Illinois Press Book Blog

The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed a variety of university press staff for its latest assessment of academic publishing.

Low sales, high numbers of books returned, operating subsidies threatened by state and university budget cuts: As the economy slumps, those are just some of the problems that confront academic publishers. . . . Talk to individual press directors and sales managers, however, and it becomes clear that the crisis does not look and feel the same for everyone.

“Either university presses will embrace new technology and offer scholarly content in new forms to researchers and under new business models, or they will follow the music industry and spend all of their resources on trying to protect their territory–unsuccessfully.”–Laura Cerruti, Director of Digital Content Development, University of California Press, profiled in Against the Grain

Tom O’Neill, brother of the Press’s Kathy O’Neill, was interviewed on January 27, 2009, on NPR’s All Things Considered, and contributed an article titled “Escape from North Korea” to the February 2009 issue of National Geographic.

The February 1, 2009, issue of Kirkus Reviews includes a rave for the forthcoming book Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People (University of Illinois Press, April 2009).

“An epic ode to personal integrity, creative vision and entrepreneurial tenacity, shedding timely light on the germination of the civil-rights movement.”

The daily e-mails seeking experts for future news stories keep coming.  My current favorites:

-Bars in NYC with Ms. Pac-Man game
-pet hypnotist
-Reality Stars Who Love Baseball
-business blogging disasters?
-Bamboo: Is it Really That Green?
-Memorable Kisses in Philadelphia

I’m sitting in Doha, Qatar, on January 27, 2009, at about 4pm Arabian Standard Time—here this year on a faculty appointment at the new Northwestern University-Qatar campus in Education City. Last night, Al-Arabiya in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) aired Obama’s first interview with an Arab TV station. The Al-Arabiya website has the interview on its front page with a full transcript, but has yet to post an accompanying video stream. So I went over to YouTube and watched some, joining at least 60,000 other YouTube viewers who had already checked out one or more of the twenty-five Al-Arabiya interview clips of Obama posted on YouTube in the past eight hours. Seeing as it is currently only about 8am in New York City, and 5am in Los Angeles, those YouTube downloads ought to easily pass 100,000 in the next few hours as the USA wakes up, gets out of bed, and gets online. My guess is, within a few days, Al-Arabiya will in fact post a video stream of the Obama interview on its website, along with its already-posted video stream of the Obama inauguration. And—alas—they have also posted a video stream from few months ago of, well, of someone throwing shoes.

The global circulation of USA Presidential TV images has changed mightily since Telstar in 1962. What was in 1962 one—and only one—satellite capable of feeding a TV signal, and only able to link the USA and Europe, and only for about 25 minutes of every 2 ½ hour orbit, has become in 2009 an unfathomable quantity of Presidential images circulated by a host of satellites and fiber-optic cables, with those images themselves copied, versioned, and reposted endlessly throughout cyberspace. The trajectories—the back stories if you will—of these technologies, these circulations, and these uses of global TV images are among the things I explore in Global TV. At the time I was writing that book, I never expected to be sitting in Qatar as Global TV was released, but it makes for an interesting locale on days like today, when the new American President makes his Arab TV debut. In the Al-Arabiya interview, Obama confirmed he is “going to follow through on our commitment for me to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital,” but chose to not reveal the name of the city. Like most everyone else here in Qatar, I’m hoping for Doha—but wherever the visit takes place, it will be another interesting moment for global TV, and another blog entry.

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James Schwoch is an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University and author of the new book Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946-69. To follow his work in Qatar, become his friend on Facebook.

 
Kevin Stein, poet laureate of Illinois and author of the new book of poems Sufficiency of the Actual, was featured in the January 24, 2009, edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Kevin Stein is used to it by now. When people first discover that he’s poet laureate of Illinois, and then when they find out that Gov. Rod Blagojevich is the guy responsible for picking the state’s first poet, everybody makes the same joke.

“They want to know how much I had to pay him,” Stein says with a laugh.

Sunday’s New York Times profiled Cincinnati’s King Records, an early recording home to James Brown. In the piece, writer RJ Smith mentioned our forthcoming book King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records (University of Illinois Press, October 2009), by Jon Hartley Fox.

On inauguration day, Aretha Franklin gave President Barack Obama a collection of her dad’s sermons, along with a biography of her late father. Is it possible that she gifted Obama a University of Illinois Press book? If so, then she definitely gets our R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Anténor Firmin (1850-1911) was a Haitian scholar whose De l’égalité des Races Humaines (Anthropologie Positive) in 1885 (Paris) was a response to European racialist and racist thought in the nineteenth century. The book was discovered in my anthropology of race and racism class, was recovered, and translated by Asselin Charles and introduced by us for the first time in English as The Equality of the Human Races (2000). In 2002 the University of Illinois Press published a paperback edition.

In his chapter “The Role of the Black Race in the History of Civilization”  he writes the following after an admiring bow acknowledging the American abolitionist, Wendell Phillips’ praise and analysis of Haiti’s defeat of the slave system and its influence on the abolition of slavery in the US. 

Appearances to the contrary, this big country is destined to strike the first blow against the theory of the inequality of the human races. Indeed, at this very moment, Blacks in the great federal republic have begun to play a prominent role in the politics of the various states of the American union. It seems quite possible that, in less than a century from now, a Black man might be called to head the government of Washington and manage the affairs of the most progressive country on earth, a country which will inevitably become, thanks to its agricultural and industrial production, the richest and most  powerful in the world. These are not utopian musings. We only have to consider  the increasing participation of Blacks in American society to cast aside our skepticism. Besides, we must remember that slavery in the United States was abolished only twenty years ago.

Firmin dedicated his book both to Haiti, and to the Black race. He wrote in the dedication his hope that the book “may inspire in all of the children of the Black race around the world the love of progress, justice, and liberty. In dedicating this book to Haiti I bear them all in mind, both the downtrodden of today and the giants of tomorrow.” It seems he had in mind a man whose reality today would have been difficult to conjure in 1885, but there is no doubt that he would recognize President Barack Hussein Obama as one of the “giants of tomorrow.”

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Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban is a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College. She wrote the introduction to The Equality of the Human Races by Antenor Firmin, translated by Asselin Charles (University of Illinois Press, 2002).