‘World Beyond Our Borders’ series features faculty books

UW–Madison’s International Institute and Borders Books announce the fall 2005 series of the partners’ popular faculty book series, “World Beyond Our Borders.”

The series, which began in 2003, has presented more than 20 UW–Madison faculty authors, features readings and discussions on international subjects. All events are at 7 p.m. at Borders West, 3750 University Avenue, Madison. The dates are subject to change. For more information, please visit http://www.intlstudies.wisc.edu or (608) 262-5590.

• Thursday, Sept. 15: Jill Casid, art history, “Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization” (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). From the plantations of the “nabobs” to the island gardens of narrative fiction, “Sowing Empire” considers imperial re-landscaping – its patriarchal organization, heterosexual reproduction, and slavery – and how it contributed to the construction of imperial power. At the same time, the book shows how these picturesque landscapes and sugar plantations contained within them the seeds of resistance – how, for instance, slave gardens and the Afro-Caribbean practice of vodou threatened authority and created new possibilities for once again transforming the landscape.
• Tuesday, Oct. 4: Ksenija Bilbija, Spanish and Portuguese; Jo Ellen Fair, journalism; and Leigh Payne, political science; editors of “The Art of Truth-Telling About Authoritarian Rule” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). People who have lived through authoritarian rule have stories to tell. But how do individuals begin to speak about a political past that was too horrible for words? “This book is both important and necessary in its laying bare of the human costs of dictatorship, and of the challenges faced by those who seek to come to terms with, and indeed remedy or atone for, brutal pasts,” says Susana Chavez-Silverman, author of Killer Cronicas: Bilingual Memories. “A most worthwhile undertaking,” says Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
• Wednesday, Nov. 9: Giovanna Miceli Jeffries, French and Italian, translator of “Keeping House: A Novel in Recipes,” by Clara Sereni (SUNY Press, 2005). Jeffries discusses the fine art of translating a book that can be read as the blueprint of Italian intellectual leftist culture of the 1960-1980s and the polarization that produced Italy’s years of “terror.” As a coming of age fictional autobiography, we find the “ferocious refusal of the overbearing family and the traditional couple” softened by the author’s “loving understanding of the different roles in life and culinary rituals.” Refreshments based on the novel’s recipes will be served.
• Wednesday, Dec. 7: Neil Whitehead, anthropology. “In Darkness & Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery & Witchcraft in Amazonia” (Duke University Press, 2004) and “Violence” (SAR Press, 2004). Whitehead will discuss two of his recent books. “In Darkness and Secrecy” brings together ethnographic examinations of Amazonian assault sorcery, witchcraft, and injurious magic, or “dark shamanism.” “Violence” presents the views of ten prominent scholars from a wide variety of disciplines who ask whether we can understand violence not as evidence of cultural rupture but as a form of cultural expression. The scholars’ research makes clear that within specific cultures, violent acts are expressions of cultural codes imbued with great meaning for both perpetrator and victim.