In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Professor Sean D. Murphy is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington University and co-author of the book Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission (Oxford University Press, 2013) with Won Kidane, Associate Professor of Law at the Seattle University Law School, and Thomas R. Snider, an international arbitrator at Greenberg Taurig. Their book goes to the heart and intricacies of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission. Its analysis and comprehensiveness is certainly insightful and is a must-read for anyone wanting to learn about the commission and its context.  Professor Murphy discusses with us some of the contents of the book, providing details on the war that occasioned the commission, the commission’s establishment, its jurisdiction and other very pertinent issues relating to the commission’s work.

I have a colleague at Newman who takes students to Guatemala every summer.  Since I arrived she’s encouraged me to join her.  I would stay with the order of sisters who sponsor our university. I’d learn at least a few words of rudimentary Spanish.  And, she says, if I’m really interested in genocide, I must visit this complicated, conflicted country. I’ve always declined (granted, I’m usually taking students to Europe, so I have a good excuse).  However, after reading Virginia Garrard-Burnett’s excellent description of Guatemala in the early 1980s, I may have to say yes the next time. Burnett does an extraordinary job of making the complex politics of Guatemala understandable. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efrain Rios Montt 1982-1983 (Oxford University Press, 2011) is at least partly a biography of Rios Montt, and an excellent one.  Burnett’s explanation of Rios Montt’s complicated personality and the influence religion played on his rule is superb.  But the book moves beyond that to explain briefly the broader context that brought the president to power and the ways in which repression turned into open violence. Before doing this interview, I probably knew less about Guatemala than any other case of genocidal violence.  After the interview, I intend to make sure this is no longer true. One note:  Garrard-Burnett’s time was relatively limited, so today’s interview is a bit shorter than normal.  I encourage you to read the book to appreciate fully the richness of her analysis.

In her previous book, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), Deborah Cohen took us into the homes of Britons and examined their relation to their habitat and its artifacts from 1830 onwards. In her new book, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), Cohen focuses on the family cupboard of skeletons. As she airs its content, she asks what families tried to conceal in the past and why. Her journey begins in the eighteenth century, in the vast imperial lands of India where men attempted to hide their local wives and children from relatives back in Britain. Cohen then travels to mid-nineteenth century Britain and enters the Divorce Court where she traces how dissolving unhappy marriages came at the price of publicly exposing domestic failure. The heart of the book beats most ardently in three chapters that consider how families dealt with disability, adoption and homosexuality from the Victorian period till the 1970s. Cohen brings to life the hushed voices of heartbroken mothers, adoptive parents and children who didn’t live up to society’s standards. Cohen ends the book with an examination of the rise of the modern confessional culture from the 1930s through the 1970s. The book situates secrets as a category in flux. It traces the role of families in the transformation of social norms from the Victorian era to the present day. Families are portrayed as active historical agents whose struggles to conceal and live with shameful details often softened social stigma such as that attached to illegitimacy, adultery or homosexuality. Cohen records how secrecy was transformed from a pervasive practice to its rejection as harmful. Cohen demonstrates insightfully how while secrecy was derided, privacy became entangled with personal freedom and public confession is championed as an avenue to greater happiness.

It is commonly assumed that states have a right to broad discretionary control over immigration, and that they may decide almost in any way they choose, who may stay within the territory and who must leave.  But even supposing that there is such a right, we may ask the decidedly moral question about how it may be exercised.  And this query calls us to try to bring our views about the ethics of immigration into equilibrium with our other moral convictions about citizenship, liberty, and equality.   Can our common views and practices concerning immigration be rendered consistent with these deeper commitments? In The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013), Joseph Carens argues that our common commitment to democratic principles requires us to revise much of our thinking about immigration.  Beginning with the uncontroversial practice of granting citizenship immediately to those born within a country’s territory, Carens argues that claims to social membership and thus to citizenship strengthen as individuals stay in a state; consequently, there is a point at which not extending citizenship to those living within a state’s borders is grossly immoral, even for those who have settled without the state’s permission.  Carens’ arguments about the moral constraints on the state’s rights to exclude eventuate in an argument in favor of open borders.

“…when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on the one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand – because Miles was that history.” -Herbie Hancock, 1968 Professor of music and musician/composer Keith Waters at the University of Colorado, Boulder has produced a masterful analysis of the Miles Davis second quintet studio recordings in the years 1965 through 1968.  Waters analyzes the remarkable period of “controlled freedom” and collaboration between trumpeter Miles Davis, keyboardist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams. Waters writes that “the role of analysis is to provide further, alternative, or nuanced ways into hearing the music, to consider how the moment to moment flow of improvisation resonates with or creates frictions with aspects of jazz traditions in which the players were so firmly rooted, and to hear how the recordings themselves participated in shaping that jazz tradition.” Waters’ comprehensive and nuanced strategies for analyzing pitch, rhythm/meter and form are given context in chapter 2 followed by chapter discussions of specific quintet recordings (and selected solos within) in E.S.P. (Iris, Little One, ESP, Agitation), Miles Smiles (Dolores, Orbits, Circle, Ginger Bread Boy, Freedom Jazz Dance), Sorcerer (Vonetta, Masqualero, Prince of Darkness, Pee Wee, Limbo), Nefertiti (Hand Jive, Nefertiti, Madness, Pinocchio, Riot) in chapters 3- 6, respectively.  The albums Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro (Country Son, Paraphernalia, Black Comedy, Stuff, Petits Machins,  Tout De Suite, Filles de Kilimanjaro), according to Waters, signaled a significant departure from previous recordings/compositions with electric piano, electric bass and rock-based rhythms,  and an “imminent shift to jazz-rock fusion.”    Later groups continued forays into jazz fusion (including those from the second quintet – Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters band, Wayne Shorter’s Weather Report and The Tony Williams Lifetime). Many of the aforementioned compositions have found their way into the “jazz canon,” though Waters cautions that lead sheets may be more indicative of jazz “pedagogies” of the time that don’t reflect the highly complex modal explorations and rhythmic nuances found in the quintet recordings. Waters writes that Miles Davis embraced the concept of “sketches” which “provided his musicians with a germinal idea, allowing room for flexibility and substantial individual input.”  This also blurred the concept of “authorship,” however, since collaborations of this kind brought varied and complex alterations to the many facets of original compositions. Waters’ own biographical sketches of quintet members Davis, Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams (their interactions and what they individually said about the music and their musical colleagues) give the reader fascinating insights as to how the sum of the parts of these extraordinarily skilled jazz professionals provided a literal Big Bang of collaborative innovation in a period of three and a half years. The idea of “controlled freedom,” a concept articulated by keyboardist Herbie Hancock, is an important concept in defining the second quintet’s body of work.  Quintet leader Miles Davis, Waters emphasizes, with his “palette of timbres,” and “…melodic ideas in the middle register of the trumpet, “searing lyricism on ballad playing combines tenderness with detachment.”    He was always open to new ideas, experimentation and   artistic challenge. Waters cites critic Robert Walsar’s description of Miles Davis,

In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a warehouse, with hydraulic pumps to simulate tides and river flows, and observed the result. The model showed what a disaster the dam plan would be: it would have turned the bay into a polluted wasteland. In Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Weisberg examines the nature, development and widespread use of models in the sciences as a means to help explain and predict natural phenomena. Weisberg, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at concrete models (such as the Bay Area model), computational models and mathematical models to argue for a model of models, in which models are interpreted structures, and their relation to the part of the world they model is in terms of weighted feature-mapping. His book systematizes and advances philosophical thinking about models and their central role in the practice of science.

Christina Greer is the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, 2013). Greer is assistant professor of political science at Fordham University. In previous podcasts, authors have illuminated the immigrant experience of Latino and Asian Americans (Rouse, Masuoka and Junn), as well as the African American politics (Logan and Gillespie). Researchers have increasingly studied the opinions, political culture, and political institutions of each community. Greer uses this literature to explore an understudied population, who she dubs “Black Ethnics.” Green analyzes the public opinion differences between African Americans, African immigrants, and Afro-Caribbean immigrants in New York City. She finds that Afro-Caribbean immigrants held some of the lowest opinions of the American Dream. Their collective frustration with a lack of opportunities placed them below African Americans and African immigrants.

How should one understand Islamic law outside of its application? What happens when we think about religious jurisprudence theoretically? For medieval Muslim scholars this was the field where one could enumerate the meaning and purpose of Islamic law. But to the uninitiated these justifications for legal thinking are submerged in rote repetition of technical language and discourses. Luckily for us, Rumee Ahmed, professor in the Department of Classics, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, dives into the depths of various legal theory manuals to draw narrative understandings of shari’a to the surface. In Narratives of Islamic Legal Theory (Oxford University Press, 2012), Ahmed examines two formative contemporaneous jurists from the Hanafi school of law to determine the relationship between law and ethics through legal discourses. He focuses on the nature and meaning of the Qur’an, the role of the sunnah (the Prophetic example), and the use of considered opinion in structuring legal boundaries. Ultimately, he views their positions not merely as academic debates over the minutia of religious opinions and injunctions but as ritual observance, which formulates a world ‘as if’ it were ideal. In our conversation we discuss abrogation, punishment, salvation, Abraham’s sacrifice, hadith transmission, Peircean notions of abduction, religious law, stoning, adultery, the role of scholars, and contemporary calls for reform.

Molly Worthen, author most recently of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the ideas that moved a variety of evangelicals in America over the last seventy years.  Worthen argues that attentive observers of American evangelical history must contend with the imagination as much as the mind when considering how evangelicals have “navigated the upheavals in modern American culture and global Christianity.”  Expertly weaving the intellectual and religious histories of institutions and movements with the biographies of specific people, Worthen provides a rigorous and fluid analysis of a much maligned and often misunderstood category of American religion.

In Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity, Melissa Aronczyk locates the rise of nation branding as a response to the perceived need to sculpt national identity in the face of a fiercely competitive global economy. In tracking the history of the nation-branding phenomenon, Aronczyk recounts the rise and spread of the very idea of national “competitiveness,” a discourse that, in effect, created a market that branding specialists then tapped. The book engages with the large scholarly literature on nations and nationalism, arguing that nation branding should not be dismissed as merely the invasion of business practices into the national imaginary–though it has this character, undeniably–but that the practice should also be read as a discourse that maintains, extends, and reconstitutes the nation. Based on dozens of interviews with nation-branding specialist over a five-year period, Aronczyk develops major case studies of Poland and Canada in particular, and substantial treatments of a number of other cases spanning the globe, including Botswana, Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Jamaica, and Libya. In Branding the Nation, Aronczyk tells the story of how national identity came to be seen, and sold, as a form of added value in a competitive global market, and how these campaigns fed back into the ongoing process of thinking, and imagining, the nation.