THE JUSTICE
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TUESDAY, MARCH 10, 2015
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CAMPUS SPEAKER
Lecture focuses on Mandela, apartheid ■ Dr. Robert Trent Vinson
gave a guest lecture last Thursday on anti-apartheid advocate Albert Luthuli. By MAX MORAN JUSTICE EDITOR
On Thursday, the African and Afro-American Studies department hosted Dr. Robert Trent Vinson for a guest lecture on anti-apartheid advocate Albert Luthuli. The audience included undergraduates, graduate students and professors. Vinson is the Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings associate professor of History and Africana Studies at the College of William and Mary. His lecture was derived from research for his forthcoming book, Before Mandela, Like A King: The Prophetic Politics of Chief Albert Luthuli. Vinson’s lecture, “Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela and the Genealogies of Armed Struggle in Apartheid South Africa,” was the AAAS department’s 30th annual Ruth First Memorial Lecture, which is named in honor of a white journalist who exposed corruption under the apartheid government. Vinson told the Justice at the event that he accepted the invitation to guest lecture specifically because he counts First as “one of [his] political heroes” as “she was one of the few whites in South Africa who fought, who refused to accept the racial privilege that the apartheid regime was bestowing on her.”
During his lecture Vinson argued that Luthuli’s non-violent protest tactics paved the way for Nelson Mandela’s rise to primacy in the anti-apartheid movement and that “the Nelson Mandela we knew and loved ... was actually using a template based on the politics of Albert Luthuli in the 1950s and ’60s.” Vinson began by outlining some of the most important apartheid laws from throughout the 1950s, distinguishing between what historians call “Petty Apartheid,” in which racial intermarriage and civil disobedience were banned, and the later “Grand Apartheid,” in which the black South Africans who made up 80 percent of the country’s population at the time were confined to 13 percent of its land mass. Vinson said that apartheid was not put forward as “a kind of Nazilike fascist system,” but was instead viewed as “a kind of solution to the supposed problem of races intermingling.” According to Vinson, Luthuli’s argument was that “apartheid is not a solution to anything ...but that apartheid, indeed, was the problem.” He explained that Luthuli was “deeply religious” and saw apartheid as “theological heresy.” Luthuli “felt that apartheid was a violation of the Christianity of Jesus Christ, whom he regarded as a drum major for social justice,” Vinson said. “God did not separate out people saying ‘You should live well, and you should live poorly.’” According to Vinson, when Luthuli became president of the Af-
rican National Congress—the oldest political party in South Africa, which opposed apartheid—in 1952, he advocated for international sanctions against the South African government and organized peaceful protests against apartheid, inspired by Mohandas Gandhi. Luthuli then went on to become the first person from outside Europe and the Americas to win the Nobel Peace prize in 1961, the same year that marked the creation of the ANC’s armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, meaning “Spear of the Nation” and commonly abbreviated as MK. According to Vinson’s lecture, the branch’s founding was in reaction to a police shooting, and was also what Vinson called “the moment that Nelson Mandela became Nelson Mandela.” While Vinson noted that there is no historical consensus on whether Luthuli helped create MK, Vinson put forward his belief that it was Mandela who reoriented the ANC toward violent resistance, and that Luthuli did not support violence, but “understood it was collective consensus of leadership to move toward armed struggle.” Vinson concluded the lecture by noting that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. admired Luthuli, and said that “King regarded himself as an American Luthuli.” He also noted that Luthuli is an important figure to study in African Studies, as “Africa and Africans are often sidelined in diaspora studies. It’s still a great weakness in the field.” During a brief question-and-
ANTI-APARTHEID
JEREMY PERLMAN/the Justice
SOCIAL JUSTICE: Dr. Robert Trent Vinson discussed the accomplishments of Nelson Mandela and and Albert Luthuli in their fight against apartheid in South Africa. answer segment after the lecture, Prof. Wellington Nyangoni (AAAS) criticized the lecture for not addressing the Pan-African Congress, the ANC’s rival group, and for not putting criticisms of Mandela in the context of uncertainty surrounding the end of apartheid. Vinson acknowledged the PAC’s importance, saying, “That point needs to be made.” Prof. Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson
(AAAS) commented that figures like King and Mandela are connected in that “we don’t like particular images of them.” “So, like, the King who was talking about Vietnam [and] the Mandela who was armed and in fatigues don’t gel with the kinds of images of each man that we prefer,” she said. “We want to hold King there frozen in time on the steps of the Lincoln memorial,” Vinson agreed.
CAMPUS SPEAKER
Alumna discusses historical significance of novel ■ Paula Rabinowitz ’74
examines the popularity of the the paperback book in her recently published novel. By TZLIL LEVY JUSTICE CONTRIBUTING WRITER
On Thursday, the American Studies department hosted Paula Rabinowitz ’74, who discussed her 2014 book American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street and the historical significance of book covers. Prof. Stephen Whitfield (AMST) began the event by introducing Rabinowitz, who graduated from Brandeis with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and is a professor at the University of Minnesota. “Professor Rabinowitz … has gone on to a distinguished career in the field of American Studies, particularly feminist studies, and critical scholarships having to do primarily with literature,” said Whitfield.
Rabinowitz briefly read from her book’s preface, which examines the popularity of books in recent years. Due to the increasing popularity of reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook, and noting that Amazon announced it had sold more eBooks than hardback books in the summer of 2010, “books were surely dead,” Rabinowitz wrote in the preface. Rabinowitz’s research focused on pulp fiction in archives across the United States, which included the paperback novels that gained popularity after the Great Depression. She visited libraries dedicated to pulp, such as the Fales Library at New York University, the G. Nicholas Collection at the University of Minnesota and the George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection at the University of Buffalo. Rabinowitz noted the difficulty of maintaining the collection of pulp fiction at the library of the University of Buffalo. Nevertheless, she said, books have a lasting lifespan and continue to stay, regardless of
technological advances. According to Rabinowitz, the covers often play a significant role in an individual’s decision to read the book, true to the expression about judging a book by its cover. “All these covers are ‘read the book by its cover’ or ‘buy the book by its cover,’” Rabinowitz said of the covers she showed the audience. There is something “categorically different about reading eBooks than by holding a book.” Rabinowitz also presented images of paperback book covers from the 1930s and ’40s to express the diversity of the medium and notable controversial covers. Rabinowitz used Robert Jonas—an American illustrator famous for his work at Penguin Books—as an example, showing the audience his signature styles of the “broken window or key hole style, wherein you are inside [the location] and you’re looking [at the painted scene] through the distance.” Guy Pene du Bois, a 20thcentury modernist, Rabinowitz said, would frequently feature images of
women reading in his art. “[The] dynamic of public reading by women is part of … a modern sensibility that allows women to be alone in public,” Rabinowitz said. American Pulp highlights writing with a popular appeal, which “kind of level[ed] out a playing field of who read what,” Rabinowitz said, noting that the books would be packaged and sold in kiosks, drug stores, candy stores and department stores. According to Rabinowitz, the availability of these books represented the increasing popularity of reading and storytelling. The paperbacks would represent the high culture of war, gender relations, changing sexual relations and changing racial relations, she told the audience. “These books were meant to be read,” Rabinowitz said, also discussing how even Congress and Hollywood would pay attention to the novels that allude to high culture issues. Rabinowitz also discussed how printing methods began to change in the early 1960s, noting publishers’
decisions to create trade paperback books, which were similar in size to hardcover books. Additionally, she said, the changes in tastes and formats of books and the rise of vintage press and anchor books contributed to paperback sales. Nevertheless, certain marketing characteristics remained the same, Rabinowitz said, using Edmund Wilson’s novel, Memoirs of Hecate County as an example. The State of New York banned Wilson’s book, which prompted marketers to promote the book with the tagline, “Banned in the state of New York!” Although there was no image on the cover, the book still sold well, partly due to the interest generated by its ban. It is “always good to have your book banned if you want to sell it,” Rabinowitz joked. Rabinowitz is also the author of the works Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary and Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America.
FACULTY
Prof Jadhav awarded grant to explore brain research ■ As a Sloan Reasearch
Fellow, Prof. Jadhav will study parts of the brain related to neurological disorders. By ABBY PATKIN JUSTICE EDITOR
Prof. Shantanu Jadhav (PSYC) was named one of the 126 Sloan Research Fellows of 2015 and was awarded a $50,000 grant to explore memory and decision-making processes in mammalian brains. According to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s website, the fellowships seek to “stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.” The fellowships last for two years and are awarded yearly to researchers in a variety of scientific fields, according to the website. The foundation has awarded the fellowships
since 1955, and past fellows include 42 Nobel Prize winners. According to Jadhav’s website, studying specific parts of the brain can unlock crucial information toward the understanding and treatment of many neurological disorders, including diseases such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. “The hippocampus is known to be critical for episodic memories, and the prefrontal cortex is involved in executive control, working memory and decision making,” his website notes. “It is critical to understand how these two regions act in concert to support learning, form memories, make decisions and guide behavior.” Understanding how the two sections work together “will provide a crucial basis for addressing the numerous neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders involving these two regions, such as Alzheimers, demetia, [sic] depression and
schizophrenia,” the website states. To explore the question of how the two regions interact, Jadhav studies rat brains as they form memories and make decisions and then observes how “activity in neuronal groups in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex evolves during learning and what mechanisms underlie the organization and transmission of information across these structures,” according to a Feb. 25 BrandeisNOW article. “The brain has a remarkable capacity to learn and to use past experience to guide our daily behavior,” Jadhav’s life sciences faculty profile reads. “Multiple brain regions coordinate activity to form representations of the external world, learn new experiences, store and retrieve memories, and make decisions. We are interested in understanding the neural basis of these cognitive abilities by studying processing at the cellular and network
level in the neuronal circuits of the rodent brain.” The profile also notes that Jadhav’s previous research has shown some coordination between the two regions, which provides the basis for the research he will do during his fellowship. “We have shown that hippocampal replay during awake sharpwave ripples (SWRs) is critical for spatial memory, and SWRs are associated with coordinated reactivation of hippocampal-prefrontal neurons during memory-guided decision making,” his profile says. “This approach thus allows us to characterize the neurophysiological basis of prefrontal-hippocampal interactions, and also to provide causal evidence linking specific forms of neural activity to behavior and cognition.” Prior to joining the Brandeis faculty, Jadhav was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Center for
Jadhav Integrative Neuroscience and was also the winner of the 2013 Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award from the Society for Neuroscience.