Communication

A communication will be considered only if it relates to an article or review published in this journal; publication is solely at the editor's discretion. The AHA disclaims responsibility for statements, either of fact or opinion, made by the writers. Letters may not exceed seven hundred words for reviews and one thousand words for articles. They should be submitted in duplicate, typed double-spaced with wide margins, and headed "To the Editor."

ARTICLES

To the Editor:
I was not surprised to encounter a critical reading of my book, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (AHR, October 2004, pp. 1263–1264), since I had raised some strong objections to the reviewer's published arguments within the book's pages. It was surprising, however, to discover that Sumiko Higashi misconstrued several arguments in the book.
In Reel History I challenge the familiar claim that cinematic history should be dismissed as light entertainment merely because its creators exercise a great deal of artistic license. Dramatic cinema can introduce important ideas about the past, I argue, but not in the manner that teachers and scholars present history in lectures and publications. Movies communicate in distinctive ways. When intelligently crafted, they can arouse emotions and stir curiosity.
While developing this argument I express disappointment about some film scholarship, arousing vigorous objections from Higashi. My commentary is not radically dismissive. It acknowledges that specialists in film studies have contributed important insights that are worthy of consideration by those who operate primarily from within the field of history (pp. 161–63) I note, however, that problems remain concerning inter-disciplinary communication. Historians are responsible, in part, for the shortcomings (some operate without attention to issues raised in film scholarship), but so are film studies professionals who promise a great deal but sometimes deliver considerably less. Unfortunately, much of the film theory recommended to historians is replete with jargon, vague references to the ideas of favored French gurus, and exercises in political correctness.
Higashi reacts defensively to my questioning rather than acknowledging the challenge of discovering new ways to strengthen cross-disciplinary understanding and communication. Instead of dealing with fundamental questions raised in Reel History, the reviewer registers a series of detailed complaints that misrepresent my thesis.
For example, Higashi shows displeasure over this writer's observation that Claude Lanzmann's documentary film Shoah is without "dramatic representations." Sumiko Higashi declares that Shoah is "replete with drama if not reenactments." I certainly agree and also concur that Shoah addresses weighty philosophical issues. My point refers to information in Reel History (p. 121) showing that Lanzmann objected strenuously to Schindler's List. The documentary filmmaker recorded statements from witnesses to the Holocaust and argued that the "sacred subject" should not be fictionalized. Did Higashi fail to read this page and, therefore, not understand the meaning of the term, "dramatic"?
Higashi also claims that I am guilty of "dismissal of unconventional works," especially in my comments about the movie, Walker (1987), a Higashi favorite. Did the reviewer see my discussion (p. 164) of Walker's intriguing contemporary messages? Reel History acknowledges that provocatively designed films, such as Walker and JFK, "raise important issues for the study of cinematic history," particularly through challenges to official claims about "truth." My point is that experimental movies with radically configured narrative structures rarely attract huge audiences or excite broad public discussions about the value and limits of cinematic history (JFK is a notable exception).
It is evident that the reviewer needs to read more carefully before making sweeping judgments. For example, my book acknowledges the value of Hayden White's questions about the objectivity and truthfulness of scholarship (in contrast to filmmaking). Yet Reel History also questions how far interpreters of film can stretch this argument (pp. 161–167, 177). Higashi characterizes this commentary as a damning criticism of virtually all film scholars who embrace White's ideas. Quite an assumption!
My interest in bridging communication between historians and film scholars remains strong. As suggested in the book, film specialists can offer much of value to historians, and historians can present important ideas to film professionals as well. Furthermore, a single individual can work with a deep appreciation of these interrelated interests. We need not lead segregated lives, as Robert A. Rosenstone has shown in several insightful commentaries that connect the work of history and film professionals. Unfortunately, a reflexive response to the invitation for improved cross-disciplinary dialogue, evidenced in Higashi's commentary, obscures the issues and hinders communication.
Robert Brent Toplin University of North Carolina, Wilmington

To the Editor:
Why does Robert Brent Toplin assume that his criticism of an essay that I wrote about film as history motivated a negative review of his book? Would I not first have to take his critique seriously?
For the record, I have never written about JFK, as Toplin repeatedly alleges, so that, as far as I am concerned, his critique is irrelevant. And if I had, I would certainly not label a film that adheres to so many genre conventions as "experimental."
I plead guilty to writing about Mississippi Burning and Walker and opting, in this case, for postmodern rather than illusionist film as history. But why does Toplin ascribe my preference for Alex Cox's irreverent treatment of Americans in Nicaragua to political correctness (p. 166)? Anyone interested in filmmaking can marvel at Leni Riefensthal's documentaries without endorsing fascism.
As stated in my review, Toplin does make a credible, if defensive, argument in favor of popular films as history. "Gross misrepresentations" of such an unexceptional thesis, however, require more interest in the subject than I possess. Since historical dramas in a postmodern electronic age often lapse into camp or kitsch and unwittingly become self-parodic, blockbuster films can be read in multiple, even contradictory, ways, especially by the young. Yet such issues are unexplored. Box-office receipts, moreover, do not constitute evidence that audiences are reading historical films as academics think they are. Almost since the invention of cinema, representations of history have been associated with eye-popping spectacle. Would audiences have paid to see Titanic if it were a low-budget disaster movie?
Within the context of praise for blockbusters like Saving Private Ryan, Toplin's discussion of "Walker, JFK, and other avant-garde movies" does sound dismissive (pp. 163–66). (Neither Walker nor JFK, by the way, can be defined as avant-garde.) As for his argument that such pictures fail to attract large audiences, what else is new? An exquisite film like Eric Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke may be forgiven poor receipts because it reveals so much about artifice in constructing history.
Stating the obvious ("movies communicate in distinctive ways"), misreading works, and writing without nuance are problems that mar Toplin's work. For example, I state that "Scholars enthusiastic about postmodern films that foreground the construction of history are criticized for embracing Hayden White on 'the relativity of historical truths'" (AHR, October 2004, 1264). Toplin misreads this as his having written a "damning criticism of virtually all film scholars who embrace White's ideas." An equally tendentious argument can be made about our differences regarding Claude Lanzmann on the unrepresentabilty of the Holocaust and its dramatizations. But splitting hairs is a pointless exercise.
What is at issue here is the value of interdisciplinary dialogue involving historians and film scholars. Although Toplin claims to be interested in such discourse, his writing suggests otherwise. Why characterize film studies in general as a Marxist enterprise? Why describe "much of film theory" as "exercises in political correctness"? Why misunderstand Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan as articulated in psychoanalytic and semiotic reductionism, a theoretical move that is now passe? Why confuse issues of class with those of gender? Why fail to make a rigorous distinction between cultural and economic hegemony (pp. 168–71)? Why, in sum, misread a discipline in the process of critiquing it and then claim to be promoting a dialogue?
Granted, many film theorists (as distinct from some film historians) write thickets of jargon signifying professional trends that ensure a limited shelf life for their works. Yet they still have much to say about issues of stylistics, representation, narrative, realism, genre, spectacle, and ideology. Comprehending their work requires an investigation of a field that is often epistemologically at odds with history and demands time.
Although academic turf is constructed in terms of disciplines, the "historical turn" in screen studies presents an opportunity for dialogue between film historians and historians studying film. A number of media specialists would profit from discussion of issues including historiography; periodization; reification; human agency; social groups and dynamics in reception studies; contextualizing films; national cinemas and globalization; and so forth. Unfortunately, Toplin's book contributes little to such a dialogue.
Sumiko Higashi State University of New York, Brockport

To the Editor:
First let me thank you for reviewing the book I edited with Lois Beck (Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003) in your most recent issue (December 2004). However, I am distressed by Elton Daniel's review of my introductory article since it so misstates and misunderstands what I did.
Having read his comments several times, I have concluded that he missed entirely the point I was making. He claims that my main thesis is that Islamic teachings had very little impact on the status of women in Iran, and he uses this claim to dismiss my introduction as "standard refrain of modern apologetic Muslim literature. " Had he read my words more carefully he would have realized that what I showed was why religious teachings, whether Islamic, Zoroastrian, or otherwise, do not play an important role in determining the status of women. Instead I argue that their status and that of men are determined by social and economic forces that also influence religious and the value systems they underpin.
My aim in this and other work has been to introduce a different methodology for understanding the social and economic forces that affect women and the value systems that become institutionalized in response to such conditions. I argue that the status of women, including the veil and their absence from the public sphere, evolved in response to the evolution of urban life beginning in the Sumerian period in the region. I elaborated this point with examples about women in the Achaemenian period. These points appear to be original, and to my knowledge have not been advanced by any other scholar. Perhaps I did not develop my argument in a clear fashion, but that should be the basis for any criticism.
Daniel claims that the essay is not based on "original work in the primary sources," yet the references in the footnotes show that most of the sources I used, such as Babylonian law codes, Achaemenian tablets, Herodotus's work, the many volumes of Zoroastrian sacred writings, the Qur'an, and Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah (Biography of the Messenger of God), are indeed original sources. To be sure, with the exception of Arabic and Persian, I am not familiar with Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Old Persian, Greek, Latin, and Pahlavi. But I do not believe such knowledge is necessary in providing context for the post-Islamic period. My aim was to show the continuity between the pre- and post-Islamic practices.
Finally I would like to refer Daniel to a brief reference to my methodology by Judith Tucker, in Gender and Islamic History, published by the American Historical Association a few years ago. She credits me with a "third distinct interpretation," which she says, "minimizes the impact of the rise of Islam on the prevailing gender system." That is precisely what I also did in this introduction.
Guity Nashat University of Illinois, Chicago

To the Editor:
Guity Nashat makes a number of erroneous assertions in her communication. Among other things, I did not comment on her "introductory article"; I discussed what is presented separately as her contributor's essay, along with and in the context of the nine essays by other authors that make up the book. I did not "dismiss" her essay as a "standard refrain of [sic] modern apologetic Muslim literature"; I noted how similar one key part of her argument, and what it suggests about Islam and the status of women, is to modern Muslim apologetics and agendas, an irony apparently lost on Nashat. She asserts that I have misunderstood her essay since I claim that her "main thesis is that Islamic teachings had very little impact on the status of women in Iran." I would challenge her to demonstrate where in fact I make any such claim. I say nothing of the kind. To the contrary, I indicate that her "basic thesis" is that the status of women was dependent on "conditions of life," a brief allusion to the very "social and economic forces" she mentions in her communication. I see no fundamental conflict between my interpretation of the significance of Dr. Nashat's essay, which I present mostly in the form of direct quotations, and the view of Judith Tucker, cited approvingly by Nashat, that she "minimizes the impact of the rise of Islam on the existing gender system." Nashat should not confuse an attempt at succinctness with misunderstanding.
Nashat also disputes my observation that the essay is "not based on original work in the primary sources" since she used "original sources" (note the change in wording). I, however, explain specifically that my comment means that the essay relies on "secondary sources and some translations." This is entirely accurate, as can easily be verified by looking at the documentation for the essay and corroborated by Nashat's admission that she does not know most of the languages involved. Her use of the source languages she does know, Persian and Arabic, is negligible at best. Out of the vast corpus of classical Arabic historiography and literature, she cites (rarely) only three works by three authors—all three from English translations. She does give a couple of references to verses from the Qur'an, but even there acknowledges that she "consulted" the Arberry translation. For Persian works, she cites one article by a modern Iranian scholar and a recent Pahlavi to Persian translation of a Zoroastrian text. Now, by any standard known to me, the primary source is the original text, not a translation of it. Dealing with a cultural tradition through bits and pieces of it, and only then if they happen to have been translated into a language one can read, is not the same as dealing with the appropriate parts of that tradition as they were written. A general survey, while useful, does not carry the weight of the views of a specialist. Several very good essays in the volume reviewed are written by authorities on the periods they cover and are based on extensive readings in genuine primary sources. Nashat is a fine scholar of modern Iran, and her commendable work as co-editor in bringing this volume to press is not at issue. Nonetheless, she is hardly an established authority on the periods she discusses, and she has not exploited the sources the way those other articles do. In my opinion, the volume would have been stronger had articles on the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods also been written by experts in those fields. For these reasons I judged Nashat's contribution, as indicated in the review, less satisfactory.
Given the rather spurious nature of these complaints, I can only conclude that Nashat is primarily annoyed that I did not give her essay the extended attention and pride of place in the review that she obviously thinks it warranted. My task, however, was to provide my assessment, in rigidly limited space, of the book as a whole; suffice it to say that under those conditions I gave her essay the treatment I judged it deserved.
Elton L. Daniel University of Hawaii, Manoa

To the Editor:
Managerial ideology in the business world and, increasingly, in the political arena often denies or at least underestimates the importance of top-down power. It holds that inspirational "leaders" manage subordinates via "influence" derived from superior "values." This ideology implicitly, sometimes explicitly, denies the wisdom of traditional democratic suspicion of power. It thrives in business schools, has considerable sway in the higher levels of corporations, and is most visibly embodied in the current occupant of the White House, the first president with an MBA degree.
My book, False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today (2003), is a history of this subtly undemocratic ideology. Early in my book, I gave an example of the power of this ideology—a manager I know personally who actually believed that in a corporate context he could forego the use of power and lead through moral influence (p. xix). His career went awry as a result. It may be this example that leads your reviewer (AHR, December 2004) to assert that I "claim that employers were reluctant to exercise power" (p. 1606). While contemporary managerial ideology does have such an effect on some naive employers, I scarcely think it typical. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf therefore errs in thinking my "central proposition is that too many employers today are uncomfortable with exercising authority over their workers" (p. 1605).
The book's real central proposition—or at least one of them—is that managerial ideology promotes moral arrogance in managers. It allows them to reconcile their exercise of power with their putatively democratic convictions by encouraging them to believe that they are not merely bosses but also moral leaders. That such arrogance promotes even worse abuses than the powerful would otherwise commit is a traditional teaching of democratic theory and is borne out by the reality of much of corporate life today.
Therefore, far from arguing that managers are too "uncomfortable" with power, I argue that they should increase their discomfort by recognizing that their power is morally illegitimate: "Only if managerial power is understood as an undemocratic but necessary evil in an imperfect world does moral caution have a fighting chance to engage the manager's conscience" (p. xix). Unfortunately, however, managerial ideology with its unrealistic overemphasis on leading by "values" grows ever more influential, promoting moral arrogance among managers and among political leaders as well.
James Hoopes Babson College

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf does not wish to respond.
The Editors

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