- Bookforum is back through a partnership with the Nation, just six months after it was shuttered following Penske Media’s acquisition of Artforum. Answering some preliminary questions about what this means practically, Kate Dwyer reports for the New York Times:
The main difference between the old and new Bookforum will be its revenue model, Sunkara said. The magazine launched in 1994 as a quarterly supplement to Artforum. The new Bookforum will still count on ad sales as part of the business model, Sunkara said, but it “will have to develop a much larger direct subscription base.”
Sunkara dismissed the idea that print magazines — particularly niche literary ones — are not profitable.
“We need to stubbornly try to make these institutions sustainable on their own,” he said. “It’s somewhat defeatist to just say that these entities can’t be profitable, or that in a country of 330 million people — and in a much bigger language market — you can’t find enough people to sustainably produce a quarterly print magazine.”
- For the Guardian, Carey Baraka writes a thorough dispatch from his visit to the home of Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose anticolonial fiction and rejection of the Eurocentric literary world continues to push readers’ political imagination into new realms:
Ngũgĩ’s career is often divided neatly into two parts. There’s the first Ngũgĩ, whose work as a published writer began at Makerere University in Uganda in the late 1950s and continued until the end of the 60s. This Ngũgĩ was called James Ngugi (sometimes JT Ngugi) and he wrote in English. His novels were political and critical of the colonial state, but subtly so. His protagonists grappled with the effects of colonialism, but saw western education as a tool that could be harnessed against the colonists; they weren’t explicitly anti-Christian and dreamed of uniting local traditions with the best western ideals. Ultimately, though, they failed.
The second Ngũgĩ emerged in the 70s. Ngũgĩ dropped his English name, and later rejected English as his primary literary language. Influenced by his reading of Marx and Frantz Fanon, in these later works he began to engage much more directly with the state, with class, with education, with every aspect of postcolonial life. Petals of Blood, published in 1977, attacked the new political elite in independent Kenya. It was the first of his works published as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and the last novel he wrote in English. In this novel, education is no longer a tool of liberation; it is the educated elite who betray the people. This was the first salvo from what the critic Nikil Saval has described as “the rageful midperiod Ngũgĩ, who excoriates the Kenyan bourgeoisie, with their golf clubs and other ersatz re-creations of the colonial world they once abjured”.
- The US welcomed India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi with open arms this week despite his active cultivation of Hindu nationalism. For Al Jazeera, Joseph Stepansky speaks with human rights activists warning against Modi’s manipulation of practices like yoga to sanitize the violence he stokes:
“Yoga means to unite. So your coming together is an expression of another form of yoga,” Modi told participants at the United Nations event on Wednesday morning, hours before he was set to be greeted by Biden at the White House.
But Ria Chakrabarty, the policy director at Hindus for Human Rights, accused the prime minister of using the event as “om-washing”, a variation on “whitewashing” that employs the mantra “om”.
She explains that cultural Hinduism — through activities like yoga, meditation and mindfulness — have a great deal of “soft power” in the West, with thousands of fans and adherents.
“Essentially what he’s doing is taking advantage of that soft power,” Chakrabarty said.
“It’s really just creating cultural soft power for him to go back to India and say, ‘Look … I’m this person who has put Hinduism on the world stage,’ even though what he’s really done is put Hindu nationalism on the world stage.”
- And, as Nadia Nooreyezdan explains in Rest of World, a newly developed AI tool trained to speak in the voice of Hindu deity Lord Krishna has begun spewing dangerous nationalist rhetoric that only furthers existing far-right antagonism:
At least five GitaGPTs have sprung up between January and March this year, with more on the way. Experts have warned that chatbots being allowed to play god might have unintended, and dangerous, consequences. Rest of World found that some of the answers generated by the Gita bots lack filters for casteism, misogyny, and even law. Three of these bots, for instance, say it is acceptable to kill another if it is one’s dharma or duty.
“It feels like this is a great thing [to build] for people starting out in tech, who want to get recognition and respect,” Viksit Gaur, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and former head of user-facing AI at Dropbox, told Rest of World. “But someone else might pick up on this and say, ‘What if I could use this to shape opinion and drive my own agenda?’ And that’s where things get really insidious. So there is a lot of scope for danger here.”
- Miamians won’t be surprised to hear that a new study identified a specific dialect of English growing from direct translations of words and phrases from Spanish in South Florida. Linguist Phillip M. Carter writes in the Conversation:
There were “literal lexical calques,” a direct, word-for-word translation.
For example, we found people to use expressions such as “get down from the car” instead of “get out of the car.” This is based on the Spanish phrase “bajar del carro,” which translates, for speakers outside of Miami, as “get out of the car.” But “bajar” means “to get down,” so it makes sense that many Miamians think of “exiting” a car in terms of “getting down” and not “getting out.”
Locals often say “married with,” as in “Alex got married with José,” based on the Spanish “casarse con” – literally translated as “married with.” They’ll also say “make a party,” a literal translation of the Spanish “hacer una fiesta.”
- Learn about the remarkable life of Black American musician Dorothy Ashby, who revolutionized the harp’s role in American jazz yet rarely gets her due credit, in Julian Lucas’s piece for the New Yorker:
Making a name hadn’t been easy. “The audiences I was trying to reach were not interested in the harp, period,” Ashby later recalled, “and they were certainly not interested in seeing a Black woman playing the harp.” Night clubs regularly denied her a chance to audition, though the technical obstacles might have been even more formidable. Harps are all white keys, in piano terms, relying on seven different pedals to produce sharps and flats. Their notes sustain for so long that hairpin turns of key or melody are nearly impossible without dampening the strings by hand. Jazz, with its complex rhythms, changes, and improvisation, demands everything that the harp lacks, which is why so few musicians had tried to marry them before. It took another practitioner of an “outsider” instrument to see the experiment’s potential. In 1957, Frank Wess, a flutist with the Count Basie Orchestra, saw Ashby’s trio at a Detroit night club. A few months later, they were recording her début.
- While the Titan submersive disaster dominates the news cycle, Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan write for Democracy Now about another maritime disaster that has seemingly evaporated from mainstream attention, the 700 migrant people lost when the Adriana sank last week:
Most or all of Adriana’s roughly 100 survivors were helped not by Greek authorities but by a private yacht that had responded to the distress call. Among the survivors were 47 Syrians, 43 Egyptians, 12 Pakistanis and two Palestinians. All were men, as they were traveling above deck on the Adriana. Hundreds of women and children were trapped below deck, and went down with the ship.
“I am struck by the alarming level of tolerance to serious human rights violations against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants that has developed across Europe” Dunja Mijatović, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, said on June 19th, one day before World Refugee Day. “Reports of human rights violations…are now so frequent that they hardly register in the public consciousness.”
- A handy guide to creating your own “hologram” desktop buddy for a quick craft project this weekend:
- And finally, food for thought: Are you a Warhol or a Didion?
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
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