Jordan Goodman: Paul Robeson: A Watched Man

Paul Robeson is one of my personal heroes. Artist and activist, he gave his voice to the people, to entertain and also to speak for them. He was famous for his performances as an actor on stage and screen, as a singer of enormous talent - just to hear a recording of his voice is to be transported by it (and if you have never heard him singing what became his signature piece, Ol' Man River, the go and do it right now, I'll still be here when you get back) - but he was also an important International voice for peace, equality and justice.

Robeson was and remains important because his conception of justice was based on something as simple as our fundamental right to dignity. A true American, he had a Whitman-esque belief in the commonality of human experience, regardless of background or race. (“I realised that the fight of my Negro people in America and the fight of the oppressed workers everywhere was the same struggle,” he said of his political awakening.) The ability of his politics to contain multitudes made him a icon to rebels in the Spanish civil war, to miners in Britain, to anti-lynching marchers in the American south and to all those who heard in his voice a spirit of defiance undimmed by the persecution of his people – and by “his people”, I mean us all. (http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/11/voice-thunders)

The passion and eloquence and power that made him a voice to be heard, also made him a voice to be feared by governments caught up in Cold War hysteria and concerns about growing resistance to social injustice around the world.

Jordan Goodman's new biography, Paul Robeson: A Watched Man, is

... a story of passionate political struggle and conviction. Using archival material from the FBI, the State Department, MI5 and other secret agencies, Jordan Goodman reveals the true extent of the US government’s fear of this heroic individual. Robeson eventually appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he spiritedly defended his long-held convictions and refused to apologise, despite the potential damage to his career. (http://www.versobooks.com/books/1493-paul-robeson)

Goodman gives Robeson his due as an artist, but places particular focus on his activism and on the ways in which the American government tried to restrict his movements, silence his voice and tarnish his message.

I take great joy in hearing that Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, has announced that his next film project will be a biopic of Paul Robeson. It's more than time for people to be reminded of who he was, and for his message to rise again.

Sujata Massey: The Salaryman's Wife

In recent years, I've been consciously on the look-out for female writers of mystery/thriller/detective/whatever novels featuring female investigators (whether professional or amateur) in settings that depart from what so often seems the norm - modern day big-city America.

To this end, I have just tried out the first novel of another new writer - Sujata Massey. What intrigued me about the writer is that she is the British-born daughter of parents from Germany and Japan, living in the U.S. And writing about an American-born daughter of American and Japanese parents living in Japan. This struck me as a very interesting assemblage of influences and choices.

Overall, I enjoyed The Salaryman's Wife - it is a decent mystery novel, with a fair amount of action, although I must admit that the killer was obvious from quite early on, as the pertinent clues were made quite visible. This may be due to this being Massey's first novel, and one hopes that future novels will be less easy to solve. But that wasn't all that much of an issue for me, because I enjoyed watching the character growth of protagonist Rei Shimura. Shimura begins the book as a young woman feeling out of place and uncomfortable - as a half-Japanese woman who speaks the language well but is still learning kanji, who is an expert on Japanese art and antiques but does not assimilate well into the culture, particularly in terms of significant differences between Japanese and American gender roles - and this shows in a certain awkward combination of insecurity and bravado. Over the course of the novel, she becomes more confident and secure within herself, and I am quite interested in seeing how this growth alters the way she is presented in the next novel.

I also enjoyed the window that the novel creates into Japanese culture - in business, in media, in personal relationships.

My main gripe is the romantic element. She falls rather rapidly in lust with a blond Scottish lawyer working in Japan who is initially one of the prime suspects in the murder, without there being much rhyme or reason for the attraction, at least in my opinion. I prefer that if there is going to be romance in a novel, that it be based on mutual respect and some degree of commonality in interests, worldviews, and the like. At my age, I've learned that while lust can be short-term fun (and I'd never suggest that a protagonist refrain from responsible sex-play), if you're going to frame a sexual relationship as a romance, please give us more than lust and the heightened arousal that comes from a shared intense experience to ground it in.

But that's rather hard to find. So I'll just breeze over that bit and enjoy Rei and her relationships with parents, relatives and friends, all of which have much more depth in the novel.

Anne Innes Daag: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene

I have very serious issues with so-called "Darwinian psychology" and a fair bit of what passes for sociobiology. Not that I don't think that our genes (and other interesting stiff like epigenetics) play a role in more than our physical appearance and basic biology, because I'm quite sure they do. It's more that the proponents of this approach tend to argue from the position that the behaviours they see in a specific set of cultural circumstances must be the result of evolution, and hence coded into our brains, and then go looking for the evolutionary mechanisms that brought about the coding. This approach inevitably serves to reinforce the status quo, and, as Cory Doctorow argues in a most incisive review of Anne Innis Daag's critique of Darwinian psychology, "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene, "justify political agendas about the inevitability of social inequality, especially racial and sexual inequality." [1]

Daag notes in her Introduction to "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene that there is

... a sexual/poverty/homosexual bias which pervades Darwinian psychology. Research on animals is usually concerned with how natural selection works for a species in respect to living a healthy life, choosing a mate, producing young and caring for those offspring to ensure they will function well as adults. By contrast, of the scores of topics that Darwinian psychologists could study in human beings, they tend to research those which have social repercussions. These include domination, aggression and competition which often have a positive appeal for men; rape, infanticide and sperm competition within their wombs which have a negative connotation for women; crime and IQ studies which can be made to reflect badly on blacks and the poor; and homosexuality which is given a negative spin against gay men and lesbians.

In the book, Daag examines a number of studies published by Darwinian psychologists and raises many questions about the quality of research upon which Darwinian psychologists base their conclusions, delineating a pattern of inconsistencies, rejection of valid data that fails to support research hypotheses, relying on anecdotal evidence, misreading or misreporting data and conclusions from previous studies, and failing to follow accepted academic standards for research. She also notes that:

Geneticists are notably lacking among Darwinian psychologists even though genetics is the basis for all matters of inheritance. This is because Darwinian psychologists use genetic inheritance not as a framework but as a mantra; their analyses of specific behaviors, although theoretically based on genetics, virtually never indicate how the genetics might work.

Daag draws particular attention to the right-wing bias inherent in the field of Darwinian psychology, and the consequences of this bias:

"... their findings too often provide a framework for policy makers who want to blame the victims in society by claiming that much of human social behavior is genetic rather than learned and cultural. They favor the status quo. It is far easier politically nowadays to cut off funding for social work than to provide more money to address difficult problems of the poor.

I can think of no more fitting ending to my comments here than to quote Cory Doctorow once more:

As a debunking of pseudo-science, this is very masterful; but it is even better as a piece of social criticism, a look at exactly why Darwinian Psychology has found such a receptive audience among ideologues, particularly from the right.

[1] http://boingboing.net/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is.html - the entire review, which is far more specific than my comments here, is worth reading.