San Diego's Sestercentennial Got You Feeling Reminiscent? We've Got the Cure: Mourning Dove's Stories - An Authentic Compilation of Native Tales

From April through July, here in San Diego, both local elected officials and leaders of the Kumeyaay Nation are working together to celebrate 250 years of local history and heritage. A joint effort to commemorate the past and shed light on the region’s many peoples. And while leaders here in San Diego have waited until a big anniversary year to honor our history, native storytellers—like Mourning Dove—have long recognized the importance of preserving cultural traditions.

Considered one of the first native female novelists, Christine Quintasket (Mourning Dove), dedicated her life to transcribing the oral traditions of the Salish-speaking tribes in the Pacific Northwest.

Mourning Dove lived 1884-1936 in the native
borderlands between Washington and Canada.

Published in American Indian Studies at San Diego State University, comes Mourning Dove’s Stories, a rare unaltered collection of Mourning Dove’s original works.

Thanks to the extra efforts of editors, Clifford E. Trafzer and Richard D. Scheuerman, many of the stories in this compilation can be found virtually unchanged from Mourning Dove’s own interpretations—free from the westernized influence found in many previous presentations of her works which have been “corrected” by white men.

Featuring a diverse cast of characters—from Lynx to Coyote—all sixteen vignettes highlight the undeniable dualities of life and the careful balance between these dialectical tensions. As the pages turn characters go from brave heroes to cunning villains and back again. Through every transition the stories highlight the fragile balance between the good and evil that live both within and around us.

This book truly remains a treasured preservation of Mourning Dove and the story of her native people. Rich in wisdom and moral lessons, Mourning Dove’s Stories proves a quintessential reading for those interested in learning from the mistakes, examples, and truths of the past.

As many of us today are finally starting to appreciate the rich history of our locality (and our country as a whole), there is no better a moment to purchase Mourning Dove’s Stories as a way to complete the transformative journey through time and tradition. Mourning Dove herself lived in a transitional period in American Indian history—one where cultures collided and rapidly changed. So to the climate of today, as the United States increasingly becomes a region of diversity, we could all learn a lesson from this authentic assemblage of “the oldest truths of America.”

Purchase your own copy of Mourning Dove’s Stories here, so you to can learn from the truths and traditions of the past!

An Interview with Fanny Daubigny, Author of the New Book from SDSU Press, "Proust in Black"

Fanny Daubigny has called Los Angeles, CA home for now over ten years. In her new book, Proust in Black, published this Spring by SDSU Press, Daubigny makes the case that, despite his death just after WWI, the literary essence of Marcel Proust is alive and well in the City of Angels; hiding within its many dark recesses that spurred the Film Noir genre in the mid-twentieth century. Proust in Black stands as an unprecedented merge of poetic verse, cinematic history and critical theory that reads not so much like an academic text, but rather, as Daubigny puts it, a "love letter" to the cultural elements that she for so long has poured herself into.

Fanny Daubigny lives and writes in Los Angeles, California, and works as a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at California State University, Fullerton. This interview was conducted in February of 2019.


SDSU PRESS: You’ve written in the LA Book Review, in the context of Marcel Proust’s own critics attempting to investigate his personal life in order to better understand his work, “Reality always falls short, and objects of beauty become distorted.” How much of yourself was wrapped up in Proust’s fiction while writing this book? Was there something that you used to ground yourself in reality during the process?

Daubigny: Proust in Black is a love letter to the city of Los Angeles, the city that welcomed me more than 10 years ago both as an immigrant and a transplant from Miami, Florida. It is a love letter to literature and film and a farewell letter to a certain type of academic discourse, cultural and literary criticism that I often find too arid, insular and dry. Finally, it is an open break-up letter to a past love.

P: Because you also write poetry, Proust in Black strikes a beautiful balance between academic investigation and pros that often come across as a work of art themselves, which makes for a delightful and informative read. How did you go about finding this balance between personal expression and research-based writing?

D: The balance came to me very naturally and spontaneously. This is how I approach the world and this is how I write as a reflection of how I experience reality.  A balance that constantly swings its pendulum between chaos and order, reason and heart, intellect and emotions, all together pulled by Dionysian and Apollonian forces (as a reference to Nietzschean aesthetics).

P: Having lived all over the world--France, Canada, Chile and Los Angeles (perhaps I’m missing one or two?)--is there something about LA that lends itself especially to the Noir genre that isn’t found anywhere else?

D: Yes, I think it does although the genre goes well beyond historic and cultural determinations as I tried to show it in my essay. What makes Los Angeles so special to me in my exploration of the theme and the genre is the  explosive crystallization of various elements that are so intrinsic to the city: The historic with the second world war ‘free play zone’, the cold war freeze, the nuclear threat (nuclear tests operated in the desert of Nevada in 1953 radiated unto the city of Los Angeles); the geographic with the ever dramatic struggle of a city with its threatening landscape: the sense of a city always being ‘on the edge’ (on the fault line), at the very border of explosion (Kiss me Deadly (1955); collusion with Mexico (Out of the Past (1947); Touch of Evil (1958); at the border of death with the proximity of the desert (Sullivans’ travels, 1941) etc.

Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity, 1944

P: Your book spans decades of Film Noir in LA, from the 1920s to the 1980s. How, in your opinion, have LA Noir films changed throughout time? Do you think the tone of the LA Noir film has changed with the city, or do films change the way we see the city?

D: Yes, absolutely, I think they have even as the stereotypes belonging to the genre can be exported to other film genres. Let’s take the example of Marlowe, the stereotype of the detective.  Marlowe as seen in The Big Sleep by Howard Hawks and Marlowe as portrayed by Robert Altman in A Very Long Goodbye are two different characters and the refection of two different cities in transition. Marlowe in Altman’s movie is still on his quest for truth but the crime scene has shifted to Mexico, the bad guys have turned from librarians to hopeless middle-aged writers, psychiatric wards keep the city’s secrets and Marlowe’s greatest passion is now for a cat.

P: Proust in Black often blurs the line between reality and fiction in its embrace of the night--as you write, “In calling up the night, it is often the myths and folklore of childhood that are evoked,” and “...throughout the centuries the blackness of night has known how to share intimate space with the writer’s white page.” Is there something to the idea of letting oneself get wrapped up in the drama and fantasy of film and fiction in a city like Los Angeles? Do you think there is something that Film Noir--and for that matter, Proust, himself--can teach us about embracing the night?

D: Los Angeles has the texture of a dream-like reality. Never completely real, never completely fake. Always on the edge, on the fault line, in-between, and in-and-out. Film noir has the color of the night, where opposites contrast, collide, meet and merge with one another; where black and white evoke the night of dreamers (like Marlowe) and killers all alike. Proust’s novel, Remembrance of Things Past, contain early drafts that looked very much like a ‘bedtime story’, a conversation initially started between the narrator and his mother about literature. Later, the final version turned out to be the story of a man that cannot find sleep, dreams and wakes-up, fantasying all together about femme fatales, corrupted men and crimes (symbolic) all reflecting the progressive disparition and dissipation of a certain myth, the myth of a greater France, nostalgic of its glorious past whose dream was brutally interrupted in 1914, at the onset of one of the most vicious and barbaric times of the history of the French Republic when France, Europe and the world turned into the blackness and bleakness of WWI.

P: It’s undeniable that our world is changing more quickly by the day, with the advent of  social media, our addiction to the news cycle (and the news cycle’s reliance on our addiction), political turmoil, etc. Where does Proust’s work fit into all of this? Is there a remedy within his writing that society can find solace within? Likewise, where does your book fit into our society today? What can we learn from reading about the relationship between Film Noir and Marcel Proust’s work in your book?

D: Proust’s political stance is oven overlooked (or overshadowed) by the complex aesthetics the novel famously (or infamously) stands for. As said earlier, Proust’s novel is as much a work about poetry, fine imagery and complex metaphors as it is about history involving the researching, chronicling archiving and rendering of complex cultural, political and socio-economic questions such as: secularism, cultural diversity, class struggles, xenophobia, education, sexual politics, genre etc…

Proust in Black follows the path inaugurated by Proust’s novel in the sense that it strives to strike a balance between poetry and history, and in the end addressing in its content and in its form the primary question: how being bicultural is not just a historic but also a poetic question; how bi-culturality blurs the lines between forms and identities, genres and cultures.

Kiss Me Deadly, West of Los Angeles 
@2016 fdaubigny

SDSU Back in the Day!

New from Hyperbole Books, an SDSU Press Imprint: PROUST IN BLACK Los Angeles: A Proustian Fantasy by Fanny Daubigny

PROUST IN BLACK 

Los Angeles: A Proustian Fiction 

{Full Color Special Limited Edition} 

by Fanny Daubigny 

translated from the French by Bruce Whiteman 

HYPERBOLE BOOKS AN IMPRINT OF SDSU PRESS ISBN-10: 1-938537-81-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-938537-81-3 $30.95 USA | $42 CANADA | $600 MEXICO | €29 EURO

Fanny Daubigny's PROUST IN BLACK fuses French Literature, cultural studies, film noir, film studies, and Los Angeles, the City of Angels, in a dynamic synthesis of imagination and invention that remakes cultural criticism in the here and now. With lucid and evocative readings of Proust, Billy Wilder, Hollywood film noir and more, Daubigny emerges as a literature and film studies critic with a compelling vision and a lyrical prose artistry that tracks manifestations of Proust in and across the dark night of Southern California. 

Advance word on PROUST IN BLACK 


“A book about Proust and film noir and Los Angeles, yes, but so much more: it is about fear and desire, about guilt and insomnia, about the ‘chiaroscuro of consciousness’ in text and film and culture, about the ‘aesthetics of fear.’ And like a detective searching around dark corners of the city, we are constantly surprised. Buster Keaton joins Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang as an inaugurator of film noir! Pasolini’s debt to Proust! Albertine as femme fatale! It is criticism as detection, criticism as collision, criticism as crime, criticism as confession. It is critique noire.” Tom Lutz, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Los Angeles 
 Review of Books 

“It is a tour de force of dexterous and poetically rendered cross-referencing. In Proust in Black Fanny Daubigny has composed a multi-layered cultural exchange between the country of France and the City of Los Angeles. The polarities, oddly drawn toward each other, will involve, on the French end, the great literary masterpiece of its age, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and from the U.S. seaside dream city, L.A.'s body of films noir, those darkly gorgeous, cheaply made black and white crime movies from the 40s and 50s. At the center of all this is Desire. At the center of all this are the fluid permutations of memory, persistent yet illusive, and (as Elizabeth Bishop once said of another intangible essence, knowledge) ‘flowing and flown.’” 
 Suzanne Lummis, L.A. Noir Poet 

“Fanny Daubigny maps the liminal spaces where Proust’s romanticism collides with the cynical yearning of the film noir, in a Los Angeles that is at once real and cinematic, present and impossibly distant, smoldering-look cool and branding-iron hot. Like a half-remembered dream, her city floats above the smog line and gets caught in the palms.” 
Richard Schave, Founder, Los Angeles Visionary Association 

About the author: Fanny Daubigny is a writer, translator, and poet--she's also a Professor of French at CSU Fullerton. She has published many articles on Marcel Proust and is a specialist in the nineteenth and twentieth century literatures of France and the French-speaking countries. She lives in Los Angeles, city of angels.

Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews

by Christian Benavides

Daniel Olivas, a grandson to Mexican immigrants, grew up in Los Angeles. Eventually, he went on to receive a degree in English literature at Stanford University and later, a law degree from UCLA. Now, Daniel works as an attorney with the California Department of Justice in the Public Rights Division. He writes in his free time and, in fact, has published seven books and has contributed to many publications.  In his newest venture, Daniel has put together past interviews and personal essays that put forward questions about Chicano identity and explores a writer's writing process and its relationship with the writer's life. A supplement to Latino/a literature, Things We Do Not Talk About, sets out to continue this conversation with other readers and writers whose writing is as interconnected to their lives as Daniel's is. Things We Do Not Talk About will be available May 5th, 2014! The following is a short interview with Daniel Olivas:

Interviewer: Why did you decide to title the book, “Things We Do Not Talk About”? What are some of these things you felt needed to be talked about while going through academia?

Daniel Olivas: The original manuscript that I submitted to SDSU Press not only included essays and interviews but also several short stories including one with that title. Because I liked the title of that short story so much, I decided to make it the title of the book. When I met with Harry Polkinhorn and William Nericcio to discuss my project, they said they liked the manuscript but that the press did not publish fiction. So, I removed the short stories but kept the title because it spoke to an issue—in an ironic manner—that I see with the coverage of Latino/a literature: the mainstream press doesn’t give it enough even as academia has moved towards recognizing such literature in ways that I didn’t see back in college back in the late 1970s. Since several of the interviews have already been relied upon in academic circles (i.e., scholarly books on Latino/a literature, Ph.D. dissertations, etc.), I thought that bringing them together in one volume along with my essays might be useful. I want to note that the stunning cover art is by Perry Vasquez, a San Diego artist and educator who was a classmate of mine at Stanford and who worked with me when I was the art director of the Chaparral, Stanford’s humor magazine. I think his art conveys the broad spectrum of topics covered by my essays and author interviews.

Interviewer:  How was the process in the making of this book different from previous books you’ve published? What sparked the idea of it?

Daniel Olivas: My previous six books were works of fiction so this was a departure for me—I never thought that I’d publish a non-fiction book. Yes, it’s true that I’ve been writing essays and interviewing authors for many years, but I never thought that I’d have so much material for a whole book. And when I learned that my coverage of Latino/a writers was being relied upon by professors and students alike, the idea for this project began to evolve.

Interviewer:   In the introduction, you mention a reoccurring question in the background of your essays: what does it mean to be a Chicano writer? Is this a question you continue to ask yourself?

Daniel Olivas: In a sense, yes. I am always delighted when Chicano and Chicana students attend my readings and then come up afterwards to discuss fiction. There is this beautiful connection based on some common cultural touchstones. And I am always thrilled when they say that they are inspired to become writers themselves. Yet, in the back of my mind as I’m having these interactions, I wonder if I have any responsibilities as a Chicano writer. In the end, I think that my primary responsibility is to be honest to my art and the representation of all people in my fiction, essays and poetry. I also have a responsibility to be a mentor to those who wish to express themselves through literature and to promote worthwhile books especially those written by Latino/a writers.

Interviewer:   Looking back through all the interviews you included in this book, what is a reoccurring message or experience that seems to connect all these writers that have been successful in publishing Latino/a literature? Is there anything in an interview that stands out the most and has helped your writing journey?

Daniel Olivas: None of the writers I interviewed ever gave up the dream of publishing even when faced with a society and publishing industry that is not always very understanding or hospitable to Latino/a literature. That kind of bravery is so incredibly inspiring to me. I would be hard pressed to choose one interview that stands out because, as readers of this book will learn, each of the 28 writers offers some kind of important insight on writing and culture. I think taken together, we can only be heartened by the eloquence and energy these writers.

For more information on the author, visit his website at: http://www.danielolivas.com/

SDSU Press Proud to Co-Sponsor the Wendelmoot Symposium Event of the Year! Blacktinx Queer Performance | E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University

Blacktinx Queer Performance: Crossing Beyond the Crisis of Bordered Identities

  

In this presentation, E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera-Servera will discuss their ongoing research collaborations around issues of black and Latinx (“Blacktinx”) queer performance. They will pay particular attention to the history of earlier coalitions of black and latinx queers that lay the groundwork for queer artists to create work that moves beyond hard-and-fast boundaries of ethno-racial identities.

click to enlarge

Mark your calendars! The Wendelmoot CRISIS CRISIS Symposium Series is proud to bring E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera-Servera to SDSU!

#wendelmoot is a project of the SDSU Department of English & Comparative Literature--this event is co-sponsored by the LGBTQ Research Consortium-SDSU, the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University--The Official Page, M.A.L.A.S. The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences, and San Diego State University Press.

wendlemoot.sdsu.edu

Check out more about our amazing dynamic duo from Northwestern University here and here:

https://communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/RamonRiveraServera

https://www.afam.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/e-patrick-johnson.html

The Definitive Guide to the "Southern Border" -- REFRAMING THE LATINO IMMIGRATION DEBATE by Alvaro Huerta and featuring the photography of Antonio Turok

The definitive book on what POTUS 45 calls "The Southern Border" and that we call home, mi tierra, mi alma, la frontera REFRAMING THE LATINO IMMIGRATION DEBATE by Alvaro Huerta, featuring the amazing photography of Antonio Turok #antonioturok
direct link: https://t.co/7hZwTt0Mgy pic.twitter.com/AYskVYHRAQ

— San Diego State University Press (@SDSUPress) February 13, 2019