Lives & Letters Mailing: March & April 2020
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– New Collection! Lady Anne Barnard letters, NLSA Cape Town/Robinson 1973
– New Trace! Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas, 11 June 1798
– From the Blog: Thinking past coronavirus
– From the Blog: Spoof letter, what is it?
– From the Blog: The mind in a grasshopper state
2. Coronavirus Lost and Found is a new public archival project where anyone can log what has been lost, or found, because of the pandemic.
3. The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life
4. The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker, by Blessing-Miles Tendi
5. Important new book! Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative by Mark Davis and Davina Lohm
6. Everyday Life and Everyday Communication in Coronavirus Capitalism
7. Maps, globes, and plans: an ongoing census of free digital archives
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five items of project news to report on, including three new Traces, on the topic of passes:
New Collection! Lady Anne Barnard Letters, NLSA Cape Town
The letters, diaries and journal of Lady Anne Barnard (1750-1825) are well-known. A member of the Scottish aristocratic Lindsay family, in her 40s she married the younger Andrew Barnard (1762-1807), who became Colonial Secretary in the Cape when Lord Macartney was appointed as its first civilian governor, in the later 1790s. Please click here to read more about the Barnard letters: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/collections/collections-portal/barnard-letters-collection/
New Trace! Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas, 11 June 1798
This trace concerns a letter, dated 11 June 1798, one of 35 or so written by Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas, who over the period of her extant letters to him was a government minister. He had become the minister responsible for the War and the Colonies, a new government position second only to the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger. To read this trace, please click here: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/barnard-dundas-1798/
From the Blog: Thinking past coronavirus
At the moment it’s difficult to think past coronavirus, which hangs over us all. It is however salutary to think about the 1918 influenza and pneumonia pandemic killed between 50 and 200 million people. Little was known about this in any country before it happened, when their populations were swiftly affected in huge numbers. Olive Schreiner’s letters record her in London having had influenza and pneumonia twice in an 18 month period, while in the Hemming collection letters from Schreiner‘s nephew Elbert Hemming to his sisters suddenly stopped. To read on, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/thinking-past-coronavirus/
From the Blog: Spoof letter, what is it?
During March, something was circulating via social media which many posts presented as an previously undiscovered letter written by F Scott Fitzgerald. Wow. But before anybody reads on, please note that the letter is a spoof and its original posting on a blog makes this very clear. To read more about the spoof and what it suggests about letters more generally, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/spoof-letter/
From the Blog: The mind in a grasshopper state
Some strange dislocations of time have been brought by the lockdown in Britain because there are few of the usual markers of what is a week, what is a working day and so on. As a consequence, my mind has been in a grasshopper state, leaping about. There have been three main sets of WWW activity. To read more about them, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/grasshopper/
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2. Coronavirus Lost and Found is a new public archival project where anyone can log what has been lost, or found, because of this pandemic.
Coronavirus is measured on the planetary scale, but felt at the human one. The losses that make the news are massive: thousands of lives, trillions of dollars. The losses that make this pandemic real to us are much smaller than that: one job eliminated, one celebration canceled, one sunny spring afternoon spent indoors, one irreplaceable person. Unexpected pleasures coexist with all this sadness, though they don’t diminish it. We find surprising things while we’re compelled to stay at home or maintain our distance. We figure stuff out, stay in touch, get creative, keep kids entertained, appreciate our partners in new ways, daydream about all we’ll do on the other side of this. Coronavirus Lost and Found is an archive of individual losses and those feats of care and ingenuity that make life in a pandemic a little more tolerable.
See what others have lost or found, and share your story at pandemicarchive.com. And please forward this on to colleagues, students, and friends who might be interested in reading or contributing.
Thank you, and take care,
Rebecca
—
Rebecca A. Adelman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
UMBC Department of Media and Communication Studies
*Add to the archive at Coronavirus Lost and Found: pandemicarchive.com
*Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War (Fordham University Press, 2019)
*www.rebeccaaadelman.com
===== General list info and FAQ: http://comm.umn.edu/~grodman/cultstud.html
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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3. The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life
Edited by Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos
Indiana University Press, 2020
The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats, including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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4. The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker, by Blessing-Miles Tendi
The global hardback edition is available via Cambridge Press: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/african-history/army-and-politics-zimbabwe-mujuru-liberation-fighter-and-kingmaker?format=HB
There is also a cheaper paperback edition for the African market available via Cambridge Press South Africa: http://cup.co.za/products/the-army-and-politics-in-zimbabwe-mujuru-the-liberation-fighter-and-kingmaker-9781108815468
And here is a book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPd3Y_JGPFs
Below is a blurb and some endorsements:
General Solomon Mujuru (or Rex Nhongo) was an illustrious African liberation fighter in the 1970s. Until his mysterious sudden death in 2011, he was an important figure in Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU PF party in Zimbabwe. Through Mujuru’s life history, this book throws much needed light on the opaque elite politics of the 1970s liberation struggle, the post-independence army and ZANU PF. This first full-length biography of Mujuru examines his moments of triumph, as well as his shortcomings – in equal measure. From his undistinguished youth, and poor upbringing in colonial Rhodesia’s Chikomba rural area, through his rapid rise and notable feats in a transnational liberation struggle, his role as the first black commander of independent Zimbabwe’s national army, to his contentious political career and private life. Whatever your views are on African liberation politics, Zimbabwe’s post-independence army, ruling party politics and Mujuru’s controversial death by fire, this essential record of a prodigious life will irrevocably change them.
Endorsements:
‘This is the book everyone interested in Zimbabwean political history has been waiting for. Its biographical lens provides unique new insight into the ruling party and military. Moving from Mugabe’s rise to power in Mozambique, through the ceasefire, army integration and persecution of ZIPRA cadres in the early 1980s, to the bitter succession struggle of the 2000s, it reveals the workings of the deep state against Mugabe’s adversaries.’
JoAnn McGregor – University of Sussex
‘Tendi’s General Solomon Mujuru is an energetic, believable, Zimbabwean freedom fighter, post-independence politician, and eventual antagonist of President Robert Mugabe’s despotism. Tendi’s enthralling biography encapsulates the entire modern political evolution of a desperate country where even heroes are in the end destroyed by their fearful rivals.’
Robert I. Rotberg – Harvard University
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. Important new book! Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative by Mark Davis and Davina Lohm
Read Mark Davis’s blog: https://blog.oup.com/2020/03/the-story-of-covid-19-by-the-numbers/
Mark Davis & Davina Lohm’s new book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pandemics-publics-and-narrative-9780190683764?cc=fi&lang=en&#
Description:
Research suggests that future influenza pandemics are inevitable as strains of the virus mutate in new ways. With this uncomfortable reality in mind, this book examines how the general public experienced the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus outbreak by bringing together stories about individuals’ perception of their illness, as well as reflections on news, vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures. The book also charts the story-telling of public life, including the ‘be alert, not alarmed’ messages from the beginning of the outbreak through to the narratives that emerged later when the virus turned out to be less serious than initially thought.
Providing unprecedented insight into the lives of ordinary people faced with the specter of a potentially lethal virus and drawing on currents in sociocultural scholarship of narrative, illness narrative, and narrative medicine, Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative develops a novel ‘public health narrative’ approach of interest to health communicators and researchers across the social and health sciences.
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6. Everyday Life and Everyday Communication in Coronavirus Capitalism
Christian Fuchs: Everyday Life and Everyday Communication in Coronavirus Capitalism. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 18 (1): 375-399
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v18i1.1167
German version: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v18i1.1168
In 2020, the coronavirus crisis ruptured societies and their everyday life around the globe. This article is a contribution to critically theorising the changes societies have undergone in the light of the coronavirus crisis. It asks: How have everyday life and everyday communication changed in the coronavirus crisis? How does capitalism shape everyday life and everyday communication during this crisis?
Section 2 focuses on how social space, everyday life, and everyday communication have changed in the coronavirus crisis. Section 3 focuses on the communication of ideology in the context of coronavirus by analysing the communication of coronavirus conspiracy stories and false coronavirus news.
The coronavirus crisis is an existential crisis of humanity and society. It radically confronts humans with death and the fear of death. This collective experience can on the one hand result in new forms of solidarity and socialism or can on the other hand, if ideology and the far-right prevails, advance war and fascism. Political action and political economy are decisive factors in such a profound crisis that shatters society and everyday life.
Keywords: coronavirus, COVID-19, everyday life, everyday communication, critical theory, critical theory of communication, means of communication, communication technology, capitalism, ideology, fake news, false news, crisis, public health, Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey
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7. Maps, globes, and plans: an ongoing census of free digital archives
Dear all,
In these hard times of quarantine, any tool allowing to “travel from the sofa” becomes even more precious. We are surveying the digital collections of maps, and here you will find the first episode: https://www.air4edu.com/academic-life/maps-globes-and-plans-an-ongoing-census-of-free-digital-archives-1/
Feel free to share with your colleagues & students, but most of all feel free to suggest any collection that might fit: digital archives are virtually infinite and any hint would be of great help.
Best,
EF // AIR
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Last updated: 24 April 2020
