Islands and the Law: An Interview with Christina Duffy Burnett

Sina Najafi and Christina Duffy Burnett

Bounded by water, circumscribed, and discrete, islands arguably constitute a natural geographical model for the classic territorial conception of a state (where sovereignty is thought to extend homogenously across a defined terrestrial region and terminate at the border). At the same time, the historical evolution of imperialism in both the East and the West has meant that most of the world’s actual islands became, at some point, off-shore colonial possessions of a distant metropolitan power. Treated as way stations, outposts, and resupply harbors, these outre-mer acquisitions tended to be spatially and legally marginal, regardless of their economic importance.

Christina Duffy Burnett is a professor of law at Columbia University, where she teaches legal history, immigration, citizenship, and the US Constitution. Much of her work deals with the legal problems that arise at the margins of empire. She spoke with Sina Najafi by phone in June of 2010.

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Hot on the Trail

Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen

“You reproach me for not sending you one earlier,” Alexis Soyer wrote in the introduction to the 1851 edition of his book of recipes The Modern Housewife. “That which I intended for you has been taken by the Marquis of N. [Normanby] and party to Egypt, with the view of having a dinner cooked on the top of the Pyramids.”¹ The Marquis of Normanby was an eccentric, somewhat Jules Vernesque aristocrat to whom Soyer apparently had lent his latest culinary invention: a proto-camping gas cooker called the Magic Stove.

Undoubtedly, Normanby’s choice of location was audacious and original. Picnicking, that unique Victorian jumble of high-class formality and bucolic joviality, relied in large part on spectacular locations. The fun of the picnic was not so much about eating and drinking in the outdoors, but about moving the whole formal dining experience—complete with cutlery, wine cellar, servants, and appropriate attire—to the countryside. An abrupt contrast between formal interior and informal exterior, between civilization and nature, was essential; the more contrast, the more fun. In that respect, the pyramids could not have been better chosen. Another obvious contrast was that a well-appointed picnic basket typically held only cold food: smoked salmon, cold cuts, biscuits, fruits, cakes. Cooking on the spot was not (yet) in fashion. Soyer’s Magic Stove was to change all that. Exactly what made the picnic on the pyramid so utterly exciting was that the meal was cooked and served hot. Not only the dining room but also the kitchen was transported to this improbable and truly inaccessible location. In the history of the picnic, the experience of dining atop a pyramid could merely be regarded as the gradual, if daring, evolution of an already established theme, whereas the portable cooker heralded a total revolution.

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Other Self: An Interview with Angie Hobbs

Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Angie Hobbs

“Most men agree that a true friend is a precious treasure,” Socrates’ student and amanuensis Xenophon records the philosopher observing, “and nevertheless there is nothing about which we give ourselves so little trouble as to make men our friends.” Such tensions—between the utter centrality of friendship to the development of both the individual and society at large and the casual, almost thoughtless way in which so many friendships are made and lost—have animated philosophical discourse since the very beginnings of the western intellectual tradition. The elusive, nuanced nature of philia and its relationship to community (both earthly and otherwise) remained an essential theme for theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas and secular thinkers like Montaigne and Mill, and such questions continue to tantalize contemporary thinkers and politicians today. Angie Hobbs—Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England—has written widely on the philosophical history of friendship. She spoke with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi by phone in December 2009.


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A Dry Black Veil

Brian Dillon

­­­­­­­­By the last decades of the nineteenth century, an obscuring perplex of ideas regarding dust hung above the inhabitants of the European city like overlapping clouds, variously threatening or inspiring with the weight of knowledge, quantity of filth, or degree of infection they contained. London, especially—having only lately escaped a mid-century cholera season that had devastated parts of the inner city—seemed to exist in a miasmic haze of dirt, disease, and curiously aestheticized industrial pollution. As early as 1661, in th­e pages of his Fumifugium: Or, The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated, the diarist and polymath John Evelyn had complained that citizens breathed “nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour,” which concoction scoured their lungs and disordered the entire body, so that coughs, catarrhs, and consumption raged more in London alone than in the whole of the rest of the world. The poison fug was partly attributable to domestic fires, but Evelyn blames brewers, dyers, lime-burners, and salt- and soap-boilers for the most noxious emanations:

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Ingestion / Table Manner

Anthony Grafton

On 18 July 1573, the Venetian Inquisition summoned Paolo Veronese to answer questions about the Last Supper that he had painted for the Convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. In Veronese’s magnificent image, Palladian architecture frames the central scene, while Hogarthian servants and soldiers talk and scuffle in the foreground. The extras who give the painting its life and color provoked dry, precise queries: “What signifies the figure of him whose nose is bleeding?” “What signify those armed men dressed in the fashion of Germany, with halberds in their hands?” “And the one who is dressed as a jester with a parrot on his wrist, why did you put him into the picture?” Veronese did his best to satisfy the inquisitors. The figure with the bleeding nose, he explained, “is a servant who has a nose-bleed from some accident.” The jester with the parrot “is there as an ornament, as it is usual to insert such figures.” As to the halberdiers, he offered a more theoretical explanation:

It is necessary here that I should say a score of words. ... We painters use the same license as poets and madmen, and I represented those halberdiers, the one drinking, the other eating at the foot of the stairs, but both ready to do their duty, because it seemed to me suitable and possible that the master of the house, who as I have been told was rich and magnificent, would have such servants.

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Pop Art

Jonathan Allen

In his On the Natural Faculties (179 AD), physician and philosopher Claudius Galen explains the growth of animal organisms by using the image of a balloon—or rather the balloon of antiquity, an inflated animal bladder. “Children [in the district of Ionia] take the bladders of pigs, fill them with air, and then rub them on ashes near the fire, so as to warm, but not to injure them. … As they rub, they sing songs, to a certain measure, time, and rhythm, and all their words are an exhortation to the bladder to increase in size. When it appears to them fairly well distended, they again blow air into it and expand it further; then they rub it again. This they do several times, until the bladder seems to them to have become large enough.” Large enough to play with, that is. Galen’s focus, however, is on the increasing thinness of the bladder’s membrane. Were human bodies to grow in the same way, they might be “torn through,” and to prevent this, Nature provides “nourishment to this thin part.” Through nutrition, Nature alone possesses “the power to expand the body in all directions so that it remains un-ruptured and preserves completely its previous form.” Without nutrition, Galen’s image suggests, human bodies would pop, like over-distended balloons.

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Colors / Black

Paul La Farge

A little while back, when I was working on one of my many doomed projects, I went into a cave. Not just a little cave, either, but an enormous emptiness in the ground, the trace of a watercourse that gnawed its way across half the state of Kentucky a few thousand years ago. We—this was my friend Wayne and I—went a long way in, then we sat down and turned off our lights. The darkness was like nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; after a while I could barely believe that my hand was there, in front of my face, 
waving. 


That darkness is what I think about when I think of black. I was going to write, the color black, but as every child knows black isn’t a color. Black is a lack, a void of light. When you think about it, it’s surprising that we can see black at all: our eyes are engineered to receive light; in its absence, you’d think we simply wouldn’t see, any more than we taste when our mouths are empty. Black velvet, charcoal black, Ad Reinhart’s black paintings, black-clad Goth kids with black fingernails: how do we see them?


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Reading to the Endgame

D. Graham Burnett and W. J. Walter

­THE PROBLEM

In his brief essay “Gli scacchisti irritabili” (“The 
Irritable Chess Players”) of 1985, Primo Levi elaborates a set of symmetries between the act of literary creation and the playing of a game of chess. Both a work of literature and the royal game, he suggests, unfold in time within strictures that inexorably invoke “life and the struggle for life.” There is, as he puts it, a “symbolic shadow” that lengthens over a chess board, since 
the way to the end is the way to a death, “a death for which you yourself are guilty.” The novel, of course, 
is the literary form that has evolved precisely to afford 
language the means of erecting and choreographing such a metaphorical life space. And thus it is no surprise that the novel, too, is haunted by a long shadow: all plots, as Don DeLillo memorably put it, end in death. Moreover, en route to their respective endgames, both chess and the novel offer powerful arenas in which to investigate the question of questions: the ever-vexatious issue of the relationship between fate and agency, between necessity and freedom. Every move is our own, except when it’s not. Either way, the board thins, the sheaf of paper in the right hand dwindles, sifting 
left as if blown by an inexorable wind—though of course, we turn every page. Chess, in this sense, is the opposite of dice, just as the novel is the opposite of Scripture (the exact difference between chance and providence has never been clear, but they share an antithesis in deliberative subjectivity, and this may be 
a clue).

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