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Remembering the Forgotten: The Lost History of a Mexican Sugar Plantation

By: Kaitlyn Clingenpeel

The following excerpts come from the written fictional experiences of a university student from the US serving as an intern in Mexico. They uncovered a shocking truth and proceeded to publish and expose this truth to try and bring justice to those who were negatively affected by these events as they were understood prior to the discovery of these new facts.

Little could have prepared me for what I would find during the summer that I worked as an intern for the United States Consulate in Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico and how it would come to affect the trajectory of my life and history. My interests in history and the history of the relationship between the US and Mexico brought me to Mexico in the first place and would continue to send me on a path to uncover a lost truth and bring it into the light for the world to see. The story I found that had been “lost” to time calls into question what the two countries know of the events that sugar plantation and the events that followed its discovery were all efforts to bring the truth into the light and move forward by recognizing it and making efforts of reparations and amending the narrative.

Arriving at the Consulate campus in Merida, I was always struck by the stark white building contrasting with the lush greens of the foliage surrounding it. As an intern, I was given menial tasks, but I was genuinely happy to have my foot in the door and knew that this position would bode well for my future. A few weeks into my stay there, I was handed a key card and told that I would be helping to digitize some old archival files stemming back to the 1840s when the Consulate was first founded. I jumped at this opportunity to pour over these documents as they were scanned and this is where I discovered a box that seemingly some hoped would be forgotten to time, and it had been for almost 150 years.

This box contained witness testimonies related to the events of the Monkaab sugar plantation in 1875 following the murder of its American owner, Patrick Edwards. I recalled reading a book about these events for a project in one of my classes on US-Mexico relations, but these testimonies seemed to contrast everything that I knew on the topic. After I left that day, I went back to my accommodations and searched through my files from my previous research. This confirmed that those testimonies did not match up with the accounts I was reading about. Later searching through the documents would reveal correspondences between the Consul at the time, Charles Visage, and his counterparts in the United States that implied that those testimonies I had discovered earlier were potentially put aside and left out of any reports on the case. With this new information being brought to light, I knew I had to take this to someone and I started working my way up the chain of command until I ended up sitting in front of the Consul General, Dorothy Ngutter.

I started our meeting by explaining the current understanding of the narrative of those events as they were without the new documents I had uncovered:

Patrick Edwards was an Irish-American man who had moved to the northeast Yucatan and bought a sugar plantation named Monkaab (meaning sugar in Yucatec Mayan) with the hopes of making a fortune. After a tough hurricane season, which destroyed much of his crop, the year before, he and his hired Maya workers were set to have a great harvest and a productive season. This success was unprecedented in the area and drew the attention of local Mexican plantation owners and led to, according to Edwards, a great deal of jealousy. One of these plantation families decided to take him out of the equation by trying to bring Maya rebels from the Caste War of the Yucatan, which was going on concurrently with these events, to Monkaab. It is believed that a local official, who was bribed by the plantation family, ordered for a path to be cut through the jungle near Monkaab under the guise of plans for a new road. In reality, this path would create an easy access point to Monkaab if any Maya rebels decided to head up that way from where they were hiding out. Patrick Edwards’s last day was marked by just that, Maya rebels marched onto his plantation, captured him and his workers, and murdered all those who could not escape fast enough, including Edwards. When putting together the official reports on the case, Edwards’s initial complaints to the Consul about jealous competitors out to get him were removed from the narrative, which instead focused more on the violent attack by the rebels as the root of the situation at hand. This is the narrative that was presented to Edwards’s wife and three daughters that sparked an international crisis that jeopardized the relationship between the US and Mexico for almost 70 years following his murder and prior to a settlement of the case for $10,000 USD to be paid to Edwards’s surviving family.

I explained to Ngutter that the witness testimonies and other case-related documents found hidden within the archives present a different narrative and that I believed it is one worth telling. One where Edwards was a cruel boss who mistreated his workers and sought to put down his competitors through malicious means. He was willing to do anything to put himself on top, including abusing his workers and sabotaging those around him. Additionally, a majority of these testimonies from local workers were Indigenous Maya people and I felt it entirely necessary that these long-silenced voices needed to be heard. It was also necessary to show the intentionality of the silencing of these voices by American officials.

This was probably the most nerve-wracking part of my entire conversation with her that day. I had no clue what to expect, but I knew that I was going to an American official in a foreign country and telling her that the US was actually in the wrong and needed to admit it and adjust to move forward towards a better future. I never expected her to look at me and say “Okay, you’ve presented a great case to me. So. what’s next? How are you going to tell this story?” and I can imagine the look of shock on my face entirely gave those sentiments away when she did. Ideas started floating around my head as I thought of how to answer her, but there was one thought that kept pushing itself to the front of my brain: It’s not my story to tell. So, that’s what I told her.

Working with Ngutter and the professor from the class where I originally learned about the story of Monkaab, we reached out to the author of the original story about Monkaab, Paul Sullivan, and a colleague of my professor who was based out of a university in Valladolid, Ivan Dzul, which is a couple of hours away from Monkaab, that had been working with locals in the area. With the help of Sullivan and Dzul, we were able to reach out to some of Sullivan’s original informants, Jorge Noh and Yuraima Arceo, and other Maya locals from Dzul’s current project, Patricia Marrufo and Juan Pinzon. With this team: myself, Ngutter, Sullivan, Dzul, and our group of local collaborators, we set out to compile these new witness testimonies and revise the narrative that had been floated around for years leading up to this point.

Sticking to my goal of allowing our collaborators to decide how this story should be told, myself, Ngutter, Sullivan, and Dzul did our best to serve as resources to Noh, Arceo, Marrufo, and Pinzon as they decided how to move forward with the project. With the original title of Sullivan’s book being Monkaab Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan this project quickly became known as Monkaab Revived. As per the choices of our team, the goal of our project became to revise the story as it had been known to incorporate the recently discovered testimonies, call attention to the cover-up of these testimonies, and to included the voices of our local collaborators along the way. The decision was made to create a follow-up to Sullivan’s original book to serve as a sort of second edition and sequel combined into one. This new book, Monkaab Revived: The Revised History of a Murder on the Yucatan, served as an edited volume. We included chapters discussing Sullivan’s original work to uncover what he could about the story of Monkaab, chapters from myself and Ngutter outlining the rediscovery of the testimonies and their implications and the steps we took to pull this project together, and chapters from our local collaborators detailing their experiences with the project and the revised history of Monkaab in their own words. The concluding remarks of this book served as a call for the incorporation of more Indigenous voices and for the use of this book as a guide to do so in the future in other cases.

In putting the final touches on the book, we reflected on our goals of inclusion and accessibility. We wanted to incorporate these often-silenced voices into our project in a way that anyone could read and understand. We didn’t want this book to end up behind university paywalls or be loaded up with so much jargon that you needed a Ph.D. to understand what we were trying to say. So, we used accessible language and tried our best to put those unheard voices at the forefront of our narrative. One of the biggest ways we did this was when listing out our editors/contributing authors. Our collaborators held the so-often coveted position of first on the list, then Professor Dzul, followed by the remaining American contributors. Another way we tried to incorporate silenced voices and accessibility was with our cover. The original cover of Monkaab Must Die featured an art piece of the wetlands of that part of the northeastern Yucatan Peninsula. During a visit to the Monkaab plantation, we were all taking pictures and discussing the mangroves. Dzul managed to snap a picture of an egret among the mangroves before it was spooked and flew off. This was one of the pictures we floated around for the book’s cover. In the spirit of the original cover, Sullivan suggested that we find an artist to create a painted version of the picture. As luck would have it, one of Sullivan’s original collaborators and our team member, Yuraima Arceo, is also an artist that uses a Maya art style that stems back to her ancestors. We used her version of the picture on the cover to further emphasize the importance of incorporating Indigenous voices (and hands) in this project and others.

Figure 1: The photo that was used as the basis for our book’s cover (The Yucatan Times 2023).

            Through the help of Ngutter and Sullivan, we were able to make sure that this book was published, seen, and recognized by people around the US and Mexico and that US officials acknowledged their wrongdoing in this case, hopefully setting a precedent for similar ones in the future. The book was published in both English and Spanish and copies of the book in Yucatec Mayan were printed to be distributed to the local Maya population around Monkaab. US and Mexican officials have also begun talks on how to proceed with this new information and correspondences have also started to come in to our team asking for help with revising other narratives and bringing those long-silenced voices out of the shadows. This was in no way how I expected that internship at the US Consulate in Merida to go, but I am grateful for these experiences and how they have shaped my career and the future for the better.

Author’s Note

This fabricated account of the Monkaab sugar plantation and the murder of Patrick Edwards almost completely mirrors the true events of the murder of Robert Stephens that took place at Xuxub. What happened there is chronicled by Paul Sullivan as he seeks to find the truth of the events in his book Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan (2004). At the end of his introduction, “Terrible Beauty,” Sullivan admits that he never could crack the whole truth of the events that took place in October of 1875 at Xuxub due to a lack of information and instead has compiled all of the known facts of the case to set the stage and provide enough context to get as clear of a picture as is possible (2004). This admission from the start struck me and set the stage for my imagination as I tried to envision how the story would change with just a few more pieces of information. Could one more document have entirely changed the canon of this history? Whose voices were never heard on the situation? What would they say if given the chance? And thus, this imaginative narrative was born to explore a possible postcolonial future where more pieces fell into place on this puzzle.

Figure 2: The cover of Xuxub Must Die featuring the art piece that inspired the decision to bring in a local Maya artist for the new publication’s cover (Sullivan 2004)

The Truth Behind the Fiction

            Robert Stephens purchased the Xuxub sugar plantation and had been working hard to make it a successful business venture (Sullivan 2004). According to Stephens’s accounts of the events leading up to his death, he eventually gained enough success that a rival plantation family, the Ureclays, grew jealous of him (Sullivan 2004). The Ureclays were a powerful family that were bribing local officials to start to clear a path to Xuxub and to look the other way if or when Maya rebels made their way up that path and onto the Xuxub plantation (Sullivan 2004). Stephens raised his concerns with officials in Mexico, but they were waved off and disregarded, leaving Stephens in the same position he was in before he went to them (Sullivan 2004). In October of 1875, rebels did make their way up the path and onto Stephens’s plantation where they end up murdering him (Sullivan 2004).

The American Consul at the time of the murder of Stephens, Alphonse Lespinasse, purposefully sought out workers and other locals that knew Stephens and would speak kindly of him for the official record of events (Sullivan 2004). Based on his research of the available information and the interviews he conducted, Sullivan speculates that Lespinasse tried to paint Stephens in a positive light after his murder (2004). Those interviewed on the record spoke of him as a kind boss who treated him with respect and that would take in workers who had been mistreated by other plantation owners, such as the Urcelay family (Sullivan 2004). Some Maya people and other local workers, however, did not ally themselves with this version of Stephens. They saw him as harsh, cruel, and abusive to the Mexicans and Indigenous people that worked under him (Sullivan 2004). The possible purposeful omission of this information is what sparked the idea for the discovery of some “missing” or “lost” testimonies that were in fact left out of the official records intentionally.

This case is one that created a large amount of uproar on the American side. The Stephens family continued to fight for justice for the loss of Robert. It continued to plague US-Mexico relations until it was settled almost 70 years later in 1943 when an agreement was reached at a Claims Convention and a total of ten thousand dollars was paid out to the family (Sullivan 2004). With this settlement, the cries of the Stephens family were quieted and this allowed for both the United States and Mexico to put the situation behind them and for the story of what happened at Xuxub to truly die and become lost to time in their eyes (Sullivan 2004). As previously stressed, the Maya people involved in this case have not forgotten these events, but their voices are quieted behind those of Mexican and American officials and history writers (Sullivan 2004; Trouillot 1997).

Theoretical Framework and Background

Violence

Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, but the new mestizo population and the Indigenous populations remained at odds (McArdle Stephens 2017). This fighting eventually escalated into a Caste War by the end of the 1840s and lasted until 1901. The violence displayed during this time is used as their defining characteristic to paint Indigenous people in a negative light both in history and the specific accounts of the events of Xuxub (McArdle Stephens 2017; Sullivan 2004). This peasant revolt against the ethnic and economic oppression of the Yucatecan elite served as a perfect backdrop for the events at Xuxub to be pushed under the rug (McArdle Stephens 2017; Sullivan 2004). Placing blame on the violent rebels attempting to free themselves from the continued oppression of Mexico’s colonial remnants served as a scapegoat for the root causes of the attack on Stephens, a way to maintain Mexico and US relations, and as a way to continue to put down those at the bottom of Mexican society for years to come (Fanon 1963; McArdle Stephens 2017; Sullivan 2004). The anti-colonial use of violence by Maya rebels during the Caste War mirrors the events in Algeria as described by Fanon (1963; McArdle Stephens 2017). These Indigenous peoples, who were violently oppressed during the Spanish occupation of Mexico and viewed as less-than-human, continued to experience those same sentiments after the colonizers left and Mexico gained its independence (Fanon 1963). This sets the stage for the reactions to the Xuxub murders that would take place in the middle of the events of the Caste War.

Subaltern Studies

            While subaltern studies originated in India, its ideas are certainly applicable to the events that occurred at Xuxub as well. As described by Gayatri Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (2010), societies live in a hierarchy of the elite and the subaltern, with the elite being broken down into two categories: foreign and local, with the foreign elite holding the top position. The oppression of these subaltern groups often serves as a form of imperialism (Spivak 2010). In Spivak’s piece, she outlines Indian women as the subaltern class, but here the Maya rebels take up that role (2010; Sullivan 2004). The descriptions of the causes of the Caste War (McArdle Stephens 2017) align with Ranajit Guha’s description of peasant revolts (1983) as well. According to Guha, the subalternity of a group of people is solidified by the structures put into place by the colonizers, thus turning this oppression into tradition and making the breaking of that tradition an explicit violation of societal norms (1983). This violation of the norms by Maya rebels was used as a method to further put them down and place blame upon them, thus leading to further silencing (Guha 1983; Spivak 2010). This creates what Chakrabarty referred to as a Minority History and pushes for the idea that there are histories that are more important than others (2002). Rather than working to preserve the plurality of history, these “lesser” histories are often written out or ignored when it comes time to set a history in motion (Chakrabarty 2002; Middleton 2023).

The Production of History

This story is a clear example of the fact that the US and Mexico hold the authority on what pieces of history in situations like these are focused on (Trouillot 1997). Everyone knows about and wants to visit the major archaeological sites of the Indigenous populations of Mexico, but people are usually less familiar with the Indigenous perspectives post-Mexico’s independence from Spain and do not care as much for these perspectives. This reflects who is writing the history and who is being silenced here and in other similar cases (Trouillot 1997). The US wanted to spin a tale of a kind and successful man being taken out by violent natives and Mexico chose to push these events to the background to focus on the pieces of Indigenous history that can be used for tourism and boosting the economy.

Accessibility

One of the key discussions we have had throughout the semester for me was our discussions about accessibility. The availability and accessibility of information has come up many times throughout our discussions and assorted voices throughout the semester, along with discussions in other classes. One key example of this that I was faced with this semester came from my role as a teaching assistant in the course ANTH 270: Living Medicine. My students read two books throughout the course of the semester A Heart for the Work: Journeys Through an African Medical School by Claire Wendland (2010) and Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande (2002). The book by Wendland is an anthropological ethnography and is clearly written with an academic audience in mind, but Gawande’s book is written for a more mainstream audience. Seeing the difference between the students’ abilities to understand the two books in our recitation discussions further cemented the necessity for accessibility within this project.

When developing this imagined future for the story of Xuxub and how the information about the fictional “Monkaab” would be disseminated, I knew that I wanted to try and find more accessible ways to get the story out there. I had never heard of Xuxub prior to checking this book out. While written in a slightly more accessible manner than most books centering around theory, the book itself was hidden behind university paywalls and would likely not be very accessible to the layperson. I wanted to see some kind of artistic expression and collaboration play into how this lost history was put out into the world as well. So, I chose to have the discoverer seek out local collaborators who would have knowledge of the area and its history to produce an accessible work designed for a more mainstream audience to put this along with a Maya artist local to the area where Monkaab would have been located to paint the wetlands of that part of the Yucatan for the cover of the revised story.

Conclusion

            One of the pieces of this fictional story is just how optimistic it is. I found myself doubting if this is actually how it would play out if a similar discovery was made about Xuxub. Still, in this fictional narrative, where anything could happen, I was able to explore how things could go with minimal obstacles in place to create a version of a postcolonial future that presents the ideal outcome. Shifting to a more accurate representation of a historical narrative and a method of history production that incorporates lost and far too often silenced voices in a collaborative way should be something that we see as more normal. Removing the narratives that are written solely by the colonizers brings forward the voices of the oppressed. Throughout working on this piece, I found myself thinking of the work of Ann Stoler on Imperial Ruins and Ruination (2016). In particular, when she addresses the questions prompted by Derek Walcott in his piece “Ruins of a Great House” (1990): “What is the rot that remains when the men are gone? What forms does rot take? What does it corrode; what interior spaces does it touch; and how does it seep through the social and material fabric where it remains?” (Stoler 2016, 361). I would like to close this out by calling others to consider another question prompted by these ones and the work done here in this piece to highlight silenced voices: What can grow out of the rot when given the chance to have the sun shine on it once again?

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts” in Postcolonial Passages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 229-242.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. “On Violence” + “Conclusion.” in The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1-62, 235-239

Gawande, Atul. 2002. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. New York: Picador.

Guha, Ranajit. 1983. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” in Subaltern Studies II, edited by R. Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

McArdle Stephens, Michele. 2017. “Caste Wars in Yucatán.” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Accessed 24 April 2023. https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-386.

Middleton, Townsend. 2023. “Subaltern Studies: From South Asia to Latin America,” ANTH 461 Class Notes and Discussion, February 23.

Spivak, Gayatri. 2010 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” revised edition, from the “History” chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason, in Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea,  edited by R.C. Morris, 21-78. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stoler, Anne Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham NC: Duke University Press

Sullivan, Paul. 2004. Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1997 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

Walcott, Derek. 1990. “Ruins of a Great House,” In Collected Poems: 1948-1984, 20. New York: Noonday.

Wendland, Claire L. 2010. A Heart for the Work: Journeys Through an African Medical School. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

The Yucatan Times. 2023. “Yucatan Mangroves: the ideal habitat for the Melipona Bee.” The Yucatan Times website, February 13. Accessed April 25, 2023. https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2023/02/yucatan-mangroves-the-ideal-habitat-for-the-melipona-bee/

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Journal

Meditations on Silences: Researching Robert F. Williams and Encountering Cornell Watson

By: Madison Holt

“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” -Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Silences in historical narratives are everywhere, and unavoidable. As Rolph Trouillot writes in the first chapter of Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History, “the production of traces is always also the creation of silences. Some occurrences are noted from the start; others are not. Some are engraved in individual or collective bodies; others are not. Some leave physical markers; others do not.”1 This “materiality of the sociohistorical process” is often what we think of when we attempt to decipher historical truth from fiction, as Western ideologies have attempted to create as close to an objective, scientific study of history as possible.2 Although helpful in establishing credibility in the study of history, it consequently silences narratives that may not have any “material proof.” Because many silences are simply due to the nature of human memory and perception, searching for this objectivity distracts us from the goal to examine, as Trouillot writes, 

how history works. For what history is changes with time and place, or, better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the process and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.3

This “differential exercise of power” that Trouillot refers to goes beyond silence due to lack of materiality; as I will illustrate in the subsequent pages, silences in the historical archive are often intentional, damaging, and demonstrative of legacies of colonial power that still exist today. 4

As Trouillot explains, historicity 1 is “what happened,” whereas historicity 2 is “that which is said to have happened.”5 Colonialism, in the past, has taken advantage of this distinction by controlling the public view, passing off its version of historicity 2 as historicity 1. For example, the Haitian Revolution is the first and only successful slave revolt in history, as formerly enslaved people successfully drove out plantation owners and established the country of Haiti. However, as monumental of a moment in history this revolution was, it is not as nearly well known by the global West as, say, the French Revolution, or the American Revolution, even though it is a part of Western history since the French colonized Haiti. This is not coincidental. As class discussion explains, colonialist histories tend to erase, trivialize, or overwrite other views on historical processes for the sake of emphasizing their own narratives, which can be seen through France’s denial of Haitian sovereignty, the media’s downplay of the mistreatment experienced by Haitian enslaved people, and the spinning of the historical process to make it seem like Haiti is a failed “test-case of Black Humanity.”6 In the case of Haiti, if the French empire can control prevailing narratives about what happened during the Haitian Revolution, then it can create the illusion that it still has hegemony over Haiti. Therefore, colonialism seeks to undermine subaltern histories as one tool in the colonial toolbelt. 

Who is a subaltern? According to class discussion, subalterns are people that are “excluded from hegemonic power and its systems of representation,” “those who lack voice,” and “those who have been written out of history.”7 In the case of the Haitian Revolution, the enslaved people were subalterns in relation to the plantation owners and the French empire. But how did they become subalterns? At the same time that Europe was colonizing other countries, forcing the inhabitants to contribute to an economy they were not benefitting from, the idea of liberal universality8 emerged in Western thought. Needing a way to justify hegemony over the colonized despite advocating for individual freedom and universal human rights, Europe then perpetuated the idea of the anthropological minimum, which established a threshold of humanity that the colonized needed to achieve in order to deserve human rights.9 Furthermore, the colonial difference went hand in hand with the anthropological minimum as it suggested an absolute difference between the colonizer and the colonized, a difference that justified treating the colonized as less than human.10 As Partha Chaterjee writes in The Nation and Its Fragments

to the extent this complex of power and knowledge was colonial, the forms of objectification and normalization of the colonized had to reproduce, within the framework of a universal knowledge, the truth of the colonial difference. The difference could be marked by many signs, and varying with the context, one could displace another as the most practical application of the rule. But of all these signs, race was perhaps the most obvious mark of the colonial difference.11

For the enslaved population in Haiti, race did, in fact, become a mark of colonial difference, thus they became the subalterns in the history of the colonization of Haiti. This legacy of using race to subjugate colonized populations then made its way to the United States as the plantation system resulted in the forced migration of millions of Africans. Although Robert F. Williams was not alive when chattel slavery was legal in the United States, as a Black man, he was still excluded from the power and its systems of representation that White people were, and still are, afforded, which is why he fought to dismantle this power during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Therefore, as a subaltern in the history of the United States, Williams is no stranger to silences. 

ROBERT WILLIAMS

Going into the research I planned for this essay on Robert F. Williams, I didn’t expect much. A fellow alumnus of Piedmont High School, Kristina Drye, who has also looked into Williams’ life, recounts her experience looking for sources: 

In July of 2020 I found myself sheltering from the humidity of a North Carolina summer in the local history room of the Monroe Public Library…The librarian soon arrived with the materials I had asked for. I already knew that the area was a hive of KKK movement. Infamous Grand Wizard Catfish Cole set up shop one county over in Cabarrus, and though Union County had only 11,000 residents in 1961, Klan rallies could reach sizes of an estimated 7,500. Given this, I expected some robust material. Instead I was handed a slim manila folder with only a handful of records, so thin that the entire folder didn’t need so much as a rubber band to keep it closed.

“This all?” I asked the attendant, perplexed.

“That’s all we got,” she said. “There’s a drawer back there on Rob Williams, but let me see what I can find for you. Pretty sure that’s it, though.” And by the finality in her voice, I knew it was.12

Because it was so difficult for Drye to find sources on the event that took place in Monroe from the Monroe Public Library, and because, as I’ve gained more experience doing archival research, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the lack of volume at which subalterns get to speak in the archive, I wasn’t hopeful for extensive information on Williams. And yet, as I hit “search” after typing in the keywords “Robert F. Williams” into the search bar on the UNC Libraries page, I found myself rather surprised. There were, in fact, a multitude of newspapers, oral interviews, transcripts, and court documents, all providing details about the life of Robert Williams, his family, and acquaintances. There were even works written about Williams, from articles and books written by Timothy B. Tyson to a PBS documentary, as well as Williams’ own work, Negroes With Guns. Seeing as I grew up in Monroe but knew absolutely nothing about this Monroe native until I read Drye’s article about him my senior year of high school, I was quite shocked to find the amount of information that I did on him, as well as embarrassed. My entire argument throughout this essay was meant to be about the lack of information on Robert Williams, especially from Robert Williams himself, yet there were interviews and newspaper articles staring back at me, almost taunting me with “you look so uneducated right now.” However, this instance reminded me of Trouillot’s explanation of the four points throughout the creation of a history in which a silence may occur: 

Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).13

Remembering Trouillot’s typology, it became clear to me that the biggest silencing of Robert F. Williams’ story emerged from the lack of retrospective significance. As demonstrated earlier through the Haitian Revolution, this vast lack of public knowledge can be attributed to colonial pasts that are persistent in attempting hegemony over subaltern populations through controlling historicity. Yet, despite the surprising amount of material I found on Williams in the archive, silences that emerge during fact creation, assembly, and retrieval still remain. For example, the singular scholar that I found to write a narrative about Robert F. Williams, Timothy B. Tyson, provides this telling of the event that resulted in Williams’ exile in Cuba: 

Williams welcomed the Freedom Riders warmly but had a similar understanding of the stakes. “I saw it first as a challenge,” he recalled, “but I also saw it as an opportunity to show that what King and them were preaching was bullshit.” Two weeks of picketing at the Union County Courthouse grew progressively more perilous for the Freedom Riders. Crowds of hostile white onlookers grew larger and larger. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, August 28, a mob of several thousand furious white people attacked the approximately thirty demonstrators, badly injuring many of them; local police arrested the bleeding protesters. In his classic memoir, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, James Forman later called this riot his “moment of death,” “a nightmare I shall never forget.” To the consternation of SCLC, the nonviolent crusade swiftly deteriorated into mob violence; throughout the community, white vigilantes attacked black citizens and even fired fifteen shots into the home of the former mayor J. Ray Shute, a white moderate who had befriended Williams. At the height of this violent chaos, a white married couple, for reasons that are unclear, entered the black community and drove straight into an angry black mob milling near Robert Williams’s house. “There was hundreds of niggers there,” the white woman stated, “and they were armed, they were ready for war.” Black residents, under the impression that the demonstrators downtown were being beaten and perhaps slaughtered, threatened to kill the white couple. Williams, though busy preparing to defend his home, rescued the two whites from the mob and led them into his house, where they remained for about two hours. White authorities later charged Williams and several other people with kidnapping, although the white couple met two police officers on their way home and did not report their alleged abduction. The woman later conceded that “at the time, I wasn’t even thinking about being kidnapped . . . the papers, the publicity and all that stuff was what brought in that kidnapping mess.” During a long night of racial terror, Williams slung a machine gun over his shoulder and walked several miles with his wife and two small sons to where Julian Mayfield waited with a car. “I didn’t want those racist dogs to have the satisfaction of legally lynching me,” he explained to Dr. Perry. The Williams family fled first to New York City, then Canada, then on to Cuba to escape the hordes of FBI agents who combed the countryside in search of them. Supporters of Williams gloried in the escape. Some black residents of Monroe still maintain that Fidel Castro sent helicopters for Williams. Others tell of how he got away in a hearse owned by a black funeral director from Charlotte. An agent assigned to search for Williams locally reported his frustrations to FBI director Hoover: “Subject has become something of a ‘John Brown’ to Negroes around Monroe and they will do anything for him.14

Continuing to reference Trouillot’s typology of silences, it is evident that there are a multitude of silences occurring in this narrative, not only as a result of Williams’ experiences in real time, but also as a result of Tyson’s choices for retelling. Examining Tyson’s narrative, one can see that attempts were made by white citizens, the local police department, the media, and the FBI to silence Williams and the Freedom Riders with threats of arrest and death, so much so that Williams had to escape the US to Cuba to avoid false kidnapping charges.15 Williams was also prevented from relaying the way in which he made his escape to Cuba for fear of the harm that would come to the people that helped him if they were revealed.16 Yet, Tyson’s retelling produces its own silences, as there’s no direct mention of the KKK’s role in forcing Williams’ exile in Cuba, nor is there any direct mention of where Williams was or what he was doing when the picketers got attacked by the mob of white residents. These silences, exacerbated by Monroe’s purposeful failure to keep Williams’ public memory alive, have contributed to the persisting legacy of colonialism. 

CORNELL WATSON

As I walked toward Alumni Hall to finish this essay, I became distracted by the large congregation in the Pit protesting Mike Pence’s presence on campus. I stood watching for a few minutes, until someone caught my eye. It was Cornell Watson, the same Cornell Watson whose Tarred Healing exhibit I brought attention to in class however many weeks ago. I’m not typically an outgoing person, so I was fully prepared to let him pass me by and regret it afterwards, but my friend and coworker Abi, who saw how excited I got when I spotted him, urged me to introduce myself. I did, in fact, work up to the courage to talk to him, and I’m so glad I did. He was warm, welcoming, and equally excited that I recognized him. We talked for a little bit, I told him about this class and the paper I was working on, and we parted ways. I then made my way to Alumni Hall, replaying our conversation in my mind like a crazed fangirl the whole way there. I remembered how he said I must be inspired to think about colonialism by the ongoing conflicts between the Pit and the Union, and indeed I was. However, I was more inspired to think about colonialism when I saw Watson taking pictures. As the sounds from the crowd swelled around me, I couldn’t help but notice how Watson slowly snaked through the rows of people, completely silent, looking for scenes to photograph. As I watched, his silence captivated me, distracting me from the rest of the noise. It made me wonder, who else noticed him? Furthermore, who didn’t notice him because they were enthralled by the speakers protesting Mike Pence? I originally brought up Cornell Watson in class to talk about the ways in which the University system censors and silences certain narratives for the sake of maintaining funding, which stems from colonial pasts that destroy subaltern narratives to maintain power. Now, in meeting him and experiencing Watson as one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met, it makes me wonder what, other than certain perspectives on historical processes, do we lose to these silences? Yes, Watson’s art was censored and therefore the alternative narrative about Black life in Chapel Hill that he wanted to convey was lost, which prevents any chance of moving beyond colonial pasts. However, censoring Watson’s art also censors his humanity, as it prevents any chance of visibility. If the institution were successful in their silencing mission, if I never saw Watson’s photography, I would have never gone up to him in the crowd, never experienced his humanity. Seeing Watson and being able to speak with him, being able to experience him for who he is outside of his art, reminded me of what’s missing from Robert F. Williams narrative. I’ve examined how he’s been silenced and prevented from offering an alternative narrative to the archive, but how did he greet his wife when he came home from work? Did he play with his kids in the backyard? What time did he get up for church on Sundays, did he even go? These tidbits of life that detail the simple, day to day routines that all humans experience in one way or another are silenced when we only ask for perspectives, rather than life stories. 

Ultimately, it is evident through both my experience researching Robert F. Williams and my encounter with Cornell Watson that silences produced by the legacies of colonialism are harmful to subalterns. As the legacies of colonialism silence significant events in subaltern histories, like the Haitian Revolution or the attack on Freedom Riders in Monroe, it maintains the power that institutions continue to gain from subjugating minorities and prevents any chance of moving past these legacies. However, this is not the only harm done to subalterns. The phrase, “history will say they were best friends,” is a popular response on the Internet to any depictions of homosexuality that suggest ambiguity, meant to mock the legacies of colonialism persisting in the archive that erase LGBTQIA+ pasts. Although humorous, this joke also points out the dangers of erasure, trivialization, and overwriting. LGBTQIA+ people have always existed, yet their purposeful erasure from the archive suggests that they have not existed throughout history. This is where the legacies of colonial power come into play, as the erasure of their history is used as an excuse to claim they don’t, or shouldn’t, exist today. The erasure of Black Americans, specifically in the case of Robert F. Williams, plays out similarly. By failing to emphasize any retrospective significance in Williams’ life, Monroe has perpetuated the idea that Black people are of no significance in the town’s present, either. Furthermore, the lack of details on Williams’ personal life in the archive essentially objectifies him, as it perpetuates the idea that he’s only valuable to the archive as a catalyst for the Black Power movement. This objectification is yet another legacy of the colonial past, as colonizers maintained power through the objectification of the colonized.17

FUTURES OF THE ARCHIVE

There’s a certain magic in meeting a figure you’ve only read about on the internet or in history books in real life. In the case of Cornell Watson, meeting him in person brought his story to life, and I find myself more intimately connected with him, more hopeful for his future success. This is what is missing from the archive. Videotaped interviews come close, but when those aren’t possible, creative expressions could serve to foster a similar connection. For example, Rhiannon Giddens is a world-renowned singer and banjo player who commits to writing songs that tell stories about Black history, using as much empirical evidence from the archive as possible. In this way, Giddens brings to life accounts in the archive that would otherwise remain static. However, as Saidiya Harman points out in Venus in Two Acts,

How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it? Is it possible to construct a story from “the locus of impossible speech” or resurrect lives from the ruins? Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to “exhume buried cries” and reanimate the dead? 

As a writer committed to telling stories, I have endeavored to represent the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot be known. I chose not to tell a story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive. History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are produced by terror.18 

Unfortunately, there are some limitations of the archive that will never be reconcilable, but that doesn’t mean the archive is incapable of change. As anthropologists, historians, folklorists, artists, and storytellers, we can make a commitment to making the archive more dynamic and representative of subaltern pasts. As Chakrabarty suggests, we could eventually create an archive of “‘workable truths’, which would be based on a shared, rational understanding of historical facts and evidence.”19 In this way, maintaining historical credibility while representing all participants of history in dynamic ways would be a step in the right direction toward leaving the legacies of colonialism behind. 

Notes

  1.  Trouillot, Rolph. 1997. Silencing the Past : Power and the Production of History. Chapter 1. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, Pp. 1-30. 
  2. Ibid.; Trouillot explains that positivism seeks to distance the sociohistorical process from its knowledge in order to give the study of history objective credibility.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid.
  6.  Class Discussion on the ways in which empire tries to change public perception of historical processes (H1) using its own narratives (H2). Lecture on the Problem of History.
  7.  Class Discussion. Lecture on Subaltern Studies: History From Below
  8.  An idea that developed in the 18th century in the Global West that advocated for equality, freedom from institutional oppression, individualism, political representation, citizenship, civic responsibility, and progress. 
  9.  Class Discussion. Lecture on the State and Difference. 
  10.  Class Discussion on the Anthropological Minimum. Lecture on the State and Difference.
  11.  Chaterjee, Partha. 1993. “The Colonial State” in The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 14-34. 
  12.  Drye, Kristina. “Forgetting Robert F. Williams: Critical Race Theory’s Long Game.” Medium (blog), November 9, 2022. https://medium.com/@kd719/forgetting-robert-f-williams-critical-race-theorys-long-game-bf43913db327
  13.  (Trouillot 1997)
  14.  Tyson, Timothy B. “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’ and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 540–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/2567750.
  15. Ibid.
  16. Ibid.
  17.  (Chatterjee 1993).
  18.  Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14. muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
  19.  Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts” in Postcolonial Passages. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 229-242. 

Bibliography

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts” in Postcolonial Passages.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 229-242. 

Chaterjee, Partha. 1993. “The Colonial State” in The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton :

Princeton University Press, 14-34. 

Drye, Kristina. “Forgetting Robert F. Williams: Critical Race Theory’s Long Game.” Medium

(blog), November 9, 2022. https://medium.com/@kd719/forgetting-robert-f-williams-critical-race-theorys-long-game-bf43913db327

 Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.

muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.

Trouillot, Rolph. 1997. Silencing the Past : Power and the Production of History. Chapter 1.

Boston, MA: Beacon Press, Pp. 1-30. 

Tyson, Timothy B. “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’ and the Roots of the African American

Freedom Struggle.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 540–70.

https://doi.org/10.2307/2567750.
Categories
Journal

Communality vs Community: The Promise of Panchayats

by Maitreyee Singh

“More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar/

Utterly this fair garden we might win.”

The above is a couplet from “Modern Love: XLVII” by Victorian writer George Meredith. Indian readers might more likely recognize it from the title page inscription of Constitutional architect and social reformer B.R. Ambedkar’s Pakistan or the Partition of India (1946: 1). Pithy and urgent, it was a well-advised rejoinder for a nation on the precipice of independence. As it happens, gardens wither, too, when not tended, and Ambedkar’s plea for mindfulness remains both timeless and timely for post-Independence India.

Instructed to examine some particularity of the postcolonial condition, my immediate thought was to analyze the Panchayat system of local governance as a precolonial institution with potential for mediating postcolonial conflict. Perhaps predictably, my assumptions were informed by my personal experiences of India, and as anyone who has done any academic writing knows, attempting to retrofit research to a preconceived thesis never works. In examining the Panchayat system more closely, I’ve been made to also examine the lacuna in my own understanding of communal conflict in India.

Bibliography

Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. (1946). “Weakening of the Defences” in Pakistan or the Partition of India. India: Thacker. 78-80

Avruch, K., & Black, P. W. (1991). The Culture question and conflict resolution. Peace & Change, 16(1), 22-45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0130.1991.tb00563.x

Baxi, U. (1982). The Crisis of The Indian Legal System. Alternatives in Development Law.

India: Vikas Publishing House, Pvt. Ltd. Chaudhary, M. A. (1999). Justice in Practice: Legal Ethnography of a Pakistani Punjabi Village. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bhabha, Homi. “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities. Ed. Laura Garcia-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer. Columbia: Camden House, 1996.

Bhabha, Homi, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

Bhabha, Homi, DissemiNation…., pp 294

Borooah, V.K., Tagat, A. and Mishra, V. (2020), “Conflict, caste and resolution: a quantitative analysis for Indian villages”, Indian Growth and Development Review, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 319-338. https://doi.org/10.1108/IGDR-08-2019-0087

Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, Princeton UP, 1993.

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed, 1986, 22.

Cohn, B. S. (1965). Anthropological Notes on Disputes and Law in India. American Anthropologist, 67(6), 82-122. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1965.67.6.02a00960

Cohn, B. S. (1967). Some notes on law and change in north india. In P. Bohannan (Ed.), Law and warfare: Studies in the anthropology of conflict. New York: Natural History Press.

Galanter M, Krishnan JK. 2003. Debased informalism: Lok Adalats and Legal Rights in Modern India. In Beyond https://media.law.wisc.edu/s/c_8/ymy9n/mgdi.pdf

Galanter M, Meschievitz CS. 1982. In search of Nyaya Panchayats: the politics of a moribund institution. https://api.law.wisc.edu/repository-pdf/uwlaw-library-repository-omekav3/original/bcc574c4f38bc892c422e00f062f5e206416c1e9.pdf

Gohar, A. (2018). Returning to indigenous traditions of peacemaking, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping: From Jirga (TDR) to restorative justice (ADR) in Pakistan. In T. Gavrielides (Ed.), Routledge international handbook of restorative justice (pp. 84-97). https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315613512  

Hayden R. 1999. Disputes and Arguments Amongst Nomads: A Caste Council in India. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press

Islam, Md. Taufiqul, 2014. ―Decentralisation and Rural Local Government in India and Bangladesh: A Brief Comparison‖, Journal of South Asian Studies,

Jaffe, James A. “Custom, Identity, And the Jury in India, 1800–1832.” The Historical Journal 57, no. 1 (2014): 131–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24528913.

Jaffe JA. 2015. Ironies of Colonial Governance: Law, Custom and Justice in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge

Jaiswal, Hrishikesh and Mandloi, Pragati, 2020. Alternate Dispute Resolution in Rural India: A Brief Study About Panchayat System (August 1, 2020). CB Eduvents-Legal Encyclopedia, ISBN- 978-81-943164-1 https://ssrn.com/abstract=3817307

Kadir, Jawad (2019). The Utility of Traditional Justice System of “Panchayat” in Resolving Pakistan-India Interstate Conflict. https://icermediation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/The-Utility-of-Traditional-Justice-System-of-Panchayat-in-Resolving-Pakistan-India-Interstate-Conflict-Jawad-Kadir.pdf

Lange, Matthew, Emre Amasyali, and Tay Jeong. 2021. “Communalizing Colonial Policies and Postcolonial Ethnic Warfare: A Multimethod Analysis of the British Empire.” European Journal of Sociology, 62 (2): 141-165.

Lange, Matthew and Andrew Dawson, 2009. Dividing and Ruling the World? A Statistical Test of the Effects of Colonialism on Postcolonial Civil Violence, Social Forces, Volume 88, Issue 2, December 2009, Pages 785-817, https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.0.0255

Lederach, J. P. (1991). Of nets, nails, and problems: The folk language of conflict resolution in a central american setting. In K. Avruch, P. W. Black, J. A. Scimecca (Eds.), Conflict resolution: Cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 165-86). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Mannathukkaren, Nissim. “The ‘Poverty’ of Political Society: Partha Chatterjee and the People’s Plan Campaign in Kerala, India.” Third World Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2010): 295–314. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25677772.

Moog, Robert. 1991. Conflict and compromise: the politics of Lok Adalats in Varanasi District. Law Soc. Rev. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3053726.pdf

Moore E. 1985. Conflict and Compromise: Justice in an Indian Village. Cent. South Southeast Asia Stud., Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nandy, A. (2002). Telling the Story of Communal Conflicts in South Asia: Interim Report on a Personal Search for Defining Myths. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870120112030

Pai, Sudha, and Sajjan Kumar, ‘Communal Mobilization and Riots in Western Uttar Pradesh: Muzaffarnagar and Shamli Districts’, Everyday Communalism: Riots in Contemporary Uttar Pradesh (Delhi, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 17 Apr. 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199466290.003.0006.

Sharda, Mridula, 2010. Evolution of Panchayati Raj in India: From Traditional to Constitutionalize Panchayats, New Delhi, Kanishka Publishers, Distributors.

Sharma, Manohar Lal (1987). Gandhi and Democratic Decentralization in India. New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications. OCLC 17678104.

Singh, Vijandra (2003). “Chapter 5: Panchayate Raj and Gandhi”. Panchayati Raj and Village Development: Volume 3, Perspectives on Panchayati Raj Administration. Studies in public administration. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons. pp. 84–90. ISBN 978-81-7625-392-5.

Sharafi, Mitra. Annu. “South Asian Legal History.” Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 2015. 11:309–36 The Annual Review of Law and Social Science is online at lawsocsci.annualreviews.org This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102612-134041

Stewart, Neil. “Divide and Rule: British Policy in Indian History.” Science & Society 15, no. 1 (1951): 49–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40400043.

Upadhyay, Anjoo Sharan and Priyankar Upadhyaya 2016. Traditional Institutions of Dispute Resolution in India: Experiences from Khasi and Garo Hills in Meghalaya. Berlin: Berghof Foundation.

Appendix A

1858: India comes under direct British colonial rule after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

1920:  Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms provide for local self-government bodies at the village level

1927: The British government introduces the Local Self-Government Act, which establishes local self-government bodies in rural areas known as Panchayats.

1935: The Government of India Act provides for the establishment of provincial and central governments.

1947: Indian independence from British colonial rule.

1951: The first Panchayati Raj system in independent India is established in Nagaur district of Rajasthan.

1973: The Ashok Mehta Committee recommends reforms to strengthen Panchayats and make them more effective.

1978: The 73rd Amendment to the Constitution of India is passed, which provides a constitutional basis for the establishment of Panchayati Raj institutions and mandates their compulsory existence in every state.

1992: The 73rd Amendment is implemented in all states of India.

1992-1993: The Aman Committee is formed in response to riots between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai.

2002: The Shanti Sena plays a role in mediating between warring communities during the Gujarat riots.

2002: The 73rd Amendment is amended to provide for the reservation of one-third of seats in Panchayati Raj institutions for women.

2010: The Rajiv Gandhi Panchayat Sashaktikaran Abhiyan (RGPSA) provides financial assistance to states for activities such as training of Panchayat functionaries, development of Panchayat infrastructure, and implementation of e-governance initiatives.

2011: the National Advisory Council proposed a set of recommendations for further strengthening Panchayats included ensuring greater representation of marginalized groups

Jackson, William Henry, photographer. 1895. Going to
charshit? – Indian men entering building. India, Photograph.
https://www.loc.gov/item/2004707714/
Photoglob Co, P. (ca. 1890) Bombay. Palm-tree in the university garden. India Mumbai, ca. 1890. [Zürich: Photoglob Company] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017658

Jackson, William Henry, photographer. The Holy Man of Benares – Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswathi. India Varanasi, 1895. -20. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004707381/.

H.C. White Co, P. (1907) Wretched life of the native Hindus at close quarters, street in Fatehpur-Sikri, a typical village street in India. India, 1907. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2020681576/.
People Gathered in Front of Structure. India. (Between 1860 and 1930) [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2020681622/.
Kashmiri Pandit Asha Jee (R) who won the Panchayat elections from the Wussan block of Kashmir’s Baramulla district being garlanded by her Muslim supporters.
A Muzaffarnagar panchayat takes place in a masjid destroyed in the 2013 riots.
Categories
Journal

A Portrait of the (Ugandan) Artist as a (Colonial Subject): Subaltern Subjectivities and Art Education at Margaret Trowell’s Makerere

by Michael Baird

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.”

–Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Included in the “General Developments of Interest” report by R. S. Foster, Deputy Director of Education in Uganda, at the 16 February 1939 meeting of the British Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, was mention of the “progress in Art work, particularly painting and drawing, under the inspiration of Mrs. Trowell, who worked voluntarily.” He continued by expressing hope that the members of the committee would see for themselves the works produced by Trowell’s students which would be on display at the Imperial Institute in London later that year.[1] As the minutes demonstrate, despite not being employed in a formal capacity within the British colonial bureaucracy, Margaret Trowell came to be understood as not only an asset in the self-proclaimed and, at least partially, rhetorical “civilizing” goals of the British but also in the project of colonial governance more broadly.

Margaret Trowell first arrived in the British East Africa Protectorate in 1929 when her husband, a member of the Colonial Medical Service, was assigned to Kenya. In 1935, he was transferred to Kampala, Uganda, and it was there that—as the story goes—Margaret Trowell began teaching informal art making classes on the veranda of their house.[2] By 1937, her efforts had received sufficient enough attention from the leadership of the protectorate that a fine arts program was incorporated into the curriculum at Makerere University in Kampala, and Trowell, appropriately enough, was selected to be the inaugural director of the program that continues to bear her name.[3] She remained in this role until her retirement and return to England in 1958, splitting her time between the teaching of fine arts classes and curatorial duties at the Uganda Museum, which was, at the time, housed at Makerere.[4]

In the most general terms, this paper seeks to situate the fine arts program at Makerere during the Trowell era within the broader cultural and political context of the British Empire during its final decades of formal control in Uganda. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that rather than apolitical aesthetic exercises, art education was a key component of the British colonial apparatus. Drawing upon digitized archival materials of the British government, Trowell’s own prolific writings, and secondary literature concerning the history of the program at Makerere, I seek to understand how a white, British-born woman came to be seen as an arbitrator of “authentic” Ugandan and, more broadly, African art; more importantly, however, I seek to turn my attention to the students of Trowell in order to consider how art education shaped the personhood of colonial subjects and how these students and their artistic productions became sites for debates regarding the nature of African personhood. In crafting this impressionistic portrait of the colonial subject-artist in Uganda, the corpus of postcolonial and decolonial thought from both within and without the African continent will prove indispensable. This literature will enable consideration of the psychological dimensions of colonial art education (and an exploration of the limitations of what may be possible in this regard) as well as its political functions, expanding upon the typical emphasis on pedagogy, ideology, and classroom operations that predominates in scholarship on colonial art education.[5]

Culture as an Arena of Colonialism

In his book Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o utilizes martial language to compare the cultural arena of colonialism to more familiar forms of colonial domination. He writes:

The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environments, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.[6]

He continues by discussing how this alienation from self on the part of the colonized results in an association with their antithesis—the colonizer—and their way of life. His discussion is reminiscent of and, in some ways, an extension of Antonio Gramsci’s conception of cultural hegemony. In “The Intellectuals” and “On Education,” Gramsci argues for the importance of ideology, socialization, and taste to class-based oppression and vertical stratification.[7] The cultivated desire by individuals to achieve the good life as defined by cultural elites facilitates continued exploitation. Thiong’o applies a similar critique to the relationship between colonizer and colonized; the forced alienation from one’s own culture and the simultaneous inculcation of the mores of the metropole subsumes the colonized within the order of the colonizer, creating a system of dependency or “colonization of the mind.”

Similarly, Nigerian novelist and essayist Chinua Achebe argues for the importance of culture as a dimension of the colonial project; however, in his essay “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature” published in print in the collection The Education of a British-Protected Child, Achebe rejects the binaries laid out by Thiong’o. Drawing on the historical memory and experience of the Biafran War, Achebe takes issue with the core claim of Thiong’o that the use of English by African writers intrinsically replicates colonial power structures and modes of thinking.[8] For Achebe who comes from a country that does not have a lingua franca with the exception of English and that has experienced first-hand in horrific ways that violence that can occur through the exacerbation of cultural and political cleavages, English cannot simply be said to belong to the English. Culture is not owned but is rather a site of contestation and negotiation. To Achebe, English was a tool of anti-colonial struggle and ongoing nation-building.[9]

The disagreement could possibly be a reflection more of their respective positionality and citizenship than anything else—the existence of Kiswahili as a lingua franca in the area that constitutes the modern day nation-state of Kenya provided a readymade alternative for Thiong’o’s call for continued anti-colonial efforts—and a warning against the tendency for generalization that flattens the unique historic experiences of colonialism and possibilities for the postcolonial even amongst formerly British colonies on the African continent. Certainly, both Thiong’o and Achebe understand culture as an important arena of the colonization and the fight against it. The instrumentalization of culture—specifically language, dress, art, literature, and even architecture—by post-independence state builders in Africa like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal illustrate the pivotal role of culture in continued agitation against what could be understood as the vestiges and continuing forms of colonialism.[10]

The Artist is not Present

Margaret Trowell begins her article “The Kampala Art Exhibition—A Uganda Experiment” with what seems to be a rather bold claim, albeit one that typifies the attitude in the United Kingdom at the time. She writes, “At first glance East Africa is probably one of the most disappointing parts of the world from the point of view of the student of indigenous art.”[11] She goes on to juxtapose this vacuum with the recognized sculptural canon of art that emerged from West Africa.[12] The representational, incredibly high relief forms of—for example—the so-called “Benin Bronzes” more readily aligned with European constructions of “fine art.”[13] Three dimensional, optically real art works depicting subject matter with human figures were well represented within the canon of European art history from its fabricated origins in the Greco-Roman world and also able to be rendered knowable and legible through the methodologies of art historical inquiry.

With the exception of isolated groups of works like the Benin Bronzes—regardless of the provisionality of their positioning within the category of art—sub-Saharan Africa was understood by Europeans to be devoid of art. Western understandings of art and what kinds of material culture were encompassed by that term were, and often still are, taken as natural, given, and universal. So too are the attendant hierarchies that privilege the so-called fine arts of sculpture and painting as well as the favored mimetic genres. According to the suppositions of evolutionist thought, the lack of art on the African continent was evidence of the inferiority of African populations, which were understood to be at an earlier point on the teleological timeline of human evolutionary “progress.”

As Aníbal Quijano points out, it was the Europeans—the very people situating themselves at the endpoint of the timeline they were producing—that were setting the rubrics and classificatory schemes by which culture was measured. He writes, “Through the political, military and technological power of its foremost societies, European or Western culture imposed its paradigmatic image and its principle cognitive elements as the norm of orientation on all cultural development, particularly the intellectual and the artistic.”[14] Addressing the African continent specifically, he continues, “What the Europeans did was to deprive Africans of legitimacy and recognition in the global cultural order dominated by European patterns.”[15]

As they become naturalized, categories and labels like art gain what seems to be a rationality or internal logic of their own, despite the reality that this production of knowledge is, by necessity, situated.[16] The presumed universality of that which arose out of a particular social and cultural context—regardless of how fictional—has material effects. The global distribution of what came to be called art divided the world and provided a rhetorical justification and impetus for colonial rule and, more specifically, for educational projects like that of Trowell in Uganda.

African Artist as Medieval European

Even as an agent of the European global effort of remaking the world in its own cultural image, Margaret Trowell espoused a broader definition of art than many of her contemporaries. The title of her first book, African Arts and Crafts: Their Development in the School, published in the same year that she became director of the fine arts program at Makerere, is instructive; she did not see the African continent or even East Africa as devoid of art and certainly not devoid of the potential for further production of art and refinement of existing practices, which was the cause to which she dedicated her career in this period.[17] In African Arts and Crafts, she offers a definition of art that challenges the binary of art/craft and the presumed hierarchy associated with the two. While art was often seen as—and continues to be, in some cases—the prerogative of the white male genius artist who is presumed to be intellectually engaged with art history and theory, craft was positioned as its antithesis. Craft was and is a highly gendered and racialized category associated with the “primitive,” rote adherence to tradition, and more corporal than intellectual engagement.[18]  

Trowell does not so much discard the categories of art and craft in their entirety but rather expand the category of art to include types of material culture often placed within the category of craft. She writes, “By art I think we should mean all worthy handicraft, from daily work and ploughing to cathedral building…art may seem a subject remote from many…but I wish to argue…[art] is near every one of us. It is universal and for all.”[19] In doing so, she seeks to elevate craft to the status of art and grant it the relative prestige reserved typically for art.

To understand Trowell’s views on what art is, it is necessary to consider her educational history and intellectual influences. Before she was an art educator, she was an artist herself; she attended the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London from 1924-1926. After recognizing her interest in art education, she enrolled at London University Institute of Education. There she was a student of Marion Richardson—a British educator and author who was known for her approaches to teaching art making and handwriting to school-age children—who had an indelible impact of Trowell’s educational philosophy and understanding of art. Richardson emphasized giving children the space to develop their artistic practices on their own terms, at least in theory.[20] Juxtaposed with the technical exercises and emphasis on the copying of old “Masters” inherited from the Academic system, this philosophy was quite radical.

While it is true that Richardson’s approach, at least arguably, granted children more autonomy and agency, its underlying rationale was steeped in primitivist and even evolutionist logic. Richardson was interested in what she understood to be the “purity” of art produced by those who were understood to be on the margins of or most untouched by society. To her the works of children, the incarcerated, and the mentally ill, especially when their natural development was not hindered by external societal interventions, was an art that was more pure and more human. Not only does this understanding require, by necessity, a biopolitical division of humanity that is then naturalized and supposedly evidenced (tautologically) by the art produced, but it also requires the presumption that a natural state of humanity exists and that some individuals are less developed and, therefore, closer to that point.

At the same time that Trowell was studying under Richardson, the British Arts and Crafts Movement, although certainly past its apogee, was still a major cultural force. Although there was quite a bit of diversity of thought among its key proponents, in general, the Arts and Crafts Movement could be understood as a reaction to modernity, industrialization, and even the Enlightenment more broadly. For figures like John Ruskin and William Morris, the antithesis to the ailments of modern means of production was medieval Europe.[21] For Ruskin and Morris, medieval Europe, especially as exemplified by the Gothic cathedral, represented a time when humanity was closer with nature, craftspeople were closer to their work which may continue for multiple generations and did not involve factory methods of production, and the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality had not foreclosed the possibility of transcendent experience. Unsurprisingly, their view of the medieval period was romantic and ahistorical and said more about the period in which they were writing and their thoughts about it than any empirical reality of the medieval period.

The symbol of the medieval European craftsperson was a recurring theme in Trowell’s writings on Ugandan artists.[22] At various points, this was a reflection of reality as she saw and understood it or more of an aspirational model that she hoped to cultivate through her art education program. For Trowell, the medieval European functioned similarly to how it did for Ruskin and Morris. She saw in her students, and in African populations more broadly, the potential for art to continue existing alongside and inextricable from life itself, as opposed to the European modernist tenets of “art for art’s sake.”[23] In her mind, the African artist was free from the trappings of mechanization and individualism and was, therefore, producing art that was more “pure.” British-Ugandan artist and art historian Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa points to an additional function of this image of the medieval craftsperson in the imagination of Trowell. She argues that, in a way that was not necessarily the case for figures like Ruskin and Morris, Trowell also desired a return to what she perceived of as the intensity of religious piety during the medieval period.[24] For Trowell, art education was not and should not be separated from missionary efforts.

This marking and fetishization of difference between colonist and colonial subject—whether it be through the image of the child or that of the medieval European craftsperson—created the impression that somehow Trowell’s students were outside of modernity and time itself. It reinforced European evolutionist narratives of linear and teleological progress with African individuals positioned behind Europeans, either as not fully developed (children) or mythic but historical previous Europeans (the romanticized and exoticized image of the imagined medieval craftsperson.)[25] The ambiguous and, at times, seemingly contradictory relationship of Trowell to her students illuminates what could possibly be considered the central paradoxes of the British “civilizing mission”: Namely, the need to continually mark difference between the colonizer and colonized precluded accomplishment of the rhetorical goals of civilizing efforts. In other terms, if the stated aim to civilize was successful, it would have obviated the legitimizing rationale of colonial relations. Additionally, Trowell’s belief in the British obligation to assist in the evolutionist development of African populations was fundamentally at odds with her desire to maintain the purity of African art and the relationship between Africans and material culture.

An “Authentically” African Artist

The students at Makerere and the art works that they produced became arenas in which British colonial officials and intellectuals debated these theories and apparent contradictions. Writing about this time period in the British colonies where indirect rule was being more widely adopted in places like the Uganda and during which the end of British control in some parts of the world started to seem like less of an incredibly distant prospect, art historian Sunanda K. Sanyal argues, “It was no secret in this era that Makerere had been a pawn in the protectorate administration’s experiments with education.”[26] He goes on to outline some of the different factions within the Western faculty at Makerere. On one hand were those who adhered to strict evolutionist thinking. If Ugandan students were simply at an earlier stage in the process of human development, then a curriculum that mirrored British educational institutions was ideal. For Trowell and others who espoused the so-called “Adaptation Theory,” there was a belief that there were cultural distinctions between Europeans and Africans and that the best curriculum for the university would consider and incorporate both.[27] While in theory this view left space for alternative forms of knowledge production and challenged the presumed universality of Western thought, it relied upon an essentialist view of culture that, in practice, revealed more about the British image of Africa than truly emic forms of knowledge production. In other words, cultural relativity did not equate to cultural pluralism or equality, especially in a colonial context where power in its various manifestations was so asymmetrically distributed.

As a proponent of Adaptation Theory and, furthermore, as someone who believed and valued the supposed purity of African art, Trowell wrote extensively about the need to maintain the African nature of the work of her students. Ideally, education would permit the students to “adapt” the useful elements of European thought while developing according to the lines of their essential cultural characteristics.[28] To this end, Trowell discusses her exhaustive efforts to limit the exposure of her students to Western fine art and reproductions. She also insisted on a bottom-top approach in the classroom, arguing that she had minimal influence on the works of her students; she went so far as to famously give up her artistic practice during periods of her time as director of the fine arts program at Makerere as to not affect unduly the work of her students.

Taking her statements of wanting to maintain the African-ness of the works of her students at face value, one might expect to see students working in any of the media—for example, basketry, decorated gourds, body adornments, or musical instruments—and/or adopting the subjects or forms of any of the Ugandan material culture Trowell exhaustively surveys in African Arts and Crafts or Tribal Crafts of Uganda.[29] Up until this point, I have only seen evidence of her students working in two-dimensional media, painting and printmaking, as well as sculpture of which there is no evidence for longer lineage in Uganda.

It is instructive to pause for a moment and consider a print by Trowell herself. (Figure 1) The image depicts two black women bending over in order to—it seems—scrutinize a pot that is in the central focal point of the composition. The figure on the left is in a profile view while the one on the right is in a frontal view, but the both their faces are inscrutable, submerged almost completely into shadow. In the distant background are gently rolling hills upon which undifferentiated and anonymous masses of people stand. The scene calms; it is pastoral and idyllic and the labor of the women, if that is what is occurring, is represented as leisurely contemplation. Without an ability for the viewer to discern the faces of the main figures, they seem to function more as passive objects for consumption by the colonial gaze than subjects capable of returning that gaze. The color of their clothing and the dramatic shading echoes the forms of the vessels scattered on the ground, which themselves follow the same diagonal across the picture plane as the anonymous masses behind.

A comparison with the work of one of her students that she published to illustrate a 1947 essay in the journal Man is provocative.[30] (Figure 2) Appropriately enough, she did not attribute the work.[31] Even without access to the coloring of the original (if it is even still extant,) parallels can still be drawn in terms of the rural subject matter and anonymous figurative forms positioned alongside material culture that would have been recognizable, in a general sense, to Western audiences. Despite (or more accurately perhaps, because of) her stated desire to facilitate growth of Ugandan art along its own lines, preserving its essential African nature, the images of Africa produced by her students seem to replicate Trowell’s own essentialized and stereotypical view of Africa and its peoples. She positioned herself as the arbitrator of authentic African-ness and, unsurprisingly perhaps, saw her ideas of African reflected back at her from the picture planes of her students.

It was these kinds of images that found a market in the West and that received the approval of colonial officials like Trowell. To Western eyes, these were authentic representations, because they conformed to the images that Europeans already had in their minds. In Orientalism, Edward Said discusses how the marginalized can psychologically internalize both discursive and visual representations of themselves.[32] At Makerere, Ugandan artists were not only looking at and consuming exoticizing and primitivizing images but producing them. And finding success within the liberal and capitalist hegemonic colonial order through it.[33]

Can the African Artist Speak? Further Directions

Despite Margaret Trowell’s claim that she wanted to minimally interfere with the work of her students, she was the ultimately authority within the classroom and a privileged based on her nationality and ability to navigate the cultural spheres of the metropole and the Ugandan colony. As already noted, her draconian limits on what was acceptable for her students to be exposed to and draw inspiration from insured that she was herself playing a role in maintaining the contours of what may be artistically possible for her students. It also presumed that Uganda and its peoples had not been an active and connected part of the international system before the arrival of the British in a sustained way. As Quijano notes, Trowell had the full weight of the military and economic power of the colonial United Kingdom to enforce her cultural vision, her cultural values, and to set the terms of engagement.[34]

Given this fact, what, if anything, can a historian say about the students on their own terms? What can be recovered? This portrait of the Ugandan artist at Makerere during the Trowell era, perhaps by necessity, reveals more about British concerns and anxieties—about their supposed cultural superiority and the universality of their cultural rubrics, about the impact of modernity and mechanization on material culture, about the tenuousness of their colonial rule, about their images of themselves and the African continent—than any reality of the African continent or its peoples.

In her famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak urges caution in attempting to recover the voices of the already marginalized, lest one perpetuates another level of violence; another act of silencing built on historical acts of silencing.[35] Is there a way to avoid simply projecting the anxieties and debates of my current moment into my images of Trowell’s students at Makerere? To avoid reading agency where there is none or where it would not have been conceived of in that way by the individuals themselves?

US American writers Simon Gikandi and Saidiya Hartman, in “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement” and “Venus in Two Acts,” respectively, provide alternative ways of engaging with the archive that may prove useful in considering the students at Makerere in their own terms. Gikandi proposes the reading the archive, which is itself a testament of the power of hegemonic forces, for slippages and secondary narratives that reveal lived realities of those who are not the authors of the archive.[36] Hartman pushes the possibility of the archive perhaps a bit further, arguing for paint[ing] as full a picture of the lives” of marginalized individuals featured within the archive by “exceed[ing] or negotiat[ing] the constitutive limits of the archive…by advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive.”[37]

If the subaltern cannot speak, can they at least make noise? Could the strength of that noise be its illegibility?[38] Its inability to be captured, fixed, subsumed within the presumed universal epistemological confines of knowledge production deriving from the Western Enlightenment? In his provocatively titled “Can the Mosquito Speak?” Timothy Mitchell raises the question as to whether nonhumans can be agents of history.[39] Could the artworks produced by Trowell’s students speak? Were they agents in the history of colonialism? Do they continue to be?

In her autobiography, African Tapestry, published the year before she left Uganda to return to the United Kingdom, Margaret Trowell writes about her experiences with one student, Gregory Maloba.[40] For his part, Maloba would ultimately become a fairly well-renowned sculptor in East Africa. For instance, his work still remains in the permanent collection of the Uganda National Museum. In the passage, Trowell emphasizes—a position that she often adopts in her writing—the great efforts and lengths that she went to in order to reduce exposure of her students to what she understood as external influences. She employs the anecdote to highlight her sacrifice with the goal of cultivating a kind of sympathy in the reader for her, but, regardless of the veracity, might we understand the narrative in a different light?

In the text, she recounts how despite her best efforts to keep Maloba from reproductions of canonical and contemporary European art, she found him one day having snuck into her personal library in her house while she was away. According to her, he was there to look at her books of European art history. For Trowell, this was a source of endless frustration as she so desperately sought what did not exist in reality but was a product of her mind, her own fictional image of the African artist. Instead of loss, perhaps we might see resistance. We might see an African artist, as modern and as contemporary as everyone around him, navigating a highly asymmetrical colonial structure, adopting what is useful and disregarding what is not.

Might there be other Gregorys?


[1] “Minutes of the Ninety-First Meeting of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies,” Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies: Minutes of 15th-95th Meetings, 1939, 6.

[2] Margaret Trowell, African Tapestry (London, United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1957), 103.

[3] Elisbeth Joyce Court, “Margaret Trowell and the Development of Art Education in East Africa,” Art Education 38, no. 6 (1985): 35–41.

[4] This antecedent to the Uganda National Museum was moved to its current location on Kitante Hill in Kampala in 1954.

[5] For instance, see Hamid Irbouh, Art in the Service of Colonialism: French Art Education in Morocco, 1912-1956 (London, United Kingdom: I.B. Tauris, 2012); J.P. Odoch Pido, “Pedagogical Clashes in East African Art and Design Education,” Critical Interventions 8, no. 1 (2014): 119–32; and Sunanda K. Sanyal, “Modernism and Cultural Politics in East Africa: Cecil Todd’s Drawings of the Uganda Martyrs,” African Arts 39, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 50–59.

[6] Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London, United Kingdom and Portsmouth, New Hampshire: James Currey Ltd. and Heinemann, 1986), 3.

[7] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London, United Kingdom: Lawrence and Wishart, 2003), 3-43.

[8] Chinua Achebe, “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature,” in The Education of a British-Protected Child (New York City, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 96–106.

[9] Ibid.

[10] For an overview of Mobutu Sese Seko’s policy and state-sponsored program of Authenticité, see Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2015). On the École de Dakar and twentieth-century art in Senegal in the decades following Léopold Sédar Senghor’s time as president, see Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004).

[11] Margaret Trowell, “The Kampala Art Exhibition—A Uganda Experiment,” Oversea Education: A Journal of Educational Experiment and Research in Tropical and Subtropical Areas 10, no. 3 (April 1939): 131.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Though it should be said that the status of the Benin Bronzes as art—while more widely agreed upon at the time of Trowell’s writing—was relatively recent. In the proceeding decades, debates raged as to how they should be considered and even as to their origins (attributed variously to Egypt or waves of migration from the north,) with some scholars expressing skepticism that they could have been the artistic productions of sub-Saharan Africans. For this history, see Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1994).

[14] Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 170.

[15] Ibid, 170.

[16] Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2002), 13-15.

[17] Margaret Trowell, African Arts and Crafts: Their Development in the School (London, United Kingdom: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937).

[18] The art/craft binary mirrors the relative privileging of mind over body within Cartesian dualism. On the implications of normative dualism, see Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983).

[19] Trowell, African Arts and Crafts, 33.

[20] Marion Richardson, Art and the Child (London, United Kingdom: University of London Press, 1948); Rosemary Sassoon, Marion Richardson: Her Life and Her Contribution to Handwriting (Bristol, United Kingdom: Intellect Books, 2011).

[21] See John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 2nd ed. (London, United Kingdom: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1867). For a general introduction to the Arts and Crafts Movement, see Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement (New York City, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991).

[22] Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, “Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education, ed. Amelia M. Kraehe, Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, and B. Stephen Carpenter (London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 85–101.

[23] Frequently, Trowell in her writings would easily slip between specifics and generalizations. She did not hesitate to philosophize on African nature and African art more broadly. This reductionist and totalizing tendency is perhaps not surprising and is part of the larger colonial image of the continent, but it should be said that this elision is hers and not one that I am making.

[24] Ibid.

[25] On “colonial difference,” see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993).

[26] Sunanda K. Sanyal, “Modernism and Cultural Politics in East Africa: Cecil Todd’s Drawings of the Uganda Martyrs,” African Arts 39, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 51.

[27] Ibid, 51-56.

[28] Sanyal and Wolukau-Wanambwa.

[29] Trowell, African Arts and Crafts: Their Development in the School; Margaret Trowell and K.P. Wachsmann, Tribal Crafts of Uganda (London, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1953).

[30] Margaret Trowell, “Modern African Art in East Africa,” Man 47 (1947): 1–7.

[31] The question of anonymity in the reception of African art in the West has been the subject of important studies, especially regarding the intentional obfuscation of authorship to conform to Western perceptions of African art. Investigation of naming practices in the fine arts program at Makerere though remains fertile ground for future exploration. See, for instance, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, “One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art,” History in Africa 11 (1984): 163–93.

[32] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York City, New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 25-28.

[33] The role of art in relation to the colonial, capitalist international system also merits further exploration. In their seminal essay for critical museum studies, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach highlight how perceptions of fine art erase or mystify the accumulation of labor that produces it and how myth of the creative genius reinforce meritocratic ideals. The overlap between these values and the liberal ideology that fueled colonialism and the expansion of Western hegemony seems significant to consider in the context of colonial art education. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4 (1980): 448–69.

[34] Quijano, 2-3.

[35] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York City, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 66–111.

[36] Simon Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” Early American Literature 50, no. 1 (2015): 81–102.

[37] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 11.

[38] Fred Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–24.

[39] Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, 19-53.

[40] Margaret Trowell, African Tapestry (London, United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1957), 104.

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The College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology: Makerere University. “The Makerere Art School Through The Ages.” Accessed December 8, 2021. https://cedat.mak.ac.ug/academics/schools/mtsifa/the-makerere-art-school-through-the-ages/.

Thiongʼo, Ngũgĩ wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London, United Kingdom and Portsmouth, New Hampshire: James Currey Ltd. and Heinemann, 1986.

Trowell, Margaret, and K.P. Wachsmann. Tribal Crafts of Uganda. London, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Trowell, Margaret. “Modern African Art in East Africa.” Man 47 (1947): 1–7.

Trowell, Margaret. “The Kampala Art Exhibition–A Uganda Experiment.” Oversea Education: A Journal of Educational Experiment and Research in Tropical and Subtropical Areas 10, no. 3 (April 1939): 131–35.

Trowell, Margaret. African Arts and Crafts: Their Development in the School. London, United Kingdom: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937.

Trowell, Margaret. African Design: An Illustrated Survey of Traditional Craftwork. 2nd ed. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003.

Trowell, Margaret. African Tapestry. London, United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1957.

Trowell, Margaret. African Tapestry. London, United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1957.

Trowell, Margaret. Classical African Sculpture. 3rd ed. London, United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1970.

Van Beurden, Sarah. Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2015.

Wolukau-Wanambwa, Emma. “Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education, edited by Amelia M. Kraehe, Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, and B. Stephen Carpenter, 85–101. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Figure 1. Margaret Trowell, Untitled. c. 1940-1950. Woodcut, 8.67 in. x 10.24 in.
Figure 2. Unidentified student of Margaret Trowell, Untitled. c. 1947. Paint on canvas (?), dimensions unknown.
Categories
Journal

Lessons from Machiavelli’s Prince

by Levin Low

            “Wanting to annex territory is indeed very natural and normal, and when capable men undertake it, they are always praised, or at least, not criticized.”

            So goes a quote from Niccolò Machiavelli’s most seminal work, The Prince. A former diplomat of the state of Florence, he wrote The Prince after his fall from grace, as a gift for the new ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de Medici, hoping to be reinstated. It is not certain if he ever read it; Machiavelli’s gift did not achieve its intended effect, and he never regained his lost power. However, Machiavelli’s Prince lives on as perhaps the most infamous political treatise ever written. The scandalous nature of The Prince comes from the matter-of-fact manner in which Machiavelli pragmatically describes what must be done to grasp power and keep hold of it. He takes for granted that we already know that life (particularly political life) is routinely, and oftentimes unspeakably cruel; and that once enthroned in a position of power, a ruler must resort to any means necessary to stay there.

            That Machiavelli quote, then, may perhaps be the best explanation of the colonial impulse to subjugate. Many reasons have been put forth in an attempt to explain how and why the colonizers colonized, but in the end, there isn’t but one answer. Machiavelli seems to have accepted the existence of this impulse; in The Prince, he puts before us, without any compunctions, many historical examples of things men have done in the process of conquering. This tradition was continued by the colonizers. In this essay, I aim to draw from The Prince lessons in statecraft, frame them with real-life colonial examples, and consider alternative interpretations of The Prince.

Machiavellianism in Real Life

            “… there are three ways of holding them: the first, to destroy their political institutions; the second, to go live there yourself; the third, to let them continue to live under their own laws, exacting tribute and setting up an oligarchical government that will keep the state friendly towards you…” is what Machiavelli had to say on “How one should govern cities or principalities that, before being conquered, used to live under their own laws”. And the colonizers took note.

            The first, destruction of political institutions. This is what Prince Leopold II did when he seized the Congo, making it his private colony. Leopold established the Congo Free State as his personal private property; he was essentially its supreme leader, and as such, was allowed to do as he pleased. He accomplished this via what Machiavelli might term “wicked means”; Leopold enlisted the explorer Henry Morton Stanley as his agent in Africa, and for five years Stanley travelled up and down the Congo River basin, persuading local chiefs to sign treaties with Leopold. Almost all of them were illiterate, so they didn’t know what exactly they were signing away – effectively agreeing to cede their land to the Belgian crown. Some of the treaties also appear to have been doctored according to Leopold’s specifications.  

            With proof on paper of his ownership of the Congo, Leopold was able to get the major power players of Europe to recognize that he, Prince Leopold II of Belgium, was the sole owner of the Congo. He called himself the “proprietor” of the Congo Free State, and thus began his efforts to make a fortune from it. In the beginning, ivory was the Congo’s most valuable resource. As they traversed the Congo killing elephants for their ivory, the hunters also severely ravaged the people. Societies fell into ruin because so many of them had been kidnapped to serve as servants and concubines, and to be sold as slaves. The destruction of the Congo was accelerated with the invention of the rubber tyre, creating an insatiable demand for rubber. Leopold’s colony, with its huge supply of rubber vines, was ripe for the picking. Thus began a system of terror in which the people of the Congo were forced into labour, or be executed by their Belgian overseers. Leopold would send dispatchments from his 19000-man private army, the Force Publique, to march into a village, take the women hostage, and send the men into the rainforests with a quota of rubber – or else (Hochschild 2023).

            Leopold’s finances grew immensely. Meanwhile the population of the Congo was halved; around 10 million people lost their lives (Cox 1999). Causes of death ranged from famine, to being shot as they attempted escape, to torture. Leopold’s reign over the Congo was rock-solid because the Congo had been so completely destroyed. “Destroying cities is the only certain way of holding them,” observed Machiavelli.

            The second, to go live there yourself. This is what the British did, to maintain their hold over India. And they were extremely successful: they held India as a colony for nearly 200 years. The period of British rule in India is termed the British Raj; “Raj” is derived from the Hindi word “raj” meaning “rule” or “reign”. They used the East India Company (EIC) as a means of establishing control. The EIC’s paramountcy became apparent when they overthrew the nawab of Bengal and installed a puppet ruler, gaining control of the Bengal region. From there onwards, the EIC’s power only grew, eventually leading to direct British rule over most of the Indian subcontinent.

The British were so successful in holding India for so long because they established a physical (and cultural) presence in India by living there. The British officials and administrators, along with their families, settled in India and created a British expatriate community that sought to replicate the British lifestyle in a foreign land. They built British-style homes, established clubs, schools, and churches, and adhered to British customs and social norms. This created a distinct social and cultural divide between the British and the Indian population, reinforcing the notion of British superiority and reinforcing their sense of entitlement to rule. During that period, the British assumed the attitude of (as Rudyard Kipling put it) “tak[ing] up the white man’s burden”. They utterly rejected any and all “native contamination” (Wolpert 2023).

By virtue of their being in India and reinforcing “British superiority” among the people, the British were able to maintain their position as rulers. They propagated the concept of British as “better”, while denigrating Indian culture, custom, and tradition. This cultural imposition allowed the British to establish cultural hegemony in India, proving Machiavelli’s second precept of holding power in a conquered nation-state.

The third, to let them continue to live under their own laws, exacting tribute and setting up an oligarchical government that will keep the state friendly towards you. I consider Malaya (now known as Malaysia) a notable example of this. As with India, the British subjugation of Malaya began with the East India Company, whose occupation of Penang is now notorious as the dawn of British colonization in Malaya. Politically, it was easy for the British to seize control due to the growing discord, but their initial attempts were unsuccessful (Encyclopedia Britannica 2023). Their aim was a policy of indirect rule through the installation of British residents (advisers) in each state, but the very first one was assassinated by the people. He had been overly aggressive in his reforms; his was a mistake that the British learnt from. The next British residents were comparatively more tolerant, allowing them to be governed according to their own laws. Indirect rule was successful because the Malayan people, so fiercely proud of their customs and traditions, were led into believing that their Malay sultans still wielded authority and sovereignty and were only being “advised” by the British residents. In reality, the sultans had been coerced into signing agreements that contained terms extremely favourable towards the British. Yet those agreements recognized the traditional authority of the sultans, granting them a semblance of authority while keeping them on a leash.

The British might have avoided all that trouble if they had just read The Prince a lot more closely the first time. Centuries before the Age of Imperialism, Machiavelli had already noted that “if one wants to preserve a city that is accustomed to being independent and having free institutions, it is more easily held by using its citizens to govern it than in any other way.” By allowing the sultans to retain their ceremonial roles and status as the symbol of sovereign authority, the British thus gained the support of the Malay (the most populous race in Malaya) people, for they deeply revered their traditional rulers. Other local institutions were also allowed to continue, such as the village councils known as the Penghulu (headman) system: they were appointed by their sultan and were therefore friendly towards the British administration.

As for the Chinese (who were the second most populous race), their secret societies known as triads—gangster organizations—were likewise permitted to go on. The triads functioned like the Mafia: they maintained the social order, acted as mediators of conflict, and did what needed to be done to keep the peace. Even if it was illegal. The triads operated massive clandestine networks that spanned Malaya and other countries, engaging in lucrative criminal networks that flooded their coffers. Recognizing the delicate power balances to be navigated, the British pragmatically allowed the triads to continue their operations, but under British supervision. Colonial administration had learnt the hard way that in this particular state, it would be prudent to grant its citizens right of governance.

Which of Machiavelli’s three methods of governing conquered states was the surest way of holding on to them? Machiavelli favoured the most Machiavellian option: the first. Total destruction.

“Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to a free way of life, and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it himself, because when it rebels, it will always be able to appeal to the spirit of freedom and its ancient institutions, which are never forgotten… if [the new ruler] does not foment internal divisions or scatter the inhabitants, they will never forget their lost liberties and their ancient institutions, and will immediately attempt to recover them whenever they have an opportunity…”

Alternative Readings of the Prince

            Machiavelli’s name has become synonymous with ruthlessness, realpolitik, political deceit, etc. Immoral acts committed in the name of power. To many, The Prince is a handbook of the evil one must do to in order to gain power. But to say that this is all The Prince is would be reductionist. As Rosseau saw it, The Prince itself was a Machiavellian ruse: while laying out examples for what must be done to rule, his real aim was to teach the people freedom, by showing them that power was no more than subterfuge. Gramsci shares this view. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci draws upon Machiavelli’s politics extensively in his analysis of the politics of rule, offering his own interpretation of The Prince: that Machiavelli’s intended audience was in fact the common people. I concur. I think that Gramsci’s interpretation of Machiavelli was written with the intention of freeing us from hegemony.

As Gramsci theorized, hegemony is a process of “moral and intellectual leadership” through which subordinate classes consent to their domination by the ruling classes. To have hegemony is to have dominion over the people (Gramsci 1891-1937). It is a totalizing system of power that seeks to completely draw in the people materially, culturally, politically, ideologically (Middleton 2023); it involves the manipulation and control of ideas, values, beliefs, and norms to shape the perceptions, behaviours, and identities of the subjugated population. To achieve hegemony is to achieve total control of your subjects. Hegemony, the concept of, is regarded as the “locus of innovation” in Gramsci’s writings; before its significance as his “philosophical linchpin”, it had been commonly employed by Italian political philosophers to propose the gradual building of consent across the nation for a new Italian state—”making Italians”—instead of joining via force. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci presents hegemony as a project the ruling class was working on: consensual domination granted by the people for its rule.

This is where Machiavelli’s Prince plays into the postcolonial development of the politics of recognition. The Prince exposes the “ideological power of the ruling class” (Townsend 2023) for what it truly is: a long, drawn-out conspiracy of pomp and pious circumstance. The French insisted on the notion that they were superior morally, politically, and intellectually; hence, they were duty-bound to civilize and educate the poor, primitive Algerians. Across the Americas, the Europeans enslaved and looted and slaughtered, all while preaching with a halo around their heads. They worked hard to appear religious and at all costs, uphold their faith, shrewdly discerning that religion would be the sword that strengthened their position and protected the mystery of their privileges.

The Prince was a threat. Perhaps it was so condemned by the authorities, like the church, who alleged that it was written by “Satan’s finger”, because it served as a reminder that there is no such thing as right to rule. Power is a farce, and can be won by anyone who is willing to resort to any means to take it. In fact, Machiavelli opined, “a shrewd ruler, therefore, must try to ensure that his citizens, whatever the situation may be, will always be dependent on the government and on him; and they will always be loyal to him.”

This is a prime example of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Like so many other philosophers in the Existentialist tradition, Hegel posited that self-consciousness only arises out of being seen as an object of another’s perception. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”; through the gaze of another, we define our own shape and form (Hegel 1952). The way I understand it, the master-slave dialectic takes form when two selves meet. Upon meeting, they inevitably engage in a struggle, because the existence of an Other means they cannot see their Self as before. Their consciousness is now mediated by the Other’s perception, judgement and assessment, and now they must struggle to claim their identity. One Self emerges the victor, and thus, the master-slave dialectic is established. The master is seen as the dominant one, possessing control over the slave, who is reduced to a mere object. Interestingly enough, the master has mastery only insofar as the slave acknowledges them as the master: their Self-identity as the master rests upon the slave.

In his works “Black Skin, White Masks” and “The Wretched of the Earth”, Frantz Fanon reworked Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the context of colonialism. Personally affected by his experiences as a black Algerian man living under French colonial rule, Fanon saw the colonizers as the master, and the colonized as the slaves, subject to systemic dehumanization, cultural erasure, and violence at the hands of the master. He argued that the colonizer’s identity is defined in opposition to the colonized people, and the colonized people are reduced to mere objects in the eyes of the colonizer. The colonizer maintains their power through violence and oppression, but this power is ultimately dependent on the colonized people’s acknowledgement of the colonizer’s authority. Therefore the colonized people must reject this power dynamic and assert their own identity and agency in order to shake off the yoke of oppression.

Conclusion

The true power, therefore, lies with the people. What Machiavelli teaches in The Prince is how to gain that power. He outlines clearly his doctrine of rule, but in doing so, Machiavelli exposes the fragile, farcical nature of power. The art of governance is nothing but the art of deception, and recognizing this grants us the people the knowledge of the absolute value of human freedom.

The French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir once remarked that “to will oneself free is to will others free.” Freedom is pointless unless we connect with others as free and equal human beings in fruitful interpersonal relationships; we find meaning in sharing connections with others whom we regard as free and equal. As I close The Prince, I find that I now think of it as a cautionary tale about the hollow nature of power; one whose purpose was to strip those who possess it of dignity and allure, and teach us how to fight it. With that knowledge in hand, think about where we are today. We say we live in the postcolonial era, but are we truly free? Are we being governed by the same Machiavellian principles that were enacted by the colonials?

“Wanting to annex territory is indeed very natural and normal, and when capable men undertake it, they are always praised, or at least, not criticized.”

I end this paper with the same quote I began it with. In the end, one must always remember that power is the ultimate goal of man, and that most are prepared to discard morals to acquire it. As we navigate this so-called postcolonial era, let Machiavelli’s Prince remind us of the nature of power, and that it lies with us.


References

Cox, Mary Lea. 1999. “Author Hochschild Recounts Lost History of Horror in the Belgian Congo.” Wilson Center. October 14, 1999. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/author-hochschild-recounts-lost-history-horror-the-belgian-congo.

Encyclopedia Britannica. 2023. “History of Malaysia.” Accessed April 25, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/place/Malaysia/History.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1891-1937. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1952. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hochschild, A.. “Leopold II.” Encyclopedia Britannica, April 5, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-II-king-of-Belgium.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1988. The Prince. Edited by Quentin Skinner and Russel Price. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, James. 2023. “Antonio Gramsci.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, April 26, 2023.

Middleton, Townsend. 2023. “Class 7: Technologies of Rule.” PowerPoint presentation, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, January 31, 2023.

Wolpert, S. A.. “British raj.” Encyclopedia Britannica, March 31, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/event/British-raj.

Categories
Journal

The Materiality of Chemicals: Understanding Temporality and Recursivity through Petrochemical Plants

by Regina Lowe

Abstract

By following the life of chemical products from an area of concentrated petrochemical production in Louisiana (LA), I argue that chemicals are material artifacts that collapse temporality by building on the contingencies of the past and extending into the lives of individuals in the present and future. Drawing on post-humanist ideas and the writing of Michelle Murphy (2017) and Anne Laura Stoler, (2016) I situate this work as continuing to confound the boundaries between the human and non-human as well as the boundaries between past and present. The historic plantations in Ascension Parish, LA are archaeological examples of colonial contingencies making way for the petrochemical plants of Geismar, LA. By examining records from the plantations of Ashland-Belle Helene, L’Hermitage, and Linwood as well as the chemical plants of BASF and Shell in Geismar, I look at chemicals as a material to collapse space and time. 

Introduction

In the following paper, I will first explore the history of the sugar plantation and petrochemical economy in Louisiana. Second, I will provide a specific example of sugar plantation lineage leading to petrochemical plant ownership. Third, I will discuss how these histories are entangled and fold on each other. Thus, I argue that by understanding chemicals in the landscape as persistent materials, we can understand temporality in a non-linear postcolonial framework.

Temporality is the way time is ordered and experienced. Anne Laura Stoler (2016) suggests there are multiple kinds of temporalities, such as rupture versus continuity. Where ruptures reflect distinct epochs and shifts in time and continuity represents seamless extensions and transitions. While tracking colonial presences, though, our colonized conceptions of time may inform the way we interpret the present and the past. Stoler (2016) instead uses a recursive analytic to describe how histories fold back onto themselves, revealing new contingent possibilities. 

Stoler’s (2016) work feeds directly into the work of Michelle Murphy (2017) and the idea of materiality influencing colonial afterlives. In Murphy’s work, chemicals challenge the bounds of the body and the human. Murphy specifically draws on how PCBs have entered the human body through the pollution of the landscape to become persistent through time (2017). These inescapable entanglements and persistent materials are what the following of this paper revolves around.

History and Background

The sugar cane plantations of Louisiana were the driving mode of production and economic growth in the 19th century. Between 1820-1860, planters experienced rapid growth in the industrialization process of sugar. However, “Louisiana evolved as the last of the New World’s cane sugar colonies, and its industry combined the collected experience and suffering of plantation sugar production with lessons drawn from American slavery and industrialization” (Follett 2005:8). Due in part to the demanding cycles of sugar production and the horrific conditions of enslaved workers, the need for labor stability and consistent production drove the industrialization of cane processing and sugar production (Follett 2005:13-16).

By 1805, the river bottomlands of South Louisiana had been transformed into a rising sugar production landscape (Follett 2005:19). In the early 19th century, demand and federal tariffs allowed planters to exploit the sugar market and the number of estates went “from 308 in 1827 to 691 in 1830” (Follett 2005:21) With tariff support, the sugar production expanded across South Louisiana with the core zone along the Mississippi River spanning between New Orleans and Baton Rouge (Follett 2005:21).  In 1853, sugar planters in Louisiana produced a quarter of the world’s exportable sugar (Follett 2005:22). Sugar production did take a turn in the late 1840s as land, labor, and capital costs increased and federal tariff protections for sugar were reduced. This caused increased mergers between estates. “In 1850, the average sugar planter in Ascension Parish cultivated 460 acres. A decade later, fourteen fewer sugar planters recorded that 29,149 acres— approximately 800 acres per estate— lay under crop” (Follett 2005:32). 

At the same time, the expansion of plantations caused a rise in enslaved populations. In 1830, one average plantation consisted of 52 enslaved peoples. In the 1850s, average plantations consisted of 85 enslaved workers, and “by the Civil War, most large sugar plantations listed as many as 110 enslaved African Americans on their inventories.” (Follett 2005:25-26) In Ascension parish specifically, enslaved persons outnumbered whites two to one (Follett 2005:26). Plantation landscapes have been a subject of anthropological, archaeological, historical, and geographical study. It has often been argued that Plantations are a panopticon based on Michel Foucault’s (1977) idea of prison panopticon. Scholars argue that the plantation is spatially organized for the social control of the enslaved black population (Marshall 2022; Nielson 2011; Singleton 2001; Kumar 2015; Davis 2016; Epperson 2000; Michelakos 2009)

From a postcolonial perspective, the plantation offers a place for reimagining the environment and ecologies. As the location of anthropogenic violence, plantations capture the capitalist nature of ecological simplification and progress and at the same time offer places of “multispecies resistance and resurgence” (Chao 2022:363). To envision the co-creation of life in these landscapes and the impacts of non-human forms draw on the work of Donna Haraway (2015), Anna Tsing (2012), and Catherine McKittrick (2013). McKittrick (2013) offers up the idea of futures within the plantation where opportunities emerge to contemplate survival. The rest of this paper will continue to think with her questions: 

“What are some notable characteristics of plantation geographies and what is at stake in linking a plantation past to the present? What comes of positioning the plantation as a threshold to thinking through long-standing and contemporary practices of racial violence? If the plantation, at least in part, ushered in how and where we live now, and thus contributes to the racial contours of uneven geographies, how might we give it a different future?” (McKittrick 2013:4). 

I continue to draw on these questions and thoughts of alternative ecologies (McKittrick 2013, 2020; Cervenak 2021; Haraway 2015; Tsing 2012; Barra 2023) as I draw out the relationships of place, time, and non-human actors. 

The area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that was the core of sugar production in the 19th century is now home to “more than 150 petrochemical plants and petroleum processors” (Allen 2006:112). In the aftermath of the civil war, the Freedmen’s Bureau awarded small areas of land to black family groups in the area where they had previously been enslaved and worked. However, large plantation lands stayed in the hands of white owners. As a result, the region was made up of large blocks of land owned by a single owner with smaller separated communities of freed blacks and poor whites adjacent to the larger properties (Allen 2006). As chemical and petroleum companies moved into the region, the preferable land for building was large areas owned by a single owner. Thus, the smaller “African-American communities and petrochemical facilities came to exist in such close proximity along the river” (Allen 2006:113).

Initially attracted to the region for its access to transportation and ports as well as favorable treatment from Louisiana politicians, Mexican Petroleum (now Amoco) and Standard Oil (now Exxon) were the first companies to establish plants in the area. Despite the economic downturn of the 1930s, “the Gulf Coast experienced tremendous growth in both petroleum processing and chemical production” (Allen 2006:114). Decades later, in 1964, the African-American town of Geismar was sighted as the next location for major petrochemical development. By this time, there was multi-corporation cooperation making the region interconnected by infrastructure and piping and ideal for increased development. The list of corporations buying property along the river in Geismar included Mobil, MonoChem, BASF, Morton, Allied, and others. 

The attraction to this area was not just based on the property availability and corporate cooperation/infrastructure but also the government assistance in the forms of little to no property taxes, Corps of Engineers work on levee stabilization, construction of state highways and bridges, and the lack of political pressure from the governor (Allen 2006). The biggest benefit to building and operating in Louisiana is the state’s corporate tax-exemption programs, which assist plants like Shell’s Norco facility and Exxon’s Baton Rouge refinery (Allen 2006). These two companies in particular “avoided paying over $175 million in taxes during the 1980s” (Allen 2006:117). This exemption dates to 1936 and has persisted into the present where Louisna grants the exemption status without local approval or input such that the lack of tax revenue has caused these local areas to be underfunded and lack access to basic resources (Allen 2006).

Case Study – Geismar, Ascension Parish, Louisiana

            The case study I present here offers an opportunity to examine how the postcolonial landscape is shaped and changed over time. I specifically look here at how chemicals can change temporality and expose recursive sociohistorical elements of the landscape. To do this, I will delineate the landscape history of two chemical plants in Geismar, LA. These plants are situated on property that used to be large sugar plantations in Ascension Parish. Thus, I will begin with a lineage of plantation ownership before moving on to their present-day petrochemical plant counterparts and the persistent chemicals they produce. 

Figure 1. Norman’s chart of the lower Mississippi River, depicting plantation owners in 1858. Sugar plantations are shown in green and yellow. Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC (Persac et al. 1858).

            The first plantation I followed the history of is Ashland-Belle Helene, or Ashland Plantation, also known as the Belle Helene or Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation. It may be evident already that this plantation is a result of property consolidation. Today, the entire property of the estate belongs to and is surrounded by the Shell Chemical, LP, Geismar plant (Couvillion 2015). In 1840 the Kenner brothers acquired the Oakland, Belle Grove, and Pasture Plantations. In addition to this consolidation, Duncan Kenner acquired land and property that included not only what was to be named the Ashland Plantation and mansion that he built for his wife, Anne Guillemine Nanine Bringier, but also the Bowden, The Houmas, the Hollywood, the Hermitage (as his wife was related to the Bringier family), the Fashion (home of his brother-in-law and partner General Richard Taylor), and Roseland plantations (“Bibliographical and Historical” 1892). The 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules for Ascension Parish, Louisiana (NARA microfilm series M653, Roll 427) includes the Kenner name and number of enslaved people associated with them. Duncan F. Kenner is associated with 473 enslaved people (Blake 2001).

The second plantation is the Hermitage, or L’Hermitage. Shortly after his marriage in 1812- to fourteen-year-old Louise Aglaé duBourg, Michel Doradou Bringier built the Hermitage on land given as a wedding gift by his father. At Bringier’s death in 1847, his second son, Louis Amédée, became owner of the plantation. In 1881 Duncan Kenner of Ashland-Belle Helene, who was married to Bringier’s daughter Nanine, purchased a part share of the plantation. He acquired full control from 1884 until his death in 1887 (“Bibliographical and Historical” 1892). The 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules for Ascension Parish, Louisiana (NARA microfilm series M653, Roll 427) includes the Bringier name and number of enslaved people associated with them. Louis A. Bringier held 144 enslaved people and M. L. Bringier (likely the first son) held 386 enslaved people (Blake 2001). 

            Linwood Plantation was owned by the J.N. Brown until his death in 1859 (“Bibliographical and Historical” 1892). Probate records of Brown (1807–1859), a wealthy sugar planter from Iberville Parish, Louisiana, contain primarily financial records related to the administration of his estate, which mentions legal and family ties to the families Ventress and Minor (Brown J. (1858-1871). The 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules for Ascension Parish, Louisiana (NARA microfilm series M653, Roll 427) includes the Brown, Ventress, and Minor names and number of enslaved people associated with them. John M. Brown held 105 enslaved people, John L. Minor held 193 enslaved people, Wm. J. Minor held 223 enslaved people, James A. Ventress held 88 enslaved people, and W.C.S. Ventress held 89 enslaved people (Blake 2001).

            The petrochemical plants that have replaced these plantations in the present firstly include Shell Geismar. The facility uses ethylene feedstock to manufacture ethylene glycol and alpha olefins, chemicals that can be converted into plastic resins and polyester fibers. Linear alpha olefins are used to make polyethylene, synthetic lubricants, detergents, and waxes (Environmental Integrity Project 2022). The second major plant is BASF Geismar. BASF, which owns the complex, is an acronym that stands for Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik, which is German for Baden Aniline and Soda Factory. Germany’s largest chemical company was founded by Friedrich Engelhorn in 1865. “Currently, the Geismar Complex is composed of 14 plants which produce ethylene oxide/glycols, aniline, acetylene, butanediol, and other chemicals and petrochemicals” (Environmental Integrity Project 2022).

As recently as April 7, 2022, BASF invited representatives from Ascension Parish, the River Road African American Museum, the United Houma Nation, and members of the descendant community to dedicate a new memorial at the BASF site in Geismar to those who were enslaved on what was previously Linwood plantation (Anderson 2022).

Discussion

Steiniger (2021) argues that there are connections of the petrochemical corridor in Louisiana to German industrialism. Because of this Steiniger argues that it is important to develop a “‘chemical cultural theory’ that seeks to observe the specific technicalities of modern materiality and the historical settings that enabled this” (265). Because chemicals have a significant materiality, the material and technical aspects are entangled with mechanisms of power (Steiniger 2021:265). Steiniger (2021) combines aspects of the study of the Anthropocene and contingencies with a material centered approach that I suggest is archaeological in perspective. In a material ontological turn, Stieniger (2021) places the chemicals (in his argument fertilizer) in an agentive role transforming history, landscape, and power. 

One persistent aspect of these chemicals that is felt and seen is in the pollution of the landscape and the health of the residents of the area. “According to a seven-parish survey of residents living within a mile of the river, where industry is most heavily concentrated, 35 percent suffer from respiratory problems, 21 percent from allergy problems, and 17 percent from other sinus problems, in addition to claims of elevated cancer rates” (Allen 2006:117-118). Terrell and St. Julien (2022) explore these claims of elevated cancer rates that residents of the area have long said they are disproportionately affected by. Their results (Figures 2 and 3) show that there is a higher cancer risk from air toxins and higher cancer incidence did affect black populations and impoverished populations, which tended to coincide (Terrell and St. Julien 2022:10). 

Figure 2. Age adjusted annual cancer incidence rate, averaged from 2008 to 2017 from Terrell and St. Julien 2022: Figure 1:3.
Figure 3. Cancer risk from point sources of pollution as reported in the EPA’s 2005 (top) and 2014 (bottom) National Air Toxics Assessment from Terrell and St. Julien 2022: Figure 2:4.
Figure 4. A screenshot of an interactive map that ProPublica made in collaboration with the Advocate and the Times Picayune 2019 map of facilities along the river in Cancer Alley from Kang 2021: Fig. 3:107.

The chemical presence and continued pollution in Cancer Alley (Figure 4) illustrate the chemical persistence as well as the way the chemical presence collapses temporality. Kang (2021) argues that the Plantationocene “firmly emplaces the machination and violence of the plantation in the present. As such, the material theorization of coloniality and the temporalization of the Plantation epoch helped give shape to the ongoing violence of Cancer Alley” (109). Because of this, the perception of time and place has consistently changed for the residents of the area. There is visual change with the surrounding influx of industrialization and slow death of the environment, which itself is a non-human actor part of the larger ecology. In addition, residents of the area have an underlying consciousness of their potentially shortened life-span. Time and the time spent in their homes affects them differently. Time is afforded differently because of the chemical conviviality residents endure. 

In addition, the chemical landscape provides us an opportunity to interrogate recursivity in the history and use of the landscape. Returning to colonization and plantations while connecting with the present allows us to see webs of contingencies. Indigenous artist, Monique Michelle Verdin, uses collages to collapse time and demonstrate colonial and postcolonial erasure on the landscape. She describes this work as: “The collages illuminate how these sites are variously represented or simply erased, and how the challenges of today are founded in colonialism, with rapacious multinational corporations and international financing fueling violations against basic human rights like clean water” (Verdin 2020:80). 

Orienting us within the native language she describes what is now Baton Rouge: “Istrouma is both a place and a symbol, a red stick, le bâton rouge, used to mark territorial lines, acknowledging the Houma nation’s hunting grounds to the north and the rights of the Bayou-goula tribe to the south, or thus it was recorded in the journals of colonizers” (Verdin 2020:81). Geismar is not represented within her collages but sits on the eastern Bank of the Mississippi River between Plaquemine Island and Donaldsonville: Point Houmas, which I include in this paper. She follows the river to “Bvlbancha (“place of many languages” in Choctaw) is the original name of the lower Mississippi River that was successfully rebranded “Nouvelle Orleans” by French colonizers. Plaquemine means persimmon in Mobilian, a pantribal pidgin language and the predominant trade jargon spoken in the territory when the colonizers arrived.” (Verdin 2020:83).

The collage of Plaquemine Island (Figure 5) connects it to the long history of extraction in the region. As she states, “In the early years of colonialism, from the late seventeenth century through the 1920s, the fur trade fueled such a get-rich-quick furor that beavers, minks, muskrats, and other furry creatures nearly went extinct” (Verdin 2020: 83). Second the collage (Figure 6) of Donaldsonville: Point Houmas represents “the historic distributary La Fourche des Chitimatchas (the fork of the Chitimatcha), also called the River of the Chitimatcha, [which] is known today as Bayou Lafourche” (Verdin 2020:84). This area was historically an area that connected a web of bayous to Indigenous settlements, a place where enslaved peoples found food security, and where sugar planters began to claim land after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (Verdin 2020).

Figure 5. Collage includes: USGS maps from 2018 Plaquemine and 1908 Baton Rouge; George Shaw, Common Beaver, 1809; Du Pratz, Indian Buffalo Hunt on Foot, illustration in History of Louisiana, 296. (Verdin 2020:82-83)
Figure 6. Collage includes: USGS map from 2018 Donaldsonville; unknown artist, An Indian Inhabiting the Country Northwest of Louisiana, 1741, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art and Architecture Collection, New York Public Library; Monique Verdin, photograph of Mississippi River water foam and supertanker, 2019. (Verdin 2020:84-85)

Conclusion

            Throughout this paper, I have worked to show that the landscape of Ascension Parish offers a case study to reconsider chemical materiality. As persistent and invasive artifacts of human activity ion the region, their presence and agency shape the ecosystem in new and different ways. In addition, their role in the present is underscored by contingencies of the postcolonial world. Because of this, chemical artifacts also change our temporality. They represent a postcolonial present and past interacting in one locality.

            I want to end this paper by turning to the questions posed by McKittrick in “Plantation Futures”:

“What are some notable characteristics of plantation geographies and what is at stake in linking a plantation past to the present? What comes of positioning the plantation as a threshold to thinking through long-standing and contemporary practices of racial violence? If the plantation, at least in part, ushered in how and where we live now, and thus contributes to the racial contours of uneven geographies, how might we give it a different future?” (McKittrick 2013:4). 

Using the case study, I have presented, what at stake in linking a plantation past to the present is a different understanding of temporality and ecologies. Positioning the plantation as a threshold to thinking through long-standing and contemporary practices of racial violence allows us, as Verdin (2020) shows, to see the hidden parts of the post-colonial world and the continued racial inequities that manifest from those parts. Finally, McKittrick (2013) invites us to consider a different future. By reckoning with the past, we begin to shape how we can change the future, but with our understanding of a non-linear temporality, we can also consider how the future we design will fold back on the past and where we are in the present.

Works Cited

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Anderson, S. J. (2022, April 8). BASF Dedicates Memorial to honor enslaved of former plantation. Gonzales Weekly Citizen. Retrieved April 27, 2023, from https://www.weeklycitizen.com/story/news/2022/04/08/basf-dedicates-memorial-honor-enslaved-former-plantation/9510302002/

Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Louisiana: Embracing an Authentic and Comprehensive Account of the Chief Events in the History of the State, a Special Sketch of Every Parish and a Record of the Lives of Many of the Most Worthy and Illustrious Families and Individuals …. (1892). United States: Goodspeed publishing Company.

Blake, T. (2001) Ascension Parish, Louisiana. Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census. Transcribed from the 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules for Ascension Parish, Louisiana (NARA microfilm series M653, Roll 427)

Brisbois, B. W., Spiegel, J. M., & Harris, L. (2019). Health, environment and colonial legacies: situating the science of pesticides, bananas and bodies in Ecuador. Social Science & Medicine, 239, 112529.

Brown J. (1858-1871) James N. Brown Papers, 1855-1879, Iberville, Ascension, Plaquemines, and East Baton Rouge Parishes, Louisiana. In Records of Ante-bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution Through the Civil War. Series G: Selections from the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Part 5: Natchez Trace Collection— Other Plantation Collections. University Publications of America.

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Couvillion, E. (2015, June 17). Ashland-Belle Helene in Ascension Parish restored to former glory; Historic Plantation Home owned by Shell Chemical. NOLA.com. Retrieved April 27, 2023, from https://www.nola.com/news/communities/ashland-belle-helene-in-ascension-parish-restored-to-former-glory-historic-plantation-home-owned-by/article_be6d82c9-f2ec-54fb-ab6f-9960dc41df05.html

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Environmental Integrity Project. (2022). Oil and gas watch: Shell Geismar Chemical Plant. Oil and Gas Watch. Retrieved April 27, 2023, from https://oilandgaswatch.org/facility/5156

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McKittrick, K. (2020). Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press.

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Singleton, T. A. (2001). Slavery and spatial dialectics on Cuban coffee plantations. World Archaeology, 33(1), 98-114.

Steininger, B. (2021). Ammonia synthesis on the banks of the Mississippi: A molecular-planetary technology. The Anthropocene Review, 8(3), 262-279.

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Terrell, K. A., & St Julien, G. (2022). Air pollution is linked to higher cancer rates among black or impoverished communities in Louisiana. Environmental Research Letters, 17(1), 014033.

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Verdin, M. M. (2020). Cancer Alley. Southern Cultures, 26(2), 80-95.

Categories
Journal

Peeking at Black Britain Through the Diachronic Looking Lens: An analysis of the lives of Black Britain post-World War II

by Safa Tonuzi

Introduction of the Author and Purpose

I envisioned myself partaking studying abroad while in college in since I was a freshman in high school. My intention derived from the fact of experiencing a culture, a movement, or a phenomenon that invoked a sense inspiration to propel me in certain direction for my studies and ultimately into life. So, this winter I determined that I would take the steps to lead me to the next steps One thing led to the next, and I ended up being accepted into King’s College in London. I plan to coincide my studies here at Chapel HiIl As a member of the Colonialism & Postcolonialism course, I feel a responsibility to further my studies as a sociocultural anthropologist and explore how the Brits intervened in internal diverse populations. More specifically, I wanted to take a closer look in. an area that is not too far from the college I plan to study at. I see this as a chance to develop a sort of preliminary research project to supplement a course I plan to take while abroad. In this paper I plan to explore postcolonial theories through the lens of postcolonial theorists and apply it. I will utilize a diachronic approach to explore Black Britain throughout three distinct time periods: The Windrush immigration, The Brixton Race Riots, and the Windrush Scandal to examine how colonial sentiments, master-slave dialectic, and recursitivity play in role in Black Britain’s attempt to break away from colonial structure.

First Look: 1948 The Arrival of the Windrush

The Windrush was a ship that sailed to the Caribbean and essentially shipped its citizens back over to Britain. After World War II, The United Kingdom needed laborers because of the labor shortages and the damage left as a result of war. It is worthy to note that from the start of the journey of Caribbean migrants, British officials did not fully disclose the type of labor they would require from the Windrush immigrants. British authority entertained the idea that the Caribbeans would have a better life in London or wherever the Windrush would take them. This ideology is harmful because it projects a dehumanized version onto the immigrants and their descendants. And what my research finds is that this projection resulted in forms of decolonization and wrongdoings by British authority that local activists revealed. Moreso, even if the British portrayed themselves as a coalition needing more members for workforce and looking toward their colonies who they knew they were stripping of wealth and opportunity. It is a form of enlightened self-interest. Enlightened self-interest, in my definition, means the act of doing something deemed as good with the motivation that it benefits you. In this case, the United Kingdom brought people from their colonies over to help the situation of the United Kingdom’s ruins from war, and it made it seem like they were granting opportunity to inhabitants of their colonies. Wrong.

For additional context, places like Jamaica – what majority of the Windrush generation consisted of – were British colonies and ruled by the Brits meaning they were not independent of their colonizers. This situation becomes wishy washy because when the Windrush generation immigrated to Britain for jobs they were never guaranteed nor granted citizenship. Many of the immigrants assumed or rather deceived into assuming that the process of immigrating included receiving citizenship. This was not the case. Nowadays, you cannot even work a job in a lot of countries without citizenship let alone in a developed country. Moreso, the journey to the United Kingdom was not free. Passengers were required to pay £28 for passage fees and then an additional £5 once the ship sailed (Royal Museums Greenwich, 2022). This really makes the intentions of British officials questionable, and makes the exchange seem more like indentured servitude rather than an act of compassion. The British did not mention that most of these job vacancies were not due to a lack of labor but rather a lack of want in certain that certain occupation. Most of the jobs that required occupation involved tedious, difficult, unpleasant work the locals did not want to partake in. The practice of exploiting people and their resources was not foreign to the British, but rather it sounds quite familiar. Much of the transportation system in the United Kingdom made possible by the Windrush generation.

Second Look: 1984 Brixton Race Riots –– The Heart

The Windrush generation and their respective descendants began to concentrate in an area in South London called Brixton. Brixton holds important context because it is home to Railton Road where the intense but – as we will examine with Fanon – necessary actions needed to hold the colonizers accountable. Most of Brixton’s population consisted of the second generation of Windrush, meaning the children of the original immigrants. Many of Windrush’s second generation were frustrated with British treatment toward them and their parents. The area of Brixton was heavily policed compared to other neighborhoods and the British deemed the Windrush’s immigration status as invaluable; therefore, many of the Windrush generation were considered illegal, leaving much of the Windrush generation either to fend for themselves or even homeless. As Windrush migrant Johnny Samuels says, “I was at work, and I was told that my work had to cease because I have no papers to show that I am a citizen of this country (BBC, 2021). Samuels reveals that much of the generation suffered basic human rights stripped away from them with no notice by British officials. With no citizenship, many could not access housing, healthcare, and ironically – jobs. Unfortunately, but also revealingly, these actions show the true intentions of the Brits at the time.

The Brits exploited their colonies and had a proposition to take the people of the countries they were already exploiting and exploit their labor more directly under the guise of opportunity and a better life ­– or at least that was the impression of many migrants coming from the Caribbean. More chillingly, the Brits brought these Caribbean migrants over with no plan of granting citizenship which makes me question how the Brits planned on getting the migrants back. The Brits didn’t want the work to seem temporary because it would tamper their own reputation. I speculate that British officials intentionally disregarded the citizenship status because they knew they would get them to leave one way or another after they completed their role – another form of colonial exploitation.

While many of the Windrush generation remained complacent out of fear of deportation, their naturalized children had other prerogatives and less limitations. What happened on April 10, 1981, has many different points of views, but this paper focuses more closely on the context of the violence that ensued after the fuel of the initial stabbing as well as a closer examination of the response that followed by both parties – the rioters and the police. It must be known that no singular event led to up to the race riots, but rather the race riots reflected a boiling over of preexisting tensions and sentiments.

 I find it interesting and revealing that the Brixton race riots did not become from direct police or rather colonial violence – it was more implicit. Thinking back to the master-slave dialectic, the Brixton race riots stemmed from a culmination of emotion and being – to state it simply ­– fed up. Despite popular belief, participants in the race riots did not only consist of gang members, but also intellects. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic explains the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor. One of the cory principles of this theory states that an individual’s perception of self-worth and self-consciousness inherently coincides with their status within a societal structure. The nuance in this theory lies at the line of when two individuals must interact with one another, but one individual must have the authority and power over the individual. The intellectual discussion conjures the following questions: Who truly holds the power? the oppressor or the oppressed? The master-slave dialectic questions in a situation where the oppressed disallows the oppressor to project his own authority – which is subjective to him and society, but not inherent to his person ­– who is truly the individual with more power? Well, the master-slave dialectic reveals that the oppressed beholds the power and the oppressor relies on the projection of the oppressed for their power. The same phenomenon occurred at Brixton during the 1980s.

Brixton was a hub for Black excellence, art, and literature and, much like Harlem, which was frightening to the British. They wanted members to assimilate to create hegemony as Gramsci would put it. When there is culture, there is solidarity, and solidarity allows marginalized groups to fight back from their oppressors.

The Windrush’s second generation rebelled because of the unfair treatment by the Brits toward their parents and toward themselves. Moreover, the lack of response and commitment to saving Michael Bailey’s life, a victim of a lethal stabbing invoked the riots. For a heavily policed area to not respond adequately to the community did not make sense. The Brit’s blatant intent to instill fear was the only thing that made sense. what I mentioned earlier about the dehumanized approach British officials had on the Windrush immigrants? We can correlate that to the lack of response and aid provided by British police in that moment. Referring to Fanon, who states, “decolonization is always a violent event,” and elaborates on the inherent cruel nature of colonialism and the language of colonialism being violence and the only way to communicate back is through violence.

In an article I found, it states, Railton Road was “crime ridden and run-down” (Guidetags, 2022). But this author fails to mention the rich culture in Railton Road. Black intellectuals like Linton Kwesi Johnson who used the race riots as anecdotes to reflect in his poetry and his overall experience as a Black man during this volatile time and beyond. The article also does not elaborate why Railton Road was considered a low-income area. The area, inhabited by the Windrush generation, was considered impoverished because their illegal immigrant status stripped the work away from them. This same article also makes it seem the reason the riots ensued because the residents had nothing better to do. It is important to call out the ignorance and lack of depth of these articles and really emphasize how the importance of subaltern studies. Subaltern studies allow us to view another vantage point to a given event and usually uplifts the voices of the marginalized groups who are severely underrepresented.


Third Look: 2018-present – The Windrush Scandal & Re-colonization

This section will most likely be the most frightening and unsettling. After years upon years of wrongdoings by British officials including but not limited to deportation and denial of basic human rights. A lot of issue stems from the broken promises attributed by the British. Many Caribbean immigrants were underwhelmed by the conditions provided by places like London. A lot of these immigrants were functioning members of society back home and lured into becoming indentured servants unbeknownst to them. Despite the number of deportations and broken families, the United Kingdom believed compensating victims or relatives of victims with £10,000 could repair the damages caused by them. Even more frustrating, a lot of the Windrush generation and their relatives are still in the queue to receiving reparative compensations (BBC, 2021). Some of the Windrush generation has even passed before even receiving a basic apology from British Parliament. Currently, activists are criticizing the slow nature of the compensation. Out of the fifth of the generation who was come forward for the compensation, only a fourth of that fifth has received some form of compensation. Although in words, parliament speaks as if they are passionate about making things right, their actions speak otherwise. This shows not only the performativism utilized by parliament, but it also shows colonial remnants still left over from directly after the post-war period. The Parliament is making it extremely difficult for the Windrush generation and their relatives to receive the proper compensations for the trauma inflicted upon them by British Parliament. These individuals must have adequate documentation to prove their status which is contradictory to the whole situation because a lot of these people never received adequate documentation.

To make matters even worse, an area that was so vibrant and filled with Caribbean culture is now starting to see the downward spiral of gentrification and white washing. If you look at Figure A in the Appendix, you can see a stark difference of what a marketplace in Brixton used to look during the 80s compared to what you might see now. Going back to a concept learned throughout the course, we can think about architecture as a slow, lurking form of violence and domination. Additionally, as you see in Figure B signs that celebrated the culture and proudly labeled the area as Brixton have been taken down to make the area more palatable to its new rising influx of younger white people. Not only is this a form of erasure it is a blatant yet sneaky form of hegemony which British officials attempted to execute when the Windrush generation first arrived in London. As more white people move into the area, the area becomes more expensive and pushes out the history. Although the violence is not as explicit as it was during the race riots, we must acknowledge and recognize the colonial recursivity at play here. During the race riots, British police officers felt a threat by the rich culture in Brixton. Many agree that Brixton has a vibrant atmosphere, so it is no surprise that people wanted to live there. So essentially, British officials were jealous that their attempts of hegemony did not work and as a result kicked the Windrush generation out their area by making their citizenship status illegal. This process allowed white people of Britain to begin their infiltration of the sacred area.

Some people do not understand the problem of white people infiltrating a minority place. A lot of media has led people into believing that processes like gentrification benefit communities because they make them safer and more trendy-looking. Moreso, at the surface-level it looks like integration and coexisting, but when we peel back these layers, gentrification is really a form of colonial recursivity. Taking a minority safe space and imposing white people, when there already have been racial tension, does not fix the coexisting issue, if anything it exacerbates it.  


The Conclusion

After using a diachronic approach to look at Black Britain, we can see the perpetual exploitation and inconsideration committed by the British onto the Black Population in Britain. From the start, the British had plans to continue to exploit their colonies at a closer proximity but guised their intentions as a white-savior complex which ultimately led to the dismay of coexistence in London. The dissonance was seen during the Brixton Race Riots when, referring to the master-slave dialectic and Fanon, the people of Brixton established their dominance and met law enforcement with their colonial language of violence. However, now British officials are taking a more insidious and subtle approach with the gentrification of an area that was so rich with Black culture and history. The recursivity of colonialism is prevalent in Black Britain and the response provided by Black Britain also plays a major role in their history.

Appendix

Figure A*

Figure B*

*Photo extracted from Metro online publishing, refer to bibliography

Bibliography

BBC. 2021. “Windrush Generation: Who Are They and Why Are They Facing Problems?” BBC. November 24, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43782241.

Black Cultural Archives. 2023. “Brixton Uprising 1981.” Google Arts & Culture. 2023. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/brixton-uprising-1981-black-cultural-archives/FgXBwW9BGSVDJQ?hl=en.

Guidetags. 2022. “Brixton Riots Railton Road.” 2022. https://www.guidetags.com/mindmaps/explore//3049-brixton-riots-railton-road.

King, Jordan . 2022. “‘Not Welcome in My Own Neighbourhood’: How Gentrification Is Segregating Brixton.” Metro. October 30, 2022. https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/30/not-welcome-in-my-own-area-how-gentrification-is-segregating-brixton-17587009/.

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Journal

A Tribute to M. Butterfly: A Postcolonial Masterpiece

by Erica Boey

Madama Butterfly, the renowned opera by Giacomo Puccini was released in 1904 and inspired by John Luther Long’s short story Madame Butterfly (1899). The story tells the tragic tale of protagonist Cio Cio San, a young Japanese girl who falls in love with an American naval officer, Pinkerton. At the turn of the 20th century, 15-year-old Japanese geisha, Cio Cio San, better known as Butterfly, marries Pinkerton to escape poverty. She instantly devotes herself to the American, going as far as to denounce her own Japanese faith to convert to Christianity for him. Pinkerton, on the other hand, disregards the significance of the marriage. Instead, he intends to marry an American woman. He abandons Cio Cio San and their child in Japan, where she sorrowfully yearns for his return. After three years, Pinkerton arrives in Japan with his new wife. Heartbroken and devastated, Butterfly chooses to die with honor by taking her own life. 

Critics believe the opera to be a poignant depiction of unrequited love. However, David Henry Hwang believes otherwise. Hwang is an Asian American playwright, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City. After coming across a recent newspaper account of an actual international spy scandal between a French diplomat and Beijing Opera singer during the Vietnam War, Hwang wrote what would eventually be a Tony Award-winning play, M. Butterfly

It premiered on Broadway in 1988, where the playwright uncovers his own interpretation of the scandal and the story of Madama Butterfly. The play is narrated by minor French diplomat Rene Gallimard, where he recounts his 20-year affair with his lover, Song Liling in mid-20th-century China. Gallimard meets Song Liling after watching the Peking Opera singer play Puccini’s Butterfly. Eventually, they both develop a relationship. Gallimard uses this relationship with Song, his personal Butterfly, to restore his sense of manhood. Unbeknownst to him, Song is a Chinese spy who seduces Gallimard to obtain information about the French for the Chinese Communist Party to leverage themselves in the Vietnam War. Their forbidden relationship explores the clashes between Eastern and Western cultures and the shifts of perceptions between each other. As the story unfolds, it is revealed that Song, the diplomat’s 20-year lover, is actually male. Driven into madness by this revelation, Gallimard takes his own life in his prison cell as the scandal comes to a tumultuous end. 

Fortunately, I was given the opportunity to act in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student-led production of the play during my first semester. Since then, it has left a profound impression on me. The critically-acclaimed play is a bold piece that cleverly deconstructs Puccini’s Butterfly. But above all, Hwang’s M. Butterfly illustrates the dark side of Puccini’s opera and the 20th century — Orientalism. M. Butterfly is a richly-textured prominent postcolonial drama that heavily critiques Orientalism, stereotypes of Eastern and Western civilization, and racial and gender identity. The play highlights the blatant sexism and misconceptions of the Orient propagated in Puccini’s opera. It criticizes and even rebukes the Occident’s ideals of the “exotic East”. It sheds light on the gendered warfare of the subaltern during the Vietnam war by giving them a voice. The gradual dismantlement of Hegel’s master slave-dialectic is present in the progression of Song and Gallimard’s relationship, where the conception of gender plays a pivotal role in the formation recognition or misrecognition of the characters. 

The East: Debunking Objects of the “Feminine Mystique” 

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly has similar themes to the Western ideals and perceptions of the Orientals. The “exotic” East is deemed as mysterious, inscrutable, and ultimately, inferior to the Occident. The object comes into definition through objectification (Said 1979, 27). Based on Puccini’s assumptions about the East, the play paints the Orient as beings that are helpless to resist. Cio Cio San is willing to surrender the entirety of her culture and being for a White Caucasian man. She is a “poor little thing” condemned to a life of tragedy. The Asian female lead is naive and childlike, an object of submission to the West. 

M Butterfly: Act 1 Scene 4

In the scene above, an excerpt from Madama Butterfly is depicted in M. Butterfly to exemplify the dogmatic views Western men had on Oriental women. This idea of the Oriental women’s desire to being subjugated by violence is one of the many instances in Puccini’s play that propogates European representation of the colonized that is far from an objective or accurate truth. While seemingly minute and inconsequential, stereotypes on the Orient during the colonial period were pervasive and can penetrate into different societal structures. 

M. Butterfly: Act 1 Scene 3

Beyond the derogatory perception of the Orient, colonization further enables the West to capitalize on their ideals in an oppressive manner. According to Said, this presumed knowledge of the Orient is deeply internalized within the psychology of the colonial being, and in turn manifests itself in institutions as a form of colonial conquest, occupation, and administration (Zhang 2002, 7).  In Act 1 Scene 3 of M. Butterfly, Gallimard recounts the events that occur in Madama Butterfly in his prison cell. He explains the marriage laws in 20th-century Japan, where Oriental women are treated as property to be bought by Western men. In this scene, not only are we able to understand the oppressive system established by the Western world on the people of the Orient, but it also highlights the unbothered nature of the Occident on their actions. Gallimard uses the phrase “great bargains” and “package deal” to describe Pinkerton’s purchase of Cio Cio San. Through the systemic integration of the Western’s knowledge of the Orient into various societal bodies, the objectification of Asian women is proliferated throughout generations as a theory that ultimately becomes ingrained as a part of general culture. 

Hwang attempts to condemn the false ideals of the West and Puccini’s play in his writings, most prevalently through Song Liling. Throughout the play, Song consistently challenges Gallimard’s perception of the East. The Peking Opera singer is the play’s most prominent figure in facilitating Hwang’s views on anticolonialism and gender during this time period. 

M. Butterfly: Act One Scene 8

Puccini’s play presents the women of the East as victims of imperialization and their own culture. They are objects who do not have autonomy over body and mind and the West manipulates this to their own advantage. However, the West does not realize how the Oriental woman has utilized misogyny to navigate the system. In Act One Scene Eight of M. Butterfly, Song gives Gallimard a glimpse into the life of an Oriental woman. When speaking to the French diplomat, he characterizes the women of the Orient as  “delicate” and “slender lotus blossoms”, an implication that women of the East were well aware of the fetishization of the West. 

In an interview, Hwang explains the East’s complicity in projecting a dual form of cultural stereotyping (Hwang & DiGaetani 1989, 13). “We have always held a certain fascination for you Caucasian men, have we not?” said Song, is a justification of the occurrence of the reverse fascination of the West from the East, a possibility that seems unfathomable to the West. Gallimard’s hesitance in the line “that fascination is imperialist”, not only insinuates the West’s self-acknowledgment of their derogatory behavior, but it is foreshadowing on how the Orient attempts to disrupt the hierarchy between the subject and the object. 

Let the Butterfly Speak: An Homage to the Heroes of Gendered Warfare

(from the Left): M. Butterfly: Act One Scene 13, Act Two Scene Two

(Bottom): M. Butterfly: Continuation of Act Two Scene Two, Act Two Scene Three

During periods of war, women played into misogyny to conduct belligerent activity or acquire information from the enemy. Similarly to the Female Bombers scene of Battle of the Algiers, Song utilizes gendered warfare in the form of honey-trapping to obtain knowledge on the French and Americans from Gallimard for the Chinese Communist Party. In Act One Scene 13, Song takes advantage of the West’s sexualization of the Asian woman, specifically the notion of the modest and untouched Chinese girl, to seduce Gallimard. Evidently, this pays off as we see in the beginning of Act Two, where Song ridicules the sexism of their own culture while bolstering the ideals of the West as saviors to Asian women. His unsuspecting nature to the eye of the colonizer allows him to worm into the inner circles of Gallimard’s war discussions. This scene signifies women in the war were deemed as unconvincing and incapable by men on either side of the spectrum, and this placed them in morally complex positions. 

M. Butterfly: Act Two Scene Five

Women, who are the subalterns of history, are caught in a proxy of men of the colonial power or colonized believe they are saving women from one another (Spivak 1988, 16). However, participants of gendered warfare who committed adultery to penetrate the colonial power are a subgroup of the subaltern. In morally acceptable warfare, Chinese women who take up arms are praised for their nobility and bravery in spite of their unusualness, but those who engage in espionage and honey-trapping are often condemned despite advocating for the same nationalistic causes against a common aggressor. In this scene, Chin revers to Song with disgust, much like the scrutiny against sex spies in China. Under Chairman Mao, women spies deployed by the CCP face degradation from both their nation and the colonized. Women spies are subjected to developing an intimate relationships with members of the Occident. However, Orientalism forced the nature of women’s espionage roles to be inevitably sexualized, which taints the morality and chastity of the CCP (Edwards 2012, 20). The West per are just objects or playthings. To the CCP and post-war rewriting of history, sex spies are repulsed by their own people. Due to the high morality placed upon women in a collectivist and conservative country like China, acknowledging this war strategy will be a hindrance in legitimizing a then-fractured government. Hence, the roles of sex spies are silenced due to their “controversial” means of achieving their goals.  

M. Butterfly attempts to shed light on the stigmatization of characters like Song, who are victims of Orientalism and Mao’s iron fist rule. But above all, the playwright provides the subaltern the opportunity to have a voice by criticizing the discrimination inflicted by both the West and the East.

.

M. Butterfly: Act Three, Scene One 

In Act Three Scene One, the narrative of the play is transferred to Song. He recounts his perspective of the affair, and he blatantly states his unfiltered judgments about Orientalism and the West’s misogyny toward Asian women in a Western courthouse. Hwang has allowed the Butterfly to speak, in full force. Through Song, M. Butterfly opens the conversation of a part of history that has consistently been silenced. Here, the unexpressed rage and hatred for the Western patriarchy and objectification are addressed through the voice of the subaltern. The Occident is condemned by the most unexpecting of Orientals — the unsuspecting Butterfly. 

The Dismantlement of Hierarchy: Recognition and the Master-Slave Dialectic

Unlike Puccini’s Butterfly where the self-identification of Pinkerton and Butterfly are solidified through the perceptions of the West, recognition and power dynamics in Hwang’s M. Butterfly is reversed between our two main characters. 

(Top): M. Butterfly: Act Two, Scene Seven

(Bottom) M. Butterfly: Act Three, Scene One 

At first glance, Song could be said to occupy a similar role as Puccini’s Butterfly — an objectified vessel for the West whose sole purpose is to drive the plot of the story. In this case, Gallimard’s desire for the perfect woman, or the possibility of his repressed homosexual desires. However, we see that Song has complete agency over who he is as the gender-fluid Peking Opera singer. The difference in the hierarchy of the subject-object relationship is defined by the disparity of knowledge and power (Quijano 2007, 10). Gallimard believed that his perceived knowledge that was projected on the Orient gave him leverage on the hierarchy. However, Song always had the upper hand in their relationship, the object was constantly steering the subject’s story. The Peking Opera singer expresses his agency through his ability to navigate his unjust society by being self-assured in his gender identity. This self-assurance allows Song to not only be indifferent to the objectification of the West and the ostracization of the East, but it also provided him with the confidence to manipulate the system to his advantage. The object may internalize their identity as inferior in their given reality, but that does not mean that they are defined by it. It is the counterrevolutionary acts of the object that can spark radical change, and even start a revolution. Song absorbed the projections of the West on his identity, but he never settled for them. Instead, he defied all the odds and served China on his own terms. 

The success of Song’s deception could not have come into fruition without Gallimard’s misrecognition of himself, as the subject, and the Orient. The French diplomat’s relationship with Song was built on a Western male fantasy of the perfect Oriental flower. 

M. Butterfly: Act Two Scene 11

M. Butterfly Act Three Scene 3

To maintain control over the object, Gallimard refuses to believe in the possibility of Song being anything other than his fantasy woman in spite of knowing the truth all along. Admitting and acknowledging Song’s true identity would go against everything he believed about the Orient, and more importantly, himself. The formation of self-consciousness is a product of culture and society which contributes greatly to the hierarchical master-slave dialectic (Hegel 1977, 10). The revelation of the truth invalidates the legitimacy of Gallimard’s entire existence, and it exposes his misrecognition to society. As the slave, Song has nothing more to lose, but Gallimard, the master, has everything to lose. The mutual recognition between master and slave is dismantled, and it completely warps the power dynamic of the subject-object relationship. The end of M. Butterfly comes into a full circle with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, where the loss of autonomy of one’s self leads both Gallimard and Cio Cio San to their own demise. 

The Butterfly is the master, and the master is the slave all along. 

Living Through it All: My Takeaways from Acting in the Play

Having just arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for no more than one semester, I never would have imagined acting in a student-led production in such a provocative play. After taking this class, being a part of the M. Butterfly world has a new meaning to me. Playing Comrade Chin alongside my Song has made me more appreciative of the Butterflies who fought to push their own narrative in spite of circumstances. What I find to be the most compelling part of M. Butterfly’s screenplay is its level of attentiveness in fleshing out the nuances of Orientalism. From gender to warfare, Hwang creates a world that holds the West accountable for its injustices and amplifies the voices of the Orient that have been excluded from history. He gives his hope that the cycle can be broken when voices are amplified, making M. Butterfly an empowering crash course in postcolonial art that transcends the masses throughout generations.

Reference List

Central College. 2019. “Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic: The Search for Self-Consciousness.” Writing Anthology. Accessed April 27, 2023. https://central.edu/writing-anthology/2019/07/08/hegels-master-slave-dialectic-the-search-for-self-consciousness/.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Edwards, Louise. 2012. “Women Sex-Spies: Chastity, National Dignity, Legitimate Government and Ding Ling’s ‘When I Was in Xia Village.’” The China Quarterly, no. 212: 1059-1078. doi:10.1017/S0305741012001210.

Hegel, G.W.F. [1807] 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hwang, David. 1988. M. Butterfly. Plume. 

Hwang, David, and John Louis DiGaetani. 1989. “‘M. Butterfly’: An Interview with David Henry Hwang.” TDR (1988-) 33 (3): 141-153. doi:10.2307/1145993.

Zhang, Pinggong. 2002. “Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient — On Edwad W. Said’s Orientalism.” Comparative Literature: East & West 4 (1): 176-183. doi:10.1080/25723618.2002.12015317.

Puccini, Giacomo. 1904. Madama Butterfly. Libretto by L. Illica and G. Giacosa. Milan, La Scala Theatre.

Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21 (2-3): 168-178. doi:10.1080/09502380601164353.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Die Philosophin 14 (27): 42-58.

Categories
Journal

Excerpts from My Capstone Project: “Pa’lante, Siempre Pa’lante”…But Toward What? Imagining Status Alternatives and Bringing Possibility Back into Discussions of Puerto Rico’s Future”

By Kayla McManus-Viana

Introduction: “The Puerto Rican Problem”[1]

           My capstone project is on the topic of Puerto Rican status alternatives and has largely been motivated by my own desire to find some hope for the future of Puerto Rico. But why does Puerto Rico need hope? Puerto Rico has been in an explicit colonial relationship with the United States (U.S) since 1898, when the island was ceded to the U.S. as part of the peace treaty that concluded the Spanish-American War. While some may argue that Puerto Rico achieved “decolonization” once it became a “Commonwealth” or “unincorporated territory” of the United States in 1952, I argue that the explicit colonial relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico has persisted, as the island’s shift in official legal designation to “Commonwealth” did nothing to tangibly address the technologies of colonial control the United States has and continues to implement to subjugate Puerto Rico.

         “Technologies of colonialism” are the explicit mechanisms of domination that are used by colonial powers to subjugate and dispossess colonial subjects. These mechanisms can manifest politically, economically, strategically (i.e. be related to military concerns), culturally, etc. While I will be unable to get into the nitty-gritty of each and every technology of colonial subjugation the United States employs to keep Puerto Rico subordinate and dependent, I will address a few of the most explicit here.

         The first technology of colonial control operating in Puerto Rico is constitutional, and subsequently political, domination. While Puerto Rico does have its own constitution and Puerto Ricans “…[can] elect their own local government, governor, and legislature,” Puerto Ricans remain “subject to Congress’s power under the Territorial Clause of the US Constitution and previous Supreme Court rulings [specifically the Insular Cases],” among other political limitations.[2] In other words, “Congress gives and Congress takes,” as the rulings of the U.S. federal legislature, in every scenario, supersede those of the Puerto Rican legislature. Additionally, the precedent set by the Insular Cases, which are a series of early-twentieth century Supreme Court rulings that established the “separate and unequal” status of U.S. territories, has created a situation in which only the barest of rights are guaranteed to Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens.[3] Anything beyond the “fundamental rights established in the Constitution” are prejudicially and inconsistently decided upon on a case-by-case basis by the U.S. Supreme Court.[4] For example, the right to vote in federal elections is not one of the “fundamental rights” conferred to Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricans’ access to various social welfare programs (such as Supplemental Security Income) is decided by the Supreme Court and not guaranteed to Puerto Ricans by virtue of possessing American citizenship alone. Thus, not only do Puerto Ricans have functionally little control over their island’s governance, they also inhabit a space of second-class U.S. citizenship.

In order to fully understand the concept of “second-class citizenship,” one must first understand what full modern citizenship entails. According to Ariana Valle, “At its simplest level, citizenship is a legal status that represents formal membership in a political community; as such, citizenship as status distinguishes between citizens and foreigners” (emphasis added).[5] Beyond this legal differentiation, citizenship also confers “social, civil, and political rights as well as duties and responsibilities to all citizens” and, even further, a sense of belonging to a larger national community (emphasis added).[6] Valle argues that Puerto Ricans lack both the legal and social conceptions of membership modern citizenship confers. For Puerto Ricans, the lack of citizenship’s legal protections manifests in ways previously mentioned (not being able to vote in federal elections, unequal funding for and access to federal welfare programs), and the lack of a social membership conferred through citizenship – of belonging to the American national imaginary – manifests through the racialization of Puerto Ricans as “Latino.” According to Valle, Puerto Ricans are “subsumed into the Latino group and the broader racialization of Latino with foreigner” and as such are perpetually viewed as “Other than” American.[7] This results in a lack of inclusion of Puerto Ricans in the American imaginary. Moreover, Valle argues that the racialization of and discrimination against Puerto Ricans have been further compounded by socioeconomic vulnerability stemming from decades of colonial economic exploitation and dependence, which has contributed to the conceptualization of Puerto Ricans as “lazy, welfare dependent, and criminal.”[8]

The colonial technology of economic domination and exploitation manifests in Puerto Rico as colonial-capitalism. Colonial-capitalism refers to the “mutually constitutive and inextricable links that exist amongst capitalist logics and colonial power, which can continue even after formal colonization ends. These indissoluble relationships…continue to be highly influential in how governance, societies, economies, and certain cultural norms have been fashioned and operate [in the Caribbean and other formerly colonized territories].”[9] In other words, the technology of capitalism acts as an extension of and complement to colonial power, as capitalist policies are enacted through and inseparable from “colonial worldviews, institutions, and relations.”[10]

As Naomi Klein evidences in The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists, colonial-capitalism is a persisting economic paradigm and tangible reality in Puerto Rico. Colonial-capitalism is so prevalent on the island that Klein goes so far as to describe the Puerto Rican experience as “shock-after-shock-after-shock doctrine.”[11] This “cyclical invasion and retreat of [American] colonial capital” is intimately tied to the imposition of neoliberal policies by the United States, which have wrecked the island’s manufacturing, education, and public sectors, resulting in “capital flight and the erosion of social programs and economic opportunities.”[12] This in turn creates additional crises, such as “unemployment, crime, debt, [and] dilapidated infrastructure,” which are used to further justify even more “austerity and privatization…exacerbating existing crises, spawning new ones, and continuing the cycle” of colonial capitalism and dependence.[13] A timely example to root the idea of colonial-capitalism in the reality of life on the island is the current move to privatize Puerto Rico’s power grid. As of January 25, 2023, Genera PR, a subsidiary of the New-York based company New Fortress, Inc., has signed a ten-year contract to take charge of operating and maintaining the island’s outdated and failing power grid from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), the public corporation previously in charge of the power grid until its 2017 bankruptcy.[14] While this is but a singular example of colonial-capitalism in Puerto Rico, it is part of a larger history of capitalist exploitation that has resulted in a ballooning $73 billion debt crisis, a massive flight of Puerto Ricans from the island, and immense economic inequality.

In addition to accelerating neoliberalism and austerity measures on the island, colonial-capitalism is directly working to dispossess Puerto Ricans of their homes and land. First established in 2012 to attract outside investment in exchange for income tax breaks, Act 60 of the Puerto Rican tax code grants massive tax breaks to Americans who relocate to Puerto Rico and establish a “bona fide” residence on the island. Since its inception, Act 60 has expanded its purview to “attract finance, tech and other investors” (such as “crypto currency miners”) in addition to new residents.[15] While resulting in an influx of cash to and interest in the island, the growth of the wealthy (largely white) American population has increased property prices on the island, accelerated gentrification, and resulted in the internal displacement of native Puerto Ricans.

Additionally, the explicit political and economic colonial modes of domination discussed above have led to the development of a state of “coloniality” in Puerto Rico. “Coloniality,” an idea pioneered by Anibal Quijano and further developed by Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres, is defined as “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism…that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (emphasis added). According to Irma Serrano-García, the explicit modes of colonial relation and domination discussed above have led to and perpetuate a state of coloniality in Puerto Rico; colonialism and coloniality thus occur simultaneously, though they manifest in different ways. Serrano-García argues that coloniality in Puerto Rico primarily emerges in “the ‘Americanization’ of our way of life and the psychological, as well as concrete, dependence on U.S. welfare…[which have] generated a sense of American superiority, the idea that the United States is a nation to emulate, and that were it not for the United States we could not survive”[16]

The concept of coloniality and internalized inferiority is unpacked further in Chapter 2 of my thesis, but for now it is important to note that Puerto Rico exists in both a colonial relationship with the United States and a state of suspended coloniality. Thus any decolonization plan that does not sufficiently address both of these aspects of American domination will simply result in a reification of Puerto Rico’s subordinate, colonial status in relation to the United States.

Solving the “Puerto Rican Problem”   

The most recent attempt to remedy the colonial relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico is the Puerto Rico Status Act (PRSA), introduced in the United States House of Representatives on July 20, 2022. Should the PRSA pass both the U.S. House and Senate, it would call for a binding plebiscite to decide Puerto Rico’s future. The current options between which Puerto Ricans would vote include: 1) full admission into the American Union as the 51st state, 2) independence in a Westphalian sense, or 3) a “Free Association” between a sovereign Puerto Rico and the United States.

         Far from uniting the Puerto Rican people, however, the PRSA has been a source of controversy and debate. The grassroots social justice and decolonization advocacy organizations Boricuas Unidas en la Diaspora and CASA condemned the bill as being “negotiated behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., with minimal input from the Puerto Rican people.”[17] Other organizations, such as LatinoJustice and Power4PuertoRico, have similarly come out against the legislation in its current form because they claim it “[ignores] our community’s drumbeat for transparency and fairness.”[18] This sentiment was further echoed by Representative Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, a democrat from Illinois who currently sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, who justified his vote against the bill by arguing that “[the Puerto Rican community] was not given an opportunity to contribute their perspectives into the debate.”[19] The critiques presented here raise an important, albeit ironic, question: if the Puerto Rican people had little say in the plan meant to give them a voice in their island’s decolonization process, then whose opinions or voice does the bill actually reflect?

         The lack of Puerto Rican input in the PRSA suggests that the bill centers the interests and positionality of the colonizer (the United States) more than it presents any true decolonial option for the colonized (Puerto Rico). This is not a novel argument, however. Puerto Rico’s decolonization process has been dominated by U.S. interests from the start, as evidenced by the factthat the same pool of options have been presented to the Puerto Rican people in seven separate plebiscites since 1967 (See Table 1). The only difference between the PRSA and these earlier plebiscites is that the option of the Commonwealth, or the ability to maintain the current status quo, would not be up for vote. The fact that Puerto Ricans have been presented with and have voted upon the same three options for decades speaks not only to the lack of interest or effort on the part of the United States to truly solve the “Puerto Rican Problem,” but also highlights how limiting these options truly are. Moreover, the PRSA’s attempt to “move the meter” towards a solution by presenting, once again, the same three options has only re-enforced the status stalemate. This begs the question: if these three options do not seem to be moving Puerto Rico toward decolonization, what other path(s) exists for the island?[20]

My research addresses this question by imagining an alternative path forward to shake up Puerto Rico’s status stalemate. Importantly, my research focuses on generating possibilities by thinking-through a different or “fourth” status option that could grant Puerto Rico dignified decolonial justice – not evaluating its viability or operationalizability. In this paper, “decolonial justice” is conceptualized as a status for Puerto Rico that directly addresses and remedies the colonial power relations between the island and the United States (i.e. the “colonial rot,” which includes the concept of coloniality), and prevents future (neo)colonial subordination from developing.

Methodological Approach: Hopeful Pessimism

“We have to  find something that works for us. We have to create something new. And I think that’s where we are headed. There is a new movement that is being forged here. It still hasn’t been born, but it’s about to be born. A new future for Puerto Rico is already developing.” “Annie”[21]

         As Yarimar Bonilla notes in “Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, and La futura cuir,” in addition to a plethora of political, environmental, and economic crises, Puerto Ricans are currently experiencing the aftereffects of a “postcolonial disaster,” or “a political context of material and affective ruin that isno longer guided by the promise of a better postcolonial future or the palliative anticipation of a sovereignty to come” (emphasis added).[22] This means that many Puerto Ricans have become disillusioned with the promise of a future in line with the current, hegemonic definition of political “modernity” – understood here primarily by its organizing political factors, Westphalian-based sovereignty and territorially-bound states.[23] Thus, the question of “what comes next?” for many on the island no longer involves dreams of political independence or even US statehood, as successive mismanaged crises have shattered their faith in government. As one man Bonilla interviewed remarked, “The government [both local and federal] doesn’t work. So now we have to work harder because the government can no longer help us.”[24]

         According to Bonilla, the pervasive feeling on the island is that top-down, government reform is not the solution; the Puerto Rican people are. Thus, self-reliance and community care, i.e. grassroots or bottom-up movements, not another status plebiscite, are increasingly seen as the most likely way to break free of US dependence.[25] This sentiment stands in stark contrast to the Puerto Rican Status Act and reaffirms the critique that those composing the bill did not take into account the perspectives and opinions of the Puerto Rican people but instead re-packaged and re-imposed what they thought the Puerto Rican people should want.

         Bonilla takes care to assert that this turn toward community solutions is not an act of “giving up” but rather one of “hopeful pessimism.”[26] She asks, “Unlike a cruel optimism that blind us to the threats of the present, a hopeful pessimism opens our eyes to the hard tasks required to transform the here and now. How can we live and act politically in the absence of faith in a better future?[27] How can we develop not a cruel optimism that blinds us to what is to come but rather a kind of hopeful pessimism that can serve to build politically in the face of ruin and the promise of further decay?”[28] These are questions central to Bonilla’s current work and ones that have motivated my own research. To this end, I aim to build upon Bonilla’s work and critique what has been historically presented by the United States as the only potential paths forward for Puerto Rico and infuse the discursive conversation surrounding the “Puerto Rican Problem” with a sense of possibility in line with Bonilla’s call for “hopeful pessimism.”

         While I amconscious ofthe disenchantment with both the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments across the island, I contend that top-down government transformations are possible and indeed necessary for Puerto Rico to decolonize because without such structural transformation, the rot of colonialism remains.[29] Thus, I am preoccupied in this thesis with exploring what alternative top-down government transformations are possible for Puerto Rico when inspired by and rooted in the grassroots organizations and solidarities the Puerto Rican people themselves view as the best path forward.[30]

         In order to incorporate the voices of Puerto Ricans themselves, in lieu of being able to speak with them directly via ethnographic research, I analyze the work of three grassroots organizations on the island in order to imagine an alternative future rooted in the work of Puerto Ricans themselves. For the purpose of this short paper, I will only include my analysis of one: El Departamento de la Comida.

Imagining an Alternative: Grassroots Innovation and El Departamento de la Comida

“Prefigurative politics” is the main analytical framework through which I analyze the work of grassroots organizations across the island. As understood by Paul Raekstad, the “case” for prefigurative politics: “…starts from the premise that our basic institutions – capitalism, the state, the patriarchal family and so on – are inherently unfree and unequal…how can we emancipate ourselves if current institutions prevent us from developing the powers, drives and consciousness we need to do so?…Organizations of struggle and transition must begin to implement the social relations and practices they want for the future in the here and now. This is because doing so is important for developing the right kinds of revolutionary agency; for developing the powers, drives and consciousness necessary to bring about universal human emancipation” (emphasis added) (37-38).[31] In other words, prefigurative politics is concerned with living out a desired future in the present, with bringing into being by doing.

            Prefigurative politics is closely related to what Puerto Rican filmmaker, scholar, and activist ​​Frances Negrón-Mutaner describes as “sovereign acts.” Sovereign acts are understood as the “freedom to act and imagine in excess of an imposed law, order, or norm, [and may be] capable of opening up other ways of being in the world…In this context, sovereignty can be understood as the capacity to act and be otherwise” (emphasis added).[32] Sovereign acts attack both colonialism – through the actions themselves – as well as coloniality, through the concept of “problematization.” According to  Cristina Pérez Jiménez, problematizacion subverts coloniality through the critical analysis of peoples’ “submission and exploitation” which leads to the realization that said submission is not natural and instead “the result of alterable socio-historical processes” (emphasis added).[33] It is this combination of action and analysis found in sovereign acts that “should lead to a different understanding of reality, and the belief that people can alter their circumstances.”[34]

Each organization discussed in my project involves both an action that directly works to undermine the ongoing relations and effects of colonialism in Puerto Rico as well as an effort to problematize Puerto Ricans’ exploitation and subjugation, thus targeting the island’s state of coloniality. Therefore, each organization is engaging in sovereign acts. Additionally, the work of these organizations is prefigurative in the sense that they are working toward a Puerto Rico in the present that they want to see emerge in the future. Thus, the following organizations can be described as engaging in prefigurative sovereign acts.

El Departamento de la Comida: Food Sovereignty

As mentioned earlier, part of the status quo in Puerto Rico is colonial subjugation by and dependence on the United States. Economic dependence in particular – on PROMESA to restructure the island’s billion-dollar debt crisis, on an infusion of cash from American investors and corporations – is part and parcel to everyday life on the island. This dependency can be starkly seen in the agricultural and food sectors.

Between 80-90% of the total food supply in Puerto Rico is imported, which has resulted in intense levels of dependency – particularly on imports from the United States:[35] “There is local agricultural production, but the food distribution companies have an almost absolute control of the market. While it is not hard for producers to grow food, it is quite hard for them to sell it. Local produce is frequently more expensive than imported food, even with taxes and transportation costs added. Since most of the Puerto Rican economy turned to developing its industrial sector decades ago, there is very little economic incentive from the government to boost local agricultural production and make it more competitive” (emphasis added).[36]

In the face of this extreme dependency, food sovereignty organizations are popping up across the island. Food sovereignty is as much about “having enough food” as it is creating “place-based alternatives to the destructive logic of the colonial state and highlight[ing] the imaginative potential of thinking beyond what exists…food sovereignty cultivates healing through mutual aid and community care, connecting resistant imaginations to tangible political possibilities” (emphasis added). El Departamento de la Comida is one of the most public-facing and well-known organizations trying to bring about food sovereignty in Puerto Rico.

El Departamento de la Comida (El Depa) was founded in 2010 by Tara Rodríguez-Besosa as a multi-farm community agriculture program that “aggregated produce from farms and sold it to families and restaurants in San Juan.”[37] Since then, the work of El Depa has expanded to encompass a food hub, a restaurant, and in the face of Hurricane Maria’s destruction, support for coalitions of volunteer brigades to help local farms in the aftermath of the disaster.[38] Through these initiatives, El Depa not only works to actively undermine the dependent and colonial relationship between Puerto Rican and the United States by providing access to locally grown (i.e. non-imported) food, but also the coloniality this relationship engenders.[39] As Rodríguez-Besosa notes, “We were told how to be civilized: It’s the can, it’s the microwave, it’s going into the supermarket and having money to treat yourself to packaged foods…we were told that these fruit trees growing in our backyards were worthless,” but El Depa problematizes this narrative and successfully illustrates that Puerto Ricans can support themselves, that the island provides, and that reliance on the United States and its packaged foods is not necessary.[40]      

A common phrase among food sovereignty activists is, “if you can feed yourself, you can free yourself.”[41] In the case of Puerto Rico, El Depa is working to free Puerto Ricans from having to engage with a highly exploitative capitalist food system that is a byproduct of a  dependent colonial relationship with the United States.[42] Thus, El Depa is engaging in prefigurative work to bring about a self-sustaining, “free” Puerto Rico.

What Are Puerto Ricans Showing Us They Want?

Using the concepts of prefigurative politics and sovereign acts, my analysis of grassroots mobilization in Puerto Rico points toward the following answer to the above question: self-sufficiency, an end to structural harms created and perpetuated by colonialism, and engagement in acts of consciousness raising that help to actively challenge coloniality and internalized inferiority.

I argue that a top-down “fourth-option” for Puerto Rican decolonization should be focused on generating an alternate “relationship with government.”[43] This top-down plan would involve re-orienting the Puerto Rican government to a supportive position focused on creating the infrastructure, policy, resource coordination, etc. necessary to support the expansion and existence of prefigurative organizations – across the island and even the world – and the sovereign acts they engage in.Such a “fourth option,” inspired by and rooted in supporting the mobilization and solidarity of Puerto Ricans, would not only help break the cycle of colonial dependency and foster self-sufficiency throughout the island, but also challenge the structural harms brought about due to both Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the U.S. and state of coloniality. Such a plan would allow Puerto Ricans to slowly untangle the threads that tether them to the United States and provide the decolonial future Puerto Ricans deserve – on their own terms.

The Bully in the Backyard: Issues for Operationalizing Puerto Rican Decolonization

The seeds of a decolonial future have already been planted in Puerto Rico, as evidenced by the prefigurative sovereign actions explored further in Chapter 3 of my thesis, and as such it is relatively easy to answer the question: what else is out there for Puerto Rico beyond the traditional three status options? But even beyond that, Puerto Ricans are showing us that the answer to this question — fostering the creation, existence, and spread of radical grassroots movements across the island – is possible to implement. But how does one create a top-down decolonization plan that fosters, for example, radical anti-capitalist food sovereignty projects? More specifically, what functional barriers exist to creating and implementing such a top-down decolonization plan throughout the island?

Before moving forward, it is imperative to state that this conclusion does not claim that a de-colonization plan along the lines of what has been imagined is unfeasible. Rather, it is here that I am engaging most directly with the pessimistic aspect of “hopeful pessimism.” Thus, in this section I am identifying what I believe to be the major challenges facing the arrival of any imagined decolonial future in Puerto Rico. Moreover, I argue that instead of debating whether or not a free association, the achievement of American statehood, or Westphalian independence is “right” for Puerto Rico for another sixty years, future researchers, policymakers, and those invested in Puerto Rico’s decolonial future should be more concerned with the following issues.

Firstly, as it stands, due to the island’s official Commonwealth status, both the U.S. House and the Senate would need to vote upon a decolonization plan in order for it to be implemented in the first place but also for Puerto Rican decolonization to be considered “legitimate” and “legal” – both in the eyes of the United States and the wider global community.[44] That being said, the United States has a rather violent knee-jerk reaction to anything “Other” in what it sees as its “backyard,” i.e. the entire Western hemisphere (see the Grenadine Revolution, the US’s involvement in Cuba and throughout Central and South America during the twentieth century for more information). Using the example I presented earlier, food sovereignty movements are inherently anti-capitalist, and addressing the structural harms incurred from unchecked and predatory colonial capitalism would be an inherently anti-capitalist project and thus considered unacceptable by the United Status. Resultantly, any plan that seems to challenge or undermine capitalism in any way would probably not pass Congress.[45] The question to ask ourselves now is: how do we get a decolonial plan with anti-capitalist components through Congress?

Second, there exists ample evidence of the predatory nature of neoliberal international institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, in their interaction with “developing” or recently-independent countries (see the documentary Life and Debt for more information). Resultantly, an important question is: how do we navigate the constraints of (transnational, exploitative) capitalism and protect Puerto Rico from incursions by global neoliberal institutions? Even further, what role, if any, does regional integration play in protecting Puerto Rico against neoliberalism and further economic exploitation?

Third, as Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth, having the colonial bourgeois (who are “mimic men” that want to assimilate with the colonists) come to power after a colonizer retreat results in “neo-colonialism.” With that in mind, how do we guard against elite-capture and potentially the establishment of neo-colonial relations with the United States? (This is a major concern for Puerto Rico, given the history of former U.S. colonies’ postcolonial experiences, see: The Philippines).[46]

Finally, the “national question” is still an unanswered and incredibly complicated question in Puerto Rico. A de-colonization plan rooted in island-wide and international networks and solidarities would help challenge the idea that national space and a state’s territory are congruent, thus making more “space” for the diaspora in the “Puerto Rican imaginary.” However, the issue of who is and is not Puerto Rican is about much more than geographic location – it is about language, race and ethnic background (ex. if you are part of the Creole elite or of African or Taíno-descent), where you were educated, etc. Additionally, there exists a “hierarchy of suffering” in determining if one is “Puerto Rican enough.” Meaning, the more time you have spent on the island, enduring the effects of colonization, climate change, the debt crisis, etc., you are “more” Puerto Rican than those who were born and raised in the diaspora and insulated from such experiences and subsequent suffering. Working through these issues, in my opinion, is as difficult as getting an anti-capitalist decolonization plan through the U.S. Congress, because it would require a problematization of the diaspora among Puerto Ricans – both on the island and off – and the challenging of a generations-long understanding of what it means to be Puerto Rican.

The obstacles identified in this section are some – not all – of what I believe to be the most pressing challenges facing the implementation of any decolonial plan in Puerto Rico today.[47] While daunting, addressing these questions, in lieu of debating the efficacy of the three traditional status options for another sixty years, will result in more productive conversations regarding the “Puerto Rican problem” and generate the type of critical, problematizing engagement necessary for creating a true, dignified decolonial future for the island.

Bibliography

Acevedo, Nicole. “Puerto Rico Officially Privatizes Power Generation Amid Protests, Doubts.” NBC News, January 25, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-officially-privatizes-power-generation-genera-pr-rcna67284.

Bonilla, Yarimar. “The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA.” Political Geography 78 (2020): 1-12.

Bonilla, Yarimar. “Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, and La futura cuir,” small axe 62 (2020): 147-162.

“BUDPR, CASA Issue Joint Statement on Opposition to Puerto Rico Status Act.” Latino Rebels, August 19, 2022. https://www.latinorebels.com/2022/08/19/bupdrpuertoricostatusact/.

Bustos, Camila. “The Third Space of Puerto Rican Sovereignty: Re-imagining Self-Determination Beyond State Sovereignty.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 32, no. 1 (2020): 73-102.

Cabán, Pedro. “Bad Bunny, AOC, and Decolonizing Puerto Rico.” The American Prospect, September 7, 2022. https://prospect.org/politics/bad-bunny-aoc-and-decolonizing-puerto-rico/.

Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. 

Gahman, Levi, Gabrielle Thongs, and Adaeze Greenidge. “Disaster, Debt, and Underdevelopment: The Cunning of Colonial Capitalism in the Caribbean.” Development 64 (2021): 112-118.

Kirts, Leah. “How El Departamento de la Comida Fights Colonialism Through Food,” them, October 21, 2022. https://www.them.us/story/el-departamento-de-la-comida-tara-rodriguez-besosa-puerto-rico-food-farming.  

Life and Debt. Directed by Stephanie Black. Los Angeles: Tuff Gong Pictures Production, 2001. 

Mignolo, Walter. “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 44-66.

Murphy Marcos, Coral and Patricia Mazzei. “The Rush for a Slice of Paradise in Puerto Rico.” The New York Times, January 31, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/puerto-rico-gentrification.html.

Raekstad, Paul. “Prefiguration: Between Anarchism and Marxism,” In The Future is Now: An Introduction to Prefigurative Politics, edited by Lara Moticelli, 32-46. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.

Rodrigues, Meghie.“Puerto Rico Adapts to a Changing, Challenging Environment.” UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, April 22, 2021. https://eos.org/articles/puerto-rico-adapts-to-a-changing-challenging-environment.

Rodriguez, Franklin, and Richard Huizer. “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Puerto Rico, Colonialism, and Citizenship,” Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies 3, no. 2 (2019): 119-140.

Serrano-García, Irma. “Resilience, Coloniality, and Sovereign Acts: The Role of Community Activism.” American Journal of Community Psychology 65, no. 3 (2020): 3-12.

Standen, Alex. “Confronting Colonial Capitalism.” Review of The Battle for Paradise: The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists, by Naomi Klein. New Labor Forum 29, no. 1 (Winter 2020). https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2020/02/01/confronting-colonial-capitalism/

Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Stoler, Ann Laura. “‘The Rot Remains:’ From Ruins to Ruination.” In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Valle, Ariana. “Race and the Empire-state: Puerto Ricans’ Unequal U.S. Citizenship.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 1 (2019): 26–40. 

Wilms-Crowe, Momo. “‘Desde de Abajo, Como Semilla:’ Puerto Rican Food Sovereignty as  Embodied Decolonial Resistance.” B.A. Honors Thesis, University of Oregon, 2020.


[1] “The Puerto Rican Problem” is a colloquial phrase used to refer to Puerto Rico’s “in-between” status as neither a U.S. state nor a Westphalisn (nation) state. Rather, Puerto Rico is an “unincorporated territory” of the United States, but what this means, entails, and what rights this status secures for the Puerto Rican people in practice is constantly up to (re)interpretation. Solving the Puerto Rican Problem would involve providing clarity re: the island’s status.

[2] Franklin Rodriguez and Richard Huizer, “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Puerto Rico, Colonialism, and Citizenship,” Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies 3, no. 2 (2019): 135; “Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, the ‘Territorial Clause,’ empowers Congress to ‘make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States’” (emphasis added) (Rodriguez and Huizer 130).

[3] Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917 as part of The Jones Act, but as many authors argue (Torruella 2017, Smith 2017), Puerto Ricans experience second-class and incomplete U.S. citizenship.

[4] Rodriguez and Huizer, “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion,” 131.

[5] Ariana Valle, “Race and the Empire-state: Puerto Ricans’ Unequal U.S. Citizenship,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 1 (2019): 27.

[6] Valle, “Race and the Empire-state,” 27.

[7] Ibid., 36.

[8] Ibid., 27.

[9] Levi Gahman, Gabrielle Thongs, and Adaeze Greenidge, “Disaster, Debt, and Underdevelopment: The Cunning of Colonial Capitalism in the Caribbean,” Development 64 (2021): 113.

[10] Gahman, Thongs, and Greenidge, “Disaster, Debt, and Underdevelopment,” 114.

[11] Here, Klein is making an explicit reference to her breakthrough and widely praised book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

[12] Alex Standen, “Confronting Colonial Capitalism,” review of The Battle for Paradise: The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists, by Naomi Klein, New Labor Forum 29, no. 1(Winter 2020): https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2020/02/01/confronting-colonial-capitalism/.

[13] Standen, “Confronting Colonial Capitalism,” https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2020/02/01/confronting-colonial-capitalism/.

[14] Nicole Acevedo, “Puerto Rico Officially Privatizes Power Generation Amid Protests, Doubts,” NBC News, Jan. 25, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-officially-privatizes-power-generation-genera-pr-rcna67284.

[15] Coral Murphy Marcos and Patricia Mazzei, “The Rush for a Slice of Paradise in Puerto Rico,” The New York Times, January 31, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/puerto-rico-gentrification.html.

[16] Irma Serrano-García, “Resilience, Coloniality, and Sovereign Acts: The Role of Community Activism,” American Journal of Community Psychology 65, no. 3 (2020): 4.

[17] “BUDPR, CASA Issue Joint Statement on Opposition to Puerto Rico Status Act,” Latino Rebels, August 19, 2022, https://www.latinorebels.com/2022/08/19/bupdrpuertoricostatusact/.

[18] Pedro Cabán, “Bad Bunny, AOC, and Decolonizing Puerto Rico,” The American Prospect, September 7, 2022, https://prospect.org/politics/bad-bunny-aoc-and-decolonizing-puerto-rico/.

[19] Pedro Cabán, “Bad Bunny, AOC, and Decolonizing Puerto Rico,” https://prospect.org/politics/bad-bunny-aoc-and-decolonizing-puerto-rico/.

[20] Through a qualitative analysis of de-colonial critiques of Eurocentric modernity, Chapter 2 of my thesis goes into more depth as to why the “traditional status options” would not bring about decolonial justice for Puerto Rico. This discussion has been excluded for the purpose of this short paper.

[21]  Yarimar Bonilla, “The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA,” Political Geography 78 (2020): 10.

[22] Yarimar Bonilla, “Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, and La futura cuir,” small axe 62 (2020): 150.

[23] Aka “statist solutions.”

[24] Yarimar Bonilla, “The coloniality of disaster…” 7.

[25] Bonilla,  “The coloniality of disaster…,” 9.

[26] Also referred to in this thesis as “visionary pragmatism.”

[27] Here, Dr. Bonilla is referring to Lauren Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) here.

[28] Bonilla, “Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, and La futura cuir,” 157.

[29] I also recognize that this is a rather privileged position to take, keeping in mind my positionality as a member of the Puerto Rican diaspora who was born, raised, and educated on the mainland;

This is a direct reference to Ann Laura Stoler’s “‘The Rot Remains:’ From Ruins to Ruination,” In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

[30] That being said, I do recognize the need to imagine within the confines of reality, to be rationally “hopefully pessimistic”. As Frank Gatell observed when discussing the state of the Puerto Rican status debate in the 1940s, “…without a viable economic life, arguments about political status represented a luxury which the island simply could not afford” (emphasis added).# This remains the case today, nearly eighty years later. With this in mind, while the majority of this thesis imagines an ideological ground upon which we can build a fourth option by listening to the opinions and analyzing the actions of the Puerto Rican people, the conclusion brings us back down to Earth and investigate the tangible barriers impeding the development of said imagined future in Puerto Rico today.

[31] Paul Raekstad,“Prefiguration: Between Anarchism and Marxism,” In The Future is Now: An

Introduction to Prefigurative Politics, ed. Lara Moticelli (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022): 37-38.

[32] Irma Serrano-García, “Resilience, Coloniality, and Sovereign Acts: The Role of Community Activism,” The American Journal of Community Psychology 65, no. 3 (2020): 7.

[33] Irma Serrano-García, “Resilience, Coloniality, and Sovereign Acts,” 4.

[34] Ibid.

[35] This is largely due to policies like the Jones Act which subsidize U.S. shipping and products at such a rate that Puerto Ricans cannot afford the premium attached to locally grown products. For more information, see: “How the U.S. Dictates What Puerto Rico Eats” by Israel Meléndez Ayala and Alicia Kennedy, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/puerto-rico-jones-act.html?referringSource=articleShare.

[36] Meghie Rodrigues, “Puerto Rico Adapts to a Changing, Challenging Environment,” UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, April 22, 2021. https://eos.org/articles/puerto-rico-adapts-to-a-changing-challenging-environment.

[37] Camila Bustos, “The Third Space of Puerto Rican Sovereignty: Re-imagining Self-Determination Beyond State Sovereignty,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 32, no. 1 (2020): 99.

[38] Leah Kirts, “How El Departamento de la Comida Fights Colonialism Through Food,” them, October 21, 2022. https://www.them.us/story/el-departamento-de-la-comida-tara-rodriguez-besosa-puerto-rico-food-farming 

[39] Kirts, ““How El Departamento de la Comida Fights Colonialism Through Food,” https://www.them.us/story/el-departamento-de-la-comida-tara-rodriguez-besosa-puerto-rico-food-farming.

[40] Additionally, El Depa challenges coloniality on the island through the existence of its resource library, “which includes a collection of seeds from native plants, books about the plant history of Puerto Rico, Indigenous poetry, and agricultural fiction, along with a tool library stocked with equipment for farming, small-scale construction, volunteer projects, and emergency response” (Kirts).

[41] Momo Wilms-Crow, “‘Desde Abajo, Como Semilla’: Puerto Rican Food Sovereignty as Embodied Decolonial Resistance” (Honors Thesis, University of Oregon, 2020): 48.

[42] Momo Wilms-Crow, “‘Desde Abajo, Como Semilla,’” 48.

[43] Again, my thesis is not focused on exploring what this relationship would look like in practice. Rather, I am simply imagining an alternative future informed by the work of Puerto Ricans on the island. The next step for this project would include drawing from Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse to figure out how to “design” or “operationalize” the suggestions put forth in my thesis project.

[44] At the time of writing, the Puerto Rico Status Act has only passed the U.S. House of Representatives. Additionally, the question of legality gets into the territory of theories of recognition (see Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks). Working through questions of recognition would be another line of inquiry for future iterations of this project to consider/expand upon.

[45] While this might be the case, prefigurative movements on the ground in Puerto Rico could and would most likely persist in the face of a lack of Congressional certification. That being said, as I argued in Chapter 2, without fundamentally challenging the ongoing colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, true decolonization will not occur. So these prefigurative movements would simply be trying to reform the system, not contributing to its transformation.

[46] See Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

[47] For example, the issue of what to do about Puerto Rico’s debt is another question I believe to be essential to address in order to achieve decolonial justice for the island. 

Categories
Journal

Socialist Planning in Mali

By Nathanaël Micolod

“Independence is worth what are worth or what want its leaders”. In his novel “African leaders facing their people” then-Minister of Development of newly-independent Mali Seydou Badian Kouyaté suggested that leaders, above all, determined the future of African countries after independence. In 1961, Modibo Keïta became the first President of Mali, promising socialist development. Yet despite the promises and hopes that accompanied independence, the socialist experiment in Mali was short-lived, as a coup deposed Keïta in 1968, changing the economic direction of the country. This essay will examine how this came to be, studying how the slave trade and colonialism affected the future prospects of Mali after independence and the goals of independence leaders, the strategies employed by the new government, and critically look at their effectiveness, exploring the causes behind the failure of socialist planning. The essay concludes that this derives less from the worth of Mali’s leaders than in the government setting for itself overly ambitious goals, significant economic constraints inherited in part from the colonial era which hampered successful planning, and the lack of popular concertation and control over policy.
As a result of rising demand for raw materials at home, as well the high potential for investments and new markets for goods, Europe began between the 1870s and 1900s its “scramble for Africa.” By the 19th century’s end, French Sudan (present-day Mali) was under direct French colonial administration, linking the other French colonies of Senegal and Algeria. While France’s stated goal in Africa was the assimilation of the colonies into its whole, in practice French rule was repressive, with a heavily centralized administration led by white local elites (Mamdani 1996). Nevertheless, French colonial rule of Mali quickly proved unattractive to the French, as the administrative costs of running the colony exceeded the profits the colonial government could extract, particularly because of its large swathes of inhabitable territory and paucity of natural resources. As the trans-Saharan trade ended and West African coasts prospered, the French colonial government continued passively to rule over French Sudan, with little attempt in developing the area (Suret-Canale et al. 1976). In the 1950s, with independence movements prospering around the world, French Sudan attempted a short-lived alliance with its more prosperous neighbor Senegal — the resulting Mali Federation, formed in September 1959, successfully bargained for independence with the French and gained its formal independence on July 1960, before coming apart in September of that year, with Modibo Keïta becoming the first president of Mali. To Keïta, the main objectives of African leaders was to “resolve problems of subsistence, of living conditions, of the struggle against illiteracy, and especially of giving back to African man his confidence in himself, and forever ridding him of the inferiority complex which colonialism has created in him” (Speech in Bouaké, Ivory Coast 1962). To achieve this objective, the Union Soudanaise-RDA (the ruling and only party in the country) assembled an extraordinary congress in September 1960 and unanimously voted to lead the country towards a socialist path to development.
While socialist planning was meant ultimately to improve the conditions of the poorest and working classes, there was an understanding that certain objectives, such as economic independence, were to take priority in the short-term. As stated in the Malian Five-Year Plan: “The ultimate objective of the planning of our economy is the improvement of the standard of living of the population. However, the investible surplus realized through the implementation of planning cannot be totally divested for that particular purpose: a great portion of this surplus must be divested to exports and investment.”
Attempts at a socialist path to development, such as the Malian Five Year Plan of 1961-1966, overall failed to produce the results planners had hoped for. The new government mobilized its resources, creating thirty-six new state enterprises, with the goal for them to eventually grow large enough so as not to require foreign capital and guarantee Mali’s economic independence on the global stage. The government established a new rural network of cooperatives, created its own national currency, and established a treasury for foreign exchange control. Nevertheless, despite the “prerequisites” to successful socialist development being established, development failed in practice, which dissuaded further planning attempts after 1966 until the coup that would depose Keïta and the US-RDA in 1968. As the new government that overthrew Keïta would put it: “The first Five-Year Plan […] has resulted in an unmitigated failure, despite some commendable realizations in the industrial sector and some spectacular realizations in the field of infra-structure[…]. The inefficiency of the productive sector, the low level at which modern enterprises have been operating, and the absence of a taxation system adapted to the rural world have both prevented the realization of an export output sufficient to cover imports and of a surplus revenue that would have allowed to cover the ever-increasing recurrent administrative costs. Consequently, a point of equilibrium could be reached only be reached by resorting to an inflationary currency circulation and by external indebtedness” (Programme Triennal De Redressement Économique Et Financier 1972).

Several explanations may be given for the failure of socialist planning in Mali during this period. Mali was first of all an especially poor country, with a GNP about three times lower than its neighbor Senegal, and such limited resources proved quite constraining to Mali’s socialist experiment. In their study of economic development in Tanzania, Gerald K. Helleiner (1972) proposed a distinction between “basic” and “self-imposed” economic constraints. Whereas “basic” constraints represent the endowments a state planner is provided with (the stock, present and future of the factors of production — land, labor and capital), “self-imposed” constraints the political, social or economic rules imposed by socialism. Mali experienced several “basic” economic constraints. Its distance from the sea, and particularly its limited infrastructure (owing to the scarce attempts by the French colonial government to develop such infrastructure) made the transport of goods for imports and exports much more costly. Mali also lacked the infrastructure necessary to produce energy domestically, leading to dependence on entirely imported oil and other sources of energy. The country was poor in natural resources, fertile soils and water sources; it also faced high population growth, social heterogeneity, lack of human capital (skills and knowledge in most sectors of the sectors of its economy), and finally an overall lack of financial resources and savings (Martin 1976). All of these conditions combined to create a particularly difficult backdrop for successful planning.
The Malian Five-Year Plan relied on increasing output in agriculture to raise domestic income, but the production of its main cash-crop, groundnuts, only continued to fall over the period of the Five-Year Plan. Climate conditions, while a part of it, do not fully justify the overall failure of agricultural production. Peasants resisted attempts at the collectivization of agriculture, refusing to participate in programs such as the “Groupements ruraux de production et de secours mutuel.” The government failed to provide sufficient incentives for peasants to participate in government programs, and this alongside the worsening of peasant conditions after the Plan led to growing distrust for socialism (Jones 1972). The Malian socialist experiment struggled with insufficient popular support, as despite some enthusiasm in the early years following independence the lack of popular consultation or popular control quickly encouraged distrust of the government and socialism.

Planning also struggled from seeking both growth and development. As scholar William Jones put it: “The politicians saw the primary purpose of the socialist option as structural change — having the state take over the commanding heights of the economy and probably a good deal more. The planners expected to have both structural transformation and fast economic growth. Indeed, far from expecting the structural transformation to impose economic costs on society, they thought it would start paying its way immediately and provide a surplus to finance other investments” (1969). However, the attainment of growth and development, besides being somewhat antithetical, were hampered by the basic economic constraints listed earlier, and the economic costs of structural changes could not be shouldered by state enterprises as they failed to create the profits planners had hoped for.
The inability of state enterprises to produce as per expectations created inflationary pressures. As public investments rose, so did administrative costs rise as well as transfers to public corporations. By 1962, Mali shouldered a 4.6 billion Malian Franc (MF) deficit in its balance-of-payment. While administrative costs skyrocketed, employment in administration saw only small increases and little improvement in its ability to manage its public sector. Public corporations continued to receive subventions even as they failed to produce the profits planners had hoped for, preventing economic development rather than enabling it (Crespo et al. 1966). The monetary system was forced to continue to sustain a failing public sector, doubling the amount of money in circulation and overall doubling the price of goods and services in the country. The country’s struggling domestic market required the importation of many consumer goods; and as importation failed to keep up with domestic demands, causing rising prices on the black market, the government was forced to rely on foreign debt, approximating 110 billion MF by the end of 1968.
The planning process itself it also at fault in the failure of socialist planning in Mali. Preliminary drafts of the Five-Year Plan drawn in 1959 lacked any serious statistical foundations, which only became available in 1961; this caused discrepancies between the goals of the Plan and how feasible such goals were to attain, particularly as the amount of public expenditure which had been supported by the French colonial administration had been greatly underestimated. The planners, ignoring the country’s basic economic constraints, hoped for a whopping 8.3% annual growth, exceeding all other countries in the world at the time. However, the planning staff was both insufficiently funded and insufficiently manned to comprehensively manage state enterprises (Gaud 1967), and lacked the power to enforce its authority as several investments occurred without the Ministry of Planning’s consent (Crespo 1966).

However, these economic factors do not explain what prevented planners from changing course while they had time to do so. Scholar Claude Meillassoux (1970) proposes that the answer lies in the socio-political composition of Malian society. The “Parti Soudanais Progressiste” (PSP) was a political party created in 1945, largely composed of the traditional aristocracy which had begun to form before the colonization of Mali by France. Receiving significant pushback from the US-RDA, which had been gaining momentum through the acquisition notably of the merchant class’ support, the PSP eventually adhered to the US-RDA. However, despite restrictions on foreign activity initially favoring the merchants, the socialist policies of the new government soon challenged the merchants. The creation of the Malian Franc (which restricted trading operations by the merchants), the strict regulation of foreign trade, and the state holding a quasi-monopoly in both foreign and domestic trade led the merchants to become the primary opposition group to Keïta’s regime.
Meanwhile, a new bureaucratic class developed, monopolizing political power; however, the challenge of the merchant class required the consolidation of this political power by seizing economy power as well. This was done through the development of an extensive public sector “under the label of ‘socialism,’ which provided [the bureaucratic class] with a convenient ideology to bring the economy under their control” (Mefflassoux 1970). This created a situation where undermining expenses in the public sector would go directly against the interests and power of the bureaucratic class — instead of reorganizing the public sector in an attempt to make it more profitable, it tended to further create state corporations. As the largest employer in the country, it had control over the distribution of profits, using this to consolidate their position of power. Rather than radically change the conditions of the peasantry following the end of colonial rule, the peasantry found itself exploited again by the new bureaucratic class, which held interests which differed from its own — a situation enabled by the lack of popular participation or control in the policies of its new government.

In conclusion, the failure of socialist planning in Mali may be attributed to a variety of factors. Economic constraints and poor planning led to inefficient public sectors, setting the country on a path to rising inflation and foreign debt. While resources might have been reallocated or reorganized to avoid this outcome, the lack of avenues for popular participation enabled the new bureaucratic class to maintain the status quo and defend its economic and political power instead of improving the peasantry’s living conditions, using socialism as a label to pursue their own interests while stripping it of its substance and promise.

Works Cited

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