In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Just ImagineAlisse Waterston (bio)The united states is a flower of harm.—Tongo Eisen-Martin, “Taking a Common Name (after Claudia Rankine’s Just Us)”I never have to go far for evidence of the truth of this line from Tongo Eisen-Martin’s response to Claudia Rankine’s Just Us.On a Friday, Kyoo Lee, coeditor of philoSOPHIA, invited me to offer my own response to Eisen-Martin’s and Fanny Howe’s essays in what she said would (...) be “like a game of exquisite corpse,” a productive way, I think, to build up rather than tear down, the latter of which is too often the case in academia. I had to think about it, to think about Just Us, Claudia Rankine’s powerful, generous, sharp, and profound book. In it, she makes an urgent request for “an American conversation” on whiteness. Rankine teaches us: “Universalized whiteness, that racial imaginary, lives in every moment” (2020, 329).I pace around the house, make some tea, and pick up the New York Times, scanning the headlines. There it is, front-page news this very day: “Sights Set on School Districts as G.O.P. Targets Race Theory” (Saul 2021, A1). Scarlett Johnson, profiled in the article, is a dirty-blond “just a mom” from Mequon-Thiensville, a school district in Wisconsin. Johnson has made it her mission to refuse the conversation; she is buttressed by a set of powerful and wealthy behind-the-scenes interest groups. Rankine writes, “I have only lived as me, a person who regularly has to negotiate dismissal, erasure, disrespect, and abuse” (2020, 23).The news article goes on: “Republicans say critical race theory has invaded classrooms.” Then, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson implores, “take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils” (Saul 2021, A12; emphases [End Page 141] mine). Rankine observes, “Among white people, black people... are not allowed to implicate the present company in [their] precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes” (2020, 155). She explains “the narrative of white privilege that secures white spaces,” then quotes legal scholar Cheryl Harris on “the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white... a valuable asset that whites sought [and seek] to protect” (Rankine 2020, 25). Only connect.§§§The spiraling back, the turn of the screw to take it out, to look at what happened, to break apart the cover, to disclose in reverse, recalibrate and recapitulate, to find points of composure and recognition—to view the news as what happened already but left the stain of reportage and evidence of fraud and failure.... The time we live in and the way we make use of our “screws” to construct a new stage to play on.—Fanny Howe, “After Reading Just Us”Here, Fanny Howe offers a beautiful metaphor for Rankine’s gift to the world, if it will take it. Many people, not enough, have joined in turning the screw. Those who have are engaging the process of thinking, without which the catastrophe of universalized whiteness and its human toll will endure. Howe writes of a new stage to play on, which I interpret as an exciting challenge to re-create. Claudia Rankine writes: “what if ” (2020, 3).What if we imagine. The Oxford English Dictionary defines imagine as the process of forming an image of something in the mind, something akin to dreaming, visualizing, thinking, supposing. To imagine is to form a mental image of something, perhaps a goal, an end to which one yearns to arrive, an achievement not yet actualized. On the last pages of Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano dares readers to exercise the right to dream. “Suppose we rave a bit?” he asks, and he offers a long list of possibilities for an alternative world (Galeano 2000, 333–36; see figure 1).In a classroom exercise designed by my former student James Williams, I ask my undergraduates at a public university in New York City to rave a bit, writing out on a slip of paper one thing they would change to make for an alternative world. The world they... (shrink)

A growing interest in affect holds much promise for anthropology by providing a new frame to examine and articulate subjective and intersubjective states, which are key parts of human consciousness and behavior. Affect has its roots in the social, an observation that did not go unnoticed by Durkheim and since then has been kept in view by those social scientists interested in the emotions, feelings, and subjectivity. However, the challenge for ethnographers has always been to articulate in words and conceptualize (...) theoretically what is only felt and sensed. What we are calling “evocative ethnography” is an ethnography that meets this challenge to make room for, and hold onto, feelings and affect in its description and explanation. The papers in this special issue accomplish that, as well as provide some anthropological insights into affect theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 103-108 [Access article in PDF] Defining, Using, and Challenging the Rhetorical Tradition Alisse Theodore Portnoy "What counts as 'the tradition'?" was the question that provoked this series of essays. Several of us attended a retreat sponsored by the Rhetoric Society of America, and we had dutifully split into smaller groups in an attempt to define or mark rhetoric as a discipline. Patricia Bizzell (...) and Bruce Herzberg had recently published the second edition of their The Rhetorical Tradition, and Michael Leff wanted to know what criteria Bizzell and Herzberg used as they revised the tradition. Bizzell was part of the group and responded. Jacqueline Jones Royster also responded to the opening question as the terrain shifted from defining to using and—quite naturally for everyone in the room—challenging the tradition. Maurice Charland soon entered into this Burkean parlor, despite his refusal to call rhetoric a discipline.One product of this ongoing conversation was a panel at the 2002 RSA biennial conference, from which the essays in this special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric emerged. In their essays, Bizzell (English), Charland (Communication Studies), Leff (Communication Studies), and Royster (English) agree on several key points, the most basic of which are not only the existence but also the dynamic nature of a rhetorical tradition. The essayists agree that contemporary users of the tradition have agency in its constitution, and that texts by "performers" as well as by rhetorical theorists have a place in the tradition. But all of the essays have different starting points and offer us myriad ways to think about the rhetorical tradition.Patricia Bizzell writes with a unique perspective, having, as she says, edited the tradition—twice. In "Editing the Rhetorical Tradition," Bizzell takes stock and quickly accounts for us her sense of the "traditional tradition," or the tradition's blue chip stocks, and then offers tips on high risk and growth stocks. Playing with the stock market metaphor, Bizzell imagines [End Page 103] as high-risk stocks the texts or authors who have been marginal players, figures for whom presence is assured but reputation is not. Their reputations fluctuate depending on the ways "they can be made to serve the cultural preferences of those in power." Also contributing to what Bizzell calls "new traditions" are "thinkers who were practically unknown to traditional historians of rhetoric, sometimes because we did not have the methodological and pedagogical approaches necessary to construe their texts as rhetoric and sometimes because their work itself was hidden from scholarly view, fragmented, or lost." Bizzell outlines three ways these "growth stocks" enter into the tradition as she acknowledges the "whole new set of [scholarly] priorities" these texts often require.But just the novelty of these texts can pose challenges. Bizzell uses an exchange that occurred during the question period of the RSA session to suggest that texts might appear more abstract and philosophical, and therefore (mistakenly) more complex and valuable, simply "because we have the benefit of generations of scholarship and pedagogy assisting us to read these texts as rhetorical theory." Bizzell also argues that a metacritical awareness of the constraints upon language use makes a text theoretical even as it seems primarily "performative." In other words, more than a few "new tradition" texts count as contributing to rhetorical theory because they advocate non-traditional rhetorical practices or non-traditional access to conventional rhetorical spaces in the performance of the text.Bizzell reports the increased inclusion of these "growth stocks," the "thinkers who were practically unknown," even as she admits that reviewers for the second edition of The Rhetorical Tradition asked for more, not less, of the traditional tradition. And so as she concludes Bizzell refuses to see the composition of the tradition as a matter of contention or animosity. Rather, according to Bizzell, the tradition shifts "as our needs and interests change," based on choices "aris[ing] out of complex cultural factors relating to gender, race, social class, national identity, and more."Since anthologies like The Rhetorical Tradition play such a large part in the evolution of the rhetorical tradition, Bizzell claims some... (shrink)

Re-examination of the manuscript of John Farey's unpublished mineral survey of south-east Sutherland, together with his published opinions on the significance of fossils from the Brora Coalfield and his interpretation of the stratigraphy of that coalfield, leaves no doubt that, contrary to the accepted view, Farey did not recognise the Mesozoic age of the Brora Coalfield but thought of it as Carboniferous. Farey was a Smithian geologist, and the difficulty he had in interpreting unfamiliar evidence from Brora illustrates the difficulties (...) experienced by bio-stratigraphers in the 1810s when fossil ranges were imperfectly understood. Evidence is presented which suggests that the first geologist to recognise the Mesozoic age of the Brora beds may have been John MacCulloch. (shrink)

For researchers and students interested in the connections between theoretically informed work and the possibilities for bettering people's everyday lives, this ...

ABSTRACT:Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden’s Light in Dark Times (2020) began as an address by the president of the American Anthropological Association and was transformed into “a work of art and anthropology” by a member of the audience. The result was a coauthored book-length graphic essay that is expansive in subject matter, and in the representation of ideas, scholars, and questions about what it means to be human and how we will pass the time that is given us (...) on earth. Light and dark are central to the visual representations that serve as the background to a story about what is necessary to become a person who is honest. This critical assessment reflects on the content and form of that story, which predated the COVID pandemic, widespread political unrest, and assaults on truth, evidence, language, categories, education, and “others” in the US and elsewhere. The format is both challenging to read and interesting to think with. As teaching and learning increasingly become animated and visualized, Light in Dark Times is a worthy introduction to these ways of apprehending the vexing questions and conundrums presently in such abundant supply. (shrink)

During the past decade, it has become apparent that it is within our grasp to understand fully the development and functioning of complex organisms. It is widely accepted that this undertaking must include the elucidation of the genetic blueprint – the genome sequence – of a number of model organisms. As a prelude to the determination of these sequences, clonebased physical maps of the genomes of a number of multicellular animals and plants are being constructed. Yeast artificial chromosome (YAC) vectors, (...) by virtue of their relatively unbiased cloning capabilities and capacity to carry large inserts, have come to play a central role in the construction of these maps. The application of YACs to the physical map of the Caenorhabditis elegans genome has enabled cosmid clone ‘islands’ to be linked together in an efficient manner. The long‐range continuity has improved the linkage between the genetic and physical maps, greatly increasing its utility. Since the genome can be represented by a relatively small number of YACs, it has been possible to make replica filters of genomically ordered YACs available to the community at large. (shrink)

Book review:Noam Chomsky – Marv Waterstone, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance. Haymarket Books, 2021, 400 p.

The Bermuda Principles for DNA sequence data sharing are an enduring legacy of the Human Genome Project. They were adopted by the HGP at a strategy meeting in Bermuda in February of 1996 and implemented in formal policies by early 1998, mandating daily release of HGP-funded DNA sequences into the public domain. The idea of daily sharing, we argue, emanated directly from strategies for large, goal-directed molecular biology projects first tested within the “community” of C. elegans researchers, and were introduced (...) and defended for the HGP by the nematode biologists John Sulston and Robert Waterston. In the C. elegans community, and subsequently in the HGP, daily sharing served the pragmatic goals of quality control and project coordination. Yet in the HGP human genome, we also argue, the Bermuda Principles addressed concerns about gene patents impeding scientific advancement, and were aspirational and flexible in implementation and justification. They endured as an archetype for how rapid data sharing could be realized and rationalized, and permitted adaptation to the needs of various scientific communities. Yet in addition to the support of Sulston and Waterston, their adoption also depended on the clout of administrators at the US National Institutes of Health and the UK nonprofit charity the Wellcome Trust, which together funded 90% of the HGP human sequencing effort. The other nations wishing to remain in the HGP consortium had to accommodate to the Bermuda Principles, requiring exceptions from incompatible existing or pending data access policies for publicly funded research in Germany, Japan, and France. We begin this story in 1963, with the biologist Sydney Brenner’s proposal for a nematode research program at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge. We continue through 2003, with the completion of the HGP human reference genome, and conclude with observations about policy and the historiography of molecular biology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing the chores for (...) centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

This article conceptualizes the British Empire as a spatial arrangement created and sustained in the everyday activities of women. Focusing on the work of Jane Waterston – a missionary and doctor working in South Africa – and Mary Kingsley – a traveller and political lobbyist – it argues that women played an important part in fabricating the social relationships and practical activities of empire in their daily lives. Women also contributed to the spatial configuration of empire in their journeys (...) back and forth between Britain and various parts of the empire. It argues that women's routes and journeys connected parts of the empire with each other and with Britain as they, along with sailors, traders and adventurers, wove the diasporas of privilege. In making places and the connections between them, women also made themselves and their lives in new terms. In making use of the maps of territorial expansion in making themselves and their lives, the women featured in this article also contributed to forging versions of white British subjectivities which bear the imprint of empire. (shrink)