In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

What is hip? Can a piece of music be hip? Or is hipness primarily a way of engaging with music which recognizes the hip potential of the music? Or primarily a manner of being, which allows the hip individual to authentically engage with the hip artwork? Whatever the case may be, we know that the hip is meant to be authentic. We know that it is opposed to the square:all that is inauthentic, conformist, and authoritarian. And we know that attempts to understand hipness tend to locate it in the sonorous immediacy of musical experience. Phil Ford‘s, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) uses these attempts to understand hipness as an entry into the altogether more intractable problem of defining hipness itself. Ford traces the hip sensibility from its roots in the African-American subcultures that arose in cities such as New York and Chicago in the aftermath of the Great Migration, through its adoption (or appropriation) by the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture movement of the 1960s. In doing so, he marshals a wide array of sources:newspaper columns, jazz improvisations, political posters, liner notes, diaries, and amateur acetate recordings, all grappling — in creative, illuminating, and sometimes painful ways — with the impossibility of capturing the lived experience of hipness. In the closing chapters of the book, he turns to two specific figures, Norman Mailer (a major writer), and John Benson Brooks (a somewhat peripheral jazz musician), reevaluating their works — and perhaps more importantly, their methods of working — in the light of the hip aesthetics described in the earlier sections of the book. Further Listening/Viewing/Reading: John Benson Brooks Trio: Avant Slant Thomas Frank: The Conquest of Cool Fruity Pebbles Rap Rip Torn attacks Norman Mailer with a Hammer

Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His book, In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (Oxford University Press, 2015), offers a rich and deep examination of the place of the bible, both as an object and a source of ideas, in the public life of early America. Noll sets out to show the evolution of the colonial relationship with the bible in the context of Christendom, anti-Catholicism and the British empire in which it was understood. Noll offers innumerable examples and references of New England as thoroughly immersed in scripture in which a broad biblicalism saturated the imagination, culture, and politics. Both fervent and lukewarm believers took the authority of the bible for granted providing analogies for interpreting immediate events, inductive instruction, and inspiration for a vast number of political and cultural projects. But the bible was also a double edge sword that could both unite and divide friends and foe. Noll teases out the often-subtle difference in views of the bible that had significant political consequence. Dissenters and religious radicals believed that the bible stood against Christendom and church establishment. Other issues were not only about the bible itself, and whether it was the sole or final authority, but also who could read it and understand it. Slaves, women, and common people under the sweep of revivals, increased literacy, and the tool of a versified text began to interpret the bible for themselves rather than look to the clergy for guidance. This worked to undermine Christendom and created a uniquely American attitude towards the bible. What remained was a providential rhetoric that replaced the empire with the nation, and ongoing debates over scriptural mandates on the economy, slavery, and arguments for or against the Revolution. Noll has demonstrated that it is virtually impossible to understand the colonial society without understanding the place, significance, and prominence of scripture in private and public life.

In Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford UP, 2014), Glenn Dynner, Professor of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College, explores the world of Jewish-run taverns in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Jews had to fend off reformers and government officials that sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Dynner argues that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers evade fees, bans, and expulsions by installing Christians as fronts for their taverns, revealing a surprising level of Polish-Jewish co-existence that changes the way we think about life in the Kingdom of Poland.

For people and governments in the west the revolutions of 1989 and 1991 were happy events, and as the twentieth anniversary of those events rolled around they were to be celebrated once again with historical reviews in newsmagazines and tv news shows. For the peoples of Eastern Europe they were always political events that went beyond the thrill of no longer being systematically harassed for being too openly religious or public about political views not in line with the party line. There were big questions about how to deal with the legacy of communist rule and how to redirect the country, which have shaped politics in those countries ever since. In Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik‘s collection Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Oxford University Press, 2015), then, it should come as no surprise that the celebration and commemoration of 1989 looks quite different. As such, it provides an interesting means to explore the political landscape in Eastern Europe revealing a variety of different directions politics have taken since 1989, and provides insights into how and why 1989 is remembered differently in these countries. I invite you to listen to my talk with Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik to learn more about their findings and their book.

Gambling and sports have been in the news lately in the US. Authorities in Nevada and New York have shut down the fantasy sports operatorsDraftKings and FanDuel in their states, judging that their daily fantasy games constitute illegal gambling. Both companies had already come under scrutiny this past October, when news broke that their employees were scoring among the top money-winners each week. Is fantasy fixed? Or do all players have a fair chance of winning? State officials across the U.S. are deliberating whether this new variety of sports-related betting represents contests of skill and research, like investing in promising stocks, or illegal games of chance. Wagers have always been a part of modern sports. In fact, many aspects of what makes our games modern – uniform rules, standardized playing spaces and equipment, the authority of governing bodies – were developed in order to ensure a fair bet. As Charles Fountain shows in his book The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball (Oxford UP, 2015), gamblers were a constant presence around organized baseball from its start, so much so that a common term in baseball vernacular of the 1800s was “hippodroming,” a word used to describe a game whose results had been pre-arranged. Chuck points out that when rumors of a fix began to swirl around the 1919 World Series, it was nothing new or unusual. And when the rumors were revealed as true, it was thanks not so much to a principled effort to clean up the game but to the personal feud between White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and Ban Johnson, the president of the American League. But no matter how the news broke, the Black Sox scandal had a decisive influence on baseball and – as this new history shows – a lasting legacy in American popular culture.

While “fundamentalism” and “authoritarian secularism” are commonly perceived as the two mutually exclusive paradigms available to Muslim majority countries Naser Ghobadzadeh‘s new book Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State (Oxford UP, 2014) highlights the recent political developments that challenge this binary perception. Ghobadzadeh examines the case of Iran which has been subject to both authoritarian secularization and authoritarian Islamization over the last nine decades. While politico-religious discourse in Iran is articulated in response to the Islamic state, it also bears signs of a third discourse. Ghobadzadeh conceptualizes this politico-religious discourse as religious secularity. He uses this apparent oxymoronic term to describe the Islamic quest for a democratic secular state. Naser Ghobadzadeh is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice, the Australian Catholic University (ACU).

In The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press, 2015), Kenneth L. Marcus, the President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, explains what it is at stake in how we define anti-Semitism. “Nowadays virtually everyone is opposed to anti-Semitism although no one agrees about what it means to be anti-Semitic,” Marcus writes (p. 11). Marcus discusses the global rise in anti-Semitism; in the United States, Marcus tells us, college campuses are frequently sites of frequent anti-Semitic–and anti-Israel–incidents.

On November 11, 2015, leaders and citizens of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy–Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora–will gather in the small lakeside city of Canandaigua, New York to commemorate the 221st anniversary of a monumental treaty. Negotiated between the Confederacy and representatives of new federal government in the autumn of 1794, the Treaty of Canandaigua recognized the sovereign status of the Six Nations as separate polities with the right to the “free use and enjoyment” of their lands. While state and private actors would soon violate the accord, seizing ever more Haudenosaunee territory, the Canandaigua Treaty remains a binding expression of “peace and friendship” between the the Confederacy (commonly known as the Iroquois) and the United States. Michael L. Oberg tells this remarkable story of intercultural diplomacy in Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (Oxford University Press, 2015). Distinguished Professor of History at SUNY-Geneseo, Oberg narrates the twists and turns of war, dispossession, and resilience that brought sixteen hundred Haudenosaunee delegates, including Red Jacket, Cornplanter, and Handsome Lake, to a council with Colonel Timothy Pickering, an official representative of President George Washington. “Brother, we the Sachems of the Six Nations will now tell our minds,” Red Jacket declared in 1794. “The business of this treaty is to brighten the Chain of Friendship between us and the fifteen fires.” The Haudenosaunee continue that effort today.

Buddhaghosa, a fifth-century Pali Buddhist scholar or group of scholars, is the most influential commentator in Theravada Buddhist tradition, who has in many respects created the set of ideas we now associate with Theravada Buddhism today. Maria Heim‘s new The Forerunner of All Things (Oxford University Press, 2013) is one of the few books to explore Buddhaghosa’s extremely wide corpus of work on a whole. She focuses on the theme of intention (cetana) to explore how Buddhaghosa articulates a moral psychology very different from modern Western conceptions of ethics that focus on individual choices and decisions. The book is an important work for philosophers in moral psychology as well as students of Theravada.

In Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), Aaron W. Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester, explores that paradox he sees at the heart of Jewish philosophy. He looks at canonical Jewish philosophers like Maimonides and Rosenzweig, but also Solomon ibn Gabirol and Judah Abravanel to depict Jewish philosophy from a different perspective. Hughes suggests a possible way forward to Jewish thought if we, and the academy, embrace the idea of Jewish theology.