also, on this day, Imogen left us (to go visit the old man I hope- chatting over the issues now – Palestine I’d guess, but more…)
Happy Birthday / Chúc mừng sinh nhật / Herzlichen Glueckwunsch zum Geburtstag!
Cairns – Moratorium
Some video of the 1970 Moratorium in Melbourne
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This starts with JIm Cairns setting out some rules of engagement for when the crowd reaches the intersection opposite the state parliament. Jim used to sell his books outside the Prahran Market every Saturday morning when I knew him – circa 1978, a few years after his notoriety .
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The occasion of this post though is that I’ve just bought one of his books – one I had lent out long ago and not had returned – and wonder how it got to Vietnam. Obviously it makes sense that it did, bit who is this outfit the “Australian Troll Union Delegation” who visited in 1972. Among the names on the page listing the delegation members is George Crawford, Plumber and Gasfitters Union official, Australian Labor Party Victoria branch member, he appears as a speaker on disarmament in the University of Melbourne Archives in the 1960s, becomes State President of the ALP in 1969 and MP for Jika Jika in 1985 (Gayle Tierney, ‘Crawford, George Robert (1926–2012)’, Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://labouraustralia.anu.edu.au/biography/crawford-george-robert-33126/text41305).
Ron Arnold, Neville Hill and Sphi(?) Gillard are the other delegates.
Henrietta Clive
A friend is in India and I am vicariously planning tours that would take more time than anyone has…
I recently – well 3 years ago – read the journals of Henrietta Clive, the daughter-in-law of Lord Clive, and she, in 1800, just after Tipu’s defeat, sets out from Madras with 60 elephants and hundreds of retainers, intrepidly “on her own”!! This means she was on her own, of course, sans man – it was only that she was leaving her insufferable colonel husband at home doing colonial admin: she takes her two daughters and their governess with her. Seems her trip was a series of stops at military encampments all across South India – there is a map, a trail so to speak – Madras-Vellore-Mysore-Coimbatoor-Trichy-Tanjore-Tranquebar-Pondicherry-Madras – and she basically is visiting various battle sites and occupation/guard stations to collect up loads and loads of tribute and booty after Tipu’s defeat. This includes getting his gold encrusted slippers which are now on display in Powys Castle, rural Wales, along with more Indian loot than is in the whole of the Victoria&Albert Museum in London (and that’s a lot of looting). The narrative is called “Birds of Passage” – the kids and the governess make it plural – and my copy was an edition printed in Serampore – it was absolutely fascinating, romantic, ghastly, and revealing of much detail that is not available in the usual Chris Bayly type histories. Car-crash plunder nevertheless. Would make a great trip, historical investigation – reparations implied.
More marsten mats
Just a few of a growing collection to accompany the article here – these are the ones that did not fit in the article in Inter Asia Cultural Studies – OR, for which I did not manage/afford to get the permissions… (note: I increasingly see Marston Mats as the very fabric of perforated capitalism).
A still from the film footage of the victory at Điện Biên Phủ.
The Bridge – French soldiers surrender at Điện Biên Phủ
Mannequins at Điện Biên Phủ today:
French colonial army assembling an airstrip in Điện Biên Phủ:
Prison gate of the Tiger Cages, on Côn Đảo
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A 1965 photo shoot Ken Russell:
Watch madness
Discount Star Wars – From the Book of Bobba Fett
The border between Mexico and the United States – look into the shadows of this Nik Oza photograph.
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And – enough for today – three more film appearances of the ubiquitous mats – the first one here is that national treasure (soon 91), Michael Caine in a bunker in “The Quiet American”:
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Then a classic: 1971 Đường về quê mẹ directed by Bùi Đình Hạc:
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and I think this dialogue inspired Coppola, from John Wayne’s dodgy Green Berets 1968 – pah!
And then, in a field used by the organic agriculture department of the university, about 40 minutes walk from the centre of Bonn:
Too big and heavy to take home of course…
please see here for more – permission granted – mat images in my research article on the Mats in the new “Inter Asia Cultural Studies” special issue on Social Challenges for Vietnam. Email me for the pdfs:
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Elemental structures of memory: Marston Mats in Vietnam and beyond – preprint
This is a postprint of the article – The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2024, at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649373.2024.2293553
To cite, if you must – please email me for a version with correct page numbers – John HUTNYK (2024) Elemental structures of memory: Marston Mats in Vietnam and beyond, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 25:1, 76-91, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2024.2293553
Social challenges for Vietnam
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 25, Issue 1 (2024)
Social challenges for Vietnam
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction: challenging transformations for Vietnam
Pages: 1-3
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
First Page PreviewforIntroduction: challenging transformations for Vietnam|Full Text|PDF (466.7 KB)|EPUB
Research Articles
Article
Middle-class occupations in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: impact factors and policy implications
Pages: 4-18
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforMiddle-class occupations in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: impact factors and policy implications|Full Text|References|PDF (1.1 MB)|EPUB
Article
Main challenges of Vietnamese families nowadays and in the coming years
Pages: 19-34
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforMain challenges of Vietnamese families nowadays and in the coming years|Full Text|References|PDF (1.5 MB)|EPUB
Article
Pages: 35-45
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforFactors that contribute to impoverished women gaining access to social work services in Ho Chi Minh City|Full Text|References|PDF (876 KB)|EPUB
Article
Pages: 46-61
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforUsing mobile communication and implications for constructive and open dialogue in enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City|Full Text|References|PDF (1.8 MB)|EPUB
Article
Citizenship policies and precarity of stateless Vietnamese from Cambodia migrating to Vietnam
NGUYENNu Nguyet Anh & CAOThanh Tam
Pages: 62-75
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforCitizenship policies and precarity of stateless Vietnamese from Cambodia migrating to Vietnam|Full Text|References|PDF (1.2 MB)|EPUB
Article
Elemental structures of memory: Marston Mats in Vietnam and beyond
Pages: 76-91
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
First Page PreviewforElemental structures of memory: Marston Mats in Vietnam and beyond|Full Text|References|PDF (4.7 MB)|EPUB
Article
Social impacts of zero-COVID policy on airline workers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
DANGThi Kim Phung & LUONGThuy Ngan
Pages: 92-110
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforSocial impacts of zero-COVID policy on airline workers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam|Full Text|References|PDF (2.3 MB)|EPUB
Article
Developing social work education in Vietnam: the student field practicum during the pandemic
NGUYENThi Do Quyen & NGUYENThi Phuong Linh
Pages: 111-124
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforDeveloping social work education in Vietnam: the student field practicum during the pandemic|Full Text|References|PDF (1.2 MB)|EPUB
Article
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work and health of university library staff
Pages: 125-138
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforThe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work and health of university library staff|Full Text|References|PDF (1.1 MB)|EPUB
Article
Staycation tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic
HUNGNguyen Phuc & HUANMinh Nguyen
Pages: 139-155
Published online: 17 Jan 2024
AbstractforStaycation tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic|Full Text|References|PDF (1.4 MB)|EPUB
Siraj // Begam Lutf-un-nisã
there are many gems to be found in the life and death of Siraj. The Gardens by his tomb are most peaceful, and here I read and honoured the sharp wit of the power behind the throne.
Women of Indology?
Caroline Michaelis, Böhmer, Schlegel, Schelling.
Just leaving this here to look for later – seems there is more to the story of the founding of Indology…
“Schlegel, Caroline, née Michaelis (1763-1809): born at Göttingen, the daughter of Johann David Michaelis, the orientalist. In 1784 she married Johann Franz Wilhelm Böhmer (1755-1788) and moved with him to Clausthal in the Harz. There were three children, Auguste (1785-1800), Therese (1787-89) and Wilhelm (1789). Böhmer died in 1788. She lived alternately in Göttingen and Marburg, and from this time date AWS’s first serious attentions. In 1792, she moved to Mainz to be near her friend Therese Huber. A brief liaison with the French officer Crancé left her pregnant. She was arrested and incarcerated after the fall of the Mainz republic. AWS rescued her and brought her back to Brunswick. The child, Julius Crancé (or Kranz) died in 1795. After his return from Amsterdam, AWS married her in 1796 and they moved to Jena. She took a full part in his literary activities, and worked on the Shakespeare translation and the essay, Die Gemälde. An attraction developed for Schelling after his arrival in Jena. On the death of Auguste in 1800, she separated from AWS, divorcing him in 1803 and marrying Schelling. She moved with him to Würzburg and then to Munich. She died at Bad Maulbronn” – wiki
Seriously John, some wiki stub is not enough. Yup, gonna look for more in Germany this year… Also:
Dorothea Brendel Mendelssohn, Viet, Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel’s muse certainly deserves more attention:
“Schlegel, Dorothea (von), née Brendel Mendelssohn (1764-1839): novelist and translator. Born at Berlin, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn. In 1783, she married the banker Simon Veit. Their two sons, Philipp and Johannes, became prominent painters of the Nazarene school. A nephew was Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. In 1797, she met FS in Henriette Herz’s salon, and an intensive liaison developed, of which his novel Lucinde (1799) was the expression. She moved with him to Jena during the period of the closest Romantic association, and in 1802 went with him to Paris. Her unfinished novel Florentin appeared in 1801, and in 1807 her translation of Madame de Staël’s Corinne. In 1804, on her conversion to Protestantism, she and FS were married. In 1808, she and FS were received into the Catholic faith in Frankfurt. She moved with FS to Vienna, sharing the vicissitudes of his life there, moving mainly in pious Catholic circles. In 1818-20 she accompanied her artist sons to Rome. After FS’s death, she moved to Frankfurt, where Johannes Veit was director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut. She died at Frankfurt.”
Again, just the wiki stub for now. Gonna revisit.
“A physical and spiritual love at first sight seems to have seized both Schlegel and Dorothea. Except for Caroline (his brother’s wife from 1796 to 1803), Schlegel had never met a woman of such brilliance and charm” (Peter Firchow, 1971: 21. Introduction to Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinda and the Fragments).
Robinson Crusoe: After the Island
To cite this article: John Hutnyk (2023): Robinson Crusoe: After the island, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2244204 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2244204
To get the pdf of the published version, email me.
Post review preprint version – here.
Arabian Nights: abriged too far (longest-kept trinket-exotica)
The 1821 Galland version of the Thousand and One Nights. “slightly abridged” with eight full colour drawings by Joan Kiddel-Monroe. 1965 reprint, Dent & Sons.
Got this book when I was 8 years old, poured over the stories and illustrations (yes, exoticist before the rush). Am not sure what an 8 year old was meant to make of the instruction to enjoy the stories over a cup of strong Arabic coffee, but my dad did get me ready for my early morning paper round with some of his percolated finest tar-like brew.
Unfortunately, and unforgivably, in this edition Scheherazade is basically written out of the whole thing, which made it all the more a challenge to work out what these two paragraphs really meant:
“The stories are connected one with the other by the fact that they were said to have been related night after night by a wife under sentence of death. She cleverly managed to stop at daybreak at such an exciting point in the story that her husband, the Sultan, was compelled by curiosity to let her live another day so as to hear the end of her tale.
This went on for the thousand nights, when eventually the wife was pardoned and her life saved by her own wit and imagination.
The text of this selection from the ‘Arabian Nights’ is that of Galland, 1821, slightly abridged and altered.”
Anaïs Nin to Edgard Varèse.
*painting is of Varèse by Raffaello Brusoni 1954
Book Burning
Are we living in the greatest ever era of incineration?
Add your favourite book burning quotes here. Bradbury’s F◦451, Maugham’s Razors Edge, Umberto Eco’s name of the Rose, here and here and here…
But mainly I am keen to find stats on how many books are burnt after non-delivery by providers like amazon etc.
The history of book burning is inflammatory of course. Still surprises me when I ask who has burned a book (and how each page seems to be read as the book is consumed). The controversial historical memory of celebrity book burnings is storied enough – Libraries, Spanish Inquisition, Opernplatz, Bibles, The Koran, Rushdie, etc – But today, seems to me more books than ever are put to the torch. An anecdote from John J about living in the building where Progress Press had its offices back in the winter of 1990: in a fuel shortage, the building heating was stoked by feeding the Collected Works of V.I.Lenin into the furnace (sacrilege). Yet, this is minor compared to what I suspect is going on today with the flame put to the written word by the brutality of delivery services and their doublespeak – “energy recovery” (see article excerpt below).
This from a Katie Tarasov @KATIETARASOV article in January this year from the pretty mainstream source that is CNBC:
“Amazon told CNBC, “No items are sent to landfill. We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal and our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organizations or recycle any unsold products. As a last resort, we will send items to energy recovery, but we’re working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero.””
““Energy recovery” often means it’s burned. In the words of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it’s “the conversion of nonrecyclable waste materials into usable heat, electricity, or fuel through a variety of processes, including combustion, gasification, pyrolization, anaerobic digestion and landfill gas recovery.””
““The thing that really shocked me honestly, was the items that the computer system tells you to destroy,” said Shay Machen, a seasonal worker at an Amazon returns center in Mississippi. “I had a book come back, it was a children’s book, and the customer said that it was smashed upon arrival and bent, and it was not. And no matter what I put into the system, it said destroy the item. And that was kind of heart wrenching.””
“Disposal of returns is a widespread practice in e-commerce. Luxury retail brands like Burberry have been criticized in the past for burning millions in unsold merchandise to protect their brands, a practice Burberry told CNBC it stopped in 2018. A Danish TV station reported H&M burned 60 tons of new and unsold clothes since 2013, a claim that H&M told CNBC was a misunderstanding. An H&M spokesperson said, “The products media referred to had been affected by mold or did not comply with our chemical restrictions.” Similar claims have hit Coach, Urban Outfitters, Michael Kors, Victoria’s Secret, and J.C. Penney.”
““It’s the easiest thing to do and sometimes certain brands do it because, you know, they want to protect their brand and they don’t want lesser valued items out there on the market,” Moore said.””
What really happens to Amazon returns
PUBLISHED FRI, JAN 28 20228:00 AM EST
Footnote
‘The bookbinding trade in the city of London employs very many young girls from 14 to 15 years old, and that under indentures which prescribe certain definite hours of labour. Nevertheless, they work in the last week of each month until 10,11,12, or 1 o’clock at night, along with the older labourers, in a very mixed company. “The masters tempt then by extra pay and supper,” which they eat in neighbouring public houses. The great debauchery thus produced among these ‘young immortals’ (“Children’s Employment Comm. V.Rept P.44. n.191) is compensated by the fact that among the rest many Bibles and religious books are bound by them’ (Marx 1867/1890/1990: 477n)
as reported in the Sterling Observer (2 July 1863).
Black Swan
“Willem de Vlamingh was sent in 1696 to search for two VOC ships, Ridderschap van Holland (Knighthood of Holland), which had gone missing on its way to Batavia in 1694, and Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon), lost in 1656. He was also instructed to chart parts of the western coast of New Holland not previously mapped by the Dutch. Although no trace of the VOC ships was found, de Vlamingh and his crew mapped 1,500 kilometres (932 mi) of coastline, landed on Rottnest Island, and ventured up the Swan River, becoming the first Europeans to sight the Western Australian black swan.”
Kim Martins 2023 – https://www.worldhistory.org/Dutch_East_India_Company/
The black swan has its own mythology – in honour of Humphrey McQueen’s book The Black Swan of Trespass – worth checking out- and below there are more than enough snippets to follow up to gather the story:
For example (rather than the Nolan ‘portrait’) here is Ern Malley pictured in a tribute by Garry Shead (The Apotheosis of Ern Malley, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 26 November – 20 December 2003).
From the Adelaide catalogue via the fakers own journal Quadrant: discussion of how ideas were buried in a frisson of controversy – “the idea that a creative person in this material world is almost inevitably a sacrifice” (Sasha Grishin cited in McDonald, J., ‘The Eternal Ern’, Quadrant Magazine, issue six, 2009
The Black Swan of Trespass “scandal” is worth your time – see here for another version of the hoax. I am more interested that the title of one of the notebooks that contained the so-called fakes is Durer: Innsbruck, 1495. The first poem in the Ern Malley sequence is ‘from’ there:
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters.
The last four lines of the short poem (you can hear it read, with care, here):
The Hoax was a conservative piece of mischief that got more traction than might have been expected (media sensation, obscenity trial, collapse of the Angry Penguins publishing venture) but the Hoaxers went on to found the despicable aforementioned “Quadrant” magazine, putting the lie to the idea that we now live in an era of false news – it was ever thus.
It is not that surprising to be taken by obscure details and I am still somewhat curious at the motivations as to why “Malley” would name his notebook after Albrecht Durer, maker of images of that rhino in 1515, also not seen in person.
The Rumour of Calcutta at Foreign Publishers Agency on Jawaharlal Nehru Road. In the window! – after 27 years.
From a time before the city had a five word name (K.F.K.A.C), photogenic proof of the rupee version of Rumour in the window, re-released after 27 years…
Maarx Darwiin Malthuss Hegell
How to read this one – and fun.
Marx’s handwriting, that Engels had such trouble to decipher later on (and used some interesting help) is here well hard to read, but he is talking about how Darwin says he was bringing Malthus’s theory to the animal kingdom.
“Mit dem Darwin, den ich wieder angesehn, amüsiert mich, daß to er sagt, er wende die „Malthussche” Theorie auch auf Pflanzen und Tiere an, als ob bei Herrn Malthus der Witz nicht darin bestände, daß sie nicht auf Pflanzen und Tiere, sondern nur auf Menschen — mit der geometrischen Progression — angewandt wird im Gegensatz zu Pflanzen und Tieren. Es ist merkwürdig, schaft mit ihrer Teilung der Arbeit, Konkurrenz, Aufschluß neuer Märkte, „Erfindungen” und Malthusschem „Kampf ums Dasein” wiedererkennt. Es ist Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, und es erinnert an Hegel in der Phänomenologie, wo d i e bürgerliche Gesellschaft als „geistiges Tierreich”, während bei Darwin das Tierreich als bürgerliche Gesellschaft figuriert”.
Marx to Engels June 18 1862 – having a laugh at Darwin’s expense after reading Darwin saying he had based his work on the ‘Malthusian’ theory but now also applied to plants – since Malthus was to be applied to human society, not animals, Marx is reminded of Hobbes and of ‘Hegel in his Phenomenology, where bourgeois society appears as a “spiritual animal kingdom”. While the animal kingdom appears to Darwin as a bourgeois society’ (Marx to Engels, June 18, 1862, in Marx and Engels 1983: 74).
Special Issue: Robinson Crusoe
Free to download in 2023. Click the TOC below and download each as a PDF or EPUB from T&R. #robinson #crusoe #JournalofPostcolonialWriting.
Now with the introduction by Claire Reddleman – articles featured by Claire, Nicole Pepperell, Wulf Hund and I: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjpw20/59/4?nav=tocList
If commodities could speak… Amatav Ghosh drops a penny in his new book “Smoke and Ashes”
It is amazing to see the trinketization penny drop – more than 150 years after Marx had called it out – here is trinketization coming to consciousness, in ways I like, but, erm, why is this presented as if all new? Apologies for reproducing a slab of quotation, but it – again, erm – speaks for itself (from Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories, 2023 – and yes, I am well-jealous of this work):
“Another part of the world that has had a long and visible presence in the Indian subcontinent is the Middle East. Across the region, Middle Eastern influences are apparent everywhere—in art, architecture, food, clothing and language. The vocabularies of the major subcontinental languages all draw massively on Persian and Arabic. Even as a teenager I was aware that I used dozens of words of Arabic and Persian origin while speaking Bengali, Hindi or English. But I would not have been able to name a single word of Chinese origin in any of those languages; indeed, the very idea that I might be using words of Chinese derivation in my everyday life would have seemed bizarre. The same was true also of everyday objects and practices: it would not have occurred to me that anything in my material or cultural world might point in the direction of China rather than to the Middle East or Europe.”
“It was not until I visited China for the first time, in September 2005, that I discovered how profoundly mistaken I was. That first visit to China was revelatory in many ways even though I spent only a few weeks in the country, almost all of them in Guangzhou. But my epiphany did not occur while I was in China; it happened after I returned to India.”
“One day, soon after my trip to Guangzhou, I was sitting in my family home in Calcutta drinking a cup of tea in my study. This ritual was as much a part of my everyday routine as getting out of bed; I’ve sat at that same desk, in the same chair, with a tea tray in front of me, thousands of times. But that day was somehow different. When I looked into my cup of tea —or ‘cha’ as it is called in Bengali—I suddenly remembered a word that I had recently used in Guangzhou: ‘chah’. I looked at the cup again and saw that it was made of porcelain—‘China’ in English, or ‘Chinémati’ (Chinese clay) in Bangla. It struck me then that this too was something that had entered my orbit through Guangzhou, which for centuries had exported vast quantities of ‘China-ware’ to the world.”
“Sitting on the tea tray, along with the cup and saucer, was a bowl of white sugar: this is arguably, of all flavourings, the most beloved of the Indian tongue. And what is it called? In Bengal, as in much of India, it goes by the name ‘cheeni’—which is but a common word for ‘Chinese’.11 I had been using this word all my life, yet it had never occurred to me to wonder about its origins. And then there was the tea tray, a cheap lacquerware object, of a kind that is very commonly seen in India. This too was so much of a piece with my surroundings that it had never stood out or raised any questions. But on that day it conjured up visual memories of the collections of lacquerware I had recently seen in Guangzhou: it struck me then that the tray too might have Chinese antecedents.”
“I looked around that room and suddenly I could see China everywhere: in a jar of peanuts (which are known in Bengali as ‘Chinese nuts’ or ‘chinébadam’); in chrysanthemums in a vase; in goldfish in a bowl; in envelopes and incense sticks. It was as though an invisible hand had appeared in the room and were pointing out a whole range of objects that, in their very familiarity, had sunk so deep into my consciousness as to evade notice. These things—tea, sugar, porcelain—had never meant anything to me in themselves: they were just things, inanimate, silent and devoid of communicative ability.”
“A few weeks later, on returning to Brooklyn, where I live, I had the same experience in my study there. Apart from a similar ensemble of things related to tea there was an old rug, a paperweight and, of course, a plethora of ‘Made in China’ gadgets and devices. Everywhere I looked there was something, old or new, that harked back to China.”
“What dawned on me then was that certain objects are themselves the material, silent equivalent of words spoken by invisible, spectral forces and agencies that often form our lives without our being aware of it. In a strange reversal, the inanimate articles around me suddenly became my teachers, showing me that my physical existence spoke of a past that was completely different from the histories I had read about in books and documents. In my mental universe China almost didn’t exist; in my material world China was everywhere.”
“In the years that followed, Sea of Poppies grew into a sprawling trilogy of novels, named after the schooner Ibis. Many chapters in the last two volumes of the Ibis Trilogy (River of Smoke and Flood of Fire) are set in and around Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. As I immersed myself in the research for the books, I realized that what was true of me was true also of much of the planet: China looms large within our material and cultural lives, yet its presence often passes unnoticed.”
“Why is this so? In wrestling with this question, I eventually came to accept that China’s historical presence in my world was easy to overlook because it was for the most part non-verbal: it was not usually attached to the kinds of discursive concepts, like ‘development’ and ‘progress’, that have played such a large part in the writing of modern history.”
“Or, put differently, while the West’s influence on my world was exerted through a near-obsessive elaboration of words and concepts, China’s influence was more subtle, almost invisible, wielded through the diffusion of practices, and through objects, like those that were arrayed on my desks in Calcutta and Brooklyn. Because objects are mute, and do not of themselves supply an explanation for their presence, it requires a conceptual shift to become aware of what it is that they do, in fact, communicate. This shift is especially taxing for those of us who, through training and education, have become accustomed to thinking about the world in ways that depend, almost exclusively, on language. And since language, of the human kind, is by definition an attribute of the species Homo sapiens, this means that all things non-human are, in principle, mute, in the sense that they cannot speak. Of course, the objects that sparked my epiphany were not ‘speaking’ in any sense. Yet, they were communicating something to me silently, something that pointed to historical and cultural connections that were quite different from those suggested by abstract concepts…”
Then, a little later on, the whole batter down all Chinese walls gets a more in depth treatment and the bleak truths of biological contagion reshape the world – an incomparable comparison. If war is heck, biological impacts are far more heckful:
“the devastation that Europeans had earlier unleashed on the Native peoples of the Americas and Australia, much of which was inflicted through non-human forces like diseases, pathogens, processes of terraforming and the introduction of non-native fauna and flora … were structural, biopolitical struggles where outbreaks of war were the exception rather than the rule; instead, the deadly effects of processes like terraforming and the spread of pathogens made themselves felt over decades and centuries”
Ghosh, Amitav. 2023. Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories, 4th Estate
Gillen dies
I expected it to end with Gillen’s death, but I had not anticipted being made a bit weepy by Baldwin Spencer (whose name graced various aspects of my uni in Melbourne, a building, a lecture hall, a prof’s chair):
“No one ever had a better friend and comrade than he was and I look back on his friendship as one of the greatest privileges and blessings of my life. His memory is and always will be very dear to me. May you have help to bear the great blow that has come to you. You know at least that you have the heartfelt sympathy of those of us to whom he was intimately known and that if we can do anything to help you or your family it will be done in memory of him and in deep and sincere friendship for yourself” (W. Baldwin Spencer to Amelia Gillen on the death of Frank, sent June 18, 1912, in Mulvaney, Morphy and Petch 1997: 485) [“‘My Dear Spencer’: The Letters of F .J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer”. eds John Mulvaney, Howard Morphy and Alison Petch 1997, Melbourne: Hyland House.
Утро Индии Morning in India – 1956 film by Roman Karmen
Even greater than landing on the moon was throwing off the English yoke – reel two of this amazing film by Roman Karmen (4 parts from https://www.net-film.ru/) has footage of Gandhi, Nehru, and – as should be appreciated by the much maligned social realism of the time, the camera’s loving embrace of building, agriculture, locomotive production, ambassador cars coming off the assembly line, plus, he seems to have travelled the length and breadth of the land – no small feat. No translation I’m afraid, but a few clicks will have youtube’s approx-translate guess it for you.
Part one
Part two
part three
Part four
Ramon Karmen 1955 Vietnam
Raoul Coutard
Raoul Coutard was camera-person on nearly all Godard’s major 1960s films, including Á bout de souffle, Bande à Part, Le Mépris, Alphaville, La Chinoise, and Weekend, and then some later films Passion, Prénom Carmen. After the second imperialist war, so in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Coutard was a member of the French far eastern Corps Expeditionnaire and director of photography for Indochina, a map-maker in the Geographical Division, and even a war correspondent for Life and Paris Match – he was at Dien Bien Phu before it fell [I would nevertheless be keen to see his photographs from there if they exist – there is a book of his other Vietnam images, somewhat exoticist, ‘Le Même soleil’, and apparently a huge collection of unsorted images, but its not yet clear just where all these are from – I am on the case, but I expect it takes much time to be reinvented as a picture researcher].
This below is the first of over 170 fascinating short anecdotes from him that amount to an incredible interview/autobiography – problematic jokes and deep insights jumbled together, each one is 2 to 4 minutes, so the entire thing is well worth the couple of hours needed.
Web of Stories – Life Stories of Remarkable People
Raoul Coutard – Family (1/179)
oh Yoko
Yoko Ono handed this artwork to me on arrival at her show somewhere in shoreditch about 2000. Christies auction house offers considered… dm me with your bids. This is Warhol level art, not jyst to placate the well-to-do.
The Rumour of Calcutta update
27 22 years ago my first book was typeset and laid out in the days before electronics – well, an electric typesetting machine was plugged into a wall, but no digital file was produced. Nevertheless, I had crossed out the digital rights clause in my contract with Zed so I own this [2023 update, though since Bloomsbury acquired zed books they seem to be selling an ebook version, which is a bit weird because I don’t have a digital copy and as the electronic rights clause was removed in the contract I signed, I own those rights – anyone want to get in touch?]. At last some kind anonymous soul has bootlegged it and set digital copy free on the nets, though its a large scanned file and the bibliography was left off (I’ve made a rough scan of the biblio but that too is a large file). Nevertheless, notwithstanding, and such like phrasings, the book is still one of which I am proud, if nothing else for trialling a way of citing tourist backpacker-informants, for its stuff on photography and maps and for the reviews it got (and indeed keeps getting discussed, for example on films – see diekmann2012) and especially for its critique of charity and what charity is for. In the context of do-gooder well-meaning hypocrisy, the effort of charity workers serves wider interests as well as their own, and only marginally any individuals they help – who would be better helped in better funded state-run facilities if the funds extracted through business-as-usual colonialism were, you know, made as reparations for the several hundred years of colonial plunder. Ah well, the critique stands up, the charity industry sadly thrives, second only perhaps to weapons in terms of so-called development, writing books does not yet always change the world as much as you’d like (and no, I did not ever think a book would single-handedly stop Mother Theresa, but…).
I would welcome new readers.
Download The Rumour of Calcutta here: [John_Hutnyk]_The_rumour_of_Calcutta__tourism,_ch
Biblio here. Rumour biblio
And this retrieved by Toby:
Marx and South Asia
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies vol 1 2023…
Foreigners and (merely trifling … criminal) ideology in poetry: Note for a future appreciation of Aragon that will likely never appear…
From Louis Aragon’s epic History of the USSR 1962 (1964)
“Although it may have been necessary to remind creative artists and writers of the national context of art and to dissuade them from a vulgar Imitation of foreign models often (though not necessarily) the vehicles of the ideology of a hostile regime, there is no doubt that the systematic campaign that began with these observations and which was, under the name of the fight against ‘ going down on one’s knees before the West’, to go on for several years, arose from that truly Stalinian spirit of distrust, and it appeared to be influenced by the mistaken theory that the dangers increase in proportion to the success of socialism. It is perfectly understandable that there should have been, and that there ought to have been, a struggle for a national art, for the usefulness of that art and for its taking part in the improvement of the people. But it is not so easy to understand that everything that seemed to draw its nourishment from elsewhere or that seemed (perhaps rightly) to be merely useless or trifling should be put on the same footing as treason. In the unbalanced sense of values that the ‘cult’ [of personality] introduced and in its practical consequences, trifling faults took on the appearance of crime, and ended by serving to hide crime itself . .. Not that this in any way means that in the ideological field the party did not have to intervene, in the spirit of Leninism. On this point, as on others, one may differ in one’s opinion as to the direct Intervention of a political party in these matters; but the difference will be in exact proportion to one’s rejection of Lenin’s theses. Yet the need for intervention does not mean that at the time when Beria was exercising his well-known influence on government decisions, the enemy whom it was most urgently necessary to unmask should have been the poetess Akhmatova, even if her verse was as devoid of sense” (Aragon 1962/1964: 481)
Stepan Georgevich Shaumian – not to be forgotten.
Besides the usual wiki stuff, I would welcome any recommendations on Shaumian. Or Shaumyan as Louis Aragon spells his name in The History of the USSR (1962) – an excellent book by the way, with snide comments on Trotsky I have appreciated, some set up re the anticipated revisions regarding Stalin – I am at page 400 or 600+, but lots of things that simply have been forgotten by many. By me at least. And one of those Not To Be Forgotten, as the poster says, is Stepan Shaumian of the Baku Soviet that really is a story deserving greater attention. THis is especially so as his murder along with 26 others (even though ‘some’ claim there were a few escapes) is part of the prelude to the Armenian massacre that is also too often lost in the admittedly pretty full annals of atrocity. The despicable role of the British in selling Stepan Shaumian and the Baku Soviet leadership into execution is clear enough (the alleged alternate British “intention”, or mealy-mouthed apologetics, was to use them in prisoner exchange) but I would like very much to learn more. Who knows of the best book on this (besides Aragon’s snippet)?
Trinketization 
