International Visitor Spotlight: Anne Simonin

By Marie-Pierre Ulloa

French legal historian Anne Simonin has been called a “champion of finesse” – she has an unconventional way of looking at embarrassing moments in French and European history. When she arrived at the Stanford Humanities Center in Winter 2010, Simonin had just completed a major project about the origins and the propagation of “unworthiness.” She traced the concept through the French Republican tradition from Revolution to the aftermath of the Second World War.

During her stay at the Center, Simonin spent much of her time researching in the archives at Green Library and the Hoover Institute. There, she uncovered the story surrounding a novel published in Algiers in 1943, The Army of Shadows. The existence and content of this book had been overshadowed by its 1969 movie adaptation (which starred Simone Signoret and was directed by legendary filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville). Until Simonin’s research at Stanford unraveled it, the content of the novel had been lost to history.

“I had not envisaged spending so much time in the Hoover Archives,” Simonin said. “In the fifties and sixties, the Hoover Institute was famous for having gathered unpublished materials from Collaborators. Its Resistance papers are less known; they nevertheless constituted the basic foundation of my current project, dealing with the narrative of the Resistance and the relationships between fiction, history and law through The Army of Shadows”.

International Visitor Spotlight: Adams Bodomo

Adams Bodomo

By Armine Pillikan

Adams Bodomo, an FSI- Humanities Center International Visitor in October and November of this year, has been researching a relatively new and unexplored phenomenon: the migration of Africans to China and the type of Sino-African relations emerging from this process.

Bodomo is currently African Studies Programme Director at the School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong, as well as Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics. We asked him to tell us about how migrant African populations interact with Chinese civilians on a daily basis, and how this is creating types of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic collaboration.

Tell us a bit about communication between these two populations.

Africans don’t know much Chinese; they don’t speak, read or write it, and vice versa. One of the most unique communication techniques I’ve seen is what I call “calculator communication.” In a buying and selling situation, the African customer approaches the Chinese seller and points to the commodity, and the seller types out the price on the calculator and points to it, and this goes on until the sale is either agreed upon or aborted. I’m seeing that it’s possible to use all media available to us to communicate!

How does this migration affect language?

Africans have developed a form of pidgin, just picking up small words and intermixing them with their own language. So there are mixes of Swahili and Chinese, Arabic and Chinese, Hausa and Chinese. The primary way Africans in China communicate is through English or French.

What’s interesting is the influence that their presence has on the way that the Chinese learn to speak English. This phenomenon comes about because many Africans who have set up shops decide to employ Chinese salesmen. These salesmen end up beginning to learn English and they learn it in a way that is very clearly African-English, not Chinese-English.

Arts Visitor Spotlight: M.K. Raina

M.K. Raina

By Armine Pillikan

M.K. Raina, an international visitor and SiCa Arts Writer/Practitioner this October, is known as one of the most prominent theatre artists throughout India and Southeast Asia. He speaks 13-14 different languages, has traveled and taught from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, and works not only with professional performance artists, but also children who’ve had very little exposure to the arts.

Recently, his work has included revitalizing theatre and visual arts in his birthplace, the Kashmir Valley—a place that has suffered from militant terror for many years. During a presentation in the Humanities Center Board Room on October 11, he discussed his creative work in folk and experimental theatre, as well as with his goals to rehabilitate orphaned Kashmiri children and to set up educational opportunities for performers.

What are some of the struggles the Kashmiri artistic community faces?

 The country has suffered through terrorism, and there has been a ban on performance arts. These people are very poor. They don’t even have land for agriculture, much less the time and venues to put on plays, so they haven’t been able to perform for 10 to 20 years. Imagine a person who couldn’t play his instrument or paint for that long! This also affects school children’s engagement with art. Violence had reached such a point that children could not go to schools. They had become victims of this violence and it impacted their minds, their imaginations. They don’t really know what it’s like to have a normal day, to go to school, play, come home—it’s not there. But I believe that through education and culture, I can break this frozen situation.


Describe some of your work with the Kashmiri folk performance group Bhand Pather.

I’m not letting the tradition of performing arts die out under the current circumstances. Recently I helped direct and make possible three different plays: two traditional plays, and King Lear. Five thousand to ten thousand people attended the plays, sat on hills and watched the performances.


How did the group engage with Shakespeare?


King Lear was definitely a challenge, since the performers do not read or write. I had to tell them the story, and then together we discovered the subtext and interpretation of the story. I began to see that they completely understood the depth of the play. We merely adapted it to our language and traditions. When the performers compose the dialogue, they are fantastic. They made it their own King Lear. It was Shakespeare, yes, but the way they see it, the way they experience it.

In the storm scene, when King Lear realizes what he’s done, the performers felt as though Lear reached a stage where he realizes what life is all about, what the world is all about, what people are all about. They saw this as Lear taking this first step into the Sufi traditions, and so he sings a Sufi song.


Tell us about your work with Kashmiri youth.

My goal is to reclaim cultural space, to intervene through culture. So I organized a group of people: child psychologists, educators, painters, film-people, artists, creative writers, and we started helping children through the arts. We did four or five creative workshops.


How did the workshops start?

I gave them a lot of colors to paint with, but at the beginning, they painted only using one color, someone only green, another only brown. They couldn’t see the colors in front of them, even though they live in such a colorful valley! So I had to devise new exercises, new methodologies, to get them to start enjoying culture, to teach them to see color.

What did the children create as a result of these new ways of thinking?

They shared a scroll many feet long to create their paintings. It took them almost all day to paint it, and then we held it up and all the kids stood there with their eyes wide open. There were all kinds of things: peacocks, boars, and huge lions. It was a wonderful mural painting. I told them to find stories in their painting. Out of one scroll they came up with 10 different stories. We weren’t telling them anything; it was all their imagination! And then we said: now enact a play out of this. And then they started to write songs for the play. There was one girl who by the end of the program was writing poetry and then singing those poems.

Fellows Spotlight: Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey, a Stanford alum and former resident of our very own Casa Italiana, has spent the decade since she’s graduated developing a new lens through which to view nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature—through the lens of an actual camera. With a PhD from UCLA, she returned to Stanford as a Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow last year. Carey’s work on campus includes developing her new book Envisioning Italy: Photography and the Narrating of a Nation, alongside teaching a class based on the intersections of photography, literature, and cinema in Italian art. She will be introducing and screening Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “The Passenger” at the first meeting of this year’s Humanities Circle on October 26, 2011 in Building 260, Room 113 at 6:00 pm.

You teach several courses at Stanford. Can you get into depth about one of them?

I’m most interested in the course that I’m teaching right now, which is based on my primary research interest: the relationship between photography and Italian literature and film. I am very interested in looking at texts with students that not only describe photography, but also include images, as well looking at films that seem to draw upon the aspects of still photography.

What I’m asking students to think about are the ways in which visual culture influences national identity: how do photographs give us an idea what Italian identity might be, what Italian nationhood might be? What I’ve found from my own research is that photography has been used, ever since it’s invention and dissemination, to create a visual representation of the nation that the citizens can then identify with.

It’s great because it’s so interdisciplinary. It’s not tunnel vision on one subject, but it opens up into many other fields. It gives students a lot of flexibility on what they want to do for a final project: they can work on film, the history of photography, or even hybrid texts that use both photographs and prose.

What is it that’s really particular about the way photography functions in Italian culture, that sets it apart?

Well take the Civil War. It was heavily documented in that States by photographers, right on the field. But that didn’t happen in Italy.

What’s interesting is that Italy, even in comparison to the United States, is a very young country. It didn’t become a country until 1861, and that was about twenty or thirty years after the first inventions of photography. So those first couple decades of photography happened to be a time in which the Italian peninsula was in a lot of turmoil, and in the process of unification.

You would think they would have documented a lot of these events with photographers on the field. But it wasn’t used during those years. It was used after the unification. Oddly enough, they wanted to use photography to recreate the events during that time. So they would stage certain battles, or even take pictures of locations and then paint in representations of what had happened. So photography didn’t serve its natural documentary purpose, but as a way to tell a story, sort of after the fact. They used photography to narrate, rather than to document. I think this appeals to Italian writers and directors. For a scholar in any art field this would provide a lot of material that has not yet been explored, and there could be a lot of projects that delve into archives that have not yet been tapped into.

Any ways to get involved with Italian culture?

Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco is a great reference point. On campus, I lived in Casa Italiana, which has a lot of great events. It’s funny because I taught a course last year which I had to take when I was a student, “Italian Literature and History.” And actually, the study abroad program in Florence was probably what led me to pursue the path that I’m on right now. So it’s a blessing to be back at the place that started it all.

Remembering Graham Leggat (1960-2011)

by Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Stanford Humanities Center

Graham Leggat, Stanford alumnus and former executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, transformed the Bay Area film scene. Tobias Wolff, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford, remembers him with “immense fondness and admiration” as “one of the most interesting students I had.”

Visionary executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, Graham Leggat, class of ‘87, died on August 25th at his home in San Francisco after an eighteen-month struggle with cancer. He was 51.

In recent years, Leggat collaborated frequently with various Stanford institutions to bring foreign films to campus. I had the pleasure of working with Leggat on four different occasions, first, on behalf of the Mediterranean Studies Forum and then for the Humanities Center.

Leggat became the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society in October 2005 after two decades in the non-profit arts world where he held executive positions at the American Museum of Moving Image, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

“For nearly six exciting and transformative years, Graham Leggat led the San Francisco Film Society with irrepressible determination, dash and design,” wrote Pat McBaine, president of the Film Society’s board of directors. “His vision, leadership, passion, work ethic, tenacity, imagination and daring along with his colorful language and wicked Scottish sense of humor have indelibly marked our organization with a valuable legacy and left it in the best shape - artistically, organizationally and financially - in its 54-year history.”

A Quest for Enlightenment

Leggat was born in England in 1960, of Scottish parents. He came to Stanford in 1979 on a soccer scholarship. Commenting on his athletic gifts he once joked, “Dad was a professional soccer player, so I had a genetic advantage.”

On his journey of “looking for enlightenment,” he spent eight years earning his B.A. in modern English and American literature and American studies at Stanford. This extended period of study was, to paraphrase Thoreau, because he “loved a broad margin to his life” and spent three of those years studying Zen in the monastic setting of Tassajara, the San Francisco Zen Center.

During his tenure at Stanford, he was the editor of the campus literary magazine, and earned a $1,000 prize for being named outstanding undergraduate-in-the-creative-arts. Graham Leggat then went on to earn his M.A. at Syracuse University where he studied fiction writing with acclaimed author Tobias Wolff, who would later join the Stanford English Department.

Sharing a Love of Film 

Leggat’s collaboration with Stanford began in 2007 when, as the Associate Director for Mediterranean Studies, I worked with him to organize a screening of the acclaimed Algerian film, Rome Rather Than You in Palo Alto. After the screening, students and community members joined in a discussion with Tariq Teguia, the film’s director. In 2008, Mediterranean Studies co-sponsored a SF Film Festival presentation of the Greek movie, Valse Sentimentale, directed by another young and daring Mediterranean filmmaker, Constantina Voulgaris.

The same year, Graham and his team facilitated a showing of the Venice Film Festival award winner, The Secret of the Grain, directed by Tunisian-French filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche. Screened at the Cubberley Auditorium at Stanford, the event was well attended by students and sparked a lively discussion afterwards with film studies professor Pavle Levi. Students’ eyes were opened to the complexities of the Muslim migrant experience in southern Europe through the vision of a film director with a uniquely provocative storytelling style.

Our last collaboration took place in April, 2011 when renowned French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon was the 2011 Bliss Carnochan Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center. Together, Leggat and I arranged to have Frodon participate in the SF Film Festival during his time at Stanford. Leggat invited Frodon to give the master class in film criticism for the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival (see video of the SFIFF54 Master Class: Critic’s Response and Responsibility with Jean-Michel Frodon.)

Working with Graham was pure joy. He truly cared about including Stanford, his alma mater, in the life of the festival and the film society. He firmly believed in the inspirational and transformative values of films, and in educating the students in the art of cinema. It says a lot that in 2009 he hired the highly-talented Rachel Rosen, a Stanford’s alumna who earned her M.A in Documentary Film in 1993, to be the director of programming for the film society.

Remembering a Visionary in the Arts

Remembering Graham is remembering his charismatic presence, his talent in mentoring a “crack team” of collaborators, his clean cut elegance, his gracious way of being in the world, his commitment to the civic and cultural missions of film festivals, his humorous irreverence, delivered in one-liners with his “je ne sais quoi” of an accent, his amazing talent of making you feel that you are the most important person in the room.

Remembering him is remembering fun conversations about French cinema - “a true cinephile is a cinephile of French films” he’d say, knowing how the French love to bask in those kinds of compliments!

Remembering Graham Leggat is also remembering his legacy. He boldly (and baldly) took the San Francisco Film Society where no one had taken it before. He gave film lovers in the Bay Area permission to believe that San Francisco can be both an international and local “futurist” destination. He and his team brought star power to the festival, such as bay area icons George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Sean Penn, Robert Redford but also international artists Tilda Swinton, Walter Salles, Ewan McGregor, Werner Herzog, Mike Leigh.

Under his charismatic leadership, the Film Society extended his programming to being on a daily, year-round basis; the Society offers a magnificent autumnal season of seven festivals: Hong Kong Cinema, Taiwan Film Days, the NY/SF International Children’s Film Festival, French Cinema Now, Cinema by the Bay, the San Francisco International Animation Festival and New Italian Cinema.

Last but not least, Leggat’s legacy will shine through the San Francisco Film Society’s New People Cinema, which will open its doors on September 1st, in a remarkable, state-of-the art theater in Japantown. This new theater will enable the Film Society to make a daily impact on the cultural life of the community it serves, a realization of Leggat’s ultimate ambition.

Graham Leggat is the author of a science fiction novel, Song of a Dangerous Paradise, published in 2007 (Cambrian Press). He is also Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la Republique Francaise, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to cinema.

Leggat is survived by his parents Graham and Marilyn of Niagara Falls, Canada, son William and daughters Vhary and Isabelle, sister Alexandra Leggat of Toronto, partner Diana Chiawen Lee, former wife Ellen Hughes, mother of his daughters and former wife Lillian Heard, mother of his son.

In lieu of flowers, donations in Leggat’s memory may be made to the San Francisco Film Society. Condolences should be sent to inmemoryofgraham@sffs.org or c/o Jessica Anthony, SFFS, 39 Mesa Street, Suite 110, The Presidio, San Francisco, CA 94129.

A memorial service, open to the public, is planned for late September. For information visit: http://sffs.org/

2012-13 Fellowship Applications Now Open

The Stanford Humanities Center is now accepting fellowship applications for the 2012-13 academic year. External Faculty and a new Arts Writer/Practitioner fellowship have a deadline of October 3, 2011. Stanford Faculty and Dissertation Fellows have a deadline of January 11, 2012.

The online application portal is now available. For more information, contact Fellowship Program Administrator Robert Barrick.

2010-11 Fellow Richard White Featured on NPR-Morning Edition

2010-11 Donald Andrews Whittier Fellow Richard White was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition on July 11, 2011.

White discussed his new book Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America as the first in a three-part series on 19th Century events that shape the America we live in today.

Listen to the story.