Editor's Note
This is the first of a few posts on our Salon selection, Women and Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard. I hope you all are enjoying the book. I will be posting briefly with my own thoughts and questions about the book next week, but today I am bringing you a brief interview with Mary Beard herself. Please read along and feel free to engage in the comments or by submitting a post yourself!
HG: Your new book, Women and Power, is based on lectures. What inspired the topic of these lectures? Is there something specific about this format that appealed to you?
MB: I fear that the practical answer is that I was asked to do a lecture on two occasions for the London Review of Books Series in the British Museum…I was struggling a bit to find a subject on each occasion (sure you know what that is like). I talked it through with my editor, Mary Kay Wilmers, and it was in those discussions that the topics emerged. In a way, it is a sign that a really good literary editor knows what you want to write about before you do yourself. Once I had settled on the topic I ran with it.
HG: How did you decide to publish these lectures as a book? Was this a challenge?
MB: I didn’t set out to do that. But they both got a lot of hits online on the LRB website, so it seemed that they might get a wider audience if they went between hardcovers too.
HG: Do you think the response to your book has been affected by the #metoo movement?
MB: It may well have been. It certainly turned out, by chance, to be a time when people were interested in thinking about women’s voices.
HG: Jumping out from this a bit, you have spent a fair amount of time beating back the trolls on twitter. Any advice for women starting out in academia?
MB: Two main things. One: You don’t have to be on social media if you don’t want to be. I have got a lot out of it, but there is no obligation. Second: You have to find your own of way of feeling comfortable with it and with the abuse that from time to time is likely to come. Mine has been to answer back (I felt very awkward about just shutting up in the face of abuse…it seemed like doing what women had been told to do for centuries–(put up and shut up). But if hitting the block button is more your style, then do that. Overall, I have got a lot more out of twitter than I have lost.
HG: How does Women and Power fit into your corpus of work more broadly? Do you see connections?
MB: I think that I have long thought that classics was not just about the ancient world, but also about the connection between the classical world and ‘us’.This was a slightly different way of doing it..but it fits. It is worth stressing that is isn’t planned as a work of ‘gender theory’ (which it certainly isn’t)..it is a combination of history and experience.
HG: Who/What are you reading now? What are you most excited to read in 2018?
MB: The truth is that I am working on the final stages of the new BBC series ‘Civilisations’ (a new version of K Clark’s old series)…so I am reading for that. I have just really enjoyed Jamal Elias, Aisha’s Cushion on Islamic Imagery.
I hope you guys have enjoyed this interview! Looking forward to your comments!
2 Thoughts on this Post
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A few thoughts—one classics and great books (of course): I think that Mary Beard is right that when an author, in any period, sets out to write what they hope will be a great book, and then achieves that goal, that the audience is both alive and dead. The author is trying to answer anticipated questions from interlocutors from both audiences, as you imagine them. So I get her point about classics aiming high. And then there’s the idea that the definition of classic is oftentimes applied from the present, so that the designation implies a connection to today. I say often rather than always because we deem some classics, as such, out of a historical thread or tradition. But the work so deemed must remain relevant to the present audience, despite the past imprimatur. – TL
This has nothing whatsoever to do with U.S. intellectual history but I wanted to second Beard’s enthusiasm for Jamal Elias’ book Aisha’s* Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam (Harvard University Press, 2012). It is brilliant work of multi-disciplinary scholarship that aids in correcting regnant and stubbornly stereotypical generalizations and falsehoods routinely uttered about art in Islam, some of which were earlier corrected in Oliver Leaman’s Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (2004) (which I reviewed for Philosophy East and West, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2007). Among other topics, it should attract anyone with an interest in iconography and iconoclasm and religious art in general. A non-Muslim can, as Leaman argued, “aesthetically” appreciate (in keeping with some aesthetic theories) art of Islamic provenance without any significant knowledge of the Islamic tradition (in which case I would suggest this serve as the merely the beginning, not the entirety of our aesthetic experience or appreciation of art), but I think Elias helps us understand what (and how and why!) a knowledge of this worldview and tradition (in comparative context) does to enhance or deepen that aesthetic appreciation such that we can have a broader understanding of the nature and function of religious and/or spiritual art in a manner that ties aesthetics to philosophy of art as well other other dimensions of human experience. In the word of Elias,
” … [E]xamples of visual art (including textual ones) need to be looked at as objects or entities that are perceived and interpreted, and not simply as objects for aesthetic appreciation. Second, that notions of representation as they emerge from a study of Islamic writings helps us understand how Muslims might perceive religious objects in their midst, and that this understanding cannot be reduced to simple questions of whether or not Muslims tolerate religious art. Third, that the definition of what is considered Islamic religious art needs to be expanded so that one can develop a new understanding of the nature of ritual and practice, aesthetics and art, as well as material and social culture in Islamic society. And lastly and more generally, it is very productive to look at art objects as technological products that serve as mediums of communication within societies. Such an understanding is not reductive, in the sense that it devalues aesthetic questions of appreciation and patronage or of artistic and technical virtuosity. On the contrary, such a view removes the multifaceted appreciation of the object from the confines of detached appreciation and brings it to the center of social and religious life.”
* ‘A’ishah (613/614 – 678 CE) was the youngest of Muhammad’s wives and considered by Sunnis to have been his “favorite.”