Monthly Archives: July 2017

A Russian Revolution Reading List

In this centennial year of the Bolshevik Revolution, here is intriguing reading on political and cultural facets of the revolutionary era (1914-21).

AN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT IN BOLSHEVIK RUSSIA
DeWitt Clinton Poole
Edited by Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner

“A fascinating edition of US diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole’s oral account of his experience in revolutionary Russia from 1917 to 1919. . . . His views of the early Bolshevik government, like those of other Americans who were there, are critical as the centennial of the Russian Revolution approaches. Highly recommended, all levels/libraries.“—Choice

“A historical treasure trove for an era that will never be short on paradoxes, colorful characters, brutal conflict, and harrowing circumstances. Poole, one of the last American diplomats in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and before recognition in 1933, was a cool, detached observer of events, and rather prescient in his predictions.”—Russian Life

THE BODY SOVIET
Tricia Starks

“The Body Soviet is the first sustained investigation of the Bolshevik government’s early policies on hygiene and health care in general.”—Louise McReynolds, author of Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era

“A masterpiece that will thoroughly fascinate and delight readers. Starks’s understanding of propaganda and hygiene in the early Soviet state is second to none. She tells the stories of Soviet efforts in this field with tremendous insight and ingenuity, providing a rich picture of Soviet life as it was actually lived.”—Elizabeth Wood, author of From Baba to Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia

FAST FORWARD
The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930
Tim Harte

“The book is well-written and richly illustrated. It is a pleasure to read both in the old-fashioned slow way and to browse in the accelerated fast-forward mode. This highly stimulating study responds to a long-standing need to address speed as an aesthetic category in modern Russian art and constitutes a very welcome and important contribution to the field.”—Nikolai Firtich, Slavic Review

Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters.

WHEN PIGS COULD FLY AND BEARS COULD DANCE
A History of the Soviet Circus
Miriam Neirick

“A beautifully written, compact history of the Soviet circus.”—Janet M. Davis, author of The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top

For more than seven decades the circuses enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Soviet Union. How did the circus—an institution that dethroned figures of authority and refused any orderly narrative structure—become such a cultural mainstay in a state known for blunt and didactic messages? Miriam Neirick argues that the variety, flexibility, and indeterminacy of the modern circus accounted for its appeal not only to diverse viewers but also to the Soviet state. In a society where government-legitimating myths underwent periodic revision, the circus proved a supple medium of communication.

EPIC REVISIONISM
Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda
Edited by Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger

“Platt and Brandenberger have collected first-rate contributors and produced a coherent and powerful volume that amplifies what we know about the uses and abuses of history in the Soviet 1930s.”—Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago

“A boon to graduate students and a delight to aficionados of Soviet culture.”—Jeffrey Brooks, John Hopkins University

RUSSIA’S ROME
Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940
Judith E. Kalb

A wide-ranging study of empire, religious prophecy, and nationalism in literature, Russia’s Rome provides the first examination of Russia’s self-identification with Rome during a period that encompassed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state.

“Gives a new and significant context to the work of some of Russia’s major poets and prose writers of the early twentieth century. Kalb’s main contribution is to show that the interest in the Roman Empire was not an incidental part of Russian literature in this period, but a genuine obsession.” —Michael Wachtel, Princeton University

Prison Laugh Riot

The University of Wisconsin Press is pleased to release IF YOU DON’T LAUGH YOU’LL CRY: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers. Author Claire Schmidt writes about the unexplored world of prison staff humor. In their high-stakes, high-stress environment, these workers let off steam by cracking jokes that are not always nice. In this post, Schmidt emphasizes the difference between movie portrayals of cruel guards and real corrections workers and discusses why the evolving state of U.S. prisons is no laughing matter.

“There’s nothing funny about prison.” That’s what my uncle told me when I started researching the humor of prison workers.
There's nothing funny about prison, said my uncle as I started writing about what was funny about prison. Click To Tweet
And yet, when prison workers get together, they surround themselves with laughter. Many of the people I interviewed for this book—my collaborators—are gifted verbal artists, making each other laugh. Practical jokes, gag gifts, smart remarks, memes, and mimicry evolve into stories that travel beyond the walls of the institution.

One collaborator told me, “I am constantly trying to make my coworkers laugh. I consider it imperative to do this every day in this profession. Humor cuts tension. Cutting tension in the correctional setting, rather than adding to it, elevates my self-worth.”
We love to hate the prison guards in films and television; their violence, racism, and inhumanity is legendary, from Cool Hand Luke to The Shawshank Redemption. But we almost never see the faces or hear the voices of actual, living prison workers. Prison work happens behind closed doors—there is no “take your daughter to work day.”

The men and women who work in Wisconsin’s correctional facilities work hard for low pay and eroding benefits. They don’t get much respect or appreciation. The job brings elevated risk of heart attack, suicide, substance abuse, and divorce. So why is humor so important to prison work?

The men and women I interviewed insisted that humor is an essential job skill. “It’s really true—if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,” one collaborator told me. Enduring stress, boredom, stigma, violence, and human suffering is part of prison work. As one collaborator observed, “We need to rely a lot on gallows humor to cope with the things that we see.”

When we joke, we are able to talk about such scary or taboo topics as sex, death, and race. The communicative power of humor is especially important in prison. Workers can express anger, sadness, or frustration with their jobs under the protection of “only” joking.

Prisons are all about people and all about communication. My collaborators made it clear that they use humor to build functional relationships with inmates as well as to communicate solidarity and affection to their coworkers. Wit and comic timing can deescalate a crisis and good storytelling turns that crisis into an educational story.
One collaborator told me, “If we like you, we’ll mess with you!” Humor helps to educate, test, and initiate rookies, just as gag gifts and roasts are an essential parts of corrections retirement parties. Laughter turns outsiders into insiders, but humor also defines the boundaries between groups like officers vs inmates or black vs white.

Humor isn't safe or nice. Professionalism is at war with the desire to push the limits. Click To Tweet
Humor isn’t safe or nice. Professionalism is at war with the desire to push the limits and to talk about uncomfortable things. Prison worker humor (just like doctor or teacher humor) can be tasteless and offensive. “We joke about a lot of gay stuff,” one collaborator told me.

Corrections officer Harriet Fox writes, “We sure laugh a lot at work. Watching inmates act disorderly and shocking can be sadly entertaining.” And since most Wisconsin prison workers are white, anxiety about unfamiliar cultures manifests in racial humor. Just because humor is offensive doesn’t mean it isn’t important.
Although violent crime has declined in the US, we lock up a huge number of our citizens (and in Wisconsin, a really disproportionate number of black, Hispanic, and Native people). It’s getting harder and harder to recruit and retain correctional officers in Wisconsin after the workers’ union was stripped of collective bargaining rights. If we want safer prisons, we can start by trying to understand what makes these workers laugh.

Audioclips from interviews conducted by Schmdit wherein prison guards tell stories of the humor involved on the job.

“Don’t send me any of them down here!”

“What’chu know bout CeeLo Green?”

“Best part of the job.”

And a final word of advice: If you meet a correctional officer, avoid “don’t-drop-the-soap” jokes. They’ve heard them.
If you meet a correctional officer, avoid “don’t-drop-the-soap” jokes. They’ve heard them. Click To Tweet

Claire Schmidt is a folklorist and assistant professor of English at Missouri Valley College.

Burying the United Nations Genocide Treaty

This week, University of Wisconsin Press is pleased to release THE SOVIET UNION AND THE GUTTING OF THE UN GENOCIDE CONVENTION. After the staggering horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations resolved to prevent and punish the crime of genocide throughout the world. The resulting UN Genocide Convention treaty, however, was drafted, contested, and weakened in the midst of Cold War tensions and ideological struggles between the Soviet Union and the West. Author Anton Weiss-Wendt presents a unique historical account of the failure of the genocide convention.

Joseph Stalin is the most outstanding figure in Russia’s history, followed by Vladimir Putin and Alexander Pushkin, according to a poll of Russians released in June 2017 by the independent Levada center in Moscow. The 38% of Russians who gave their vote to Stalin clearly dismiss and/or trivialize the mass crimes committed by his regime.

Mine is a story of international criminal law through the prism of Cold War, a legal history of the Cold War. Click To Tweet

When I learned the word genocide, it was in Russian. My paternal grandparents spent nearly twenty years of their lives in Stalin’s Gulag, though they rarely spoke of it. For me, genocide is a personal story. But I am also a professionally trained historian. Hence, the objective of my book is not to condemn but to explain. Neither is it exclusively a story of the communist dictatorship and its crimes.

Unearthing a mass grave on the site of a Gulag camp at Chelyabinsk, east of the Urals, in 1990 (Scanpix)

The Soviets were certainly the biggest offenders in trying to hollow out the Genocide Convention during the UN debates in 1947–48, but they were not the only ones with a vested interest. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States wanted political groups to be protected by the Genocide Convention. The two countries also reached an unlikely consensus that postponed indefinitely the establishment of an international criminal court. The British, for their part, never tried to conceal their dislike for the kind of international treaty they regarded as futile.

As I worked through documents in over a dozen archives in the United States and Europe, I have oscillated in my view of whether or not Stalin and his top diplomats/ accomplices Andrei Vyshinsky and Vyacheslav Molotov (the men on the front cover of the book) should have stood trial on charges of genocide. I conclude that, “under ideal circumstances, Stalin and the Soviet Union could no doubt be indicted for genocide,” yet I caution that this statement not be taken out of context.

Negotiators for the former Allies in World War II—the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom—were each conscious of cases of mass violence that they did not want to be covered by the convention. For the Soviets it was forced labor, ethnic deportations, and the destruction of political opposition in Eastern Europe. The Americans had on their minds racial discrimination at home and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. The British had yet the longest list of hot-button subjects: the treatment of colonial populations, American use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the treatment of Jews in Mandate Palestine, again the faith fate of German expellees, and so on.

A car owner in Moscow displays his admiration of Stalin, October 2015 (Photo: Ilya Varlamov)

The big question for me—and for all those who have examined or tried to apply the Genocide Convention in a court of law—is whether or not it is a useful legal tool. I am not optimistic. Cold War politics bankrupted the word genocide and ran aground the international treaty that was meant to stamp genocide out of existence. Stalin, and bloody dictators like him, care little for human rights law and are seldom brought to justice.

Stalin, and bloody dictators like him, care little for human rights law and are seldom brought to justice. Click To Tweet

Anton Weiss-Wendt directs research at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway. He is the author of Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust and Small-Town Russia: Childhood Memories of the Final Soviet Decade; editor of The Nazi Genocide of the Roma; and coeditor of Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938–1945.

Honoring Mekemson era at Contemporary Literature

Mary Mekemson, hard at work editing Contemporary Literature

The Fall 2016 issue of Contemporary Literature marked the end of an era, the last to be edited by Mary Mekemson. Her nearly thirty years as managing editor with the journal were celebrated at a party in September, given in honor of her retirement. Mary received a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature in 1988 and took the position of managing editor with the journal in 1989. She has read, corrected, and revised every word in Contemporary Literature from 1989 to 2016. She was (and is) a superb editor. Her insistence upon clear writing improved the prose style and argument of many an essay. She regularly received praise and thanks from the authors with whom she worked, and her mentoring of the journal’s graduate-student editorial assistants was much appreciated. The editorial office staff of the journal and staff at UW Press wish Mary the very best.

Executive Editor Thomas Schaub, outgoing Managing Editor Mary Mekemson, new Managing Editor Eileen Ewing

Eileen Ewing is the new managing editor. “Having worked for Contemporary Literature for several years as its editorial and administrative associate, I am pleased to take on the role of managing editor. It allows me to continue my scholarly engagement with the literature of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I have a Ph.D. in English, with my dissertation focusing on twentieth-century women’s writing. I am particularly interested in the technical aspects of journal production and find the process of rejigging workflows for an electronic environment both stimulating and fun. I look forward to the challenges of manuscript editing and to carrying on the journal’s tradition of excellence.”

Badger Baseball’s Last Decade Launched Many Major League Careers

This week, past players on University of Wisconsin varsity baseball teams are gathering for an alumni reunion. Some, including Rick Reichardt, Craig Zirbel, and Dean Rennicke, will appear at the July 23 Madison Mallards game for a book signing of A History of Badger Baseball: The Rise and Fall of America’s Pastime at the University of Wisconsin, along with author Steven D. Schmitt. Click here for details of the book signing event. Or, read on below about some of the great stars of Badger baseball.

When you pick up your copy of A History of Badger Baseball: The Rise and Fall of America’s Pastime at the University of Wisconsin, be sure to read carefully the chapters on the final years of a storied 120-year sport—the University of Wisconsin’s first intercollegiate sport.

The Steve Land coaching tenure (1984–1991) consisted of overall winning records in the first five years, including a 1986 Big Ten tournament appearance that featured a victory over Purdue. The Badgers won thirty-five games that season and qualified for post-season play for the first time since 1952. Scott Cepicky’s home run power, Jim Rosplock’s bullpen work (eight saves, five in Big Ten play), and the speed of leadoff hitter Joe Armentrout made the Badgers a solid squad.

Lance Painter prepares a masterpiece pitch

But the pitching staff deserves equal attention. Lance Painter won eight games in his first season, came back from elbow surgery, and went on to a twelve-year major league career. He has remained in major league baseball, now serving as the pitching coach for the Seattle Mariners’ top farm club.

Paul Quantrill is locked in

Paul Quantrill joined UW in 1986, choosing Wisconsin over Michigan and a contract offer from the Los Angeles Dodgers. He proceeded to become the most durable pitcher in Badger history and set a single-season complete game mark of eleven in 1989. He signed with the Boston Red Sox organization and toiled in the minors but eventually logged fourteen major league seasons in both the American and National Leagues, leading the majors in games pitched for five consecutive years (2000–2004). Quantrill is a senior adviser for the Toronto Blue Jays, providing coaching and guidance to the team’s minor league prospects.

Tom Fischer angles for a strike

Tom Fischer was the first choice of the Red Sox in the 1988 free agent draft, after completing a stellar career at Wisconsin that included six victories in his first season , the career record in strikeouts, and a nineteen-strikeout performance in May 1988 during which the Iowa Hawkeyes hit one baseball out of the infield. The only hit Fischer allowed was on a change-up. The coaches told him to go back to his fastball.
These three pitchers made a great contribution to Badger baseball from 1985 to 1990 and may have been the best ever to pitch on one UW team. Hats off to these hurlers who made Wisconsin winners in the history of Badger baseball.

Hats off to these hurlers who made Wisconsin winners in the history of Badger baseball. Click To Tweet

Steven D. Schmitt is a former news and sports reporter for several Wisconsin newspapers and radio stations. He writes the blog Home Run Historical Research and is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, the Old-Time Ballplayers Association of Wisconsin, and the Milwaukee Braves Historical Association.

Contemporary Literature journal marks 57 years of publishing

This guest post is written by Eileen Ewing, Managing Editor of Contemporary Literature

This year marks Contemporary Literature’s fifty-seventh year of publication. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature was begun by graduate students in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960.

The journal publishes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. Over the decades, many literary luminaries have been featured in the journal, often early in their careers. CL published the first articles on Thomas Pynchon and Susan Howe and the first interviews with Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo. It also helped to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro, Eavan Boland, and J.M. Coetzee to American readers. At the links, read some fascinating recent interviews found exclusively in Contemporary Literature with poet Brian Kim Stefans, novelist Rachel Kushner, and novelist Anthony Cartwright.

L. S. Dembo, a scholar of modernist poetry, became editor of the journal in 1966 and shortened its title two years later. During his twenty-four years as editor, Dembo’s dedication to all that is exciting in modern and contemporary literature helped the journal to attain the international readership and large subscription base that he and the associate editors (Cyrena N. Pondrom, Betsy Draine, Phillip Herring, Jay Clayton, and Thomas Schaub) sought for it.

At Dembo’s retirement in 1990, Thomas Schaub took over as editor and shifted the parameters for submissions to work on post-World War II literature in English. The journal continued to publish interviews with established and emerging authors, articles featuring a diversity of critical practices, and reviews of scholarly books. Throughout the next two decades, Schaub and the associate editors (Richard Begam, Lynn Keller, Rafael Pérez‑Torres, Robert S. Baker, Jacques Lezra, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz) kept Contemporary Literature at the forefront of its field as a forum for discussing the issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies.

In 2009, the editorship of the journal was restructured as a collective led by Lynn Keller (poetry), Thomas Schaub (American fiction and drama), and Rebecca Walkowitz (British and Anglophone fiction and drama). The three co-editors worked closely with six new associate editors: Alan Golding, Adalaide Morris, Amy Hungerford, Sean McCann, Matthew Hart, and John Marx.

The current editorial collective is composed of Yogita Goyal (British and Anglophone fiction and drama), Michael LeMahieu and Steven Belletto (American fiction and drama), and Timothy Yu (poetry), with Thomas Schaub acting as executive editor. The associate editors are Elizabeth S. Anker, David James, Heather Houser, Jessica Pressman, Alan Golding, and Adalaide Morris.

Revised 7/10/17 to add byline.

New books and new paperbacks, July 2017

We’re pleased to announce these new books, and titles new in paperback, debuting this month.

July 18, 2017
WISCONSIN AND THE SHAPING OF AMERICAN LAW
Joseph A. Ranney

“Not simply about Wisconsin’s legal history, for Ranney covers the sweep of state laws in American history from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to recent legal questions of the twenty-first century. Impressively researched and invitingly written, this is a unique introduction to our states as laboratories of democracy.”—Lloyd C. Gardner,Rutgers University

State laws affect nearly every aspect of our daily lives—our safety, personal relationships, and business dealings—but receive less scholarly attention than federal laws and courts. Joseph A. Ranney looks at how state laws have evolved and shaped American history, through the lens of the historically influential state of Wisconsin.

July 18, 2017 NEW IN PAPERBACK
AMENDING THE PAST
Europe’s Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History
Alexander Karn

“Historical commissions, Karn argues, have brought expert historical practice to bear on complex questions, adding new meaning to facts that have either been debated or glossed over. These commissions matter because they serve to amend history in cases in which social memory has impeded understanding of historical injustices and begin the amelioration of past human rights violations.”—Choice

“A very important contribution to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the broad theme of reckoning with histories of atrocity.”—Bronwyn Leebaw, University of California, Riverside

Critical Human Rights
Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus, Series Editors

July 18, 2017 NEW IN PAPERBACK
SHAPING THE NEW MAN
Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
Alessio Ponzio

“Ponzio tells a nuanced story of the delicate and volatile relationship between interwar Europe’s two fascist regimes. . . . He highlights power struggles between leaders, curricula designed not to educate youth but to transform them into ideal representatives of their regimes, and strict gender policing within each of the organizations. Recommended.”—Choice

“Ponzio provides, above all, valuable new perspectives on the tremendous influence of Italian Fascism on fledgling Nazi youth organizations, and the cooperative and reciprocal relationships that flourished between the two regimes.”—Michael Ebner, author of Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy

George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History
Steven E. Aschheim, Stanley G. Payne, Mary Louise Roberts, and David J. Sorkin, Series Editors

July 27, 2017
BEYOND THE MONASTERY WALLS
The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 1814–1914
Patrick Lally Michelson

“Impressive in its analytical breadth and astute in its interpretive depth, this is an engaging, lucid, and original contribution to the history of modern Russian thought and modern Orthodoxy.”—Vera Shevzov, Smith College

“Reading this extraordinary book is like having missing pieces of a puzzle click together at last. Actors normally examined separately—radical socialists, theological academies, hermits, great writers, bureaucrats, lay intellectuals—emerge as part of the same religious culture that placed asceticism at the center of discourse and practice in imperial Russia’s defining century.” —Nadieszda Kizenko, University at Albany, SUNY

July 27, 2017
IF YOU DON’T LAUGH YOU’LL CRY
The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers
Claire Schmidt

“A lucid, compelling study of some very funny, compassionate corrections officers. Their intelligence and comic delight shine through on every page.”—Jackie McGrath, College of DuPage

America is fascinated by prisons and prison culture, but few Americans understand what it is like to work in corrections. Claire Schmidt, whose extended family includes three generations of Wisconsin prison workers, introduces readers to penitentiary officers and staff as they share stories, debate the role of corrections in American racial politics and social justice, and talk about the important function of humor in their jobs.

Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World