Mairi McLaughlin is Associate Professor of French and an Affiliated Member of the Linguistics Department and the Department of Italian Studies. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and Translation Studies. Her most recent publication presents the results of the first major study into the history of language in the French press. It has a dual aim: to shed light on the history of the genre of journalism and to explore what the study of historical periodicals can bring to our understanding of the history of language.
Professor McLaughlin discussed her recent book with David Bates (Rhetoric) on November 10, 2021 through the Townsend Center’s Berkeley Book Chats.
From its beginnings on the artistic fringe during the Hispanic Civil Rights Movement to its current status as the oldest and most accomplished publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by US Hispanic authors, Arte Público Press and its imprint, Piñata Books, have become a showcase for Hispanic literary creativity, arts and culture.
The original publishers of Sandra Cisneros’ seminal The House on Mango Street, Arte Público’s other well-known authors include Obie-award-winning playwright and filmmaker Luis Valdez, playwright Miguel Piñero and best-selling authors Nicholasa Mohr, Victor Villaseñor, and Helena María Viramontes. As part of the ongoing efforts to bring Hispanic literature to mainstream audiences, Arte Público Press launched the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program in 1992. This program represents the first nationally coordinated attempt to recover, index and publish lost Latino writings that date from the American colonial period through 1960. [from the publisher’s web site].
From children’s books and contemporary fiction to critical social history, the UC Berkeley Library is proud to hold most of Arte Púbico Press’ bilingual catalog of publications in the Main (Gardner) Stacks, the Ethnic Studies Library, and The Bancroft Library. In recent years, the Library has also acquired many of its publications in digital form through Digitalia Hispánica, Latino Literature, and other ebook platforms such as OverDrive. These can be discovered in UC Library Search with keyword phrase “arte publico press” and limiting to online through UC Berkeley.
Oral Narratives and Black Lives in Francophone Studies
Senegalese in the Diaspora: What Sociolinguistic Interviews Can Tell Us about Language, Race, Mobility, and Belonging Maya Smith, University of Washington
Drawing on extensive interviews with people of Senegalese heritage in Paris, Rome, and New York City, this talk explores the fascinating role of language in national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities. Senegalese in the diaspora are notable in their capacity for movement and in their multifaceted approach to discourse, shaping their identity as they purposefully switch between languages. Through a mix of poignant, funny, reflexive, introspective, and witty stories, interviewees blur the lines between the utility and pleasure of language, allowing a more nuanced understanding of why and how Senegalese move.
“Un désordre indescriptible”: Folklore as Mask in the Congolese Nervous State Jonathon Repinecz, George Mason University
This paper is part of a larger project about how colonial explorers, missionaries, and magistrates in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo used strategies of “folklorization”—that is, the framing of oral traditional materials as quaint, rural, and authentic—as propaganda in the service of popularizing the colony and obscuring the everyday violence of the colonial state. It will focus on the archives of Léon Guébels, a prosecutor and judge who published many folklore collections under a pseudonym, contain manuscripts written by Congolese schoolchildren in both French and African languages, sent to him by their teachers, which he overwrites in large red letters with appreciations such as “IDIOTIC,” “NOT WITTY ENOUGH,” or “CLEARLY THE INVENTION OF A SILLY CHRISTIAN GIRL.” I will examine some of the reasons he finds these tales inconvenient, framing my findings in the context of colonial racial anxieties over subversive ideologies, urbanization, “detribalization,” and open rebellion.
This exhibit celebrates the academic achievements of Berkeley South and Southeast Asia scholars across disciplines. It recognizes Berkeley’s robust South and Southeast Asian language instruction program, distinguished teaching award recipients, and previous Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research winners and honorable mentions.
The South/Southeast Asia Library plays a pivotal role in building interdisciplinary collections in all major formats and languages and has, for five decades, served as the scholarly lifeline for vibrant South and Southeast Asian Studies communities, both local and global.
This exhibit uses a variety of faculty publications and special collections to highlight Berkeley scholarship’s evolution, scope, and profound impact. Source collections and libraries whose noteworthy treasures are most featured in the exhibit include The Bancroft Library, Doe Library, Music Library, and the South/Southeast Asia Library.
We hope you will enjoy viewing this exhibit.
Sincerely,
Virginia Shih, Adnan Malik, and Vaughn Egge Co-curators of the South/Southeast Asia Exhibit
It has been a challenging year and we look forward to most of you returning to campus where you can take advantage of all the resources the Library has to offer. By August 25, most of UC Berkeley’s libraries will have reopened. This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the Romance languages focuses on both digital and print resources. For the most up-to-date information on the UC Berkeley Library’s services, please continue to check the Library services and resources during COVID-19 page.
Photo: Centre Cultural La Nau – Universitat de València by Claude Potts, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Librarian for Economics, Political Economy, and International Government Information Jim Church is one of the three editors of the just released IFLA publication The Government Information Landscape and Libraries, which provides case studies on challenges and opportunities for access, preservation and digitization of government information around the world. Jim is also the author of the chapter on international governmental organizations (IGOs), and he provides a terrific overview of this complex and challenging area. As Jim states, “IGO documents and publications often do not show up in Google Scholar or in the Indexing and Abstracting databases that libraries purchase. They are often not cited, or cited poorly.” Yet they are an important, often essential, source for researchers seeking information (numeric and textual) on a wide array of global topics.
We are very fortunate to have Jim’s expertise at Berkeley, and it’s great that it’s now being shared globally through this open access resource!
Susan Edwards,
Head, Social Sciences Division Social Welfare Librarian & Interim African Studies Librarian
This past spring, the UC Berkeley Library added 181 French ebooks to our existing collection from Franco-Belgian vendor Cairn.info. Though they aren’t yet discoverable in OskiCat or in the new UC Library Search unified catalog which launches on July 27, they can be read along with other ebooks and ejournals on the Cairn website.
Illustration by Rachid Koraïchi for Le Livre de la frontière (2006)
Al Manar Éditions is an independent publishing house dedicated to the art and literatures of the Mediterranean with a notable focus on the Arab world. Established in 1996 within the Galerie Al Manar in Casablanca, directed by Alain and Christine Gorius from 1994 to 2003, the editorial house is now based in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and has published nearly 400 titles to date. Whether in translation or in original language, the majority of their books are in French. Well-known writers in their catalog from the global south include Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Adonis, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Mohammed Bennis, Abdellatif Laâbi, Mostafa Nissabouri, and Salah Stétié. From Europe and among others, there is Sylvie Germain, Jean-Pierre Millecam, Nicole de Pontcharra, as well as Kabila, a French painter of Andalusian Roma origin. Others include Syrian poets Aïcha Arnaout and Maram Al-Masri, Lebanese writers Etel Adnan, Georgia Makhlouf, Leïla Sebbar and Albert Bensoussan, who, by virtue of their family origins and their background, belong to both shores of the Mediterranean, like Anne Rothschild, an Ashkenazi poet and engraver who is often met in Tahar Bekri Ramallah—a Tunisian poet, or Özdemir Ince a—Turkish poet and man of letters as well as the Catalan translator and literary critic Jaume Pont.
Al Manar serves as a reputable vehicle of dissemination for the staggering diversity of thought and creative talent in the Mediterranean region. The UC Berkeley Library is proud to hold more than 40 of its imprints with several of the more precious artists’ books shelved in The Bancroft Library. The publishing house regularly exhibits at the Codex Book Fair and Symposium held biannually in Richmond and Berkeley.
Thurber, J. (1939). The last flower: a parable in pictures. New York: Harper & brothers. Source: HathiTrust.
Originally published in November 1939, two months after World War II officially began, James Thurber’s The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures is a graphic novel ahead of its day. Inspired in particular by the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, it chronicles the eternal cycles of war, peace, love, and the resilience of one little flower and remains as relevant today as it was then. The text has been translated into dozens of languages worldwide, among them a French translation by Albert Camus and published by Gallimard in 1952. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Thurber was not only a cartoonist but also an author, humorist, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit who joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1927 where he remained for most of his career.
Reissued by the University of Iowa Press in 2007, the first edition and later edition are temporarily available online to the UC community through the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access service until the UC libraries fully reopen this fall. You can learn more about The Last Flower at the Columbus Public Library’s Art Unbound II exhibition installed in its Carnegie Gallery.
Thurber, J. (1939). The last flower: a parable in pictures. New York: Harper & brothers. Source: HathiTrust.
Dibs Earth by Philip Chapman-Bell on Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
Last month, the Executive Committee of the Librarians Association of the University of California, Berkeley (LAUC-B) unanimously endorsed a resolution written by its Committee on Diversity stressing the importance of the continued acquisition of print materials during the pandemic and beyond. The statement reflected on temporary changes to the UC Berkeley Library’s collection development policies and the lasting impact they might have. LAUC-B chair Ramona Collins wrote in an email, “[. . .] the focus on acquiring more digital and fewer print resources can lead to further suppression of already underrepresented voices, topics and geographical areas.”
Faced with the prevalence of print publications from the Global South, East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Eurasia, the spectrum of viewpoints collected and preserved by academic libraries risks becoming impoverished. “Strong and diverse collections like Berkeley’s inspire and allow researchers to immerse themselves in cutting-edge discovery and teaching,” reads the statement, “but what happens when the acquisition of diverse resources becomes vulnerable to reduced funding or reprioritization?”
