All Announcements

Announcing “RENDANG”

by  • 

buy from HFS Books

buy from Bookshop.org

“Harris’s poems turn the utterance back to ourselves, opening a dialogue between us, our modernity, the depth of our loss and the weight of our remembering. Where epithets rend memory from the moment, the artefacts of wounds heal themselves through a weft of irony, weaving language into a hard-earned scar.” —Sandeep Parmar

In RENDANG, Will Harris complicates and experiments with the lyric in a way that urges it forward. With an unflinching yet generous eye, RENDANG is a collection that engages equally with the pain and promise of self-perception. Drawing on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage, Harris shows us new ways to think about the contradictions of identity and cultural memory. He creates companions that speak to us in multiple languages; they sit next to us on the bus, walk with us through the crowd, and talk to us while we’re chopping shallots. They deftly ask us to consider how and what we look at, as well as what we don’t look at and why.

Playing eruditely with and querying structures of narrative, with his use of the long poem, the image, ekphrasis, and ruptured forms, RENDANG is a startling new take on the self, and how an identity is constructed. It is intellectual and accessible, moving and experimental, and combines a linguistic innovation with a deep emotional rooting.

sample poem from book

WILL HARRIS is a London based poet of Anglo-Indonesian heritage. He’s the author of the critically acclaimed Mixed-Race Supermanand All This is Implied, winner of the LRB Bookshop Poetry Pick for best pamphlet. In 2016, he was part of an Evening Standardfeature on the ‘new guard’ of London poets; he was shortlisted for the 2017 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, and the 2018 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for ‘SAY’ (Poetry Review). He was awarded a Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation in 2019. He has published with the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Granta, The Poetry Review, and The White Review, among others.

Summer Sale On All Wesleyan Music Titles!

by  • 

View a list of music titles here.


Award Winners

Wesleyan University Press was founded in 1957 and our books have won many awards. Books in our music series are no exception!


Recent Favorites

We always have great new titles! Be sure to sign up for our mailing list.


Books for Courses

If you’d like to consider a book for a course you teach, Wesleyan offers free electronic exam copies for teachers. We offer free desk copies (hard copies) to teachers who adopt a book for a course.


Classics

Wesleyan University Press was founded in 1957 and is known for publishing cutting edge books by scholars and practitioners including John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Christopher Small, and many others.

Buy through the end of August and save!

For 40% off single books, use code QSUMMER4

For 50% off of 3 or more books, use code QSUMMER5

View a list of music titles here.

 

 

 

 

Hamilton Movie–Original Letters from the Burr-Hamilton Duel

by  • 

The Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway sensation Hamilton, along with the recently released Disney film version, has sparked renewed interest in historical figures Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Interview in Weehawken: The Burr-Hamilton Duel as Told in the Original Documents, first published in 1960, is a closely annotated thread of documents that provides a riveting account of the lead-up to and aftermath of their disastrous duel.

On July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton was mortally wounded by Aaron Burr in a wooden pistol duel that was the culmination of years of personal and political conflict. Hamilton succumbed to his wounds on July 12th. The incident helped to further legislation banning duels, and Burr was indicted for murder in the states of New York and New Jersey. Charges were dropped.

Starting in the summer of 1804, the fiery correspondence between Hamilton and Burr, notes and accounts from their seconds-in-command, and other documents that provide an immediate sense of the personalities and times are included in this richly researched book.

Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr

Plaque commemorating the fateful duel.

The introduction and conclusion to the documents provide an interesting synopsis of the parallel lives of Hamilton and Burr, as well as an explanation of the duel’s lasting impacts on American history. This is the perfect summary of the events that inspired the hit musical—a great resource for teachers and students and the perfect gift for history buffs and fans of the musical.

Use code Q301 on HFS Books to get 30% off in your purchase of Interview in Weehawken. 

“Public Figures” Revisited

by  • 

The topic of monuments and memorialization of historical figures has been a point of contention in the United States. We recall the removal of confederate statues in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, resulting in retaliation from violent white supremacist groups. In more recent news, the removal of similar statues has swept the nation after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Riah Milton, and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells. As protests against police brutality occur in states across the nation, calls for the removal of statues that stand as symbols of racism and oppression have increased. Some monuments, such as one of Christopher Columbus in Boston and Thomas Jefferson in Portland, have been physically removed by frustrated people demanding a more accurate recognition of American history.

Many of these Civil War-related statues were erected long after the war, in the early 20th century. This fact might leave one to ponder, what was the intention of honoring Confederate military leaders in the early 20th century?

Jena Osman’s book Public Figures examines the monuments and statues of Philadelphia, pondering each statue’s literal “view” on the city as well as the embedded history within their creation and placement. As the book progresses, including photographs of various figures, the common theme remains of militarism and pride in the state. Regardless of the historical context of a statue, whether it be a Civil War soldier or a replica of a classical Greek statue, weaponry including guns, swords, spears, and grenades are attached to the hands and arms of these iron men. Many are dressed in military uniform, differentiating them from the civilian life of the passersby.

Osman ponders what we do and do not notice as we move about our lives. Does our oblivious walk past such statues parallel our nation’s ability to ignore the deadly work of state-sanctioned violence and indicate an implicit acceptance of our country’s racist history? What kind of message do statues symbolizing slave owners and colonizers send to communities of color? And why must these communities accept these statues looming over their daily lives?

When you next find yourself in a public space, take a look around at the monuments and art placed there. Ponder what the intended message is.

To learn more about Public Figures, check out our Reader’s Companion. Teachers might find these classroom exercises useful, including a research project for students to investigate their local “public figures.”

 

 

Human Signs Ensemble includes Wesleyan author and professor Hari Krishnan

by  • 

HUMAN SIGNS is a series of audiovisual ensembles created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Its creator, Yuval Avital, describes its premise:

“HUMAN SIGNS unites great protagonists of the contemporary dance and Ballet scene, vocal soloists from all around the globe, including carriers of ancient traditions, contemporary and experimental pioneers, religious representatives from every faith. All united in a participatory art project that from Milan connects the entire world to share – at the times of COVID-19 – the HUMAN SIGNS, presented online through a series of weekly audiovisual creations (every Tuesday at this link)–each one introduced by a different curator–interpreting the viral aesthetic as a multimedia choir of vulnerability, spirituality, inner strength, hopes and fears.”

HUMAN SIGNS’ 7th edition ensemble includes Wesleyan author and professor Hari Krishnan. His dialogue/vignette is from 40:26- 52:20.

Read Dr. Krishnan’s statement on his work, “Life on Pause–A Meditation”.

“Being part of this artistic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, was a truly evocative, moving, revealing journey for me. I had to sit, still, in my dark bedroom, retreat within myself, and distill the restless, helpless despair my physical self and soul embodied in this fractured, tumultuous time. After two weeks of introspection, in the friendly company of the Cantus Firmus mantra and the sunrise as a healing balm, I let my mind, body and heart express my inner world through this ‘dance’. Drawing from my rich Indian dance ethos, I carefully abstracted from the structure of mezzuvani–a seated salon solo dance style where the dancer performs with mudras (hand gestures) and abhinaya (facial expressions).

“As I choreographed, using Covid-19 as the premise, current political events collided with my (already) altered realties, i.e. the police killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement protests in the U.S. In homage, I empathized with my marginalized friends, by referencing BLM’s symbol of resistance–the raised clenched fist–in the beginning of my solo to join in solidarity with them.

“Reflecting the context of isolation and depletion in my current life, I radically edited all the staples I take for granted as an Indian dancer–the complex footwork, layered multiple mudras, theatrical abhinaya, elaborate costumes, jewelry, make-up, etc. Hence my minimalist iteration. As a metaphor for the quarantine, I “locked-down” my dancing legs by immobilizing them in the Padmasana (yogic lotus seated) position. While my left hand ‘stops’ loneliness, angst, dissonance, sorrow, hurt and fear at the outer prakaram (perimeter), my right hand’s index finger, quantifying a singular prayer, invites the healing sun into my darkened soul to bathe it in light and cleanse it with warmth. My centered, gently undulating torso, and circling hands welcome the spirit of a Higher Power to take residence in and transform the ‘chaotic beauty’ within my soul garbha griha (sanctum sanctorum) into Ananda (Bliss)….”

Hari Krishnan Krishnan is an internationally respected and award-winning choreographer, professional Bharatanātyam dancer, educator, and writer. His research interests span a range of topics, including queer subjectivities in South Asian and global dance performance, colonialism, post-colonialism and Indian dance, and the history of devadasi (courtesan) dance traditions in South India. Krishnan is also the artistic director of Toronto-based dance company inDANCE. As an award winning dance maker, he is commissioned internationally for his bold and transgressive choreography. Also an associate professor of dance at Wesleyan University, he is the author of Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam (Wesleyan University Press) and is currently co-editing a forthcoming volume entitled Dance and the Early South Indian Cinema (Oxford University Press).

Juneteenth, celebrating freedom

by  • 

On June 19, 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation was read by General Gordon to Texas, the last state to free enslaved people. Known as Juneteenth, this day marks the official end of slavery in the United States.

President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation almost two years before Juneteenth on January 1, 1863. However, at the time it was issued, the proclamation only applied to places under Confederate control, excluding other areas such as border states and rebel areas under Union control. Two years later, all enslaved people were officially freed.

Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday in 1979. Today, it is recognized by many states and celebrated through parades, barbecues, and other outdoor activities.

On this Juneteenth, Wesleyan University Press celebrates old and new publications by black authors exploring the legacy of the black experience in America through poetry, essays, and historical texts. Make sure to check out the below titles to support Black authors on this holiday.

Congratulations Abigail Chabitnoy, winner of a Colorado Book Award!

by  • 

Colorado Humanities has awarded Abigail Chabitnoy with the Colorado Book Award in the Poetry Category, for her first collection of poetry, How to Dress a Fish.

Winners of the 2020 Colorado Book Awards were announced and read briefly on Saturday, May 30, during a celebratory virtual event held. Please click here, view to the Facebook Live video. (You do not need a Facebook account to watch in your browser.)

Finalists filled two Zoom rooms for the traditional picture, and over one thousand viewed the Live program. An after-party for the winners and finalists was held via Zoom.

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael’s boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies—while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices—the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

Abigail Chabitnoy is a poet of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She received her MFA at Colorado State University, where she was an associate editor for Colorado Review. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat Brut, Red Ink, and Mud City.

How to Dress a Fish was also short-listed for The 2020 Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Learn more about Colorado Humanities Council and the Colorado Book Awards.

Enjoy a slide show from Pablo Delano’s “Hartford Seen”

by  • 

“With the images in Hartford Seen Pablo Delano captures the delicate balance between architectural permanence and the evanescence of community—a celebration of generations of residents and the structures they’ve shaped.”
—Frank Mitchell, Executive Director, The Amistad Center for Art & Culture

With more than 150 full-color images, Hartford Seen vitally expands the repertoire of photographic studies of American cities and of their contemporary built environments.

Hartford Unseen is a personal meditation on the city’s built environment. Documentary photographer Pablo Delano implements a methodical but intuitive approach, scrutinizing the layers of history embedded in the city’s fabric. He documents commercial establishments, industrial sites, places of worship, and homes with a painter’s eye to color and composition. His vision tends to eschew the city’s better-known landmarks in favor of vernacular structures that reflect the tastes and needs of the city’s diverse population at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Over the last 100 years Hartford may have transformed from one of America’s wealthiest cities to one of its poorest, but as suggested by Hartford Seen, today it nevertheless enjoys extraordinary cultural offerings, small entrepreneurship, and a vibrant spiritual life. The city’s historical palette consists mostly of the brownstone, redbrick, and gray granite shades common in New England’s older cities. Yet Delano perceives that it is also saturated with the blazing hues favored by many of its newer citizens.

In his essay, “Hartford Unseen,” Guillermo B. Irizarry explains how Delano was born in Puerto Rico to Eastern European Jewish artist emigrants. Moving to Hartford from the Bronx, Delano, as explained by Irizarry, “has for the past two decades scrutinized layers of history embedded in the Connecticut capital’s built environment.” The first major exhibition of this work was held at the Connecticut Historical Society in 2014. In the original exhibit catalog, artist Richard Hollant noted how “[p]eople walking down [the] street see things differently because cities like ours are built on hierarchies, and the people within them…adapt this model to make sense of their city in their own way…based on economic conditions, some by historical or social context, others by location.” Delano presents his metropolis “in a state of flux,” as he explains, where architecture, small businesses, and residential neighborhoods experience a visual layering as a result of change.

An introduction by Laura Wexler and the aforementioned essay by Guillermo B. Irizarry frame the historical context of the images, from the land theft and forced removal of Natives in the 17th century through the city’s role in the slave trade and succession of immigrant communities that have called Hartford home over the decades. Traces of these stories are evident in Delano’s photographs, seen in the changing architecture, housing, public art, and colorful signage that grace Hartford’s neighborhoods and commercial districts.

PABLO DELANO holds BFA in painting from Temple University Tyler School of Arts and an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Fine Arts and the Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, where he has lived and taught for almost twenty-five years.

Announcing “The Cultural Work: Maroon Performance in Paramaribo, Suriname”

by  • 

 

buy from HFS

buy from IndieBound

“Based on in-depth ethnography, this book presents a fresh and theoretically provocative view of some of the most prized, but least documented, African-based music and dance traditions of the Americas—as they exist today rather than in some idealized past.”
–Kenneth Bilby, author of True-Born Maroons, and Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart

How do people in an intensely multicultural city live alongside one another while maintaining clear boundaries? This question is at the core of Corinna Campbell’s fascinating study The Cultural Work: Maroon Performance in Paramaribo, Suriname, which illustrates how the Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves) of Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, have used culture-representational performance to sustain and advocate for their communities within Paramaribo, the capital.

Based on the author’s long-term fieldwork, The Cultural Work focuses on three distinct collectives—Kifoko, Saisa, and Fiamba—known locally as “cultural groups” (cultureel groepen), all of which specialize in the music and dance traditions of the Maroons of Suriname and neighboring French Guyana. Weaving together performance analysis, ethnography, and critical theory, Campbell demonstrates the broad spectrum of functions and meanings that culture-representational performance can have, while highlighting competing pressures that feature prominently in the lives of Maroons in Paramaribo. She suggests that ambivalence—fundamental to the folkloric enterprise and magnified here by the urban Maroons’ social circumstances—enhances possibilities for social criticism for performers and audiences alike.

A vital contribution to scholarship that seeks to broaden our knowledge of the cultural map of the African diaspora in South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this interdisciplinary book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of ethnomusicology, dance studies, performance studies, and anthropology.

A Fiamba dancer illustrates a choreographed move.

CORINNA CAMPBELL received her PhD from Harvard University in 2012 and is assistant professor of music at Williams College. Her work focuses primarily on traditional genres of music and dance throughout the African Diaspora, with particular interest in Suriname and Ghana. Her research has been funded by Fulbright Program, Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Chabitnoy Shortlisted for International Griffin Poetry Prize

by  • 

 

Abigail Chabitnoy’s debut poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, was shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize. The prestigious award is given by The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. In addition to the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Griffin Trust initiates and supports projects and ventures consistent with the mandate of the prize to further promote appreciation of Canadian and international poetry.

Watch the video to find out who was awarded the International and Canadian Griffin Prizes.

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael’s boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies—while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices—the poems form an act of witness and reclamation.

Judges had high praise for Chabitnoy’s debut collection, saying “How to Dress a Fish is an act of remythologizing and personal re-collection, a text of redress to the violence of US colonialism.” Further praise says her poems “move with undercurrent, sections, elision, and invention into voicings of self, land, story, and mythic place” and “speak of division’s expression and history’s fracturing violence.” Read a sample poem from the collection below:

It was winter.

It was winter. I was sweating. You and I were in a boat, going back to
Unalaska and my body went cold to spite my discomfort. You can be
wind. You can be feathers. You can be fur or fin or teeth. I am not even
earth. Not even bone. But permafrost in a warming state. Cold, not cold
enough. Porous. Full of holes. Not filled but
disappearing.

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat. Brut, Red Ink, and Mud City.