Rumba under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi
- Edited by Irina Dumitrescu
Published on February 29, 2016 by punctum books
- Pages
- 264 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 5⤫8 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-0-692-65583-2 (Paperback)
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: LCO010000, LCO015000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: DNL, DNP
A professor of poetry uses a deck of playing cards to measure the time until her lover returns from Afghanistan. Congolese soldiers find their loneliness reflected in the lyrics of rumba songs. Survivors of the siege of Sarajevo discuss which book they would have never burned for fuel. A Romanian political prisoner writes her memoir in her head, a book no one will ever read. These are the arts of survival in times of crisis.
Rumba under Fire proposes we think differently about what it means for the arts and liberal arts to be “in crisis.” In prose and poetry, the contributors to Rumba under Fire explore what it means to do art in hard times. How do people teach, create, study, and rehearse in situations of political crisis? Can art and intellectual work really function as resistance to power? What relationship do scholars, journalists, or even memoirists have to the crises they describe and explain? How do works created in crisis, especially at the extremes of human endurance, fit into our theories of knowledge and creativity?
Contents
Frontmatter (i–x)
Irina Dumitrescu
Introduction (xiii–xxiii)
Irina Dumitrescu
Triptych (The Library) (1–1)
Andrew Crabtree
What Book Would You Never Burn (For Fuel)? (3–13)
Dennis Ferhatović
Poems in Prison: The Survival Strategies of Romanian Political Prisoners (15–30)
Irina Dumitrescu
Writing Resistance: Lena Constante's The Silent Escape and the Journal as Genre in Romania's (Post)Communist Literary Field (31–52)
Carla Baricz
War and the Food of Dreams: An Interview with Cara De Silva (53–77)
Cara De Silva, Irina Dumitrescu
Atempause and Atemschaukel: The Post-War Periods of Primo Levi and Herta Müller (79–99)
Tim Albrecht
Theater in Wartime (101–102)
Greg Alan Brownderville
Counting Cards: A Poetics for Deployment (103–117)
Susannah Hollister
Ace of Hearts (119–120)
Susannah Hollister
Civilization and its Malcontents: On Teaching Western Humanities in "The New Turkey" (121–144)
William Coker
Departure Entrance (145–153)
Dennis Ferhatović
Profanations: The Public, The Political and The Humanities in India (155–174)
Prashant Keshavmurthy
Village Cosmopolitanisms: Or, I See Kabul from Lado Sarai (175–195)
Anand Vivek Taneja
Terpsichore (197–199)
Irina Dumitrescu
Rumba Under FIre: Music as Morale and Morality in Music at the Frontlines of the Congo (201–230)
Judith Verweijen
Ulysses (231–231)
Sharon Portnoff
Backmatter (233–241)
Irina Dumitrescu
Biographies
Irina Dumitrescu teaches medieval literature at the University of Bonn, and writes on literature, food, immigration, and dance. Her scholarly essays have appeared in PMLA, Anglia, Exemplaria, Forum for Modern Language Studies, and in various collections. Her belletristic writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southwest Review, the Washington Post, The Manifest-Station, and Petits Propos Culinaires. She blogs about dance at Atisheh(opens in new tab) and about culinary disasters at Food Gone Wrong(opens in new tab).
Reviews
Don't panic: the best books to help us survive a crisis(opens in new tab)
Joe Moran
Irina Dumitrescu’s edited collection Rumba Under Fire – available to download free from Punctum – is full of stories of people still managing to write, teach and learn in the cruellest circumstances. Romanian prisoners kept in solitary confinement under the Ceausescu regime share poetry with each other in Morse code, by tapping, coughing or moving their chairs so that they squeak. Siberian prisoners make ink from blackberries so they can write down poems they remember from school. An imprisoned professor of English writes his lectures on string, tying knots for each letter. A 16-year-old prisoner teaches herself English by scratching newly learned words on stolen scraps of soap. These heartening tales put our own troubles into proportion. They show us that the human will, and our inescapably social instincts, usually find a way.
READS OF THE YEAR 2016: Steve Mentz(opens in new tab)
Steve Mentz
Amid laments about the crisis of the humanities, it’s good to read about the power of humanities in times of crisis. Essayist and scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature Irina Dumitrescu’s introduction outlines the “tension between the productive and destructive aspects of crisis,” before her book unfurls gorgeous and painful evidence of “a special relationship between crisis, time, and the arts.” Poetry, for dissidents imprisoned by Romanian communism, was “meditation … occupation … secret code … food.” Jail was “university.” “Tyrants,” she writes, “can be such good literary critics, censorship the best reading list.” The materials she collects range beyond Romanian prisons; for me some of the most powerful were the cookbooks salvaged from the Terezin concentration camp by Cara de Silva, Tim Albrecht’s gripping essay on Primo Levi, and William Coker’s description of classroom teaching in modern Turkey as “counter-interpellation.” Original poems by contributors also demonstrate the power of humanities to speak back to crisis. The book’s title describes a form of Congolese music that serves as “one of the primary means of softening the harsh realities of everyday life by commenting on them with subtle irony or by normalizing them as shared fate.” In a world under fire and on fire, such music helps humans endure.
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Genres
- Humanities+University
Keywords
- art in crisis
- crisis
- cultural studies
- humanities
- war