Tipping our cap to the great players of the Negro Leagues
The 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues has been a highly anticipated celebration, with plans for many MLB teams to honor the historic players throughout the 2020 baseball season. Although these plans are rescheduled until 2021, there has been no shortage of memorials from a wide variety of fans–including a few former presidents.
Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and columnist Joe Posnanski joined efforts to create the “Tipping Your Cap” campaign. Beginning in mid-June, the ‘TipYourCap2020’ Twitter account has gathered over 2,000 followers in about a month. Beginning with fans posting videos and photos, the campaign quickly caught the attention of former players and presidents, as well as the Hollywood community.
We joined the campaign on Twitter with a photo of our editor tipping her cap to the great Negro Leagues players and we’ve highlighted two SU Press books that honor these activists and their efforts. These books follow the Negro Leagues from their birth, highlighting many accomplishments, until their eventual collapse providing a history rarely discussed in such detail.
In Black Baseball Entrepreneurs 1860-1901, Lomax reflects on black baseball’s beginning as exercise or a pastime. He follows the incredible transition into a lucrative opportunity for black entrepreneurs as black baseball became an organization and commercialized amusement. The black baseball community began earning respect and paving the way for future athletes and activists with these originating efforts.
In the second and final book in the mini-series, Black Baseball Entrepreneurs 1902-1931: Operating by Any Means Necessary, Lomax continues with the development of black baseball as an organization and the way it was promoted. Focusing on how race influenced the institutional development of black baseball, Lomax discusses the decision made by Black baseball managers to distance themselves from white clubs and managers. This book is an informative and interesting take on the promotion of the Negro Leagues and how that influenced the success of this organization.
Nadje al Ali Speaking at the Reel Iraq Festival 3/22, 3/23
Nadje al Ali, co-editor of We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War, will be speaking at the Reel Iraq Festival this weekend. The two-day event will explore the consequential responses of artists and institutions to the invasion of Iraq through collaborative discussion.
The first talk, Friday, March 22, will be held from 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Mosaic Rooms and the following discussions, on Saturday, March 23, will be from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at SOAS. The event is free and open to the public with proper registration!
Please contact the Reel Iraq Festival at info@reelfestivals.org for more information.
“Falling Up” Book Signing With Thomas Holliday
The event was held at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colorado on Feb. 22, 2013.
Let the Author Talks Begin!
In honor of our year-long 70th Anniversary celebration, Syracuse University Press presents two author events this week. Fall 2012 authors, Bill Rezak and Thomas Holliday will each be holding a book talk and signing for an audience of interested readers. If you’re around the area, we invite you to attend these events, engage with our authors, and be part of the celebration! For more information, please contact Syracuse University Press at 443-5541 or supress@syr.edu.
Bill Rezak
The Arab and the Brit: The Last of the Welcome Immigrants
Bill Rezak was president of Alfred State College from 1993 until his retirement in 2003. He was dean of the School of Technology at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia. Rezak is a mechanical engineer and spent eighteen years in the design and construction of power plants before moving to higher education.
“Rezak re-creates, in novel form, detailed genealogical accounts and emigrations by his Arab and British forebears who share values of ambition, hard work, devotion to family and education.”—James A. Jacobs, author of Transgressions: A Novel
Thursday, Feb. 21 at Barnes & Noble
3454 Erie Blvd. East, Dewitt, NY at 7:00 p.m.
Thomas Holliday
Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, The Authorized Biography
Thomas Holliday has directed multiple productions of over fifty operas, operettas, and musicals in Europe and the United States. He has worked as a composer, conductor, opera educator, writer, and lecturer on operatic subjects.
“Tom Holliday’s astonishingly comprehensive biography of one of America’s preeminent composers makes great reading because it marries the private and the professional, the trials and the triumphs of a long and fascinating career.”—Hal Prince, Tony Award–winning producer and director
Friday, Feb. 22 at Tattered Cover Book Store
1628 16th Street, Denver, CO 80202 at 7:30 p.m.
Author K. Animashaun Ducre Event a Success!
Thursday, February 7 at 6:30p.m. author K. Animashaun Ducre’s book talk and signing was held at the Community Folk Art Center. A Place We Call Home: Gender, Race, and Justice in Syracuse was published in January and is available for purchase at the Syracuse University Press website.
All photos taken by Krithika Sathyamurthy.
Celebrating 70 Years of Scholarly Publishing
We are proud to celebrate 70 years of scholarly publishing. Since its inception, Syracuse University Press has been committed to serving scholars and scholarship, promoting a diverse culture and intellectual expression, and preserving the history, literature, and culture of our region. Through the publication of significant and groundbreaking books, we have been able to extend the reach and influence of Syracuse University, making evident the university’s commitment to knowledge and ideas. For the past 70 years and the years ahead, our goal has been and will remain steadfast: to produce rigorously edited, beautifully designed, intelligent, interesting books. In honor of our anniversary, Syracuse University Press will host six authors over the course of the spring semester. We invite you to attend these readings, engage with our authors, and be part of our celebration.
Along with our author gatherings, Syracuse University Press will also bring the celebration online with monthly guest blog posts, SUP Superlative Trivia and a Fluff Photo Campaign. Follow our blog, Facebook, and Twitter to join in on the excitement.
We thank all those who’ve supported us over the past 70 years and hope you’ll stand by us for the next 70 years as we continue to spread knowledge through reading. For more information on how you can support Syracuse University Press, please contact Ronald Thiele at 315-443-2537 or visit campaign.syr.edu.
SU Press “How-To” Series Announced!
Syracuse University Press has teamed with The Graduate School’s Future Professoriate Program (FPP) to provide a series of workshops and talks designed to shape academic authors. The February edition of The Graduate Student Newsletter announced the “How-To” series with a full list of the upcoming events. For more information on the FPP, visit their page on the Syracuse University website.
Full Newsletter available at http://www.syr.edu/gradschool/pdf/gs-newsletters/GS%20Newsletter%20Feb%202013.pdf.
In Conversation With Carlisle Floyd- Falling Up Launch
Carlisle Floyd fans will be flocking
to the National Opera Center of New York, New York on January 10th to hear the legendary composer speak and join the launch of his authorized biography, Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd by Thomas Holliday. At 7:00 PM the celebrated Carlisle Floyd will be discussing his career, past and future works, and his new biography. Following the conversation, Floyd and author Thomas Holiday will participate in a book signing.
Falling Up: The Days and Night of Carlisle Floyd is an essential reading for opera fans and combines insights from hundreds of interviews to provide a compelling, full-length study of the modern Renaissance man. Holliday’s book comes out this month and is available for purchase at the event, courtesy of The Julliard store, or at the Syracuse University Press website.
The National Opera Center event is open to the public, but registration is required. Visit Opera America for more information and to register. If you are unable to attend, the event will be streamed live at Opera America. Don’t miss the opportunity to celebrate the life of the greatest living opera composer!
For upcoming Thomas Holliday book readings/signings, see the Events page.
SU Press Heads to Chicago for AJS
December 14-16, the 44th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) will take place in Chicago, Illinois at the Sheraton Chicago. This year the SU Press will not only attend the international event, but also prepare a display table promoting the latest Jewish Studies titles. Some of the featured books include From Our Springtime: Literary Memoirs and Portraits of Yiddish New York, Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America: A Biography, A Portrait of Pacifists: The Life and Thought of Louis Lowy, Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas and Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature.
The AJS Conference is the largest international meeting of Jewish studies scholars; hosting close to 1,000 attendees. With a book exhibit of prominent publishers, over 100 open sessions, and a gala banquet to top off the weekend, this annual gathering provides a unique celebration for Jewish studies scholarship.
Visit the AJS website for a complete conference schedule.
Grisha Bruskin’s Solo Exhibition ‘H-Hour’
If you enjoyed Grisha Bruskin’s book, translated from Russian by Alice Nakhimovsky, titled Past Imperfect: 318 Episodes from the Life of a Russian Artist, check out the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow’s solo exhibition.
The talanted Artist and Author, Grisha Bruskin, was born in Moscow in 1945 and grew up in a Jewish family under the Stalinist and post-Stalinist state. He now lives in New York and Moscow and his works can be seen in museums worldwide, such as MoMA in New York, the Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, National Gallery of Art in Caracas, Art Institute of Chicago, State Russian Museum, State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, State Tretyakov Gallery, among others.
According to The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, “Grisha Bruskin’s new sculpture project ‘H-Hour’ (2012) has no specific historical or geographical ties and examines the myth of the enemy in very diverse manifestations: the hostile state, class enemy, enemy of the subconscious, ‘the other’ as enemy, Time, Chronos and Death as enemies, the Enemy of the Human Species, and so on.
Bruskin’s installation of several dozen sculptures plunges the viewer in the atmosphere of a strange Kafkaesque world where an emergency situation is in force. All the ‘H-Hour’ sculptures – soldiers, people in gas masks, blind wanderers laden with suitcases and knapsacks, terrifying androgynes, mythological guardian creatures – are in one way or another related to the artist’s personal experiences. But the visual inspiration for them was neither direct impression from life nor high art, but on the contrary ‘low’ art that is anonymous, collective and archetypical. Pictures found in the products of mass culture – in foreign language textbooks, civil defense posters and all kinds of instructions. The author identifies these pictures and endows them with his personal experience, giving them a new and different life. Even when the subject is ‘high’, for example, melancholy (the melancholy androgynous warriors), the artist turns to the plasticity of primitive popular sculpture from the 16th to 18th centuries, rather than to the plasticity found in superior examples of West European Catholic sculpture from the same period.”
‘As in my childhood, in the modern world a person’s life is spent, like the life in Valerio Zurlini’s movie ‘The Desert of the Tartars’, in anticipation of the enemy. Real or mythical. That is why neither the time nor the geography is specified in ‘H-Hour’. ‘H-Hour’ is a parable about the enemy, manifested in absurd metaphors. Just as in the civil defense posters, ‘H-Hour’ exists in an emergency situation. According to Giorgio Agamben, when the boundary between law and life is lost, both are lost, and the strange world of the state of exception arises, where law is superseded and human life turns into pure ‘biology’, under the supervision of the expert bio-powers. In our times (the struggle against the enemy and, primarily, against international terrorism), the state of exception is no longer an exception but becoming the norm everywhere, including democratic countries. It is becoming routine. Today, arriving in Moscow or New York, the world seems to me in both places as it did when I was a child staring at civil defense posters, with the horror and stupor of an ‘outsider’.’ -Grisha Brushkin
Visit the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow for more information on the exhibition.
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