CALL FOR PAPERS

Date: Saturday, 27th May 2017

Venue: Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Within the study of media theory and history, competing narratives have identified, on the one hand, the absorption of the human voice or body within the text, and, on the other, the development of technology and material texts as extensions of that voice or body. To date these narratives have been largely located from the twentieth century onward. This one-day conference aims to readdress these narratives within a longer historical and wider interdisciplinary perspective. From eighteenth century concepts of the bodily consumption of texts by readers, and words being impressed upon their brains, to more recent imaginings of the multi-sensorial spaces of digital texts and their distribution in the new media landscape, the relationship between the media of writing and the human body has been fraught with affective potentials. This conference aims to examine this relationship between the materiality of texts and the materiality of bodies by bringing together researchers from different disciplines and time periods across the study of textuality.

Moreover, this conference seeks to make use of the potentials of such media forms for academic study. Speakers will be asked to send a digital copy of material related to their presentation ahead of the conference. These materials will be uploaded to the conference website, allowing speakers to explore the implications of their research during their presentations and enabling participants to view the material before and after the conference itself.

Possible topic areas could include:

• The physiology of reading

• The multi-sensory experience of texts: visuals, sonics, and tactility

• Literacy and the materiality of the alphabet

• The (dis)embodied nature of writing

• Technology and media and/as bodily forms of writing

• Text processing from print to the digital

• The Internet and (post)human identity

• Pens, typewriters, keyboards, touchscreens, and other media of writing

• The place of the body in media theory and history

Keynote speaker: Dr Seb Franklin (Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, King’s College London)

Please submit a title and abstract of a maximum of 300 words, along with a short biographical note of up to 50 words, to embodyingmedia@gmail.com by 20th February 2017.

Monday 30 January, 12.30-2

Milstein Exhibition Centre/Seminar Room, University Library

A guided tour of the Cambridge University Library exhibition ‘Curious Objects’, in the company of lead curator Jill Whitelock, followed by discussion.

Places are limited–please email jes1003 to reserve.

Monday 6 March, 12.30-2

Milstein Seminar Room, University Library

‘The Medical Book in the Nineteenth Century: From MS Casebooks to Mass Plagiarism’
A workshop led by Sarah Bull, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, HPS

Speaker: Prof Sasaki Takahiro (Keio University, Shidō bunko)

Place: Faculty of Asian and Middle Easter Studies, The University of Cambridge, Room 8-9
Date: Monday 23 January 2016, 5pm

Notes for an exhibition in the English Faculty Building, first floor, 17 January – 17 February, 2017

Dropping his history books,

a young man, lined against the horizon

like an exclamation point with nothing to assert,

stumbles into the dance.

– “Death as History” by Jay Wright

RECLAIMING THE LEGENDS: MYTH & THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT finds inspiration in the anti-historical world described by Wright. Its mysterious dance is the “cabinet of curiosities”: the defiance of categorical boundaries, the assembling of varied objects, the powerfully mythic rather than the historical, the rhythmic rather than the calculated. The exhibition also “plead[s]” like Wright’s dance. It asks visitors to abandon traditional epistemologies and participate in the microcosm it has created. This exhibition-world is a miscellany of anthropological & egyptological studies, revisionist histories, spiritualist & esoteric writings, books of poetry, and music record. It intimates some organizational principle, but finds time operating synchronically. Traditional chronology, here, is corrupted: Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Lorenzo Thomas, Bob Kaufman, Ishmael Reed, David Henderson, and Marvin X appear alongside Gerald Massey, George James, and Theodore P. Ford. Like Wright’s dance, its form is ritualized and its theme is mythical.

Although the exhibition looks above and beyond “history” (“visionary-wise”), it is from there where we begin. The symbolic birth of BAM occurred in the spring of 1965. Not long after the assassination of Malcom X, LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] (1934-2014) moved from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Harlem, where he, Larry Neal and others co-organised the Black Arts Repertory Theater / School. BAM (its artists, journals, and institutions) would soon spread across a number of major American cities—Detroit, Chicago, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and New York—; however, under repressive government measures like COINTELPRO, President Nixon’s strategy of pushing Black Capitalism as a response to Black Power, and an ideological shift towards Marxism, BAM began to decline by around 1974.

Although BAM was largely a decentralized movement, its artists and thinkers did have a common political foundation: nationalism. James Edward Smethurst writes, “the common thread between nearly all the groups was a belief that African Americans were a people, a nation, entitled to (needing, really) self-determination of its own destiny” (15). BAM’s socio-political concerns bespeak of the radical significance of their historical moment. Yet, perhaps unexpectedly, “history” (as such) did not figure in the poetry and drama of BAM. In fact, many of BAM’s thinkers equated history, as Wright states, with “death.” History was the story and culture propounded by the tyrannical power of the white-West. BAM and Black Power politics wanted to change or, better, to drop “history” altogether. Neal writes, “the cultural values inherent in western history must either be radicalized or destroyed.” What was needed, Neal continues, was “a whole new system of ideas”: a system that would be alternative, black, and “mythic.”

The poetry and drama of BAM often served to build this alternative myth-world. In BAM’s literature, allusions to Akhenaten, Moses, Zipporah, warriors, gods, spirits, and orishas appear with more frequency than figures of recent history (Patrice Lumumba and Malcom X included). Symbols like the ankh or Egyptian hieroglyphs can often be seen integrated in artworks or poems. Ancient Egypt and Ethiopia regularly appear as the settings of a prosperous black past, now suppressed by white historians. If “history” distorted and oppressed, “myth” empowered. For BAM, this mythic past was also as an image of the future. Time, in the alter-world, functioned synchronically: its occupants could freely move backwards (to the glory she/he once was) or forwards (to the glory she/he will be). In infinity, as Sun Ra states “it doesn’t matter which way you go”—you will find free and everlasting life in all directions.

RECLAIMING THE LEGENDS: MYTH & THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT is a journey through the synchronic alter-world of BAM. The first display case (THE PAST MADE PRESENT) decides to position itself in the past. On the far left of the display case lie two books: Gerald Massey’s The Light of the World (1907) [1] and George James’s Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (1954) [2]. Both Massey and James’s texts reconsider the accepted history of Western tradition, concluding that a number of its philosophical and religious ideas have ancient Egyptian origins. As Massey and James’s texts assert the cultural influence of Africa, the three works in the middle of the display case encourage their readers to use this African knowledge as a means of selfempowerment. Theodore P. Ford’s God Wills the Negro (1939) [3] ends with the call to find strength in “the accumulated folk-wisdom and social experience of a hundred centuries of civilization.” Amiri Baraka, in his interview with Austin Clarke, [4] makes a similar gesture when he encourages the “black man” to repossess his ancient “lifeforce”— the force that made Egypt, Ghana, Timbuktu—and flourish as he used to. In “The Bathers” (1981) [5], Lorenzo Thomas aims to describe this life-force at work. Set in the 1963 Birmingham Civil Rights demonstrations, a young boy, hit by a high-pressure hose, “[transforms] into a lion” whose powerful “tail is vau the symbol of love.”

The most influential example of ancient myth being used as a means of self-empowerment occurs in jazz music. On the video monitor beside the first display case, the visitor can watch musical performances by Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and The Art Ensemble of Chicago as well as readings by Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Askia Touré. Many of the performances find their energy in ritual-like percussion or rhythmic phrasing, dance, and costume. Turning back to the first display case, the visitor sees three objects of a similar theme. Henry Dumas’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (1974) [6] tells the story of an ancient horn so powerful that it kills a group of uninitiated white listeners. In “East Fifth Street (NY)” (1965) [7], Bob Kaufman describes jazz as having the capacity to cause “time” to “[cry] out” from “the skin of an African drum.” At the very end of the first display case is Sun Ra & Henry Dumas’s The Ark and the Ankh (1966) [8]. During the course of their interview, Ra describes music as a bridge to a world beyond death, destruction, and time.

Following Ra, the exhibition’s second display case ( LOOKING AHEAD, VISIONARYWISE) positions itself in the future. On the left hand side of the display case, the visitor sees three texts that explore the theme of death bringing about new life. E.A. Wallis Budge’s translation of The Book of the Dead [1] contains a series of “magic spells” with the capacity to determine the afterlife of the deceased. In “Egyptian Book of the Dead” (1970) [2], David Henderson uses metaphors like magic spells to transform a deceased New York City into an Edenic ancient Egypt. In his ode to the legacy of Malcolm X (1968) [3], Marvin X turns Malcolm’s assassination into something affirmative, bringing with it strength, hope, blackness, and black power. While death brings about new life, myth and magic provide models of what that new life may look like. Reed’s “Neo-HooDoo” mixture of fact and fiction, history and myth, in Mumbo Jumbo (1972) [4] provides the reader with an aesthetic and cultural model antithetical to the West’s. In “The True Way to Life” (2006) [5], Sun Ra uses intuitive logic to reinterpret history, decode biblical scripture, and reveal the secret path to everlasting life. In Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1968) [6], Amiri Baraka provides examples of how sensationalism, surrealist symbolism, and mythology can be placed in the service of political protest.

The exhibition ends with two explorations of what may be called the future-present. In “to Morani/Mungu” (1971) [7], Sonia Sanchez puts “peace” in the hands of a loving mother and has her assert that it is in the present that African Americans—particularly children—can actualize their dreams. Lastly, Space is the Place (1972) [8], is a musical exploration of Sun Ra’s space world. After journeying through cacophonous horns, offkilter piano, and energetic percussion, the album ends with the electronic beeps and bops of Ra’s spaceship taking off for another voyage.

Please find two informative PDFs below. One is an extensive description of the exhibition and the objects on display and the second is a short handout visitors can pick up at the exhibition:

Reclaiming the Legends [Long]

Reclaiming the Legends [Short]

The next event in our calendar will be a talk by Dr Nick Hardy (Munby Fellow, 2016-17), entitled ‘New evidence for the drafting, revision, and intellectual context of the King James Bible (1611)’, on Thursday 26th January.

Dr Hardy’s talk will offer the first holistic treatment of several crucial sources for the creation of the King James Bible that have been discovered or rediscovered in the years since 2011. Taken together, these sources allow us to see for the first time how an individual biblical book (the apocryphal 1 Esdras) was drafted by a group of translators, and then revised once the Bible was nearing completion. They also show how the translators’ decisions were shaped by the philological, historical and theological questions which they were asking about the origin and significance of the Old Testament Apocrypha, and their relationship to the canonical books.

The talk takes place in the Milstein Seminar Rooms at the University Library, with tea from 4.30 and the talk beginning at 5.00. Rare books and manuscripts relating to Dr Hardy’s work will be on display.

Last Tuesday, a gaggle of CMT members were treated to a guided tour of the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Colour’ exhibition by the curator, Stella Panayotova. Entering the dimly-lit space and seeing the greens, reds and blues that surround the meeting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden would be a sublime experience in anyone’s book. But this exhibition is really about the meeting of art and science, and in particular the use of modern non-invasive methods to work out which pigments were used in each image. Part of the reason why this image was heading up the show was that it turned out to be concealing instructions for its own colouring. Like a painting-by-numbers, particular areas had written instructions for the colours to be employed in them. And while the manuscript is Parisian, the instructions were in Dutch, which tells you something about flows of expertise around the time of the illumination in 1414.

Such migrations of artists and materials are at the heart of the exhibition. Precious substances travelled thousands of miles along the silk road to be ground up and used in pigments; techniques such as the application of egg yolk to lend sheen to a surface migrated (perhaps) from panel painting to manuscript illumination; identifying particular rare materials in a manuscript can be used to solve mysteries about a manuscript’s provenance, to place or displace it. (The presence of smalt from ground glass in a manuscript by the ‘Murano Master’ appears to confirm that he did indeed work in that centre of glass production, however much the stylistic evidence might tell against this).

Part of the point of the exhibition is to show that a vast amount of medieval painting, particularly from northern Europe, survives between the covers of books. But this overlap between the bookish and the visual has had unfortunate consequences, since over the years many manuscripts have been broken up and mounted as wall-paintings, for display in frames. ‘Colour’ reunites a number of these scattered fragments to see what can be learnt from them, and pulls together the work of researchers at a number of institutes devoted to exploring the chemistry of manuscripts. It’s a wonderful example of what can be achieved by crossing borders, and a tribute to Stella’s infectious enthusiasm for her subject.

Attention student book-collectors!

Your chance to win £500

You can enter any type of collection provided it is solely owned by you and has been collected by you. The books do not have to be especially valuable – a collection of paperbacks, put together with imagination, is equally eligible. The contest is open to all current undergraduate and graduate students of the University of Cambridge.

The closing date for entries is the first day of Lent Full Term, Tuesday 17 January 2017

Full details of how to enter are given on the University Library website at:
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/about-library/prizes-and-fellowships/rose-book-collecting-prize

The Gordon Duff Prize is an annual competition for an essay on any one of the following subjects: bibliography, palaeography, typography, book-binding, book-illustration, or the science of books and manuscripts and the arts relating thereto.

The Prize, which will be of the value of £500, is open to all members of the University.

To enter, candidates must submit the proposed subjects of their essays to Dr Jill Whitelock, Head of Special Collections, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, CB3 9DR (jw330@cam.ac.uk)  so as to reach her not later than the last day of the Michaelmas Term, i.e. 19 December 2016. Candidates will be informed whether their proposed subjects are approved by the Library Syndicate after its meeting on 7 February 2017.

If the proposed subject is approved, essays, which must not exceed 10,000 words in length, must be submitted by the last day of Lent Term, 25 March 2017.

For further information see http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/about-library/prizes-and-fellowships/gordon-duff-prize.

PETER STALLYBRASS, ‘Shakespeare’s Desk’

18 November 2016, 18:15 – 19:15

The new Cambridge University Library exhibition opens today. Entitled ‘Curious Objects’, it’s a fascinating display of some of the things that the library accumulated, mostly in a period before the strict demarcation between libraries (for books) and museums (for objects) had kicked in.

Among the curiouser articles on display is a leather boot from Lithuania, which was presented to the library along with a shoe and a copy of the New Testament in Lithuanian by the widow of the translator, Tomasz Ramsaeus. Quite why she thought the library needed this footwear is not fully explained. There is also a ‘luminous trumpet’ or spirit trumpet, for use in a séance, together with some ectoplasm in the form of a ‘cloth-like substance’ (which appears to the untrained eye merely to be cloth). ‘This example was captured during a séance given by the medium Helen Duncan and is part of the archive of the Society for Psychical Research’.

For devotees of literature like me, there’s a tobacco stopper made of wood from the mulberry tree supposedly planted by Shakespeare at New Place in Stratford. The catalogue tells us that the tree was cut down by the Reverend Francis Gastrell in the 1750s because he had ‘grown tired of tourists asking to see it’. (That’s one solution to the blight of tourism). Souvenirs made from Shakespeare’s mulberry were apparently commonplace in later eighteenth-century England. A neighbouring cabinet has a beautiful silk bookmark with thirteen strings, each woven with a verse from a medieval Latin prayer to Jesus.

Those of us who suspect that the theory of evolution would not have been formulated had it not been for the proliferation of facial hair in Victorian England will have their views confirmed by another item in the exhibition: a set of cuttings from the beard and whiskers of Frank Chance, who considered himself an exception to Darwin’s rule that ‘when in man the beard differs in colour from the hair of the head … it is … invariably of a lighter tint’, and who wrote to Darwin (with enclosures) to tell him so.

Stone-age tools from Nigeria, wall-paintings from Pompeii, children’s games from Paris, slippers from South India, oracle-bones from Sumatra, spear-heads from Western Australia: there is a whole world of stuff in there. Go see!