Books

Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 22:53:30 +0000

Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority Rachel Sauer Mon, 01/06/2025 - 15:53

Bradley Worrell

CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version

If Peter H. Wood wants to stump some University of Colorado history majors about early American history, he’ll ask them which of the original 13 colonies was the wealthiest before the American Revolution and also had an African American majority at the time.

“Often, they will see it as a trick question. Some might guess New Jersey or New York or Connecticut, so most people have no idea of the correct answer, which is South Carolina,” says Wood, a former Rhodes Scholar and a Duke University emeritus professor. He came to the CU ��«��Ƶ Department of History as an adjunct professor in 2012, when his wife, Distinguished Professor Emerita Elizabeth Fenn, joined the department.

Peter H. Wood has been an associate professor at CU ��«��Ƶ for more than a dozen years, following a lengthy career teaching American history at Duke University.

South Carolina colonial history is a topic with which Wood is intimately familiar, having written the book Black Majority: Race, Rice and Rebellion in South Carolina, which was first published in 1974 and has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. W. W. Norton published a 50th anniversary edition of the book in 2024.

Recently, Wood spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about how he first brought the story of colonial South Carolina to light, reflecting on how the book was received at the time and why this part of history remains relevant today. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for clarity.

Question: How did you become aware of this story of colonial South Carolina, which was unfamiliar to many Americans in 1974 and perhaps still is today?

Wood: I knew when I was an undergraduate that I wanted to study early American history. After a two-year stint at Oxford in the mid-1960s, I came back to Harvard for graduate school.

At that time, the Civil Rights Movement was going on. I’d been very interested in those events, as most of my generation was, and I wanted to see how I could put together my interest in interracial problems with my interest in early American history.

What I found was that early American history was very New England-oriented in those days. Ivy League schools were cranking out people writing about the Puritans, and when they wrote about the South, they would mainly write about Virginia. They talked about Jefferson and Washington. South Carolina had hardly been explored at all. There are only 13 British mainland colonies, after all, so to find that one of them had scarcely been studied was exciting.

Specifically, I was motivated by the Detroit riot in 1967, watching it unfold on television in the summer of 1967. Roger Mudd, the old CBS reporter, was flying over Detroit in a helicopter the way he’d been flying over Vietnam. He was saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on down there.’ I realized that he was supposed to be explaining it to us, but he didn’t really have a very good feel for it himself. No white reporters did.

And the very next morning I went into Widener Library at Harvard and started looking at colonial history books to see if any of them covered Black history in the very early period … and South Carolina was completely blank. So, that was what set me going.

Question: If there wasn’t any significant scholarship about South Carolina prior to the American Revolution, particularly about African Americans living there, how did you conduct research for your book?

Wood: I went to the South Carolina State Archives in Columbia, not knowing what I would be able to find. I understood that if I did find materials, they would be written by the white colonists … because enslaved African Americans were not allowed to read and write. There wasn’t going to be anybody who was African American keeping a diary.

But what I did find was that the records were abundant. That’s partly because these enslaved people were being treated as property; they had a financial value. So, when I would open a book, there would be nothing in the index under ‘Negroes’ (that was the word used in those days). But I would look through the book itself and there were all kinds of references to them. They just hadn’t been indexed, because they weren’t considered important.

At every turn, there was more material than I expected, and often dealing with significant issues. …

And when you’re researching early African American history, you learn to read those documents critically. The silver lining of that sort of difficult research is that it forces you to be interdisciplinary and to use any approach you can.

Black Majority by CU Associate Professor Peter H. Wood was updated for its 50th anniversary in 2024. First published in 1974, the book broke new ground in showing how important slaves were to the South Carolina economy in Colonial times.

So, I ended up using some linguistics and some medical history (about malaria) and especially some agricultural history. Most people back then—and most Americans still today—don’t realize that the key product in South Carolina was rice. I argued successfully and for the first time in this book that it seemed to have originated with the enslaved Africans. The gist of the book is that these people were not unskilled labor; they were skilled and knowledgeable labor, and it was a West African product (rice) that made South Carolina the richest of the 13 colonies.

Question: With regard to Black Majority, you made the statement, ‘Demography matters.’ What do you mean by that?

Wood: I realized early on that demography was a very radical tool in the sense that it obliges you, or allows you, to treat everybody equally. In other words, to be a good demographer, you have to count everybody: Men, women and children, Black and white, gay and straight—everybody counts equally. As a born egalitarian, that was appealing, especially in a period where there were lots of radical ideas bouncing around that I was a little leery of.

But demography seems very straightforward, as in: All I have to do is count people. So, the very title of the book, Black Majority, is a demographic statement. It’s not saying, ‘These people are good or bad’ or anything else. It’s just saying, ‘Here they are.’ It becomes what I call a Rorschach test, meaning it’s up to the reader as to what they want to make out of these basic facts. …

The book—especially in those days—was particularly exciting for young African Americans, because they’d been told they didn’t have any history, or that it was inaccessible.

Remember, this was even before Alex Haley had published Roots. I actually met Alex while he was working on his book, because I was one of the only people he could find who was interested in slavery before the American Revolution. Most of the people who were studying Black history—which was only a very small, emerging field in those days—were either studying modern-day Civil Rights activities and Jim Crow activities, or maybe the Civil War and antebellum cotton plantations.

Question: You initially undertook your research on this topic to write your PhD dissertation. At what point in the process did you think your findings could make for a good, informative book?

Wood: Very early on, I thought I wanted to write a book. I mean, I wanted to be able to publish something and I wanted to start at the beginning. … If I could go all the way back to 1670, when this colony began, and find records, and tell the story moving forward—instead of going backwards from the Civil Rights movement—I wanted to do that.

If I could write a book about that, then it would show lots of other people that they could write a book about Blacks in 18th-century Georgia or 19th-century Alabama, for example. All of those topics had seemed off limits at the time.

So, I was going to start at the beginning and move forward and see how far I had to go to get a book. I thought, ‘I’ll probably have to go up to 1820,’ but by the time I got to 1740, by the time I got through the Stono Rebellion—which was the largest rebellion in Colonial North America, in 1739, and it was unknown to people—I had enough for a book.

I had enough (material) for a dissertation so I could get my degree, but I also had enough for a book. And, luckily for me, it was just at the time when there was a lot of pressure on universities to create Black Studies programs, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

That put a lot of pressure on New York publishers to find books about Black history. And so, Alfred Knopf in New York took the book and gave me a contract within two weeks. I was very lucky in that regard: That was a moment where it was just dawning on everybody that, ‘My goodness! There’s a huge area here where we have not shone a searchlight.’ …

I'll tell you a funny story. At Knopf, they said, ‘You should go talk to our publicity director,’ because they were excited about this book. I walked into her office, and she was this burly, blonde advertising woman. Her face just dropped. She said, ‘Oh, Dr. Wood, I thought you were Black!’ And then she brightened up. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I'll get you on the radio.’ (laughs)

Peter H. Wood, here exploring chimney remains, is revising his book Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America, which will be published in an expanded edition this year.

So, that just illustrates, if I’d been Black, it would have been even better, but at that point, anything was grist for the mill, especially if it was opening up new territory in American history.

Question: That actually raises a question: Did you face any criticism as a white author writing about Black history, like author William Styron did?

Wood: That was the controversy about William Styron’s 1967 book, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron was a white Connecticut author, and quite well-informed and well-intended. He had been raised in Virginia himself, so he’d grown up with versions of this story.

He was not a historian. Still, he wanted to try to write about Nat Turner’s rebellion from Turner’s perspective. So, he had the freedom of a novelist, of trying to put himself inside Nat Turner’s head. That effort was troublesome to a lot of folks.

It bothered some Black folks because it was a white author trying to do that and showing a complicated version of things. It was also upsetting to some white folks. If they knew about Nat Turner at all, it was that he was some crazy madman who killed people, so the idea that you should try to get inside his head, that was upsetting to them.

But, in answer to your question, I was lucky in that … the critique that white people shouldn’t do Black history had not really taken hold. At that time (1974), very little was being written about African Americans in Colonial times … and so there was a desire for anything that could shine some light on the subject.

Question: Why do you think Black Majority has maintained its staying power over the years? And what changes were made for the 50th-anniversary edition that W. W. Norton published?

Wood: As I’ve said, it came along at the right time. Along with other works, it opened up a whole new area, and so early African American history is now a very active field.

When I did the revisions for this 50th-anniversary edition, I didn’t change it drastically, because it is a product of the early 1970s, of 50 years ago. I think the points I made then have held up pretty well. That’s why I’d say it has been influential in the academic community, but for the general public, not so much.

Question: Why do you think that is?

Wood: It’s very hard to change the mainstream narrative, especially in regard to our childhood education about early American history. From elementary school on, we hear about Jamestown and about the Puritans; we learn that colonists grew tobacco in Virginia, but almost nothing beyond that. …

I think that’s part of our failing over the last 50 years. The idea of having a national story that everyone can agree upon has fallen apart, and I wish we could knit it back together. It may be too little, too late. But if we if we can ever manage to knit it back together in a more thorough, honest way, African Americans in Colonial times will be one of the early chapters.

Twenty years ago, I worked on a very successful U.S. history textbook called Created Equal, where I wrote the first six chapters. Even then, our team was trying to tie all of American history together in a new and inclusive way—one that everyone could understand and share and discuss. … I hope that book, and Black Majority, is more relevant than ever.

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CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version.

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Top image: Remnants of rice fields along the Combahee River in South Carolina. (Photo: David Soliday/National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Spinning stories of birds, magic and 19th-century science

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 14:30:00 +0000

Spinning stories of birds, magic and 19th-century science Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/16/2024 - 07:30

Cody DeBos

In new novel The Naturalist Society, CU ��«��Ƶ alum Carrie Vaughn offers a fresh take on historical fantasy

For New York Times bestselling author and ��«��Ƶ graduate Carrie Vaughn (MEngl’00), the boundary between science and magic is a playground.

Her latest novel, The Naturalist Society, released last month, transports readers to an alternate Victorian era in which scientific discovery and arcane magic coexist. Here, the Latin binomial nomenclature used to classify plants and animals grants extraordinary powers to certain scientists.

The novel is a departure from Vaughn’s usual urban fantasy or mystery settings, for which she's been nominated several times for the Hugo Award and won the 2017 Colorado Book Award in the genre fiction category. She recalls a friend joking, “Hey, you like birds, you should write a book about them!”

In her new novel The Naturalist Society, Carrie Vaughn (MEngl’00) explores an alternate Victorian era in which scientific discovery and arcane magic coexist.

From that comment, she spun a tale blending 19th-century Victorian science and a distinctive magic system—with a splash of romance added for good measure.

“I tend to do this a lot, take several different ideas and smoosh them together to see what happens,” Vaughn says. “The story developed pretty quickly and went in some unexpected directions. It’s not just historical fantasy, but also alternate history.”

When research meets imagination

Creating an immersive world for the protagonist of The Naturalist Society to traverse was more than a work of imagination. Vaughn immersed herself in research while preparing to write the novel.

“I read a bunch of history of the natural sciences, about Darwin and the impact of his ideas,” she says. “And I kept my Sibley Field Guide to Birds on my desk the whole time.”

Vaughn also drew inspiration from Victorian-era literature.

“I read some Edith Wharton to get that flavor of upper-class New York City in the late 19th century,” she says.

As any writer can understand, Vaughn’s work on The Naturalist Society didn’t come without challenges. Stepping away from her familiar urban fantasy worlds—she reached the New York Times Bestseller list with her long-running novel series about Kitty Norville, a Denver DJ who is also a werewolf—to tackle a historical setting took Vaughn on a lengthy fact-finding journey.

Despite completing extensive research, Vaughn admits the process felt never-ending. “As much research as I do, it never feels like quite enough. It’s impossible to be completely thorough.

“Using a concrete historical setting means I’m very aware of all the possible mistakes I could make. I’m waiting for readers to start emailing me about what I got wrong,” she jokes.

Still, Vaughn considers these trials part of the creative process. She strives to remain open to all ideas and let her stories evolve naturally—a tricky balance to strike while keeping The Naturalist Society grounded in history.

The Naturalist Society is a departure from the urban fantasy and murder mystery genres in which Carrie Vaughn has widely written.

Embracing the unexpected

For Vaughn, The Naturalist Society is more than just her latest novel; it’s part of a larger journey as a writer. Throughout her career, Vaughn has written more than 20 novels and 100 short stories spanning every genre from urban fantasy to murder mystery.

“I’m always looking for new stories to tell,” she says. “I go where the stories tell me to go. I like the challenge of trying new genres and tropes.”

Vaughn’s exploratory approach to storytelling is rooted in experimentation. She says she enjoys the surprising outcomes that emerge after taking time to reconnoiter new settings or blur the lines between genres.

This approach helps The Naturalist Society exist as a historical fantasy novel while also transcending the conventions of the genre.

From CU ��«��Ƶ to a career of discovery

Vaughn’s ability to weave complex stories is no accident. She credits her time at CU ��«��Ƶ for giving her a firm foundation in her craft.

“I need to give a big shout out to Professor Kelly Hurley,” Vaughn says. “Her seminars on Victorian and Gothic literature have stayed with me.”

She says these classes, among others, helped shape her understanding of storytelling. Time spent reading and discussing books and literature during her degree studies also played a pivotal role in Vaughn’s career.

“If I can write across genres and settings, it’s because I’ve read across genres and settings,” she explains. “I go back to Professor Hurley’s ideas and reading lists all the time. She helped fill a well that I’m still drawing on.”

Advice for writers

Every aspiring writer’s journey is unique, Vaughn says, and her experiences emphasize the value of exploration and risk-taking. Her advice to writers looking to try new genres or settings?

“Read widely! Look for inspiration in unlikely places.”

She also encourages writers to embrace bold ideas and trust their instincts.

“When I’m working on an idea and find myself thinking, ‘This is crazy, people will never go for this,’ I know I’m on the right track,” she says.

With The Naturalist Society, Vaughn has unlocked yet another creative direction for her work, but her latest novel is just the beginning of her foray into historical fantasy. She’s already working on a sequel and aims to build further on the world she created.

Learn more about Carrie Vaughn and The Naturalist Society on her website.

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In new novel The Naturalist Society, CU ��«��Ƶ alum Carrie Vaughn offers a fresh take on historical fantasy.

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Exploring the ‘musical audacity’ of funk

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 15:30:16 +0000

Exploring the ‘musical audacity’ of funk Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/09/2024 - 08:30

Rachel Sauer

In a newly published book, CU ��«��Ƶ Professor Reiland Rabaka delves into the culture and sound of music’s ‘best-kept secret’

Barely two months into the ‘70s, Funkadelic—led by George Clinton, Jr.—released something of a musical manifesto with the song “Good Old Music”:

Everybody’s gettin’ funky

In the days when the funk was gone

I recall not long ago

When the funk it was goin’ strong.

CU ��«��Ƶ Professor Reiland Rabaka (left) recently published The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics.

In hindsight, the lyrics hint not only at funk’s musical and cultural impact, but at the forgotten shadows in which funk has often lived.

“One of the many reasons funk frequently is not understood to be funk has to do with its ghettoization within the music industry and White music critics’ tendency to lazily lump most post-1945 Black popular music under the ‘rhythm & blues’ moniker,” writes musicologist Reiland Rabaka.

“In other words, because White music critics often serve as musical gatekeepers for White music fans, telling them what is ‘hip’ and ‘hot’ and what is not, most White folks never developed an ear for, or serious appreciation of, classic funk in the ways they did for pre-funk Black popular music such as blues, jazz, rhythm & blues or even soul music.”

Rabaka, a ��«��Ƶ professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for African and African American Studies, aims a scholar’s eye at funk in his newly published book The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics. Originally scheduled for 2025 release, a deluge of pre-orders prompted publisher Routledge to release it in late October.

“(Funk is) this musical gumbo, where you’ve got all these different kinds of music and not just distinctly Black music,” Rabaka explains. “African American culture is a hybrid heritage—we’re talking about an incredibly creolized culture, and as Black folk in America, we’re not searching for some sort of purity. Music reflects our multiple traditions and heritages and also allows us to live out loud. The musical audacity in funk, even if it’s just for three minutes and 30 seconds, when Parliament Funkaldelic says dance without constrictions, we’re dancing without constrictions.”

No rap without funk

The Funk Movement joins Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement, released in 2022, and Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas, released in 2023, in Rabaka’s ongoing exploration of the confluences of music, culture, identity, politics, place and people.

"It’s not a coincidence that James Brown comes out and says, ‘Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated,” says Reiland Rabaka. (Photo: James Brown performing in the Musikhalle in Hamburg, Germany, February 1973. Heinrich Klaffs/WikiCommons)

He comes to this work not only as a scholar, but as a musician: “I was the kid from the projects who got bussed to these incredible creative arts schools,” he says. “From there, I was able to get a truckload of music scholarships, which is how I became the first person in my family to go to college.

“I really feel like my musicology is coming full circle, coming back to where I started. I was a performing jazz musician and have a performing arts degree, so in a way I’m what social scientists call a participant researcher—I’m deeply involved in a lot of the music I write about. It lends my work a kind of insider’s knowledge, a kind of intimacy with my subject. I’m not just somebody writing to achieve tenure; these are passion projects to me.”

Rabaka came to funk not only loving the music but fascinated by its place at the nexus of the women’s liberation movement, the sexual revolution, the Black power movement, the evolving civil rights and gay rights movements and all the other political and social upheavals of the 1970s. However, he acknowledges in his book that funk—both the music and the culture—is often subsumed into musical movements that are more broadly familiar to non-Black audiences.

“Most funk, both as a genre of music and a cultural movement, has not resonated with non-Black fans of Black popular music the way a lot of pre-funk Black popular music has,” Rabaka writes. “It is like funk is one of the best kept secrets of Black popular music, even though it, more than any other post-war Black popular music genre, laid the foundation for the mercurial rise of rap music and hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s.”

In other words, Rabaka says, “there’s no rap, no hip-hop, without funk.”

Award winner

Reiland Rabaka’s book Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas was recently named Best History in the category Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop or Soul Music in the 2024 Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Awards for Excellence.

The goal of the ARSC Awards Program, according to the organization, “is to recognize and draw attention to the finest work now being published in the field of recorded sound research.”

In the book, Rabaka, a professor in the University of Colorado Department of Ethnic Studies, critically explores the ways the soundtracks of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement often overlapped with those of other 1960s and 1970s social, political and cultural movements, such as the Black Power Movement, Women’s Liberation Movement and sexual revolution. His research reveals that “much of the soul, funk and disco performed by Black women was most often the very popular music of a very unpopular and unsung movement: The Black Women’s Liberation Movement.”

Rabaka and his fellow award winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony during ARSC’s annual conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May.

Say it out loud

However, funk—like the broader umbrella of “art” under which it lives—can be difficult to define; listeners know it when they hear it. And it’s more than music: “It’s the sound and the aesthetics of Black bohemia,” Rabaka says.

In his book, Rabaka approaches the funk movement as it encapsulates both the music and the culture of funk, focusing on the golden age of funk that’s generally categorized between 1965 and 1979. He notes that while funk is often dismissed as simple party music, it addressed and embodied the upheaval and frustrations of the times in which it was born.

“To adequately interpret funk, one needs to understand key moments in African American history and culture, especially the struggle to end racial segregation that culminated in the 1960s and the beginning (and unfulfilled promises) of the era of racial integration in the 1970s,” Rabaka writes.

“Funk can be interpreted as ‘a discourse of social protest’ and ‘the critical voice of a post-Civil Rights Movement counterculture’ that challenged mainstream histories that attempt to nicely and neatly paint the 1960s as the decade of racial segregation and the 1970s as the decade of racial integration, ‘equal opportunity,’ and ‘ubiquitous optimism.’”

When Marvin Gaye asked “What’s Going On,” Rabaka says, Sly Stone answered several months later with “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.”

“In the book I say it’s not a coincidence that James Brown comes out and says, ‘Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated,” Rabaka says. “There was mass disillusionment, mass depression, so funk is also a deeper and darker sound, a grittier sound. It exists in a lot of levels, where it can be good-time music, sure, but sometimes there are a lot of heavier topics and themes that go on in funk.”

Rabaka is particularly fascinated with the women of funk and is already working on a book that brings them out of the shadows.

“Funk, I argue, was a Black popular music response to the hippie movement, to the women’s movement, to Stonewall even,” Rabaka says. “Black America has a way of refracting things that are going on in mainstream America, saying, ‘How does that speak to us?’”

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In a newly published book, CU ��«��Ƶ Professor Reiland Rabaka delves into the culture and sound of music’s ‘best-kept secret.'

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Top image: Earth, Wind & Fire perform in 1982 (Photo: Chris Hakkens/WikiCommons)

Readers are taking in the ‘trash’

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 17:39:31 +0000

Readers are taking in the ‘trash’ Rachel Sauer Wed, 11/20/2024 - 10:39

Adamari Ruelas

CU ��«��Ƶ scholar Katherine Little explores how Colleen Hoover and similar authors have taken over bestseller lists and social media

Colleen Hoover fans cheered last month when the film version of her novel Reminders of Him was announced to be in the works at Universal Pictures and slated for February 2026 release. On the heels of the almost $150 million that It Ends with Us, a 2024 film based on another of Hoover’s novels, earned domestically, even non-fans or those not on TikTok probably know that a new Colleen Hoover film is a big—and lucrative—deal.

Hoover and a cohort of bestselling authors that includes Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry and many others have taken over the reading—and sometimes film-adaptation—world one romance novel at a time. Their rise to literary fame writing novels that critics often dismiss as “trashy” can be attributed in large part to social media, especially BookTok, a subcommunity in the TikTok app dedicated to books. In fact, “BookTok authors” is a sales metric that Publishers Weekly tracks, and cites seven of the 10 bestselling adult novels of the first nine months of 2024 as being written by BookTok authors—who also happen to write romance or romantasy.

Katie Little, a CU ��«��Ƶ professor of English, has taught a course called Trashy Books.

This raises the question: What is the enduring appeal of these “trashy” novels? Why are they so popular?

First, it helps to understand what exactly makes a novel “trashy.”

“There isn’t one correct answer to what makes a book ‘trashy,’” says Katie Little, a ��«��Ƶ professor of English who has taught a course called Trashy Books, adding that the word “trashy” suggests these novels are in some way bad—poorly written, too sexy or simply a waste of time.

“It’s the marketing,” says Little. “Usually, somebody who is writing a trashy book understands themselves to be writing it for a particular audience looking for something fun to read, looking for romance.”

Some even argue that these novels are intentionally “trashy,” and sales figures might back that up. NPD BookScan reports that 2022 adult fiction sales rose 8.5% from 2021, growth that was led by a 52.4% increase in romance book sales. So, the authors of these novels likely understand that they are not writing books for academic or high-literary audiences but are purposely writing what Little calls “books for fun.”

“Books that we read for fun do have a bad-for-you aspect, and sometimes people aren’t as aware of it because they’re just looking for something fun,” Little explains. Books for fun are what some consider to be books that aren’t challenging to read—a concept that has shadowed fiction almost since the first fiction was written.

Books for education

Through human history, books have been essential for formal—and even self-directed—education, and the prevailing idea has been that people could not consider themselves educated if they did not know how to read or if they didn’t read often.

Colleen Hoover is one of the leading "BookTok authors," or authors who are beloved in the book-focused subcommunity of TikTok.

With the invention of the printing press and the growth of mass publication, books—and particularly novels—became a more popular and accessible means of entertainment, not just education. Even before the printing press—as early as the first century AD and The Satyricon by Petronius Arbiter—novels were generally regarded as the dumber, less respectable offspring of the epic poem. So, it wasn’t a far leap to “trashy” books that are more about fun and entertainment than enlightenment.

And while it might be an exaggeration to claim that social media have had as significant an effect on people’s reading habits as, say, the printing press, the effect has nevertheless been significant—specifically BookTok. A community within the social media app TikTok, BookTok is dedicated to all things books—from book reviews to news about authors and new releases—and made writers like Colleen Hoover into bestselling authors. BookTok content creators have embraced romance and romantasy novels that might be termed “trashy,” helping to make the genres a driving force in publishing.

“What’s changed with social media and BookTok is that people are reading books, and they don’t really read books the way they used to,” Little says. “[Readers] don’t have this sense of ‘I should be reading a better book,’ as in better written, more intellectually challenging.”

But what does BookTok mean for the future of reading? Little asks what would happen if people put similar effort into reading Shakespeare or other highly regarded authors that they put into BookTok—the lighting, the recording, the influencing and tagging. In a recent article in The Atlantic about student reading abilities, several college professors expressed fear for future generations: Will they learn how to analyze, explain and understand difficult texts that are meant to challenge readers?

“I still think that books are the path to education,” Little says. “I understand people want to read for escape, but I also want people to read to use critical ways of thinking and knowledge.”

According to Little, one day Colleen Hoover and similar writers will fade in popularity, just as many authors have before her. “Even if writers exhaust the romance—the trashy books line of writing—people are so creative, they’ll come up with something else that will percolate in a different way.”

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CU ��«��Ƶ scholar Katherine Little explores how Colleen Hoover and similar authors have taken over bestseller lists and social media.

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Top image: iStock

Kinship may not mean what you think it does

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 19:52:34 +0000

Kinship may not mean what you think it does Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/18/2024 - 12:52

Bradley Worrell

CU ��«��Ƶ anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheads new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.

Historically, anthropologists defining kinship tended to begin with who people are related to by birth and by marriage. Family was often considered a bedrock of society.

Over time, the idea of what constitutes kinship has evolved, but a key underlying assumption has remained largely unchanged when it comes to the idea of families being a source of caregiving support, says Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the ��«��Ƶ Department of Anthropology, whose research focuses on social relationships, including kinship.

“The literature in anthropological scholarship on families often still supports this notion that, definitionally, family is what keeps us together,” she says. “There is a perception that kinship is where social solidarity lies, how social continuity works, how society hangs together.”

Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the CU ��«��Ƶ Department of Anthropology, researches social relationships, including kinship.

The problem with that idea, Goldfarb says, is that empirical data, including Goldfarb’s own fieldwork in Japan connected to the child-welfare system, often contradicts that idealistic portrayal. That, in turn, posed a problem when assigning readings to her students.

“As I’ve taught kinship over the years, I had this increasing sense that many of my students don’t see themselves reflected in the literature,” she says. “We often talk about diversifying our syllabi, making sure that the authors come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse perspectives. That was really lacking in the materials that I had available to assign to students, because a lot of the reading doesn’t take serious the fact that some people’s lives with their families are really problematic and really hard.”

Goldfarb’s solution was to spearhead the book Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, which was recently published by Rutgers University Press. Goldfarb led the conceptualization of the book’s theme, served as co-editor and co-author of the introduction, and wrote one of the chapters.

As Goldfarb and her co-author, Sandra Bamford, note in the book’s introduction, “If family is, by definition, about nurturing and caregiving, then how do we understand kinship when it is not?” The authors do not attempt to redefine kinship, but instead seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to the field.

Recently, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine spoke with Goldfarb about the book. Her responses were lightly edited for style and condensed.

Question: What is kinship, exactly? And how has the idea of kinship changed over time?

Goldfarb: The term ‘kinship’ is fairly academic and is taken to mean the systematic level of family relationships. In the old anthropology literature, it was about trying to discern what sort of kinship system each society had, allowing researchers to produce a systematic understanding of how people reckoned their social ties.

One of the reasons anthropologists cared about this was that they believed ‘primitive’ societies didn’t have politics; they just had kinship. Anthropologists were often tasked by colonial governments to determine these key social structures so colonizers could more effectively govern. …

From my perspective, now when we talk about kinship and anthropology, it is about how we think about relatedness more broadly—beyond just heterosexual reproduction and marriage. For example, if I ask my students to depict their own kinship networks, they may draw a genealogy, but when you actually find out what their real relationships are like, those may not be reflected in either their genealogies or legal documents. …

If you are just basing things on genealogy, you’re not seeing the foster child who is part of a family; depending on the local legal regime, you may not be seeing the same-sex couple; you’re not seeing the ghost of the grandmother who is still a part of a family’s daily life. These are all aspects of human life that you wouldn’t actually see if you are just looking at relationships that map onto a normative genealogy. So, definitionally, we need to be more open-minded about the ways that we categorize social relationships in order to analyze them.

Question: And the book specifically grapples with the idea that familial kinship doesn’t always carry the positives that many people tend to associate with it, correct?

Goldfarb: A very stubborn assumption continues to exist in both the academic literature and the popular imagination that kin ties are—or should be—loving, forever, unconditional and nurturing, and that the obligation to care should exist in perpetuity. The chapters presented in this collection paint a different picture.

In Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, authors seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to studying kinship.

In the ‘Ambiguities of Care’ section, we were thinking about situations where normative frameworks of caregiving were destabilized in some way, which often meant that care was delegated to nonfamilial others—so, either the carceral, the child welfare system, long-term care facilities or medical systems. …

For example, one essay looked at recidivism rates for older adults in Japan, where people tend to commit petty crimes so they can be re-arrested and incarcerated, as prison offers more comfort than life ‘outside’ if their family is not able to care for them. In those cases, they find being incarcerated more ‘homey’ than being at home.

The section ‘Toxic States’ is about the ways state formations shape the types of relationships that are possible, or that people produce in spite of these state formations. So, for example, one of the essays is about people who have been incarcerated after being caught at the U.S. border, and how American border policies impact kinship relationships and possibilities for connection and disconnection.

And the third section is ‘Negative Affects.’ The main idea in that section is that types of affect or emotion that are often considered negative, like anger or envy or favoritism, are actually constitutive aspects of how we understand ourselves in relation with others. …

My own essay, in that last section, talks about how in child-welfare contexts, the idea may be that family is a dangerous place; when children have been removed from their homes, it may be because their family of origin is not safe for them. From my fieldwork in Japan with child welfare institutions, I observed that one of the goals of those spaces was to produce what I call ‘sanitized relationality’—something that was not family, that was safe, not contaminated by arguments or worry and everyone was equal and was treated the same.

The argument I make in the essay is that that type of relationship is not the sort that helps people understand in adulthood how to maintain social ties. If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can’t just prohibit those things and you can’t have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things. So, it’s hard to grow up in a situation like that and know how to have relationships. To be able to argue with someone and still continue that relationship is a type of privilege.

Question: By extension, it seems that when kinship works like people envision it’s supposed to, it should be recognized and maybe respected because it’s not automatically the norm?

Goldfarb: Exactly. At least, the recognition that kinship relationships that feel positive and good take a lot of work; there is nothing natural or automatic about kinship ties being caring or based upon positive sociality.

Question: How did the idea for this book come together?

Goldfarb: We had proposed a session for the 2020 American Anthropological Association conference, which ended up being canceled because of COVID. … When the conference was cancelled, we decided to do two online workshops instead. For that, we had people send in drafts, and we grouped the participants in thematic groups. …

"If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can’t just prohibit those things and you can’t have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things."

We asked the authors to think about: What irritates you about the way kinship has been talked about in the literature? How can you think against the grain of typical arguments? …

For the volume as a whole, I wanted something that would be accessible to undergrads and good materials for graduate students; something that would be ethnographically rich and also theoretically exciting. We wanted these to be short, delicious essays of between 4,300 and 6,000 words, which is quite short for academic articles. …

And one thing that I love about the book is that there’s such diversity in the contributors. Some of them are junior grad students and others are emeritus professors.

Question: Who is the intended audience for this book? And, have there been any reactions to it thus far?

Goldfarb: As an academic press, it’s probably academics in general who are the audience. So, undergrad students, graduate students and faculty. But I also feel the essays are quite accessible, so I really hope that people beyond academia read it.

I taught portions of the book this fall in my undergraduate Kinship seminar, and the students have reacted really positively to it; some of them said they found it very validating of their own experiences.

We did a book launch on Oct. 24, where the first half was a cabaret performance by Ronan Viard, who is French actor and singer who lives in ��«��Ƶ. His story is exactly what the book is about. It was about him being abducted by his father and brought from France to the United States when he was a child. The story is about his experiences with that, but it’s also about his relationship to the United States, where he lives now, and his relationship with his father after all these years, and his children’s relationship with his father.

It was a powerful performance, and it brought up all these questions that were at the center of the book, like: How do you grapple with the types of family inheritances, including inherited trauma, that are perhaps unwelcome but hard to escape?

Ronan’s cabaret also raises questions about belonging that are very anthropological: How do we theorize belonging? How do we think about belonging to a nation or to a family or a community or to a language?

Kathryn Goldfarb’s solo-authored ethnography, Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-being in Japan, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

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CU ��«��Ƶ anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheads new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.

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Top photo: iStock

Loriliai Biernacki wins American Academy of Religion Book Award

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 20:46:32 +0000

Loriliai Biernacki wins American Academy of Religion Book Award Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/11/2024 - 13:46

The award jury called Biernacki’s 2023 book, The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism, ‘both striking and original’

Loriliai Biernacki, professor of religious studies at the ��«��Ƶ, is one of this year’s winners of the American Academy of Religion Book Award (AAR).

The group’s annual award “recognizes new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion,” according to the award announcement. Biernacki’s book, The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism, published by Oxford University Press, won in the category of constructive-reflective studies, beating out five other finalists.

“Loriliai Biernacki makes a fascinating case for the contemporary relevance of Abhinavagupta’s 11th-century Indian philosophy,” the AAR jury said. “By analyzing wonder (camatkāra) as rooted in the material rather than in a cognitive faculty, The Matter of Wonder is both striking and original in its approach. The links she draws with viruses and AI in particular make this work pertinent and fresh.”

A faculty member at CU ��«��Ƶ since 2000, Biernacki researches Hinduism, gender, New Materialism and the religion-science interface. She’s published dozens of book chapters and journal articles, as well as two other books: God's Body: Panentheism across the World's Religious Traditions and Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra, the latter of which won the Kayden Award in 2008.

"As I was working on this book, reading these medieval Sanskrit authors, I found myself continually marveling at how prescient and cogent these medieval Indian thinkers were, so it felt very important to be able to connect us today to the thought of these writers so many centuries ago," Biernacki says. "Also, feel fortunate to be at the University of Colorado, which has been supportive of my work here."

Biernacki’s fellow recipients this year include Sinem Arcak Casale, Elizabeth O’Brien, Molly Farneth, Carlos Eire, Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst.

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The award jury called Biernacki’s 2023 book, The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism, ‘both striking and original.’

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Flying with the man behind the capes

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:44:03 +0000

Flying with the man behind the capes Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/18/2024 - 12:44

Doug McPherson

CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month

When alumnus Patrick Hamilton was growing up, he, like many kids, found comfort in comic books. “I’m an almost lifelong comics fan, and specifically a fan of ‘Avengers’,” Hamilton says.

As Hamilton continued enjoying comics and learning more about the people behind them, he eventually came across the name George Pérez. It’s a name you may not immediately recognize, and that’s a key point Hamilton makes in his new book, George Pérez, which hit shelves earlier this year.

“The main argument of the book [is] that Pérez had a larger impact on comics than he’s generally been given credit for,” says Hamilton, an English professor at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania who earned his PhD in English at the ��«��Ƶ in 2006.

CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus Patrick Hamilton (PhDEngl'06), a lifelong comics fan, highlighted the groundbreaking work of Marvel Comics and DC Comics artist George Pérez in an eponymous new biography.

But in the comic book world, the name George Pérez and his work turn heads—not just for his impact on the art, style and story structure of comics, but because he was one of the first Hispanic artists to become a major name in the industry and helped pave the way for greater diversity in the field.

Pérez, who worked both as an artist and writer starting in the 1970s, played a significant role in blockbuster series such as Fantastic Four and The Avengers for Marvel Comics. In the 1980s, he created The New Teen Titans, which became a top-selling series for publisher DC Comics. And he developed DC Comic's landmark limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, followed by relaunching Wonder Woman.

Hamilton says Pérez is also “pretty synonymous” with large event titles, most prominently DC Comic’s Superman revamp in 2011 and Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet.

“And he developed a reputation for a dynamic and hyper-detailed style, particularly in terms of the number of characters and details he’d put into a page, that was highly regarded and ultimately influential in the … 1970s and 1980s and beyond.”

Hamilton says he sees his book as attempting to expand Pérez’s legacy.

“Despite his acclaim and prominence, he hasn’t really been seen as an artist that contributed to the style and genre of comics in ways artists before him … are seen,” he says. “I argue in the book that Pérez made contributions to the style of comics, not only in the layout of the page and what effects that could achieve, but especially in his way of building what we would call the story world around the characters, where he embraced the possibilities for the fantastic within comics.”

Paving the way

The book also speaks to Pérez’s interest in representations of race, disability and gender, the latter of which Hamilton says Pérez consciously strove to improve in his art over his career.

Artist George Pérez was reknown for his work with both DC Comics and Marvel Comics. (Photos: DC Comics, left, and Marvel Comics, right)

Hamilton adds that he believes a lot of other Black, Indigenous and artists of color working today likely see Pérez as “an influence and as carving out a space” for them within the industry.

“I think you can look at the significant number of Hispanic and Latinx creators working in comics today—many of them as artists—and see them as following, in some cases quite consciously, in Pérez’s footsteps.”

He adds that Pérez did much to help define the look and feel of modern superhero comics in the 1970s and 1980s, as did another Latino artist, José Luis García-López.

“Garcia-Lopez, who, among other things, created the official reference artwork for DC Comics that is still much in use today. So, you have two Latino creators working in the late 20th century, when the comic book industry was even more predominantly white than it is today, and shaping the look of it.”

Hamilton says one of the more interesting findings about Pérez that meshes with how Pérez has been overlooked is a kind of “invisibility or transparency” in his art.

“It [his art] is never meant to overshadow and … is always in service to the story or narrative. What surprised me is how much this was a conscious choice on Pérez’s part, that he never wanted his art to draw attention to itself in a way that was detrimental to the overall storytelling. It’s kind of ironic, and … surprising, because Pérez does have one of the most recognizable styles in comics, but his goal as an artist was always to do what’s best for the realization of the story first.”

Perez died in 2022 at age 67. You can see examples of his Marvel Comics art here and his DC Comics art here.

Top image: A group scene of DC Comics characters drawn by George Pérez (Photo: DC Comics)

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CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month.

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Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:31:39 +0000

Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/17/2024 - 15:31

Silvia Pettem

In book, CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story

As a student at the University of Colorado, I often passed through the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater on the way to my classes. I had assumed Rippon was a woman associated with the theater department, but that was not so. I later learned that she had arrived in ��«��Ƶ in 1878 and became the university's first female professor. After her death in 1935, then-President George Norlin named the theater (then under construction) in her memory.

Publicly, "Miss Rippon" was highly respected by students and faculty. However, unknown to Norlin and the others, she had a secret private life that would have been considered scandalous, had she not hidden her husband and daughter behind a Victorian veil of secrecy.

The long-concealed truth was revealed in 1986 when an elderly man donated Rippon's diaries, account books, and journals to the university's archives. He was Rippon's grandson and revealed that she had had a romantic relationship with one of her students, became pregnant in 1888, secretly married, and took a year's sabbatical in Germany to give birth.

CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus and historian Silvia Pettem (left) wrote Separate Lives about a little-known chapter in the life of influential CU ��«��Ƶ Professor Mary Rippon, namesake of the campus theater.

At the time, there was no rule concerning teacher-student relationships, as it never occurred to anyone to implement one. Rippon was 37, and her husband, Will Housel, was 25. When the baby, Miriam, was born, Housel was still at CU in his senior year.

After graduation, Housel joined his wife and daughter in Europe before Rippon returned to ��«��Ƶ and continued to teach as if nothing in her life had changed. Housel and Miriam remained in Europe, where he attended graduate school. Initially, Miriam was placed in a series of orphanages. At the age of 4, she was taken to Rippon's extended family in Illinois.

At the time, Victorian-era society expected women with children to be supported by their husbands. If a professional woman married, she would have been accused of taking a job away from a man with a family to support. Rippon had to completely separate her public and private lives in order to keep her job. She continued to teach for 20 more years.

As a revered pioneer woman educator, Rippon appears to have valued career over family, but she may have, instead, realized that she needed to work to financially provide for her daughter's care.

Eventually, Rippon and Housel divorced. Housel remarried when Miriam was 8 years old and provided his daughter a home, but he lacked an adequate income. On a salary less than her male colleagues, Rippon continued to support her daughter, as well as her divorced husband, his second wife, and, eventually, their four children!

Meanwhile, Rippon was a role model for her female students, a full professor, and even chair of the Department of German language and literature. Except for confiding in two close friends, she took her secret to her grave in ��«��Ƶ's Columbia Cemetery.

For decades, the only tangible evidence on the CU campus of Rippon's secret life was ivy that Housel had planted outside of Old Main, where Rippon held her classes. His sentiment was obvious in a poem he penned his senior year that read in part, "But the ivy is for friendship and it seemeth best of all; 'tis the rose of love and petals that will never fade or fall."

Silvia Pettem’s In Retrospect column appears once a month in the Daily Camera, where this first appeared. She can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com. She will be signing copies of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon (Lyons Press, 2024) at the ��«��Ƶ Bookstore on Oct. 22.

In book, CU ��«��Ƶ alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story.

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For medieval Iberian queens, love was a dangerous sickness

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 22:45:41 +0000

For medieval Iberian queens, love was a dangerous sickness Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/13/2024 - 16:45

Blake Puscher

In a newly published history of the region’s female monarchs, CU ��«��Ƶ scholar shows the connections between love, grief and madness

Like many of their royal European counterparts of the time, the medieval queens of Spain and Portugal often married for politics, but rarely for love.

Instead, their marriages generally embodied the political intrigue facilitated by personal relationships in hereditary monarchical power structures. During a time of religious conflicts between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, as well as cultural and philosophical developments spurred by the rediscovery of Aristotle, their marriages were more political maneuvering than swooning.

And even when love was involved, it rarely ended well.

Núria Silleras-Fernández

In a newly published exploration of emotion and political power in the medieval Iberian Peninsula, which is composed largely of peninsular Spain and continental Portugal, ��«��Ƶ scholar Núria Silleras-Fernández, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, analyzes a time and place and the royal women who navigated the treacherous territory between heart and state.

In her book The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, Silleras-Fernández focuses broadly on these powerful emotions through the individual stories of three queens, whose stories in some ways presage the issues that women in politics still face today.

Somewhat confusingly for the reader, several were named Isabel, so Silleras-Fernández gives each woman a brief distinguishing title: Isabel of Portugal (1428–96), who was the grandmother of Isabel of Aragon (1470–98) and Juana of Castile (1479–1555).

A comparative study of the three women, whom historians had not previously put together, is informative not only because their lives tell us about the politics and culture of their society, but because—despite facing similar tragedies—Juana, Isabel of Aragon, and Isabel of Portugal’s lives took very different directions.

‘El amor es un gusano’

According to Silleras-Fernández, these three women “suffered from very intense grief following the death of their spouses.” Their grief was ultimately viewed as excessive, in part because of the cultural attitude towards love— expressed in the poem “Las Mañas del Amor” by Florencia del Pinar, Silleras-Fernández says. “She describes love as un gusano, a worm.

“In medieval times, passionate love was seen as a sort of affliction. When someone was really in love, it was seen as dangerous.”

This is not to say that love had no place in court culture; in fact, according to a historian whom Silleras-Fernández cites, it was fashionable for Spanish lords to pretend to be in love.

In The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, CU ��«��Ƶ scholar Núria Silleras-Fernández notes that in medieval times, passionate love was seen as an affliction.

Nonetheless, authentic, passionate love was seen as a personal affliction, a spiritual danger and a political vulnerability. “Passionate love was even medicalized,” Silleras-Fernández says, and in a way, it “was seen as an affliction that was tied to melancholy,” with unrequited passions causing lovesickness.

When it came to medieval Christian culture in Spain, she explains, “there was something called the religion of love. For men, their lady was not merely the object of their desire, as in courtly love; she became more important to them than God.” This was understood as a form of idolatry and therefore a violation of the second of the 10 commandments from the Bible.

Moreover, Silleras-Fernández says, “royal marriages were arranged for political purposes, so it was common for women not to be in love with their husbands. The idea was that the couple would enjoy some sort of affection and collaborate in ruling the kingdom and producing heirs.”

To the extent that it interfered with remarriage, love was even an obstacle to the political maneuverings of the royalty. Ultimately, then, passionate love “was seen as dangerous, and it was not encouraged for royal partners.”

Conflict at court

Isabel of Portugal, who was born in Portugal but became Queen Consort of Castile and León through her marriage to King Juan II (as opposed to becoming a queen regnant in her own right by inheriting the throne), exemplified the dangers of “loving too much.”

According to Silleras-Fernández, the chronicles of her life suggest an unusually intense love for her husband. The conflict between her and Álvaro de Luna, the royal favorite and Constable, is an example of this.

Both Isabel and Álvaro exercised significant influence over Juan, Silleras-Fernández says: “Álvaro de Luna’s role as adviser put him in clear competition with the functions of the queen.” Isabel and her faction within the nobility and Juan’s entourage eventually won out, and she convinced the King to have Álvaro executed.

While overtly political, this situation may not seem at first to involve love. However, according to Silleras-Fernández, Álvaro wrote a letter to Juan’s advisors from prison, asking them to prevent the king from having too much sex, arguing it could compromise his health. This suggests the intimate nature of Álvaro’s interference with the king and queen’s relationship and demonstrates the importance of love to a queen consort’s political power.

Perhaps more illustratively, Isabel “felt such great pain at the death of her husband that she fell into a sickness so grave and long that she was never able to recover,” Silleras-Fernández writes, and lived the rest of her life without much political influence.

Mixing politics, religion and grief

Isabel of Aragon, one of Isabel of Portugal’s grandchildren, also suffered greatly after the death of her first husband. She became Princess of Portugal through her marriage to Crown Prince Afonso, and this marriage was, by all accounts, happy, Silleras-Fernández says—if brief.

"Infanta Isabel de Trastámara," artist unknown.

Unfortunately, Afonso died young, which caused national grief and inspired a series of consolatory texts by noted clergymen. Isabel of Aragon was “presented with works explaining that his death should be seen as an opportunity for her to become a better Christian, and that she needed to remember that it was important to love God above anyone else,” Silleras-Fernández explains.

Like her father-in-law, João II, Isabel received letters from important clergymen blaming the bereaved for the death of their loved ones, Silleras-Fernández explains. João was even accused of loving his son more than God, and informed that his son’s death was a form of retribution for this sin.

Despite Isabel’s continued mourning, she was a princess and therefore a political asset for the Catholic monarchs, most especially because she could secure a marriage alliance for them. Whether because she did not want to remarry, or because the religious messages in the consolatory letters had heightened her Catholic convictions, she requested, as a condition of her planned second marriage to Manuel I, that all the “heretics” be expelled from his kingdom, Portugal.

The exact meaning of “heretics” here is unclear, but according to Silleras-Fernández, “it probably meant that she wanted the expulsion of the Jews, the Muslims, and all the recent converts from Judaism to Christianity who had been prosecuted by the Inquisition.”

Regardless of Isabel’s motivations, it is clear that grief played a role. Hence, Silleras-Fernández says, grief and other emotions can have serious consequences when they interact with politics and religion, which were closely related in medieval and early modern times.

Juana the Mad

“Most people knew about Juana,” Silleras-Fernández says, “because she is famous as Juana the Mad.” Like Isabel of Aragon, she was a daughter of Isabel the Catholic, and she was the mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Like Isabel of Portugal, her grandmother, Juana was ultimately alienated from the political power she once possessed, Silleras-Fernández explains, spending the rest of her life put away.

“The difference between her grandmother and Juana’s eldest sister Isabel was that both of them were queen consorts, while Juana was queen in her own right, and she needed to rule.”

Perhaps the most extraordinary story of Juana’s grief—also incited by the unexpected death of her husband—was her insistence on personally accompanying the king’s remains to Granada, a trip of more than 400 miles, while she was in the third trimester of pregnancy. This trip was a perpetual funerary procession, taking more than two years and including religious services at every stop.

Juana is reported to have become ill along the way, and began to not change her clothes, as well as eat and sleep on the floor. After this, her father, King Fernando, sent her to a palace in Tordesillas where she was confined for the rest of her life.

"The Madness of Joanna of Castille" by Lorenzo Vallés (1866)

When she finally returned from her husband’s burial, she was in a bad place emotionally and mentally, but her condition improved. “If you read the letters that the people who were living with her sent to her son, Charles V, it was obvious that she was feeling better.

“The problem was that, when you send someone away because you have decided that person cannot rule, you cannot easily reestablish that person as a viable ruler,” Silleras-Fernández continues. “Neither her father nor her son was interested in rehabilitating Juana because they were already doing Juana’s job.” They had taken over out of necessity while Juana was gone and did not want to give up power. For her family to continue ruling, she had to be put away.

According to Silleras-Fernández, what makes her situation different from those of Isabel of Portugal and Isabel the Catholic is that the Isabels had more freedom as queen consorts. Since they were not formal rulers, they were not seen as a threat to the status quo, but “because Juana had the potential to personally take charge of the kingdom, she was dangerous.”

‘Backwards and wearing high heels’

These three Iberian queens embody the lesson that, as a ruler, “one needed to be perceived as someone could control their emotions, because they served as a mirror for their subjects,” Silleras-Fernández says. “A ruler needed to be in control, and the ruler needed to demonstrate balance and stability—what Aristotle called the golden mean.”

It was particularly difficult for women to present themselves this way because, she says, “as in the eyes of Aristotle, women were seen as imperfect males. It was harder for them because they were asked to perform like men but were not valued like men. At the same time, of course, women had to adhere to the standards and preconceptions of the time regarding gender. It’s a little bit like the old saying that Ginger Rogers had to dance as well as Fred Astaire, but in her case, going backwards and wearing high heels.

“In many ways, this is a period that is very far from today’s reality, but you would be amazed how much of the dynamics and prejudices surrounding gender and emotion are similar and how— despite the fact that we live in an age of science—medicine and health are still socially and culturally constructed. I expect that with recent events, we will see all of these dynamics at play today in the USA over the course of the next four months.”

Top image: Juana la Loca by Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz (1877)

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In a newly published history of the region’s female monarchs, CU ��«��Ƶ scholar shows the connections between love, grief and madness.

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Prescribing kindness in modern medicine

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 21:43:30 +0000

Prescribing kindness in modern medicine Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/23/2024 - 15:43

Doug McPherson

In her new book, Microaggressions in Medicine, CU ��«��Ƶ alum and bioethicist Heather Stewart writes that some healthcare professionals are causing emotional and psychological harm

Contrary to what is sworn in the Hippocratic Oath, a new book co-written by ��«��Ƶ alumna Heather Stewart (MPhil'17) argues, those who vow to first do no harm are, in fact, causing harm regularly via microaggressions.

In the recently published Microaggressions in Medicine, Stewart defines microaggressions as “comments, actions, bodily gestures or even features of physical spaces” that subtly communicate bias or hostility toward those in marginalized groups.

In a newly published book, CU ��«��Ƶ alumna and bioethicist Heather Stewart (MPhil'17) argues that the effects of microaggressions in medicine may compound over time.

“Microaggressions are particularly pernicious forms of bias or discrimination precisely because they’re frequent and subtle, and so they’re often disregarded as insignificant,” says Stewart, now an assistant professor of philosophy at Oklahoma State University. “From the perspective of those on the receiving end of microaggressions, however, they can be incredibly harmful, especially as their effects compound over time.”

A common example of microaggression, Stewart says, is misgendering a person who is trans or non-binary, referring to a person who is transmasculine with feminine identifiers such as “ma’am,” “Miss” or “Mrs.”

“When done unintentionally, the person committing the microaggression often doesn’t realize why it’s harmful, but it’s also likely that they assume their mistake is a one-off occurrence, and they fail to consider that trans and non-binary people may face misgendering regularly,” Stewart explains.

Stewart, who earned her master’s in philosophy from CU ��«��Ƶ in 2017, adds that being misgendered, especially routinely, can be “incredibly harmful” to trans and non-binary people’s senses of who they are and how they want to be perceived and treated in the world. “From that perspective, microaggressions and their consequences really aren’t micro at all, but touch on core aspects of identity, belongingness and self-respect.”

Feeling unseen

In the book, Stewart and her co-writer, Lauren Freeman, describe several short- and long-term consequences of microaggressions. After a microaggression, they note, the person on the receiving end might feel confused, shocked, disrespected or unwelcomed.

“They might feel as if they’re not being seen, heard, recognized or respected,” Stewart says. “Over time, as microaggressions add up and wear on a person, they can cause real harm to one emotionally, psychologically and more. They can cause one to doubt themselves and question how others see them.

“The goal is to better understand the nature of this distrust so that we can work to form better relations between these communities and the important institutions which govern our lives,” says Heather Stewart.

“In medical contexts, the stakes can be incredibly high. Frequent microaggressions can cause marginalized patients to lose trust in their healthcare providers, which makes them less likely to communicate openly, and can even lead them to delay or avoid seeking medical care. This obviously has serious consequences for the health and wellbeing of marginalized people and communities.”

While she doesn’t share details of her personal healthcare experiences in the book, Stewart does say she’s had “first-hand experience” in not being taken seriously by a healthcare provider and that she’s faced “harmful consequences” such as misdiagnoses and delayed diagnoses.

“I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of microaggressions, including being doubted and dismissed when making claims of pain,” she says. “A long-term consequence of these experiences has been that my trust in healthcare has been shaken. It takes a lot for me to allow myself to be fully open and vulnerable in healthcare settings.”

But her own experiences aside, Stewart says she sees the book as a way to “amplify the voices” of others and their experiences navigating healthcare, and to think about how healthcare can and must do better by them.

A key in solving the problem, Stewart says, is to improve “structural and background conditions.”

“For example, when healthcare professionals are under intense time pressures and constraints, it can be harder to be fully thoughtful, deliberative and empathetic with patients,” she says. “And when healthcare workers haven’t been given adequate education and training about diverse identities and experiences, they might not realize how their words or actions can be harmful. This points to the need for more robust and inclusive training throughout medical education as well as continuing education.”

In a similar vein, Stewart also is studying marginalized groups’ distrust in institutions, specifically distrust that LGBTQ+ communities often have in healthcare institutions.

“The goal is to better understand the nature of this distrust,” Stewart says, “so that we can work to form better relations between these communities and the important institutions which govern our lives.”

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In her new book, Microaggressions in Medicine, CU ��«��Ƶ alum and bioethicist Heather Stewart writes that some healthcare professionals are causing emotional and psychological harm.

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