December
17,
2004
MHC
Newsmakers
Making
Connections
The recent visit of Rami Khouri to campus as the first Global Studies
Fellow through the Center for Global Initiatives prompted some
significant press coverage, both locally and farther afield. Khouri,
an internationally recognized columnist and commentator on issues
key to the Middle East and the executive editor of Beirut’s
Daily Star newspaper, was on campus November 15–19, and delivered
a public lecture titled “Iraq and the Wider American Dilemma
in the Middle East” on November 16. His visit here and his
lecture were covered by WFCR, the Republican, and the Daily
Hampshire Gazette. In addition, Khouri participated in an hour-long segment
of The Connection, a nationally syndicated public radio discussion
show, while he was visiting, and discussed the Middle East at a
lunch with a number of local journalists, representing WFCR and
papers including the Advocate, the Hartford
Courant, the Republican,
the Gazette, and the Mount Holyoke News.
Cheryl Wilson wrote in her November 17 Gazette story on the Khouri’s
talk:
“The United States is pursuing a misguided, simplistic foreign policy in
the Middle East that is creating more terrorists, a prominent Middle Eastern
journalist told several hundred people at Mount Holyoke College Wednesday.
“Rami George Khouri, executive editor of the Daily
Star, a newspaper based
in Beirut, Lebanon, is at Mount Holyoke this week as the college’s first
global studies fellow, addressing classes, meeting with Five College international
politics faculty, and holding informal discussions.
“Khouri said his views are shared by many in the Arab world. ‘You
may not find them comfortable, but I hope you will accept them in the spirit
of candor and honesty in which they are presented,’ he said.
“‘The manner in which the U.S. has almost unilaterally gone to wage
war on terror has made terrorism much more widespread and more difficult to control,’ he
said.
“‘The war on terror has become a problem for the United States and
now for the entire world,’ he said. While the policy has seen some success
in capturing terrorists and cleaning up training grounds in Afghanistan, there
are far more terrorist incidents around the globe, in Madrid and Istanbul, in
Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, in Morocco.
“The Bush administration has misjudged the Arab world and the underlying
reasons for terrorism, Khouri said. He maintains the single most important reason
for terrorism is humiliation, not poverty.”
John Appleton wrote in his November 23 story in the Republican:
“(Khouri) was critical of much of the American news coverage of Middle
East events.
“‘The single biggest shock to me was to see how in the last three
years, the depth and breadth of analysis in the United States of the phenomenon
of terrorism has been very weak, very thin,” Khouri said.
“‘One attitude that I heard a lot dealt with whether the death of
Yasser Arafat would be an opportunity for making peace,’ he said. ‘That
is off the mark and rather insulting to Palestinians. It betrays a lack of understanding
of how policies are made by Palestinians.’”
Paper View “Rituals of Being,” an installation by
Rie Hachiyanagi, assistant professor of art, received a glowing
review in the Deseret Morning News of Salt Lake City, Utah. Reviewer
Dave Gagon viewed the installation at the Museum of Art, on the
Provo, Utah, campus of Brigham Young University, and wrote: “For
those thoroughly enmeshed in occidental reasoning, ‘getting’ Rie
Hachiyanagi’s installation ‘Rituals of Being’ may
be an arduous task. If, on the other hand, we can enlarge our
concept of what art should and could be—even for a small
moment—there are genuine rewards. Besides, according to
Hachiyanagi, ‘there’s nothing to, quote-unquote, “get.” There’s
no right answer.’” Gagon noted that each of the installations,
composed largely of space, light, and handmade, blank paper, “evokes
thoughts and feelings of reverence and peace, of being connected
with something that isn’t requiring a verbal or physical
answer. ‘The Golden River,’ which references D.H.
Lawrence’s poem ‘The Ship of Death,’ presents
viewers with a multitude of miniature vessels, made of handmade
paper, folded with rare tenderness and hanging as a long stream
at various heights from a grid by thread. The boats stir with
each breeze made by viewers, as if moving along on the waters’ current.
In the artist’s piece ‘Threshold,’ viewers
enter a room to discover layer upon layer of handmade paper on
the ground. Isolated lights shine up through the paper, and,
depending on the amount of paper over the light, the installation
glows in patches.
It is visually striking.” Images from the installation
can be viewed at http://cfac.byu.edu/moa/News/rituals_press_release_images.php.
Ten Worth Reading Christopher Benfey, Mellon Professor of English,
takes readers around the globe and across millennia in his annual
review of the year’s most notable art books in the December
5 New York Times Book Review. In “The Year of Art and Archaeology,” part
of the Book Review’s “100 Notable Books of the Year” issue,
Benfey singles out ten significant books that cover subjects
ranging from stone weights made in 6,000 BCE by Native American
artists to modern-day earthworks constructed by Robert Smithson.
Benfey finds in these “vivid books” a telling of “how
cultures borrow from one another to create new artistic syntheses.” An
example from his review of The Colonial
Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830, by Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina
Esteras Martin, which deals with the discovery of abundant silver
by Spanish invaders: “The conquistadors shipped it, as
coins or wrought objects, to China and Europe in return for,
among other things, Chinese silk and porcelain, diamonds from
Ceylon, carpets from Persia and the first edition of Don
Quixote from Spain. Incan weavers—as though they were illustrating
Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings—wove an amazingly
cosmopolitan menagerie into their tapestries: the Asian phoenix
(which probably ‘resonated in the minds of Andean weavers
with the native condor’), the one-horned Chinese xiezhai
and its European counterpart, the unicorn, along with a harem
of mermaids playing the Spanish guitar.”
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