AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines

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Book:

AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines
edited by: Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Sarah Dillon
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780198846666; 448pp.; Price: £55.00

Reviewer:

Dr Leah Henrickson
University of Leeds

Citation:

Dr Leah Henrickson, review of AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, (review no. 2433)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2433
Date accessed: 20 August, 2022

‘Artificial intelligence (AI)’ is a loaded term, rife with connotative contradiction that inspires debate, disagreement, and disillusion. But what is AI, really? How have our expectations of computational capability, and even a robot Armageddon, come to be? Why does it matter how we talk about increasingly sophisticated technology, not just in expository prose, but also in fiction? How might visual and cinematic representations of AI technologies reflect and contribute to particular understandings and potentialities? AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines is an ambitious effort to prompt widespread critical consideration not of AI itself, but of the stories—particularly fictional stories—surrounding this pervasive but still largely misunderstood technology. Comprising 16 chapters by scholars from various disciplines, AI Narratives offers a panoramic snapshot of a land still largely unexplored: AI humanities.

Given the relative newness of AI as a term, though, the editors of AI Narratives have opted for the more inclusive ‘intelligent machines’. Recognising the range of terms used to refer to such machines (automaton, android, robot, and cyborg), they explain that ‘[t]he chapters in this book engage with AI in its broadest sense, one that encompasses all of the aforementioned terms: that is, any machine that is imagined as intelligent’ (p. 4). The editors further specify an Anglophone Western scope, and divide the collection into two parts: ‘Antiquity to Modernity’, with each chapter focusing on an era; and ‘Modern and Contemporary’, with each chapter focusing on a theme. Both parts question, commend, and criticise portrayals and explanations of AI. ‘The work of this book contributes to establishing the importance of narratives as constituent parts of any sociotechnical imaginary,’ the editors write. ‘Narratives of intelligent machines matter because they form the backdrop against which AI systems are being developed, and against which these developments are interpreted and assessed’ (p. 7). Despite widespread societal concerns about AI technologies, the editors are optimistic that, through conscious consideration and adjustment of AI narratives, we will progress towards affirmative integration of AI technologies into everyday life.

It is this optimism that drives the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, with which two of the editors are affiliated. Indeed, this collection has emerged from the AI Narratives project workshops jointly led by the Centre and the UK’s Royal Society. These workshops also resulted in a pamphlet about Portrayals and perceptions of AI and why they matter, published by The Royal Society in 2018.(1) Those seeking further analysis of representations of AI may benefit from reading other publications stemming from the Centre.

AI Narratives begins with antiquity, as Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas examine the intelligent machines in the Homeric epics (Chapter 1). Many of these examples are weak, both in the sense that they could be categorised as weak AI and that their intelligence is largely implied. However, Liveley and Thomas’ analysis of the Phaeacians’ self-sailing ships (Odyssey) in particular illustrates the hierarchies of cognitive ability that continue to distinguish human and machine. The ships, after all, are ‘programmed by the knowledge and intelligence found in human minds (noos/noemata). […] The ships’ “independent” thinking and “independent” movement is limited by their human programmers and users’ (p. 35). The use of ‘programmed’ here is admittedly anachronistic, but such language reinforces the relevance of Homeric epics in framing AIs as tools under human control. Even in Homer’s strongest ‘embodied AI’—identified as the amphipoloi of the Iliad—the machines are portrayed as servants of sorts, existing solely to assist their masters. ‘Already in antiquity, then, automata and intelligent machines were conceived as artificial slaves, occupying a special social status no less than ontological category: above that of an inanimate tool—an oar, say; but below that of a human,’ Liveley and Thomas aver (p. 41).

E.R. Truitt elaborates upon the slave argument in her chapter about AI in works of the Latin Middle Ages (Chapter 2), focusing on the representation of early AIs as means for maintaining existing social hierarchies. ‘The desire to use artificial intelligence to spy, to police boundaries and populations, and to act as slaves in the service of power appears equally in the medieval period and in the now,’ Truitt observes. ‘[S]o what does that tell us about now?’ (p. 66) The understanding of AIs as slaves – or, when considered more positively, powerful or even superhuman servants – pervades the history of AI presented in this collection. In her chapter (Chapter 8), Kanta Dihal makes direct connections between narratives of AI and narratives of slavery, delving into the grey area between personhood and thinghood to argue that AI may justifiably resist enslavement. Ultimately, through Dihal’s chapter, ‘we see that the AI uprising narrative is not about the technology itself, and certainly not about the current state of the technology. Instead, these narratives reflect much older accounts of intelligent people being used as tools’ (p. 208). Other chapters elaborate upon the varying potential levels of control that AIs may exert over their human makers (Chapter 9), and even ponder whether distinctions between humans and machines actually matter (Chapter 10). Kate Devlin and Oliva Belton assert in their chapter (Chapter 15), though, that sometimes these distinctions are not so clear. Through an analysis of gynoids and sex robots, Devlin and Belton show how fictional representations of ‘female’ robots and real-world technological development have perpetuated harmfully narrow expectations of womanhood.

Fictional representations of AI transcend genres, but in her chapter (Chapter 12) Anna McFarlane looks to cyberpunk ‘no longer simply as a genre of science fiction, but as a mode that provides an avenue for representing and interrogating the role of algorithms and the power of data over our lives’ (p. 285). Indeed, as McFarlane observes, ‘[r]ather than aiming to predict the future, cyberpunk diagnoses the state of technology in the present, arguing that we are already cyborgs, components in a system that we cannot completely understand’ (p. 291). To repurpose the words of Julie Park (Chapter 5), AI has long seeped through ‘the porous boundary between popular and intellectual culture’ (p. 136), being the subject of overt public spectacle, as well more implicit deception. Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton’s chapter about a device reputedly created by medieval philosopher Albertus Magnus (Chapter 3) further shows how AI may between mechanics and magic. Those ‘components in a system that we cannot completely understand’ may be justified through comparison to more familiar—or familial—circumstances (Chapter 11), or they may simply be accepted as technological feats. These feats, however, do not necessary change the proverbial game. AI is, Sarah Dillon and Michael Dillon argue (Chapter 14), simply another player in social games, governance, and life in general.

AI Narratives introduces readers to numerous fictionalised accounts of seemingly intelligent machines, and offers rich analyses of these accounts as they may pertain to nonfictional technological and social developments. The collection reviews the very real fictional histories of AI, drawing attention to the ways in which the expository and aesthetic may come together to instil different understandings of mechanical capacity in different publics. All of the book’s chapters address the use of AI to establish and maintain power, whether human or robotic. When considered together, the chapters constitute a pointed argument for a necessarily historical and literary study of technology to meaningfully question and counteract hegemonic norms.

From Aristotle to Alexa, intelligent machines have long been the subject of human imagination, and this collection provides much-needed historical insight into representations of AI that have informed modern perceptions. Yet imagined applications and implications of intelligent machines actually appear to have changed little over time, and AI Narratives may have been enhanced with more inter-chapter citation to stress the transhistorical nature of themes addressed and avoid repetition of particular examples (e.g. Blade Runner). The collection may too have been enhanced with greater attention to nonfiction narratives. In his chapter (Chapter 13), Stephen Cave examines the narrative devices of works of speculative nonfiction, arguing that these elements have helped the concept of ‘mind uploading’ gain public traction and support. In contrast, Cave observes, works of fiction have served as spaces of critical imagination ‘through narratives that are more nuanced and multisided than those of the proselytizers’ (p. 329). While the focus of AI Narratives is described in the Introduction as being on the fictional, ‘imaginative thinking’ is by no means limited to the realms of fiction, and is it hardly contentious to recognise the bilateral conference between the real and imagined. The book’s narrowed scope prevents digression, but it also inspires future research into the gaps that it adroitly leaps over.

Another such gap is the possible distinction between human and machine intelligence. Although some chapters allude to the unique potential of AI’s cognitive and physical exploits, AIs are always measured against human counterparts. In his comparison of Renaissance AIs to those of our modern day (Chapter 4), for example, Kevin LaGrandeur concludes that ‘[u]ltimately, superhuman slaves—and our worries about them—reflect an archetypal need to supersede our natural limits by whatever ingenious means, even if by developing super-powerful artificial servants we threaten the very dominion we seek’ (p. 114). Yet as Paul March-Russell concludes in his discussion about robot consciousness (Chapter 7), ‘[m]achine consciousness as something separate and distinct from the human gaze (an often white, male gaze) remains, like the figure of Hadaly [from Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Tomorrow's Eve], mysterious and unexplored’ (p. 184). Megan Ward (Chapter 6) gingerly attempts such an exploration. Reviewing arguments for and against computational creativity, she writes that ‘[o]n both sides, machine creativity is being defined against human creativity, whether through imitation, evaluation, or even attempts at machine independence altogether. […] Victorian fictions of originality offer a form of creativity not directly traceable either to machine or human but to their symbiosis’ (p. 157). Ward suggests that computational creativity is not—and need not be—equivalent to human creativity, but might instead be distinct, and might further contribute to new processes and outputs that could be deemed creative. Ward’s chapter ends with the declaration that ‘[i]n order to become creative, machines need not necessarily be more like humans; rather, humans could recognize the creative capacities inherent in mechanicity’ (p. 159). For this to be would require adjustments to modern conceptions of creativity, but Ward’s insight into Victorian conceptions shows the malleability of the term, as well as the possibility of a sort of mechanical autonomy. However, nowhere in AI Narratives is intellectual autonomy of machines sufficiently addressed. In this way, while AI Narratives presents original research, its analyses largely restate what is already widely accepted: intelligent machines may be superhuman, slaves, or superhuman slaves, but their existence and value remains dependent upon human control. For a book about imaginative thinking, these analyses—however insightful—are perhaps not as imaginative as one would expect.

In the book’s final chapter (Chapter 16), Gabriel Recchia applies digital humanities techniques to identify key characteristics of current AI narratives in screen media from the Anglophone West. Recchia emphasises the prevalence of the word ‘control’ in references to AI, confirming that many uses correspond to fears of both humans and AIs losing control. But, Recchia notes, how AI agents may lose control in reality differs from lost control on screen. The former sees AI optimising its programmed instructions by, for example, lobbing a pancake to keep it in the air as long as possible, while the latter sees circuits gone haywire and robotic rebellion. ‘While the “evil overlord” theme may strike some as a legitimate real-world concern as the purposes that corporations and states put AI to come under greater scrutiny, it somehow seems a shame that real failure modes of AI systems are not better represented,’ Recchia concludes. ‘By inflating implausible fears […] and missing genuine risks […], many popular depictions of AI miss opportunities for creative storylines that are more in line with reality, and which will increasingly resonate with audiences as AI systems become increasingly integrated into everyday life’ (pp. 404-405). And so AI Narratives concludes: not with a roboapocalypse, but with a hopeful plea for recognition of the almost unbelievable current state of the art.

AI Narratives triumphantly paves the way for future work in AI humanities. Individual chapters—all balancing historical context with sharp analysis—would make valuable additions to relevant module syllabi, and the volume would be of certain advantage to any reader seeking a fresh and substantiated approach to AI scholarship. This History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines is only a first glance into this kaleidoscopic field of study, but it positions future researchers well for imaginative thinking about their own perceptions.  

Notes

1. Portrayals and perceptions of AI and why they matter (London, 2018). <https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/ai-narratives>Back to (1)

December 2020

Knowledge under attack

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• 

Book:

Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack
Richard Ovenden
London, John Murray, 2020, ISBN: 9781529378757; 308pp.; Price: £20.00

The Lost Library: The Legacy of Vilna’s Strashun Library in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Dan Rabinowitz
Waltham, MA, Brandeis University Press, 2019, ISBN: 9781512603095; 284pp.; Price: £23.15

Reviewer:

Dr John R. Hodgson
University of Manchester

Citation:

Dr John R. Hodgson, review of Knowledge under attack, (review no. 2436)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2436
Date accessed: 20 August, 2022

The burning of books is a highly emotive subject. The Nazis’ bonfires of Jewish books and other ‘degenerate’ literature in 1933 horrify, and not only because they presaged the incinerators of the Holocaust. From the paradigmatic (and, we learn, probably apocryphal) conflagration of the ancient library of Alexandria, which consumed most of the corpus of Classical literature, to the torching of the Baghdad National Library following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the destruction of books (and archives) seems to shock more than the loss of any other form of material culture. Why should this be? Although Richard Ovenden does not directly address the question in his excellent Burning the Books, the answer may lie both in the unparalleled capacity of books and archives to preserve the past—they constitute our collective memory—and in their limitless potential to generate new knowledge, Milton’s ‘potencie of life’. Perhaps, as Sappho’s enigmatic ‘you burn me’ fragment intimates, something of ourselves perishes in the destruction of books.

Burning the Books, which has justly garnered considerable critical and popular attention, eloquently and powerfully describes numerous attacks upon knowledge across four millennia, from the destruction of Ashurbanipal’s cuneiform library in 621 BCE to the ‘Windrush’ scandal of 2010 when Home Office officials were revealed to have destroyed records that would have proved migrants’ entitlement to British citizenship. While Burning the Books may not break new ground in the scholarship on libraries and book history—it largely draws upon existing literature—it is meticulously researched and referenced, compellingly argued, and likely to prove a landmark in the history of libraries and the preservation of knowledge.

Ovenden’s examples are carefully chosen to illustrate particular motivations and contexts for the destruction of knowledge. Chapter 3 narrates the dispersal of English monastic libraries in the name of religious reformation and Henry VIII’s fiscal incontinence. The statistics are shocking: ‘between 70 and 80 per cent of the contents of the pre-Reformation libraries of the British Isles were lost’ (p. 70). A key theme running through Burning the Books is the impact of imperialism and military campaigns upon libraries and archives. The ill-starred library of the Université Catholique de Louvain was twice destroyed by German forces (Chapter 7). Outrage at its loss in 1914 led to an international campaign to rebuild and restock the library, led in Britain by Henry Guppy of the John Rylands Library. These efforts were in vain for, tragically, the library was destroyed again in 1940. However, these attacks upon knowledge pale in comparison to the Nazis’ systematic destruction of Jewish libraries and archives throughout Europe, discussed in Chapter 8. Ovenden cites Jonathan Rose’s estimate that over one hundred million books were destroyed during the Holocaust (p. 119n1). Such statistics can overwhelm, and Ovenden therefore focuses on one library in one city in eastern Europe, the Mattityahu Strashun Library in Vilna (now Vilnius), Lithuania, which is discussed in greater detail below.

Cultural ‘cleansing’ reared its head again in Bosnia during the civil war of the 1990s, which is the subject of Chapter 10. Again, there was an attempt systematically to eradicate a culture and literally to rewrite history through the targeted destruction of libraries and archives that preserved centuries-old records of Muslim communities and their rich cultural heritage. The scale of the losses was appalling:

In all, it is estimated that 480,000 metres of archives and manuscripts held in institutional collections across Bosnia and around 2 million volumes of printed books were destroyed in the conflict. (p. 159)

Lest readers suppose that Britain adopted a more enlightened approach, Burning the Books is littered with examples of English/British imperialism’s destruction or appropriation of libraries and archives. They span from 1596 when the Bishop of Faro’s library was plundered by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who then donated the books to the embryonic Bodleian Library, to the end of Empire, when large quantities of colonial archives in Malaysia were destroyed ‘to hide the racist and prejudiced behaviour of the former colonial officials’ (p. 176). Exactly 100 years before the first destruction of the Louvain library at the hands of German forces, British troops set fire to the infant Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Literary archives are particularly susceptible to the flames of oblivion, whether committed by authors themselves as ‘a kind of extreme self-editing’ (p. 95) or by those wishing to protect—or manipulate—their reputations. Ovenden contrasts the famous incident when Byron’s friends consigned the manuscript of his memoirs to the drawing-room fireplace of his publisher, John Murray, and Ted Hughes’s notorious destruction of Sylvia Plath’s journals, with Max Brod’s defiance of Kafka’s instructions to destroy his papers. Who was right? Ovenden refuses to be drawn, but he does point out an alternative option: the transfer of papers to a public repository, subject to temporary closure:

Working in a library that measures time in centuries, one answer to these questions is, perhaps, to take a long view. The stacks of the Bodleian are full of manuscripts that are ‘closed’. (p. 151)

Indeed, Burning the Books is as much as about the preservation of knowledge as it is about its destruction. Throughout its pages we witness individual acts of extreme heroism: the endeavours of the Jewish ‘Paper Brigade’ to smuggle books from the Strashun Library into the Vilna Ghetto on pain of death, or Aida Buturović, the young librarian killed by a Serbian sniper while she was trying to rescue materials from the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992. Yet Burning the Books is also a homage to the everyday heroism of dedicated (but often poorly remunerated) librarians and archivists who work tirelessly to preserve knowledge:

This book has been written not just to highlight the destruction of those institutions in the past, but also to acknowledge and celebrate the ways librarians and archivists have fought back. It is through their work that knowledge has passed down from one generation to the next, preserved so that people and society can develop and seek inspiration from that knowledge. (p. 14)

One of the triumphs of Burning the Books is that it shines a penetrating light upon the essential preservation duties of librarians and archivists, whose work has hitherto been discussed primarily in the professional and academic literature. Ovenden issues a challenge both to information professionals and to their employers and funders. In their endeavours to open institutions up to new audiences in the name of ‘access’ and ‘engagement’, Ovenden claims that librarians and archivists have perforce downplayed, if not neglected, their core duty to preserve knowledge, which increasingly means digital knowledge. Ovenden advocates for libraries and archives as repositories of collective memory: librarians and archivists are the guardians of truth, ‘collecting knowledge in both analogue and digital form. Without them, with their mixture of skills, dedication and passion for preservation, we will continue to lose knowledge.’ (p. 219) Moreover, Ovenden deplores the gross neglect of publicly funded libraries and archives over the last decade, in the UK and elsewhere, which has undermined their ability to tackle the unprecedented challenge of digital preservation:

Preservation should be seen as a service to society, for it underpins integrity, a sense of place and ensures diversity of ideas, opinions and memory. Libraries and archives are highly trusted by the general public, yet they are experiencing declining levels of funding. (p. 223)

A complimentary copy of Burning the Books should be distributed to every politician and policy maker, to press home this message.

Ovenden offers two practical suggestions to address the digital preservation challenge: first, greater cooperation between libraries, following the example of the UK Web Archive initiative, of which the Bodleian Library is a partner; and, secondly, a ‘memory tax’ levied on the profits of internet giants such as Google and Amazon (p. 222). Whether the political will exists to achieve this goal at an international level is a moot point, but the end of the Trump Presidency offers a glimmer of hope.

One of the pleasures of Burning the Books is the insights it provides into its author’s personal and professional motivations. Ovenden writes with the conviction born of personal experience, from the many hours he spent in Deal Public Library studying during his teenage years, to his professional involvement in digital preservation initiatives since the early 2000s. As 25th Bodley’s Librarian, Ovenden enjoys unrivalled access to the extraordinary riches of that ‘ark of learning’. The reader is drawn in by his contagious enthusiasm for the treasures in his keeping, as he evokes the multisensory experience of handling such precious volumes as the 1,000-year-old St Dunstan’s Classbook (‘soft, thick and almost velvety to the touch’, p. 52) and the Romance of Alexander (‘this volume still sends a shiver of delight down my spine’, p. 69).

Yet Ovenden is more reticent when it comes to some of the controversial issues that Burning the Books touches upon, such as the continued custody of Iraqi state archives by the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and the case for repatriating the manuscripts and other treasures that victorious British forces looted from Magdala in Ethiopia in 1868. Ovenden regrets the continued exile of the Iraqi archives, but does not explicitly call for their return, since ‘[t]he geopolitical situation in the region has not made this possible’ (p. 195). The Magdala manuscripts are now found in the British Library and other institutions, including the Bodleian and Manchester’s John Rylands Library (where this reviewer is employed and is thus implicated in this challenging issue). Perhaps Ovenden is right to leave readers to reach their own conclusions on these matters, but an intimation of where he stands would have been welcome. He argues that ‘the communities from which these materials have been removed should be allowed to take control of the narrative of history once again’, but what would this mean in practice? Libraries and archives in the West have hitherto largely failed to address issues of cultural repatriation and the legacies of empire; we need to follow the example of (some) museums in confronting these challenges.

Burning the Books concludes with a coda, ‘Why we will always need libraries and archives’. Ovenden makes a powerful case for the continued relevance of repositories of knowledge, including their vital importance in supporting education, providing a diversity of knowledge and ideas, sustaining wellbeing and the principles of open society, encouraging accountability, and helping to root societies in their cultural and historical identities. Few would demur from these assertions. However, the ‘archival turn’ in the humanities, and more recent challenges from the decolonisation movement, have demonstrated that libraries and archives are themselves problematic and partial, and information professionals need to work much harder to represent more effectively the diversity of the communities that they purport to represent. An acknowledgement by Ovenden of this representational challenge, in parallel with the challenge of preservation, would arguably have strengthened the compelling case that he makes for knowledge institutions.

Nonetheless, few have advocated so effectively as Ovenden for the centrality of libraries and archives. Burning the Books is both a scholarly survey of the history of knowledge under attack and a manifesto for preservation. Meticulously researched and eloquently written, it deserves a wide readership beyond the realms of information science and academic history.

As noted above, one chapter of Burning the Books is devoted to the Mattityahu Strashun Library in Vilna, which is the subject of a recent full-length investigation by the book collector and attorney, Dan Rabinowitz. The Lost Library: The Legacy of Vilna’s Strashun Library in the Aftermath of the Holocaust examines the formation and cultural context of the Strashun Library, its near destruction during the Second World War, and a controversial afterlife that echoes the geopolitics of the post-war period. Rabinowitz asserts that the Strashun Library, ‘the first modern Jewish public library’, ‘ranked among the greatest intellectual institutions in all of Jewish Europe’ (p. 1). If few today have heard of this remarkable foundation, Rabinowitz argues that this is because the surviving books have been deliberately conflated with other collections and their identities suppressed since the Second World War.

The first three chapters of The Lost Library discuss the formation of the Strashun Library and the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of 19th-century Vilna, which Rabinowitz describes as ‘an epicenter of Jewish intellectualism, a veritable Jerusalem’. At the age of fourteen, Mattityahu Strashun (1817–85), son of the Talmudic scholar Samuel Strashun, married the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Vilna and thus was able to devote the rest of his life to polymathic studies and book collecting. He amassed over 7,000 books and manuscripts across a wide range of topics: Bible commentaries, Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, responsa, Kabbalah, Jewish philosophy, liturgy, as well as Jewish history and other secular works. Strashun left his collection to the Vilna Jewish community at large and eventually, after several years of legal and financial difficulties, the purpose-built Strashun Library officially opened in 1902, vested in the entire community. Within a year, it was reported that 300 visitors a day were using the library. It ultimately became the largest public Judaic library in Eastern Europe, housing over 50,000 volumes in 1940 on the eve of its destruction.

Chapter 4 describes how, following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Strashun Library and all other Jewish libraries in Eastern Europe were systematically destroyed by the Nazis. In a cruel twist, Jewish intellectuals were conscripted to identify the most valuable books for transfer to the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question (IEJ) in Frankfurt. By September 1944, when the Red Army reentered Vilna, at least 23,000 books had been shipped to Frankfurt. However, at great personal risk, the so-called ‘Paper Brigade’ smuggled several thousand more volumes into the Ghetto where many remained concealed after it was ‘liquidated’ in September 1943.

The remaining chapters of The Lost Library reconstruct the post-war fate of almost half the books from the Strashun Library, which were transferred from the US military government’s clearing house for looted Jewish property at Offenbach near Frankfurt to YIVO in New York. YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) was founded in Vilna in 1925 to encourage the study and preservation of Yiddish culture, and it built up a library that surpassed the Strashun in Yiddish works. YIVO’s library suffered the same fate as the Strashun, but crucially YIVO relocated its headquarters to New York in 1940 and thus the organisation survived after the Jewish community in Vilna and its Yiddish culture had been annihilated. After the war, YIVO’s director, Max Weinreich, convinced the US authorities that it was rightful heir to the Strashun Library’s books, which were duly shipped to New York in 1947:

In his telling, the basis for YIVO’s claim to the Strashun Library is predicated on YIVO’s long-standing relationship with the Strashun Library, a relationship that intensified over time, ending in a planned full consolidation of the two into a “superlibrary” that would be helmed by YIVO. (p. 113)

While Ovenden is largely silent on the post-war fate of the Strashun Library, through meticulous archival research Rabinowitz exposes the fallaciousness of YIVO’s claims: ‘the extant record shows that YIVO had no significant relationship with the Strashun Library’ (p. 115). Rabinowitz acknowledges that in the chaotic circumstances of a defeated Germany, amid growing hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union, returning the surviving Strashun books to Vilna, where the Jewish community had been exterminated, was not a feasible option.

Recognizing that under certain circumstances, otherwise illegal actions are justifiable and permitted, theft for rescuing archival materials that otherwise would be destroyed provides one justification and defense. Under those conditions, theft is converted into salvage or rescue. (p. 141)

However, YIVO’s subsequent treatment of the Strashun books was less pardonable. Rabinowitz shows that they were stamped as YIVO property when they arrived in New York, using copies of pre-war stamps, effectively backdating YIVO’s ownership to 1939; he sardonically calls this ploy ‘a brilliant revision of the material history of each Strashun book’ (p. 129). Indeed, YIVO did not publicly acknowledge that it held Strashun books until the early 1960s. Instead, they were quietly assimilated into the composite ‘Vilna Collection’, thus eliding their specific provenance. Rabinowitz’s conclusion is damning: ‘In the end, YIVO may have saved the Strashun Library books, but YIVO failed to save the Strashun Library.’ (p. 138)

While it is difficult to justify YIVO’s treatment of the Strashun books, it should be noted that it was once common for libraries to elide the discrete identities of their component collections. YIVO was also not unique in selling ‘duplicates’ from the Strashun Collection in 2009: my own institution was guilty of this in the 1980s. However, one of the unhappiest episodes in the afterlife of the Strashun Library was YIVO’s transfer, in 1960, of approximately 500 duplicate volumes to the Hechal Shlomo (Central Rabbinical Library) in Israel, for in the early 2000s all of these books were sold. ‘The self-proclaimed center for all religious Judaism dispersed “the remnant of the Strashun Library,” and with it one of the last testaments to Jewish Vilna.’ (p. 167) Books from Mattityahu Strashun’s personal library are still being offered for sale by dealers. One of the lessons of The Lost Library is that collections are at risk not merely from catastrophic events such as fires, wars, and cultural genocide, but also from the more insidious forces of institutional neglect and professional malpractice.

The Lost Library is not without fault. The introduction, in which the author explains at length how his interest in the Strashun Library arose, struck this reviewer as somewhat indulgent and could usefully have been abbreviated or relegated to an appendix. Rabinowitz could perhaps have elaborated further on how the Strashun Library was used and on its central role in Jewish culture and learning in Vilna, but no doubt he was constrained by the loss of the library’s archives and oral testimony. There is also a handful of typos.

However, Rabinowitz demonstrates a mastery of his subject, and over 70 pages of endnotes attest to his command of the secondary literature and to extensive archival research in Lithuania, the United States, and Israel (though he notes that he was denied access to some of YIVO’s records). While forensically building a case for its maltreatment, Rabinowitz effectively deploys the Strashun Library as a lens through which to examine wider cultural and geopolitical forces in the 19th and 20th centuries. An essentially tragic story—of a lost culture and of the mistreatment of its material remains by those who claim to be the heirs to that culture—ends on a more sanguine note. An international project is digitising the surviving books and manuscripts of Mattityahu Strashun himself in Lithuania and at YIVO; liberated from the tyranny of geography and virtually reunited, they will become ‘the property of the entire world’ (p. 180).

Image on landing page: Khaykl Lunski, chief librarian of the Strashun Library until its destruction by the Nazis during World War II, Vilna, ca. 1930s. (Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.)

January 2021

Feminisms: A Global History

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Book:

Feminisms: A Global History
Lucy Delap
London, Pelican (imprint of Penguin), 2020, ISBN: 9780241398142; 416pp.; Price: £20.00

Reviewer:

Dr Anne Cova
University of Lisbon

Citation:

Dr Anne Cova, review of Feminisms: A Global History, (review no. 2445)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2445
Date accessed: 20 August, 2022

The historian Lucy Delap, author of The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century  (CUP, 2007), winner of the 2008 Women’s History Network Prize, has now published another book—Feminisms: A Global History (Penguin in the UK, and the University of Chicago Press in the US). This book, at nearly 400 pages, is a truly global history, dealing with 250 years of feminisms. Readers will find here a profound analysis of feminism across Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Americas, and Europe, though Delap takes a non-Eurocentric approach.

This journey across the globe is eloquently accomplished and begins with the assertion of an unknown African woman who published an article in a local newspaper in 1886: ‘We Ladies of Africa […] Although we have not white or angelic faces we are capable of as high a degree of culture as any white lady’ (p.1). Following recent events in the Black Lives Matter movement, this quotation provides an echo and sets the tone for the book, which travels back and forth from 1886 as it traces the complex history of feminisms. To de-centre (Delap does not use this term, leading this reader to wonder why) the historiography and focus on those countries that have received less attention is a challenge to which this book rises very well.

Divided into eight thematic chapters, titled Dreams, Ideas, Spaces, Objects, Looks, Feelings, Actions, and Songs (the plural is important just as is the use of the plural, feminisms, is in the title), this global history examines feminisms across a broad canvas, alternating ‘between wide-angle summaries of different feminist beliefs or campaigns, and close scrutiny of the lives of individual women who fought against gender inequities’ (p. 21).

Three apparently simple questions are asked on the cover of the book: How has feminism developed around the world?; What have feminists achieved?; and, What can we learn today from global histories of feminism? The book then demonstrates that the answers to these questions are not homogeneous, with Delap managing to clearly draw out the complexities of feminisms in different global contexts. Benefiting from a flurry of recent historical publications available at the Cambridge University Library, which the author describes in the acknowledgements as a ‘treasure trove of histories of feminisms’ (p. 349), this well-written book offers a sophisticated approach to the plurality of feminisms.

Delap explores the multiple facets of feminisms through the metaphor of the mosaic, which is: ‘built up from inherited fragments but offering distinctive patterns and pictures […] And like mosaics, feminist coalitions were built up from the bits and pieces available—other movements, committed individuals, actions and ideas. Some mosaics have been long-lived; others have crumbled, and their tiles have been reused, or have disappeared from view’ (pp. 20–21). She also notes another metaphor on conversations: ‘Metaphors of mosaics and conversations give a sense of the richness of feminist debates’ (p. 22). In doing so, Delap engages with the debate on the many metaphors used by scholars in discussion of feminisms, and challenges the best-known one, which employs the image of ocean waves: ‘The historical organizing frame of “feminist waves” has not proved up to the job of making sense of the complexities of feminist history’ (p. 5). Instead, she highlights the significance of a metaphor employed by the historian Nancy Hewitt, which uses the imagery of feminist radio waves:

Hewitt suggests that rather than seeing successive “ocean waves” of feminism, we might imagine competing, simultaneous broadcasts, some loud and clear, others disrupted by static. This helps capture the global multiplicity and inequality of voice that was poorly captured by tired talk of first, second and third wave feminism. Radio broadcasts are not neutral but can be creative, innovative and even vitriolic. The “radio waves” metaphor is suggestive of the disagreements between feminisms. But it reminds us that we can literally or imaginatively hear feminisms, through their shouts, keening, music and song (pp. 331–2).

Delap is also keen on the feminist radio waves metaphor because it allows us to hear the many voices of feminists, which is the topic of her last chapter: Songs. This is not an easy task for historians: ‘Trying to recapture what the women’s movement “sounded like” is difficult at a historical distance. Nonetheless, refusing to see feminism only as a textual affair is important’ (p. 331). Following this approach, Delap also provides insights into objects and looks, through chapter four and five, respectively. These chapters lead the reader onto the matter of archives, which are fundamental for historians.

The book questions the classification and content of archives: ‘Archival materials, where they document feminism at all, tend to lean towards the story that more powerful and privileged feminists have wanted to tell’ (p. 6). This assertion applies particularly to the first chapter, Dreams: ‘Very few dreams are recorded in historical archives […] And, of course, those written down are those the dreamer chooses to share’ (p. 49). These thoughts about the enormous dependence historians have on archives recalls the mosaic metaphor:

But mosaic pieces may be lost, destroyed or buried, and their survival is not just a matter of chance—it depends on access to power and resources. The records of feminist protest and ideas are not well archived for the poor, working-class, migrant or ethnic-minority activists who sought change. That means that all feminist histories will be partial affairs, skewed towards those who wanted to or were able to claim the mantle of feminism and who could make their voices heard. The more marginalized, or those who were wary of being termed a “feminist”, are obscured. Nonetheless, a self-consciously global, critical history can attend to and preserve what has survived, and point to the missing mosaic tiles (p. 342).

Inspired by the growing scholarly interest in how locations and spaces shape social movements, chapter three explores the idea of feminist places: the libraries, women’s centres and bookshops ‘such as the Women’s Press in London (1977), Women and Children First in Chicago (1967), the Shokado Women’s Bookstore in Kyoto, Japan (1975), the Libreria delle Donne di Milano (1975), Streelekha in India (1984) and Binti Legacy in Nairobi (1996) have formed a powerful network for the distribution of feminist ideas’ (p. 127). Chapters two (Ideas) and seven (Actions) respectively, analyse the theoretical resources that feminists have created, and their many means and methods of protest.

Intersectionality is at the core of this book and has influenced it deeply: ‘The idea of “entangled histories” has been used by global historians to capture the ways in which ideas, people and texts crossed and re-crossed borders to create multiple “intersections”’ (p. 20). Though the term ‘transnational history’ is not used even once in the book—and it would be interesting to know the reason for this—the words ‘transnational’, ‘transnationalism’, and ‘transnationally’ appeared sporadically, while some important works on transnational history are referenced in the notes and further reading sections. From the perspective of this reader, the book makes a fascinating contribution to transnational history:

...historians of feminism must take care not to erase the local specificity of struggles and activism. However, it would be a mistake to simply look at all these debates and movements in isolation; they often shared key ideas or drew inspiration from each other’s struggles. We can chart the rich interweaving of global debates on the relationship between gender and power, at the same time as recognizing feminism as a deeply historical and context-specific phenomenon (p. 10).

This value placed on the study of the specificities as well as on global debates is at the heart of the transnational approach. This approach is also evident when Delap argues: ‘histories of feminism cannot be located only within single nation states, regions or empires. Global influences have been based on the migration of individuals, as refugees, students, exiles and workers […] Historians have become newly attentive to the deliberate cultivation of transnational spaces, in the pages of globally circulating periodicals, in conventions, conferences, alliances and federations’ (pp. 18–9). Delap insists on local diversities: ‘Local diversity has meant that the emergence of organized demands for change happened in very different ways all over the world. Where they existed, “feminists” spoke for different groups, and in diverse registers. ‘“The women’s movement” or “woman question” was the terminology of nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas, while “women’s awakening” was widely debated in Middle Eastern and North African countries in the early twentieth century’ (p. 10). Delap’s preference for the expression ‘global history’ is obvious throughout the book, as in the title: ‘A global history approach also allows us to see the interactions between globally famous texts and local intellectual or activist traditions’ (p. 19).

Conflicts within feminisms are not put aside: on the contrary, they form a cornerstone of the book, and Delap’s encourages the normalisation of conflict: ‘A global history of feminism, as historian Mrinalini Sinha has insisted, will not simply pluralize our picture so that we think in terms of “feminisms”. Instead, our account of feminisms must acknowledge what Sinha terms the “discrepant histories of different women’s movements”, marked by contests, conflicts and power-play’ (p. 22).

Regarding the definitions of feminisms, Delap seems skeptical and prefers to emphasise the varieties of meanings that may change over time: ‘Though it was often defined in highly various ways, “feminism” as a term was adopted globally in the early twentieth century. It might refer to women’s “rights” as well as to campaigns of women’s advancement, protection and equality’ (p. 10). She notes that: ‘Across the world, there was fascination with this new concept, as well as suspicion of European or American influences. […] The meaning of “feminist” has continued to evolve, and to be controversial. Activists in the 1970s and 80s often preferred to talk of “women’s liberation”, since they associated “feminist” with reformist “liberal” politics of parliamentary rights and suffrage’ (p. 12). Delap insists on the pluralities of feminisms, while noting:

Despite the many varieties of feminisms, one of the overarching feminist dreams has been of a movement that could span all women: ‘‘Helping each other, all of one mind”, as the Chinese banner declared at the 1913 conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. This fantasy has carried with it the paradox of an abstract political agenda that, in its very inclusivity, ignores concrete exclusions (p. 13).

Delap rises above such quarrels as ‘who can be considered feminist?’, ‘who was the first in their domain?’, etc. She argues, convincingly, that: ‘We need not engage in a competitive struggle to identify the first, or the truest, feminists. Instead, we can trace out experiences of exclusion and difference amongst gender and social justice activists, and chart their passionate, painful or strategic coalitions’ (p. 14). She also properly questions ‘the problematic idea of “backwardness”’ (p. 17), and makes us aware of anachronism and the need to avoid measuring the past by today’s standards, even if ‘there may be aspects of the feminist past that make us uncomfortable today’ (p. 23).

Another important insight worth mentioning is the emphasis on non-linear history. The book is not a narrative of the various demands raised and gradually met through the years. Delap reminds us that: ‘Rights won did not always stay won, and often needed defending or regaining after setbacks’ (p. 335). It is important to take the different political contexts into account:

Yet women’s experiences around the globe during the twentieth century were of painfully slow reform, withdrawal of rights when they experienced wars, coups and dictatorships, pervasive everyday violence, and the mockery or outlawing of feminist voices’ (p. 263). She uses feminism as ‘an entry point to understand better how campaigns over “women’s rights”, “new womanhood”, “the awakening of women” or “women’s liberation” might have shared concerns and tactics. But I will also be telling the story of the limits of feminism, its blind spots and silencings, its specificities and complicities (pp. 2–3).

Once again, Delap alerts the reader to the complexities of feminisms that cannot be summarised simply through successive struggles and achievements, and she refers to the work of historian Kathryn Gleadle, who ‘invites us to think of feminist history as a non-linear rhizome root structure, full of unexpected growth points, dead ends and patterns of influence’ (p. 20).

Throughout the book, Delap wants to demonstrate the importance of male figures because ‘to ignore men’s and women’s cooperation would be a deliberate historical effacement, as well as a loss of hope for future change’ (p. 339). Consequently, she notes that, in this book: ‘we will meet men who have worked to advance women’s rights, often through deep personal investment in feminist goals as also benefiting men’ (p. 8). One paradigmatic case is that of John Stuart Mill, even if justice is done also to his wife Harriet Taylor Mill.

 The book fully achieves the challenge its author sets, to trace ‘the evolution of global feminist themes that span a remarkable range of concerns: women’s rights to property, education and citizenship; pacifism, antifascism, the welfare and protection of mothers and children; social justice, labour rights and human rights; sexual autonomy, cultural expression and reproductive rights’ (p. 334). Delap concludes that a ‘recognition that feminists have not agreed on a single programme in the past can help reduce the toxicity of today’s disputes’ (p. 344).

This path-breaking book is an essential read for those who believe ‘we should be suspicious of attempts to flatten and simplify the landscape of feminisms, or to ignore its irredeemable ideological differences’ (p. 343). As such, it is a masterful contribution to ‘some important new ways of reading feminist practices and ideas across historical time’ (p. 21). Delap’s understanding of feminisms around the world offers fascinating insights, based on innovative sources, establishing this volume as a landmark work in the current historiography, and one that is both accessible to the experts in the field and inspiring for a broader audience.

Additional image: Women gathering for the1956 Women’s March, Pretoria, South Africa

April 2021