In a nutshell

On the face of it, my title is silly: there is no “before fiction” for humans, for we are, from the start of recorded history and from the start of our individual lives, fiction-loving animals.  Homer, say, on the one hand; and pretty much any toddler on the other.  It’s for good reason that “fiction” has become the de facto, lowest-common-denominator way of referring to vastly different products of human storytelling.  Besides: long ago Aristotle cleanly separated history from poetry—“what happened” from “what would happen.”  Whether we are talking about human history or literary history, surely fiction runs through the lot of it.

But there are other ways of looking at the matter, depending on what you want to explain.  I want to explain a predominant feature of the early novel in France and England—“early” meaning the period of what is usually known as the genre’s rise, from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries.  Readers of the period’s classics—Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa, Dangerous Liaisons—will recognize the feature:  it’s the way these novels pretended to be real documents.  They usually didn’t pretend very hard: bona-fide hoaxes were rare.  But they didn’t advertise their fictionality, in contradistinction to most novels of the following century.  Emma Woodhouse, Emma Bovary:  their creators never for one moment assert their stories as literally true.  Looking back, the early novel’s insistence on its own literal reality is hard to comprehend.  Why even bother, especially when that insistence was so often ironic and half-hearted?  Why didn’t these writers just invent as matter-of-factly as we do?

Good questions, though I can well imagine the ghosts of Richardson and Laclos asking today’s writers: How can it possibly be of no concern to you that your characters never existed?  Because if we look at Western literary history, it’s the modern position that stands out.  Even Aristotle’s Poetics argues pretty clearly that the best subject of literature is historically attested people engaged in historically attested events.  And for many centuries, historical subject matter remained at the core of most literature of any ambition.  Writers took attested heroes and events and crafted good plots, using what was known and inventing whatever was necessary.

Should we count as fiction this particular configuration of the relation between invention and history?  Are novels that ironically pretend to be real collections of letters, or memoirs, fiction, too?  It obviously depends on how one defines the term.  I’ve chosen—partially for reasons of maximum clarity, partially for polemical thrust—to talk about three distinct regimes of literary invention.  The first I call Aristotelian:  in order to make a good plot the poet adds what he needs to what’s known about this-or-that hero.  The second, for which I’ve borrowed the term “pseudofactual,” describes the eighteenth-century novel: writers pretend to offer readers real documents about otherwise unknown people.  The third regime is fiction, and it allows writers to propose novels as models of reality without advancing their protagonists as historically real.

In a nutshell

Through Amateur Eyes is all about how amateur documentary films and photographs taken primarily by Germans can be used in the memory and memorialization of World War II and the Holocaust.

All of the films and photographs I discuss are taken by Germans, ranging from high level Nazis, through unknown soldiers on the battlefield, to bystanders and civilians during World War II.  The book puts these films and photographs into a social, cultural and aesthetic context that helps to understand them as amateur films and photographs that were deeply engaged with the world around them—they are in conversation with technological developments, cultural and social events, aesthetic trends. They are so much more than documents of Nazi ideology. Effectively, my perspective on the images casts them as more than “pictures taken by the German perpetrators,” a perspective that has often led to their rejection or, at best, marginalization, because , through this lens, the images have become equated with reflections of Nazi ideology.

Because many of the images I discuss are often recycled in contemporary narratives that memorialize World War II, the book also analyses the recyclings as cues to contemporary beliefs and practices of cultural memory.  I ask: How are these films and photographs understood today?  What are the biases of the narratives into which they are woven?  What are the prejudices brought to bear on them? How are they manipulated to corroborate a certain version of World War II and the Holocaust?

The re-presentations of archival images are found everywhere: in museum exhibitions, Gallery Exhibitions, made-for-television documentaries, magazines, documentary films, and on the Web. And they have been used and reused in both mainstream and alternative media since 1995 in Europe and North America.

Ultimately, Through Amateur Eyes wants to intervene in the urgent and ongoing debates about events that took place during World War II, their visual representation, and the question of how to continue to remember them today.  And it does this by taking a radical perspective, namely to look through the eyes of Germans with cameras who were present at the events themselves.

It’s important that readers understand Through Amateur Eyes as another perspective on the Holocaust and World War II.  It’s not a rewriting of this history, it’s putting forward another version that can and should sit side by side with all of those that exist already.

The same can be said about the images themselves: I offer a specific perspective, but one that nevertheless needs to be seen and known in conjunction with more familiar interpretations.  Both the films and photographs, in their archival form as well as in their contemporary recyclings, are multiple and layered, and I have tried to capture that depth.

All of this said, my visions of the films and photographs are not relative.  They begin and end with the sensuous properties of the images themselves, and for that, I hope my arguments will carry credence for many readers.

In a nutshell

The Statue of Liberty tells the story of America’s most beloved icon, the symbol, we like to think, of our openness to the world.  But how many Americans know that Lady Liberty had essentially nothing to do with immigration when she first went up?  That xenophobes used the statue as a symbol before pro-immigration forces did?  That Emma Lazarus’s poem about the “Huddled Masses,” written in 1883, remained little known until the 1930s?  The Statue of Liberty is at once familiar and unknown, commonplace and full of surprises.

The statue is surprising in part because its meaning has changed from one generation to the next.  Ever since the first images appeared in the mid-1870s, even before construction in Paris had begun, the colossus of New York Harbor has been an open figurative screen, a massive sculpted form onto which an endless variety of ideas, values, intentions, and emotions could be projected.  It has come to signify both liberty and subjection, immigration and xenophobia, the lure of America and its dangerous shoals, the dangers of terrorism and the resilience of New York City and the United States in the wake of 9/11.

Our extremely fluid understanding of what the statue says comes from three of its essential qualities: abstractness, artistic banality, and colossal size.

Its creator, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, intended the Statue of Liberty to last many decades, even centuries, and wanted it to express a general, universal theme.  He thus gave it a classical form, one that had endured since ancient times.  He kept it abstract and allegorical rather having it represent a particular individual or historical event.  Except for the barely-visible “July 4, 1776” inscribed on its tablet, the Statue of Liberty doesn’t even overtly refer to the United States.

Like its abstractness, the Statue of Liberty’s artistic banality—its conservatism of form—is related to its need to survive political and cultural change.  Bartholdi himself admitted that his statue “cannot be considered as a very great work of art.”  But its neutral neoclassicism allowed it to elude passionate aesthetic attack and gave it the potential to represent a great many different things.

Finally, the statue’s colossal size and strategic location guaranteed that it would continue to draw attention and thus retain the ability to encourage people to confer meaning on it, whether for political, social, or commercial purposes.

In a nutshell

The most compelling and unsettling moment for me in all of Victorian literature comes when Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole: that epistemological abyss at the heart of nineteenth-century modernity.  For all its quaintness, it is a terrifying image. A ludic microcosm swallows reality whole.  The boundary between the inside of the child’s game and the outside schizophrenically collapses.  Modern life, in the shape of a girl, loses its footing.

In this book, I lower myself into the rabbit hole.  I survey and map it.  I explore the extent to which a growing number of nineteenth-century British writers and thinkers equated modern life with the sensation of a world in play.  A world in play means two things.  It means a world in flux, an unstable cosmos with an unfixed horizon, a universe turned inside out.  But it also means a world trapped in a ludic representation of itself, a world literally inside play.

The further I made my way down this Victorian rabbit hole, the more startled I was by the ubiquity of the logic of play in nineteenth-century depictions of modernity, indeed, the centrality of play to the Victorian sense of self.  Darwin, for instance, conceives of nature, including human nature, as a competitive sport, with biological winners and losers.  Rudyard Kipling rechristens British imperialism the “Great Game.”  The Victorians invented the weekend.  They turned leisure into big business.  They built hundreds of parks and playgrounds in a normalizing effort to cultivate and manage play.  Child play acquired unprecedented ideological importance in the nineteenth century.  In myriad ways, the logic of play made the Victorian world cohere.  From the middle-class ethic of competition, through the therapeutic faith in recreation, to the political efficacy of holidays in the promotion of national identity, play made everyday life make sense.  At the same time, however, this intrinsically unstable concept betrayed the illusoriness of life’s coherence.

The idea of a world in play is not the same thing as a world at play, which is how the Victorians depicted that apocryphal epoch known as “Merry Old England.”  A world in play is not about having fun.  It is about being trapped in the funhouse mirror, in illusion, in an unsettling new reality in which “all that is solid,” to quote Marx and Engels, “melts into air.”  Our twenty-first-century fascination with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and online communities, with dystopian computer programs that colonize consciousness itself, can be traced to the Victorian world in play.  In The Matrix, Alice-like Neo follows a woman with a rabbit tattoo down a digital hole.

This book maps the Victorian world in play—and hence our own.  In the process, it advances a new theory of Victorian literature and culture.  But the book also examines how various Victorian writers—Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, among others—struggled valiantly to find their footing, ethically and politically, in play, how they made a home for themselves in this unsettling world of ours.

In a nutshell

This book is an effort at the “quest for the historical Muhammad” that uses methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical and early Christian studies to investigate the beginnings of Islam.  It takes its main focus on divergent traditions about the timing of Muhammad’s death in the historical sources for the early Islamic period.

The traditional Islamic biographies of Muhammad, which were first written more than a century after his death, relate Muhammad’s death in 632 at Medina.  Nevertheless, an alternative tradition survives in earlier and more numerous Jewish, Christian, Samaritan, and even Islamic sources, in which Muhammad was still alive when his followers entered Palestine in 634-35.  Although this discrepancy in the source materials has been known for several decades, until now, it had never been investigated.

The purpose of this study, however, is not to determine when Muhammad really died.  Rather, these rival memories of the end of Muhammad’s life afford a valuable opening through which to explore the nature of earliest Islam more broadly.

The tradition of Muhammad’s leadership of the campaign in Palestine seems to be earlier than the account of his death in Medina.  The question then is what developments within early Islam could explain such a transformation in the early Islamic memory of the conclusion to Muhammad’s life.  This study argues that the basis for such “re-remembering” of Muhammad’s death lies in the rapidly changing nature of the new religious movement that he founded.  Evidence suggests earliest Islam to have been driven largely by belief that the end of the world had drawn very near: Muhammad and his followers seem to have expected this event even within their lifetimes.  The final judgment of “the Hour” was anticipated, it would appear, in Jerusalem, as it largely still is today in the Islamic tradition.

Accordingly, Jerusalem and the biblical Holy Land were of enormous religious significance for Muhammad and his earliest followers, vestiges of which can still be found in the Islamic tradition today.  There is in fact mounting evidence that Jerusalem and Palestine were at least as significant as Mecca and Medina—if not perhaps even more so—in early Islamic sacred geography.  Such a configuration would favor a memory of Muhammad’s association with the invasion of Palestine, as he led his followers to meet the final judgment in the Holy Land that was their promised inheritance as children of Abraham.

Nevertheless, Muhammad’s followers soon grew more patient regarding the end of the world and also developed a distinctive sacred geography that significantly diminished the status of Jerusalem to focus instead on the western Arabian Peninsula.  Consequently, a new tradition of Muhammad’s death in this uniquely Islamic “Holy Land” was required.  In such a way then, one can imagine the emergence of a tradition that remembered Muhammad’s death in his own sacred city, Medina, in parallel with these other developments in earliest Islam.

I hope that readers will read the book with an open mind.  As clichéd as that may sound, this is particularly a concern given the hostility that some scholars of early Islam have expressed toward prior studies of Islamic origins that use historical-critical methods on traditional materials and approach the traditional Islamic narrative of its origins with a significant measure of skepticism.  Indeed, in comparison with other areas of religious studies, the occasional but persistent antagonism to these kinds of approaches from some scholars in Islamic studies is unusual and unfortunate.

In a nutshell

How Economics Shapes Science focuses on how costs and incentives—core concepts in economics—shape the practice of science, especially the practice of science at universities.

Costs matter:  they play a role in determining the size of equipment—Europe had to shelve plans to build the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope in favor of the smaller (and cheaper) Exceedingly Large Telescope.  Costs play a role in determining whether researchers work with male mice or female mice—females can be more expensive to study.  Costs dictate that the Large Hadron Collider not run in the winter but rather during the rest of the year when electricity is considerably less expensive.  Costs play a role when universities choose to staff labs with graduate students and postdocs, who are significantly cheaper than staff scientists.  And costs play a role in determining what is feasible:  when the first human genome was sequenced in 2003, the price tag for the entire project was estimated at $3 billion.  A genome can now be sequenced for $5,000 or less; by the end of this year, 2012, it is highly likely that a genome can be sequenced for $1,000 or less.

Incentives matter as well.  Universities went on an unprecedented building spree in the early 2000s in response to the doubling of the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major funder of research in the biomedical sciences.  Universities invest considerable resources in attracting highly cited scientists, in an effort to increase their place in the rankings.  Scientists and engineers are also highly responsive to incentives.  Money matters, as does reputation.  But it’s not all for reputation, and certainly not all for money.  Scientists enjoy the “pleasure from finding a thing out, the kick in the discovery,” to quote the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.

Science also plays a role, an important one, in shaping the economy.  The lags between research and economic growth are long.  But the connection between research and economic growth is present and important.  Examples of how research in the public sector has contributed to new products and processes are plentiful.  Global positioning devices, which have transformed the way we navigate, would not have been possible without the development of the atomic clock.  Hybrid corn, which has done much to increase food supply, was first produced by a faculty member at (what is now) Michigan State University.  Modern high-capacity hard drives would not be possible were it not for the research of two European physicists, Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg, who independently discovered giant magnetoresistance in the 1980s—the science behind the ability to store vast amounts of information in a small space.  Nowhere is the relationship between science and growth more obvious than in increases in life expectancy.

In a nutshell

You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Storyland.  Storyland is your home and before you die you will spend decades there.  If you haven’t noticed this before, don’t feel bad: story is for a human as water is for a fish—all encompassing and not quite palpable.  While your body is always stuck at a particular point in space-time, your mind is always free to ramble in lands of make-believe.  And it does.

We read novels.  We go to movies.  We watch TV serials, and the faux non-fiction of reality shows and pro wrestling.  We groove to ultra-short fictions in popular songs.  We lose ourselves in video games that make us the rock-jawed heroes of action films (or fleshed-out characters in story-rich games like The World of Warcraft).

When we are not consuming stories made up by others, we are making up our own.  Our children play at story by instinct—inventing scenarios and acting them out in Neverland.  When our bodies sleep, our restless minds stay awake all night telling fevered stories.  And we don’t stop dreaming when the sun comes up.  We spend hours per day spontaneously generating daydreams in which all of our vain, dirty wishes—and all of our secret fears—come true.

Scientists and philosophers have long debated the human essence—the thing that sets us apart most fundamentally from the rest of creation.  Is it intelligence (Homo sapiens)?  Is it the sophistication of tool use (Homo habilis)?  Is it upright posture (Homo erectus)?  Is it playfulness (Homo ludens)?  Or could it be language or the complexity of our social behavior?  These factors are all important, but an equally important factor has been overlooked.  Big brains and upright posture set us apart—so does the way we live in Storyland.  I give you Homo fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.

In a nutshell

In 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image at every level, from the logo to products to buildings and beyond.  The Interface tells this story in full for the first time, showing how Noyes and his fellow consultants (Charles Eames, Paul Rand, George Nelson, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., and a host of architects from around the world) remade IBM in a way that went well beyond this particular corporation—to transform the relationships between design, computer science, and corporate culture.

This history is more significant than a mere “case study.”  It is a determining case.

IBM was the largest business machine corporation in the world; by the 1960s it was the size, in capital and employees, of Portugal and Norway combined.  As such, it completely dominated the market for computers.  Its products—and the new mode of managerial and logistical practice that came with them—impacted nearly every sphere of cultural endeavor from politics to art to science.  As its executives were fond of saying, “IBM is a business whose business is how other businesses do business.”

Thus designers themselves were hardly unaffected by the insertion of the computer into manifold aspects of everyday life. I show how, in the period stretching from the “invention” of the computer just before and during WWII to the appearance of the personal computer in the mid-1970s, disciplines once well outside the realm of architecture—information and management theory, cybernetics, ergonomics, computer science—became integral aspects of design theory and practice.

The Interface is organized according to media—which are the “interfaces” through which the corporation appears as part of the world.  It moves upward and outward in scale.  Beginning with IBM’s graphics, it then moves to consider its products, architecture, multinational expansion, and its films and spectacles.  In doing so, the book provides the first critical history of the industrial design of the computer, of Eliot Noyes’s influential career, and of some of the most important and long-forgotten work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames.

In a nutshell

The twentieth century is often called “the century of sex” and seen as an era of increasing liberalization. Indeed, taking the century as a whole, we have seen the erosion of the double standard, the greater acceptance of premarital sex and the eroticization of marriage, the decriminalization and mainstreaming of homosexuality, and the saturation of the public sphere with sexual imagery and talk. Without a doubt, the twentieth century witnessed a vastly intensified preoccupation with sexual matters. But this standard paradigm of liberalization conceals another huge story.

Three issues are especially important to keep in mind. The first has to do with the grassroots appeal of sexual conservatism, the recurrent backlashes against liberalization. Some of the most significant aspects of sexual rights, including access to contraception, or freedom from persecution for homosexual sex, were for extended periods extraordinarily fragile. The backlashes were sometimes coordinated at the state level—think of National Socialism in Germany and Austria, fascism in Italy, Spain, or Portugal, or Stalinism in the Soviet Union. But they were also often carried by popular movements from below.

A second matter is just as essential, and it has to do with the problems often embedded also within what were thought to be liberalizing efforts. In some cases, we can look back and see what contemporaries could not, or did not care to, see—for example, the horrifically disdainful discrimination against the disabled and against people of color in many lands that was used for much of the twentieth century to justify the promotion of contraceptives.  In other cases, we ourselves today remain challenged to make sense of such matters as the increasing commercialization of sex. And in yet other cases—for example over the connections between sex and love, or the lack thereof—the disputes over how best to organize sexual politics remain ongoing.

And third, there is the related matter of ambivalences.  Sex does not always make people happy. Quite apart from the recurring dark sides of sexuality in the form of rape, abuse, exploitation, hurt, and harassment—which also have their important histories, both with regard to what human beings have done to each other but also with respect to the campaigns fought against such pain and against the conditions that facilitate it—also sex that was mutually willed could be the site of many conflicting feelings: explosive, transformative ecstasy, delight, and excitement; serene security, satisfaction, status confirmation, the pleasures of conformity to norms; anguished longing, vulnerability, insecurity, jealousy; or habit, duty, boredom, even repulsion.

These emotions matter. It is not least because sex is complicated that human beings are so politically and socially manipulable in this area—although historians have too rarely reflected openly on this complicatedness when trying to explain how sexual cultures change.  My aim in the book was, first, to reconstruct the extraordinarily varied ways people in the past imagined sex and, second, to analyze how activists of all stripes battled over the ethics of sex, and struggled to change laws, attitudes, and practices.

In a nutshell

Why do all cultures have verse?  Why nevertheless, is poetry a minority taste, unlike stories, even among keen readers of literature?  And why, all the same, does some verse succeed in touching hearts and minds across the centuries?

What distinguishes poetry from prose, anyway, and why does that make a difference to its demands and delights?  What is special about lyric verse, verse without stories?  How can what we know of the mind explain the particular challenges and rewards of lyrics?

After I raise these questions in general terms, and try to answer them from evolutionary and cognitive viewpoints—more of this in a moment—I move on to Shakespeare.  His Sonnets rate as the most successful of lyric collections, and ten or perhaps twenty of the poems are dear to lovers of English literature.  Yet very few people read the sequence right through.  What do both the sonnets’ appeal at their best, and the resistance they offer to sustained reading, tell us about lyrics in general and about Shakespeare’s aims in this extraordinary collection?

Here’s the start of my answer: We can understand the abundant information in the world rapidly, in real time, only if it falls into patterns.

Narrative seems highly likely to be the default task orientation of the human mind: that is, if our minds can process information patterns in narrative terms, if they can interpret as events what they experience, they automatically will.  Narrative organizes experience as naturally as a magnet organizes iron filings.  Stories appeal so widely partly because their principal patterns usually converge so effortlessly.  They also hook attention by providing their own internal sense of relevance: Hamlet’s or Elizabeth Bennet’s aims, for a time, become ours.

Lyric poetry can turn the absence of story to advantage.  Precisely because it resists the automatic convergence of patterns that we normally meet in narrative, it can explore patterns of its own, patterns of experience and emotion, of image and idea, of word and structure, of set forms and found freedoms.  Because lyric poetry lacks the internal relevance a story supplies, it allows us the illusion of access to another’s thought at its least constrained by circumstance, appealing to others regardless of their circumstances.  And since a lyric forfeits the supplied circumstances of a story, it invites an expansively resonating response, appealing to our imaginations to intuit the relevance, whatever our circumstances might be.

The freedom and intensity of high lyric verse tend to offer greater challenges than stories, and different kinds of reward.  That’s why I try to show how thoroughly Shakespeare’s purposes in his Sonnets—which suggest but strongly resist narrative—differ from those of his plays and his once wildly successful narrative poems.

In a nutshell

This book defends the duty of judgment and the freedom to err. Against the modernist ambition to discover truth by the power of reason, and post-modernist flagellation of both truth and reason, it urges that we drop the crutches of ideal theory when we think about justice and act upon injustice.  The book offers a model of a pragmatic assessment of the grounds and direction of political action aiming singularly at the alleviation of existing human suffering.

The project is driven by the search for a politically useful theory of justice.

Much needed policy action is either blocked or sidetracked by hefty pondering about the grounds, goals, and preconditions for policy action.  Did we get Iraq wrong?  Should we intervene to stop the carnage in Syria? Should the wearing of the Islamic headscarf be allowed in public office in our secular republics? Should failing banks be bailed out by taxpayers?  Should the European Union impose austerity measures on the Greeks as it is saving the Greek state from bankruptcy?

While politicians, when facing hard cases, are often in need of intellectual guidance, political philosophers have hardly ever offered ideas that can help or serve a politician—as the German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel once noted in exasperation.  Indeed, for centuries learned men and women have supplied elaborate theories spelling out conflicting rights and duties and unattainable conditions for their satisfaction.

That political judgment is cursed by a perpetual wandering between vision and practicality, between high moral ideals and the pragmatics of political life, is something Aristotle already warned about. Aristotle observed that even though justice might be essential for political life, a science of politics and therefore a scientific theory of justice is unattainable. In matters political, he claimed, the particulars of our collective existence are the proper object of judgment. Therefore, practical wisdom, not general principles and theoretical reasoning, is what is needed when we judge the right organization of society.

Ironically, the design of a theory of justice seems to be as impossible as justice is essential for politics.  The book offers a way out of this conundrum by replacing the search for high-minded theory of justice with a model of practical judgment.

In a nutshell

My study looks at the emergence of modern art among Muslim South Asian artists by examining in some detail the work and intellectual concerns of a select number of artists from the 1920s to the present.  These artists are usually associated with Pakistan, but I situate them within a narrative of transnational Muslim South Asian modernism, rather than viewing them within a national art history. The book looks at the development of art with respect to issues of “tradition,” “Islamic art,” and “modernism” during the era of decolonization to the present.

The idea of tradition embraces intellectual and cultural resources of the Persianate cosmopolitan world of the Mughal Empire since the sixteenth century.  It also encompasses the reformist movements allied with the rise of print culture that flourished in the wake of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and sought to shape Muslim life in India by religious and educational reform, and by modernization of Urdu language and literature. “Tradition” further included the rise of progressive cultural politics in South Asia during the 1930s, and the growth of literary journals and criticism.  Urdu poetry and literature further provided many of the artists with imaginative tropes.  Tradition also partially encompassed the rich iconography of Hindu and Buddhist South Asia.

“Islamic art” was clearly a key facet of tradition the artists wrestled with.  The term usually refers to artistic practices over a specific geographic area before the advent of modernity.  But this definition is not indigenous to Muslim intellectual history; it is a categorization that developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European orientalist art-historical scholarship.  The term is clearly catachrestic, referring neither to purely religious art, nor to art made exclusively by Muslims, while excluding art made by Muslims in the modern era and also in major regions such as Southeast Asia.

The artists in my study “decolonized” “Islamic art via their artistic practice, by selectively reworking threads and fragments of classical Islamic art into modern formulations.  “Islamic art” was available to these artists as received and lived practice in some cases, but as a result of modern scholarship, it was also furnished to them in discursive articulations.  Beginning in the 1920s, artists reworked fundamental categories that characterize the study of classical Islamic arts—architecture, miniature painting, ornament, and calligraphy—via the formal and procedural openings afforded by transnational modernism.

It must be reiterated that modernism itself drew upon artistic practices of the non-West, in which “Islamic art,” the decorative arts, and primitivism in general have played a foundational role—these crossed paths complicate questions of originality and derivativeness by defying any simple ascription of linear causality and temporality.

The artists’ work in my study also needs to be set in relation to the larger rubric of decolonization, as it made a certain type of claim to a “national” art.

However, the “national” in modern Muslim South Asia since the late nineteenth century is a highly fragmented and overdetermined concept that cannot be neatly captured in a concise definition.  The later nineteenth century witnessed the growing awareness by Muslim intelligentsia of their minority status in India, and led to the rise of Muslim identity in relation to wider pan-Islamic ideas.

Artistic practice therefore adopted a studied distance from Pakistani nationalism, and largely eschewed direct identification with it.  Even in cases when the artist was patronized by the state, the addressee of the artwork was hardly ever the nation in a simple sense.  Rather, artists availed of the opening towards reflexivity and articulation of an alternative aesthetic universe offered by modernism, and simultaneously also investigated transnational cosmopolitanism modalities in early modern and modern South Asian Muslim culture.  It is striking that all the artists I study also devoted considerable efforts to establish new institutions, by publishing journals, creating exhibition spaces, teaching, and running art foundations.

One needs to underscore the powerfully affirmative potential of modernism itself in fostering new imaginations during the decolonizing era.  Modernism needs to be understood to reference cultural production that is experimental and reflexive, inhabits new patronage arrangements, seeks new audiences and venues, and is generally concerned with exploring the predicament of the subject in modernity by drawing on a ruined tradition. The artists I have examined in my study undertake that project, and they do so not primarily as “national” figures but as participants in a framework of a networked, cosmopolitan imaginary. In this sense, the book marks a partial break with the model of national art histories.

In a nutshell

This book is intended to help social scientists make sense of the fact that our relation to the world is one of concern. The concern needn’t take the form of worry; it may be just caring about our well-being and how the people and things that matter to us are faring. It’s an evaluative relation to the world.

It’s tempting to think of people just as rational beings.  But a one-sided emphasis on that special capacity fails to take us far in understanding our concerns. We are vulnerable particularly to how others treat us.

At every moment we are moving from current states of flourishing or suffering, to possible future ones—from avoiding lack or deficiency, to finding satisfaction, interest and fulfillment. Even if things are OK now, they may change in the future.

We are also deeply social beings: dependent on the care of others in early life and in illness and infirmity; only able to develop a sense of self and acquire a language and identity via others; dependent on the valuations of others to develop self-respect and esteem.

We become attached to certain people, activities and causes, so that our well-being becomes inseparable from theirs. Although those attachments may help us flourish, we become vulnerable to their loss.  Hence our concerns.  To flourish, we have to monitor, evaluate and look after such things.

Flourishing is not just about physical health, or avoiding violence, but being able to develop and exercise our capacities, and this depends on opportunities to develop good relations to others and to form commitments—to our families, or work, or music, or sport or religion, or whatever.

Suffering can be caused not just by physical harm, but by preventing people from pursuing their commitments—for example, stopping a religious person worshipping.

Yet modern ways of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason—just subjective inventions having nothing to do with evaluations of circumstances.

When a social worker claims a child is suffering from neglect or abuse, she is not merely expressing a personal “value-judgment,” but putting forward a factual claim about the child. When our doctor takes our blood pressure and gives us the numbers, we ask whether it’s good or bad; and when she tells us which, we don’t dismiss this as a gratuitous value-judgment having nothing to do with the facts of the case, but precisely a fuller account of precisely that—our state of being.

Such claims escape any dichotomy of fact and value. If you don’t know that suffering is bad, you don’t know what it is.

Why Things Matter to People follows through the implications of these qualities for the nature of values, for how we reason about what to do, for everyday morality and dignity, and for how we should study society.

In a nutshell

The ability to develop new vaccines quickly is essential to national security and public health. Historically, the U.S. has excelled at responding to national health emergencies. World War II-era programs developed ten new or improved vaccines, often in time to meet the specific objectives of a military mission.  However, since that time rates of vaccine innovation have been falling, not rising.

The idea that we will have the drugs/vaccines that we need, when we need them, is less true today than it once was. The molecular biology revolution has yielded a myriad of tools that facilitate new development. But key research capabilities have eroded, rendering innovation less likely and supplies more vulnerable. As man-made biological threats proliferate and new diseases continue to emerge naturally, we have an urgent need to understand the conditions that foster timely innovation.

Many celebrated late twentieth-century developments—the explosion of scientific sub disciplines and bioengineering techniques, the specialization and dispersion of firm capabilities, and the growth of outsourcing—have actually frustrated vaccine development efforts. The present environment gives developers access to a wider range of scientific expertise and sophisticated techniques, lower overhead, risk-sharing arrangements, and near-term market efficiencies.  But it also leads to higher overall development times and failure rates largely because the development process has become so disaggregated.

Few understand the seriousness of this problem because widespread errors in official vaccine license records create the false impression that innovation has steadily increased over time. These data create support for innovation policies that have not worked well for vaccines of global health and national security importance.  Present day vaccine programs tinker with push/pull policies (such as research grants or market guarantees) to spur innovation, but they rarely scrutinize the development process itself to address critical obstacles to innovation.

Long Shot probes the history of vaccine development for lessons that can inform our efforts to rebuild twenty-first century biodefense capabilities, especially when the financial payback for a particular vaccine is low, but the social returns are high.

In a nutshell

This book tells my personal story, that is, the story of a young scientist, driven by a curiosity about the natural world, who found himself wandering, essentially by accident, into one the fiercest public debates in the history of science and society. That debate is the raging and often rancorous tussle over the reality and implications of human-caused climate change.

I provide a firsthand account of what I refer to as the “climate wars.”

The climate wars are being fought on science by vested interests opposed to any efforts to regulate our ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  These emissions are warming the planet and changing our climate.  If unchecked, they could have disastrous consequences for human civilization and our planet.

Back in the late 1990s, my co-authors and I published a graph that depicted the trend in temperature of the past thousand years. The graph demonstrated that the spike in global temperatures of the past century was without precedent for at least the past 1,000 years.  It became known as the “hockey stick” for its shape—a long-term decline from relatively warm conditions during Medieval time to the colder conditions of the Little Ice Age (think of this as the “handle”), followed by the unprecedented and abrupt warming of the past century (the “blade”).

By publishing this graph—which quickly became an icon in the debate over global warming—my co-authors and I found ourselves directly in the sights of an industry-funded effort to discredit the science supporting a human impact on our climate.

Although I was initially a reluctant combatant in these battles, as I explain in the book, battle scars have hardened me and have led me to embrace the role I now find myself in—an advocate for insuring that the choices we make today, which have a bearing on the futures of our children and grandchildren, are informed by objective and accurate science—science which indicates that the ongoing, unchecked burning of fossil fuels represents a threat to the future of human civilization.

There are other excellent accounts of the science and politics of global warming. But no other provides such a front line view of the scientific battle behind efforts to save our planet from the perils of climate change.