THE SEMIANNUAL NEWSLETTER OF THE ROBERT PENN WARREN CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES VOL. 20, NO. 2 ­­• SPRING 2012 • VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

Landscapes of the Delhi Durbar, 1903: Ritual and Politics Leo C. Coleman

he landscape around Delhi, India, is Indian Princes, notables, and visitors. These marked out by old walls and gates were placed from four to seven miles away which once protected important from the Central (European) Camps, for “rea- settlements and royal centers, and sons of space and public health” as one colonial Tby the monuments of the various governments observer described it. that have occupied this capital city over centu- Of course, Indian participation, and pres- ries. The gates of what is called the “old city” of ence, in this ritual of colonial display was Delhi still stand, now breached by the modern indispensable for its spectacular effect, and city built up since the nineteenth century. The the officials of the Native States, which were old city, in its earlier incarnation as Shahja- an integral part of the British Indian political hanabad, was further protected by a low ridge structure, were encouraged to constitute their which bound the northwestern approach to the encampments as a kind of ethnological museum. city. The ridge also provided a redoubt, of sorts, Some, while keeping with the colonial logic of for the British when their occupation of North sumptuous display, mounted their own coun- India came under attack in the so-called Mutiny ter-display of modern technique and efficiency. of 1857. It was on the ridge that the British later The representatives from the state of Baroda, for built a memorial to the “defense” of the city. instance, were housed in a splendid teak-wood Now visitors are reminded by plaques in Hindi, bungalow, elaborately illuminated inside and Urdu, and English that “The enemy of the out with electric light, topped by a huge dome inscriptions on this monument were those who Delhi Mutiny Memorial plaque with new inscriptions some fifty feet high, with an electric beacon at rose against colonial rule and fought bravely for (1972) its top that could be seen for miles. Around the national liberation.” the coronation in England the previous sum- Baroda encampment, ceremonial archways and After the bloody trial of four months of mer of Edward VII as King of Great Britain and large reception tents were all fitted with elec- battle in 1857, the walls of Delhi could not Emperor of India. Away from the modern city tric signs proclaiming the long life of the King serve to protect the city from the depredations of Delhi, then fitfully expanding, throwing out Emperor and welcoming guests. The encamp- of reconquest. Large sections of the walls were suburbs and developing civic institutions and ment of Kashmir’s Maharaja, Sir Pratap Singh, dynamited in the following years, to make way infrastructures (Gupta 1981), the British built a was likewise fitted with electric lights, to a for railways and to clear defensible areas, as tent-city and a ceremonial amphitheater of lathe well as to provide space for new accommoda- and plaster, to accommodate the celebrants and tions. The sacred spaces of Indian sovereignty, provide a dramatic backdrop for their rite of Inside in the Red Fort or Lal Qila, were taken over as sovereignty over the Orient. Landscapes of the Delhi Durbar, 1903: barracks, and later transformed into ballrooms In keeping with colonial notions about Ritual and Politics...... 1-3, 12 and banquet halls for assemblages of Imperial utility and pomp—favoring the former and Preview Spanish Theater: notables. denigrating the latter—the Durbar settlements Text and Performance...... 4 On New Years’ Day, 1903, under the direc- were not just decorative appendages to a mean- Representation and Social Change Symposium..5 tion of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, one of these ingless ritual, but rather served as a massive great ceremonial gatherings was staged near demonstration of technical skill and thereby “All I Need to Know I Learned from Delhi on plains dotted with villages but, for the sovereign right. A power plant for producing Don Quixote” by Edward H. Friedman...... 6-8 occasion, cleared, platted, and filled with tents. electricity was specially imported from England, What We Are Writing...... 9 The event was called a Durbar, after the Persian and a network of underground wires piped 2012/2013 Warren Center Seminars...... 10 term for a royal audience used by the Mughal clean, efficient electric power throughout the Emperors of Delhi, and it was held to celebrate tent-city. Meanwhile, camps were arranged for Graduate Student Fellows Lecture Series...... 11

Letters • Spring 2012 • 1 Letters • Spring 2012 • 2

reported total of 120,000 candlepower. disdain I brought on myself by being on visit- As I develop materials to address such ques- Though the tents, electric lights, railway, and ing terms with a clerk who was living in E-class tions, I aim to expand our ability within politi- amphitheater installed for the Durbar were all quarters.” Such distinctions and discrimina- cal anthropology to understand political rituals taken down at the end of the event, the grid of tions, drawn from the pay-grades of civil ser- as more than sideshows, or mere reflections or roads and expansion of the city to the northwest vants, thus provided the lingua franca for much performances of political texts already set down. remained as traces on the land. The Durbar of the administration of Delhi throughout the Rituals, whether the personal and private or grounds combined the memory twentieth century, across changes the great public rites of political life, work with of British conquest with the orna- in regime—and indeed the same meanings and material conditions in ways ments of a longer, indigenous is true of almost any modern city, which are highly formal, set apart from and yet Imperial past and the technologi- though to varying degrees and necessary to everyday life, often though not nec- cal imperatives of the twentieth drawing on different repertoires essarily religiously sanctioned, and by definition century. It is not incidental that of distinction. It is the ritual orga- effective. Ritual collapses distinctions between Lord Curzon’s appointment book nization, in urban landscapes and cause and effect and intention and action, trans- for the event had bound inside political consciousness, of such forms space and time, and marks the physical the front cover a map of the posi- distinctions and discriminations world with its traces, its temporary occupations tion of British troops around Delhi that I am studying further as a fel- producing powerful sites of return, memory, during the battles of 1857, nor that low in this year’s Fellows Program and concern. The sites of memory which mark the Central Camp of the assem- at the Robert Penn Warren Center Delhi to this day, though recoded to remember blage on the Western side of the Leo C. Coleman for the Humanities. In particular, I different aspects of long-ago political struggles, Ridge was laid out in just the am embarking on new research on the are such because of constant and renewed ritual same spot where the occupying army had been politics of urban citizenship in contemporary attention to them, connecting them with great housed some 45 years before. global cities. transcendent and justificatory stories about who The events of the Durbar and the shaping of This year, the Warren Center Fellows are counts in the “we” of political communities. the city of Delhi through such political rituals, investigating “Sacred Ecology,” human rela- Political anthropology has become, over the in which particular cultural and technological tions with the land, and with representations past thirty years or so, predominantly the study resources are deployed to mark, transform, and and projections of landscape, in which the of how differences between groups of people make socially meaningful a set of relations in sacred, the supramundane, and ritual prac- are made and marked. Classically defined as space and time, are the subject of my book-in- tices affect both the real and the imagined the study of ordering institutions of a society, progress, “Delhi in the Electrical Age.” Based on terrain of human occupation. As a political and of behavior in contexts defined as about ethnographic research in contemporary Delhi, anthropologist and an urbanist, this topic power and control, and therefore political, this and historical materials about the experience of provides me with a framework for thinking subfield of cultural anthropology has more and the city and its transformation into a modern, through contemporary struggles over identity more focused on what the theorist Judith Butler techno-political space through electrification and citizenship in globalization. As global cit- has called the “ground of politics,” the making and planning, I tell a story about the modern ies such as Delhi grow in population, and also (and remaking) of the common-sense world of state, its urban techniques and technologies become important sites of residence for a ris- categories and distinctions in terms of which of rule, and how people are able to participate ing affluent class, how are spaces made and strategies can be formulated and tactics are effec- in politics and modernity in and through the remade to give expression to new communi- tive. Responding, indeed, to the constricted state’s rituals. We can trace a line from the plat ties and to exclude others? Comparatively, I range of conclusions possible in studies of coun- of the Durbar camps to the rigorously ordered, am also interested in how recent conflicts cils, committees, and local disputes, and more separated, and meaningfully marked spaces for over mosques and other religious buildings importantly under the influence of Foucauldian each rank or category of person that typified the at key sites in the United States represent definitions of power as “productive” (as opposed bureaucratic regulation of space in Delhi. struggles to understand the American politi- to repressive), political anthropology has focused To give a sense of how that bureaucratic cal community, and how disputes over such on the apparatuses of knowledge and power regulation of space was experienced, the Bengali religious sites offer another forum in which through which people come to be particu- memoirist Nirad Chaudhuri provides an exam- to pursue a wider public conversation about lar kinds of bodies, selves, and subjects. Many ple of a comical encounter he had in the 1940s: immigration and citizenship. More generally, political anthropological studies now begin with Passing along a line of buildings [in New the seminar encourages me to reflect on how the “discursive field” of a particular expertise— Delhi] which looked like stables, I asked abstract political and policy issues are worked whether colonial accounts of native “difference” an elderly Bengali whether the clerk out and transformed in everyday struggles to or scientific claims about genetics. They explore whose house I wanted to find lived in occupy a particular place, live in a commu- how certain forms of self-knowledge, and ways that row. He angrily pointed to the let- nity, and give meaning to place, livelihood, of being authentically in the world defined by ter “D” carved on the top of the building and identity. What role, I ask, do landscapes power and knowledge, are made possible and and said: “Do you not see that these play in everyday consciousness, and how are others are made impossible. are D-class quarters, and the person you new presences in them—big religious build- Thus, caste in India has been shown to be a have come to see lives in E-class quarters?” ings for new immigrant populations or minor topic that obsessed colonial administrators, and (1987: 690). practices like a domestic shrine or a backyard scholars have recently emphasized how caste was Chaudhuri adds that “even my very superior garden growing exotic products—dealt with transformed from a practice to a “system” by clothes . . . did not protect me from the D-class ritually, pragmatically, and politically? British attempts to treat it as a fixed and immu- Letters • Spring 2012 • 3

table guide to Indian society. Caste cannot be does not seem directly connected with them— of the twentieth century and beyond (Arendt reduced to a “colonial construction,” since an from the thought of man and his past, from the 1968). These ritual assemblages of Imperial important part of this story is the work of caste- strangeness of what I see in myself and in oth- pomp were a very British device, in both their groups to reorganize themselves for colonial ers, what I have seen and heard” (Wittgenstein medieval symbolism and technical efficiency. recognition. Still, in recent scholarship caste 1979: 16-18). Yet their effect and perdurance in historical is rethought less as an indigenous system and Thus, in trying to understand the contem- and postcolonial memory cannot be explained more as an effect of British practices of tabula- porary divisions of identity and interest which away by any reading of them simply in terms tion, ordering, and ranking in service of colonial mark global cities, and the violence, variously of their connection to older models, or indeed control (see Dirks 2001). Likewise, the patterns submerged and quiet, or overt and deathful, lack thereof as “invented traditions.” An anthro- of land-holding or of agricultural technique that provides the contours of identities and pological interpretation of their meaningfulness that an earlier political anthropology might structures access to space, hypotheses of colonial and the call to participation which was differ- have taken as the subject of a survey, attempt- origins or accounts of technocratic domination ently experienced by different actors is, at least, ing to understand this or that local distribution through planning and its exclusions, are less use- a start toward understanding their evidential of power and political system, might now be ful than the recurrent dramas of politics which power and factuality in the life of the Imperial studied through the lens of nineteenth-century link the past with the present in moments of state and afterlife in the postcolonial one. practices of surveying, recording property, or interpretation. Such dramas can be quite daily In particular, the transformations that were legislating land-tenure, in which the “system” and mundane, like the encounter with D- and achieved in the landscape of Delhi and in the as we know now it was produced (see Mitchell E-Class residences recorded by Nirad Chaud- lived experience of the city are among the most 2001). huri, but they still require our attention and important evidence we can draw upon when Yet there is a problem, now being widely interpretation. How are people organizing to considering the effects and effectiveness of these recognized, with these sorts of studies. Once meet their situation, in their present, and what imperial rituals. These landscape transforma- we recognize that such ordering social and forces of distinction, competition, and chal- tions for ritual practice were only partly unique legal institutions are the result of a past politi- lenge do they feel shaping their lives? As the to the great concentration of the Durbar; mean- cal practice—whether colonial or not—we may anthropologist Jonathan Spencer (2007) has while, the electrical installations for that event have “denaturalized” them but we haven’t really lately pointed out, attention to ritual perfor- are only part of a larger story of technological provided any insight into the pull that they have mances, to the symbolism of mundane objects transformation, with many actors, that changed on people, which to my mind is the key anthro- when they are connected with important events the tempo and style of daily life in Delhi. How- pological question. The philosopher of language where new meanings are made, is what distin- ever, in their connection in and through the Ludwig Wittgenstein once pointed out that guishes anthropological interpretation from Durbar, they become a significant part of wider hypotheses about the ancient origins of everyday other approaches to politics that strip it of every- symbolic politics and struggles over the future. rituals cannot explain the pull that they exert on thing unique, specific to a place and time, and The Delhi nationalist politician and law- even the most casually involved observer. Inter- treat it as an abstract play of strategy and interest. yer Mohammed Asaf Ali was barely a teenager pretations of rituals, such as those by Sir James Importantly, these events in which we find the when the 1903 Durbar happened; a few years Frazer in his magnum opus The Golden Bough, kernel of cultural meaning, including distinc- later he went to Europe to study for the Bar that stress their putative origins in human sac- tions and discriminations, run the gamut from and was impressed by the sight of “the com- rifices or similarly terrifying encounters with the apparently secular, such as elections, to the mon use of mechanical devices and appliances the numinous and the supramundane world of overtly ritual, such as state funerals (Banerjee . . . and the blaze of light in the evenings,” as he forces, imply that terrifying origins can explain 2008; Borneman 2003). recounted in autobiographical notes made in contemporary dramatic power. But, Wittgen- The British in India held a theory of power the 1940s. Seeing the ways in which the British stein argued, trying to explain the power of a which separated the real, utilitarian calculation treated Delhi as a show-place and a site of only ritual through its historical origins misses the of everyday political control from the pageantry temporary and symbolic improvements, how- most important problem of all—that of the and pomp by which they tried to garb their rule ever, he would later “make his emotional break observer confronted by something that compels, in ancient custom and thus sway the emotions with Britain,” and resolved to bring together the but which he or she cannot wholly understand of those over whom they ruled. Commentators “dazzling effect” of Western technique with the conceptually. There must be an element, drawn spoke about the technical and organizational “richness of poetry” of the “old” world where he from our human experience of the world, which genius of a man like Curzon, able to conjure a had been born and raised. The novelist Ahmed rituals and their symbols touch, unconnected living city from what they took—wrongly—to Ali, too, writing on the cusp of Independence with fantastic myths of origin or retrospective be the “desert” plains of Delhi; they likewise in the early 1940s, imagined the effect that attempts to ground them in “primitive” realities, praised his “invaluable and very un-English” the colonial pomp of the Durbar and its occu- and which explains their recurrent fascination. ability to take himself seriously in the midst of pation of the city with light, and parades, and “If I tried to invent a festival,” Wittgenstein notes, “Oriental pageantry.” And yet the ritual prac- shows, must have had on those who witnessed “it would very soon die out or else be so modi- tices of the colonial state were something more it. His characters in Twilight in Delhi, set in fied that it corresponded to a general inclination than window-dressing. They staged, reproduced, the beginning of the twentieth century, indict in people.” Invented rituals and historically- reinforced, and indeed motivated the very prin- the imperial power which is both founded on rooted ones can both be equally powerful, and ciples of colonial rule, not least the rigorous the violence of conquest and yet invests in such interpreting either requires drawing upon all racial separation on the grounds of “fitness” for mighty, and always temporary, displays while their symbolic equipment and the meanings of rule which made the whole enterprise possible, demanding a permanent loyalty: “Life goes on the performance, “including such evidence as and which has since marked the world politics with a heartless continuity, trampling ideas and

continued on page 12 Letters • Spring 2012 • 4

Spring Symposium “Spanish Theater: Text And Performance”

“La familia,” Bestia contra bestia, courtesy of José Luis Raymond.

uring the first week of April, 2012, professor at Madrid’s Royal School of Dramatic Raymond has designed sets for many plays in the Robert Penn Warren Center Art (Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático); Spain and internationally. In 2010, he was the for the Humanities will host a and Mar Zubieta, theater scholar and histo- set designer for Lope de Vega’s El caballero de symposium on “Spanish Theater: rian, editor, and director of cultural activities at Olmedo (The Knight from Olmedo), an early DText and Performance,” funded by a Research the National Company of Classical Theater seventeenth-century play, staged at the Gala Scholars Grant from Vanderbilt University. In (Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico), based Hispanic Theatre in Washington, D.C., and addition to the Warren Center, cosponsors of in Madrid. in the spring semester of 2011, his photogra- the symposium include the Max Kade Cen- Valerie Hegstrom has written extensively phy exhibit “Bestia contra bestia” (Beast versus ter for European and German Studies and the on early modern Spanish theater. She has con- Beast), was on display at Vanderbilt’s Fine Arts Spanish Ministry of Culture. The events will centrated on female playwrights of the period, Gallery. Mar Zubieta coauthored the adaptation feature talks by four distinguished scholars and including nuns who wrote plays for convent of El caballero de Olmedo for the D.C. perfor- theater practitioners—two from Spain and two audiences. She also has been active in staging mance, and she is involved at all levels of the from the United States—as well as several short and directing plays from the Spanish Golden production process in her administrative role in dramatic performances by Vanderbilt students, Age repertoire. Vincent Martin has focused his Spain’s national classical theater company. including graduate students in the Department research on theater, on ties between drama and “Spanish Theater: Text and Performance” of Spanish and Portuguese and participants in philosophy, and on questions of performance. should be of interest to students and faculty the Master of Liberal Arts and Science program. He has published a number of studies on Pedro in Spanish, theater, literature, and culture in The invited speakers include Valerie Heg- Calderón de la Barca, the author of the most re- general. All events will be free and open to the strom, professor of Spanish at Brigham Young nowned Spanish play, La vida es sueño (Life Is public. The schedule will appear on the Warren University; Vincent Martin, professor of Span- a Dream). Professor Martin is managing editor Center website. ish at San Diego State University; José Luis Ray- of the journal Bulletin of the Comediantes. An mond, artist, photographer, set designer, and artist who cultivates a variety of fields, José Luis Letters • Spring 2012 • 5

Representation and Social Change Symposium

he 2010/2011 Faculty Fellows Program at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities will host a symposium titled “Representation and Social Change” on February 23 and 24, 2012. The symposium serves as the culminating project of the Fellows’ year-long seminar. The symposium will take place in the auditorium of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center. The tentative schedule follows. TPlease check our website for the final program. Thursday, February 23 6:30 p.m. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin Screening of Trouble the Water documentary and discussion Deal and Lessin directed and produced this 2009 Academy Award®-nominated documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The film is the winner of the Gotham Independent Film Award and the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize. They were also producers of Michael Moore’s films Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine, and, more recently, Capitalism: A Love Story. Introduction: Edward Wright-Rios, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, 2010/2011 Warren Center Fellow. Friday, February 24 8:45-9:00 a.m. Welcoming comments, Arts and Science Dean’s Office 9:00-10:30 a.m. Sarah Sobieraj “Covered: Activists, Journalists, and News in a Shifting Media Landscape” Sobieraj is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University. She is a specialist in media, politics, and culture, and is the author of Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism. Sobieraj’s current project examines the remarkable expansion of political opinion media, focusing on political blogs, talk radio, and cable news programming. Introduction: Laura Carpenter, Associate Professor of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, 2010/2011 Jacque Voegeli Fellow, and co-director of the Warren Center Fellows Program. 10:30-10:45 a.m. Coffee break 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m Farhad Manjoo “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” Manjoo is the technology columnist at Slate and Fast Company, and he is a regular contributor to the New York Times and National Public Radio where he discusses technology, new media, politics, and journalism. Introduction: Terence McDonnell, Kellogg Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, 2010/2011 Warren Center Fellow. 12:15-1:30 p.m. Lunch break 1:30-3:00 p.m. J. Robert Cox “Climate Change, Media Convergence, and Public Uncertainty” Cox is Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies and the Curriculum in the Environment and Ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Cox has also served three times as the President of the Sierra Club. Introduction: Bonnie Dow, Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Studies, Vanderbilt University, 2010/2011 Spence and Rebecca Webb Wilson Fellow, and co-director of the Warren Center Fellows Program. 3:00-3:15 p.m. Coffee break 3:15-4:45 p.m. Camilo José Vergara “Detroit: The Eternal City of the Industrial Age” Vergara is a photographer, writer, and documentarian. He is a 2002 MacArthur Fellow whose books include American Ruins and How the Other Half Worships. Vergara has been called the “Archivist of Decline,” having documented the American inner city for the past 41 years in his collection, the New American Ghetto Archive. Introduction: Anne Morey, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, 2010/2011 William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow. 4:45-5:30 p.m. Reception Letters • Spring 2012 • 6

All I Need to Know I Learned from Don Quixote Edward H. Friedman

ne of the pleasures of teaching at would be more beneficial? If forced to decide, I sat in classrooms praying that I would not get Vanderbilt is having the privilege know what I would say, but the preferable so- called on, I am strong on empathy, but I must of entering into dialogue with lution, here and elsewhere, would be to select note that my students at Vanderbilt have been outstanding students, colleagues, both/and over either/or, that is, to unite process uniformly excellent in contributing to class dis- Oand other members of the university com- and product. I would want to understand the cussion and in tackling difficult material with munity, including the many good people who “stages” of preparation for performance—the vigor and skill. The students deserve the lion’s come in and out of the Robert Penn Warren juxtaposition of the director’s vision and the share of the accolades, yet Vanderbilt’s dedica- Center for the Humanities. The following is a actor’s collaboration and individual style— tion to undergraduate education has attuned meditation of sorts on that experience. and ultimately to observe the results of the the faculty to the pedagogical challenges, the The study of literature has always been pre-rehearsal and rehearsal periods. And, as a rewards, and the potential for creativity in complicated, because fictional texts are com- budding thespian, I would want the expert to teaching. Learning hardly takes place in a vacu- plex, rich in ambiguity, and certainly open to assess my personal work and to give me tips for um, and every faculty member ponders on how interpretation. There is a stability to the print- improvement. best to organize classes and to promote student ed word and an accompanying instability to The classroom can, and arguably should, achievement and advancement. We and our analysis, to what one could label the activity of lend itself to the dialectics of process and students profit from a diversity of instructional word processing. The discipline (and the art) of product. Teachers may enjoy sharing the inner strategies and from methodologies that suit a rhetoric focuses on the ways in which speakers workings of their disciplines and of their own particular target audience. and writers can manage and manipulate words, research, and presumably this will facilitate When I teach literature, I find that I have and thus ideas and messages. Those who teach the distribution and acquisition of knowledge. much in common with the Russian Formal- writing and communication studies (formerly To take the theater analogy a step further, one ists of the early part of the twentieth century. often called speech) rely on the tools of rheto- could submit that the classroom is a stage and These critics and theorists highlight texts that ric to convey the fine points, and perhaps less- than-subtle points, of their trade. Rhetoric is not far removed from “spin,” and “spin” is a two-way street, dependent on the sender and the receiver of discourse. The poststructuralist enterprise echoed a message borrowed from the rhetoric of classical antiquity: that what we say or write is a function of how we say it, and that every utterance or written word bears an inflection. In the humanities—and, by citing the humanities, I am not excluding other areas of knowledge or other disciplines—we teach our students how to contemplate and analyze multiple forms of speech and writing. That interest in producing good readers, and good listeners, is part of our collective venture. Recent theory has emphasized what has been classified as the “constructedness” of texts. We train ourselves and our students to discern, scrutinize, describe, investigate, and interro- gate formal and conceptual structures, and to note the convergence of form and concept. In- struction in literature often used to be more of Don Quixote illustration from the 18th-century artist Honoré Daumier an exposition than a practicum, more self-illu- minating than interactive. Flashes of professo- that we must maintain the attention of—if not proclaim, rather than hide, their status as liter- rial brilliance can be wonderful to behold and entertain—our audiences. At times, I wish that ature, that flaunt their “literariness.” Literature effective as learning tools, perhaps more sub- I were a song-and-dance man, but I cannot sing offers a vehicle for ideas and ideologies and for liminally than directly; they are built on fin- (in English or in Spanish), and my dancing has examination from infinite perspectives, and a ished products. In contrast to product-orient- gone downhill since I left the Bar Mitzvah par- literary work is also, and always, an art object, ed approaches, the give-and-take method, as it ty circuit some decades ago. I have had to make with some type of aesthetic function. Literature were, is more likely to concentrate on process. up in enthusiasm what I lack in talent, with has ties to the so-called real world and to liter- An analogue might be the prospect of seeing the goal of encouraging students—for most of ary tradition. It is bidirectional, shifting as its Al Pacino on stage as Shylock or Judi Dench whom Spanish is not their native language—to openings and its interpreters allow, and forever as Lady Macbeth versus taking an acting les- comprehend the material and to find a com- mutable. I am drawn to texts that display their son from Mr. Pacino or Dame Judi. Which fort zone for participation. On occasion having fictional identities, their seams, their ambigui- Letters • Spring 2012 • 7

ties, and—conspicuously, almost palpably— themselves in their accounts and that the im- in distress, Don Quixote exhibits a sense of his their designation of an honored and inevitable plied authors add, as it were, a third dimension. historical role. He imagines his heroic deeds place for the reader. Forms of expression, style, Narrative realism is born, then, alongside self- and envisions the chronicle that will record his and language put the narrative wheels in mo- referentiality. The predominant mode will be chivalric feats before an adventure presents it- tion, and, led by the text and their own disposi- one or the other, but realism and metafiction self. His time lapse, here and throughout the tions, readers can expand the frame, and insert will coexist. The picaresque narratives help text, gives Cervantes the opportunity to play new frames, as they choose. Texts can become to establish the paradigm, and Cervantes will with chronology and with the mechanisms pretexts for limitless readings, contextualiza- raise the ante in Don Quixote by multiplying of perception, thought, and expression. Don tions, and transformations, but they do not the narrators—and hence the perspectives— Quixote’s mind games become the grist for his cease to belong to the realm of art. and by exploring and exploiting the open spac- creator’s exceptionally comprehensive agenda, As I think about the origins and growth of es revealed in the picaresque. which moves from the literary past to an an- the novel, I locate a decisive moment in early ticipated future and from literary territories modern Spain, in the middle of the sixteenth Cervantes did not write to the real world and back. At the end of the century, with the publication of an anony- “ eighth chapter—with Don Quixote caught in mous and relatively brief work of fiction titled a theory of a novel. mid-battle with a Basque squire—the narrator Lazarillo de Tormes, commonly described as informs the reader that he cannot continue the first picaresque narrative. The picaresque Don Quixote is his theory the reporting because he has run out of data. generally features a first-person narrator from in practice, a synthetic The continuation shows up in the next chapter, the bottom rungs of the social latter. The when the narrative figure comes across a manu- pícaro (or pícara) seeks upward mobility in a document on reading, script in Arabic in a marketplace in Toledo and rigidly hierarchical society, and the efforts go writing, life, and art.” has it translated into Castilian. The manuscript for naught, although the satire is double-edged, serendipitously begins where the first section aimed, through ricocheting irony, at the self- The errant knight Don Quixote and his ended. Consequently, the remainder of the incriminating storyteller and at the hypocrisy squire Sancho Panza are iconic. They are “true history” will be transmitted through the and obsession with appearances that dominate known to those who have not and may never intervention of a Morisco translator, who relies social protocol. The picaresque texts of the read the novel, or, actually, the two novels in on the original by a Muslim historian, Cide late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narra- which they appear, published ten years apart, Hamete Benengeli, within an atmosphere in tives—which include Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán in 1605 and 1615, but now generally con- which old enmities with the Catholic Span- de Alfarache, Francisco de Quevedo’s La vida sidered as a single unit. The contents of Don iards remain. By means of this precociously del buscón, and Francisco López de Úbeda’s Quixote undoubtedly will surprise readers who deconstructive turn of events, Cervantes shows La pícara Justina—are intriguing cultural arti- believe that the windmill episode stands at its his awareness that much will be lost in transla- facts on a number of levels, and they are so- center. Part 1 of Don Quixote begins with a pro- tion. He winks at readers and involves them in phisticated cases of literary ventriloquism, in logue in which the author of the manuscript the negotiation of meaning. He brings them which the author puts words into the narrators’ discusses with a friend his reluctance to write into the frame, as Diego Velázquez does with mouths in a less than subtle manner. Wayne C. a prologue. The friend recommends bypassing an array of spectators a half-century later in his Booth’s term the implied author, which refers the traditional allusions to renowned writers painting Las Meninas, which, not coinciden- to signs of the “presence” of the writer in the of the past and throwing in anything that oc- tally, places the artist (amid members of Spain’s narrative structure, as an interpretive voice- curs to him. There are hefty doses of rebellion, royal family) in the work of art. over, captures the give-and-take quality of the of humor, of parody, and of metacommentary Along with its nostalgia for—and under- picaresque. Picaresque narrative falls into the in these first pages, as the act of composition mining of—chivalric romance, Don Quix- category of pseudo-autobiography, so that the becomes an organizing principle of the narra- ote is populated by characters emblematic of refashioning of a “life” into a text is comple- tive trajectory. Writing is, in a word, inscribed picaresque, pastoral, theatrical, and poetic mented by the subversion of the authority by into the narrative, and so, obviously, is reading. precedents. The illiterate Sancho Panza is an the creator of the fiction. The reader can see In a brilliant stroke, Cervantes elects to have exemplum of the legacy of oral culture. Don agents of textual production at work—and the the initial narrator—one of a corps of narra- Quixote’s niece and housekeeper, along with author’s usurpation of the narrator/protago- tive personas—insist that the episodes being his friends the priest and the barber, evalu- nist’s space—as ironic distance presents the recounted constitute the “true history” of Don ate the books in the knight’s library and burn story in another light. What may be the most Quixote, thereby acknowledging and refuting, those that they judge to be offensive, in effect, fascinating, and paradoxical, aspect of the dis- from the start, the Aristotelian distinction be- a joint exercise in literary criticism and allegory cursive battle for control is the protagonist’s tween the objectivity of history and the subjec- of the Inquisition. In great proliferation, char- ability to project a personality of his or her tivity of fiction. The narrator is an advocate of acters, including a soldier who (like Cervantes) own; there is a psyche behind the manipulation, the absolute truth, whereas every sign indicates was held captive in Algiers, narrate their stories. pronounced character development despite the that truth is relative, at best. A novella (written by Cervantes) is read aloud. high degree of mediation, and a causal connec- A man whose exact name seems to be in There is a debate about the value of histories tion between the beginning and the end of the doubt—he is a small landowner and an hidalgo, and biographies as compared with works of fic- story. Something is going on here that is new or lesser nobleman—reads romances of chival- tion. In this profoundly meta- universe, Don and different, and that takes narrative from ry in his leisure time, and, from that mental ex- Quixote meets a madman and comments on the stasis of idealistic models to the domain of ertion, his brain “dries up.” He decides to sally his actions, and shortly thereafter announces realism. Significantly, this early instance of re- forth as a knight, renaming himself Don Quix- that he will imitate the madness of Amadís alism includes what might be deemed a meta- ote de la Mancha. As soon as he sets out on his of Gaul, for him the archetypal knight er- fictional twist, given that the narrators reinvent quest to right wrongs and to protect damsels rant. Part 1 concludes, in essence, when the Letters • Spring 2012 • 8

intercalated tales are completed and Don is animated, fortunately, by the discovery that other. A reading of Don Quixote is perforce a Quixote promises to return home for a spell, there is a false sequel in print; the bad news practicum in literature, rhetoric, poetics, his- escorted by the priest and the barber, who have puts him on the defensive, and he is ready to tory, theology, ethics, race and ethnicity, satire, taken to the road to retrieve him. The narrator do battle. A character from the invasive tome and the power of the imagination. My stance is again short of material, but he vows to keep appears in the “real” second part and certifies may seem, well, quixotic, but, trust me, this searching for the rest of the (hi)story. before a notary that the genuine Don Quixote remnant from early seventeenth-century Spain Much of the reception of Part 2 of Don is the one who stands before him. As if inge- covers those things, and more. Quixote rests on an unexpected intrusion into niously scripted by Cervantes, the author is We all have our bouncing-off places. Don the knight’s history and literary history: the forced to align himself with the Arab historian, Quixote, which I have taught thirteen times publication in 1614 of a sequel by the pseud- whom fate has cast in the role of the “true” his- since I came to Vanderbilt in 2000, is one of onymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, torian, therein reconfiguring the irony. Sansón mine, and, without a doubt, the main one. whose identity is still unknown. Cervantes Carrasco poses as an enemy knight in order to Even when it is not on a syllabus or among likely had written the major portion of his defeat Don Quixote and to force him to return the texts that I am using for a particular re- second part when the spurious continuation home. Back in his village, Don Quixote has search project, it is present symbolically and appeared. He speaks of Avellaneda in the pro- an ex-machina conversion, and he renounces emphatically. Whenever I teach a course in logue and brings him into the narrative proper his chivalric persona, dying shortly afterwards. contemporary theory, I find myself apologiz- as of chapter 59 (of 74). Cervantes’s own plan The novel—this one and its successors—does ing for citing Don Quixote too frequently as for Part 2 is nothing if not inspired. The book not die with him, needless to say. an example. Because my teaching philosophy, about Don Quixote has been published. It is a Cervantes did not write a theory of the if I may be so bold as to call it a philosophy, success, and he is a celebrity. When a character novel. Don Quixote is his theory in practice, a stresses engagement with texts, contexts, and named Sansón Carrasco notifies Don Quix- synthetic document on reading, writing, life, colleagues, recourse to what, for me, is the ote of public and critical reaction, the knight and art. Cervantes recognizes the cultural novel of engagement par excellence seems ap- wonders aloud if there might be a sequel in past—the intertext—and foresees the future propriate. It is my most desired goal for stu- the making. Don Quixote becomes concerned of the novel and of theory. He blends realism dents to leave my classes feeling that they have about the ability of an Arab historian to trans- with metafiction and comedy with serious re- learned important subject matter and that they fer his accomplishments to the page. In Part 2, flection on perception, perspective, and the na- have learned to approach texts—to read—with Cervantes replicates the literary critique of Part ture of truth. Don Quixote provides a mirror to new insights, critical acumen, and confidence. 1, but now it is Cervantes’s work, and/or Cide early modern Spain: its push for political and We all seek method in our pedagogical mad- Hamete Benengeli’s, that is being appraised. religious unity, its obsession with blood purity ness. As a student, I knew that Don Quixote On the road once again, he encounters read- and rules regarding honor, its rigid censorship was special—substantial, intricate, adaptable, ers of Part 1 who know him and his story, and of speech and art, its social and class divisions, dazzlingly comic, deeply serious, inexhaustibly he is in danger of being marginalized by his its economic woes, its treatment of women ironic, and so forth—but it dawned on me a fame. A devious duke and duchess—avid read- and minorities, and its projection of a baroque bit later that Cervantes’s novel had become ers—invite him to their palace, which becomes sensibility, among other elements. The New my instructor’s manual. I hope that everyone a theater in which they make Don Quixote World, the new science, and a new religious chances upon such a guide. and Sancho Panza their jesters. Relegated to crisis (the Reformation against a Counter Ref- the role of actor in the drama of his hosts, the ormation) bring change and increased com- Edward H. Friedman is Gertrude Conaway Vander- knight ceases to be a metaphorical playwright plexity to society. These are all aspects of Don bilt Professor of Spanish and Professor of Comparative and stage director. The altered circumstances Quixote’s extended environment, and they are Literature at Vanderbilt University, and director of the threaten to deflate his energy and his drive. He all encoded within the text, in one way or an- Warren Center.

2011/2012 Warren Center Faculty Fellows. Pictured from left to right: Tony K. Stewart, Tracy G. Miller, Roger E. Moore, Leo C. Coleman, Helena Simonett, William R. Fowler, Robert F. Campany, Betsey A. Robinson, John W. Janusek, Bronwen L. Wickkiser. Not pictured: Jane G. Landers Letters • Spring 2012 • 9

What We Are Writing

hat books are our colleagues Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine. Holly Tucker. Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine in the humanities and social The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish and Murder in the Scientific Revolution. W. W. sciences writing and editing? Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Norton & Company. LETTERS has asked Vanderbilt Teach Us. HarperOne. WUniversity’s scholars to share their 2011 pub- lications. Their answers show an active and Peter Lake and Michael Questier. The Trials diverse mix of scholarly interests. of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyr- dom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan Lewis V. Baldwin, editor. “Thou, Dear God”: England. Continuum International Publishing Prayers that Open Hearts and Spirits-The Rever- Group. end Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beacon Press. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler, co- Tracy Barrett. Dark of the Moon. Harcourt editors. The Jewish Annotated New Testament. Children’s Books. Oxford University Press.

Robert F. Barsky. Zellig Harris: From Ameri- Lorraine M. López. The Realm of Hungry can Linguistics to Socialist Zionism. MIT Press. Spirits. Grand Central Publishing.

Colin Dayan. The Law is a White Dog: How Peter Lorge. Chinese Martial Arts: From Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princ- Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Cam- eton University Press. bridge University Press.

Edward H. Friedman. Into the Mist. A Play Peter Lorge, editor. Five Dynasties and Ten Based on Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla. Juan de Kingdoms. The Chinese University Press. Martina Urban and Christian Wiese, co-edi- la Cuesta. tors. German-Jewish Thought Between Religion Wendy Martin and Cecelia Tichi, co-editors. and Politics. Walter de Gruyter. Mark Jarman. Bone Fires: New and Selected Best of Times, Worst of Times: Contemporary Poems. Sarabande Books. American Stories from the New Gilded Age. Francis W. Wcislo. Tales of Imperial Russia: New York University Press. The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915. Oxford University Press. John S. McClure. Mashup Religion: Pop Music and Theological Invention. Baylor University Press.

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore. The Wiley- Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology. Wiley/Blackwell.

Betsey A. Robinson. Histories of Peirene: A Corinthian Fountain in Three Millennia. Princ- eton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Allison Schachter. Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press.

Kathryn Schwarz. What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space. Uni- versity of Pennsylvania Press. Claire Sisco King. Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema. Rutgers Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three University Press. American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. Penguin Press. Douglas A. Knight. Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel. Westminster John Knox Press. Helmut Walser Smith, editor. Oxford Handbook of Modern German History. Oxford University Press. Letters • Spring 2012 • 10

2011/2012 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Seminars The following is a list of seminars and reading groups that will be hosted by the Warren Center in the spring semester. For more detailed information please contact the seminar coordinators or the Warren Center.

Art of Narrative Workshop: The purpose of this Group for Pre-modern Cultural Studies: The purpose Mexican Studies Seminar: The goal of this group is workshop is to gather together writers interested in the of the group is serve as a forum for those with interests to raise the profile of research related to Mexico on the art of narrative non-fiction and, in particular, in the in pre-modern studies, including not only history but Vanderbilt campus and support members’ individual possibilities of bringing together scholarship and nar- language and literature, chiefly, though not exclusively, scholarly endeavors regarding this important nation rative non-fiction techniques. The group will meet to Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, as well as music, art, and bordering the United States. The group brings together workshop members’ writings, read and discuss works culture. The group meets monthly to discuss ongoing faculty and graduate students from history, political of narrative non-fiction and pieces dealing with craft, research by a faculty member, recent publications in the science, literature, sociology, art, anthropology, mu- and invite visiting speakers known for their narrative field, or the work of a visiting scholar. Seminar coordi- sic, and Latin American studies. At monthly meetings non-fiction to address the group and the larger campus nators: Leah Marcus (English), leah.s.marcus@vanderbilt. the group will discuss work-in-progress authored by community. Seminar coordinator: Paul Kramer (history), edu and Bill Caferro (history), william.p.caferro@vander- members and invited scholars from beyond Vanderbilt. [email protected]. bilt.edu. Seminar coordinator: Helena Simonett (Latin American Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar: This group reads Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Studies), [email protected]. and treats scholarship that is interdisciplinary in nature, Life: The Warren Center and the American Studies Political Culture in Practice: This graduate-led semi- focuses on at least two of the following regions—Af- Program are co-sponsoring this group to provide op- nar intends to facilitate an interdisciplinary conversa- rica, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and North portunities for exchange among faculty members and tion about the implications of, and methodologies America—and treats some aspect of the trans-Atlantic graduate students who are interested in or who are cur- for, interpreting and understanding political culture slave trade, colonialism, and/or postcolonialism. Up- rently involved in projects that engage public scholar- in all its forms. Meetings will incorporate discussions coming guest speakers include Eric Hinderaker (history, ship. Vanderbilt is a member of the national organiza- of specific source and methodological issues through University of Utah) on January 25 and the Black Atlan- tion, “Imagining America,” a consortium of colleges pre-circulated readings, while also providing partici- tic Seminar on February 2. Seminar coordinators: Celso and universities committed to public scholarship in the pants with opportunities to workshop papers-in-prog- Castilho (history), [email protected] and Jane arts, humanities, and design. Seminar coordinators: Tere- ress and raise questions relevant to their own research. Landers (history), [email protected]. sa Goddu (American Studies), teresa.a.goddu@vanderbilt. Seminar coordinators: Lance Ingwersen (history), lance. Digital Humanities Discussion Group: Digital hu- edu and Mona Frederick (Warren Center), mona.freder- [email protected], Alexander Jacobs (history), manities projects are rich new additions to the intel- [email protected]. [email protected], and Sonja Ostrow lectual life of humanities scholars. If you are currently Modernism, Emergence, and Critiques: A Twen- (history), [email protected]. working on a digital humanities project or hope to do tieth Century Literature and Culture Seminar: Science Studies Seminar: This interdisciplinary group so in the near future, please join this discussion group This graduate-led seminar group seeks to explore the is comprised of faculty from the natural sciences, the to learn more about resources and innovations in this visual and print culture of the twentieth century with social sciences, and the humanities with a shared inter- area. The group will be hosting a Digital Humanities respect to various national, regional, and transnational est in the history and sociology of scientific thought and Roundtable Event with visiting scholars on February traditions, including but not limited to literature and practice, issues of scientific methodology and its ap- 3. Seminar coordinators: Lynn Ramey (French), lynn.ra- the arts from Europe and the Americas. Meetings plication across disciplines, and the social functions of [email protected] and Mona Frederick (Warren Cen- will provide those whose interests involve twentieth- scientific knowledge.Seminar coordinator: Dahlia Porter ter), [email protected]. century literature and culture with a formal group (English), [email protected]. setting in which to workshop their writing, read and Film Theory & Visual Culture Seminar: This semi- The Heart of the Matter: This graduate-led seminar discuss the work of their colleagues and mentors, and nar aims to foster dialogue among faculty and graduate will explore the intersections of social ethics and so- engage with recent developments in relevant scholar- students across campus working in film, visual culture, ciology as they relate to classism, racism, and sexism. ship (modernism, postmodernism, postcolonial studies, art history, literature, and cultural studies interested in Through incorporating social justice frameworks, this film studies, American studies, identity studies, philoso- theories of the image, philosophies of perception, aes- seminar provides a platform for social ethicists and phy, etc.). thetic and critical theory, media histories, and the his- Seminar coordinators: Andy Hines (English), sociologists to engage each other in discussions of so- tory of vision. The group will meet monthly to discuss [email protected] and Aubrey Porterfield cial inequality, theories that explain it, and how to readings, share work, and engage the research of invited (English), [email protected]. apply knowledge to construct more equitable societ- scholars. Upcoming guest speakers include Jacques Kh- Literature and Law Seminar: This reading group will ies. Seminar coordinators: Christophe Ringer (religion), alip (English, Brown University) on January 27 and Da- meet to discuss current approaches, new challenges, [email protected] and Nakia Collins vid L. Clark (English, McMaster University) on March and new possibilities that are offered to legal and liter- (sociology), [email protected]. 16. ary scholars when they use insights from both fields to Seminar coordinators: Jennifer Fay (Film Studies and 18th-/19th-Century Colloquium: The colloquium illuminate their work. The seminar welcomes anyone English), [email protected], James McFar- brings together faculty, graduate students, and visit- interested in the many topics now addressed in this field, land (German), [email protected], and ing scholars to explore ground-breaking scholarship on including the use of obscenity laws to regulate creative Paul Young (Film Studies and English), paul.d.young@ the arts, cultures, and histories of the 18th and 19th work, the representation of law in literature, law as lit- vanderbilt.edu. centuries. While loosely focused around British culture, erature, the application of literary methods to legal texts, Food Politics Seminar: This graduate-led seminar the group also invites scholars from other linguistic and the challenges of constructing “characters” appropriate aims to continue a transdisciplinary conversation about geographic fields to share work and join in the discus- to literary and legal settings, and the revitalization of law the political, economic, ecological, cultural, spiritual, sion. Upcoming guest speakers include Jacques Khalip through reference to humanistic texts and approaches. and nutritional dimensions of foodways, agricultural (English, Brown University) on January 27, Markman practices, and consumption habits. Each month will in- Seminar coordinator: Robert Barsky (French and Italian), Ellis (history, University of London) on February 24, clude a meeting focused on a discussion of selected read- [email protected]. Wolfram Schmidgen (English, Washington Univer- ings, as well as a second meeting oriented toward praxis, sity) on March 16, and Sara Maurer (English, Notre engaging with the principles discussed through shared Dame University) on March 30. Seminar Coordinators: physical or community activities. Seminar coordinators: Gabriel Cervantes (English), gabriel.cervantes@vanderbilt. Tristan Call (anthropology), [email protected] edu and Rachel Teukolsky (English), rachel.teukolsky@ and Wade Archer (Divinity School), wade.w.archer@ vanderbilt.edu. vanderbilt.edu. Letters • Spring 2012 • 11

2011/2012 Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows Lecture Series

ow in its sixth year, the Warren Wednesday, March 28 Alison Suen, Ethel Mae Wilson Fellow Center’s annual Graduate Student Department of Philosophy Fellows Program currently spon- “The Kinship of Language: Reworking the Human-Animal Divide” sors eight outstanding Vanderbilt Ngraduate students in the humanities and quali- Monday, April 2 Tara E. Plunkett Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Queen’s University (Belfast) tative social sciences in a year-long fellowship program. These awards are designed to support “Self and Desire: Surrealism in the Images and Texts of Federico García innovation and excellence in graduate student Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington” research and allow the students a service-free Tuesday, April 10 Diana E. Bellonby, Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow year of support to enable full-time work on the Department of English dissertation. It is expected that students who “Magic Portraits: Visual Culture, Ekphrasis, and the Novel, 1850-1930” receive this award will complete the disserta- tion during the fellowship term. Additionally, Wednesday, April 11 William L. Bishop one graduate student from Queen’s University Department of History in Belfast is selected to participate in the Grad- “Diplomacy in Black and White: America and the Search for uate Student Fellows Program. Zimbabwean Independence, 1965-1980” As part of their affiliation with the Robert Thursday, April 19 Anna-Lisa Halling, Joe and Mary Harper Fellow Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Fel- Department of Spanish and Portuguese lows are integrated into the center’s interdisci- plinary scholarly community through partici- “Feminine Voice and Space in Early Modern Iberian Convent Theatre” pation in a weekly seminar, occasional seminars Friday, April 20 Robert J. Watson with visiting speakers, and special events. The Department of French and Italian capstone of the fellowship is the delivery of “Cities of Origin, Cities of Exile: The Literary Emergence of a public lecture during the spring term. The Maghrebi Jewish Diasporic Consciousness, 1985-2010” Graduate Student Fellows Lecture Series is an intellectually invigorating time at the Warren Tuesday, April 24 Matthew E. Duquès, American Studies Fellow Center and we encourage you to plan to attend Department of English one or more of these talks by these outstanding “‘To a Certain Degree’: Northern Education Reform and young scholars. Early U.S. Literature, 1781-1867” Following is the schedule for this year’s Wednesday, April 25 Matthew L. Eatough talks which will all take place at 4:10 p.m. in Department of English the Warren Center’s conference room. Lec- “Narrating the Ends of Class: Imperialism and Affect in the ture titles will be posted soon on the Warren Twentieth-Century British World-System” Center’s website; the listing below includes the Thursday, April 26 Joanna M. Mazurska, George J. Graham Jr. Fellow titles of the Fellows’ dissertations. Department of History “Making Sense of Czesław Miłosz: A Twentieth-Century Intellectual’s Dialogue with His Transnational Audiences”

2011/2012 Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows Pictured from left to right: Tara E. Plunkett, William L. Bishop, Diana E. Bellonby, Matthew L. Eatough, Anna-Lisa Halling, Matthew E. Duquès, Alison Suen, Joanna M. Mazurska, Robert J. Watson. Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities VU Station B #351534 2301 Vanderbilt Place Nashville, Tennessee 37235-1534

Landscapes of the Delhi Durbar, 1903: Ritual and Politics The Robert Penn Warren continued from page 3 Center for the Humanities worlds under its ruthless feet, always in search of of cities that we find ceremonial enactments at Warren Center Staff the new, destroying, building, and demolishing their most condensed, and most political, and Edward H. Friedman, Director once again with the meaningless petulance of a most potentially dramatic—even literally explo- Mona C. Frederick, Executive Director child who builds a house of sand only to raze it sive” (James 2003: 249). This power and poten- Kate C. Rattner, Activities Coordinator to the ground” (Ali 1994 [1940]: 110). tial of urban life, this concatenation of meanings and Letters Editor Allison J. Thompson, Administrative Assistant In such rituals, and by living amidst the and possibilities, multiplied by the number of changed landscape—of imagination and participants, viewers, passersby and interested Letters is the semiannual newsletter of the memory—that they help to produce, people parties, is what makes it and its rituals impor- Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities may come to understand themselves and oth- tant to any contemporary grasp of politics in its at Vanderbilt University, VU Station B #351534, ers in new ways, though not necessarily in bet- global extent, and which links investigations of 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, Tennessee 37235-1534. ter or more civil ones. The kinds of distinctions long-ago colonial rituals to the struggles, prac- (615) 343-6060, Fax (615) 343-2248. and discriminations that Nirad Chaudhuri tices, and self-understandings of the present. experienced were, in one sense, the everyday, For a listing of Warren Center programs bureaucratic transcription of the catalogues of and activities, please contact the above ethnological diversity and official rank that were References address or visit our Web site at a central part of the performance of the Dur- Ali, Ahmed (1994 [1940]). Twilight in Delhi. New www.vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center. bar. Accounts of the ceremony are replete with York: New Directions. lists of “Ghoorkas and Sikhs, Mahrattas and Statement of Purpose Arendt, Hannah (1968). The Origins of Totalitarian- Established under the sponsorship of the Col- Mahomedans,” or, on the other side, “District ism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. lege of Arts and Science in 1987 and named the Officers and Magistrates, Knight Commanders Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humani- Banerjee, Mukulika (2008). “Democracy, Sacred and and Companions of the Order of the Star of ties in 1989 in honor of Robert Penn Warren, Everyday: An Ethnographic Case from India.” In India,” as both the audience for and celebrants Vanderbilt alumnus class of 1925, the Center Democracy: Anthropological Approaches. Julia Paley, ed. of the ritual. Meanwhile, however, it also pro- promotes interdisciplinary research and study in Pp. 63-96. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. the humanities, social sciences, and, when appro- vided an occasion for technological displays that Borneman, John, ed. (2003). Death of the Father: An priate, natural sciences. Members of the Vander- cut across these boundaries, and provided an bilt community representing a wide variety of Anthropology of the End in Political Authority. New alternative scale on which to assert oneself, if still specializations take part in the Warren Center’s York: Berghahn. in the service of the kinds of sumptuary distinc- programs, which are designed to intensify and tions drawn upon elsewhere. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. (1987). Thy Hand Great increase interdisciplinary discussion of academic, social, and cultural issues. Such multiple scales of identity and rank Anarch: India 1921-1952. London: Chatto & Windus. are, in the complex situation of a stately ritual, Dirks, Nicholas (2001). Castes of Mind: Colonialism Vanderbilt University is committed to principles of equal opportunity simultaneously in play as the materials with and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princ- and affirmative action. which people seek to recognize and order their eton University Press. Published by Vanderbilt University Creative Services. own place in it. The more deeply and perma- Photos of Faculty and Graduate Fellows by Anne Rayner. Gupta, Narayani (1981). Delhi Between Two Empires, “New inscriptions” photo courtesy of Leo C. Coleman. nently such distinctions are crafted into the 1803-1931: Society, Government, and Urban Growth. space of everyday life, and the more stern the Delhi: Oxford University Press. separations, the more we enter the modern James, Wendy (2003). The Ceremonial Animal: A world of tabulated identities, and even the regu- New Portrait of Anthropology. New York: Oxford Uni- lation and ordering of life-potentials on the basis versity Press. not of humanity, but of actuarial calculations. Legg, Steven (2007). Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s This ordering and inscription in space is the Urban Governmentalities. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. topic of many studies of “governmentality” in Delhi and elsewhere (Legg 2007). Once we have Mitchell, Timothy (2001). Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of Cal- accounted for all the permutations of all this ifornia Press. governmental, statistical, and abstract knowl- edge, however, there remains that element of Spencer, Jonathan (2007). Anthropology, Politics, and meaning and experience which is equally present the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. but differently “evidenced “within the ritual and the routine, and which anthropological interpre- Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1979). Remarks on Frazer’s tation tries to elucidate. As the anthropologist Golden Bough. Rush Rhees, ed., A.C. Miles transl. Wendy James has put it, “it is in the public life Denton, UK: Brynmill Press. Professor Leo C. Coleman is the 2011/2012 William S. Vaughn Visiting Faculty Fellow from The Ohio State University.