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Boston Globe
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A lock of hair, a baby rattle — and a history of slavery
It's fitting she begins with Samuel Coleridge's signature, located in a Cambridge library ledger, a seemingly innocuous record left by an author Nabugodi admired. In it, she locates the 'contemporary abolitionist poetry' he probably sourced for his prize-winning, anti-slavery-themed Greek ode, which, it turns out, was milk-fed on pro-slavery's watch. Coleridge, she notes, was a 'Rustat Scholar,' a prestigious award funded by the estate of Thomas Rustat — one of the founding members of the Royal African Company, the most prolific slave-trading organization in history. Nabugodi connects this funding to even more complicated systems of erasures. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Related : At the Bristol library, she realizes how ledgers reinforce human hierarchies. 'The same record keeping techniques that help us sort and arrange books in a library also enable the reduction of human lives into nameless entries,' she writes, 'and paved the way for transforming humans into commodities.' These ledgers were more than neutral bookkeeping. 'The ledger is a powerful technology of dehumanization,' and a form of agnotology — a term for the deliberate production and maintenance of ignorance. Advertisement If this all feels abstract or victimless (lists, libraries, literary allowances) Nabugodi traces the pedigree of Coleridge's work to the finale of his descent: 'how [he] went from being an idealistic abolitionist to becoming a white supremacist.' Her critique contains discomfort, for Romantic literature has long been her field of expertise and joy. 'This is what I do not want to talk about,' she writes. But she does, and thankfully so. 'Much as I was appalled by discovering their views [Wordsworth, Coleridge] I was even more dismayed by the absence of any critical discussion of their statements, even though they had been in print and easily accessible for decades.' Romanticism was lit by ideas like equality and electricity, she writes, but those advancements came with an asterisk — progress wasn't for everyone: 'Europeans of the Romantic period considered themselves to be superior to people with darker skin.' Even abolitionists 'tended to regard Africans as inferior' and felt it was 'their duty to take pity on the poor savages.' Coleridge not only shared these views — he diagrammed them, placing Black Africans at the bottom of a racial hierarchy and 'crystallized' them in a lecture where he argued: ''Human Species consists of ONE historic Race and of several others .'' Related : Nabugodi also studied the stepladder of influences in Mary Shelley's work, finding them saturated with the racist pseudoscience Coleridge (whom she knew since childhood) later espoused. Shelley's personal physician, William Lawrence, was also deeply interested in comparative anatomy — 'the science that sought to define species, races, and varieties of man through comparison … skin tone, hair type, skull measurements' — eugenics, in other words. Shelley likely owned Lawrence's 'Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology' or knew of it, and she certainly borrowed from his lectures for ' Advertisement Her encounter with the Shelley 'relics,' as they were called, a word in lockstep with Nabugodi's suspicion that archives expose a racialized sense of exclusion, is the can opener of the book. As she holds Shelley's bracelet — mourning jewelry made from the author's hair: 'It takes me a while to realize that one reason why I do not expect to find any carefully preserved Black hair is because I myself do not value my Afro.' She recalls how, as a teen, her white schoolmates mocked loose Afro curls on the floor. 'Yuck, it's pubes.' When a white friend stuck some of Nabugodi's hair on a Barbie doll, 'It looked horrendous. … The other kids could see it. Yet [my friend] was beaming … seemingly unaware that, like a childish Frankenstein, she had created a monster.' These memories lead Nabugodi to explore racist Romantic-era taxonomies. If Black hair ever entered the archive, she writes, 'it is more likely to be a scientific specimen than a family heirloom.' Despite the scholarly weight of the book, as a writer Nabugodi is warm and witty, her prose both intimate and animated. To unite scholarship with storytelling, the political with the personal, and the funny with the grim, is something that really should be required for tenure because it shows how nimble her intellect is. There's another kind of archive she alludes to — our neural archives, which activate when we learn something new. If some people are excluded from the archives, do we accept their absence because they are not part of the networks our brains remember or design? Nabugodi has written a masterpiece about how history is made, maintained, and remembered, while also including what history forgot — with trembling hands, she admits — and with power and ferocity. Advertisement THE TREMBLING HAND: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive By Mathelinda Nabugodi Knopf, 432 pages, $32 Kerri Arsenault is the author of ' ' and director and founder of The Environmental Storytelling Studio (TESS).
New York Times
18-07-2025
- General
- New York Times
The Meaning Hidden in Wordsworth's Teacup and Mary Shelley's Hair
THE TREMBLING HAND: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, by Mathelinda Nabugodi William Wordsworth liked his tea, and he had a favorite cup to drink it from, one 'painted in an Orientalist design,' as Mathelinda Nabugodi writes, with little birds 'flying around beneath' its glaze. That cup is now in the archives of St. John's College, in Cambridge, England, and, as Nabugodi recounts in 'The Trembling Hand,' her new book about the entanglement of British Romanticism and slavery, she first saw it while attending a seminar at the college on abolitionism in 18th-century Britain. Wordsworth's alma mater had educated some prominent abolitionists, and in 1833 the movement finally succeeded. Parliament abolished slavery, and ever since the English have told what Nabugodi, a literary scholar at Cambridge, rightly calls a 'self-congratulatory' story about its end, while turning 'a blind eye' to the fortunes they made from it. The seminar she attended was not blind. The instructor reminded participants that many people in Britain saw slavery as a positive good, and among the documents on display was a letter from the overseer of a Jamaican sugar estate about the purchase of ever more men and women to work in its fields. Sugar was a brutal business. Razor-like machetes to cut the cane, heavy rollers to press its juice and constant flames to boil it down: All had to be done fast, to keep that juice from spoiling, and severed limbs and disabling burns were common. When Wordsworth got his teacup in 1816, almost every spoonful of sugar in Britain had been produced by Caribbean slave labor, and Nabugodi assumes he drank it sweet. But his connections to slavery were much closer than that. The Lake District nobleman who employed Wordsworth's father owned a plantation in Barbados, and an early patron had one as well, on the tiny island of Nevis. Indeed, it was at that slave owner's house in 1795 that Wordsworth first met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The creative friction of their friendship led to some of the greatest poems in the English language, and the birth of the movement called Romanticism. 'The Trembling Hand' recognizes that greatness. Nevertheless, Nabugodi wants her readers to see how fully entwined the cultural and material wealth of Britain's Romantic era was with slavery, and how long a presence Black people have had on that island. Much of this is well known to specialists; 30 years ago Gretchen Gerzina's 'Black London' described their workaday presence in the metropolis during a period that exactly corresponds to Nabugodi's own. 'Bridgerton' it wasn't. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Stop using the word ‘genius' – here's why they don't exist
'Genius' has become a widely devalued concept: it can describe a goal by Mo Salah, Sally Rooney's latest novel, or the geek who fixes your computer. One reason for this, as Helen Lewis suggests in her breezy and entertaining new book The Genius Myth, is that the idea of genius has always been hazy. It holds that an exceptional few possess, for some reason, faculties or talents from which the many are ineluctably excluded, and that no amount of perspiration, method or reasoning can produce the eureka! moment, the sudden flash of inspiration or intuition that opens closed doors. Lewis is sceptical. There is no such thing as genius, she argues, in the sense of an individual discovering or creating something unprecedented. Even the most apparently original artists and scientists are building out of what is already there, drawing on either tradition or collaboration. 'To make Leonardo,' she writes, 'you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450.' The same could be said for Steve Jobs needing Silicon Valley in 1997. And yet there lingers the glamorous notion, fundamental to Romanticism, that genius is a divine gift granted to an elite exempt from normal standards of behaviour. Licensed by his operatic achievements, Wagner's anti-Semitism has to be excused; Picasso's serial maltreatment of the women he loved is framed as inspiration for some of his most powerful paintings. Related to this is Thomas Carlyle's belief that history is made and changed not by impersonal social forces or revolutionary masses but egregious mould-breakers such as Cromwell or Napoleon. Lewis finds such hero worship aggravating: she complains that 'people who succeed wildly in one domain stop thinking of themselves as any combination of talented, hard-working and lucky, and instead come to imagine that they are a superior sort of human.' After this comes the book's strongest section, exploring the development of the (now largely debunked) idea of IQ and its implication of inherent genius in those who score highly – as well as its uncomfortable relationship to racism and eugenics. Lewis exposes the fraudulence of some celebrated spokesmen in this field, including the psychologists Cyril Burt and H J Eysenck, as well as recording the rather poignant tale of Marilyn Vos Savant, whose chart-busting IQ of 228 was honoured in The Guinness Book of Records but who ended up as an advice columnist in a popular magazine. Some comedy pops up here too, notably in the account of Robert K Graham's short-lived scheme for Nobel laureates to provide a bank of sperm that could impregnate comparably brilliant women to produce a new breed of genius. And it's amusing to find among Havelock Ellis's many potty notions the assertion in his study of 'the British genius' that East Anglians have 'no aptitude for abstract thinking'. The latter half of Lewis's book is a series of disconnected essays, and it's less successful. A chapter on Thomas Edison usefully points to the moment when the Byronic idea of genius gives way to 'the workaholic tech bro harnessing the white heat of technological innovation'. There's proper acknowledgement of the backroom boys on whom the front-page astrophysicists such as Stephen Hawking rely for their ground-breaking discoveries, and due tribute is paid to the support systems that women such as Tolstoy's wife Sophia and Pollock's wife Lee Krasner provided for their husbands' grand achievements – at the cost of their own aspirations and talents. But too much space is wasted on the question of the Beatles, and futile speculations as to what might have happened if John had never met Paul. Quite what the avant-garde theatre maker Chris Goode (posthumously exposed as a paedophile) did to merit inclusion is anyone's guess. More predictably, 'disruptor' Elon Musk appears to be dispatched as 'one of the clearest examples of how the mythology of genius – the sense of being a special sort of person - can warp someone's outlook'. What is most disappointing, however, is that Lewis doesn't engage in any depth with a category of genius that doesn't depend on tradition or collaboration, and which remains something of a neurological mystery. This consists very largely of men, often on the autistic spectrum, who excel in fields such as chess, mathematics and music and whose brains appear to be wired differently to those of the rest of us, especially in terms of their ability to make staggeringly complex computations in nanoseconds and draw on total recall of anything they've read. Films such as Rain Man, based on the real-life figure of Kim Peek, have romanticised this phenomenon, and it would have been worth analysing, inasmuch as it relates to Lewis's questioning of the extent to which genius is the result of mental torture or eccentricity. It would also have been interesting to speculate on a new species of purportedly superhuman genius: AI. Now that computers are on the brink of becoming creative thinkers as well as information processors, might the intellectual potential of homo sapiens have run its course? Or will A1 turn out to be merely the latest instalment in the 'genius myth'?
Hindustan Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
A Biography of Loneliness: Read an excerpt from the book by Fay Bound Alberti
In the critically acclaimed The Lonely City (2017), the writer Olivia Laing extolled the pleasures as well as the pains of loneliness, identifying loneliness as a creative enterprise as well as a manifestation of a particular urban identity. Laing illustrates beautifully the paradoxical situation of loneliness in the modern urban landscape, where one is theoretically closer to others, yet also anonymized and placeless. She links her personal story of loneliness in a vast city to works of modern art, including the anonymity of the self in the work of the American realist painter and printmaker Edward Hopper (1882–1967). Hopper's representations of modern American life, of solitary figures in a hotel lobby or a diner, for instance, surrounded by the possibility of companionship yet somehow removed from others, have become synonymous with the alienation of the urban environment. For the Romantic poets, loneliness intersected with the creation of a particular kind of secular, creative identity—one which was gendered and combined ideas about civilization versus nature with the pursuit of beauty, love, and the soul. The vision of loneliness as a Romantic ideal in the broadest sense, linked to the poetry and writings of the Romantic poets in late eighteenth -and nineteenth- century Britain, drew together earlier ideas about the divine and the spiritual, and reworked these for a humanistic and sometimes deistic mood. The American literary critic and essayist William Deresiewicz has summarized the emergence of Romantic ideals about solitude in ways that acknowledge their eighteenth-century origins and religious roots: The self was now encountered not in God but in Nature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: The poet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural model. But because Romanticism also inherited the 18th-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability. The Romantics were not inherently antisocial or in constant need of solitude, then, though that was once a widely held belief. They took moments of solitude, as Wordsworth had, in order to commune with nature, and valued time to reflect on what they had seen, but they were also intensely social when it came to spending time with other poets and writers, to enjoying the conviviality of urbane society. Indeed, the point of writing for the Romantics was to perform a social service as well as a personal and spiritual good; it was searching for answers that might help the individual to negotiate his or her way through an increasingly mechanized, urbanized, and (for some) brutish environment of the Industrial Revolution, and the 'dark, satanic mills' of William Blake. Like Blake, Wordsworth (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who jointly published Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth in 1798, though the second edition of 1800 had only the latter as the author) was part of the first generation of British Romantics. In the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth set out the elements for a new type of poetic verse that moved away from the rigid diction of eighteenth-century poetry towards a spontaneous writing style said to be earned through tranquillity in nature and proximity to the soil. The construction of a particular middle-class Romantic sentiment marked by excessive emotionalism and sensitivity to the natural world allowed the self-reflection and introspection needed to commune with God in nature. Wordsworth remained religious throughout his life, though the same was not true of all Romantic poets. And his 'Daffodils' emphasizes the significance of solitude and quiet reflection for this creative process which paralleled the imagination (the inward eye) and the existence of the divine: 'for oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude'. There are no negative associations here attached to the state of being alone. Loneliness is less apparent in Wordsworth's writings than solitude, which reflects the eighteenth-century absence of loneliness as a pathologized emotional state. As an aside on the centrality of the natural world to the early Romantics, particular forms of environment are known to mediate and promote a sense of loneliness. Geographers, particularly cultural geographers, are sophisticated in narrating the emotional impact of the physical world. One of the striking aspects of twenty-first-century loneliness, especially in urban, impoverished settings, is the lack of 'nature' of any kind; people who do not see greenery from one day to the next are prone, in some studies, to mental health problems, including loneliness, and there is increasing evidence of the restorative function of green spaces. The medicalization of the environment as a source of wellbeing is reminiscent of eighteenth-century discussions of climate and 'taking the air' by engaging with nature in relation to health, as well as the concept of holistic health and the habits of the body. It is important to note both the links between urban impoverishment and a lack of green spaces in twenty-first-century life, and the class-based interpretation of nature as a source of solace during the Romantic era. For Wordsworth's 'peasants', the natural world was much in evidence in the pre-industrial landscape, but it was overwhelmingly the context of hard, manual labour rather than quiet contemplation. In Shelley's Frankenstein, the eponymous doctor seeks solitude as a respite from guilt and regret: 'I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, death-like solitude'. There is a hint here of the modern alienation that would become so central to the writers of the early twentieth century, in which solitude was equally respite and torment. Importantly, there is not a single reference to 'loneliness' in Frankenstein, and only one reference to 'lonely', which meant little more than the state of being alone. The desolation of solitude could be associated with the abandonment by the creator; this seems compatible with my suggestion that the increasing secularization of society in outward forms from the late eighteenth century contributed to the creation of loneliness as an emotional state: loneliness as related not only to the state of being alone, but to a related sense of abandonment. At the time Mary Shelley was writing, and despite the political and social radicalism of many of the Romantic poets, women's creativity was still marginalized; some recent scholars have argued that women within the Romantic circle nevertheless experienced distinct forms of alienation and loneliness as artists. Certainly, they might not have wandered as freely in search of daffodils as their male counterparts. And women's writing in the Romantic period continues to be downplayed in favour of their male counterparts. … From 1905, a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals had begun meeting at the home of Virginia Woolf, and her sister, artist Vanessa Bell: 46 Gordon Square, London. These members of the self-constructed 'Bloomsbury Group' were liberal, from wealthy, white backgrounds, and their bohemian rejection of conventional attitudes to sex, morality, and marriage was part of their self-definition. Woolf, however, suffered from mental illness all her life, probably exacerbated by the sexual abuse she had experienced as a child. Woolf also recognized that periods of loneliness were central to her ability to write, to imagine, to create new worlds that were removed from the daily routines of everyday life: 'It is going to be a time of adventure and attack', Woolf wrote in her journal on 28 May 1929—'rather lonely and painful I think. But solitude will be good for a new book. Of course, I shall make friends. I shall be external outwardly. I shall buy some good clothes and go out into new houses. All the time I shall attack this angular shape in my mind'. (Excerpted with permission from A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion by Fay Bound Alberti, published by Oxford University Press; 2019)
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Turner's earliest exhibited oil painting is up for auction after disappearing for 150 years
Lost for over 150 years, one of JMW Turner's earliest oil paintings is about to go on display at London's Sotheby's before being auctioned. Titled 'The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent's Rock, Bristol', it depicts a dramatic stormy scene engulfing Hot Wells House in Bristol, UK - as seen from the east bank of the River Avon, where the Clifton Suspension Bridge now sits. Painted by Turner when he was just 17 years old, it is now believed to be the artist's earliest exhibited oil painting, having been displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1793. Related More than 200 items from Princess Diana's wardrobe go up for auction Its last public appearance was in 1858, at an exhibition in Tasmania, before disappearing into private collections for over a century and a half. Upon being rediscovered last year, Turner's signature was revealed during the restoration process. 'Its reemergence now allows viewers and scholars alike to appreciate the startling ambition of this great artist at such an early moment in his career, by which stage he is already demonstrating a level of confidence and competency in oil painting far beyond what was previously known,' a press release states. The painting will go on public display at Sotheby's in London from 28 June to 1 July 2025, ahead of being auctioned for an estimated value of £200,000-300,000 (approx. €237,544 to €356,316). Related David Lynch auction: More than 450 personal items go under the hammer The auction also coincides with the 250th anniversary of Turner's birth, as various exhibitions and events across the UK - including London's Tate, National Gallery and the Turner Contemporary - celebrate the artist's legacy. Considered one of the world's most influential 18th-century artists, Turner was a key figure within Romanticism and best known for his dramatic landscapes, ambient with bold colour and tumultuous skies. While 'The Rising Squall' had previously been referenced in obituaries, it was mistaken as a watercolour and therefore excluded from the first catalogue of Turner's exhibited oil paintings. Based on a drawing from the artist's earliest sketchbook and a watercolour, both of which are currently held at the Tate Britain, the artwork is believed to have been first acquired by, and possibly painted for, Reverend Robert Nixon - a friend and early supporter of Turner's. Before now, experts considered Turner's earliest exhibited oil painting to be the 'Fisherman at Sea', displayed at the Royal Academy in 1796.
