This year has been one we won’t soon forget. Every day seemed to bring another breaking news story, and the pandemic has kept us away from our friends, our families, and our coworkers.

Still, there has been much accomplished in 2020, and we at the Bucknell University Press have been busy continuing to publish scholarly monographs in a variety of fields. At times like this, thoughtful intellectualism and academic accomplishment are as important as ever, and we are proud to be able to bring our readers the works of fine authors the world over.

This December, we wanted to take a look back at the books published over the course of 2020. Check out the full, chronological list below, and click on any book’s title to be taken to our website where you can find out more information and order a copy.

1.) 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 25)

Edited by Kevin L. Cope

Volume 25 of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era investigates the local textures that make up the whole cloth of the Enlightenment. Unfurling in the folds of this volume is a special feature on playwright, critic, and literary theorist John Dennis. This celebration of Dennis mingles with a full company of a wide array of essays in the character of revealing case studies and tops it all off with a full portfolio of relevant reviews.

2.) The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen

By Marcie Frank

Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, Marcie Frank’s The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.

3.) Beside the Bard: Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns

By George S. Christian

4.) The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: The Stoke Newington Edition

By Daniel Defoe, edited by Maximillian E. Novak, Irving N. Rothman, and Manuel Schonhorn

Robinson Crusoe has been an international best-seller for three hundred years. An adventure tale involving cannibals, pirates, and shipwrecks, it embodies economic, social, political, and philosophical themes that continue to be relevant today. This edition of the novel with its introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes provides a uniquely scholarly presentation. There has been no other edition like it.

5.) Romantic Automata: Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms

Edited by Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, but among the Romantics, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life. The contributors to Romantic Automata open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.

6.) Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700-1831

By Daniel Gustafson

Lothario’s Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period’s debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject’s relation to modern forms of social control.

7.) Transpoetic Exchange: Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues

Edited by Marília Librandi, Jamile Pinheiro Dias, and Tom Winterbottom

8.) Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-Transition, 1992-2014

By Katie J. Vater

In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors whose largely realist novels portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists’ willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence. Today, in an era of rising globalization, the artist novel proves ideal for examining authors’ ambivalent notions of creative practice when political patronage and private sector investment complicate belief in artistic autonomy.

9.) Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

By Kathleen M. Oliver

Narrative Mourning explores death and its relics as they appear within the confines of the eighteenth-century British novel. It argues that the cultural disappearance of the dead/dying body and the introduction of consciousness as humanity’s newfound soul found expression in fictional representations of the relic (object) or relict (person).

10.) Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800

Edited by Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber

11.) Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media

Edited by Jakub Lipski

Published in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. The essays here convince us that the genre’s formal and ideological adaptability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its enduring relevance to this day.

12.) Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Edited by Tanya M. Caldwell

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes.

13.) Mormons in Paris: Polygamy on the French Stage, 1874-1892

Edited and translated by Corry Cropper and Christopher M. Flood

In the late nineteenth century, numerous French plays, novels, cartoons, and works of art focused on Mormons. Unlike American authors who portrayed Mormons as malevolent “others,” however, French dramatists used Mormonism to point out hypocrisy in their own culture. This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s.

14.) Johnson in Japan

Edited by Kimiyo Ogawa and Mika Suzuki

15.) Paper, Ink, and Achievement: Gabriel Hornstein and the Revival of Eighteenth-Century Scholarship

Edited by Kevin L. Cope and Cedric D. Reverand II

During his forty-two years as president of AMS Press, Gabriel Hornstein quietly sponsored and stimulated the revival of “long” eighteenth-century studies. Whether by reanimating long-running research publications; by creating scholarly journals; or by converting daring ideas into lauded books, “Gabe” initiated a golden age of Enlightenment scholarship. Paper, Ink, and Achievement finds in the career of this impresario a vantage point on the modern study of the Enlightenment.

16.) Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier; the Letters of Emma Botham Alderson

Edited by Donald Ingram Ulin

Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Writing Home offers an unparalleled opportunity for studying immigrant correspondence due to Alderson’s unusually well-documented literary and religious affiliations.

17.) Challenging the Black Atlantic: The New World Novels of Zapata Olivella and Gonçalves

By John T. Maddox IV

18.) Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema

Edited by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

Offering in-depth analyses of fifteen different queer films from the Iberian Peninsula, this collection shows how a diverse group of filmmakers from regions including Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country have produced films that challenge the region’s conservative religious values and gender norms, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation.

19.) Association and Enlightenment: Scottish Clubs and Societies, 1700-1830

Edited by Mark C. Wallace and Jane Rendall

Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume­—the first full-length study of the subject in fifty years—examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830.

20.) Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century

Edited by Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham

21.) Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment

Edited by Kevin L. Cope

Nowhere is distance so near-at-hand as in Enlightenment culture. Whether in the telescopic surveys of early astronomers, the panoramas of painters, the diaries of travelers, the prospects of landscape architects, or the tales of novelists, distance is never far in the background of the works and deeds of long-eighteenth-century artists, authors, and adventurers. Hemispheres and Stratospheres draws that background into the foreground.

Freed: The essays focus on Samuel Johnson’s connection to Japan and Japanese academia. To some, it may seem interesting or unexpected that Johnson is studied so seriously in the country. What is it about Johnson and his writing that attracts Japanese readers’ attention? How is it that Johnson—who, as you write, thought of Japan as remote, strange, and extraordinary—has come to be studied so?

Suzuki: Our whole book might be an answer to this question, and though it’s not easy to fully reply to it in a short passage, I’ll try. As Professor Eto in Chapter 1 shows, Johnson has been an icon—a representative literary figure—to us for a long time, someone in whom we can find something to which to aspire. Those Meiji people—who wanted to learn anything from abroad after Japan opened its doors—set the trend, and we find it was not just a temporary trend; the more we learn with him, the more inviting we find he is. Though Japan was a remote country to him, I dare say his works appeal to us. I assume affinities and parallels that we can feel in his multi-dimensional complexity might be part of the explanation.

Freed: How do you find Johnsonian studies in Japan fitting in with broader scholarship (eighteen-century or otherwise) in Japanese academia? How might the Johnson Society of Japan affect, or even effect, this situation?

Suzuki: A distinguished Johnsonian, Professor Harada, has been the president of the English Literary Society of Japan, one of the largest humanities societies in the country. His extensive knowledge, the clarity of his talks, his wide range of interests, and his general sociability are appreciated well in the greater milieu of Japanese academia and he has been a key figure in maintaining the Johnson Society of Japan. However, the Society recently has been struggling in recruiting new members, which is a shared problem among many literary societies in Japan.

Freed: Yuri Yoshino’s essay focuses on Jane Austen and the Japanese path to Johnson. Some recognize Austen’s “literary debt” to Johnson, and how, through Sōseki Natsume’s reading of Austen, Johnson indirectly influenced Sōseki’s work. How has Japanese academics’ engagement with writers like Austen shaped their understanding of Johnson and the field in general?

Ogawa: Today there is a large number of Japanese academics who are engaged in Austen research, many of whom are now taking interest in Sōseki’s contribution to the spreading of her work in early-twentieth-century Japan. As Yoshino has stated, Johnson’s interest in “engag[ing] in portraits” has much relevance to Austen’s realism. I think that many Austen scholars are able to see one of the key features of modern novels through Sōseki’s literary theory (which is now translated into English). Perhaps his novels such as Light and Dark,which are much indebted to Austen’s realism, also reveal how important Johnson’s legacy was for her and consequently for Sōseki.

Freed: How do you interpret Johnsonian studies’ affecting the way Japanese academics engage with writers like Mary Shelley, given your proposition that Johnson’s work (specifically Rasselas) more directly influenced Shelley’s Frankenstein than previously recognized?

Ogawa: If I am allowed to elaborate on my own experience, Johnsonian studies have literally opened my eyes to a new aspect of Mary Shelley’s novels. Perhaps there is still a shared feeling in Japan that Romantic studies must be explored within a certain field, namely from the pre-Romantic era to the Romantic era (including Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley). Tracing the origin back to the early eighteenth century is not an orthodox method. However, after looking closely at Johnson’s writing, I realized that there is clearly an important genealogy that runs through to Romantic literature. Now that I know Shelley had read Rasselas twice, I can confidently say that she was greatly influenced by Johnson’s pessimism as well as optimism about scientific progress that is portrayed in the novel.

Freed: Your introduction mentions the dilemma around understanding the need for promoting the sciences while still simultaneously promoting and encouraging the critical study of the humanities. What problems do you see potentially arising from an undervaluing of and/or a failure to deeply understand the impact of Johnsonian studies on the social, physical, and life sciences as they are today in Japan?

Suzuki & Ogawa: In 2015 the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issued a statement that was widely understood as an encouragement to dismiss humanities in national universities. Things have changed over these five years and it seems that the worst is now behind us; students of the humanities have begun to regain confidence in their field’s values. But this year in October, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga denied six nominees to the Science Council of Japan, all of whom are from the humanities and social sciences, and this has sparked a huge debate about why he rejected them. The council, which was established in 1949, is the representative organization of the scientific community—not just those pursuing natural and life sciences, but also the humanities and social sciences. The council’s mission, which is to debate and offer solutions to the important scientific issues of the day, requires input not just from scientists but also from humanities experts. A failure to deeply understand the impact of Johnsonian studies on the social, physical, and life sciences in Japan would lead to cases like this, and we feel that valuing interdisciplinary research—such as Johnson was able to show—would promote the understanding of why both communities need to coexist in harmony.

Johnson in Japan, edited by Kimiyo Ogawa and Mika Suzuki, and with a foreword by Greg Clingham, is available in paperback, cloth, and ebook. To order, visit:
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/johnson-in-japan/9781684482412

The park will be renovated to improve its facilities as well as feature art that celebrates Johnson’s life. There will be detailed signage outlining the activism Johnson did in leading the Gay Liberation movement, including her participation in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising and her work establishing a shelter to house LGBTQ+ youth rejected by their families.

In his announcement, Governor Cuomo said, “Too often, the marginalized voices that have pushed progress forward in New York and across the country go unrecognized, making up just a fraction of our public memorials and monuments.” He added, “Marsha P. Johnson was one of the early leaders of the LGBTQ+ movement, and is only now getting the acknowledgement she deserves. Dedicating this state park for her, and installing public art telling her story, will ensure her memory and her work fighting for equality lives on.”

Just across state lines in New Jersey, in Johnson’s home town of Elizabeth, officials similarly announced plans to dedicate a monument to Johnson. It will be located near Elizabeth’s City Hall, in an area used to “recognize trailblazers, pioneers, and international patriots.”

Johnson’s nephew, Al Michaels, is quoted as saying, “Marsha is needed now. Here we have the Black Lives Matter movement and the Trans Lives Matter movement. We have the same thing happening to people today, as far as police brutality.” He continued, “And as far as equality and justice, and Marsha was at the forefront of all that in 1969. And here it is 2020, and we’re in exactly the same place. And Marsha’s spirit has come to guide us through this fight, [like] she did back at Stonewall.”

In celebration of Marsha P. Johnson’s life’s work but also in somber acknowledgement of how far we still have yet to go, the Press wants to celebrate her by highlighting some of our recent books with themes that share her enthusiasm for LGBTQ+ history and rights.

Click on a book’s title to be brought to its landing page on our publishing partners’ websites, either Rutgers University Press or Rowman & Littlefield.

1.) Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema
Andrés Lima-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

Pedro Almódovar may have helped put queer Iberian cinema on the map, but there are also multitudes of other LGBTQ filmmakers from Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country who have made the Peninsula one of the world’s most vital sources for queer film. Together, they have produced a cinema whose expressions of queer desire have challenged the region’s conservative religious and family values, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation.

Iberian Queer Cinema is a unique collection that offers in-depth analyses of fifteen different films, each by a different director, produced in the region over the past fifty years, from Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s La residencia (The House That Screamed, 1970) to João Pedro Rodrigues’ O ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016). Together, they show how queer Iberian cinema has responded to historical traumas ranging from the AIDS crisis to the repressive and homophobic Franco regime. Yet they also explore how these films gesture towards a more fluid understanding of sexuality, gender, and national identity. This book will thus give readers a new appreciation for both the cultural diversity of Iberia and the richness of its moving and thought-provoking queer cinema.

2.) Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Jason S. Farr

Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward.

3.) Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella
Frieda Ekotto

Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.

4.) The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence
A.W. Barnes

The Dark Eclipse is a book of personal essays in which author A.W. Barnes seeks to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Mike. Using source documentation—police report, autopsy, suicide note, and death certificate—the essays explore Barnes’ relationship with Mike and their status as gay brothers raised in a large conservative family in the Midwest. In addition, the narrative traces the brothers’ difficult relationship with their father, a man who once studied to be a Trappist monk before marrying and fathering eight children. Because of their shared sexual orientation, Andrew hoped he and Mike would be close, but their relationship was as fraught as the author’s relationship with his other brothers and father. While the rest of the family seems to have forgotten about Mike, who died in 1993, Barnes has not been able to let him go. This book is his attempt to do so.

5.) Representing Queer and Transgender Identity: Fluid Bodies in the Hispanic Caribbean and Beyond
Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins

Fluid Bodies traces the intersections of global movement with transgender and queer identities from authors and artists of the Hispanic Caribbean. Utilizing the theme of fluidity and travel, Fluid Bodies analyzes novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art. These works demonstrate how transgender and queer bodies redefine belonging, particularly national belonging, through global movement and community making practices. Through these genres, the text follows the movement of transgender and queer identities from textual spaces to spaces of the body. The gradual movement from text to body—as it occurs in these genres—demonstrates the variety of representational strategies that dismantle binary readings of gender, sexuality, and nationality. 

Transgender visibility is a pressing social issue, and today’s transgender moment will be a social and political necessity for years to come. Of particular importance are representations of transgender and/or queer people of color. The field of transgender representation is growing, and Fluid Bodies adds to the visibility of transgender and queer identity from the Hispanic Caribbean. By investigating the relationship between novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art, Fluid Bodies emphasizes how each work plays on and against the separation of language and the body, and how Hispanic Caribbean authors and artists represent transgender and queer identity in order to redefine cultural and national belonging in various geographic spaces.

Barnes, a scholar of early modern literature and gender theory, makes use of source materials—police report, autopsy results, suicide note, and death certificate—to inform his own memories and understanding, and in so doing seeks to come to terms with his brother’s death and their complex relationship as gay siblings in a conservative Midwestern family.

Presidential Fellow Nate Freed posed the following questions to Barnes, who is also the author of Post-Closet Masculinities in Early Modern England (Bucknell University Press, 2009).

Freed: Writing The Dark Eclipse must have required a different approach from that of your last book, Post-Closet Masculinities, a traditional scholarly work. How did you find this transition from monograph to memoir-style essays? How did you conceive of these essays, and how did you think differently about style and audience while writing them?

Barnes: When I wrote Post-Closet Masculinities, I was interested in the historical construction of the concept of masculinity as a (seemingly) stable identity in western culture. My desire to write the book was born out of an intellectual curiosity from having read Shakespeare’s plays and the metaphysical poets like John Donne. But this intellectual desire was also informed by my personal experience of having grown up in a family of seven boys and one girl. My familial experience, that is, had intuitively taught me that there were unspoken rules about being masculine—rules to do with emotional output and behavioral codes—although as a kid these rules didn’t feel natural to me. In many ways I was the antithesis of the masculine ideal that reigned in my family. I don’t know if this feeling of not belonging in that hyper-masculine family came from being a gay kid—a sissy, really—growing up in a conservative Catholic, male-dominated family, or if having a creative personality in a family of practical business-minded people made me more sensitive to the brutal nature of masculinity. Either way, I’d always struggled with my place in such a family and so my intellectual pursuit in Post-Closet Masculinities was to satisfy that question of how one performs that kind of masculinity that I’d witnessed growing up, a performance that I wasn’t able to claim.

As a student in a doctoral program, I was taught that the personal or the emotional is suppressed in order to engage the intellectual, to prove, really, that the research you conduct is unbiased, which is an impossible thing to do. As scholars and intellectuals our desires obviously inform our pursuits although we are taught to hide those desires—at least this is the lesson I took from being a scholar and an intellectual.

While I was researching this book, I was hired as the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. As a liberal arts college embedded in an art and design institute, we were outsiders in every way, and thus as a school we were allowed—or we decided—to ignore the ways such divisions are supposed to behave in the academy. We made up our own rules. This freedom came from the art and design ethos that drove Pratt. This ethos also had a profound effect on how I saw myself as an academic. It allowed me to put aside that notion that a scholar must suppress the personal in order to highlight the intellectual.

In 2015, I decided to get my MFA in Creative Writing to help me with this transition. The research and the research methodologies I used to write The Dark Eclipse were informed by my doctoral training although the narrative arc of the book is informed by my MFA. I think that I achieved what I wanted to achieve; that is, to write a book whose emotional content comes first and whose intellectual premise comes second —the exact reverse of what I was taught to do as a scholar.

Freed: How did you find the craft of life writing? Was there any aspect of tackling this sort of writing that you found surprising, perhaps surprisingly difficult?

Barnes: While promoting this book, people consistently asked me if I had a hard time revealing such personal information and painful events. They also told me that I was brave for writing this book. I didn’t find it difficult nor did I consider myself brave, primarily because I have always been a person who needed to tell my story. I did find that writing about my brother Mike and his suicide was as painful as when I experienced the event itself over 25 years ago. The painful memories were just as sharp writing this book as they were back in 1993 when I traveled to New York to identify his body.

Freed: What has the response been that you’ve received? Was it what you expected and/or, perhaps, hoped?

Barnes: The response to this book has been great, and surprising. First, I realized that many people have had to experience the loss of a loved one through suicide, and that loss is often not discussed because suicide is still taboo. Many people thanked me for writing the book because it allowed them to deal with their own experiences with suicide. 

I was also surprised that many people came up to me and told me their deepest secrets about loved ones who’d died, or about their own attempts at suicide. At first, I was taken aback by their frankness, but then I realized that they were entrusting me with secrets they hadn’t told anyone else because they felt a bond between us. Eventually, I realized that as a memoirist I had a responsibility to accept my readers’ responses even if they made me uncomfortable. That is, I felt an obligation to listen to their stories because they had invested their time and money in reading my stories.

Freed: You write detailed scenes with specific dialogue throughout The Dark Eclipse. How much of this dialogue was literally spoken, and how much is paraphrasing?

Barnes: This question is the question that memoirists have to tackle, and each of us has to answer it in our own ways. I know writers and teachers—some of my own teachers—who insist that dialogue in memoir must be completely accurate to the actual event. I know other writers and teachers—some of my teachers, as well—who believe that dialogue in memoir must be true to the emotional content of the scene, but without being made out of whole cloth. I align with this second group more than the first because memory necessarily plays with the accuracy of past events. 

However, in The Dark Eclipse, there are dialogues that I am certain are completely accurate to the event, especially events that were imprinted so firmly in my hippocampus. For example, the scenes in the book at the morgue and at the lunch after my parents and I identified my brother’s body are 100% accurate. I can never forget those words. For other scenes in the book that contain dialogue, I relied on my memory of the event to capture the emotional essence of that event and used dialogue to relay that emotion as best as I could.

Freed: How did you decide the order in which to place the different essays in The Dark Eclipse?

Barnes: One aspect of the book that I like is that there is a narrative arc that is pretty straight-forward: my brother Mike committed suicide; I travelled to New York with my parents to identify his body; my parents claimed his body and buried it back in our home state, even though I was certain Mike wouldn’t have wanted that. Decades later, at the behest of a therapist, I decide to find out the facts of Mike’s death by looking at the documents that surround his death—the police report, the autopsy, Mike’s account of his illnesses, the death certificate—and other documents that informed my relationship with Mike—the coming out letter, the movie “Prospero’s Book” (which is its own kind of document), and Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” which helped me to understand Mike’s suicide when suicide—and certainly Mike’s suicide—seem impossible to understand. Thus the narrative arc follows the on two tracks: the suicide event from 1993, and my desire to uncover the facts of that event in 2015.

So, the structure of the book is determined firstly by the narrative arc, and secondly by a weaving together of the official and personal documents in the timeframe in which they were produced or in the order I encountered them.

Freed: The jacket copy states that “[You have] not been able to let [your brother Mike] go. This book is [your] attempt to do so.” Would you say that The Dark Eclipse was successful in allowing you to let Mike go?

Barnes: During the two months of radio interviews that I did for this book—interviews that can be heard on my website drawbarnes.com—interviewers consistently asked me this question. I’ve thought about this question a lot, and I think the best way to describe what happened to me in writing this book and putting it out in the world is that it allowed me to cordon Mike into a specific area of my brain, of my memory, where I allow him to live without interfering with my everyday life, which used to be the case. This was especially true when I went through difficult periods of my life and Mike was ever-present as a dangerous example of how I could end the suffering I was then going through. That is, he was a kind of seductive presence, a voice in my head that said I could simply commit suicide and thus end the pain I was going through, as I assume he decided to do. In writing this book, I’ve been able to relegate him and that suicidal voice to a specific area of my memory where it is allowed to live without influencing the way I life my life today.

Since 1976, February has been designated as Black History Month in the United States (as well as other countries, like Canada and the UK). The month was chosen due to the fact that it coincides with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two important abolitionists. Far from just celebrating the end of slavery, Black History Month emphasizes the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans and black culture. It is a recognition of the significant leaders, activists, moments, and achievements related to black history.

The Griot Project Book Series, published in conjunction with Bucknell’s Griot Institute for Africana Studies, produces books related to black history, focusing on scholarly monographs and creative works devoted to the interdisciplinary exploration of the aesthetic, artistic, and cultural products and intellectual currents of historical and contemporary African America and of the African diaspora, using narrative as a thematic and theoretical framework for the selection and execution of its projects.

Please find below a list of some recent Griot publications, as well as other BUP books relevant to Black History Month.

1.) In Media Res: Race, Identity, and Pop Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Edited by James Braxton Peterson)

In Media Res is a manifold collection that reflects the intersectional qualities of university programming in the twenty-first century. Taking race, gender, and popular culture as its central thematic subjects, the volume collects academic essays, speeches, poems, and creative works that critically engage a wide range of issues, including American imperialism, racial and gender discrimination, the globalization of culture, and the limitations of our new multimedia world. This diverse assortment of works by scholars, activists, and artists models the complex ways that we must engage university students, faculty, staff, and administration in a moment where so many of us are confounded by the “in medias res” nature of our interface with the world in the current moment. Featuring contributions from Imani Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Suheir Hammad, John Jennings, and Adam Mansbach, In Media Res is a primer for academic inquiry into popular culture; American studies; critical media literacy; women, gender, and sexuality studies; and Africana studies.

2.) Venus of Khala-Kanti (By Angèle Kingué)

Venus of Khala-Kanti is a tale of life-altering loss and mystical recovery. Set in an imaginary West African village that becomes a charming cul-de-sac, the unintended consequence of a national roadwork project gone awry, the story follows characters drawn with humor, irony, and empathy. The heart of the story beats with the laughter and tears of three women. Having faced incredible hardship, they come together to build their lives anew, armed with the age-old spirit of human resilience, understanding, and tenderness. Tapping into the very soil of Khala-Kanti, Bella, Assumta, and Clarisse construct spaces, both internal and external, where they and others can rejuvenate their bodies, minds, and spirits. They build the Good Hope Center, which embraces both the physical and the mystical landscape of the story. The Center fuels the restoration and growth of the village’s inhabitants, and offers sanctuary for those who visit and those who stay.

3.) Postracial America?: An Interdisciplinary Study (Edited by Vincent L. Stephens and Anthony Stewart)

The concept of a “postracial” America—the dream of a nation beyond race—has attracted much attention over the course of the presidency of Barack Obama, suggesting that this idea is peculiar to the contemporary moment alone. Postracial America?: An Interdisciplinary Study attempts to broaden the application of this idea by situating it in contexts that demonstrate how the idea of the postracial has been with America since its founding and will continue to be long after the Obama administration’s term ends. The chapters in this volume explore the idea of the postracial in the United States through a variety of critical lenses, including film studies; literature; aesthetics and conceptual thinking; politics; media representations; race in relation to gender, identity, and sexuality; and personal experiences. Through this diverse interdisciplinary exploration, this collection skeptically weighs the implications of holding up a postracial culture as an admirable goal for the United States.

4.) Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella (By Frieda Ekotto)

Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Too Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure, and agency.

5.) Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation (By Miguel Arnedo-Gómez)

The Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén has traditionally been considered a poet of mestizaje, a term that, whilst denoting racial mixture, also refers to a homogenizing nationalist discourse that proclaims the harmonious nature of Cuban identity. Yet, many aspects of Guillén’s work enhance black Cuban and Afro-Cuban identities. Miguel Arnedo-Gómez explores this paradox in Guillén’s pre-Cuban Revolution writings, placing them alongside contemporaneous intellectual discourses that feigned adherence to the homogenizing ideology whilst upholding black interests. On the basis of links with these and other 1930s Cuban discourses, Arnedo-Gómez shows Guillén’s work to contain a message of black unity aimed at the black middle classes. Furthermore, against a tendency to seek a single authorial consciousness—be it mulatto or based on a North American construction of blackness—Guillén’s prose and poetry are also characterized as a struggle for a viable identity in a socio-culturally heterogeneous society.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Antjie Krog, visiting poet and lecturer on social justice, to talk about her recently published Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse. Below is a transcribed version of the interview, with my questions in boldface and Antjie’s responses in regular face.

These poems were originally written in Afrikaans, and the whole collection was published in that language. What brought you to your decision to translate it into English?

It is the visit of professor Greg Clingham who came into my office and asked wouldn’t I oversee, or look, or do a translation of Lady Anne into English. And I said, “Why?” And he said, “No, no, no, I think Lady Anne is on a comeback, and that the book would fit in nicely with all the other projects.” And so I said yes, and I was too nervous to ask anyone else to do the translation, because maybe the poems don’t work, and then that one has to tell you, or you have to realize, and so I said no, I’d do it myself. I think on 1 December—our long holidays are over December, so November, December, January, February—I translated them into English. There is a whole controversy about poets’ translating themselves. Brodsky did that, and some playwrights did that, and it’s very problematic because you’re not really a translator; you’re a poet. So when the line doesn’t work in English, you don’t look for a better line; you change the line. So this time, I tried my best not to do that, but to behave like a translator, and not to make too big a difference between the Afrikaans version and the English version.

Poetry—I’d say much more so than prose—uses rhythm, meter, and the actual sounds of the words to effect emotion, as opposed to just the literal meaning of the words. So I imagine this must have caused some issue in the translation process. You said you were very active in translating Lady Anne; you did it all yourself, or mostly yourself. What troubles did you come across? Were there any instances where the standard English translation of an Afrikaans word or phrase was inadequate, or didn’t really get across the meaning that you wanted it to?

There were several specific translation questions, but I don’t have any on the top of my head. More generally, one of the things in the Afrikaans volume is that the Afrikaans was very cryptic. It didn’t flow necessarily, and Afrikaans is a language that lends itself easily to any kind of distortion. It’s a young language, so you can do with it what you want, which you can’t in English. It’s very jarring if you do the word distortions in English that you’ve just done in Afrikaans. So, there’s none of that, and I think the flow is much more logical. But when the book was written in Afrikaans, when it was filled with anger against your leader, after other Afrikaners, you actually didn’t want them to read you. You didn’t want them to like what you wrote, so you made it deliberately difficult to read. This time it was not like that. The other biggest issue was the form, because I chose a specific rhyme pattern for the historical parts. It’s sort of ABAB et cetera, and the last line is again A, so that the whole stanza ends with a rhyme. It’s like a circle; it comes together with a rhyme. And that I was not always able to do in English. So it’s less formal, and it’s less structured.

At first glance, many readers may assume Lady Anne is a history of the 18^th– and 19^th-century character, not a collection of poems that delves into resistance to apartheid and other things. Can you tell me why you chose her as the person around whom you based the book? What specifically made Lady Anne Barnard so good for your intentions?

It’s like a treasure if you come across someone who is herself or himself a good articulator, and because she wrote a lot—diaries, letters—she not necessarily expressed herself so well, but she had the eye of a painter, and so she could describe the things that she saw, which is wonderful because you move with her through the Cape during that era. And then, she had these unbelievable drawings which you could also then use in your poems, and you could then treat her as a fellow artist. So she’s not only a fellow woman, she’s not only a fellow observer, but she’s also agonizing about how to do justice to what she sees, or to the complexity of what she sees. One more example is that there was a sale of paints in London at Newman’s, and she went there and bought a lot of paint to bring back to the Cape, and when she arrived at the Cape, she realized that she completely misjudged the sun and the clear clarity of that landscape. She had all these dull English greens, and she doesn’t have yellow, red, or others. And how many times she tried to draw somebody or something and it didn’t work out. All of that is a precious extra thing that she brought to why I wanted to choose her. Or, I chose her, and then, in the end, there are a lot of spinoffs. Like also, the notion of the turtle or the soul-fish, this also I got from her. And it became a constant metaphor for me in other works as well. I often used “in change of tongue.” It’s the same as the fish in South Africa. We have “to change our tongues” if we want to live there.

Many of the poems set in Lady Anne Barnard’s time are posed as journal entries and letters, as if they were historical documents that were dug up and reproduced. Why did you choose to format it this way, pretending that it was a journal written by Lady Anne herself?

Because of the form of the epic. Lady Anne is an epic, and the epic has to tell a story. And, by using letters and diaries, it tells a story—it tells her story. That is to make a difference between her and the bard. Her work is telling; it’s narrating stories, not emotions. Her work is strictly formal, and it has a kind of old-fashioned vocabulary. While the bard is completely free-verse; it’s always just personal. It’s filled with anguish, anger,and anxiety, which is hidden in her texts. So it is to make a difference between the two. It also had to contrast in style and in context. But what it does say is that the bard is capable of writing the Lady-Anne style. It’s you who are versatile. You write in free-verse, but you can also write in that style and pretend you are somebody else.

One of the big issues you touch on in Lady Anne is apartheid, or racial injustices in South Africa at the time in general. How does the situation in South Africa now compare to the situation during the climax of apartheid when you were writing in the late ’80s? Is it better? Is it perhaps worse?

It feels like it’s worse. But the moment I say it, I say to myself, “We have forgotten how it was in the late ’80s.” There was actually a low-intensity civil war, and the country was exploding, and we thought it was going to be havoc and destruction. This, in fact, didn’t happen, but the country is now very, very bad. People are angry. The poor are angry. The politicians are corrupt, and the corrupter they get, the easier it is to blame white people for it. And, of course, white people are to blame. We are to blame. But that means, if you continuously blame white people, it means you don’t take responsibility for what it is that you should have done, or should have done right. This is a big problem.

Have you seen any specific improvements, beyond, of course, the legal aspects of apartheid?

Yes, there are wonderful improvements. We have a new constitution that declares everyone is equal. We have freedom of the press and freedom of expression. We have the fastest-growing black middle class in the world. So things have improved. It’s just that we all wanted it to improve foreverybody, and now it seems it’s only a few that benefit.

How would you say the state of race relations in the United States compares to that of South Africa? Are you concerned by anything you see, perhaps particularly by the current political climate here?

The big difference between your racial issues and ours is that yours takes place as a minority issue, a minority that is feeling itself hardened by the majority. With us, it’s different; it is a minority that is accused of doing in a black majority. It’s a black majority that has the political power, butit doesn’t have the economic power it wants. So that is the biggest difference. I think both those struggles should be waged with that in mind. I think the vocabulary should be different, because if you say in South Africa “black lives matter,” then you are saying it not only to white people, you are also saying it to black people. In other words, don’t steal the money from the poor, because poor black lives also matter. It’s that kind of difference that, for me, is the most important.

How has the reaction been to Lady Anne? Have you found that readers are enjoying the collection and understanding what you hoped they would?

You mean when it came out in Afrikaans, or when it’s now coming out in English?

Considering it hasn’t been out in English for very long, let’s focus more on the original Afrikaans.

It received the most important prize for poetry then, so it was hailed, and it’s still the only contemporary epic in Afrikaans. It is the only one that is writing about a woman, with a woman as a hero. And the first post-modern structure for a long poem in Afrikaans. So, academically, it has received a lot of attention, and it has been prescribed. The English one, the publication of it I find interesting, because suddenly I have an English market, but there is now a different market of people who are interested in history. They are suddenly reading, and some of them have problems. They say I abuse Lady Anne, I appropriate her, and I judge her unfairly. Which is an accusation, if it were a black person that I abused like that, that I’d agree with. I would feel very bad about it. But an accusation where you abuse aristocracy, I don’t feel bad about that. It really doesn’t…I don’t care two hoots. And I’m not doing her biography; I’m using her as a metaphor for privilege. For me, she’s privilege. And one looks at the role of privilege, and the responsibility of the privileged in South Africa at the time, and this is one. It’s fine. It has sold quite well in South Africa also.

What are your personal opinions on Lady Anne? How do you feel about her, beyond, perhaps, what you wrote via the bard? Do you think she was a good person? Do you think she used her privilege well enough, or not to the extent that she should have?

I think she didn’t use it well enough. But you have to remember, when I wrote it, there was no other material available about her except that stay at the Cape. Someone published the letters and some of the diaries, but nothing else was known. Some people would try to suggest other things about her, but it was only that period. So I felt, in that period, that she failed in a way. But, of course, I fell in love with her. She is such a beautiful woman, and so creative. Ja, I was enamored with her, which makes that I actually don’t condemn her. You must understand that there are barriers when you’re female, and when you have a husband like she had. She was much older, all of that. But now, a biography has appeared this year, a full biography. The family gave that person access to all the material, and now a lot of other things have arisen. It’s like, you know your grandmother, but you only know that part when she was quite older. Suddenly, someone writes about the unbelievable life she had before you got to know her. So I love that biography. It doesn’t, for me, change my judgment on her, but it makes her as remarkable as one thought she was, reading her texts and looking at her pictures.

What do you think she could have done, considering that she was a woman in the late 1700s–early 1800s, what came with that, and the limitations that that had? What do you think she could have done more to be a better person of privilege back then, considering she didn’t have much autonomy?

Oh, she had no autonomy. She wrote letters back to Dundas, to tell him what was wrong with the Cape, but the wrongness was basically the corruption of the English civil service there, the government service, what they did not do, and how they were involved in slavery, et cetera. It was seldom a hard, critical look at race. And I think it was because she was part of the aristocracy. You know that you are better than others. You know you are born better than others. So you are kind to the poor; you feel sorry for them. But you don’t want to…you are not out to disturb the levels that are there. And that’s the feeling that you get, that she felt very sympathetic toward slaves. She noticed that they were not treated well, but she herself never decided not to have a slave, to do all the work herself.

You originally published Lady Anne in 1989. Looking back, almost thirty years later, is there anything you wish you would have done or written differently? Is there anything you wish you could have included, given retrospect?

You know, what came out in the biography is when Andrew Barnard went back the second time (when he went alone), he actually had an affair with a slave, and had a child by her. So, Lady Anne was then told, and she waited until that child was then nine years old, and someone had to bring that child to her to England, and she raised her. She left her an extra amount of money because she thought she would never marry because she was not pure white, and would then have a hard time. But she ended up marrying into a very good English family and is now part and parcel with the echelons in England. I was so surprised, because if my judgment was hard on her, it was much harder on him. It was a surprise to come across that. I said that I wish I knew that, but ja, what would I have done? Because when I go back to the text, I suggest several times in the text that he is looking at other women, so it would not really change what I wanted to do. So ja, I don’t think it would make a big difference. No, I’m surprised that the set is working. And I think it’s working because I chose her. If I only wrote my own personal poems, if I only wrote my own anger at apartheid, I think that book would have, you know, perhaps suffered the mark of time. But because I chose her, it makes it more complex than just anger at apartheid. It’s much more; it deals with women, it deals with race, it deals with class, and it deals with many things: food and form, artistry, to be an artist, et cetera, all of that. This is because she, as a metaphor, is so rich.

Well, that is the end of my questions. Is there anything else, any last comments you’d like to make concerning Lady Anne?

Tell me, now, if you have read it, did you find it easy reading?

Personally, poetry is not my forte, so I would not describe it as “easy reading,” no. I got much more out of it when you read it yourself because of the way that you so easily showed the differences in characters with the voices you would make and such. When you were more impassioned or less impassioned, it was easier for me to understand what was trying to be conveyed than when I read it myself.

It’s important, I believe, to stick to the notion that the original, the root, the strongest root of poetry is oral. So if you don’t hear what you write, you shouldn’t write it. But it’s difficult to write it so that it sounds to the reader the way you mean it. And still, no one knows how to do that.

 

—by Nate Freed

South African poet Antjie Krog, author of Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse (Bucknell, 2017), will be coming to Bucknell September 19–20, during which time she will give a poetry reading and a lecture on social justice. In anticipation of her arrival, we would like to bring to our readers’ attention two other books we have published that touch on issues facing South Africa today.

Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa: Essays and Interviews on Higher Education and the Humanities
by John Higgins; forward by J.M. Coetzee

ISBN: 978-1-61148-598-1; Paperback: $49.99

“Must universities starve themselves to death in order to stand up for their principles? Noted cultural critic John Higgins has written a book about much more than what Americans call ‘academic freedom.’ Taking up a perspective that is defiantly located ‘offshore,’ Higgins shows in brilliant and intriguing detail how the humanities in post-apartheid South Africa have suffered both from American-style corporate instrumentalism and from what he calls ‘applied nationalism’ and how much democracy stands to lose thereby. This is a world-scale contribution to the university’s never more than partially realized challenge of figuring out what cultural literacy should be and how it can be defended.”

—Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality After Apartheid
by Kylie Thomas

ISBN: 978-1-61148-534-9; Hardback: $78.00; Co-published by Wits University Press (South Africa)

Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality After Apartheid argues that while the HIV/AIDS epidemic has figured largely in public discourse in South Africa over the past ten years, particularly in debates about governance and constitutional rights post-apartheid, the experiences of people living with HIV for the most part remain invisible and the losses due to AIDS have gone publicly unmourned. This book engages with multiple forms of visual representation that work variously to compound, undo, and complicate the politics of loss.

 

—by Nate Freed