Academic

More History of the Book in the News

By Alfred Brophy

Ok--I'm resurfacing briefly from grading trusts and estates exams.  Been quiet of late because I've been busy.  However, there are a series of history of the book posts that I'm combining into one.  

First, the most recent issue of NYROB has a couple of history of the book essays--one by G.W. Bowersock ("The Scholar of Scholars") on Anthony Grafton's Worlds Made by Words and another by John Gross ("A Constant Reader") on Timothy Ryback's Hitler's Private Library.  

Second, I haven't followed the controversy over Joseph Massad of Columbia University until the last week or so.  I see that he's up for tenure and that's generating a lot of press.  One of the points of controversy is his recent book, Desiring Arabs, published by the University of Chicago Press.  Here is a description from the press' website:

Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. 

In a central thesis, Massad targets a movement he calls the "Gay International," made up of "white male European or American gay scholars" and advocates. He accuses this Gay International of, in effect, creating homosexuality in the Arab world.

He writes: "It is the very discourse of the Gay International, which both produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology."

Echoing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's infamous claim on a visit to Columbia that Iran has no homosexuals, Massad attacks the Gay International for assuming that "homosexuals, gays and lesbians are a universal category that exists everywhere in the world."

Massad also asserts that the "white Western women's movement" had similarly tried to force gender equality onto "non-Western countries."

As I said, I'm not familiar with the book, so I am unable to evalute the merits of the News' charges. But I'm intrigued by the controversy, for once again we see the ideas in a book at the center of a political dispute.  Just as Open Veins in Latin America fades from the news cycle, here's more fodder for the history of the book crowd.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 30, 2009 (boomark / email).