makes it so special. In Allen and Rachel, we have two scholars who approach the Body of Jesus from distinct and unusual perspectives.

Allen is one of the leading African-American theologians working today. An expert in biblical languages and literature, biblical theology, and hermeneutics, he is the author of The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, a path-breaking study of black culture and its creative and resistive appropriation of the biblical narrative. The meaning of Jesus is central to this work, which Callahan traces in texts from W.E.B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison.

Rachel is a biblical scholar as well. But she is a professor of Jewish Studies. Rachel thus approaches Jesus through the religious and cultural tradition from which he emerged. The result is a fascinating recontextualization of Jesus’s life and teachings – one that also has ramifications of our understanding of his bodily manifestation.

Bringing together an African-American and Jewish perspective on the Body of Jesus, Allen and Rachel will engage in a dialogue that promises to be one of CHF’s most fascinating events.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Discussion

The Body of Jesus

#611: Sat, Nov. 13 2:00 - 3:00 PM

Alfred Barr's Diagram

Tania Bruguera represents this fluid situation like few other artists working today. Born in Havana, educated in Chicago, and now mostly based in Paris, she has, over the last decade and half, emerged as one of the most influential forces in the global art world. Her work has been shown at the biennials of Venice, São Paulo, Istanbul, Gwangju, Moscow, Santa Fe, and Havana, as well as Documenta, the quinquennial exhibition in Kassel widely considered to be the apex of contemporary art. Earlier in 2010, Tania had her first museum retrospective, a tremendous honor for an artist still considered in the early part of her career. That show, organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, also yielded a beautiful catalogue.

Tania Bruguera

I, myself, fell in love with Tania’s work when I first saw it at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in 2004 – and I have been following it ever since. To me, it uniquely combines poetry and politics, body and intellect, observation and participation. It often takes the form of performances, some featuring Tania herself, others deploying actors or activating the audience. The themes vary, too, although they are almost always political and often reflect on Tania’s native Cuba along with the motifs of surveillance and freedom.

Goya, Disasters of War

Picasso, Guernica

To me, Tania’s work constitutes a crucial advance, combining, as it does, the fields of political and performance art. In regard to the former, she is continuing a project of artistic witnessing pioneered by such figures as Goya and Picasso and energized in the 1960s by feminist, anti-war, and postcolonial movements. In regard to the latter, she draws on such sources as Allan Kaprow’s scripted yet improvisational Happenings, the anarchic antics of Japan’s Gutai group, and the ludic body work of the Viennese Actionists, like Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch, who sought to overcome the separation between artist and medium in an act of collective transference. Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American artist of mystical femininity, is an important reference point as well.

Günter Brus, Selbstbemalung

Herman Nitsch, Orgien Mysterien Theater

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Works in Mexico

These influences have inspired such indelible works as The Burden of Guilt (1997-1999) in which Tania recovered a Cuban legend about the conflict between the island’s indigenous peoples and the invading Spaniards. Unable to resist the conquerors, the natives committed collective suicide by ingesting dirt, an act that is echoed in the Cuban phrase comer tierra (“to eat dirt”), to survive in the face of calamity. In the performance, Tania donned a lamb carcass and consumed a mixture of dirt and salt water for several hours. It is a gesture of nearly unbearable poetic intensity, characteristic of so much of Tania’s work.

Tania Bruguera, The Burden of Guilt

Another favorite is Untitled (Havana, 2000), a performance in which the audience was invited to enter a cave-like tunnel. There, amidst layers of rotting sugarcane (the cash crop of Cuba’s colonial economy), they encountered naked men (the indigenous population strapped of their humanity? the slaves working the plantations?), as well as a television screen with looped but silent footage of Fidel Castro’s speeches (the liberation from the yoke? the failed promise of revolution?). Like all the best art, the piece enjoined a multiplicity of meanings, a situation that was only heightened by the Cuban authority’s decision to close it after just one day.

Tania Bruguera, Untitled (Havana, 2000)

More recently, Tania returned to Havana to stage the extraordinary Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version). Having installed a podium and microphone, she invited members of the audience to ascend to the stage and speak completely freely for one minute. After a long pause, a woman followed the invitation weeping as she grasped the microphone. Two people in military dress placed a white dove on her shoulder, a reference both to the universal symbol of peace and a famous speech by Castro. Almost forty others followed, enacting a freedom not readily granted by the Cuban authorities.

 Indeed, in the days following the performance, the country’s arts administrators renounced the comments made in the course of the event, claiming that they had discredited the Cuban Revolution.

There are many more brilliant works in Tania’s oeuvre, including a growing number addressing global issues from the effects of neoliberalism to new forms of policing. All of them will come up in the conversation she will have at the CHF – an event that is certain to be one of the highlights of this year’s Festival.

Hamza Walker

What promises to make Tania’s CHF appearance particularly fascinating is her interlocutor: Hamza Walker. One of the country’s leading voices in the field of contemporary art, Hamza is the Associate Curator and Director of Education at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. The “Ren” is one of the truly great art institutions in our city, a bastion for the avant-garde, and a veritable barometer of what is (or soon will be) important in the art world. In his role at the Ren, Hamza has organized some of the most important exhibits of the last years, many of them – including Black Is, Black Ain’t; Meanwhile, in Baghdad...; and A Perfect Union... More or Less – overtly dealing with political issues.

I can’t wait to hear the conversation that will develop between Tania and Hamza and to see what insights and surprises the two will have in store for us!

One last note – like all our programming in the visual arts, this event is made possible by Richard Gray whose generous gift underwrites the annual Richard Gray Visual Art Series. Thank you!

UPCOMING EVENTS

Discussion

Tania Bruguera and Hamza Walker: Sculpting Politics, Debating Art
Richard Gray Visual Art Series

#103: Sun, Oct. 24 11:30 - 12:30 PM

But it’s not just the creative types who populate the CHF stage. We regularly hear from key figures in the world of politics and higher education – the folks who set the larger parameters for the humanities in our country.

Jim Leach

 
Morton Schapiro

Last year, we formalized these conversations into an annual series on the state of the humanities. The first event was as high-powered as can be, featuring National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Jim Leach in conversation with Northwestern University president Morton Shapiro. (To see the video, just click here).

Top-level engagement with a local angle continues this year in a discussion between Cathy Davidson and Michael Hogan.

Davidson was recently nominated by President Obama as a member of the National Council on the Humanities. A prominent Duke University professor of literature and interdisciplinary studies, she is a national leader in the field of digital humanities and the founder of HASTAK, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaborative. The author of such acclaimed books as Reading in America: Literature and Social History, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, and The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, she will also be discussing her brand-new book, New You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

Cathy Davidson

Michael Hogan is the recently appointment President of the University of Illinois, a university that has long been at the forefront of technological innovation, including in the humanities. Hogan’s scholarship is in the field of American diplomatic history, where his widely respected publications include such titles as The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952, America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941, The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the American Century, and Hiroshima in History and Memory.

Michael Hogan

The conversation between Davidson and Hogan promises to be an extraordinary occasion, bringing together two of the most influential people in the humanities today. Their free-wheeling dialogue will be the kind of event that can only happen at the CHF.

RELATED EVENT

The State of the Humanities

UIC Forum - Main Hall AB: Nov. 5, 11:00 AM 

At the CHF, we are lucky to have patrons who are as excited about such work as we are. Cody and Deborah Engle are among them. Long-time supporters of the organization (Cody is a former board member, Deb a current one), they have underwritten a series of lectures that has brought some of the country’s most influential scholars to the festival.

Just consider the last two years: In 2010 for our festival on “The Body,” they sponsored Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago’s brilliant philosopher and classicist – and one of the leading intellectuals of our time. Not just that. They were keen to have hear speak on a truly pressing issue – to intervene, in other words, in one of the debates that truly matter. Nussbaum did not disappoint. In a tour de force that was as much philosophy as it was public policy, she addressed the crucial concept of “disgust.” It was the question of lesbian/gay equality that was foremost in Nussbaum’s mind – and she stunned her audience with her critique of sexual Otherness and her call to substitute in its place a sense of common humanity. The intellectual ambition was palpable, not least because it changed the very foundations of debates on questions like gay marriage. (You can listen to Nussbaum’s talk here.)

The Engle Lecture of 2011 was no less far-reaching. That year, we presented Columbia University journalism professor Sylvia Nasar. World-renown for A Beautiful Mind – her book on John Nash that was the basis for the film with Russell Crowe – she had just published a seminal history of economic thought. But Grand Pursuits was so much more. It doubled as an account of the modern condition, particularly in light of the fact that economics is the tool that has allowed our species to understand and change social conditions on a large scale. It’s exactly the kind of work Cody and Deb like to champion – scholarship that at once reflects on the human condition and explores our ability to transform it for the good. (Check out the event here.)

This year, we are continuing the Engles’ great tradition with a lecture by one of America’s leading sociologists, who also happens to be a native of Chicago. Eric Klinenberg, professor at New York University, came to national prominence in 2002 with the publication of Heat Wave. In the book, he homed in on the devastating week in July 1995 when over 700 Chicagoans succumbed to record temperatures. In doing so, Klinenberg developed a new form of analysis – a “social autopsy” of all the demographic, institutional and political factors that led to the catastrophe. In the first instance, then, Heat Wave was a study of tragedy and urban failure in Chicago. But the book had ramifications far beyond the city. Heat waves kill more Americans in a typical year than all other natural disasters combined. And Klinenberg’s analysis revealed that changes in residential patterns are a crucial factor – people living (and dying) at home alone.

It was the first inkling of what became Klinenberg’s bestselling book of 2012, the fascinating and widely discussed Going Solo. The study reflects on some extraordinary demographic shifts: In 1950, only 22 percent of American adults were single. Today, more than 50 percent are, and roughly one in every seven adults lives alone. Adults living alone, in fact, make up a larger percentage of U.S. households than the nuclear family. These massive sociological transformations are the jumping-off point for a truly ambitious analysis. For one, Klinenberg explores the immediate effects and benefits of this shift for our country. Even more far-reaching, though, he contextualizes the new demographic realities in the past, present, and future – both of America and the world at large. Humans, after all, have lived in groups from the moment of evolution of Homo sapiens. And with the rise of living alone, we might be witnessing a world historical transformation.

Eric Klinenberg will return to Chicago to discuss Going Solo at the festival. And I know that Cody and Deb Engle will be in the front row debating the implications of another piece of scholarship that truly matters.

Related Program 

 

Going Solo: Eric Klinenberg on the State of American Society
Deborah and S. Cody Engle Program

605: Fri, Nov. 9 6:00 - 7:00 PM

This is a classic question for biological anthropology. Why is it that humans walk on two limbs rather than four? Our closest living relatives do that latter, although both chimpanzees and gibbons can walk on two feet when the situation calls for it. We, of course, do it habitually; and on top of that, we can run. But why?

The most recent answers to these questions are fascinating – and what’s more, they have unleashed a craze among runners across the world: barefoot running.

Daniel Lieberman

The scientist at the center of this scholarly and athletic revolution is Harvard’s Daniel Lieberman. A professor of human evolutionary biology as well as an avid runner, Dan has undertaken pioneering work on the evolution of locomotion. In the process, he has proposed answers to a series of key questions: when, how and why did early hominins become bipeds? When, how and why did humans become so exceptional as long distance endurance runners? How do bipedal humans maintain stability when standing, walking and running? And how does the human foot work during running with and without shoes?

It is the last question – and Dan’s fascinating answers – that have underwritten the current fascination with barefoot running and the, only slightly paradoxical, development of a shoe industry supporting it (just google “barefoot running shoes”).

Barefoot Running Shoes

Dan will share his cutting-edge research with us at the CHF.

John Polk

He will be joined by John Polk, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois. Yes – John is a good friend and colleague of mine in Champaign. And a few years ago, he was Dan’s postdoctoral student, working in his lab to develop new methods to reconstruct human evolution. Now, John is a comparative anatomist – and that led him to the following question: what could I learn from studying the gaits of different animals? Fast forward to the University of Illinois where John was able to procure a herd of sheep that happily, he assures me, exercises on treadmills along with the university’s track team. John will present this work – and yes, there will be video!

I hope Frank Shorter, the last American medalist in the Olympic marathon and another CHF presenter, will be there for the event. I can’t wait to ask him if the sheep running on treadmills will turn him into a barefoot runner.

Der Standard homepage on the morning of August 19, 2010. The top story announces the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq.

Various thoughts usually come to me during this daily exercise. One invariably turns on the miracle of the internet (along with memories of my father sending me weekly clippings from Austrian papers when I came to the United States to go to college in 1990). Another concerns the odd sensation of simultaneity, the recognition that what is news in Chicago is also news in Vienna, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. It is a moment when the “time-space compression” – the resonant phrase geographer David Harvey used to characterize our postmodern condition – seems at its greatest.

And yet, difference persists. We may hear the same news at the same time, but its meaning varies – a lot.

Ideology obviously matters, the kind that has MSNBC applauding the drop of the unemployment rate to 10% while FOX News fumes about the administration’s failure to get people back to work. But that is pretty straightforward stuff, easily decoded by any media-savvy observer.

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC

Bill O'Reilly of Fox News

More interesting are the deep-seated cultural distinctions that continue to exist. Read any European story about U.S. health care, for example, and you will see an entirely different world of assumptions, quite independent of political affiliation. To the European press and its readers, it is simply puzzling why the quest to provide coverage for all Americans should be so controversial.

Homepage of ORF, Austria's public broadcasting company, on the morning of August 19, 2010. The headline reads "Sex shop yes, Mosque no? The bigotted debate over "Ground Zero"  in the USA."

The same is true in reverse. From an American perspective, the French injunction against wearing religious insignia in schools or the Swiss plebiscite prohibiting minarets seem quite absurd (until the rather shocking debate on the mosque near Ground Zero made the US look a lot more like Europe).

"STOP: Yes to the Minaret Ban."  The poster advertising Switzerland's controvertial plebiscite.

All this is to say that culture still matters and that the world of news, while ever-increasingly global, also remains profoundly local.

This is the fascinating situation we will explore in the panel Ourselves as Others See Us. The event is a veritable CHF classic. For several years, we have been bringing together U.S.-based journalists from across the globe, and this year’s trio – Tan Yingzi of China Daily’s Washington Bureau; José Díaz-Briseño, Washington correspondent for Mexico City’s Reforma; and Maria Lipman, editor in chief of the policy journal of Moscow’s Carnegie Center – is especially distinguished. They will discuss Obama’s America with Washington Post political writer Peter Slevin, showing us that, global village-rhetoric notwithstanding, we still live in a world of fascinating and confounding cultural difference.

Our Bodies, Ourselves

I am speaking of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the organization that has been publishing the eponymous book in ever-expanding editions since 1973. Formerly known as the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, it is one of the great products of the feminist movement, educating countless women on their bodies and giving the medical establishment a real awareness of the specificity of women’s experience.

Judy Norsigian

I owe my own appreciation for Our Bodies Ourselves to my dear friend and colleague Rebecca Stumpf. Now, Becky is a primatologist, which means that she studies our closest biological relatives in an effort to draw inferences on the evolution of our species. It is amazing work that regularly takes her to various field sites in Africa where she observes chimpanzees in the wild. Yes – think Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.

Rebecca Stumpf

A couple of years ago, Becky and I were having lunch – and as we were telling each other about our respective research, we realized that, our different methodologies notwithstanding, we were ultimately interested in very similar questions. I had undertaken work on lesbians and gays in an effort to understand contemporary transformations of human sexuality. Becky, too, was interested in the topic. In particular, she was trying to reconstruct the gender dynamics in the evolution of human sexuality. In the field, Becky had paid particular attention to female chimps, observing their mate choices and trying to ascertain whether they had sexual agency. Ultimately, we both tried to understand what is and isn’t “natural” when it comes to sexuality.

Here is the beauty of being an academic: as we were talking, we both had the same thought – why don’t we teach a course together? And that’s what we did.

We have now taught Sex in Nature and Culture twice, once at the undergraduate and once at the graduate level (check out our syllabus here). They have been among the most rewarding experiences I have had at the University of Illinois. I can’t begin to recount all the things I have learned from Becky – and we have been having a lot of fun debating topics from the biological status of monogamy to the evolutionary adaptation of the female orgasm. 

But to return to Our Bodies Ourselves. Becky and I were teaching our course this past spring when the possibility arose of inviting Judy Norsigian to the CHF. I mentioned it in class, and Becky’s eyes immediately lit up. To her, Our Bodies Ourselves is a key reference point and one that had a direct impact on her own decision to pursue research with implications for women’s health issues. (If you are curious to see what this looks like in scientific practice, check out Becky’s major NSF grant on “Comparative Primate Microbial Biology”.)

I can’t wait to see what Becky thinks of Judy’s talk! We’ll probably talk about it over lunch. And who knows – some other cool idea might emerge in the process…

UPCOMING EVENTS

Lecture

Co-author of Our Bodies, Ourselves—Doris Conant Lecture on Women and Culture

#508: Fri, Nov. 12 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Stan Stearns

Two professors of communication, Northwestern’s Robert Hariman and Indiana’s John Lucaites, have joined forces to elucidate this phenomenon. The result of this collaboration is a remarkable book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (2007). There, Robert and John develop a new framework for the critical appreciation of iconic photographs as dynamic forms of public art. The book made a real splash in the academy.

 
Dorothea Lange

But Robert and John didn’t stop there. They continued to develop their framework and turned their project into a website, also called No Caption Needed. There, the two post brilliant analyses of the visuals animating our society, writing some remarkable cultural criticism in the process. Often, their focus is on the genre of photojournalism; and they manage to uncover the economic conditions, political underpinnings, and visual cues that make those images work.

Nick Ut

Robert Frank

I just love this project! The work speaks to so many relevant issues in our culture. And I am always exhilarated when high-powered scholars find innovative ways to communicate their findings to the general public.

Walker Evans

I am thrilled, therefore, that Robert and John accepted our invitation to present No Caption Needed at the CHF. With the body as the focus of so much iconic photography, the fit was just perfect.

Joe Rosenthal

What’s more, though, is that we will bring Robert and John into conversation with the art world. Joining them on the CHF stage will be two members of Chicago’s great photography scene: Karen Irvine and Brian Ulrich.

Brian Ulrich, Copia Series

Brian Ulrich, Dark Stores Series

Brian Ulrich, Thrift Series

Karen is a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, one of the real gems of our city. The MOCP, as it is known in art circles, has mounted some of the greatest exhibits Chicago has seen over the last few years, including definitive shows by such photographic greats as Aaron Siskind, Mary Ellen Mark, Lee Friedlander, André Kértesz, and Robert Heinecken. Karen has worked on a number of these. In addition, though, she has a real interest in photojournalism, particularly when it comes to its porous boundary with art photography.

Brian Ulrich, Dark Stores Series

Brian Ulrich, Copia Series

Brian Ulrich, Thrift Series

Brian, for his part, is one of the great young photographers in the country. A graduate of Columbia College’s renown photography department, he gained initial attention with the series Copia, started when George W. Bush encouraged the country to shop in response to the attacks of 9/11. The result is a remarkable series on the melodrama and mundanity of consumption, shown both at the Art Institute and the MCA. Like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank before him, Brian manages to combine formal elegance with ethnographic richness and to transport a critical agenda without ever resorting to exploitation. (You can check out all his work at his excellent website.)

Brian Ulrich, Copia Series

Over the years, Brian has expanded his visual investigation of the world of consumption. The series Thrift focuses on second-hand stores, while Dark Stores, Ghostboxes and Dead Malls illuminates the architectural corpses of our age, temples of consumption abandoned to rot in America’s urban and suburban landscapes. That latter series, started before the current financial crisis, has been positively prescient, propelling Brian to the forefront of American image makers. His art is featured regularly in The New York Times, and he has contributed to such publications as The New Yorker, Newsweek, Fortune, Spin, and Wired. So he, too, will have quite a bit to say about the boundary between art and photojournalism.

Brian Ulrich, Dark Stores Series

Brian Ulrich, Thrift Series

I am thrilled that we are bringing Robert, John, Karen, and Brian together for this conversation. They will benefit from one another’s perspectives, and so will all of us in the audience. It’s a great Midwestern collaboration – the kind that proves why our part of the country has long been at the forefront of cultural innovation, in journalism, art, and beyond.

This fall, we will welcome Michael Witmore to discuss his work on digital Shakespeare. Now what does that mean? Mike, as he is known, is at the forefront of a group of humanists who are pioneering electronic approaches to the study of the great texts. He uses things like bioinformatics, corpus linguistics, and probability clouds to do so – strange new technologies that are completely changing the way we think about the canon.

Michael Witmore

As an expert in early modern English literature, Mike is particularly keen to apply the new devices to Shakespeare – and he uses them to spot previously unrecognized patterns in his words. It’s a fascinating marriage of the humanities and technology and the subject of a book Mike is writing under the title “Shakespeare by the Numbers.”  Mike’s research has propelled him to the forefront of international scholarship and into one of the most influential positions in the global world of Shakespeare.

A former member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (which is our partner in the presentation), he was recently appointed Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. It is the world’s largest repository of Shakespeare materials and holds major collections of other rare Renaissance books, manuscripts, and works of art.

The Folger Shakespeare Library

I am thrilled that this year’s Festival will feature this pioneering scholar. Just like last year, when we had the chance to hear from Ania Loomba about her path-breaking work on postcolonial Shakespeare, this year’s program on digital Shakespeare will take us right to the cutting-edge of the humanities. Only at the CHF!

RELATED EVENT

Shakespeare by the Numbers

Poetry Foundation: Nov. 13, 11:00 AM

No contemporary anthropologist practices this maxim with greater verve than Michael Taussig. In a career spanning 40 years, the Columbia University Professor has produced some of the most startling and influential writings to ever come out of the discipline.

Michael Taussig, One of Anthropology's Great Lecturers

In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, the book that made him a star in 1980, he explored the contradictions of capitalism from the vantage point of its indigenous response, a radical intervention that upended more conventional approaches to globalization and started a prolonged debate about the intersection of anthropology and Marxist analysis.

He followed this up with another classic, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987), in which he postulated South America’s colonial history as an ongoing form of terror and shamanism as a resistive form of healing. Taussig did so with what has become his trademark, an unmatched literary style that freely mixes personal experience with critical analysis and ethnographic observation with philosophical reflection.

 
Michael Taussig with Don Pedro in his Garden, Columbia 1977

It’s a style whose mesmerizing effects are hard to describe. Fortunately, I don’t have to attempt it, since I can just invite the CHF audience to what promises to be one of the true highlights of the 2011 Festival on tech·knowledgē: a lecture by Michael Taussig with a typically provocative title: “Beauty and the Beast: The Monstrous Side of Plastic Surgery.”

The talk is drawn from a book he is currently writing on one of the more puzzling phenomena in contemporary South America, the morbid fascination with, even delight in, plastic surgeries that end up disfiguring or killing the patient. Rather than chalking it up to the sadism of a perverted culture, Taussig proposes to see it as a complex response to larger geopolitical constellations – a notion he approaches through his term “cosmic surgery.” I can’t wait to hear his elucidation of this tantalizing idea.

But I am delighted about Taussig’s appearance for yet another reason. It is the first in a new collaboration with the University of Chicago Press. Taussig is one of the star authors of the publishing house, which has issued Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man along with such other provocations (in the best sense) as My Cocaine Museum, Law in a Lawless Land, Walter Benjamin's Grave, What Color Is the Sacred?, and the forthcoming I Swear I Saw This.

 
Charles Bernstein

There is no finer academic publishing house in the country than the University of Chicago Press. A local gem, it is also a national and international powerhouse – something that will also be in evidence in a second program the press is co-presenting: the appearance of poet Charles Bernstein, another star author. (Check out his just-released Attack of the Difficult Poems.)

It’s a fabulous lineup – and the first in what I hope will be a long-standing collaboration!

RELATED EVENT

Lecture

Beauty and the Beast: The Monstrous Side of Plastic Surgery

409: Sat, Nov. 5 1:30 - 2:30 PM

Michael Bérubé

Across the country, these institutions responded to the fascinating transformations in humanistic practice that had characterized the 1980s and 1990s. What had been a highly specialized pursuit strongly demarcated by traditional disciplinary boundaries had rapidly become a much broader conversation. Historians wanted to talk to anthropologists about culture; anthropologists wanted to hear everything about the close readings of texts from the literary folks; and everyone wanted to learn about “theory” – an amorphous term that designated the mostly French thinkers (Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Baudrillard) who galvanized the late 20th-century academy.

Michael had been trained as a literary scholar with a specialization on 20th-century American literature. And he had published a widely acclaimed book, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, that investigated the process of canon formation through a comparison of Thomas Pynchon with African-American modernist poet Melvin Tolson. But what had really put him on the map of the interdisciplinary academy was his second monograph, Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. It chronicled his family’s response to the birth of his son Jamie who was born with Down syndrome and interspersed that account with a cogent critique of America’s (mental) health care system and society’s construction of disability more generally. The book was instantly hailed as a touchstone in the then emerging field of disability studies – the kind of interdisciplinary field that had become plausible in the course of the 1980s and 1990s.       

At Illinois, Michael became an instant model as well as a friend and mentor. What I loved about his approach to scholarship was his emphasis on intellectual camaraderie, the notion that, in addition to quiet time at the library or in front of the computer, humanists needed a space to exchange ideas and learn from one another. The IPRH was that space – and I spent many afternoons and evenings at the building, hearing lectures by visiting scholars or taking part in various interdisciplinary seminars. Michael presided over all of this, creating a wonderful vibe of intellectual curiosity and open exchange. It’s what I sought to continue when, in 2003, I became director of the IPRH. In that role, I also came to know its local peers – and I was delighted to realize that the same spirit of shared inquiry and vibrant debate also characterized the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, and the Institute for the Humanities at UIC.

Meanwhile, Michael was becoming a prominent public intellectual. In addition to his work in disability studies, he became an important commentator on the state of the humanities and the status of academic labor more generally. He published such books as Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, Rhetorical Occasions: On Humans and the Humanities, and What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education. And he began to write frequently for The New York Times among other national publications. At the same time, his blog became an academic sensation – and his fans are fervently hoping for a fast-approaching end to the current hiatus.

And then, Michael left Illinois. He was lured away by a fellow Big 10 institution – Pennsylvania State University. But it wasn’t just the beautiful campus at University Park. Michael was offered to be the inaugural holder of the Paterno Family Professorship. Yes, that’s right! The legendary coach of the Nittany Lions is an ardent supporter of the humanities – and when he endowed a professorship in the English department, Penn State had the extraordinary luck of snagging Michael. And yes – I do think that Paterno’s invitation to spend home games on the sidelines had something to do with Michael’s decision to accept the offer. It was just too perfect for the biggest sports nut I know in the academy (if you want to see true passion, start talking hockey with Michael…).

One of my goals for the CHF is to make the festival a showcase for the great work being done in the humanities in our part of the country – and the Big 10 has a big role in that. With this in mind, I was delighted to be able to reach out to my old friend and mentor. And I was thrilled when Michael, who now heads the Institute for the Arts and Humanities (the Penn State counterpart of the IPRH), not only came up with a wonderful program to be co-presented by the university but agreed to take part himself.

Susan Squier

“Boundaries of Life in a Biomedical Age” will pair Michael with Susan Squier, another stand-out member of Penn State’s English Department and the author of such widely acclaimed books in science and technology studies as Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine, and Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet. Together, they will explore the philosophical and literary ramifications of recent advances in biomedical technology, including embryo adoption, stem cell research, and intra- and inter-species organ transplants. It will be a fascinating conversation!

And while he’s in Chicago, we will make sure to ask Michael about the future of the humanities. He was just elected President of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the professional organization of America’s literary scholars and one of the most influential academic organizations in the world. Stay tuned for the great things he is certain to come up with in that role!

RELATED EVENT

Boundaries of Life in a Biomedical Age

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 6, 3:00 PM

It’s not often that I find myself sitting in church and loving every minute of it.

Actually, having grown up Jewish and secular at that, I don’t find myself in church much at all. Sure, there’s the occasional wedding, to say nothing of the conscientious traipsing through the various instantiations of Europe’s ecclesiastical culture. But the fact remains: church is not really me.

Well, that might change after the transcendent experience I had at First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple, when I had the chance to worship at the altar of performance art under the guidance of its high priestess, Marina Abramović.

But let me start at the beginning: who doesn’t love a church where the pastor cracks a truly funny joke to welcome the flock packed into his sanctuary? Reverend Phil Blackwell looked up at the nearly 1,000 folks in the standing room-only hall and said this: “When we have an event this big, it’s called Easter…”

Then, Marina took the stage. And it’s hard to describe this woman’s truly magical appeal. I don’t think I have ever been in the presence of someone so instantly charismatic. That would be quite enough for this diva-worshipper. But Marina is so much more – stern, tough, wise, and funny. Yes, FUN-NY!

How about this bit: “How many performance artists does it take to screw in a light bulb?... I don't know, I was only there for 6 hours.”

When Marina wasn’t cracking jokes, she laid out the most compelling raison d’être for art I have heard in – well, maybe – ever. It turns on the total commitment to a vision, even, and especially when, it involves the unthinkable. In a way, it seems that Marina is haunted by her imagination, compelled to enact the very fantasies that most haunt her. This, in any case, explains what seems to be the startling contradiction between Marina’s death-defying oeuvre and her near-paralyzing anxiety to bask in the reflective glow of hundreds of her most ardent fans (we practically had to talk her down from a panic attack before she took the stage). But it all makes sense. For art to be truly uncompromising, it has to entail real sacrifice. If it’s easy, it’s nothing at all.

What’s more, Marina has figured out a way to pare art down to its very core. I saw her defining show The Artist is Present  at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But I only now realize that I didn’t get it – at all! Sure, I was intrigued by her feat of endurance, sitting motionless in MoMA’s atrium for three months, staring down whoever had the nerve to take the seat across from her. But it was during her talk at the church that I grasped the larger aesthetic project: how her work has gradually become less dependent on props (as in her legendary 1974 piece Rhythm 0, in which she allowed the audience to interact with her by using such objects as roses, scissors, whips, as well as a gun) to focus on what really matters in performance art: the intersection of time and presence. It was in that context that the endurance piece at MoMA, having started with two chairs and a table, ended up with just two chairs. Several weeks into the performance, Marina realized that “the table was not necessary.” I had heard the line. But it seemed a bit of an affectation. Table or no table – what’s the difference? Well, if you are striving to isolate the true essence of presence, then ANY prop is one too many. And it is in this context that Marina is currently looking for ways to pare down performance even further. I cannot wait to see what she comes up with.

But let me return to the magic for one last moment. After 20 minutes or so of equally insightful and witty explication of her career, Marina turned down the church lights. She was going to show clips of seminal performances by various artists. But as she stood at the bimah, framed by candles and the coruscating light streaming through the stained-glass windows, she became what she talked about: total presence.

When it was all over, nobody, it seemed, wanted to leave. For several minutes, people simply kept sitting in the pews, quietly reflecting on the power of the moment. And then, Marina was mobbed by her fans!

 If Marina is right, only those of us in church that day had the experience of true presence. But for everyone else, there is great consolation. We have it all on film, ready to share with anyone who wants to get a sense of that magical evening in Chicago.

Thank you, Marina!

Compagnia TPO's Kindur

Part of my aesthetic shock had to do with my utterly confounded expectations. Never having seen TPO live (and believe me, the web clips don’t even begin to render the experience), I had come to the MCA in mind of the conventional paradigm of “children’s theater”: something along the lines of Broadway for kids, with broad acting, feel-good sing-alongs, and a well-meaning moral at the end. I’m not sure what I thought TPO would do along such principles, but I guess I imagined that its three Icelandic sheep would learn a valuable lesson about tolerance and compassion (not, as Jerry Seinfeld said, that there is anything wrong with that…).

Jasper Johns, Three Flags

The reality, however, is far more compelling. For one, TPO’s show is about Icelandic sheep the way Jasper Johns’s paintings are about American flags. This is to say that, while grounded in real-world inspiration, their genius lies in the formal manipulation of the seemingly familiar. So, yes, sheep are involved and Iceland is referenced – but just like with Johns, the drama occurs on a much higher level of abstraction and with the constant goal of aesthetic innovation.

Pipilotti Rist at MoMA

Another way of saying the same thing is that TPO produces avant-garde art. Yes, it comes in the guise of “children’s theater” – but its immediate reference points are some of the cutting-edge developments in contemporary art. The utterly striking visual world of TPO, for example, put me in immediate mind of the great Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist and her hypnotic, color-drenched films. Not since her remarkable installation in the atrium of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2008/09 have I seen a similarly potent effect of visual saturation.

Rirkrit Tiravanija cooking pad thai

TPO are also masters of relational aesthetics. The influential avant-garde paradigm is characterized by an attempt to break the conventional relationship between art, artist, and viewer. Instead of confronting the audience with finished products (like Johns’s flags), relational aesthetics activates the viewer as part of the art work itself. A great example is the work of art star Rirkrit Tiravanija, who famously cooks Pad Thai at galleries and museums and declares the ensuing conviviality the work of art. TPO does something even more remarkable, not least because it involves kids. Somehow, they manage to turn the children in the audience into the protagonists of their avant-garde spectacle. Even as I write this, I’m not sure how they do it – but the result is visually and conceptually breathtaking.

John Cage preparing a piano

TPO also continues the avant-garde tradition of aleatorics, the approach to art making grounded in chance operations. John Cage, its pioneer, would doubtless be thrilled with the direction TPO has taken in this regard, rendering the aesthetics of anarchy through some of the most sophisticated technology currently employed in the world of theater. Indeed, the audience-generated wizardry of the show – simultaneously low key and commanding, but always integral to the proceedings – is one of its great pleasures.

TPO’s Kindur is playing at the MCA through May 15. Don’t miss this extraordinary show!

Compagnia TPO:

Kindur
The Adventurous Journey of Three Icelandic Sheep

May 4-15

I still remember my first encounter with the art of Liza Lou as if it was yesterday. It was at a show at the Krannert Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the winter of 2005. I was taking in one of the more intriguing art offerings I had seen in a while, a show called Over + Over: Passion for Process. It brought together about a dozen artists whose practice is grounded in painfully slow modes of assemblage. The curators linked the resulting objects to the Arts and Crafts movement of a hundred years ago, not least because of the artists’ use of ordinary materials. But there was a strong whiff of obsession in the air as well, a single-mindedness of purpose that markedly separated the work on display from some of the more dominant trends in the art world.

Wade Guyton, Painting (2006)

 
Josh Smith, Untitled (2006)

This, after all, was the moment when trendy figures like Wade Guyton, Josh Smith, and Kelley Walker were bursting onto the scene – producers of variously aleatoric compositions that flooded the art market based on their readily accomplished mechanical and digital production.

Kelley Walker, Black Star Press (2004)

Over + Over was as far from this trend as it gets. I was particularly struck by an assemblage piece by New York artist Tom Fruin. On first glance, it presented a straightforward grid of playing cards. Closer inspection made it clear, however, that the cards stemmed from different decks and were all worn and weathered. All the cards, moreover, appeared multiple times – all, except the Six of Hearts. That one was there only once.

Tom Fruin, Discard (2005)

It’s the title, “Discard,” the finally gave it away. Evidently, the artist rummaged through the streets of New York City in search of playing cards until the moment when had found every card in a full deck. The Six of Hearts was the last – after days, weeks, months, years? – and then he stopped.

The other piece that has stayed with me for all these years was by Liza Lou. It, too, seemed quite ordinary when first glimpsed: a six-pack of Budweiser presented on an unassuming pedestal that gave it the look of a readymade. Only once I came closer did I realize that this was about as far from a Duchampian gesture as you could get. What had looked like the glint of glass from only a few steps away, was actually the reflection of thousands of tiny beads. As I examined the object, I became more and more stupefied by its radical proposition: the transmogrification of an everyday item through an abiding act of labor. From that vantage point, the piece became a startling commentary on American consumer culture, suspending a reflex that takes commodities for granted by confronting them with their true price.

Liza Lou, Windex (1995)

Beading over everyday objects is, in fact, the dominant artistic mode of Liza Lou. And in the context of her oeuvre, “Budweiser” is actually a ‘minor’ piece, something she threw together in mere weeks as opposed to the years she has spent working on her most celebrated pieces. First and foremost, this includes “Kitchen,” a full-scale replica of a functioning kitchen that took four years to complete.

Other projects have taken similar amounts of time – such as her series of presidential portraits, which were completed between 1995 and 2000 – rendering Lou’s work almost mythical, not just for its startling visual effect but in terms of its sheer means of production.

Liza Lou, American Presidents 1-43 (2000)

Someone else who has been struck by Lou’s work for a long time is the CHF’s Artistic Director Emeritus Lawrence Weschler. One of the most trenchant commentators on the contemporary art scene, he has long identified Lou as a key artist of our era. He also sees her as an artist with a unique perspective on America, which is why I am so thrilled that he will be in conversation with her during our fall festival. The event, which will be part of the annual Richard Gray Visual Art Series, promises to be a highlight of this year’s CHF.

No doubt, Ren will ask Lou some of the questions that are on all of our minds: how does she manage to create her extraordinary beaded tableaux? And how long does it really take?

Even more, though, I look forward to hearing her thoughts on the larger meanings of her art. Does she see it as an explicit critique of American culture (the way I took “Budweiser” when I first saw it in Champaign)? And what would that signify in respect to her chosen medium, the bead, with its contradictory overtones of decoration and exertion. Not all that glitters, after all, is…

Related Program 

 

A Conversation with Artist Liza Lou
Richard Gray Visual Art Series

801: Sun, Nov. 11 11:30 - 12:30 PM

Yes, that’s Katinka playing the electric cello!

To me, Katinka embodies what’s great about Chicago’s cultural scene: its excellence, openness, and can-do attitude. So I got together with her to see if she would like to get involved.

She did! And the result will be a world premiere – a piece of contemporary classical music co-commissioned by Katinka and the CHF to be unveiled during the festival in November!

The piece will be a suite for solo cello, to be titled “Oil-Free Blush.” In conversation with our festival theme of The Body, it is inspired by recent findings of the carcinogenic properties of cosmetics. It will be comprised of eight movements, each written by a different composer and titled after a chemical compound found in makeup. And people say contemporary classical music is removed from real life...

Katinka Kleijn

So we will have a world premiere. And to make it even better – several of the composers taking part in the project will share the stage with Katinka to talk about how they created their part of the score. So we will not only hear some avant-garde music but peer right behind the curtain of its very creation.

Who would have thought that a lunch with Katinka would lead to such exciting things...

UPCOMING EVENTS

Performance

Katinka Kleijn: Oil-Free Blush

#712: Sun, Nov. 14 2:30 - 3:30 PM

Some people may think that we invited him because he is one of the most transcendent athletes of all time. And they would be right. The inventor of the sky hook, six-time NBA champion, six-time MVP, and highest scoring player of all time is one of those near-mythical persons who inspire sheer awe. Fitted with an unworldly body and preternatural skills, it was his grace on the court, though, that ultimately transfixed us. To have this man at a festival on The Body will be an incredible treat!

What most people don’t know, however, is that Abdul-Jabbar fits the CHF much beyond this year’s theme. He is, quite simply, far more than “just” an athlete. Always known as one of the most thoughtful and politically astute players in basketball, he is also a long-time practitioner of yoga. Most importantly, however, he is an accomplished scholar. Yes – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a humanist!

He is the author of a number of widely acclaimed books. The first two, Giant Steps (1983) and Kareem (1990), were autobiographies. But he soon went beyond the standard fare expected from top athletes. In 1996, he published Black Profiles in Courage, an inspirational account of African-American heroes who changed American history. He followed this up in 2000 with A Season at the Reservation, a remarkable chronicle of a year he spent as an assistant coach of the Alchesay Falcons, a high school basketball team on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona.

Next came 2004’s Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761^st Tank Battalion, World War II’s Forgotten Heroes, in which Abdul-Jabbar related the incredible story of an all-black battalion during the Battle of the Bulge. Most recently, he came out with On the Shoulders of Giants, a beautiful account, both of the Harlem Renaissance and its immediate impact on himself (Abdul-Jabbar was born in 1947 and grew up as Ferdinand Lewis "Lew" Alcindor, Jr. in 1950s New York City).

All these passions will be part of the conversation we will have with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar!

But it will be even better than that!

Abdul-Jabbar will be joined on the CHF stage by Debra Hawhee. You probably haven’t heard of Debbie, as she is known to all her friends and colleagues. But trust me – you will!

Debra Hawhee

Debbie is one of the most interesting young humanists working on the body today. Trained in the discipline of rhetoric, a small traditional field that concerns itself with the art of effective communication, she is a professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Her dissertation, an ambitious study of the convergence between rhetoric and athletics in ancient Greece, propelled her to the forefront of her discipline. And during the CHF, Debbie will introduce the arguments of Bodily Arts  in a separate lecture. More recently, she has extended her research to the 20th century, issuing an acclaimed study of American literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke, whom Debbie identifies as our era’s defining theorist of the body. 

With her scholarly interest in sports and the body, Debbie will be a wonderful interlocutor for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

But here is the kicker: Debbie is herself a championship basketball player! Yes, this accomplished professor of English is a two-time NCAA Women’s Basketball Champion! She played for the Tennessee Lady Volunteers under legendary coach Pat Summit from 1988 to 1992, winning the 1989 and 1991 national championships before going on to graduate school and her career in academia.

So this is what will happen at the festival: Basketball great and humanities extraordinaire Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will be interviewed by basketball great and humanities extraordinaire Debbie Hawhee in an encounter that will bring together five NCAA basketball championships on one stage (Abdul-Jabbar won three of his own, from 1967 to 1969 at UCLA under that other legendary coach, John Wooden).

Now, tell me if anyone other than the CHF could pull this off?...

Founded in the mid-1920s and fusing aesthetic modernism and American democratic culture, The New Yorker remains a unique combination of journalism, commentary, and criticism – and, lest we forget, some of the most cutting-edge literature around. And while its name and event listings have stayed New York-centric (captured with some tongue in cheek in Saul Steinberg’s famous 1976 cover), the magazine’s utterly cosmopolitan coverage really has made it the most national of publications. It simply feels relevant week after week, whether you are in Champaign or Chicago, Los Angeles or New York.

Saul Steinberg's 1976 cover

So one of the festival events I am really thrilled about is the Baskes lecture by Jill Lepore, one of The New Yorker’s standout writers!

First, though, a shout-out to the Baskes family. Without their generous support, this wonderful event would not be possible. Like a number of other families and individuals, they have created an endowment whose annual income allows CHF to invite the kind of national and international figures our audience associates with the festival’s marquee events. Thank you!

Jill Lepore

So back to Jill Lepore, one of the most remarkable intellectuals working in the US today. Lepore is a historian of 17th and 18th-century America who established her reputation with her first book, the multi-award winning The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998). It was a highly innovative study, approaching a brutal 17th-century conflict between colonists and Native Americans through the diaries, books, articles, and plays that gave it various retrospective meanings. Lepore followed this effort with the 2005 book New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. It is a remarkable account of an infamous 1741 episode in which a series of fires led to an orchestrated panic and the violent deaths of dozens of black men. Lepore is masterful in her recreation of 18th-century Manhattan (where a full fifth of the population was enslaved), earning her a much deserved nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.

Lepore is an amazing historian – but, and this is less common among academics, she is also a marvelous writer. And that combination brought her to the attention of The New Yorker, leading to her appointment as a staff writer in 2005. Mind you, her day job isn’t too shabby either – she is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, where she also chairs the famed History and Literature Program.

But back to The New Yorker. There, Lepore has been writing a series of widely celebrated articles on notable episodes in the history of American culture. Her topics have been brilliantly eclectic, ranging from dictionary writer Noah Webster to board game inventor Milton Bradley. More recently, she has also gotten political. You might have seen her piece on the historical resonances of the Tea Party Movement, which ran in the May 3 issue. That much-discussed essay will also form the basis of a book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History  that will be published in the fall.

At the CHF, Lepore will speak about yet another fascinating topic: the history of ideas about life and death, the theme of another book currently underway. In particular, she will turn her attention to one of the great old questions: “What came first? The chicken or the egg?” I have a hunch that she will equivocate on that one – but what she will elucidate is the fascinating history by which scientists came to understand that mammals come from eggs.

I listen to The New Yorker podcasts all the time – and I know what a dynamic speaker Lepore is. With such a great topic, we are in for a real treat. All thanks to the Baskes family!

UPCOMING EVENTS

Lecture

Baskes Lecture in History
The Chicken and the Egg: A History of Life

#604: Sat, Nov. 13 12:00 - 1:00 PM

So there we were enjoying the incomparable coolness of the local Barnes & Noble, when, quite randomly, I happened on Jennifer Boylan’s book She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders. I had never heard of the author, and, prior to this moment, had not really paid much attention to the literature on transgendered folks. For a scholar working in the field of lesbian/gay studies, this is actually a rather embarrassing admission – but as is so often the case in the academy, ever-increasing specialization can lead to a peculiar kind of myopia.

She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

I started to read – and within a few minutes, I was in the strange, yet utterly delightful, space you enter when a book takes complete control of you. The account of Boylan’s transition from James to Jennifer literally opened a new world to me. To be sure, there were some similarities to the gay experience, including the “closet” and the question of family acceptance. But I was struck by the differences. If we set aside the overheated rhetoric, homosexuality, after all, is really just a “benign variance,” a perfectly healthy circumstance comparable to left-handedness. Those of us who are able to transcend the shackles of homophobia to live openly lesbian/gay lives really don’t have to do that much, comfortable as we are with our bodies and desires.

Jennifer Boylan

Not so if you are transgendered. As Boylan taught me, the recognition and acceptance of being transgendered is hardly a liberation. On the contrary, it creates an acute sense of being imprisoned in a totally alien body. To read about the decades Boylan spent negotiating this predicament is as heart-breaking as it is eye-opening.

For me, it was the inspiration to delve deeper into the field. And while there are a number of very fine books on the topic – I am particularly fond of Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States – as well as such excellent films as Boys Don’t Cry and Transamerica, Boylan’s She’s Not There remains my favorite. As only the very best writers can do, Boylan uses one story, in this case her own, to illuminate an entire world, changing the way we understand ours in the process.

Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry

Felicity Huffman in Transamerica

I have never met Jennifer Boylan. And I can’t wait to hear her lecture at CHF so that I can thank her in person for teaching me so much.

UPCOMING EVENT

Lecture

Jennifer Finney Boylan: A Life in Two Genders

#401: Sun, Nov. 7 10:00 - 11:00 AM

As Chicagoans, we are fortunate to live in one of the great architectural cities in the world. Not only that. It is a city defined, like few others, by one overarching aesthetic and functional principle: modernism. True, there are considerable differences between such masters as Daniel Burnham and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But like the other architects who have made Chicago what it is (from Frank Lloyd Wright to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and from Bertrand Goldberg to Stanley Tigerman), they were wedded to the modernist ideal of finding an architectural language that could at once respond to and lead technological and urban development. The result was not only the subordination of form to function, but the conception of architecture as a social intervention – an optimistic vision that sees the built environment as an agent of progress. 

Bertrand Goldberg, Prentice Women's Hospital

We don’t think of them this way. But Chicago’s grand public housing projects – like the now demolished Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green – stemmed from this very impulse. They certainly betrayed their modernist roots aesthetically, with clean lines and efficient design. But more than anything, they were modernist in their social vision. Conceived and built in the 1950s and 1960s, the very heyday of the movement, they were an integrated solution to a whole host of urban problems: rapid population growth, urban sprawl, social inequality. And they had their counterparts all across the Midwest and the country at large.

We know how the experiment ended. Instead of models for modern, urban living, Chicago’s housing projects became notorious incubators for narcotics, gangs, and violence. And by the 21^st century, they were gone – bulldozed to make way for mixed-income housing in low-rise buildings. That, at least, is the conventional story. And it has a good amount of truth to it.

Thomas Struth, South Lake Apartments II

But there are counter-narratives as well – representations that seek to redeem aspects of the housing projects’ progressive styling along with the optimism inherent in their original design. At the forefront of this recuperation is an extraordinary group of visual artists.

Thomas Struth, South Dearborn Street 

Thomas Struth, the great German photographer and one of the world’s most widely exhibited artists, is easily the most prominent among them. In 1990, in conjunction with his first major U.S. show held at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the artist spent several weeks photographing Chicago. Most of the images in the series are of downtown, capturing the city’s modernist ethos in its most iconic form. But he was also drawn to Chicago’s public housing projects, particularly the Robert Taylor Homes in Bronzeville. The result is a number of startlingly beautiful photographs that perfectly capture the housing projects’ precarious nature, balanced, as they were, between modernism’s visual elegance and the inhabitants’ wholly unanticipated alienation. In the wake of the demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes (completed by 2007), I see these photos as both a potent critique and wistful memento. At once populated and seemingly empty, they mark and lament a bygone moment in architecture and urban design.

Thomas Struth, South Lake Apartments III

Michael Rakowitz, Dull Roar

Another powerful representation along such lines comes from Chicago-based Michael Rakowitz, currently one of the stars of Documenta and a speaker in our upcoming fall festival. In 2005, he created Dull Roar, a remarkable installation that commemorates the modernist housing project, in this case St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe complex. Much like its Chicago analogues, the St. Louis structure hailed from the 1950s. But its demise happened much earlier, in 1972, amidst racially charged unrest. The widely-televised demolition marked the first major failure of a public housing project, a signal moment across the United States. In his piece, Rakowitz recreates the housing project in plastic tarp, inviting the public to come up-close on a viewing platform. From there, the spectator can witness the implosion, ingeniously orchestrated by deflating the building. So far, so historical. But the poetic intervention happens afterward, when Pruitt-Igoe is re-inflated to repeat the cycle. The building’s demise, in other words, is reversed on a cyclical basis, a gesture I read as a paean, no matter how ambivalent, to modernism’s ongoing promises.

Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex

Michael Rakowitz, Dull Roar

Chicago photographer Jason Lazarus sounds a similarly poetic note of resilience in his extraordinary piece Cabrini-Green housing project (before razing). Created in 2008 in the midst of the housing projects’ multi-year demolition, Lazarus gained entrance into one of the already-condemned buildings. There, he found and documented the following graffiti, written in two hands:

I was here. I was raised here and played here as a child and as a[n] adult. Now I’m leaving here after 30 years with a lot of love and memories. God bless a child with her new home and now I’m leaving my love here and taking it also to the new home. God bless you.

It’s a startling piece, both for its striking formal simplicity and the potency of its moving message. Even more importantly, it reminds us that Chicago’s housing projects were not just the product of a centralized vision of urban renewal, but the lived experience of thousands of people. And their stories, all too easily lost when buildings are torn down, are not just about drugs and violence but the whole panoply of life.

Jason Lazarus, Cabrini-Green Housing Project (before Razing)

Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green

The stories of local residents were also at the center of Jan Tichy’s marvelous Cabrini-Green installation. Realized in 2011 and widely hailed, it coincided with the demolition of the housing project’s last building and took the form of a light installation (the preferred medium of the Chicago-based artist). Working with children from the area, Tichy placed light sources in individual apartments and used them, via poetic transliteration, to tell the residents’ stories. The play of lights was set in motion and continued unabated, albeit on an ever-diminishing scale as the building vanished over the course of several weeks. Thousands witnessed this extraordinary spectacle, which could be seen live, on-line, and at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In its original form, the piece is now gone, of course. But it lives on, in film and photo, and, perhaps most importantly, in the stories Tichy collected.

Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green

Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green

Art has taken us closer and closer to the experience of living in Chicago’s public housing projects. But it’s a writer, Audrey Petty, who has taken the definitive next step. A Chicago-based author of creative non-fiction, Petty has been undertaking an ambitious oral history of the city’s public housing communities. Working in the great tradition of Studs Terkel and Alex Kotlowitz (whose There Are No Children Here remains one of the towering accounts of life in Chicago), she learned firsthand what life in the projects was actually like. Her oral history – titled High Rise Stories and covering the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green along with the Henry Horner Homes and Stateway Gardens – reveals a rich tapestry that translates into a collective story of community, displacement, removal, and relocation. The book will be published at the end of the year in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series, created by yet another great Chicago writer: Dave Eggers.  

 
Audrey Petty

Audrey is a cherished colleague of mine at the University of Illinois, where she is on the faculty in Creative Writing. And I was absolutely thrilled when she agreed to give us a preview of High Rise Stories at the fall festival. Having been taken with the artistic representations of Chicago’s public housing projects for so long, I can’t wait to hear the perspectives Audrey’s oral history approach can reveal. Will it be more wistful memories of a once buoyant but ultimately failed modernism, a celebration of collective resilience in the face of urban plight, or something else entirely? Join me as I find out!

Related Program 

 

High Rise Stories

203: Sun, Oct. 21 2:00 - 3:00 PM

Over the coming months, I will blog about the process of putting together the 2010 Chicago Humanities Festival. But I thought it would be fitting to start with a more general posting on the nature of the humanities – or at least my view of them. What, after all, are the humanities? This question does not come out of the blue. It was put to me on numerous occasions while directing the IPRH, and I am encountering it again in my work with the CHF. It’s a good question – and the answer is far from obvious, not least because the use of the term humanities can get so fuzzy.

That said, a good answer was and is needed – if I was running a program for research in the humanities, after all, I should better be able to define it.

For me, the way to a definition ultimately came through my Austrian background, and the door it opens to a long tradition of German-language scholarship in the humanities. So here it goes:

The German word used for the term in question is Geisteswissenschaft (there are no short German words…). Geisteswissenschaft actually came first; and it was rendered into English as humanities.

Hegel

So what does it mean? The literal translation comes from teasing apart the two terms making up the word: Geist & Wissenschaft. The former is one of those nearly untranslatable German words (think Schadenfreude). But what comes closest is the amalgamation of the terms spirit, mind, and intellect. As such, Geist is something intrinsically human, something possessed by both individuals and collectivities. It is romantic and a bit mystical – and German thinkers from Herder to Hegel were obsessed with it. Wissenschaft seems more straightforward – it is the German word for “science.” But there, too, we encounter something more interesting when we further tease apart the components (Wissen & schaffen), which literally translate as “producing knowledge.”

Herder

What all this leaves us with is a translation of Geisteswissenschaft as “the production of knowledge on the intellect.” That may not seem so helpful, but it actually opens up some rather useful, and perhaps surprising, perspectives.

For one, it leads us into a situation that is unencumbered by the science/humanities split that bogs down so much American thinking. Especially, in the US academy, we are practically obsessed with the distinction; and in consequence, too many folks think of the sciences and humanities as diametric opposites.

The German terminology suggests something else. There, the two relevant terms (Naturwissenschaft & Geisteswissenschaft) are homologous, both emphasizing the production of knowledge. The only difference is the object of scholarship – the natural world in one case and the world of human creation in the other.

To see the sciences and humanities as analogous and fundamentally related is a big part of the philosophy I bring to CHF. It is also a part of the intellectual heritage of my own discipline of anthropology. Its hopeless but valiant ambition of an all-encompassing “science of humanity” comprises the biological and cultural aspects of our species. It thus functions as a microcosm for discussions at the intersection of science and humanities. Indeed, anthropology is often called the most humanistic of sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. I really like it that way!

So the German perspective helps us get over the often tiresome split between the sciences and humanities. At the same time, it hones our attention to another distinction – that between the humanities and the arts. In German, art is Kunst. And before I go on, I should say that I love the arts with a passion. But as a humanities administrator, I need to be able to argue plausibly for a distinction between the humanities and the arts. This is especially crucial at a university, where such debates have implications from intellectual content to funding. But at the CHF, too, we need to be able to explain what makes us different from other endeavors, particularly those in the arts.

Here is how the difference appears through the German lens: Kunst is about experience, while Geisteswissenschaft is about producing knowledge.

As consumers of the arts, we are in the presence of human creativity (the German etymology of Kunst is können, suggesting the ability to create). As consumers of the humanities, we are in the presence of the production of knowledge about human creativity. There is a close relationship here, of course. In many ways, the humanities could not exist without the arts they reflect on. And yet, what we do as humanists is of a fundamentally different order that the work of artists.

This, then, is at the heart of what we do at the CHF: we take our audience from the mere experience of human creativity to its actual understanding.

This explains why CHF programs tend to be so different from other cultural events. They are never rooted in experience alone; they always involve explanation as a central component. They may and often do involve the arts; but they ultimately seek to convey knowledge. Kunst is often on the agenda. But the central object is Wissenschaft.

In practice, this means that we are always interested in going beyond the immediate experience of art. As theater goers, for example, we only see what’s revealed when the curtain is raised. At the CHF, we go right to backstage, explaining how theater is made in the first place. The knowledge gained in the process may range from the history of playwriting to the ways our city’s great theaters go about producing their shows.

What we do at CHF is to take people behind the scenes. In the process, we augment experience with knowledge. CHF has done so for over 20 years and on a scale unmatched in the United States. It is the ultimate venue for Geisteswissenschaft. For me, it is simply a fantasy come true!

Chicago Gay Pride

The festivities commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, when a bunch of courageous drag queens, immensely saddened by Judy Garland’s untimely death, decided to no longer take the harassment that was part and parcel of queer life. Rounded up in a raid at the Stonewall Inn, they famously resisted, inaugurating the modern lesbian/gay liberation movement.

Stonewall Riots

The event has been recalled ever since, first in the US and gradually around the world. And as we have been moving closer and closer to real equality, gay pride celebrations have grown. Our own, here in Chicago, is one of the great events of the summer season, featuring hundreds of amazing floats parading down “Boy’s Town” to the cheers of thousands and thousands of spectators.

Gay Pride 1994

Chicago’s Gay Pride Parade was actually the first I ever attended. The year was 1994 – and it was a special occasion: the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. It was the end of my first year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and I was there with my partner Billy (we had met during the first week of classes). But we were not alone. We were part of a small group of UofC faculty and students who would march in the parade. At the time, it was still not considered self-evident to be “out” at the traditionally conservative institution; but things were changing quickly, with folks like historian George Chauncey blazing a trail for the rest of us. George had just published Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, one of the definitive books in the then-emerging field of queer studies and a tremendous inspiration for many, including myself.

Gay New York

What I remember about that day in 1994 is the sweltering heat and the hours we waited for the caravan to get going – we were all the way in the back, and I swear that the Dykes on Bikes were done with their trek before we even started moving. But no matter. The atmosphere was incredible, with cheers coming from all around us. It got even better once we were on our way, with people throwing us candy and kisses. We didn’t even mind that we had to run most of the time to keep up with the procession – far from being natural partiers, it had not occurred to any of the UofC folks that it would be far more convenient to experience the parade on a float…

The Dykes on Bikes Getting Ready to Lead the Parade

But speaking of convenience. At the CHF, we have a long history of celebrating Gay Pride, and our archives are full of amazing LGBT programs. Just check them out! You will find talks by some of America’s most fabulous queer writers, including Tony Kushner, Jennifer Boylan, Wayne Koestenbaum, E. Patrick Johnson, and Mark Doty & Achy Obejas. Over the years, we have also featured scholarly presentations on lesbian/gay issues by such folks as Martha Nussbaum, Dwight McBride, and Paula Treichler.

Tony Kushner

Achy Obejas

Wayne Koestenbaum

Paula Treichler

Dwight McBride

And let’s not forget America’s favorite sex advice columnist – Chicago’s native son Dan Savage. At the 2010 CHF, he took the stage with his brother Bill for 90 minutes of insight and hilarity. It was amazing – kind of like a Gay Pride Parade…

Matti Bunzl, Dan Savage, and Billy Vaughn at the 2010 CHF

Please note: each week we reveal new fall Festival presenters and programs in our weekly update email. To stay in the know, email update@chicagohumanities.org to be added to our mailing list or check back every week for new blog posts.

Julie and Roger Baskes 

Roger and Julie Baskes, two of Chicago’s great philanthropists, are members of this group. For the past decade, they have underwritten the annual Baskes Lecture in History, an event that has become a fixture and highlight of the CHF. The list of past Baskes lecturers reads like a who’s who of the American historical profession, including such luminaries as David Blight, Robert Darnton, David Hackett Fischer, Anthony Grafton, Jill Lepore, and William McNeill. All of these scholars share a fundamental attribute: they are leading academic figures who speak with equal ease and verve to a general audience. The group thus encapsulates what the CHF is all about – the dismantling of the Ivory Tower separating so much of what’s going on in the academy from the population at large.

This year’s Baskes lecturer fully embodies this principle. Kevin Boyle, professor of history at The Ohio State University, is one of the most widely respected historians of 20^th-century America as well as a supreme story-teller – a scholar with the proverbial novelist’s eye. It was in full force in his celebrated 2004 book Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), it tells the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African-American physician in Detroit. After his 1925 purchase of a home in a previously all-white neighborhood, a mob gathered outside his house; all of a sudden, shots rang out, leading to the death of one of the white assailants. The resulting trials were landmark events, nationally followed and involving the participation of America’s leading lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who had defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial (and had served as counsel to Leopold & Loeb). In Boyle’s masterful telling, we are not only treated to the gripping story itself, but to a rich analysis of its many ramifications – political, social, and legal. It’s an absolute model for the writing of history and an instant classic, both in the graduate seminar room and on the shelves of America’s history buffs.


Arc of Justice

So what does Boyle have up his sleeve for this fall’s festival? Something totally new – and I, for one, can’t wait to hear it! Here’s the short version: after Arc of Justice, Boyle moved from the Roaring ‘20s to the Swinging ‘60s. But just like in his previous research, the story he tells is far from a conventional tale. While the 1960s tend to conjure up strong images of love-ins, flower power, anti-war demonstrations, and civil rights marches, Boyle focuses on the many Americans who regarded the progressive vanguard with considerable suspicion. The result was a political and cultural retrenchment; a phenomenon Boyle calls “the Other ‘60s.” Especially when viewed from a Midwestern perspective, those other ‘60s, he argues, hold the key to understanding the current trajectory of our country.

Boyle’s new book on the 1960s, scheduled to be published by Norton, is highly anticipated among American historians and the many fans of Arc of Justice. And I am delighted that, thanks to the generosity of Roger and Julie Baskes, we are able to present a sneak peek at the CHF. Our partner in this wonderful event is the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University. We commenced our association last year with a widely hailed talk on “Tomorrow’s History” by Boyle’s colleague David Staley. And we greatly look forward to continuing it with many more presenters drawn from the Big 10 powerhouse.

Related Program 

 

The Other 1960s
Baskes Lecture in History

813: Sun, Nov. 11 4:00 - 5:00 PM

Sometimes, though, cable news can be extraordinarily edifying. I remember one such moment. It was in the fall of 2006, and I was watching this show or another, when a guest was announced. It was Rajiv Chandrasekaran. And while the name sounded vaguely familiar from my too-infrequent perusings of The Washington Post, I knew little about the man and his work. Turns out, he was the Post’s bureau chief in Baghdad and had just written an account of life in the city’s Green Zone, the walled-off compound from where Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a democratic Iraq in the months and years after the U.S. invasion.


Rajiv Chandrasekaran

There were tons of Iraq books on the market at the time – urgent critiques of the war and angry defenses, studies of military minutiae and geopolitical analyses. But this was clearly different. Imperial Life in the Emerald City – the humanist in me immediately perked up at the poetic title alone – was neither polemic nor rant. Instead, it was something approaching an ethnographic account of the daily complexities and contradictions of the U.S. administration in and of Iraq.

The interview barely over, I raced to Unabridged Bookstore – the fabulous shop in Lakeview that happens to be right around the corner from where I live. I picked up Chandrasekaran’s book and started reading then and there. And I couldn’t put it down. Here was the rare combination of international policy expert and truly gifted writer. Packed with revelatory information, it was first and foremost an engrossing read – a book that informs you with the seeming effortlessness that only few writers can actually  achieve.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

I wasn’t alone in my assessment. Imperial Life in the Emerald City became a publishing sensation, garnering some of the best reviews of the years and accolades ranging from the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the Oversees Press Club of America Award. It was even made into a movie, Green Zone, a 2010 vehicle starring Matt Damon.

With all this in mind, I was thrilled to learn, sometime in early 2012, that Chandrasekaran was coming out with a new book, this one based on his reporting from Afghanistan. And when we had the chance to invite him to the CHF, we jumped on it!

Little America

It’s clear that we made a great choice. Published in the summer of this year, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan was instantly hailed as required reading for anyone interested in American foreign policy, in our war zones and beyond. Much like in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Chandrasekaran – now the National Editor of The Washington Post – brings an anthropologist’s eye for the telling detail to bear on his topic. And once more, he focuses on the quagmires faced (and produced) by a U.S. administration seeking to establish control over a faraway land. It’s riveting reporting, prescient analysis, and captivating narrative all at once. I can’t wait to hear his presentation at the CHF!

For me, a highlight of this food cluster will be an event with two great anthropologists: Martin Manalansan and Mary Weismantel. The two are leaders in the steadily growing field of food anthropology. They teach huge and immensely popular classes on the topic at Illinois and Northwestern respectively – and they have collaborated in the past based on their shared interest in the anthropology of the senses. Together, they will give us a brief on the key insights developed in the field over the last couple of years.

In a way, food has always been at the center of cultural anthropology. Such early fieldworkers as Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Margaret Mead all wrote about the foodstuffs they found among the groups they visited. And Claude Levi-Strauss even proposed food as the core metaphor for culture (his famous idiom of “the raw and the cooked”). But in all these treatises, food was never the object of study as such – it was part of a larger formation, maybe even a key to it.

It is only in the last two decades or so that scholars like Martin and Mary have developed specialized approaches to the anthropological study of food. And they have done so with real originality.

Martin Manalansan

Martin, who is an expert on Asian American and diasporic cultures, has championed the anthropological study of smell. To him, the olfactory signals in a number of different directions – it evokes nostalgia for homelands and engenders identities in new locales; it serves to demarcate neighborhoods and anchors racializing discourses. Smell may be fleeting, he argues, but the meanings it produces are lasting.

Mary Weismantel

Mary, for her part, is a specialist in the cultures of the Andes, where much of her work has addressed food. Her first book, in fact, was called Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (1989) – and it was a path-breaking study for the way it read the struggles of an indigenous parish of highland Ecuador through the lens of its diet and cuisine. As Mary showed, all the foods eaten by the community were laden with meanings that went far beyond the immediate need for sustenance.

We are what we eat, they say. But as Martin and Mary will show us, we say much more than we think when we eat.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Panel

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner
An Anthropologist's View

#407: Sun, Nov. 7 2:00 - 3:00 PM

To answer in order – a flintknapper is a person who makes tools through the process of lithic reduction, with is a fancy way of saying that they use stones to chip away on other stones in order to create flat surfaces and sharp edges.

Yes, that’s right. We are talking about the archaic tools built by our ancestors thousands of years ago – and that answers the second question. In a festival devoted to the place of technology in the human experience, we decided to start at the very beginning, with the most basic technology humans invented to gain dominion over the world around them.

But we didn’t just go out and get any flintknapper. We got John Shea, one of the world’s leading paleoanthropologists and a regular talking head on such programs as Nova and Alan Alda’s Human Spark. John, a professor at Stony Brook University, is among the world’s foremost experts on the evolution of human behavior, with a particular interest in the interplay of early technology and human development.

Making stone tools is thus part of his scholarly practice and something he started while still a graduate student at Harvard when, the lore goes, he used them to hunt for Cambridge wildlife. More generally, he uses the insights he gains from the experimental manufacture of stone tools to make inferences about their use during the Pleistocene area. His work, in others words, offers us a window into the very beginnings of technology.

We really wanted John to take part in the CHF; and we were delighted when he accepted our invitation. At the Festival, John will give a lecture/demonstration on flintknapping and what it can tell us about the essence of the human experience. It’s the kind of event we love to do at the CHF – and who knows, maybe some of our audience will be inspired to take up flintknapping themselves.

John, for his part, is really looking forward to his big Chicago debut. When I mentioned that the Festival pays its presenters a small honorarium, he just e-mailed back, “Getting paid to make stone tools...in ‘Caveman Heaven’ our Paleolithic ancestors are laughing.”

RELATED EVENT

Flint: Sharpening Stones at the Dawn of Technology

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 13, 11:00 AM

Chef Grant Achatz

But wait 'til you hear about some of our other presenters! The slate we are announcing today is pretty darn awesome. It includes Eric Klinenberg, who may just be the leading sociologist in the U.S. today. Eric, who is a native Chicagoan but has long been a professor at New York University, came to initial prominence with his important book on the 1995 heat wave. More recently, he has made a splash with Going Solo, his far-reaching study of the rise in single-person households. At the festival, he will give us a broad account of the current state of American society, affording us a real sense of where we are and where we're going as a country.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg

He will be joined on the CHF stage by other exciting presenters, including Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, who will be in conversation with his son Adam, a prominent American historian at the University of Chicago. Another great historian who will be with us is Yale’s John Lewis Gaddis, one of the leading scholars of American politics – and yes, this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner for his astonishing biography of George F. Kennan, the architect of the Cold War.

Historian John Lewis Gaddis

Photo by The Penguin Press, Michael Marsland

Little Rock Nine                                        

Historian Adam Green

And there’ll be amazing folks from the world of art, including the fabulous pair of Rob Lindley & Doug Peck, two of Chicago’s brightest young theater stars. In between raking in Jeff awards for such extraordinary work as Court Theatre’s Porgy & Bess and Carousel, the two have created a series of amazing shows for the CHF, including 2010’s Follies and 2011’s Academy Award extravaganza in which they did every Oscar-winning song in order (a production of Wagnerian proportions). For this year, they have come up with something truly special: Stephen Sondheim’s most controversial musical, the rarely-performed Assassins, a complicated and cautionary show that reveals the dark underbelly of American history like no other work in the canon. It will be extraordinary! And so will be the presentation by Joy Harjo, one of America’s most celebrated poets and a key figure in the world of American Indian letters.

I wish it were October already…

Director and Musician Doug Peck and Performer Rob Lindley

Poet Joy Harjo

In the beginning of June we revealed three new presenters:

Shelton Johnson is a park ranger with the National Park Service and was featured in Ken Burns's PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea.

Rolling Stone magazine has dubbed guitarist Marc Ribot the "go-to guitar guy for all kinds of roots-music adventurers," which seems an apt description given the versatility of his playing and the breadth of his collaborations.

Heather C. McGhee is the vice president of Demos, a New York-based public policy center. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN.

Are humans animals? The answer to this question is a perfectly confounding Yes and No.

From a biological perspective, things couldn't be any clearer. Like all living creatures, we evolved over millions of years. We look like most other species (two eyes over a nose over a mouth), share large parts of our genes with all other mammals (and over 98% with chimpanzees, our closest relatives), and do all the things that characterize earth's fauna (from breathing to eating to sexual procreation). Of course humans are animals!

Not so when seen from another set of traditions. In much of philosophy, religion, and aesthetics, humans appear as the very antithesis of the animal kingdom. They are the ones confined to the realm of nature; we are the ones who have ascended to the dominion of culture. Language, in all its creative potential, is the big separator. After all, what other creature has produced a Dante, Shakespeare, or Mary Shelley? To boot, what species even thinks (?) about other beasts, let alone uses them to define their own place in the world (Dante, Shakespeare, and Shelley being three of the writers whose depictions of the animalistic have done most to codify our understanding of ourselves).

This is rather familiar science-vs.-humanities territory. And it continues to have a hold on the popular imagination.

But it's not the whole story. Far from it. Over the last 10 years or so, a veritable revolution has been taking place in the academy. Spurred by developments in genetics and cognitive science, on the one hand, and new approaches to animals in the humanistic disciplines, on the other, we are witnessing an unprecedented convergence in once-distant fields of inquiry. Nowadays, evolutionary biologists speculate about art as an adaptation, while literary scholars challenge the species divide and theorize about animal communication. And interdisciplinary initiatives are sprouting all over America's campuses.

Are humans animals? Not long ago, the question produced a predictable standoff. Now it is quickly becoming the start of a fascinating conversation.

The 24th Chicago Humanities Festival will take this new conversation out of the academy and into the public at large. We will explore what it means to think about culture biologically, about biology culturally, and about the human-animal relationship beyond the science/humanities divide. In presenting the most cutting-edge work, Animal will give us a whole new perspective on our world. Most importantly, though, it will give us new answers to the oldest and most fundamental question in the humanities: What makes us human?

Sunday, October 13: Morry and Dolores Kohl Kaplan Northwestern Day
Sunday, October 20: 7th Annual Hyde Park Day
Friday, November 1 - Sunday, November 10: Downtown

Joining us this fall will be:

Photo by Rosalie Winard
Temple Grandin, animal scientist, autism activist, and bestselling author of Animals Make Us Human and Thinking in Pictures

Photo by Fred Field
Atul Gawande, leading medical thinker, surgeon, and author of award-winning books Complications, Better, and The Checklist Manifesto

Sherman Alexie, beloved novelist and filmmaker, best known for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Smoke Signals

Frans de Waal, primatologist and author of Our Inner Ape, Primates and Philosophers, and The Bonobo and the Atheist

Susan Orlean, New Yorker staff writer and author of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

Julia Kristeva, leading psychoanalytic theorist

Photo by Simon Koy
Justin Torres, literary sensation and author of We the Animals

Maria Tatar, Harvard professor and leading scholar of fairy tales

...among many, many more.

Sign up for our weekly e-mail blasts to receive information on other exciting presenters as they are announced!

Tickets will go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 3 and to the general public on Monday, September 16.

Note on the Animal artwork: it's by designer Jason Pickleman, of JNL graphic design. Jason is the artist responsible for 2011's neon tech·knowledgē and 2012's multicolored America. We're pleased to be working with him again.

America.

It’s a loaded word. It’s geography as well as terra firma; it’s history, memory, aspirations, a destination—a physical place as well as a repository of dreams and beliefs that tug at people from all over the world.

But when we at CHF say America, what do we mean?

As you have probably noticed, we are approaching a presidential election. In fact, it will occur right during our festival. Early November, after all, is our time of the year. But it happens to include the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, i.e. the date that, in 1845, became the official federal Election Day. Tuesday was chosen to give folks a workday to travel to the polls, Sunday being a day of worship after all. And now, like so many other aspects of our lives, it’s simply tradition.

The CHF has its traditions, too, of course, including the date of our fall festival. And we weren’t going to abandon ours either!

So there we were, beginning to contemplate a festival in the middle of a presidential election. Why pretend that what will be going on all around us isn’t happening? At the same time, we had no intention – none! – to contribute to the shrillness that passes for present-day political discourse. What was needed, in fact, was a counterweight.

So this is how we at CHF think of our role this fall: the presidential election is the time when we are enjoined to discuss the past, present, and future of our country. Sadly, the spectacle that passes for politics these days falls pretty short of that goal (this is not about blaming one party or the other – it’s simply a fact). And that gave us our mission: we would make this year’s CHF the forum for the kinds of sophisticated and respectful conversations about America that so many of us long to see in the public arena.

At the same time, we realized that there was no reason to limit the conversation to the United States. America, after all, is a global entity whose local concerns have transnational implications. In fact, we started thinking about America in hemispheric terms, counterposing various “new” worlds to their “old” correlates.

America, in this sense, is ideal and reality, a local brand with global meaning. Or, perhaps better, it is multiple ideals and different realities, admired and loved by some, feared and loathed by others.

The 2012 festival will explore the many meanings of America, both at home and abroad. We will debate the great American novel and celebrate jazz and the American song book, shine a spotlight on our country’s visual artists and honor the American philosophical tradition. And we will look at America from abroad, tracing the history of its meanings from Columbus to Kafka and locating its place in the world today. We will think about the Americas and the West. And we will contemplate our country’s ever-increasing diversity in the context of America’s history of immigration.

Our ultimate goal is to bring to Chicago the best that has been thought and said about our grand hemispheric experiment. We’ll do this, as we always do, through an array of talks, discussions, and performances, in October in Evanston and Hyde Park, and in November in and around Chicago’s downtown.

Sunday, October 14: Morry and Dolores Kohl Kaplan Northwestern Day
Sunday, October 21: 6th annual Hyde Park Day
Thursday, November 1-Sunday November 11: downtown

We wanted to share some early highlights with you as the festival comes together. Joining us this fall will be:

• Grant Achatz, award winning chef, owner of Alinea and Next restaurants

• David Brooks, New York Times op-ed columnist, in the annual Franke Lecture on Economics

• Harry J. Elam Jr., Stanford professor and foremost August Wilson scholar, on the playwright’s legacy and his contribution to American dramatic tradition

• Adam Gopnik, staff writer for The New Yorker, on French cuisine and what Americans can learn from it 

The Helen B. and Ira E. Graham Family ASCAP Cabaret with baritone Nathan Gunn, who recently starred in Lyric Opera’s Showboat, in a recital of selections from the Great American Songbook with wife Julie Jordan Gunn, piano 

• Author and historian Charles Mann, whose books include 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

• Brown University’s Tricia Rose, whose 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America was a groundbreaking publication in the study of hip hop culture

• Gwendolyn Wright, Columbia University architectural historian and star of the PBS show History Detectives

…among many, many more.

We’ll share additional updates with you late this spring and over the summer. Please mark your calendars, as tickets go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 4 and to the general public on Monday, September 17. We look forward to sharing dozens of programs with you this fall and taking you on this grand journey with us.

Note on the "America" artwork: it's by designer Jason Pickleman, of JNL graphic design. Jason is the artist responsible for last year's neon TECHknowledgE and we're pleased to be working with him again.

It was not until the late 19^th century that the study of Africa started to be undertaken with anything approximating scholarly rigor. And even then, the first anthropologists turning their attention to the continent relied on highly questionable “data,” culled from travel accounts and missionary sources. That’s right. This first generation of scholars, folks like Edward Burnett Tylor and James Frazer, wrote about Africa without ever setting foot there. They were “armchair anthropologists,” contemplating the place of the continent’s peoples in a putative chain of evolutionary development – from “savage” and “primitive” to “civilized” – in their distant studies at Oxford and Cambridge.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard with Zande Boys in Southern Sudan

It took until the early 20^th century for anthropologists to actually study Africans “in the field.” The pioneers were A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who made a crucial break with the evolutionary tradition that came before them. Rather than seeing Africa as a kind of stepping stone toward European rationality, they stressed the intellectual and social coherence of the tribes they visited. Their paradigm was called structural functionalism, emphasizing the systematicity of native social organization and the fact that each component (the political system, religion, etc.) fulfilled its part in sustaining the collective organism’s existence. It was a radical move that questioned ethnocentric ideas about such things as “African witchcraft,” suggesting that it was not evidence of lesser intelligence, but a perfectly adequate explanation given the empirical facts at hand. But it did have a major flaw. The structural functionalists represented African societies as existing out of time, as if the integration of their social systems held them in perpetual and unchanging balance. Scholars like Evans-Pritchard knew that that wasn’t the case. After all, they undertook their research in the middle of what was an ongoing colonial onslaught. And yet, their depictions and theories of African life betrayed none of the cataclysmic shifts underway in the early 20^th century.

The reaction to this ahistoricity came in the 1960s and was centrally inspired by the revival of Marxist theories. It was scholars like Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz who were at the forefront of the new approach to Africa. To them, it was a crucial node in a global capitalist order that had been developing ever since the age of explorations. Wolf titled his magnum opus Europe and the People Without History to suggest that the very opposite was true. Rather than peoples living out of time, Sub-Saharan Africans were part of the emerging world system. Mintz made an analogous point in his masterful book Sweetness and Power, which investigated transnational capitalism by focusing on a single commodity: sugar – a staple whose cultivation in the Caribbean had catastrophic consequences for the hundreds of thousands of Africans who were abducted and forced to labor on the New World’s plantations.

            This so-called world systems paradigm continues to produce important research. But starting in the 1980s, it came under attack for its inability to take account of the agency of the native populations whose colonial histories it charted. True, Wolf and Mintz had returned sub-Saharan Africans to history; but they only appeared as victims, the essentially passive objects of European aggression. What was missing, a number of scholars began to argue, was a real understanding of how Africans actually responded to and even resisted the European incursion. In the context of South America, a crucial comparative case, it was 2011 CHF star Michael Taussig who led the charge, famously feuding with Wolf and Mintz about the question of indigenous agency. In the African context, the most influential critics were the University of Chicago’s Jean and John Comaroff. In response to the world systems approach, they produced a remarkable two-volume study, Of Revelation and Revolution, that charted the complex dialectics set in motion by the attempt to “civilize” Africa. In their paradigm-setting account, the Tswana people of South Africa are active participants in a shared, albeit no less conflicted and brutal, history, thereby restoring to view not only their historicity, but their often subversive cultural creativity.

John and Jean Comaroff

As a graduate student, I was fortunate to study with this amazing power couple. And I saw first-hand how they were building what was quickly becoming a University of Chicago School of African Studies. In many ways, Emily Osborn is part of that School. Trained as a historian of Africa, she works in a Comaroffian tradition that seeks to understand the continent as shaped both by global forces (capitalism, neoliberalism, etc.) and local responses. In the case of her particular research, the focus is on the stuff of everyday life in West Africa, particularly Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Mali, Sénégal, and Sierra Leone. There, she hones in on a specific commodity within the global economy: aluminum. Tracing a widespread technique of aluminum casting that allows the continual repurposing of the metal, she reveals the West African engagement with the commodity (and the world system more generally) to be a highly creative process. Like Christianity in South Africa, aluminum in West Africa is not just dropped down from the sky. Instead, its introduction enmeshes it in complex local networks that at once appropriate and re-appropriate it, part of life’s ongoing struggles and an ever-present contest of meaning-making.

 
Emily Osborn

I am thrilled that Emily will share this cutting-edge research with our festival audience. In her work, we will be able to glimpse not just the long history of African scholarship, but its exciting future. With more and more native Africans joining the academy, moreover, new perspectives are already on the horizon. Stay tuned as we bring those to you over the next couple of years.

RELATED EVENT

Melting Pot: African Recycling

The Law School, Glen A. Lloyd Auditorium: Oct. 23, 12:30 PM

To me, Elizabeth Warren is a genuine American hero. A professor at Harvard’s School of Law, she rocketed to national prominence during the recent financial crisis. An expert on our system of credit, particularly the credit card industry and the laws governing personal bankruptcy, she had been among the most prescient commentators on the country’s looming debt problems. Now, in the midst of full-fledged crisis, she became one of the voices of reason, calmly explaining how we got into our current predicament and offering various solutions on how to emerge from it.

Elizabeth Warren

In the process, Warren became one of the most recognizable figures on the public policy scene – a position that was enhanced when she was appointed in November 2008 to chair the Congressional Oversight Panel instituted to monitor the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, variously known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program or, simply, the financial bailout.

In this highly visible role, Warren continued a long-standing quest: her advocacy for the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency – a government outfit that would regulate the financial industry’s practices vis-à-vis individual consumers. Such an agency was, in fact, created through the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; and Warren was put in charge of its setup, holding the official title of Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The New Sheriffs of Wall Street

Warren’s courageous and dedicated service in these essential positions has led to numerous accolades. Time alone has named her to the list of 100 most influential people in 2009 and 2010 and identified her, along with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Sheila Bair and Mary Schapiro of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as one of the “New Sheriffs of Wall Street.” With such a high profile, many people have also revisited her writings, including several books aimed at a general audience. Much like her work in government, such books as The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (2001) and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke (2004) seek to analyze the slow slide of “average people,” explaining it not as a function of individual weakness but of systemic shifts in our economic system. To see Warren enact her academic theories in the realm of public policy is thus quite remarkable in and of itself.

And speaking of remarkable – we were absolutely thrilled when Warren accepted our invitation to speak under the auspices of the CHF. Our original hope was to have the event during the fall festival. But we learned that it is rather difficult to get political figures to come for a lecture in the middle of national elections. But we persevered and are delighted to present Warren in a free-standing event on February 23.

Joanne H. Alter

What makes the occasion particularly special is that Warren will give the CHF’s annual Joanne H. Alter Lecture on Women in Government. With the series, we join Alter’s family in honoring the inspiring legacy of a true trailblazer in Chicago politics, the first woman Democrat elected to public office in Cook County and founder of Working in the Schools (WITS), the largest tutoring program for at-risk youth in Chicago. Like few other figures in American politics today, Elizabeth Warren embodies Joanne Alter’s uncompromising commitment to social action and public service – and it will be a privilege to celebrated their shared vision of the public good at the CHF. 

UPCOMING EVENT

Lecture

Elizabeth Warren

#414: Wed, February 23; 6:00 PM

Picture above: Dwight McBride

In addition to these lectures, we are featuring an event built around another leading Chicago intellectual: Dwight McBride, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIC. McBride is a remarkable scholar and person. A leading expert on African-American literature and culture, he is the author of the widely acclaimed books James Baldwin Now  and Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony and the editor of the important anthologies Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction and A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader. In addition, he published a collection of his essays with the best title of any academic book – ever: Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch, the subtitle “Essays on Race and Sexuality” suggesting the central theme of exclusion at the intersection of racism, sexism, and homophobia. In the book, McBride addressed such hot topics as the controversy around Anita Hill, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the marginalization of lesbian/gay voices in much of African-American Studies.

The question of race and sexuality will also be at the heart of the CHF event with McBride. And it will reflect his growing stature as one of the leading African-American public intellectuals in the country. For several years now, McBride has been a key voice in debates on sexual equality in the African-American community, addressing such difficult questions as the supposed homophobia in black culture and the complicated analogies between the civil rights movement and the current struggle for lesbian/gay rights. In these debates, McBride has taken a courageous stance, critical of mainstream positions in both the African-American and lesbian/gay communities.

McBride has been particularly vocal on these issues. But he has not developed the position on his own. It came out of long-standing discussions with other young, African-American intellectuals in Chicago. At the CHF, McBride will reassemble this group, which also features University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen, DePaul University philosophy professor Darrell Moore, and Beth Richie, a professor of criminal justice at UIC and the Director of its Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.

Together, this remarkable group will take stock of the current moment, assessing where things stand on the question of race and sexuality in Barack Obama’s America. Chicago has long been a center for progressive African-American thought. Dwight McBride and his colleagues are continuing this tradition. And we are delighted to take part in the conversation.

CURRENT EVENTS

Lecture

Race and Sexuality

#707: Sun, Nov. 14 1:00 - 2:30 PM

Dan Savage is coming back to sex up his hometown. How could we not invite America’s favorite relationship advice columnist to this year’s Festival? He is frank, outspoken, and so funny it hurts (in a good, giving, and game way). But as one of my students rightly said, he is mainly just “wise.”

Indeed, in his long-running cult column “Savage Love” (featured in our fair city in the Chicago Reader) and his inimitable “Savage Lovecast,” he has been developing a theory and ethics of sexuality for our day. And then, there are his bestselling books: The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant (2000), Skipping Towards Gomorrah (2003), and The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (2006). Amazing all!

Dan Savage

So here is what’s going to happen at the festival: Dan will share the stage with his brother Bill Savage, professor of English at Northwestern and an old CHF favorite. In addition to exploring what went wrong for Bill to turn out straight, the two will discuss changes in sex education over the decades. Dan has been thinking and writing about the topic for some time – and it will be fascinating to hear his insights.

Bill Savage

After that, it’s your turn! In a live version of the Lovecast, Dan will answer YOUR questions. Just like on his podcast, everything will be answered and nothing will be off limits.

So we need to hear from you – the “tech-savvy at-risk youth” (of all ages).

CURRENT EVENTS

Special Event

Savage Love with Dan and Bill Savage

#509: Fri, Nov. 12 8:00 - 9:30 PM

Claud Monet, Iris

 
Renoir, Two Sisters

 
Tuymans, Soldier

Then, we sat down to talk ideas. Stu and I had come to the Art Institute to explore the possibility of organizing a CHF lecture on some of the amazing work being done in the area of conservation science. We had seen some of the results of the department’s research in such shows as Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte” (2004) and Mattise: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 (2010). And we had a hunch that there might be other incredible stories lurking among the x-ray photographs and old color palates. That’s when Frank introduced us to Francesca Casadio.

Francesca Casadio

Francesca is a chemist who serves as the senior conservation scientist at the Art Institute. But as I was listening to her astonishing tales of chasing ancient pigments across the globe and running microscopic residues through the latest material science machinery, it became clear that I was in the presence of a veritable art detective. Just like Steppenwolf’s William Peterson on CSI, Francesca was in the business of high-end forensics. The only difference was her starting point: a great painting rather than a corpse.

William Peterson on CSI

Francesca’s latest victim (ahem, research object) is one of the Art Institute’s great treasures, Picasso’s Red Armchair. Turns out, the 1931 painting of his mistress and muse Marie-Thérèse Walter is something of an enigma, especially in regard to the paint Picasso used to create the image. That purple background in particular has given scholars fits, suggesting to some that Picasso might have been the artist who first introduced house paint into the rarified world of fine arts. For art historians, it’s a crucial question, both for the interpretation of Picasso’s work itself and in regard to his place in the development of the later 20th-century’s radical art approaches.

The Red Armchair

Enter the intrepid Francesca and her amazing art machines. In a mind-bending feat of global sleuthing, she tracked down Picasso’s paints, chasing them from the south of France to eBay and back to her lab. The spoils were right there for us to see, from early 20th-century advertising brochures to 1930s paint samples. But the real delight was to hear Francesca tell it all. Having tackled one of art history’s great questions, she related the thrill of the hunt and the triumph of discovery in the most vivid terms.

Pablo Picasso

Stu and I asked Francesca on the spot to bring her story to the CHF, and she agreed immediately. We couldn’t be more thrilled that our audience will get to share in the amazing experience we had at the Art Institute and hear from one of the true stars of Chicago’s cultural scene.       

RELATED EVENT

CSI: Picasso

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 6, 12:00 PM

Few issues are more urgent today than the environmental crisis facing us. And there, too, humanists have responded, developing an entire area of inquiry focused on creative responses to the natural world. The field goes by several names, the most common being “ecological criticism” – and it has become more and more prominent over the last couple of years.

Gillen Wood is one of the most innovative practitioners in this new area. A professor of English at the University of Illinois, he is the founding director of the campus’s Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities which seeks to investigate the human dimensions and projected lived consequences of climate change as it is expected to progress in the coming decades.

Gillen Wood

Gillen came to ecocriticism gradually. A true Renaissance Man, he was born and raised in Australia where he trained as a pianist. He then switched to literature, finding success both as a novelist (check out Hosack's Folly) and as a scholar of Romanticism. (He is the author of two widely acclaimed monographs, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 and Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770-1840: Virtue and Virtuosity.)

With the climate crisis become ever more pressing, he turned to ecology by way of re-reading 18th- and 19th-century British literature and culture. Resulting articles have addressed such topics as “Constable, Clouds, [and] Climate Change” and will be followed by a book, currently in the works, titled Frankenstein's Weather: How Climate Change Shaped the Nineteenth-Century World.

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) 

I was thrilled when Gillen accepted our invitation to speak in conjunction with Stages, Sights, and Sounds where ecological issues play such a prominent role. In particular, Gillen got excited about The Man Who Planted Trees by Scotland’s Puppet State Theatre. Aside from being keen to attend the show with his family, Gillen was immediately drawn to the material, adapted as it is, from a short story by well-known French writer Jean Giono. His meditation on the devastating environmental impact of World War I stands as a cornerstone of the canon of ecological literature; and Gillen was keen to share his analysis of Giono’s work with our audience.

Jean Giono

We are delighted to be able to present this lecture by one of the finest teachers at the University of Illinois. In light of Gillen’s presentation, The Man Who Planted Trees will emerge in all its richness, a testament not only to the multi-sensory brilliance of Puppet State Theatre but to an entire tradition of ecological literature whose relevance is becoming more important by
the day.

UPCOMING EVENT

Lecture

Reforesting the Soul
The Ecological Vision of Jean Giono

#202: Sat, May. 7 1:00 - 2:00 PM

So where do we begin in the process? Our starting point is a desire to present as all-compassing a Festival as we can imagine. To that end, we extend the notion of Humanities beyond the narrow academic definition. Yes, we do present literary scholars, art historians, and other academics who seek to elucidate the history of culture. But we never leave it at that. We also feature practitioners of the various creative disciplines – writers, artists, dancers, particularly if their works resonate beyond their immediate field.

At the same time, we are conscious in our desire not to duplicate the fabulous work that is already being done by Chicago’s other cultural institutions. Particularly in the field of classical music, of course, we are blessed with some of the country’s foremost organizations. And there would be little point to add yet another straight-up performance to what is already a wonderfully full calendar.

So this is how we go about it: we ask ourselves what a classical music event might look like in a distinct humanities setting. What would make it unique?

Ars Antigua

There is not just one answer, of course. But our basic proposition is to find ways to imbue performance with some form of humanistic reflection. Let me give an example from last year’s Festival on The Body. There, we created a program that we called, somewhat sheepishly, A Camerata on the Body. A scholarly event staged in 18th-century style, it featured University of Chicago historian of science Robert Richards and Ars Antigua, the early music ensemble led by Jerry Fuller. Together, they conceived a program that revealed connections among three towering figures of that century’s turn: Goethe, Mozart, and Schubert. Combining brief lectures with musical selections (just as it was done during the high enlightenment), Richards and Ars Antigua were able to excavate these masters’ shared interests in concepts of the body and science.

Rachel Barton-Pine

We are pairing up with Ars Antigua again for this year’s Festival tech•knowledgē. This time around, Jerry Fuller’s band is backing Rachel Barton Pine, in a program we are calling "The Adventurous Violinist." And again, there will be something different about the event. Barton Pine is a celebrated violinist, of course. Much less known, though, is her strong interest in the history of her instrument. As it happens, Barton Pine not only collects ancient string instruments but has spent considerable time mastering them. One of those instruments is the viola d’amore, the “viola of love” – a 14-stringed hybrid of the violin and viola da gamba that set 17th-century hearts aflutter.

The viola d'amore

We can’t wait for Barton Pine to perform the viola d’amore on the CHF stage. The music, a romp through the instrument’s repertoire which includes works by Telemann and Vivaldi, promises to be spectacular. But I’m just as excited about Barton Pine’s comments on the viola d’amore, both in terms of its technological particulars and its relation to subsequent string instruments. Those comments will make up a significant portion of the event, giving it the very flavor we look for when programming classical music at the CHF. I can’t wait!

RELATED EVENT

The Adventurous Violist: Rachel Barton Pine and Ars Antigua

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 12, 8:00 PM

Eugene Robinson

Robinson’s vision resonates particularly strongly in light of CHF’s online multimedia collection. Over the years, we have endeavored to represent and celebrate African-American culture in all of its great variety. And while we have no plans to rest on any laurels, we are proud to look back on the many highlights and the fact that they are readily available online.

Toni Morrison

Nothing may ever top Toni Morrison’s unforgettable lecture On Love, her inimitable voice starting the proceedings by softly intoning “It’s good to be back in Chicago. It was Paris for me when I was in Lorraine, Ohio.” Amiri Baraka came close, the passion and controversy of the great writer immediately revealed in the opening flash: “When I was a little boy in the Air Force in Puerto Rico, I used to write poems that would come back like missiles.”

Amiri Baraka

Other titans have been celebrated on the CHF stage, from blues giant Ma Rainey and jazz great John Coltrane to choreographer extraordinaire Bill T. Jones.

In 2009, our theme of Laughter produced an entire quartet of memorable programs, anchored by the incomparable Dick Gregory and completed by comedy duo Tim & Tom, a lecture by Mel Watkins, and a panel on black humor.

Dick Gregory

But we have not only focused on the legends. Over the years, CHF has been thrilled to introduce young, black voices into the conversation. We presented E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea, his path-breaking exploration of gay black men in the South and featured theologian Allen Callahan, speaking on the meaning of Jesus in the African-American experience. And we are proud of our association with performance artist Sarah Jones, whose remarkable work hones our understanding of racial specificity at the very moment of its transcendence.

Sarah Jones

In all of our programming, we have been mindful that the civil rights struggle is ongoing. Events that have focused on its history – Roger Wilkins’s account of the 1960s or Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable recuperation of the story of Henrietta Lacks – have been paired with accounts that emphasize present concerns, from Raynard Kington’s remarkable analysis of race and health care and Rhodessa Jones’s important prison project to Dwight McBride’s focus on sexuality.

In all we do, we seek to educate, edify, and entertain – ideally, though, we just want to awe ourselves and our audiences. And that, finally, brings us to the biggest speaker we ever had. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took us from the basketball courts of Harlem to one of the pivotal moments of the civil rights struggle: the controversy surrounding Muhammad Ali, when, sitting down with Bill Russell and Jim Brown, he stood up and was counted.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

For this and all the other memorable moments chronicled in the CHF archives, America is better off today.

Explore the Chicago Humanities Festival's long-standing commitment to celebrate African-American culture.

CREATORS OF GREAT CULTURE:

• Toni Morrison (2003)

Click play to listen to Toni Morrison On Love.

• Amiri Baraka (2002)
• A Good Man: Kartemquin Films and Bill T. Jones (2010)
• Victor Goines (2010)
• Houston Baker: The Great Migration, & the Blues (2001)

BLACK HUMOR:

• Dick Gregory (2009)

• Mel Watkins, black humor (2009)

NEW BLACK CULTURAL VOICES:

• Sarah Jones (2010)

• E. Patrick Johnson: Pouring Tea (2009)
• The Body of Jesus (2010)

THE HISTORY OF THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS:

• Roger Wilkins: Civil Rights in the 1960s (2002)

Click play to listen to Roger Wilkins.

• Rebecca Skloot on Herietta Lacks (2010)
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (2010)

NEW SITES FOR CIVIL RIGHTS:

• Raynard Kington: Health Care (2010)

• Rhodessa Jones: The Medea Project (2010)
• Dwight A. McBride: Race and Sexuality (2010)

University of Chicago

Enter Chicago, where I arrived in the fall of 1993 to attend graduate school at the U of C. Very quickly I felt that this is where I belonged. Here was an intellectually intense place that couldn’t be more casual interpersonally. There were no barriers, no airs, and somehow it felt that everyone was in it together. I even got a little misery when my first winter turned out to be one of the worst on record…

I came to think of all this as a very Midwestern quality of academic life – a sense that was confirmed as I started to visit other campuses to present my work. And as my graduate career progressed, all I was hoping for was to land a job at one of the great Midwestern campuses. Those, of course, would be the schools of the Big 10 – the envy of public education across the country.

 
The Ohio State University                                   

Think about it – where else are the big public institutions the finest universities of any given state? Not in Massachusetts, not in Connecticut, not in New York or New Jersey – not even in California (but maybe that’s the little bit of Stanford pride I do have left in me speaking). But certainly in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

 
University of Minnesota                                

When I went on the job market in 1998, I landed one of those dream jobs. I was hired at the University of Illinois, and I have never applied for another university position. When I got the offer to come to Champaign, I felt like I had won the lottery – and I still feel that way. Teaching and researching at a Big 10 powerhouse is a huge privilege. But it’s also sheer fun. Nothing beats the exhilaration of working with some of the country’s brightest students; nothing compares to the intellectual camaraderie we share among the faculty.

University of Illinois

I know from colleagues and friends that this is the feeling all across the Big 10. Simply put, the legacy of the land grant institution is alive and well; and while budget cuts and reduced public funding are presenting challenges all across the Midwest, I know that this is a tradition that will endure. As I see it, it is simply woven into the cultural fabric of our region.

When I came to the CHF, it was one of my goals to celebrate the greatness of the Big 10. This was not a wholly new project. The University of Michigan has been a long-standing partner of the festival; and while I directed the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the interdisciplinary humanities center at Illinois, we, too, were able to partner with the CHF.

University of Michigan

But I had a more ambitious fantasy. I was imagining a CHF in which EACH of the Big 10 campuses would be represented EVERY year. What better way to showcase the intellectual prowess of our region and to bring the Midwest’s leading thinkers into public conversation with writers and artists from elsewhere. We are, after all, the biggest humanities festival in the country (and maybe even the world) and hence the perfect node for an exchange of regional, national, and global perspectives.

Purdue University

To cut a long story short, our Executive Director Stuart Flack and I approached the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic arm of the Big 10, which also includes the University of Chicago. In the fall of 2010, we had a chance to address a meeting of all the deans of the liberal arts. And their response could not have been more enthusiastic. Since then, we have been working with the humanities institutes of each campus to curate their CHF events. And I am absolutely delighted to report that, indeed, every Big 10 university will be at this year’s CHF!

Here is the list of events. It’s an amazing slate, and we couldn’t be more proud to present it!

Illinois

Game-Changer: Technology in Sports  

How many football games have been decided through instant replay? How many world records were smashed when swimmers started wearing full-body suits? How much faster is tennis today than in the glory days of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe? We don’t always see them, but technological developments are everywhere in sports, and they continually change the games we love. University of Illinois historian of technology Rayvon Fouché discusses his research on technology and athletics, and technology’s influence on the past, present, and future of sports.

Presented in partnership with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

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Indiana University

Indiana

The Breakup 2.0

“Breaking up is hard to do,” the old song goes, but is that still the case in a world of text messaging and Facebook? Of course new technologies are changing our behaviors, but how exactly, and with what consequences? Indiana University anthropologist and communications professor Ilana Gershon researches how new media affect our intimate relationships. Join her as she discusses the findings of her new book, The Breakup 2.0, the first academic study of heartbreak in the digital age, with Madeline Nusser of TimeOut Chicago.

Presented in partnership with the College Arts & Humanities Institute.

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Iowa

Lend Me Your (Bionic) Ears  

“Lend me your ears, and I’ll sing you a song.” Paul McCartney’s beautiful sentiment seems to exclude those who can’t hear, but new technologies are rapidly changing the reality of hearing loss. Cochlear implants, often referred to as bionic ears, are devices designed to enhance speech perception for people with severe hearing loss. Can this technology restore musical enjoyment as well? Is music heard through cochlear devices still the same music, or music at all? The nature and meaning of this auditory experience form the basis of innovative research combining otolaryngology, communications, and music. In this program, University of Iowa professor Kate Gfeller reports on her pioneering research, including how people who use bionic ears to perceive and respond to music.

Presented in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa.

University of Iowa

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Michigan

Seeking the Source of The Matter of Origins  

“Sometimes you stumble into a way of describing, modeling, or actually understanding yourself better,” choreographer Liz Lerman explains in describing her ongoing conversations with physicist Gordon Kane. Lerman and Kane have both found benefits to exploration of each other’s fields. Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, encouraged Lerman to visit CERN and the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider. These visits provided inspiration for Lerman’s new work, “The Matter of Origins.” Kane and Lerman share insights from their ever-evolving explorations.

Presented in partnership with the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. The Institute is also underwriting the production of The Matter of Origins.

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Michigan State

Good Food? A Philosophical Stance on Today’s Agriculture  

We all know the saying: you are what you eat. How does that meaning change, though, as biotechnology exerts ever-greater influence on farming and the food chain? What are the ethics of genetically engineering food, of creating seeds unable to reproduce, or using hormones in livestock feed? Michigan State University’s Paul Thompson, whose work focuses on the philosophy of ecology and technology, discusses the promises and dangers of biotechnological agriculture.

Presented in partnership with the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University.

Michigan State University

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Minnesota

When Dancers and Biologists Collide  

When scientists and dancers collaborate, they usually produce an impressionistic interpretation of science, not science itself. University of Minnesota biomedical engineer David Odde, choreographer Carl Flink, and their ongoing Moving Cell Project prove what’s possible when their respective disciplines really combine forces. Odde contends that substantive changes constantly occur at the body’s subcellular level—in the form of collisions—and that these collisions are essential to healthy cells. This cellular process is, in turn, a starting point for Flink’s choreography, which examines the real physical impact between human bodies. In this program, Odde, Flink, and members of Flink’s dance company, Black Label Movement, share recent outcomes and video excerpts from their ongoing research.

Presented in partnership with the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study.

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Ohio State

Tomorrow’s History  

I say “historian,” You see: a scholar knee-deep in the dust of obscure archives, or lecturing earnestly, perhaps in monotone, always in a tweed jacket, to a room of (occasionally) riveted undergraduates. But things are changing fast, even in the historian’s estimable profession. New digital technologies have shifted original research from remote sources to online archives, and computerized tools have created immersive classroom presentations. The Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at The Ohio State University is at the cutting edge of this transformation. Its director, David Staley, provides a front-row view of history’s digital revolution, showing you how history will be researched, written, and taught in the future.

Presented in partnership with the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University.

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Pennsylvania State University

Penn State

Boundaries of Life in a Biomedical Age  

Recent advances in biomedical technology, including embryo adoption, stem cell research, and intra- and inter-species organ transplants, are rapidly changing concepts of life. How are these developments playing out in the humanities? Literary scholars and Penn State professors Michael Bérubé and Susan Squier discuss the cultural, ethical, and philosophical challenges of the biomedical age and touch on such issues as engineered fetuses, the aesthetics of prosthetics, and the boundaries of the human.

Presented in partnership with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University.

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Purdue

Can You Dig It? Technology in the Archaeological Record

Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age—human history is forever entwined with the history of technological progress. Nowhere is this more evident than in the archaeological record, where we can trace the rise and fall of entire civilizations based on the remarkable technical and scientific innovations they left behind. Purdue University archaeologist Ian Lindsay discusses the role of technology in early civilizations, including the cutting-edge approaches and the latest discoveries. Hear from Lindsay about his research on fortresses of the Bronze Age, and the ways pottery shards, crucibles, pyramids, and ancient writing systems speak to us across the ages.

Presented in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University.

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Wisconsin

Shakespeare by the Numbers  

What happens when computers join the ranks of scholars who have plumbed the depths of Shakespeare’s incomparable imagination? For more than 400 years, the Bard’s works have been subjected to scrutiny from countless angles. The latest angle is digital: a group of literary scholars is pioneering electronic approaches to study of the great texts.  A longtime University of Wisconsin professor and the newly-appointed director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Witmore is an expert on the literature of early modern England. He uses bioinformatics, corpus linguistics, and probability clouds to spot patterns in the Bard’s words. If you, like us, are not sure what any of that means, join Witmore for an unprecedented experience with Shakespeare. 

Presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

 
Ah, but what about Northwestern, you say, or Chicago for that matter (let’s call them an honorary Big 10 school on account of their membership in the CIC)?

Northwestern University

For the two home teams, we have something special – an entire day each on the campuses of Northwestern (Oct. 16) and the University of Chicago (Oct. 23). And events with some of their finest professors, including Ken Alder, Hollis Clayson, and Noshir Contractor (Northwestern) and Michael Fisch, Adrian Johns, Rocky Kolb, Emily Osborne, and Jason Salavon (University of Chicago).

Now, it’s up to our audience – and the many Big 10 alums among them – to come out and support the initiative. See you all in the fall!

Opera is a total form of art, what Richard Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk. It combines music, theater, visual art, even dance, in ways its aficionados – and I’m certainly one of them – experience as the pinnacle of human creativity. When it all comes together, when it really, really works, it’s simply magic.

Un Ballo in Maschera

And yet, there is something worrisome about the genre. Sometimes, it can feel a bit static and worn, as if it’s reproducing rather than advancing the cause. “Opera is like a museum,” is the recurring charge – silly, since museums are among the most adventurous cultural institutions around. But the basic sentiment has something to it. After all, the core of the opera canon spans a pretty short period of time (the late 18th to the early 20th century) and includes only around 100 works. Where, in this constellation, can innovation come from?

The Abduction from the Seraglio

In Europe, the dominant trend has been a radicalization of staging. If someone’s going to do La Boheme again, the reasoning goes, it can’t be yet another realist staging that charmingly evokes mid-19th-century Paris. Instead, it might be set in Nazi Germany or a dystopian military state where a deadly illness rules as the result of chemical warfare. The German opera scene, perhaps the most committed opera community in the world, calls this Regieoper. It’s best translated as director’s opera, not least because it puts the director, rather than the singers, center-stage.

Wozzeck

Regieoper can be quite thrilling, especially when it’s practiced by some of the genre’s masters. Chicago was just treated to a spectacular production by one of the greats: Spanish director Calixto Bieito. But we didn’t get to see his work in opera. His Camino Real at the Goodman was "straight" theater, even thought the piece had memorable musical elements. In Europe, though, he has been pushing the operatic envelope with radical stagings of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (with an opening scene involving toilets and their use), Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (set in a brothel rather than a harem), or Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (featuring necrophilia along with an Elton John impersonator).

Nothing but “Eurotrash,” is how many critics see this kind of work. And indeed, we are not likely to encounter it in America any time soon. The cultural conventions are too different, to say nothing about the economics of it all (in Europe, Bieito directs at state-supported houses that can afford to challenge, even offend, their audiences).

The Fall of the House of Usher

No, America’s contribution to opera’s progress lies elsewhere: in the expansion of the canon through the creation of new work. And there, our opera scene is at the global forefront. Not only are the two greatest living opera composers American – John Adams and Philip Glass – but much of their work has come into existence through American commissions. Doctor Atomic, Adams’s extraordinary piece on the first test of a nuclear bomb, is a good example. It premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 before taking the rest of the world, including Chicago, by storm (the Lyric co-commissioned the piece). So is The Fall of the House of Usher, one of Glass’s many gems. Based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story, it came into existence as a 1988 co-commission by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge and the Kentucky Opera – and we will get to rave about it in February 2013 when Chicago Opera Theater brings it to town.

McTeague

And speaking of Chicago. Our own Lyric Opera has played a central role in championing new opera, particularly through its unique relationship with Pulitzer Prize winning composer (and University of Michigan professor) William Bolcom. In 1992, the company premiered his McTeague, co-written and directed by Robert Altman, followed in 1999 by A View from a Bridge. A third commission brought Bolcom together with Robert Altman again, resulting in A Wedding for which the late, great director adapted his film into a libretto and supervised the staging.

A View from the Bridge

I was at the premiere of A Wedding in December of 2004 – and I don’t remember an evening at the Lyric quite like it. The anticipation was tremendous. No guarantees, of course – the new piece could be awful. But to be present at a work heard for the very first time was truly special. And I wasn’t alone – every critic of note was there from our local stalwarts to Alex Ross and Anthony Tommasini (the chief music critics at The New Yorker and The New York Times respectively). This is an event that matters, their presence and subsequent articles declared (and they mostly liked it, too). But what a thrill to see our hometown company take command of the art form’s future! And I'm not even talking about the nine-part New York Times series on the creation of A View from a Bridge in 1999...

Ann Patchett

That’s what I thought again when the Lyric announced its new commission in early 2012. Bel Canto will be based on Ann Patchett’s award-winning novel fictionalizing a hostage crisis in Lima, Peru. At its heart is the character of Roxane Coss, an American opera singer who is caught up in the events and emerges as a symbol for the power of music in the forging of emotional bonds.

Renee Fleming

The project is the brainchild of Renée Fleming, one of the great singers of our era and the Lyric’s first Creative Consultant. And she found extraordinary talents to accomplish its realization. The libretto will be written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz, whose Anna in the Tropics was a sensation at Victory Gardens in 2003. The music will come from acclaimed Peruvian-born composer Jimmy López.

Anna in the Tropics

Opera is a big undertaking – every aspect of it. Its creation, for one, takes a good amount of time. Bel Canto is scheduled to receive its world premiere in the 2015-16 season. At that moment, our city will become the focal point of the opera world. Alex Ross and Anthony Tommasini will be back at the Civic Opera House, assessing Chicago’s latest contribution to the future of the genre.

Jimmy Lopez and Nilo Cruz, with Lyric Opera Director Anthony Freud to their left

Bel Canto is a major cultural event, and we at the CHF are keen to accompany the process of its creation. We are thrilled to start with an event that brings together Jimmy López and Nilo Cruz in a conversation moderated by opera dramaturge Colin Ure. We will hear about their respective work and peek behind the curtain of their ongoing collaboration. I, for one, can’t wait to find out how one actually goes about writing an opera. Can you do it over e-mail (López is based in San Francisco, Cruz in Miami)? And how do you know how to do it in the first place (both artists are neophytes to the genre)?

A Wedding

When I attended the premiere of A Wedding, I came to it "cold." I was only glancingly familiar with Bolcom’s music and had not even seen Altman’s film. Even still, I came away from the performance with awe for the piece’s sheer ambition. But I can only imagine how much richer my experience will be at Bel Canto after following its creation on the CHF stage. What a tremendous opportunity to get to the heart of opera’s future – right in our city!

Upcoming Event: CUBE's 25th Anniversary Celebration featuring the music of Jimmy López

Related Program

Creating an American Opera from Scratch
502: Sun, Nov. 4 11:30 - 12:30 PM

George Stocking

I was completely taken with Victorian Anthropology, his definitive account of the history of British anthropology. And in my initial hubris, I imagined that my dissertation would be a German counterpart. That proved illusory for a number of reasons, including the fact that such a thesis would have put me squarely between the disciplines of History and Anthropology, not a good place for getting an academic job.

George Chauncey was the mentor who stood at the heart of my next venture. I have written about him before, in a blog celebrating Gay Pride Month. There, I briefly mentioned his book Gay New York along with the importance of having him, an openly gay faculty member who was doing pioneering work in queer studies, as a role model. Now, with another Gay Pride Season just behind us, I have the pleasure of going into a little more detail – and for a wonderful reason: George will join us as one of the stars of the fall festival!

George Chauncey

But back to my grad school days. So there I was in my first year at the U of C, casting about for possible dissertation topics. And there was George, frantically finishing his book manuscript. It was the winter and spring of 1994, and the 25^th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion was to be commemorated in June of that year. George’s publisher Basic Books wanted Gay New York out for the occasion, forcing him to squeeze what is typically a rather leisurely process – we’re talking about revisions, indexing, proofreading, cover design, etc. – into a few months.

Gay New York

But it was all worth it. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 was immediately recognized as a landmark. Within a few months, it had won every major award in the field of American history. And I was reading it again and again to figure out how George had done it – how he managed what had previously been thought impossible: to restore the complexity of gay lives to full historical view. This is hardly a trivial matter. After all, we’re not talking about political or diplomatic history here, where well-organized archives readily aid the scholar in his or her tasks. On the very contrary, until very recently, lesbian and gay lives tended to leave few records, a function of various forms of repression and self-censorship. Against that backdrop, George had accomplished an extraordinary feat of archival sleuthing. Starting in the 1970s, he had made ingenious use of such sources as police and court records and the papers of “social hygiene societies.” In addition, he had uncovered numerous individual diaries and conducted countless interviews (when he began, some living memory still reached to the beginning of the 20^th century). What this allowed him to do was to paint a portrait, not just of an individual or two (not that that’s so easy either), but of an entire subculture.

Sigmund Freud

It was a tremendous inspiration, both intellectual and political – and it got my hubris going again. This time, my dissertation was going to be the Viennese counterpart of Gay New York. Not only would it restore a lost gay world to historical view, but it would present the lived realities reflected in the most influential modern theorizations of sexuality – those of Sigmund Freud and Richard Krafft-Ebing.

Richard Krafft-Ebing

It wasn’t to be. A quick summer jaunt to Vienna made it clear that police and court records were spotty (a function, in part, of the destruction during World War II) and that the Austrian counterparts of New York’s social hygiene societies lacked American fervor and left few records. By the mid-1990s, moreover, living memory barely reached into the interwar period, several decades after Vienna had ceased to be the world’s center of sexology. But maybe, I was just too intimidated by George’s daunting example. In any case, I eventually retreated into the (archivally) safer territory of the post-World War II era, writing a comparative study of Jews and gays that also become my first book, Symptoms of Modernity.

George, for his part, also moved into the latter half of the 20^th century, in his case to write the sequel of Gay New York. And the scholarly community has been waiting with bated breath to see how he continues the story up to and beyond the Stonewall Rebellion. But there have been other demands on George’s time. In the wake of Gay New York, he has become one of the most prominent voices in the struggle for lesbian/gay equality, serving as an expert witness in such major gay rights cases as Lawrence v. Texas and Perry v. Schwarzenegger (the case involving California’s Proposition 8). Related to these efforts, he also wrote the widely-praised book Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality.

Why Marriage?

But it’s the “big book” we are all waiting for. And George – who left the University of Chicago for Yale in 2006 and now serves as the Chair of the History Department, arguably the best in the country – hopes to finish it by 2013.

Leonard Bernstein

In the fall of 2012, we will get a sneak peek, when he returns to Chicago to take part in the CHF. His lecture will focus on the 1940s and 50s, the heyday of Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, and the Bloomingdale’s sales clerk (you’ll have to come to find out about that last one). Their world was culturally rich and sexually confusing, populated by “homophiles” and “beards” and marked by a distinctive and, by now, bygone aesthetic.

Tennessee Williams

It promises to be a major scholarly event – and a true personal highlight!

Related Program 

 

A Sneak Peek at Gay History

505: Sun, Nov. 4 12:30 - 1:30 PM

I have heard from many friends of CHF, and I know that many of them are regulars at our city’s museums. But the galleries are a different matter. Some are located off the beaten track, and there is a kind of mystique around them. What is one supposed to do at a gallery? Is it ok to walk in and just look; or is there pressure to buy? What if I don’t “get” the art; will that be uncomfortable, etc.?

Rhona Hoffman Gallery

All this led to the following idea: why not partner with some of Chicago great galleries and incorporate them into the Festival. And that’s exactly what we have done. In the fall, eight of Chicago’s leading spaces will put on exhibits in conjunction with our theme of “The Body.” The spaces are: Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Kavi Gupta, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Tony Wight Gallery, Western Exhibitions, Rowley Kennerk Gallery, Walsh Gallery, and Three Walls – and what is best is that they are all on one block in the West Loop!

Kavi Gupta Gallery

Even more exciting – on the two Saturdays of the festival (Nov. 6 and 13), we will organize small tours of these spaces. They will all be led by local artists who will talk to festival goers about the work on display and answer any and all questions about what it is like to be part of the art world. For friends of the CHF, it will be a unique chance to get to know the art world and its members beyond the beautiful halls of our museums. It will be awesome – I can’t wait!

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

As is sometimes the case when we talk about the cultural creations of our species –  i.e. when we practice the humanities – they all have some truth to them.

Conceptual art was named into being as a discrete art movement in the late 1960s. In many ways, it was a response against the dominant artistic traditions of the day. Abstract expressionism, which had reigned in the 1950s under the leadership of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, had fetishized the individual act of art making as a form of psychological exteriorization.

Jackson Pollock, Grayed Rainbow (1953)

Willem de Kooning, Excavation (1950)

Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns reacted against the self’s apotheosis by incorporating lowly, everyday objects into their work – a gesture that was further heightened by pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who, by the early 1960s, based their work on soup cans, celebrity photos, and comics.

Jasper Johns, Map (1961)

  
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955) and Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Can (1964)

Minimalism was even more radical, removing the artist’s hand from the creation of objects, whether in the case of Donald Judd’s objects (which were fabricated to his specifications) or Dan Flavin’s sculptures (which were formed using industrial neon light bulbs).

  
Donald Judd, Untitled (1968) and Dan Flavin, Monument for V. Tatlin (1967)

 The trend in the course of the 1960s, in other words, was to move away from the author as artistic genius. And yet, all of the artistic movements from abstract expressionism to minimalism still resulted in the production of physical object – objects, moreover, that were imbued with a heightened sense of aesthetic value.

This is where conceptual art came in. Its most radical proposition was to emphasize the idea of the art work over its physical creation. Sol LeWitt came up with the iconic formulation in a 1967 article: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” But in many ways, the radicalism of conceptual art was captured even better by Douglas Huebler: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”

 
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 273 (1975)

The results of these pronouncements were varied. Joseph Kosuth turned his art into games of language philosophy; Mel Bochner played with numbers; Hanne Darboven executed endless, non-sensical inventories; Lawrence Weiner abandoned objects for text-based works affixed directly to walls; and LeWitt created instructions for elaborate drawings that others executed.

Joseph Kosuth, Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass--a Description (1965)

 
Mel Bochner, Milan Number Block (1970) and Hanne Darboven, 19 Short Transversals of the Century (1968)

Lawrence Weiner, A 36 x 36 Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard From a Wall (1968)

As a more or less cohesive movement, conceptual art had its heyday in the late 1960s and 1970s. But its most basic proposition – that ideas matter in art at least as much as, if not more, than objects – has become axiomatic in the art world. That is one of the reasons why, at this point in time, more or less all advanced art is conceptual in nature. Even work that seems naïve is self-consciously so, like the paintings of Elizabeth Peyton or Karen Kilimnik, playing with ideas of artlessness as a form of aesthetic intervention. At the same time, the triumph of conceptualism has led to a search for its historical forbears. This is where we find Duchamp, whose Fountain – his shocking 1917 presentation of a urinal as art object – is often identified as the first piece of purely conceptual art.

 
Elizabeth Peyton, Paradis (Kirsty) (2001) and Karen Kilimnik, Prince Charming (1998)

 But back to conceptualism’s heyday. In 1969, Chicago’s then brand-new Museum of Contemporary Art presented Art by Telephone, one of the defining exhibits of the conceptual art movement. The show was literally what the title suggested: a set of pieces phoned in by artists and created on-site to their specifications. It featured everyone who was anyone in conceptual art – and it helped put the MCA on the map of the international art world.

One of the contributors to Art by Telephone was Iain Baxter. A founding figure of conceptualism, Baxter worked under the moniker of N. E. Thing Company, which was registered as a business and operated like one, albeit in parodic fashion. Using such new technologies as fax machines (then called “telecopiers”), Baxter sent out advertisements that doubled as art pieces. For Art by Telephone, he faxed the MCA a list of objects that had N. E. Thing Company’s “seal of approval.”

IAIN BAXTER&

In the four decades since Art by Telephone, Baxter has continued to work on the forefront of avant-garde art, reinventing himself and his practice on numerous occasions, including his recent addition of “&” to his name. Yes, Baxter is now officially IAIN BAXTER& – in recognition, as he notes, that “life is simply all about ‘ands’ and the mystery of what comes next.”

 
Victor Romão & IAIN BAXTER&, thE eyes and hands of the raisonnE (2010)

On Saturday, November 5, the MCA will unveil an ambitious retrospective of BAXTER&’s influential oeuvre. Curated by Michael Darling, it will cover his entire career from N. E. Thing Company and Art by Telephone to recent sculptural work that presents stuffed animals in pickling jars. It will show one of the most resourceful, inventive, and adventurous artists of our time.

 
Michael Darling and Hannah Feldman

We partner with the MCA on many exciting ventures. And this one is no exception. On the very day of the opening, Iain Baxter& will take to the CHF stage to talk about this career in conceptual art. He will be joined by Hannah Feldman, professor at Northwestern University and one of the country’s outstanding, young art historians. Hannah specializes in the art of the 1960s and its many echoes to the present day. It promises to be a spectacular event!

RELATED EVENT

Art by Telephone and Other Adventures in Conceptualism - Richard Gray Visual Art Series

Museum of Contemporary Art - Theater: Nov. 5, 1:00 PM

Ars Antigua

When we started our conversation, an idea that quickly emerged was to focus on music that somehow references the human body. It turns out that composers from Hasse to Mozart composed little pieces about eyes, legs, and various other body parts. That sounded like a great start, but it got us thinking about combining performances of this music with historical research on the way the body was thought of in the 17th and 18th centuries – exactly the kind of approach only the CHF would take to the classical repertoire.

This, in turn, led us to the history of science and medicine – and here, someone came to mind immediately: Robert J. Richards, the Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. Bob, as he is know to everyone, is the world’s leading authority on Charles Darwin as well as the author of widely acclaimed books on the history of German science (for more information, see his website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~rjr6/).

Bob Richards

I had the great fortune to study with Bob when I was getting my PhD at the University of Chicago – so I know that he is one of the most charismatic and innovative intellectuals around. A couple of e-mails later, Bob enthusiastically agreed to join us at the CHF for a collaboration with Ars Antigua.

Mozart

A meeting followed and we now look forward to a truly amazing interdisciplinary event. Building on the original idea of Ars Antigua, we will focus on three towering figures of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: Mozart, Schubert, and Goethe. As it turns out, and as Bob will explicate, these giants of music and literature had close connections that turned on their shared interest in conceptions of the body and science, more generally.

Goethe

What’s more, the CHF event will restage the way scholarly presentations were made in the 18th century. As it turns out, those were never free-standing events, but were accompanied by musical interludes. This is what we will offer up at CHF: Ars Antigua will perform the pieces under discussion, while Bob will offer short lectures contextualizing the music, literature, and science.

Only CHF could put this kind of thing on stage. And I, for one, can’t wait to see the result of this unique collaboration.

 
Photos by Candida Höfer

There is no scholar whose work is more relevant to the fate of the book than Anthony Grafton. One of the greatest historians in the world today, the Princeton professor is the leading authority on the history of the book, having written the definitive accounts of its role in the shaping of the (early) modern world. His classic texts include such masterworks as Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, and Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea.

But Grafton is not only known among admiring academics. His book The Footnote: A Curious History, was an enormous cross-over success, demonstrating that serious historiography can have real appeal to the larger public. As a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, moreover, Grafton regularly captures the imagination of a wide readership.

Photo by Candida Höfer

Grafton has spent most of his career thinking about the history of the book. In light of the recent technological revolutions, however, more and more of his attention has been devoted to its present and future. One of the results has been “Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents,” a widely influential piece in The New Yorker. There, Grafton set the book’s electronic future into a compelling historical context, seeing it as part and parcel of a development that commenced in Mesopotamia when, in the third millennium B.C.E, scribes started to create collections of clay tablets. The concept of the library, with its physical objects harboring text, was born at that moment. And there is no-one better equipped than Grafton to assess whether there is a future, for the library or its contents.

Illustration by Tom Gauld 

As a graduate student, I had the tremendously good fortune to earn a junior fellowship at Vienna’s International Research Center for Cultural Studies. Even more fortuitous was the fact that Anthony Grafton was there as a senior fellow. I spent much of 1996 in conversation with him, and the lessons I learned continue to stay with me, animating much of what I try to do in the area of public humanities. Grafton, in others words, is a real inspiration – and I am utterly thrilled that he will join us at the Chicago Humanities Festival in the fall. For me, his lecture will be an absolute highlight of the CHF – and I know that our audience will think so too.

Photo by Candida Höfer

A final word: the visit by Anthony Grafton is made possible by the generosity of Roger and Julie Baskes, two of the outstanding philanthropists in Chicago. For several years now, Roger and Julie have underwritten the Baskes Lecture, which has brought some of the world’s great historians to Chicago. Grafton will continue this wonderful tradition – and for that, we are gratefully indebted to Roger and Julie.

 
Art by David Levine

RELATED EVENT

The Book: Past, Present, and Future Baskes Lecture in History

First United Methodist Church at The Chicago Temple: March 31, 2:00 PM

Growing up in Vienna, classical music was always in my life. It was on the radio and television as well as at school, where I had music instruction from grade one (all of us could choose between lessons in piano or violin – free of charge). Most importantly, though, I had my grandparents, who had fled Vienna for London in 1938, but returned in 1946, mainly because they missed Austrian culture, which is to say classical music.

Grosser Sall at the Musikverein

Every year, they went to the Salzburg Festival and they were big supporters of the Vienna Philharmonic, frequently accompanying them on tour. And once in a while, they brought me along, either to a concert in the Musikverein or a performance at the Staatsoper (two of my strongest memories from those days in the early ‘80s: shaking hands with Leonard Bernstein and seeing Edita Gruberova and José Carreras in La Traviata.)

Gruberova and Carreras in La Traviata

I loved it! From the pomp and circumstance to the incredible music! But once in a while, there was a damper on it all – all of a sudden, there might be some tension, rustling in the audience, or applause that would go from frenetic to merely polite. Even an occasional boo was possible. It typically occurred in the middle of a concert, and as my grandfather explained it happened whenever there was “difficult” music on the program. I’m not sure I readily heard the difference. But to the audience, it was clear.

Viktor Bunzl with Matti (ca. 1974)

As I understand now, Vienna was hardly a hotbed of the avant-garde in those days. Darmstadt, it decidedly was not. Instead, it still wallowed in the Vienna School, the first that is, of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. My grandparents were themselves socialized into that aesthetic. They considered Brahms to be highly progressive, Mahler difficult, and Schoenberg and Berg more or less intolerable.

And yet, I remember my grandfather always clapping with particular enthusiasm after one of the “difficult” pieces. Typically, he would say that he didn’t understand it,  but it was interesting and he was glad that he heard it.

Especially in hindsight, his attitude strikes me as pretty remarkable. True, his own tastes might have been conventional, but he saw the value, even the necessity, in challenging traditions. And even though he, himself, might not like the innovations, he was there to support them.

I, myself, have a less gallant approach. I actually like “difficult” music – not always and every piece – but I think of it as a thrill to hear sonic formations that have never, or only rarely, been heard before.

Katinka Kleijn in Oil-Free Blush

And I am thrilled that, at the CHF, we have been able to champion contemporary music. Among recent events, this centrally includes last year’s world premiere of Oil-Free Blush, a remarkable piece for solo cello, co-commissioned by the CHF and the CSO’s Katinka Kleijn. The work, inspired by last year’s Festival on The Body, addressed the carcinogenic properties of makeup in a suite of movements composed by Marcos Balter, Megan Beugger, Phyllis Chen, Pablo Chin, Nomi Epstein, Sebastian Huydts, and Du Yun. (To watch the performance, which also included a Q&A with WFMT’s Andrew Patner, click here.)

Anna Clyne

We are continuing our engagement with contemporary music in this year’s Festival on tech•knowledgē. This time around, we are teaming up with the CSO to present a performance and conversation with Anna Clyne, one of the orchestra’s two composers-in-residence. Under the title “Composing Music in the Digital Age,” Clyne will reflect on her use of technology in the creation of her acoustic and electro-acoustic music (which has earned the admiration of such diverse artists and writers as Björk, Alex Ross, and Esa-Pekka Salonen). In particular, Clyne will discuss her seminal composition Choke, a piece for baritone saxophone and tape she developed with saxophonist Argeo Ascani. The two will perform the work, recall its creation, and reflect on the opportunities and challenges presented by the latest technologies.

Argeo Anscani

I know that there will be plenty of new music aficionados in the audience when Clyne and Ascani present their work, just as there were last year for Kleijn’s remarkable performance. What I truly hope, though, is that there will also be some folks like my grandfather, who may not necessarily like the music they will hear but believe in its importance – the importance to continued creation, not in spite of all the great music we already have, but because of it.

RELATED EVENT

Composing Music in the Digital Age

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 12, 3:00 PM

William Shakespeare

I encountered Shakespeare as a teen – but it wasn’t the Shakespeare most Americans encounter. My Shakespeare didn’t speak in Elizabethan English. Instead, he sounded more like Goethe. No surprise there – after all, I was reading him in the famed translation of August Wilhelm Schlegel, one of the towering figures in the German literary landscape of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Those translations have always been considered true works of art – some even claimed that they rivaled Shakespeare himself. My grandfather was one of those. Having fled from the Nazis to England, he was perfectly capable of reading Shakespeare in the original – and he simply thought that Schlegel’s Shakespeare was better.

August Wilhelm Schlegel

And then, there was the incredible excitement of seeing Shakespeare in the theater, especially Vienna’s grand Burgtheater. Under the directorship of Claus Peymann, it was considered the leading German-speaking stage of the late 1980s and early 1990s (at least I thought so!). There, I experienced yet another Shakespeare, freshly translated for our own times and staged by such theatrical giants as George Tabori, Peter Zadek, and Peymann himself. Zadek’s legendary Merchant of Venice was particularly galvanizing. Premiered in 1988, it spoke directly to Austria’s compromised history and the country’s recalcitrance, in contrast to Germany, to deal with its Nazi past.

Zadek's Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare, these experiences impressed on me, is universal not because he is the same everywhere, but because he means different things in different times and places. This power to resonate across historical and cultural boundaries is, to me at least, the true greatness of the Bard.

Ania Loomba captures this dimension like no other scholar working today. Ania, the Catherine Bryson Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the world’s leading Shakespeare experts and the pioneer of a postcolonial approach to his work.

Now, what does that mean? Postcolonial theory originated in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered by such scholars as Edward Said, whose seminal book Orientalism proposed that the West’s knowledge of the East was the result of systematic misrecognition across colonial lines.

Edward Said

Ania, who was born and raised in Delhi and educated there and in England, applied this proposition to Shakespeare. Reading his work from a South Asian perspective, she was particularly interested in the ways Shakespeare portrayed the non-European, non-white, and non-Christian. And she was keen to understand how Shakespeare was played in the non-European world. What would it look like, for example, if an African company put on Othello?

Ania Loomba

The response to such questions is a series of path-breaking books: Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Post-Colonial Shakespeares, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, and Race in Early Modern England. These studies have given us a new Shakespeare, a writer who contemplated the world far beyond the confines of Europe and did so in ways that at once reflected and reshaped the continent’s conception of itself and others.

Ania is one of the most charismatic and brilliant intellectuals I have ever met – and I was utterly delighted when she agreed to take part in this year’s CHF. In her lecture on “Shakespeare and the Black Body,” she will present the central findings of her research, giving us a direct view of the cutting edge of Shakespeare scholarship. I doubt that any of us will look at such figures as Othello or Shylock the same again, whether we read them in Vienna or see them on the stage in Chicago.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Lecture

Shakespeare and the Black Body

#610: Sat, Nov. 13 1:30 - 2:30 PM

How do you write a history of humankind? That’s hardly an obvious question. After all, no individual text can possibly encompass the entirety of the human experience – it can’t even come close. Sure, there were any number of 19^th-century scholars who were undeterred by such verities, leading to some massive multi-volume tomes. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, for example, clocked in at an impressive (or daunting) twelve volumes. But that hardly made it comprehensive, no matter how many cultural traits it managed to catalogue in its thousands of pages.

Moche Warrior Pot 

More recently, the basic problems in writing a truly global history have been recognized. And the solution has been a self-conscious form of editing. Rather than describing it all, authors focus on particular facets of the human experience. Economic approaches have been particularly powerful, whether they have come from the left – like Immanuel Wallerstein’s magisterial The Modern World-System, whose fourth volume, published in 2011, takes the story up to 1914 – or the right, where Harvard star prof Niall Ferguson finds ever new ways to chart capitalism’s global triumphs.

Less fashionable of late have been global cultural histories. It’s not surprising, really. While an economic approach allows scholars to gloss over the multitude of particularities, cultural history demands attention to exactly those. In an age of ever-increasing specialization, however, that really isn’t possible. Who, after all, can be a true expert on both ancient Egypt and medieval Russia, the Mughal Empire and West Africa’s kingdoms?

Enter Neil MacGregor.

In 2010, the British art historian unveiled the most ambitious and inspired approach to global cultural history in, perhaps, ever. His A History of the World in 100 Objects is exactly that – an attempt to tell the human story using our physical creations. Drawing a material arc of human experience, MacGregor’s pieces range from the most basic stone tools to solar-powered lamps and include such objects as Egyptian mummies and Russian icons, Mughal miniatures and Benin plaques. It’s a brilliantly novel approach that allows MacGregor to chart ruptures and continuities in an unprecedented manner. Even more importantly, it locates our common humanity in a universally shared trait of object making. Not Homo philosophicus, but Homo materialis.

Neil MacGregor

Where does this plenty come from? Well, it helps that MacGregor is the director of the British Museum, that unparalleled institution holding some eight million works. It also employs some of the world’s finest scholars – and along with the inexhaustible pool of iconic objects, that curatorial expertise allowed MacGregor to venture his grand project.

Aztec Goddess Figure

The result was originally broadcast on the BBC. That’s right A History of the World in 100 Objects started out as a 100-part (!) radio series – a tremendously successful one that was recognized immediately as a landmark achievement and quickly became a global phenomenon (you can join the millions who have downloaded the episodes as podcasts here). Shortly after the broadcasts concluded, an accompanying book – a gorgeous atlas of human creativity – was published. It was an instant and international bestseller.

Every year, one of the highlights of the CHF is the Art Institute of Chicago President’s Lecture. And I couldn’t be more thrilled that Neil MacGregor accepted Douglas Druick’s invitation to deliver this year’s speech. Even if he were not the originator of A History of the World in 100 Objects, we would be thrilled to hear from Europe’s most influential museum administrator.

Maya Maize God Statue

But with A History of the World in 100 Objects as his topic, MacGregor’s lecture promises to be a true milestone. I, for one, cannot wait to hear about the project’s genealogy and execution. How did MacGregor conceive of his path-breaking approach to global cultural history? How did he and his team decide which objects to include? How did he deal with specialized versus generalized knowledge? etc. etc.

Clovis Spear Point

And if that weren’t exciting enough, MacGregor will do all this with an eye toward America – this year’s CHF theme. As it turns out, about 20 of the objects among his 100 are from the New World, from a Clovis spear point (found in Arizona and about 13,000 years old) to a buckskin map of the late 18^th century. Other objects hail from Central and South America, including a Maya maize god statute, an Olmec mask, a Moche warrior pot, an Aztec goddess figure, and a golden Inca Ilama, among several others.

North American Buckskin Map

What is their place – and the place of our continent – in the human story? I can’t wait for Neil MacGregor to tell us!

Related Program 

 

Songs without Words: Tales from America's Past
Art Institute of Chicago President's Lecture

603: Thu, Nov. 8 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Billy Budd at the Metropolitan Opera

But Gunn is also a consummate performer, a singing actor as much as an acting singer. He’s been clowning to great acclaim in San Francisco (Papageno in The Magic Flute) and scheming his way to raves in Los Angeles (Figaro in’ Barber of Seville). He’s created countless new parts (like Alec Harvery in Houston Grand Opera’s world premiere of André Previn’s A Brief Encounter) and found new depth in many of the classics (none more so, perhaps, than Britten’s Billy Budd, which has become a kind of signature role, most recently performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera).

The Magic Flute at San Francisco Opera

And, lest we forget, Gunn is a local favorite. Born in South Bend, he has lived in Champaign for the last twenty years. It’s at the University of Illinois where he received his training, met his future wife, pianist Julie Jordan, and now serves on the faculty. The Lyric Opera of Chicago is his homestead, in other words, and over the years, he has thrilled us with amazing performances in such pieces as Così Fan Tutte, The Pearl Fishers, and, most recently, the revival of Showboat.

And yes – he’s famously a hunk. A martial artist, he has the kind of physique opera directors just love to show off. Type “Nathan Gunn” into the Google search engine, and the first suggestion that comes your way is “Nathan Gunn Shirtless” (really – just try it!).

With Nicole Cabell in The Pearl Fishers at Lyric Opera

Other artists might be annoyed. But Gunn takes it all in stride. In fact, he can laugh about it and turn it into an advertisement for all of opera. He did so most famously in an appearance on The Colbert Report in which the brilliant satirist “worried” about opera’s “bad moral messages” and asked Gunn if he ever performed with his shirt on. Colbert’s opening line for the segment: “My guest tonight is an opera singer. He’s a baritone. When I’m done with him, he’s going to be a soprano.”

Gunn is utterly at home on the opera stage. But his artistry extends beyond the genre. Over the last years, in fact, he has come into ever greater renown as an interpreter of songs, particularly those in the great American tradition. His marvelous 1999 disc American Anthem was a step in that direction, featuring extraordinary interpretations of such pieces as “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” and “Early in the Morning.” More recently, he collaborated with Julie Jordan Gunn on Just Before Sunrise, a beautiful set of contemporary songs by the likes of Tom Waits and Billy Joel, among others.

Nathan and Julie Jordan Gunn

We are utterly thrilled that Nathan and Julie Jordan Gunn will bring this body of work to the CHF stage. Their recital – featuring American songs from Charles Ives and Cole Porter to Richard Rodgers and Tom Waits – will be a truly outstanding event!

But it’s not just the music that will be extraordinary. Those of us who have had the pleasure of seeing Nathan and Julie Jordan Gunn perform together know that they’re not just a great musical act. There’s also a good amount of talking – and it’s a big part of what makes them so wonderful. Educators at heart (Julie, like Nathan, is a professor at the University of Illinois), they have much to say about the music they perform, both in terms of its place in American culture and its personal meaning.

With Juan Diego Florez in The Barber of Seville at Los Angeles Opera

What’s more, the Gunns could easily make a living in the world of Stephen Colbert. Yes, that’s right – they are funny, funny, funny! Don’t miss what promises to be one of the all-time great CHF evenings!

Related Program 

 

Nathan and Julie Jordan Gunn in Concert
Helen B. and Ira E. Graham Family ASCAP Cabaret

419: Sat, Nov. 3 7:30 - 9:00 PM