Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation 9780822391425

Citation preview

@LKQBPQBA
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PM>@B A book in the series

radical perspectives A Radical History Review Book Series Series editors:

da n i e l j. wa l k o w i t z New York University

ba r ba r a w e i n s t e i n New York University

Contested Histories in Public Space JBJLOV
O>@B
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K>QFLK Edited by Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer A R H B
R K F S B O P F Q V
M O B P P
Durham & London 2009

© 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper b Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Dante by Achorn International Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. The following articles previously appeared in the Radical History Review and are reprinted here, in revised form, with permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Charlotte J. Macdonald, “Race and Empire at ‘Our Place’: New Zealand’s National Museum,” Radical History Review 75 (fall 1999): 80–91. Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, “Blood Money? Race and Nation in Australian Public History,” Radical History Review 76 (winter 2000): 188–207. Richard R. Flores, “The Alamo: Myth, Public History, and the Politics of Inclusion,” Radical History Review 77 (spring 2000): 91–103. Laurent Dubois, “Haunting Delgrès,” Radical History Review 78 (fall 2000): 166–77. Albert Grundlingh, “A Cultural Conundrum? Old Monuments and New Regimes: The Voortrekker Monument as Symbol of Afrikaner Power in a Postapartheid South Africa,” Radical History Review 81 (fall 2001): 94–112.

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About the Series

1

Introduction Memory, Race, and the Nation in Public Spaces Lisa Maya Knauer and Daniel J. Walkowitz

f ir st things first Two Peoples, One Museum: Biculturalism and Visitor “Experience” at Te Papa–“Our Place,” New Zealand’s New National Museum Charlotte J. Macdonald 49 Contesting Time, Place, and Nation in the First Peoples’ Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Ruth B. Phillips and Mark Salber Phillips 71 “Unfinished Business”: Public History in a Postcolonial Nation Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton 31

c o l onial legacies and w in n e r s ’ t a l e s 101 Exhibiting Asia in Britain: Commerce,

Consumption, and Globalization Durba Ghosh 122 The Alamo: Myth, Public History, and the Politics of Inclusion Richard R. Flores 136 Ellis Island Redux: The Imperial Turn and the Race of Ethnicity Daniel J. Walkowitz

state st o ries 157 A Cultural Conundrum? Old Monuments and New Regimes:

The Voortrekker Monument as Symbol of Afrikaner Power in a Postapartheid South Africa Albert Grundlingh 178 Narratives of Power, the Power of Narratives: The Failing Foundational Narrative of the Ecuadorian Nation O. Hugo Benavides 197 Affective Distinctions: Race and Place in Oaxaca Deborah Poole

under -st ated stories 229 Marking Remembrance: Nation and Ecology in

Two Riverbank Monuments in Kathmandu Anne M. Rademacher 249 Saving Rio’s “Cradle of Samba”: Outlaw Uprisings, Racial Tourism, and the Progressive State in Brazil Paul Amar 280 Afrocuban Religion, Museums, and the Cuban Nation Lisa Maya Knauer 311 Haunting Delgrès Laurent Dubois 329 Bibliography 353 Contributors 357 Index

vi    contents

a bout the ser ies

history, as radical historians have long observed, cannot be severed from authorial subjectivity, indeed from politics. Political concerns animate the questions we ask, the subjects on which we write. For more than thirty years the Radical History Review has led in nurturing and advancing politically engaged historical research. Radical Perspectives seeks to further the journal’s mission: any author wishing to be in the series makes a self-conscious decision to associate her or his work with a radical perspective. To be sure, many of us are currently struggling with the issue of what it means to be a radical historian in the early twenty-first century, and this series is intended to provide some signposts for what we would judge to be radical history. It will offer innovative ways of telling stories from multiple perspectives; comparative, transnational, and global histories that transcend conventional boundaries of region and nation; works that elaborate on the implications of the postcolonial move to “provincialize Europe”; studies of the public in and of the past, including those that consider the commodification of the past; histories that explore the intersection of identities such as gender, race, class, and sexuality with an eye to their political implications and complications. Above all, this series seeks to create an important intellectual space and discursive community to explore the very issue of what constitutes radical history. Within this context, some of the books published in

the series may privilege alternative and oppositional political cultures, but all will be concerned with the way power is constituted, contested, used, and abused. Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation is the second of two volumes in this series on public history with origins in the Radical History Review. We conceived the series a decade ago to consider the similarities and differences in debates around the world over public representation of the past. The first volume examined the impact of political transformations on changing interpretations of public space in museums, monuments, and street life; this volume moves the focus to the impact—or lack of impact—that postcolonial theory, which has so profoundly reshaped historical and literary studies in the past two decades, has had in illuminating the history of race and empire in public spaces. The thirteen essays in the collection visit sites in all six inhabited continents. Together they examine how and the extent to which public sites for the commemoration of the past in museums or public commemorative monuments have accounted for the experience of racial “others” and imperial histories in narrative of the nation. Of the countries in question Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia have had oppressive colonial pasts and long histories of having “forgotten,” mythologized, or distorted the experience of those called in Canada First Nations. The colonial experiences of all four countries are, of course, rooted in British colonial pasts, and a related essay examines an exhibit on Indian teas in London. A second essay on the United States looks at how the immigrant other is remembered. The remaining seven essays illustrate, in one case, the comparable experience of French colonialism and national identity; the complicated rendering of the constructed character of racial identity in hierarchical cases of mixed race in Cuba, Brazil, Ecuador, and Mexico; and the rehistoricizing of monuments that resonate with earlier moments in Nepal and South Africa.

viii    a bout the ser ies

Introduction: Memory, Race, and the Nation in Public Spaces

Lisa Maya Knauer and Daniel J. Walkowitz

the red-hot nationalist movements that have marked (and often scarred) the new millennium have mobilized primordialist, essentialized, and postcolonial understandings of complicated racial and national identities to help them build “modern” nation-states. Thus, postcolonial theory—notably, the focus on the impact of imperialism in an era of decolonization—is one of the forces that shape the writing of national narratives, especially in states with colonial legacies and neoco­ lonial presents. This is as true in former colonial powers as it is in the countries they colonized. The pioneering work of cultural theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Antoinette Burton, among others, has shaped compelling new analyses that interrogate the categories of race and the nation, both as “imagined” or “invented” social constructions and as subject positions.1 This “invention,” however, has taken on new political freight since the breakup of the former Soviet Union, the events of September 11, and a regime of war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East. Thus, Eastern European countries have rushed to embrace nationalism at the same time that multiculturalism

and identity politics have challenged national identities in Western democracies. Moreover, postcolonial interrogations of race and national identity exist in ongoing tension with surprisingly durable modernist notions of a unified nation-state. The political stakes of this tension are high and can be seen in struggles over the representation of the nation in its monuments, museums, and other public history sites where the various interested parties cannot agree on what the proper tone or the overarching narrative should be. This is the second of two volumes on history in public spaces around the globe, and like its predecessor this collection reflects the impact of political transformations on contested histories of museums, monuments, media, and texts. The thirteen essays in this volume, however, reflect the impact of postcolonial theory—what Burton has labeled “the imperial turn”—in their interrogations of how race and empire are implicated, referenced, or obscured in the construction of national narratives as they inform the political calculus of the varied stakeholders in public history debates. The essays demonstrate the complexity of these formulations in historical theory and practice. They also testify to the international and spatial reach of these debates, and the wide range of public arenas in which histories are negotiated. Five of the essays were previously published in the Public History section of the Radical History Review nearly a decade ago; most of these have been revised and updated for this volume. The thirteen essays reflect public histories in thirteen or fourteen countries; it is hard to fix a number because in at least one case, the specific public history project under discussion embraces historical memories that are being actively renegotiated between a former colonial power and its former colony. The essays reflect the geographic frame of empire historically and in mostly expected terms. The major regions of the world are all represented: Europe (Britain and France), Latin America and the Caribbean (Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and Guadeloupe), Africa (South Africa), North America (the United States and Canada), Asia (Nepal), and the Antipodes (both Australia and New Zealand). The first six essays are essentially grounded in the Anglophone imperia, and five others basically center on Latin America and the Caribbean. The essays on South Africa and Nepal indicate both the global reach of empire into Africa and Asia and empire’s troubled legacy in the postcolonial era. Beyond their geographic spread,     l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

the countries discussed represent a fairly broad spectrum in terms of size and degree of national cohesion. They include global and regional powerhouses and small island nations, countries that only recently achieved independence and long-established nation-states. The essays in this collection also highlight the existence of fundamental conflicts over the interpretation of history and its representation in the public arena at several levels: first, between the public and the historical profession; second, within both the public and the historical profession; third, between historians and the state and private agencies on which they depend for funding of public programming; and fourth, between historians and other professionals involved in public history endeavors (such as museum curators) who operate with a different set of criteria. These issues have often been politically fraught—a case in point is the California textbook debates of the 1960s, which pitted Superintendent of Public Instruction Max Rafferty against historians like John Hope Franklin. These conflicts have evolved in the succeeding decades as history (and historians) has become increasingly politicized and subject to intense scrutiny and passionate, often shrill public debate. We use the singular public here somewhat guardedly. All too often, politicians, scholars, and other professionals refer to “the public” as though it were a unified, homogenous mass with a single set of values and interests. In multiracial or multiethnic societies, race, class, gender, and citizenship status, among other factors, shape individuals’ investment in national narratives and the way in which they view themselves in relationship to the public sphere—including debates over public history sites. It is perhaps more accurate and helpful to conceive of multiple publics with divergent and often competing interests and different stakes in how histories are represented.2 Historians influenced by the New Left and other social movements of the 1960s and 1970s began to produce histories that highlighted the voices and experiences of the “common folk”—women, workers, and ethnic and racial “minorities”—in history. They drew upon sources whose historicity and authority had to be established and defended—principally oral histories and the multifarious vernacular artifacts that ordinary people accumulated. These new accounts were meant to do more than simply add missing ingredients (the silenced voices and missing stories). By arguing that grass-roots introduction    

social actors were active (if subaltern) agents in history making, the new social historians, as they were called, challenged top-down accounts about how the past was made. But they also expanded the production of historical knowledge beyond the ivory tower. Not only did academically trained historians work in nonacademic settings (trade unions, community centers), but these new practices and techniques were adopted by museum professionals and filmmakers (often working in collaboration with historians) to present living social history in documentaries and museums dedicated to everyday life. These were also taken up by community activists, schoolteachers, and others even further removed from academia.3 By the 1980s, as activists and scholars pressed for the inclusion of multiple “others,” community activists and museum professionals embraced biculturalism and multiculturalism to mirror left-liberal politicians’ pressures for rainbow coalitions. This opening up of history, however, while expansive in many regards, primarily stayed within a modernist paradigm. Identity, while celebrated, was seen as fairly stable and unitary. Change, while a constant, was usually for the better. The wheels of history moved in one direction only, and that was forward. The essays in this volume illustrate the strange legacy of this past from our vantage point early in the new millennium. Starting in the late 1980s, those modernist narratives began to lose their purchase, and in their place (or alongside them) writers and artists as well as historians devised openended, multivocal stories. These new texts (visual, performative, and written) engaged the objectivity and supposed omniscience of the author and the stability of the subject, problematized racial, ethnic, and sexual identities, and often blurred the boundaries between scholarship and art.4 The more political ones also challenged nationalist ideologies and the legitimacy of the nation-state more directly. Public reaction to these narratives has been intense, especially when politicians and state actors are heavily invested in the “histories” that are being destabilized if not discredited. Neoconservatives wedded to neolib­ eral privatizing and free-market policies complain of “political correctness” and seek to resurrect older stories which center on the achievements of Great White Men. And they reassert with pride the civilizing role of imperialism—most notably in the writing of Niall Ferguson.5 The ensuing battles, often referred to as “the culture wars,” have largely taken place in the     l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

public sphere—by which we mean not only the classic public sphere of me­ dia but also museums, monuments, and textbooks. Traces of these struggles between modernist strategies and postmodern, postcolonial interpretations can be seen in all thirteen essays. Ironically, the modernist stance, which is embraced by conservative politicians, urban boosters, and many commercial interests wedded to the sites as venues for cultural tourism and urban “renewal,” often takes lessons from the New Social History to argue for diversity and difference as markers of the openness, the success, and pluralism of the state and society. In contrast, as Durba Ghosh discusses in her essay, the postmodern museology worries that those national cultural projects which celebrate diversity are simply turning multiculturalism into a management technique, substituting exhibit for policy, and masking persistent inequalities, racism, and cultural chauvinism behind entertaining spectacles. The conflicts that animate these stories reflect some of the contemporary tensions and contradictions facing public historians who seek to engage public audiences and win their favor and financial support, even while telling them stories that may upset them, stories they may not wish to hear. To be sure, these tensions are not new: they came to a head in Europe in the 1980s as Germans, Austrians, and other East and Central Europeans debated the meaning of the Holocaust. Stateside, the culture wars reached a boiling point over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982 and again in the mid-1990s when the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibit called attention to Japanese war deaths. Both of these battles pitted war veterans against the professionals (an architecture student in the case of the Vietnam Memorial, curators and historians in the Enola Gay exhibit).6 But such tensions can be traced even further back in these nations’ histories: they also underlay John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s censorship and destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center depicting Marx and Lenin in the 1930s.7 Two recent developments, however, make this an especially significant moment in the history of public history. First, in the wake of deindustrialization and economic restructuring, everyone from grass-roots organizers to politicians and developers stresses history (or “heritage”) as an element of the cultural or creative economy that they fervently believe (or hope) will serve as a magic bullet to revitalize sluggish local and regional economies.8 In the absence of national and international policies that would introduction    

address outsourcing or the movement of jobs to cheap labor markets, “the arts,” historic districts, and cultural tourism seem like the only viable options to stanch the flow of money, jobs, and people from areas like Rochester, New York, or Detroit, Michigan. The increased focus on “history” intersects with a growing belief in neoliberal (that is, privately financed) solutions. In efforts to leverage the past, however, the various groups find history often becomes a contested terrain. As the essays illustrate, local and national participants in these struggles have not only divergent agendas but also unequal reserves of financial, political, and cultural capital with which to advance those agendas. A second element shapes these postcolonial-versus-modernist struggles: the omnipresence of war and the threat of war—from colonial wars of expansion and wars of independence to contemporary imperial ventures. State nationalist projects selectively invoke history and memory to justify their own positions, and war invariably raises both the stakes and the volume of the debate. This is true not only in the United States but in its many clients and allies that have joined the new millennium’s political crusades. State policy is served by unjustifiably simplifying (for its own ends) complicated and untidy pasts. Incomplete, partial, and decontextualized renderings of past events are then reframed to fit foreign policy needs; complexity is sacrificed for the sake of sound bites. Other claims on the imperial state (particularly those having to do with social justice, whether launched by citizens or other states, including its former colonies or neocolonies) can be conveniently ignored. In the new millennium, critical examination or deconstruction of the past, as well as political dissent, is equated with lack of patriotism or “terrorism.” Media announcements constantly remind Americans that “we” are “A Nation at War,” thus implicating them, willing or no, in the imperial project. Government responses to terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, Bali, and other places, and their appeals to citizens, have had a similar thrust. Contemporary wars—civil, genocidal, nationalistic, or imperial—thus help account for the acrimony surrounding public history debates and make the international reach of the essays in this volume especially powerful. In Nepal, the current “war” is incorporated almost seamlessly into a familiar Cold-War, anti-Communist narrative while a repressive state and dictatorial

    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

king, dependent on U.S. military support, confronts a Maoist insurgency. In the Caribbean and South America, the state invokes “war” to mobilize popular support for suppression of indigenous forces represented by the state as “terrorist agents.” And in this context, states have frequently used military force to maintain or reinstate colonial rule: Republican France invaded its former Caribbean possessions of Haiti and Guadeloupe, and the British launched wars in India and China. Alternately, participating in someone else’s war can be a means of asserting a shift in colonial allegiances; such was the case when New Zealand used its support of U.S. efforts in Vietnam to assert its independence from Britain. These stories—some fairly recent—take on a new political valence as states gear up to mobilize support to convince uneasy, fearful publics to fight terrorism. The title of this volume highlights the themes that evidence the impact of the imperial turn in public history sites. The word memory in our title has produced a rich cottage industry of its own, especially around the oral history of survivors of traumatic events.9 In the postmodern moment it has been a point of entry into the history of subjectivities, an unstable phenomenon that is as much about forgetting and self-censoring as remembering. In the contemporary public arena, however, we see memories contested by those in power on the one hand and those seeking it on the other.10 Exhibitors, often struggling to negotiate such interests, find themselves authorizing and “creating” or “inventing” presentist sites for memories. We can see this latter process dramatically in the installation of a former opponent of the French Republic’s colonial aspirations, Louis Delgrès, into the French Pantheon. This is but the latest of many political struggles about who is in and who is out of the Pantheon, and it is not likely to be the last one.11 As David Maximin, the Guadeloupean historian largely responsible for this reassessment of Delgrès, insightfully observes: “The present always invites a past for itself out of its desires.”12 The plasticity of categories, like insights into the invention of tradition and memory, is evident in debates surrounding the second keyword in our title, race.13 While there is a strong tendency, especially in the United States, to essentialize race as a black-or-white binary, recent scholarship on whiteness points out that racialization has never been that simple. Not all European immigrants to the United States were initially considered “white”

introduction    

upon arrival, and increased immigration in the last two decades from Latin American and Asia has complicated matters even more.14 In England, postcolonial subjects from the Caribbean and Asia have challenged the equation British = “white.”15 And as a growing number of scholars detail, race in Latin America has never been a simple black-and-white matter.16 On the other hand, we see common identities as a “race” adopted in problematic constructions, whether in the various shadings of race among mestizo and indigenous peoples or instances where putative difference between the “ethnic” and the “racial” is either asserted or blurred. The social construction of race, however, is shaped by both “racial” inequalities (differences) maintained by those in power and by racialized groups seeking to make their voices part of the historical record. Thus, we find some curators essentializing race at the same time they seek to redress the legacy of racial discrimination. In New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, for example, curators at museums dedicated to empowering the voices of “native peoples” claim the need for “authentic” native historians, while leaving open the question of how authenticity will be determined. The third keyword in our title, nation, is a metonym for the constellation of meanings invoked by empire, citizenship, and the colonial. For the essays in this collection focus on how public history sites define the nation, in relation to both its imperial past and its present. These sites become microcosms of larger debates involving both state actors and varied publics (which do not always agree) over the boundaries of the state, its legacy, and who belongs to it. The meaning of citizenship is hotly contested, as first peoples, immigrants, and other racialized communities have pointed out. National cultural projects—biculturalism, multiculturalism, pluralism, diversity—are invoked either to reject or to legitimize a colonial past or the past as a colonized subject. Within the exhibits numerous players compete to authorize their versions of the past, even as the question of who gets to judge the authenticity of one account or another remains. Curators and historians, not surprisingly, shape some sites more than others, and often must share authority, albeit uneasily, with the growing legion of heritage professionals, who themselves bring differing amounts of formal and informal historical training to their jobs. Thus, in Ecuador the state-sanctioned history textbooks

    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

celebrate accounts by the eighteenth-century exiled priest Velasco as a way of legitimizing Ecuadorian nationhood. Yet in other cases, museums committed to providing a postmodern polyphony of voices include aboriginal perspectives alongside those of colonizers. Of course, the issue remains which voices get privileged, which get heard, or which exist as an alternative to inclusion in the world outside the exhibit. This last set of issues suggests the political stakes which these essays show to be at the heart of contemporary public history around the globe. And in this struggle historians and curators are but two groups among many, and ones with limited power at that. Historians have professional credentials they can mobilize to make their claims to speak for the past. In cultures that respect professionalism (alas, even uncritically), this power is not minimal. But other social actors have wielded considerable financial and political authority that has long jeopardized the integrity of public history. Many public history endeavors were, in fact, initiated by private individuals and groups, ranging from local boosters, patriots, history buffs, and antiquarians to civic reformers.17 They often appealed to the state (national, regional, or local) for legal approval (and sometimes funding). By the middle of the twentieth century, the state had become the source of much of the funding on which public history sites depended. State-legitimizing agendas then often determined whether or not the funding spigot flowed. More recently, the neoliberal alternative, increasingly favored by both democratic and dictatorial regimes, calls for turning, or returning, public history sites to private hands, a phenomenon that shapes several of the sites discussed. Private interests may be benign and philanthropic to be sure; what we see, however, is an increasing role played by private agencies with corporate modernist agendas, such as the Daughters of the Republic of Texas at the Alamo site. Playing into this modernist enterprise project is the growing role given to public history sites for state patriotic veneration, corporate financial gain, or urban renewal “heritage” entertainment. Indeed, the commodification of the past turns history into “heritage,” which means, according to Didier Maleuvre that it is “something already forgotten.”18 At the same time as history with a business veneer can win private corporate funding, marginalized groups that lack the resources to finance the reinsertion of their historical narratives find themselves appealing to a shrinking or

introduction    

less responsive state. Such is the fraught political economy of public history in and for the twenty-first century, and it is not a pretty sight. A collection of essays as rich and varied as the ones in this volume presents an organizational challenge to the editors, for there are invariably multiple logics that run through the essays and put them into dialogue with each other. In the end, the essays are grouped into four thematic sections, corresponding to some of the central concerns they address. The three articles in the first section of the book, “First Things First,” explore the relationship between indigenous groups and “national” institutions in New Zealand, Canada. and Australia. Postcolonialism has a double twist here, since all three countries are former British colonies (and are still part of the Commonwealth).19 Some of the most far-reaching challenges to Western museology have come from the scholarly disciplines most implicated in its practices— history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists were forced to question their own epistemologies and disciplinary practices in the wake of decolonization, the Vietnam war, and the “new social movements,” in particular the newly invigorated movements of indigenous or “first” peoples, particularly in the Americas and the Antipodes. Although indigenous groups have been challenging and resisting Western and colonialist categorization and systems of knowledge production since the 1500s, these efforts have become more visible and urgent, starting in the 1960s and 1970s. In vocal and often provocative, sometimes performative ways, indigenous groups have questioned the authority of museums, historians, and anthropologists on several levels. National museums with massive ethnographic collections, like the Smithsonian Institution, became important sites of struggle for groups seeking redress for past wrongs. Some of the best-publicized cases revolved around Native American and Torres Straits Islanders who sought (and often won) the return of sacred and other artifacts that had been gathered during the grand “salvage ethnography” collecting expeditions that were a hallmark of imperializing anthropology.20 Indigenous groups have challenged the public museums’ rights of ownership over these items.21 Directly or indirectly, they have raised concerns about the conditions under which the museums had collected the artifacts and argued that they rightfully belonged to the descendants of the people 10    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

from whom they had been taken or purchased. But indigenous peoples have also called into question the entire epistemological framework that undergirds what Tony Bennett calls “the exhibitionary complex”—the classificatory schema into which “objects of ethnography” are placed, the design protocols that dictate how items should be arranged and displayed, and the interpretive structures (labels, wall texts, catalog essays) that guide the viewer experience.22 First peoples were questioning the professionals’ knowledge about, and ability to interpret, indigenous culture. But they were also questioning two of the fundamental logics of museums: preservation and display. In many instances, indigenous communities had declared that the recovered objects would be reburied, destroyed in purification rituals, or otherwise removed from public view. Preservationists, historians, and archaeologists often bemoaned these actions as antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge (at least as defined in their terms) and as putting the needs of a small group above the greater public good. In addition to the direct challenge to ownership, museum collections have also been used to substantiate legal and political claims against the postcolonial states. New Zealand is an appropriate starting point for this section because much of the recent agitation by first peoples in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere around land and cultural rights is based on the pioneering work done by the historian Claudia Orange on the treatment of the Maori in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Orange focused attention on the Treaty of Waitangi, which provided the legal basis for the dispossession of the Maori by missionaries and politicians but had been ignored or downplayed by earlier historians.23 The treaty, in fact, occupies a place of honor in the central hall of the new national museum, called Te Papa (“Our Place” in Maori), that is the subject of the first essay, “Two Peoples, One Mission,” by Charlotte Macdonald. The museum’s narrative has been shaped by several competing interests: the quest for a distinctive national identity, boosterism, and claims by newly empowered Maori groups. Certainly the museum has helped further raise New Zealand’s profile as a tourist location, following the boost generated by the spectacular success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, filmed in New Zealand. The museum, Macdonald argues, is thus simultaneously a site for conferring citizenship and cultivating national pride and also for producing a tourist brand to be sold. Celebration, populist appeal, and the museum as introduction    11

“experience” thus win out over critical engagement with colonial legacies; hence the emphasis on crowd-pleasing blockbuster special exhibits (like the 2002–3 Lord of the Rings extravaganza). National identity itself is displayed through a parade of consumer goods. The politics of biculturalism are not without contradictions, and this is expressed in the museum’s treatment of Pakeha (white) and Maori contributions to New Zealand’s national story in two separate parts of the permanent exhibit. In Macdonald’s reading of these exhibits, the Pakeha are endowed with history while the Maori only possess culture. The celebratory narrative is complicated by New Zealand’s own somewhat vexed efforts to establish itself as a regional power; after gaining independence from Britain, New Zealand became a satellite of the United States and is now trying to chart an independent course. New Zealand, MacDonald implies, becomes a modified Britain, searching for difference at the end of empire. The museum has had its critics and naysayers, but she notes that they too visit the museum, even as they question its authority. She thus suggests that the significance of the museum is not limited to the content of its exhibits, but includes creating a space where people of varying views can create their own narratives. Celebration of national identity and the respective contributions of white and native peoples are also at the heart of the Canadian Museum of Civilization (cmc), the subject of the second essay, “Contesting Time, Place, and Nation,” by Ruth Phillips and Mark Phillips. The Phillipses offer a nuanced reading of the museum’s central exhibits: the Grand Hall, the Canada Hall, and the First Peoples’ Hall. Both the Grand Hall and the Canada Hall offer contrasting but complementary presentations of Canadian history. The Phillipses argue that establishment of the cmc must be seen in the context of political and legal struggles to recognize the rights of first peoples, as well as contemporaneous challenges to modernist practices in museology. A Task Force on Museums and First Peoples, including both native and nonnative museum professionals, collaborated on the planning and design; in the resulting exhibition indigenous perspectives are put on an equal footing with anthropological knowledge. The First Peoples’ Hall thus simultaneously draws upon anthropological and museological conventions and offers critical interventions. The cmc creates a “museum effect,” but it is a polyphonous one. Overall, the museum offers an idealized 12    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

and celebratory vision of a national past; both indigenous and immigrant experiences are collapsed into an overarching settler narrative. While the first two essays focus on specific museums, and the Phillipses’ essay in particular explores aesthetic dimensions and the visual politics of display, the third essay, “Unfinished Business” by Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton engages the representation of Aborigines within the Australian national narrative by tracing the evolution of public history in Australia. Ashton and Hamilton provide, in a way, a social history of Australia’s efforts to mark and interpret its past. They distinguish three major periods in how Australian public history marks the encounters with race and empire. Grass-roots public history among white Australians dates back to the nineteenth century, when statues were erected in honor of the explorers and their pioneering spirit. Starting in the 1970s, in response to both the New Social History and indigenous organizing, there were efforts to “fill in the gaps” by recognizing the groups that had been excluded or omitted, such as Aborigines, and earlier monuments were challenged or contested. However, in the past twenty years, the context for public history initiatives and their accompanying debates has shifted. History became one of the terrains upon which increasingly militant Aboriginal groups have launched struggles for cultural, political, and land rights; the 1988 celebration of the Australian bicentenary was an occasion for Aboriginal protest. While the election of a conservative government in 1996 reinvigorated a view of Aborigines as people who need to be saved and brought into the modernist project, the election in November 2007 of a Labour government augurs a willingness to confront the legacy of Australia’s historic mistreatment of Aborigines. The authors note that, in an ironic way, the nationalization of Aboriginal history—moving it from the margins into the center of a national narrative— gives Australia a deeper history than it would otherwise have. But for the most part the history of racial conflict and division is wrapped into a larger story of reconciliation to bolster Australia’s claim to consensual multiculturalism, while presenting a pleasing image to tourists. Ashton and Hamilton note that Aboriginal narratives have found their way into some history textbooks, films, and television programs, and they question whether certain public history sites are more conducive to such interventions. They argue that, for a new history, there need to be more Aborigine historians. However, in our view, this hews to conventional biases favoring the voices introduction    13

of “professionals” and also fails to grapple with issues of essentialism and insiders’ possessive investments. The collection’s second section, “Colonial Legacies and Winners’ Tales,” addresses how nation-states that are still working out their own postcolonial status and identity grapple with the colonial legacies that frame their internal cultural politics. The three essays in this section explore how these issues reverberate “in the belly of the beast”—in this case, Britain and the United States. Although José Martí’s phrase has become a cliché, its use here is not gratuitous. In his visionary essay, “Our America,” written in the heat of the Cuban wars of independence, Martí cautions that political independence will not guarantee the sovereignty of Latin American nations, since they have as much to fear from their colossal neighbor to the north as they do from the older colonial powers across the Atlantic.24 History, as many critics have noted, is usually written by the victors. Erasing the past is itself a time-honored practice, and so is converting unpleasant episodes into something more palatable. This is quite literally what the British Library did with its exhibition in 2002 about the British East India Company, the subject of Durba Ghosh’s essay “Exhibiting Asia in Britain.” The library itself, Ghosh notes, has functioned as a repository for both the trophies of empire and the knowledge required to produce citizenship. But how does the colonial past get represented to a twentyfirst-century citizenry that now includes former colonial subjects and their descendants? The exhibition thus has twin challenges: to educate white Britons about a bland diversity devoid of hierarchy, inequality, and power while assimilating those same “others” as citizen-subjects of the nation. For Ghosh, the narrative of the exhibit has to be understood within the context of contemporary debates about what Niall Ferguson has labeled “Anglobalization.”25 She concludes that the exhibit opts for a reinterpretation of empire that creates a “teleology for the present.” Sidestepping the nasty parts of imperialism (the Opium Wars, slavery) by focusing instead on the commodities that circulated between Asia and Britain, the exhibit suggests seamless links between twenty-first-century Britons and their eighteenth-century counterparts. By reducing the politics of empire to the circulation of consumer goods (all available at the gift shop), the exhibit removes racial and cultural difference from matrices of power and inequality and glosses over the fact that some viewers’ forebears were plantation 14    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

laborers while others’ ancestors enjoyed the fruits of that labor. Empire is presented not as a problem but as a training ground for racial tolerance, which allows for the management of multiculturalism. In our first collection we deliberately chose to keep the United States as an “absent presence.” However, this collection features two essays on racialized public history sites in the United States that offer distinct but complementary glimpses of the manifold ways that notions of race and ethnicity figure into constructions of “Americanness.” They also remind us that in a country as heterogeneous and expansive as the United States, the boundaries between local narratives and national concerns are often blurry: a site like the Alamo may have a particular resonance for Texans who view it as local history, while people in other parts of the country, who are less personally invested but nonetheless see it as embodying “American” values, may read it very differently. Richard Flores’s essay, “The Alamo,” critically interrogates how, why, and by whom monuments and markers are made. His analysis is a salutary reminder that the designation of a building, ruin, or other site as “historic” is not a “natural” process. The dominant myth of the Battle of the Alamo, which is reiterated throughout the memorial, argues that “good” freedomloving Texans (i.e., Anglos) were pitted against “bad,” despotic Mexicans. In the 1960s, some historians promoted a more inclusive narrative, pointing out that people of Mexican descent fought on both sides. Later critics suggested that the specific battle that the memorial commemorates needed to be placed in a broader context. Flores agrees that the Alamo site is a palimpsest, but argues that these critiques accept the basic structure of the myth—an epic, definitional battle between two opposed forces. A more interesting task for critical historians is to look at how and when the myth gained currency, whose interests it serves, and what power relations are revealed or masked. The Alamo did not become a public memorial immediately after the attack, since what happened there was not viewed as especially significant at the time. Years later, newly arrived Midwesterners hit upon the Alamo as a master symbol that legitimates the expropriation of Mexicans. The Alamo memorial, Flores suggests, is thus part of a colonial project to justify western expansion. Modernity makes the Alamo historically significant and part of a progress tale. introduction    15

Modernity is also part of the overarching narrative of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, analyzed by Daniel Walkowitz in “Ellis Island Redux.” Walkowitz uses the arrival of his immigrant forebears, Jewish radicals from Poland, as a window onto the recently refurbished Ellis Island experience, and uses Ellis Island to stage a discussion about race, ethnicity, and citizenship, from the nineteenth century to the post-9/11 era. He draws a neat parallel between the way in which the Immigration Museum’s displays and text foreground “immigration” as the master narrative of “the peopling of America” (conveniently collapsing the discordant narratives of the nonimmigrants—Native Americans, enslaved Africans), and how racially marked European immigrants took on (or were given) new identities as “white” Americans in order to gain access to the American dream. Throughout this book, authors question the investments of various social actors in how national narratives are constructed and historical memo­ ries are mobilized—and to what ends. The third section, “State Stories,” foregrounds the role of the state in promoting and disseminating history. The state, of course, is not a monolithic entity, and national regimes are not static. In fact, the opening essay in this section, “A Cultural Conundrum?” by Albert Grundlingh, looks at what happens to a monument that legitimated a specific set of governmental policies when there is a radical, almost revolutionary regime change. The Voortrekker Monument in South Africa was erected by Afrikaner nationalists in 1949 to commemorate their forebears’ epic journey inland and the defeat of Zulu resistance, and during the four decades of white minority rule, it was the emblematic national monument. In the postapartheid era, Grundlingh argues, when Afrikaners were no longer the dominant group, the monument “shrank” and was initially redefined as an ethnic and not national shrine. There was a concurrent shift in how Afrikanerness was expressed: less dependent upon monuments, more on festivals and performance of ethnicity. The monument could not be a shrine of nationalism when the basis of that nationalism itself had been eroded. Afrikaner fears that a black government would topple the symbols of the old regime proved to be groundless; Grundlingh notes that blacks have chosen to focus on real power and can thus afford to ignore symbolic power represented by the monument. However, in the new millennium, as the government led by the African National Congress looks to international tourism to boost South Africa’s flagging economy, unsavory moments of 16    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

the past like the Voortrekker Monument can be cleansed of that unsavory past and repackaged as “heritage.” Most of the public history projects examined in this volume focus on the idea of a “national narrative.” For most it is somewhat metaphorical, but in the case of the Ecuadorian history textbooks examined by O. Hugo Benavides in “Narratives of Power, the Power of Narratives,” these are quite literally state-mandated narratives. The fragility of the Ecuadorian nationstate, in Benavides’s analysis, has led to the adoption of a foundational fiction that passes for official history. An obscure eighteenth-century text by an exiled priest, detailing an indigenous pre-Colombian Kingdom of Quito, whose inhabitants are purportedly the ancestors of modern Ecuadorians, was taken up by twentieth-century historians. The gripping narrative is peopled by noble leaders, valiant generals, and beautiful princesses who ward off the incursions of the rapacious Inca neighbors, and the fact that there is no ethnohistorical or archaeological evidence (aside from the priest’s text) to support the myth has not prevented it from becoming a required part of the history curriculum in both public and private schools. Benavides, an archaeologist by training, explores how the narrative functions to bolster Ecuador’s claim to sovereignty and national distinctiveness. He also notes the ironic disjuncture between the veneration afforded these mythic indigenous ancestors and the marginalized status of Ecuador’s substantial contemporary indigenous population. While Benavides’s essay looks at how a fragile nation-state mobilizes a particular myth both to garner the allegiance of its citizens and to send a message to its neighbors, Deborah Poole, in her essay “Affective Distinctions,” explores how racialized culture is used to ensure allegiance to a regional government—that of the Mexican state of Oaxaca—and give those regional elites a voice on the national stage. Starting in the 1920s, the local elite launched a series of cultural projects to distinguish Oaxacan regional identity against two external hegemonies: U.S. cultural imperialism and the centrifugal force of the Mexican national state. These early endeavors culminated in a kind of ethnoracial beauty pageant called the Homenaje Racial (racial homage), featuring women who were chosen to represent each of Oaxaca’s major indigenous communities (although the racial ambassadresses, as they were called, did not have indigenous features). In the present era of neoliberal reforms, culture plays an increasingly important role introduction    17

in the management of groups and communities. The discourse of mestizaje (racial mixing), which was idealized in the Homenaje Racial, has been replaced by multiculturalism, with an emphasis on locality and authenticity. Pageantry has given way to performativity, as the Oaxacan government now stages an annual folkloric festival called the Guelaguetza, featuring representatives of designated ethnic groups outfitted in “authentic” costumes and performing “typical” dances. Regional identities are still mapped onto women’s bodies, but now with an eye to ensuring Oaxaca’s stature as a tourist destination. Although state institutions are key players in constructing historic narratives, they are not monolithic. Sometimes there are internal fissures, and at other times institutions respond to pressures from outside groups or even strategically situated individuals. The final section of the book, “UnderStated Stories,” turns to challenges to the state’s apparent monopoly over collective memory and history making. Anne Rademacher’s article, “Marking Remembrance,” situates debates over which of two riverbank monuments in the Kathmandu Valley—one imagined and one existing—more appropriately reflects Nepalese national identity against a backdrop of political turmoil and questions about the future of the Nepalese nation-state. A United Nations Park, initially proposed by development professionals, scholars, and government officials on the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations to commemorate Nepal’s contributions as a member state, would emphasize Nepal’s role on the global stage; a key element of this plan was a pillar to honor the Nepalese who had died in un peacekeeping operations. The director of the Conservation Program, Laxman Shrestha, argued that locating the pillar on the banks of the Bagmati River would also be ecological in gaining attention for the riverscape and its preservation. A prominent ecological and cultural activist, Huta Ram Baidya, however, launched a crusade to restore and rehistoricize a different pillar—the 200-year-old Bhim Sen pillar, which had been displaced in the course of constructing a new bridge over the Bagmati. This bridge had been designed, in Baidya’s view, to legitimate the current government. But according to Rademacher, Baidya’s crusade was part of a broader critique of development initiatives that ignored local traditions—the pillar had been moved in violation of archaeological protocols, and there were no markers to iden18    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

tify what the pillar commemorated. Where the un Park highlighted the international context and Nepal’s modernity, the Bhim Sen pillar reflected an ancient, locally based civilization and stood as a symbolic critique of international donor interventions. The mobilization of competing versions of history to support urban redevelopment projects—this time in a Rio de Janeiro favela (shantytown)— is the subject of Paul Amar’s essay, “Saving Rio’s ‘Cradle of Samba.’ ” The municipal government has selected Serrinha, a predominantly black favela, as the site for a model project called Favela Bairro, designed to “erase the barriers” between the favelas—constructed as sites of racialized otherness and criminality—and middle-class neighborhoods or bairros. But Serrinha has, in fact, occupied an ambiguous place in the national imaginary. Since the 1920s it has been associated with the preservation of Afro-Brazilian religion and music; Carmen Miranda ostensibly learned to samba in Serrinha. And in the last twenty years it has become famous as a hub in the large drug-trafficking economy, which has created a parallel social, political, and economic infrastructure in many of Rio’s favelas that were effectively ignored by the state for decades. “Heritage” and racialized culture are thus key elements in the government’s Favela-Bairro initiative, which calls for integrating Serrinha into the larger urban fabric through a combination of urban beautification schemes and strategic marketing of Serrinha’s glorious past as the birthplace of samba, promoting the favela as a tourist destination for both international visitors and Rio’s middle-class residents. Appeals to a history of racial cordiality, argues Amar, mask the structural inequalities that have created racial ghettos like Serrinha. But the municipal authorities are not the only group with an agenda for Serrinha. Police and drug traffickers are also interested in managing urban public space and favela residents; the police deploy another set of historic racial tropes (criminality, marginality) to justify their social control practices and de facto militarization of the favelas. Meanwhile, favela residents have developed alternative projects that emphasize Afro-Brazilian cultural production, and these would create, in effect, a black heritage trail along the border of Serrinha. These, too, appeal to history, but a somewhat idealized, even essentialized version that emphasizes community agency and racial pride. introduction    19

These ambivalent attitudes surrounding African-derived culture are echoed, in certain ways, in Cuba, the subject of Lisa Maya Knauer’s essay, “Afrocuban Religion, Museums, and the Cuban Nation,” where nationalists have, for over a century, promoted a vision of a raceless society. Afrocuban cultural practices have been viewed as both colorful folklore and a backward relic, as both heritage and an impediment to modernity, by officials and intellectuals from the Spanish colonial authorities to Castro’s revolutionary government. Cuba’s entry into the international tourism market has been accompanied by a revalorization of racialized culture, argues Knauer, an expansion of the “exhibitionary complex” of museums and folkloric performance venues. But this has occurred against the backdrop of historic preservation and urban redevelopment initiatives as Old Havana, a unesco World Heritage site, is transformed into a tourist-friendly zone. Knauer’s essay looks at a museum exhibit on Afrocuban religion and a cultural performance that reenacts a nineteenth-century black street festi­ val that was a precursor of Havana’s carnival. Each plays with racialized history and historic memory. For countries that have been linked by colonial or imperial bonds, historical memory is often contested between metropole and colony (or former colony). For former colonial powers like Britain or France, their own glorious tales of nation-building usually conveniently underplay or ignore the role played by their overseas possessions—and most particularly, the slave labor on Caribbean plantations. This point has been brilliantly argued by Caribbean scholars such as Eric Williams and C. L. R. James but has occupied a marginal place in much European historiography.26 French historians—even radical or Marxist ones—have been notably uncomfortable about discussing the history of slavery in the French empire and its repercussions in both metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean. One moment when the silence was—at least momentarily—broken came when two Caribbean heroes of African descent—Toussaint Louverture of Haiti and Louis Delgrès of Guadeloupe—were installed in the hallowed Pantheon in Paris. Laurent Dubois’s essay, “Haunting Delgrès,” uses this unlikely event to explore how the legacy of slavery and racial oppression has been understood—and silenced—in France and the French Caribbean. Dubois observes that slavery was notably absent from the 1989 celebration of the French revolution’s bicentennial. To acknowledge that 20    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

the Republican ideals of “liberté, egalité, fraternité” most decidedly did not extend to black slaves or even hommes de couleur (free men of color) would destroy some cherished (and widely held) myths about the French Revolution. In fact, slavery was briefly abolished during the French Revolution, but its reinstatement under Napoleon sparked revolts in the Caribbean that challenged French rule. Delgrès, one of the leaders of the revolt in Guadeloupe, perished fighting Bonaparte’s forces, which retook Guadeloupe and violently reimposed slavery. The elevation of Delgrès to heroic status began in Guadeloupe and then moved to France—reversing the usual flow of the commemorative enterprise. Daniel Maximin, the Guadeloupean historian invited to Paris to help plan the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of abolition, was able to lobby for the memorialization of Louverture and Delgrès. Afro-Caribbeans had been incorporated into French historical memory since the revolution, but usually as villains or a sideshow. Their inclusion in the Pantheon has a double edge: it both elevates them to heroic status, and also inscribes them into a French project. A challenge to colonialism is thus recast as a key act within a republican drama. As we noted at the outset, other routes can be usefully traced through these articles. One has to do with the stability and hegemonic authority of national narratives and the extent to which national political elites (and other groups) see larger issues at stake in the interpretation and representation of history. In the case of Ecuador, a frail nationalism has to rely upon heroic myths, fabricating or at least embroidering a foundational narrative. Although we did not set out to look at the impact of regime changes, it is clear that wars, revolutions, decolonization, and national elections have shaped how race is understood, memories are mobilized, and histories are represented. Political transformation (the subject of the earlier collection of essays which is a companion to the present volume) is thus a subtext for many of these essays. Some of these shifts are dramatic, as in the case of South Africa, where a seemingly monolithic and powerful regime controlled by a racial minority simply handed power over—so it appeared—to the representatives of a movement and political party it had tried for decades to quash by legal and extralegal means. Several countries with strong labor and social democratic traditions have seen the political pendulum introduction    21

drift or swing rightward. In many of the countries examined in this volume, governments have adopted neoliberal policies emphasizing privatization. We should make it clear that we do not view any of the three central terms of the title—race, memory, and nation—as having a fixed definition, but we do see each as a distinct point of entry to thinking about these essays relationally. Michael Omi and Howard Winant introduced the concept of racial formation to suggest the complex congeries of institutional structures, social relationships, practices, beliefs, and “structures of feeling” that shape how race is understood and experienced in the United States.27 It will become clear from reading through these essays that race can be an extremely fluid, sometimes elusive concept that nonetheless often plays a foundational role in determining who is, and who is not, part of the nation, who has claims to citizenship and who is merely a subject. Racial categories are social, discursive, political, and historical constructs; their meanings, and the boundaries that distinguish them, are subject to contestation and negotiation. Race means different things in different countries; the “whitening” of European immigrants in the United States is not equivalent to the process of blanqueamiento (literally, “whitening”) in Latin America. In the first instance, people who entered the United States as racially marked individuals lost their status as “other” and were incorporated into the dominant group. As Walkowitz notes in his essay on Ellis Island, this was the case for Jewish immigrants, who were seen as racial outsiders in Europe and initially categorized in the United States as “Semitic” or “Oriental.” In the second instance, both colonial and postcolonial regimes saw their “stock” threatened by the growth of African and/or indigenous populations, Chinese or Caribbean contract laborers, or racial mixing (mestizaje), and developed policies to encourage the “right” kind of immigrants. However, in countries like Brazil and Cuba, with a legacy of racial slavery and large Afro-descendant populations, African-derived cultural practices that were formerly scorned as backward and atavistic are lauded as vital components of (postcolonial) national identity—at least in their performative, carnivalesque, and folkloricized guises. But the incorporation and promotion of Afro-Brazilian and Afrocuban cultures, especially for touristic consumption, are not without ironies and ambivalences. As several authors note, groups in power devise racial categorizations to legitimate existing hierarchies or obscure power relationships. The Battle 22    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

of the Alamo, in Flores’s view was not a “race war” since Mexicanos and Tejanos fought on both sides of that conflict—a conflict that was a relatively obscure episode of local history. However, nearly a century later, its memory was resurrected, as it were, and its location “sacralized” (to use Dean MacCannell’s term).28 What had happened in the interim was a substantial demographic (and territorial) shift in the Lone Star State. As noted above, Anglo farmers from the Midwest recast the Alamo as an epic struggle between “good” Texans and “bad” Mexicans to legitimate the expropriation and political disenfranchisement of Texans of Mexican descent. The role of critical or postcolonial historians, in this instance, is to “deracialize”—remove or deconstruct the racial meanings that have been imposed upon an event or site. As Flores’s essay demonstrates, racial categories can be both extremely localized and time bound. What in one setting or at one time may be considered an “ethnic” or “cultural” or “national” difference is recast in racial terms. Many writers have written about the rise of indigenismo—a romanticized promotion of indigenous identity—in the formative years following the Mexican Revolution. Nationalist-minded elites (including Mexico’s celebrated muralists like Siqueiros and Rivera) elevated the image of heroic Indian ancestors who resisted Spanish rule to iconic status and a defining feature of mexicanidad (Mexicanness). However, contemporary indigenous people were often treated as second-class citizens, stigmatized as degraded, uncultured, and “other.” This dichotomy reverberates in a localized way in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, the subject of Poole’s essay. These essays also provide a window on the multiple actors who contest authorship in public history. Although histories are written and contested by varied social actors, several of the essays highlight the significant role played by professional historians, anthropologists, museum staff, and other “heritage professionals.” In many instances, neoliberal policies have led the state (whether at the national, regional, or municipal level) to promote modernist narratives that are celebratory in nature, glossing over imperial adventures and the legacies of slavery by celebrating the resultant multiculturalism. (This is true whether the countries under discussion are former colonial powers or former colonies.) The past is simplified and condensed into heritage and commoditized for both touristic and internal consumption. This comes at a time when scholars and other professionals who truck introduction    23

in history have been influenced by postmodernist practices that emphasize deconstruction and multiple voices, as well as postcolonial theory and critical race studies. So there can be a radical disjuncture between the “feel good,” “multi-culti lite” museums or performances that state and commercial interests want to support (and finance) and the more critical, probing interrogations favored by historians and other non-state, non-commercial actors.29 However, as Benavides shows in his exegesis of the celebration of the priest-historian Velasco in Ecuadorian history textbooks, professional historians can be remarkably complicit with the initiatives of state and commercial cultural enterprises. A few historians and anthropologists have been willing to expose the holes in the mythic fabric, but their critiques remain isolated within elite academic circles and have little impact on state educational policy or popular cultural renditions of the Kingdom of Quito myth. Finally, one of the central themes of the book is the elusive nature of memory. The issue of whose memories are authorized and how those memories are represented is an undercurrent throughout the book and receives special attention in several essays. In Ecuador, popular and collective memories were virtually invented out of whole cloth, as mythic tales recorded by a priest and then recycled by historians acquired legitimacy and stability. In South Africa, the popular memories associated with the Voortrekker Monument—both Afrikaner nationalists’ passionate attachment to the site and black South Africans’ abhorrence—have faded and the purveyors of heritage are free to remake and market what has already been forgotten. Heritage, in Grundlingh’s view, is bogus history, recycled by the tourist industry for visitors who have no investment in, or attachment to, South Africa’s past. The growth of tourism, and the marketing of pieces or versions of the past for export, is another theme that runs through this volume. Tourism is viewed as an attractive, and even essential, option by a wide range of governments (socialist regimes, constitutional monarchies, military dictatorships, and democracies) seeking to carve a niche for their countries in an uncertain global economy where culture is increasingly mobile and commodified. “Place entrepreneurs” can also be found at the regional and local level, as cities (like Rio de Janeiro or Havana) and regions (like Oaxaca) seek competitive advantage. But the heritage tourism game has many players. 24    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

In both Cuba and Nepal, for example, international or transnational entities like unesco are involved in urban redevelopment projects linked to tourism. And localized actors, including indigenous communities or the Serrinha residents’ association, seek to enter the tourism fray as full-fledged participants and not simply tropicalized entertainers, strategically marketing their culture and promoting historical narratives in ways that they hope will reverse past inequities and provide resources for development on their own terms.30 This volume, like its predecessor, owes much to the Radical History Review editorial collective that nurtured and encouraged us to develop the public history series in the journal from 1999 to 2002. We would also like to thank the editors and two anonymous readers for Duke University Press. notes 1

2

3

4

See, for example, Said, Orientalism (1978), and Culture and Imperialism (1993); Spivak, In Other Worlds (1987), and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) and Spivak and Guha, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (1988); Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994), and Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (1990); and Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn (2003). The classic formulation of the public sphere is found in Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Experience (1962). Interest in this concept was revived in the late 1980s, culminating in the 1993 publication of The Phantom Public Sphere. Many of the contributors to this volume criticized Habermas’s work for its use of the eighteenth-century London coffeehouses (whose habitués were almost exclusively propertied males) as a model and suggested that multiethnic and class-stratified societies would be more productively viewed as comprising multiple publics. One notable example of this is the series of Foxfire books, which grew out of an oral history project developed by a public school teacher in Appalachia and his students. The Foxfire Book: Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining, edited by Elliot Wigginton (New York: Anchor Books, 1972) was so successful that it has spawned, as of this writing, eleven additional volumes, a museum, and a newsletter. One of the best known examples is the trilogy Memory of Fire by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, with its three volumes, Genesis; Faces and Masks; and Century of Wind (1998). introduction    25

5

6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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See Ferguson, Empire (2003). In the summer of 2005 this book, a popular bestseller, could be purchased in airport kiosks and bookstalls throughout the United Kingdom. The U.S. equivalent would be the popular reception afforded Michael Lind, Vietnam (1999). A good starting point for a review of these debates is Linenthal and Engelhardt, eds., History Wars (1996). There is an extensive literature on public history controversies in Latin America and Western and Eastern Europe. These include such works as our preceding volume, Walkowitz and Knauer, eds., Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (2004). Richard Florida’s work, starting with The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), is often cited by planners and boosters who promote the idea of a “creative economy” as a solution for deindustrialized areas. For a critical look at the discourse of trauma, see Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003). See Glick, ed., States of Memory (2003). See Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996 (2000). Maximin, Lone Sun, as cited in Dubois’s essay in this volume. The classic work is Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (1983). This is a growth industry. A good starting place is Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (1998). See also the bibliography at the end of this collection. See, for example, Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1991). One of the earliest contemporary works to take a critical look at the role of race in the forging of Latin American national identities is Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America 1870–1940 (1991). A more recent compendium, informed by transnational and ethnographic perspectives, is Appelbaum, McPherson, and Rosenblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (2006). Among the best-known examples in the United States are the “rescue” of George’s Washington’s legacy by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Auxiliary in the 1870s and the imaginative reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg by John D. Rockefeller in the 1930s. Several of these endeavors are discussed in the essays in Page and Mason, eds., Giving Preservation a History (2003). Maleuvre, Museum Memories (1999), 59; quoted in Grundlingh’s essay in this collection. As Charlotte Macdonald notes in the opening essay, national governments and cultural institutions in these countries are not accustomed to thinking of themselves as colonizers (in relationship to indigenous populations) but rather as the colonized (in relationship to England). Macdonald points out that until fairly recently, many white New Zealanders viewed England as unquestionably the “mother country” and a similar “structure of feeling” prevails in Australia.

26    l. m. knauer and d. j. walkowitz

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25 26 27 28 29

30

See, among other sources, Ormond-Parker, “A Commonwealth Repatriation Odyssey” (1997). The Native American Graves and Repatriation Act of 1991 mandated the return of over a million and a half objects from five hundred American museums. See, among other sources, Watkins, Indigenous Archaeology (2000). See Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (1995); and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture (1998). Orange wrote her doctoral dissertation in the 1980s on the treaty of Waitangi and has published widely on the subject; her books are considered the authoritative scholarly sources. They include The Story of A Treaty (1987) and, most recently, An Illustrated History of the Treaty of Waitangi (2004). In 2004 she was appointed director of history at Te Papa. Martí’s essay has been widely anthologized; a good source (in English) is Martí, Our America (1979). Martí’s words were unfortunately prophetic; the U.S. intervention in the Cuban wars of independence from Spain led to a brokered peace that gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs. The hundredth anniversary of the Spanish-Cuban American war in 1998 sparked a new critical engagement with Martí’s work by scholars throughout the hemisphere. See, for example, Belknap and Fernández, eds., Jose Marti’s “Our America”; and a thematic issue of Radical History Review entitled Our Americas: Cultural and Political Imaginings 89 (spring 2004). Ferguson, Empire. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1994); James, The Black Jacobins (1989). See Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (1986). See MacCannell, The Tourist (1976; 1999). “Feel-good” multiculturalism is not limited to corporate sponsors. Many grassroots groups and individuals also seek to assert their contributions through uncritical and celebratory narratives. See, for example, Dávila, Barrio Dreams (2004). Rather than bemoan the “profanation” of “authentic, traditional” culture, many scholars now view these efforts by localized actors as signs of agency and, occasionally, resistance. This position is argued eloquently in Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture (2004).

introduction    27

Two Peoples, One Museum Biculturalism and Visitor “Experience” at Te Papa—“Our Place,” New Zealand’s New National Museum

Charlotte J. Macdonald

the creation of national memory takes place in the contested present. For New Zealanders the opening of a new national museum in February 1998 came after just over a decade of tumultuous upheaval in which radical neoliberalism transformed the economy, the structure of communities, the role of government, and, ultimately, the political system. The mechanics and values of the market were extolled while the public sector shrank drastically. By the 1980s and 1990s the longer-term unraveling of legacies of a colonial history dating back formally to 1840 had produced both a boosterish cultural nationalism (expressed through a pride in a newly found “national identity”) and a vociferous challenge from the indigenous Maori population demanding redress for the dispossession suffered through colonialism. The politics of “race” in New Zealand—or Aotearoa as many Maori know it—takes the shape of biculturalism. Maori have sought, and won, recognition for a relationship of partnership agreed to in the Treaty of Waitangi, first signed in 1840 between representatives of Queen Victoria (for the British government) and a large number of Maori tribal leaders. The recognition is not simply of a historical agreement but, much

more significantly, for the treaty’s operating as the framework for relations between Maori and the Crown (the state authority) and between Maori and Pakeha (literally, non-Maori; largely white New Zealanders, the majority of whom are descendants of English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish settlers) in the present. Those politics remain a flashpoint for dissent in New Zealand life.1 The new museum positioned itself boldly in this cultural-historical terrain. Indeed, its survival depended on its doing so. But survival also required it not to be a museum—commercially, it had to cultivate a significant income from ancillary activities to support 365-days-a-year free entry. Promised an “experience” rather than a visit, “guests” were presented with a range of opportunities to park vehicles, eat and drink, take rides on virtual activities, buy goods, host their own event in hired space in the building, and more, and to do so, if they were among the approximately 40 percent of visitors who were locals, often rather than occasionally. Culturally, the museum had to distance itself very firmly from its own origins as a descendant of imperial institutions in which indigenous peoples such as Maori, and the places they inhabited, constituted prime collecting grounds for the exotic object. In wholeheartedly adopting a bicultural approach in governance, operations, management, and exhibitions, the museum became an exemplar of how a Treaty partnership might work while placing its own colonial past in the past. As opening day approached, the institution, the building, and the space were given a new name and symbol: the name “Te Papa,” with a loose English equivalent of “Our Place,” and the symbol a thumbprint. Both quickly passed into universal usage. Identity as a museum disappeared as the organization’s life as a novel institution, an experience, a destination, and a familiar space began. Binding the contrary imperatives together was an overarching theme of celebration—emphasizing the uniqueness of New Zealand / Aotearoa’s natural and human histories and the success of its peoples, narratives bearing clear messages of resolution and pride. Conflict was sublimated beneath a celebratory populism. Empire has little space in such a narrative of nationhood while the central statement of bicultural partnership suggests a postcolonial state of resolution has been reached. The recipe has been a success, though it has also drawn its critics. Decried as too popular, too bicultural, too little concerned with showing “art,” Te 32   

charlotte j. macdonald

Papa’s first decade has proved the vitality of national, cultural space. Most significant among Te Papa’s critics has been the Labour Party and in particular its leader and known cultural devotee, Helen Clark. Charging that it represented an undue devotion to populist commercialism, an emphasis on form rather than substance, and insufficient reverence for artistic achievement, Clark’s attacks on Te Papa during 1999 were part of Labour’s broader center-left challenge to the corporatism pervading the public sector and in particular, the erosion of a substantive rather than a decorative role for national cultural institutions. In so doing, the party of the center-left became the defenders of aesthetic standards against the philistinism of the centerright. The volume of both national discourses—that of biculturalism and of independent nationalism—was amplified after Labour’s election to gov­ ernment in late 1999 (in which Clark took responsibility as minister of culture in addition to prime minister). Among the incoming adminstration’s stated goals was “to strengthen national identity and uphold the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.”2 Changes in exhibition space and style followed. Art and research functions gained a higher priority at Te Papa. Biculturalism has remained central in the institution and become more established as the primary narrative for contemporary nationhood, though giving effect to it in terms of redistribution of resources remains highly contested. History, in its messy complexity and its entanglement in the present, remains problematic. Imperial relations are unspoken, apart from those which exist in the imaginary world, and there they reign supreme. Nothing in Te Papa’s ten-year existence has surpassed the popularity of The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy: The Exhibition, which drew more than 219,000 visitors over 124 days between December 2002 and April 2003. The Tolkien classic, an epic struggle between empires of good and evil, as interpreted by director Peter Jackson in Wellington studios and in New Zealand’s wilderness, but with the backing of the Hollywood movie empire, proved a huge hit. The exhibition toured other centers, beginning at the Museum of Science and Industry in London. Imagination is safer, and infinitely more popular, than the awkward and argumentative present. The much awaited opening of New Zealand’s premier public history venue, the new national museum, occurred in the midst of the extreme El Niño summer weather of February 1998. While city dwellers basked in long, hot two peoples, one museum    33

1 Te Papa–Our Place opening day, February 14, 1998. Photo: Norman Heke, F1934/15. Courtesy of Museum of New Zealand–Te Papa Tongarewa.

days, farmers in east coast regions faced severe drought, financial stress, and the prospect of running out of feed for the few sheep, cattle, and deer remaining on their properties. For a week or two the farmers’ plight and the museum’s opening extravaganza on February 14th became entwined. Crowds of people waiting their turn in the museum’s forecourt for a first viewing were marshaled into orderly queues within curving paths marked out by hay bales. Providing comfortable and folksy seating, the hay stacks made the waiting something to be enjoyed rather than endured, enhancing the mood of anticipation and excitement. Entertainers moved through the crowd, along with food, drink, and hat vendors.3 The museum’s opening publicity was careful to point out that the hay bales were only temporarily in the museum’s forecourt; within a week or so, they would be continuing their journey from the more fortunate and generous northern farms from which they had come, over Cook Strait to the Marlborough farmers most hard hit by the drought. In this way the image of New Zealand as a farming nation, a society in which the heart of the country is identified with its rural core and the mutuality to be found there, was embraced by the new museum. 34    charlotte j. macdonald

Popular reinscription of national icons is what the directors would regard as the museum’s core business. (Icon, by no coincidence, is the name of the museum’s quality restaurant and bar.) The museum is unashamedly a monument to national pride. Since it is funded substantially by public monies, statutorily obliged to provide free entry to visitors, and architecturally prominent in the capital city, this comes as no surprise. What is surprising, however, is the form which national celebration takes in this society in the 1990s. Empire has little place here because “New Zealand” is what is on display; it is a flourishing national culture that has been achieved, a triumph of cultural independence. Yet relations between the indigenous Maori and Pakeha peoples—the central issue of race in the society—are fundamental to the museum’s physical and cultural space. That a national institution can simultaneously so thoroughly marginalize empire and embrace race when the two are intrinsically bound together in New Zealand’s history since the late eighteenth century signifies the complex, often contradictory, unraveling of interwoven threads of colonialism in a former settler colony at the end of the twentieth century. The museum’s depictions of race and empire are evident in the tripartite structure of the exhibitions dealing with people, cultures, and societies. This human level of the museum is on the upper floor, above nature’s domain where displays called Awesome Forces and Mountains to Sea bristle with glaciers, earthquakes, and densely birded forest. To get to the upper level, there is either a stately seaward ascent up a galleried ramp to Te Marae, the entry point to the Maori galleries, or a staircase-and-elevator journey to the upper central concourse, poised between all the main exhibitions. In the center, immediately opposite the arrival points on the upper concourse, is the Treaty of Waitangi exhibition.4 To the left, the seaward side, are Te Marae, Mana Whenua, and the various iwi (tribal) exhibitions of Maori art, culture, and life. On the landward side, to the right, are the History exhibitions in the area designated as Tangata Tiriti, literally, the people of the Treaty, non-Maori who live in Aotearoa / New Zealand by virtue of the Treaty of Waitangi. Strangely perhaps, given the central place of the Treaty, the separation of Maori and Pakeha serves to deemphasise the interaction between the two peoples by separately exploring the experience of each. The Treaty exhibition, Signs of a Nation—Nga Tohu Kotahitanga, is intended to be viewed in two peoples, one museum    35

2 Signs of a Nation exhibition, the center of the upper floor. Photo: Norman Heke, F4908/53. Courtesy of the Museum of New Zealand—Te Papa Tongarewa.

the context of the Maori and Pakeha exhibitions on either side: approached spatially and conceptually from the two perspectives of the Treaty partners. The central Treaty exhibition is large in scale, deliberately spare, and reverential in tone. The design is drawn from religious models. Two very large panels hang high above the heads of visitors with the Maori and En­ glish texts simply depicted on each. The atmosphere is one of tribute. In the foreground of the exhibition area there is a small forest of listening posts reminiscent of the poles outside the Museum of Sydney, totemlike in appearance. These are literally listening posts where, up close, voices of a range of New Zealanders debating the treaty can be heard. The level of these voices from anything but a close distance is a whisper; again, like the barely audible human voice in a church. The exhibition’s gloss invites visitors to “engage directly with our founding document, the Treaty of Wai­ tangi,” along with the statement: “The floor is open to discussion.”5 Mana Whenua, the principal Maori exhibition, is centered around an expansive exhibition area in which carved marae (meeting houses) and waka 36    charlotte j. macdonald

(canoes) command visitors’ attention. Around these are arrayed smaller displays on Pacific voyaging, the people and places significant to particular iwi, or tribes, and the arts of weaving and taniko (decorative, usually woven, border panels). Te Marae is a contemporary interpretation of the central institution of Maori culture: a meeting house and a place where culture, in language, ritual, oratory and song, relationships, and arts, is most highly preserved and practiced. Unlike traditional marae, Te Papa’s Te Marae is adorned in highly colored modern designs, is not bound by traditional protocol, and is explicitly described as “a place for all New Zealanders.” The exhibitions on the Tangata Tiriti side of the Treaty area, popularly referred to as the History exhibitions, are comparatively intimate exploratory spaces made up of broad irregular corridors containing smaller exhibits and strongly driven by linking narratives. They invite viewers into a space in which a series of smaller artifacts are revealed and a story, or stories, can be followed. Three exhibits are presented here: Passports follows the question “Who are non-Maori New Zealanders and how did they come to be here?”; Exhibiting Ourselves follows the changing ways in which “New Zealand” has been defined and shown to the world in international exhibitions from 1851 to 1992. On the Sheep’s Back takes the economically important sheep industry as a place in which to display the science and art of wool growing and use, along with the work and social relations which were formed around it. The implication that “history” belongs to Pakeha and “culture” to Maori is one that can be drawn. It is not a designed impression. The detail throughout all the exhibitions subverts that meaning. But it arises, in part, from the largely nineteenth-century emphasis in the Maori exhibitions and the greater twentieth-century content in the history exhibitions. It also comes from the processes of naming and selecting what is to be told and shown. The side of the colonial experience and indigenous life that is fundamental here is the story of a complex and elaborate society, the resilience of that culture, and a people’s endurance through colonial imposition. All the Maori exhibitions are at pains to stress that what is on display are not relics of a time or people past, but living parts of the contemporary culture. The centrally strategic position of the Treaty of Waitangi exhibition is not surprising. The Treaty stands at the center of the relationship between Maori and Pakeha: historically and contemporaneously, as a source of grievance and as an avenue for redress. Signed originally at Waitangi in the Bay two peoples, one museum    37

of Islands on February 6, 1840, the Treaty has emerged as the base upon which a new relationship between Maori and Pakeha is being built and from which the ideal and practice of biculturalism is derived. Without legal or constitutional status for most of the period since 1840, the Treaty has begun very recently to have teeth in political, legislative, and judicial arenas. In 1975 it became incorporated in statute law in the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which established the Waitangi Tribunal to which Maori claimants could appeal for investigation of breaches by the Crown of the Treaty’s provisions. The tribunal had little presence until the early 1980s, when it made its first significant judgment; in 1985 its powers were greatly extended to include investigation of Treaty breaches from 1840 to the present.6 In this way race has very dramatically entered the public realm, and history has become part of contemporary life through the hearing of historical claims and subsequent negotiations. As the process of settling claims has moved from rulings in the Waitangi Tribunal to the next stage of negotiating redress, the scale of public discussion has escalated. In the largest claims settled to date, Maori have gained control of a substantial portion of the commercially valuable fishing industry, a small share in the forestry industry, settlements involving several hundreds of millions of dollars worth of land, and significant commerical as well as cultural assets.7 More tangible transactions of this kind are anticipated. In an atmosphere of increasing competition for resources and opportunities of all kinds, large-scale unemployment and business insecurity, fundamental restructuring of the economy, and radical reduction in the functions of the state, such processes breed insecurity, resentment, and a hard edge to residual attitudes of racial prejudice. The Treaty is a subject of fervent debate in all corners of the society; even in broadly liberal (the so-called chardonnay socialist) circles there can be public orthodoxy and private murmuring.8 While the exhibition’s design foregrounds the centrality of the Treaty, the reverential tone and unmediated display of the texts hang back from drawing the harder practical conclusions, embedded in the history of neglect of the treaty by the Crown and non-Maori, with the resulting inequalities between Maori and Pakeha. Only on much closer inspection, at the back of the exhibition area, in very small scale relative to the main features, are three display cases amplifying that history. Here the messier, more complex, harsher, and contradictory elements of race relations and the Treaty in action—or, as often not in action—can be found. Artifacts in these cases 38    charlotte j. macdonald

are grouped under three headings: Land and Cultural Heritage—Te whenua me nga tikanga tuku iho; Government—Kawanatanga; and Citizens Rights— Mana tangata. The artifacts are suggestive, at times emblematic. A shared experience is indicated by some, as in the graphic items from a Maori soldier’s kit issued in the First World War: chainsaw and wirecutters, a bayonet, helmet and webbing.9 Elsewhere a parallel history is indicated, as in the juxtaposition of the 1830s flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand (which carries a strong contemporary political resonance among northern tribes of Muriwhenua) with the current national flag. But there are also items which serve as stark reminders of the conflictual and at times coercive historical relations between indigenous and colonial powers. A theodolite, iron ruler, and surveyor’s chain, the key tools of land appropriation (and all the economic and cultural erosion associated with that) sit in a case alongside a nineteenth-century carved pouwhenua (signpost) and an eighteenth-century whenupa pot, a family treasure. Visitors bring their own level of knowledge, their existing attitudes and predispositions to these objects. That they are to be taken seriously, reverently even, is implied in the space, lighting, and sobriety of font on the labels. The three large narratives of the History exhibitions are about people, presentation, and livelihood. Passports tells the stories of the origins and migration journeys of New Zealand’s non-Maori peoples from the midnineteenth century to the present. The exhibition revolves around the question of who “we”—non-Maori New Zealanders—are. The very success of the exhibition—Passports is probably the most popular of the History exhibitions—indicates that the question of origins of non-Maori New Zealanders is a novelty. In societies with much longer histories of acknowledging their recent pasts as immigrant nations, an exhibition about people’s origins might be considered passé. But here there is genuine curiosity. When “we” were part of an empire the difference between “us” and “them” did not exist. “Home” was Great Britain even to third-generation New Zealanders, who regarded their country as a modified bit of Britain, strangely adrift, and slightly better, or slightly worse, than the original. Now that the empire has collapsed, the search for origins has a fascination associated with difference, a difference that is quaint if not exotic. In Passports Britain is an immigrant source alongside a range of others. Britain and British-originating immigrants have a status hardly different two peoples, one museum    39

3 1940 Centennial Pavilion in Exhibiting Ourselves. New Zealand’s centennial of nationhood celebrated the country’s reputation as a pioneer in social welfare and public health. Photo: Jan Nauta. Courtesy of Museum of New Zealand–Te Papa Tongarewa.

from the Dutch, Gujaratis, Dalmatians, Chinese, and variety of other immigrant groups. Australia, which has a shared history of imperial relations and with which there has been a great deal of population flow back and forth, is entirely absent. Where in other parts of the world such a narrative might have been more firmly connected to some contemporary understanding of multiculturalism, here immigrant origins are all subordinated within the Pakeha, History or Tangata Tiriti side of the museum. Biculturalism is the dominant narrative. Exhibiting Ourselves, the most elegantly designed area in the museum, re-creates the New Zealand pavilions developed for the 1851 Crystal Palace, 1906 Christchurch International, and 1940 Centennial (Wellington) Exhibitions and the 1992 Seville Expo. The contrived and dramatically different construction of national identity is wonderfully, even sumptuously, exposed, but its power to subvert the overall celebratory ambience of Te Papa is quite muted in the overall context.10 Exhibiting Ourselves and the third History exhibition, On the Sheep’s Back, allude to larger frameworks of empire and the world beyond (frequently referred to by New Zealanders simply as 40    charlotte j. macdonald

“overseas”). But that external framework is not delineated in any detail. The focus is internal: what the narratives reveal to us about ourselves—living in a place rich in natural beauty and productive capacity; being a small society which has learned to improvise and hold its own against larger forces, whether the Depression of the 1930s or the First and Second World Wars. On the Sheep’s Back uses the commodity of wool to explore the rich work and recreational cultures arising from the rearing of sheep. At its peak the sheep population outnumbered New Zealand’s human population by 67 million, a statistic frequently cited to stun visitors. The other side of the farming industry—the rearing of animals for meat—forms a silent shadow to this story. Yet it has an intriguing presence through this and other exhibitions which exemplify the dynamics of empire over time and place. As a commodity, meat appears in a variety of guises through the exhibitions, illustrating the changing forms of the imperial relationship. In the Passports area an exhibit label presents an excerpt from an immigrant’s voyage diary in 1887, recording a frightening incident in a storm in which the author’s friend Fred “had a 6 lb tin of preserved meat fall on his head, [giving] him a black eye.” Had “it gone to his temple,” the diary continues, “it might have been very serious.” The episode is told as part of the exhibition’s emphasis on the risk and difficulty of the long sea voyage from the British Isles (three to five months was common). The timing of this particular voyage is significant, for in 1885 the advent of refrigerated shipping ushered in a whole new era in New Zealand life. New Zealand, like many other colonies in the nineteenth century, was, first of all, a source of raw materials (timber, whalebone, flax, and kauri gum, used in paint, glue and, varnishes) and unprocessed farm products for consumption on the “home” market. It was also a place where surplus or “overflow” population might be encouraged to settle. The advent of refrigeration in the mid-1880s and in particular, the colonial application of that technology to shipping, made possible the transport of meat and dairy products from New Zealand to Britain and led to the second stage in imperial relations. The commercial opportunities this opened up gave New Zealand a platform for an economic imperial connection. The trade in meat and wool accounted for the greater part of its productive economic activity until well into the 1960s; “New Zealand as Britain’s farm” was a matter of fact two peoples, one museum    41

as well as pride and livelihood. At the same time, by selling its products on the traditional “home” market, New Zealand could function as a politically self-governing nation. This served to underline and reinforce the imperial relationship—entrenching Great Britain as the sole market for colonial produce and extending the foundation for New Zealand’s economic growth. Indeed, one of the consequential effects of refrigeration was an innovative animal husbandry: in New Zealand the breeding of sheep for meat rather than wool, or for wool and meat, formed a point of contrast with the wooloriented Australian economy. The canned meat which posed such a hazard to the 1887 voyagers was a much inferior product to fresh refrigerated lamb, the flagship commodity, but remained crucial in places and times when refrigeration was logistically impossible. One of these was, of course, during wartime: New Zealanders who served in the First and Second World Wars were very much a part of the imperial endeavour. New Zealand soldiers were not the only ones to live on “bully beef” but they were the only ones for whom the following antimilitarist lines could have been written: My poor little Enzed, exporting frozen meat in peace, live meat in war11 The other place where canned meat found a ready and constant market (and continues to do so) is in the Pacific, where New Zealand and Australia inherited the mantle of empire in a domain of microisland societies. In Mana Pasifika, the exhibition of Polynesian and Fijian life and culture in the museum, the next stage in this imperial meat history can be seen. One of the most spectacular items on display is a work from the 1990s created by Michel Tuffery, a young New Zealand-born artist of Samoan, Pakeha, Cook Island, and Hawai’ian descent. Standing at almost life-size, it is a cattle-beast constructed entirely out of flattened corned beef cans. The work is described in the exhibit label as talking “about [the] impact of global trade and colonial economies on Pacific Island cultures.” In the Pacific, the extension of European imperialism was broadly coincidental with that to Aotearoa/New Zealand. But these were smaller, more vulnerable peoples and economies, where, apart from Fiji, settler

42    charlotte j. macdonald

communities did not become established. Through the twentieth century a secondary set of imperial relations between New Zealand and Australia and the island groups of Polynesia and Micronesia developed. Along those commerical and cultural ties of empire went cans of preserved meat, en­ tering the island diet in the place of fish and plant proteins and changing the culture—along with Christianity, influenza, cotton cloth, and the wireless. But while these cultures have been unalterably changed by the impact of empire, as has the Maori, they are resilient and adaptive and in recent decades are finding new forms in the New Zealand–born Polynesian communities. The people and commodities of empire are turning to face their colonial authors with a wit and a meaning all their own. Within Aotearoa / New Zealand, relations between peoples who inherit the multiple legacies of a late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century colonial encounter are being reshaped. Simultaneously, the society in which those peoples coexist has been disentangling itself from its position as a minor outpost in someone else’s imperial domain. For a long time that position was found within the British Empire and the Commonwealth: well into the twentieth century New Zealand was known, and prided itself, as “the most loyal of the white Dominions.” More recently, in the postwar decades, the need for security in the South Pacific and the attractions of consumer culture have brought New Zealand under the mantle of the United States, most obviously through the anzus treaty of 1951 which forged a formal defence alliance between the United States, New Zealand and Australia. It was anzus obligations that were the main grounds on which New Zealand fought in Vietnam. But by the late 1980s this was no longer where New Zealanders wanted to be. The dissolution of anzus by the United States in the face of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the mid-1980s reinforced a sense of independence rather than bringing disquiet. Yet “Empire” in whatever form is too newly shrugged off to feature in the museum, even as an experience safely in the past. In some senses the museum’s very existence is an aberration in a country which has radically reduced its public sector in a very short time.12 While traditional areas of government contract, however, “culture” can win a newly important place. In an era in which public ownership has become

two peoples, one museum    43

4 Te Papa Marae at dawn. Using plywood and a brilliant array of colors, Te Papa’s Marae is a highly contemporary rendition of the traditional Maori marae, a meeting and ritual space and structure. As a place for all peoples rather than a place belonging to a particular group, Te Papa’s Marae functions as a national meeting and welcoming space—central in the museum’s space and culture. Courtesy of Museum of New Zealand–Te Papa Tongarewa.

very unfashionable, the museum underlined its generalist intent by making the audacious claim to belong to everybody. On the eve of opening, the project which had been known through its ten or so development and construction years as The Museum of New Zealand–Te Papa Tongarewa was rebranded as Te Papa–Our Place.13 As well as distancing the new institution from negative associations with stuffy museums (“dead places”), the new name was designed to invoke a sense of openness, of belonging, and above all, in its initial phase, to emphasise its accessibility to everyone.14 This was to be a place where “New Zealand” was to be defined, celebrated, and shown off, where New Zealanders would find themselves represented. To make this work in a country which had been subject to radical restructuring and where rich and poor, rural and urban, north and south, Maori and Pakeha were more distant from each other in material standard of living than ever before in the twentieth century, was an ambitious goal. The museum worked hard to produce a place where an experience of pride and recognition is on offer. So far it seems to have largely been successful. Visitor numbers have far exceeded initial projections, and with a few 44    charlotte j. macdonald

exceptions, Te Papa has been acclaimed by a wide diversity of people and opinion. The absence of empire apparently has not been missed. Te Papa’s successes have been considerable. In its first five years, it attracted over 7 million visitors (approximately 40 percent New Zealanders, 60 percent foreign). On this basis it has rated as the most visited museum in Australia and New Zealand. More important perhaps, the composition of its visitor population shows some interesting patterns: 46.9 percent of Te Papa visitors were aged 20–34, the female quotient exceeded the male by a relatively narrow margin (58 percent to 42 percent), while Maori and Pacific Island New Zealanders visited in numbers exceeding their representation in the population as a whole.15 The small but vocal minority of critics, however disdainful of the permanent exhibitions, have patronized Te Papa’s excellent restaurant and coffee shop, sat in its theater and meeting rooms, know its store as a source of reliably good quality gifts and books, and attend high-profile major exhibitions. Does this suggest that popularity can only be secured with celebratory narratives? Or is it rather that Te Papa has served as a place of identity construction, a place of pride? Is this not, in part at least, to be expected of a national showcase? As such it can be seen as a crucial part of the project of postcolonialism, as well as a response to globalization. The political environment, both nationally and internationally, during Te Papa’s initial decade of existence has provided more rather than less impetus in these directions. Maori remain insistent that the Treaty of Waitangi serve as the central partnership guaranteeing redress for past injustice and the foundation for a future of full and fair participation in the society. Biculturalism has become more entrenched in jurisprudence and in the constitutional framework of New Zealand, although its implications at the level of redistribution of resources and power sharing remain areas of struggle and contest. National boundaries have become both more and less important in this time. They are felt as more important as a result of security considerations and in the wake of historically high levels of immigration to New Zealand, and globally. These combine to give a sharper and more powerful meaning to citizenship, to the distinction between belonging and exclusion. New Zealanders’ sense of themselves, of being independent rather two peoples, one museum    45

than derivative of a larger entity—whether Britain, Australia, America, or elsewhere—has amplified the broad assumption of cultural independence, often expressed through statements of national identity. And more tangibly, as tourism continues to grow as a major economic activity, New Zealand as a whole—land, people, and culture—becomes a brand to market, a destination to sell. In that endeavour Te Papa plays a key role as a trading post between commerce and culture, an articulation of what we are. The politics of race and empire continue to shape the identities forged in these conditions. The centrality of the two sides of the Treaty partnership has strengthened the two broad divisions of tangata whenua (indigenous Maori) and tangata tiriti (Pakeha or non-Maori) groups, and within these, traditional broad iwi affiliations and community identities, where community is often a synonym for ethnic minorities other than Maori. Old ties of empire have no place in this setting, while multiculturalism remains a very muted discourse. National boundaries are declining in importance, however, in the conditions of global capitalism. The permanent exhibitions which show the major narratives of nation remain at the core of Te Papa, but they now exist alongside a series of temporary exhibitions which play a crucial part in sustaining the work of the museum (in no small part because they charge an entry fee). The new empires of international commerce are evident in high profile exhibitions such as Versace: The Reinvention of Material (2001) and most spectacularly, The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy: The Exhibition (2002–3). Identities of fantasy and glamour in epic narratives of moral struggles between good and evil provide appealing complements to the messy and contested present. Te Papa provides an upbeat account of a bicultural society as a successful postcolonial narrative. Across town, other, messier stories can still be found in the courts, in Parliament, and on the streets. notes Johanne Benseman and Bronwyn Labrum generously shared their ideas in the course of preparing the initial review. 1 See Belich, Paradise Reforged; James, New Territory; Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi; Ward, An Unsettled History. 46    charlotte j. macdonald

2 Te Papa, Annual Report, 2002–2003, 11; accessed January 30, 2004, on the museum’s website: www.tepapa.govt.nz 3 The opening day, including forecourt scenes, can be viewed on the museum’s website. 4 The national holiday, February 6, commemorates the anniversary of the 1840 signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. It has been the focus for the strongest and most sustained Maori protest for many decades, but especially since the late 1960s. The fullest account of Maori protest can be found in Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou. The Treaty was signed between Queen Victoria (her representative being Governor Hobson) and the chiefs of New Zealand and contained three broad articles: first, the Maori ceded to her Majesty the Queen of England, absolutely and without reservation, all the rights and powers of sovereignty; second, the Queen confirmed and guaranteed to the “Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and their respective families and individuals thereof, the full, exclusive, and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates, Forests and Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess”; third, the Queen extended her protection to the Maori people and granted them “all the rights and privileges of British subjects.” There were at least three versions of the Treaty: the original English-language version, a Maori-language version, and a further English-language version translated from the Maori. Much of the current debate has revolved around the differing meanings of key terms in the treaty articles. Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi is the standard work. 5 Thumb Nails, visitor brochure (Wellington: Te Papa, 1998), 18. 6 Before 1985 the Waitangi Tribunal could only investigate breaches of the Treaty occurring after 1975, the year in which the original establishing legislation was enacted. 7 The scale of these awards is still modest in the overall national land and asset base, as a proportion of annual government expenditure, and especially, relative to the century-and-more-long loss of land and assets. 8 There is a developing literature on the Waitangi Tribunal process and the bicultural relationship in Aotearoa / New Zealand. The following provide some important perspectives: Durie, Te Mana, Te Kawanatanga; Renwick, The Treaty Now; Renwick, ed., Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights; Wilson and Yeatman, eds., Justice and Identity. Particular issues faced by historians employed in these processes are discussed in Byrnes, “Jackals of the Crown?” Further information about the settlement process, Maori culture, and institutions can be found on the website www.Maori.org.nz; www.nzhistory.net.nz, the website of the His­ tory Group, Ministry of Culture and Heritage; and www.Waitangi-tribunal .govt.nz, website of the Waitangi Tribunal. 9 A number of Maori served as soldiers in the First World War, most of them in the Pioneer Battalion. The commanding officer was not Maori. Some Maori, notably the Waikato people, opposed conscription in protest at government two peoples, one museum    47

10 11 12 13

14

15

confiscation of their lands in the 1860s. In the Second World War Maori were not subject to conscription, but a large number served in the 28th Maori Battalion under Maori commanding officers. The battalion earned a formidable reputation; see Gardiner, Te Mura o Te Ahi. For a fuller discussion of the relationship between “national identity” and “history” in this context, see Phillips, “Our History, Our Selves.” Jim Henderson, quoted in McLeod, Myth and Reality, 8 For a critical discussion of these changes see Kelsey, The New Zealand Experiment. The literal translation of Te Papa Tongarewa: is “receptacle of treasured possessions.” With the change of name, Saatchi and Saatchi were engaged as the public relations consultants to the museum. The change was also to indicate that the new institution was different in form from the previous separate institutions of the National Museum and the National Art Gallery. Existing conventions were deliberately disturbed. The new place was to be “our place” also in the sense of being neither an art museum in the European sense nor an anthropological museum in the “collection of artifacts” definition. Te Papa Annual Report 2002–3, 30–31.

48    charlotte j. macdonald

Contesting Time, Place, and Nation in the First Peoples’ Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Ruth B. Phillips and Mark Salber Phillips

as you enter the new First Peoples’1 Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Canada’s national museum of history and anthropology, you are greeted by a billboard-sized panel bearing words of greeting superimposed over an enlarged im­ age of an Ottawa River scene. The statement is given in three languages, English, French, and Algonquin. You have arrived on Algonquin land. The Creator put the Algonquin here to occupy this land. The Creator also gave the Algonquin a language to communicate with. It was told to our ancestors that: “As long as the sun will shine As long as the rivers will flow, As long as the grass will grow” The Anishinabe life would continue to circle forever. This is what was given to the Anishinabe. And this is as it should be.

In conformity with a protocol that has become widely established in Canadian museums during the last decade, this greeting is issued not by the museum or its sponsor, the government of Canada, but by the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabe Circle of Elders, representatives of the indigenous First Nation recognized as the traditional owner of the land on which the museum sits.2 This convention belongs to the new postcolonial politics of land and nationhood that is transforming the relationship between Aboriginal people and the Canadian state;3 it also signals an important moment of rupture with the modernist traditions of museological representation and the historical understandings that informed the museum’s earlier exhibits on Aboriginal people. These political and museological changes are local manifestations of global movements of decolonization that have gained momentum since the end of the Second World War. In Canada the decolonization process has been advanced by a series of legal decisions, difficult contestations, and political negotiations. Two key early events were the enfranchisement of Aboriginal people in 1960 and the federal government’s withdrawal of its White Paper on Indian policy in 1969, which definitively ended its centuryold official policy of directed assimilation.4 In 1982 Aboriginal sovereignty— existing Aboriginal and treaty rights—was “recognized and affirmed” by the Constitution Act, 1982, through which Canada’s constitutional legislation was repatriated from Great Britain to Canada. In the early 1990s a federalprovincial treaty process was reestablished for the negotiation of a large number of outstanding land claims. In 1997 new forms of territorial sovereignty and self-government were institutionalized when the federal government and the provincial government of British Columbia reached an agreement with the Nisga’a First Nation over its land claim,5 and when the eastern Arctic territory of Nunavut was established in 1999 under Inuit control. Other important steps were taken in 1998 with the Canadian government’s formal statement of regret for its imposition of the oppressive residential school system on Aboriginal people and its establishment of an Aboriginal Healing Foundation, and, in 2008, with the formation of an Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.6 This period has also witnessed violent confrontations, most notably with Mohawk at Oka, Quebec, in 1990, sparked by plans to build a golf course on a Native burial

50    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

1 Welcome panel (Zone 1), First Peoples Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Harry Foster, Canadian Museum of Civilization.

ground, and at Burnt Church, New Brunswick, after a Supreme Court decision that upheld Native treaty rights to fish out of season. The placement of the Kitigan Zibi Circle of Elders’ words of welcome in the national museum is part of a contemporary movement to acknowledge the principle of Aboriginal sovereignty. The image over which this text is printed, however, both looks back to an earlier past and points to a more complex and unresolved present. It is a computer-generated image which merges two views of the same site: the bottom half of the image is derived from an early nineteenth-century watercolor, and the upper half from a contemporary photograph. A group of Aboriginal people dressed in the clothing of the early nineteenth century stands on the bank of a river, their backs to the viewer, looking across at the opposite shore. As the visitor follows the direction of their gazes, she is invited to see the landscape from the Aboriginal point of view. This nineteenth-century Aboriginal family, it becomes clear, is standing on the site now occupied by the Museum, but in the upper half of the picture the visitor sees something that no spectator of that time could have seen, the neo-Gothic buildings of the Canadian Parliament,

contesting time, place, and nation    51

which were not completed until 1922. This introductory image thus joins settler and Native histories that are inherently conflictual, producing a doubled process of identification and distancing. Combined with the textual overlay of the greeting, the image not only confronts museum-goers with the complexity of the questions that will be represented in the First Peoples’ Hall, but also encourages them to begin to explore Aboriginal perspectives on these issues. The First Peoples’ Hall, which opened in 2003, is now the most comprehensive exhibit on Native history and culture in Canada’s national museum. The exhibit covers approximately fifty thousand square feet and contains fifteen hundred objects, together with photographic images, videos, sound recordings, and art installations. Before we examine its themes and formal arrangements, it will be useful to rough in some of the historical and museological contexts out of which the First Peoples’ Hall emerged and also to look in some detail at the two other permanent installations in which indigenous peoples are represented—the Grand Hall and the Canada Hall. These two galleries predate the First Peoples’ Hall, and their rather different approaches to the problems of representing Native life in Canada bring into relief the profound changes that overtook museum anthropology during the decade that preceded its completion. the gr and hall and the canada hall

When Canada built its first national museum at the beginning of the twentieth century, the newly founded anthropological division was given a mandate typical for the period: to research and collect the cultures of the indigenous peoples of Canada, who were believed to be rapidly disappearing.7 Its displays, housed in the neo-Gothic Victoria Memorial Museum in Ottawa, employed the culture area divisions and typological approaches standard for the time.8 Although these exhibits were updated periodically, the occasion for a comprehensive rethinking did not arise until the early 1980s, when the government of Pierre Trudeau allocated long-awaited funds to create new buildings for the National Museum and the National Gallery. The government chose facing sites on two sides of the Ottawa River—the National Museum on the Quebec side, and the National Gallery on the Ontario side, adjacent to Parliament Hill—creating a new monu52    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

2 Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Quebec. Photo: Pauline Wakeham.

mental landscape that articulated the Trudeau government’s strong federalist stance in relation to the continuing threat of Quebec separatism.9 The architectural and curatorial programs developed for the national museum, renamed the Canadian Museum of Civilization (cmc), were informed by the visions of two men: its director, Dr. George MacDonald, an archaeologist specializing in the Northwest Coast, and its architect, Douglas Cardinal, a member of the Metis and Blackfoot nations.10 Cardinal’s design reflects his deep conviction of the integral bonds linking humans to the natural world and the forms of the land.11 MacDonald’s master plan for the exhibits was influenced by his passionate admiration for Northwest Coast arts and cultures and the populist communication theory of his early mentor, Marshall McLuhan.12 The two major exhibitions that were installed for the museum’s official opening in 1989 were, accordingly, a Grand Hall devoted to Northwest Coast arts and cultures and a Canada Hall that unfolds a national history that is (implicitly at least) that of the settler society. The Grand Hall is an enormous curving space, roughly three hundred feet long by fifty feet wide, located at the lower level of the cmc’s spacious, sloping site along the Ottawa River. Through the bank of windows which forms the long outside wall one can see a prospect of the river and the contesting time, place, and nation    53

3 Northwest Coast house fronts. Grand Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Pauline Wakeham.

high bluffs on the far shore crowned by the Parliament buildings; along the opposite wall there is a raised platform suggesting a boardwalk on which stand six recreated Northwest Coast houses juxtaposed with an array of monumental totem poles.13 Though the carefully researched house fronts reproduce the styles of six different peoples of the coast, their placement suggests the form of a single village. This synthetic vision elides the differences among the nations of the coast, presenting as one an array of culturally and linguistically diverse political entities that historically have often been in conflict.14 Northwest Coast houses were traditionally oriented to face bodies of water, and the polished surface of the floor—much in use for entertainments of all kind—becomes symbolic of river or sea.15 Behind the houses rises a scrim with images of British Columbia’s dense rain forest, animated by the sounds of crashing waves, bird song, and Native music. This backdrop creates a dramatic sense of place, but also runs some risk of reinscribing traditional stereotypes of the Native as natural man. Early plans

54    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

for the Grand Hall included the recreation of a European vessel seemingly anchored offshore—a historical gesture that would have linked the exhibit to the time of the fur trade.16 The decision to eliminate this feature avoided a common museological trope which links the historical significance of indigenous peoples to their contact with Europeans, but its omission further increases the sense of timeless sublimity that infects the exhibit.17 The Grand Hall was conceived in the familiar mode of the panorama—a vast, curving, but essentially two-dimensional historical tableau designed to show the art of the Northwest Coast in all its grandeur. Originally, only one house was intended to have an interior; the others would simply be left as house fronts. The village was also originally without printed signage, which MacDonald thought a technologically outdated way to communicate with visitors in the era of the “information society.” The aim of the Grand Hall was to “make an impression on visitors through their senses and their emotions.”18 Museum visitors would have to make their way to the adjoining First Peoples’ Hall to fill in their understanding of the objects and activities that occupied the space behind the façades. During the planning process, both of these positions were modified, and all six houses now have interiors that contain both didactic installations and information on Native life, past and present, though constraints of space have limited some of them to a relatively shallow spatial depth. The concept for the Grand Hall also provided for the animation of the space through live performances and interpreters who would give visitors an appreciation of the continuing vitality of traditional expressive culture. Despite the presence of these animateurs and the addition of the house interiors, however, it is fair to say that the overwhelming impression of the Grand Hall gained by the visitors who descend into it via a tall escalator that flows down from the admissions area remains a view taken from the water—a kind of Pacific Coast Canaletto. Our first thought in meeting up with this miniature village on an enormous scale is not to explore whatever world might lie behind the house fronts, but to stand back in admiration of a picturesque spectacle that manages to be both dazzling and approachable. So pleasing in fact is this panoramic effect that we may not fully register its impact until we have begun to explore the rather different approach to historical representation that confronts us in the Canada Hall, situated two

contesting time, place, and nation    55

floors above the Grand Hall.19 The curators of the Canada Hall also had an enormous stage to work on, but rather than aiming for the monumentality that characterizes the Grand Hall’s Northwest Coast village, they chose a more intimate approach. They designed a series of enclosed spaces and close-up views artfully arranged along a winding path that is simultaneously a geographical journey across Canada and a chronological journey through its history.20 Thus as we travel from east to west, we also progress through a series of scenes and moments—typical rather than specific—in the history of the nation: Basque whalers, a town square in Nouvelle France, nineteenthcentury Ontario storefronts, a Metis encampment, a railway station ready for immigrants, a grain elevator on the prairies—until once again we reach the fishing villages of the Pacific coast. The Canada Hall is an extended version of the streetscapes that have become popular in history museums, as MacDonald himself explained, partly because “they offer a change of scale” from traditional displays, partly because (given the familiarity of city streets) “people feel comfortable in that type of environment.” Despite the overall size of the hall, all the spaces here are small, enclosed, and intimate, and—in keeping with the cmc’s strongly stated goal of making the museum a place of experience rather than a treasure house of artifacts—the exhibits work to make the past seem as accessible as possible. Whereas old-fashioned display cases “place a barrier between visitor and artifact,” MacDonald wrote, “environmental reconstructions allow visitors to penetrate the exhibit, thus increasing the potential for that participation and interactivity which enhances both the enjoyment and the learning process.” As in other exhibitions of this kind, visitors to the Canada Hall have a kind of voyeuristic experience as they enter bedrooms, taverns, and churches and peer at the replicated artifacts of the past. The impression of intimacy with another time is also intensified by the reduced five-eighths scale of the reconstructed buildings, a device borrowed from theme parks such as the Epcot Center at Disneyworld, which was an important source of ideas for MacDonald as the cmc’s exhibits were being planned.21 If the Grand Hall is a sublime panorama, then the Canada Hall is a sentimental journey. The intimacy of its settings offers the visitor a sense of participation and belonging. At any given moment, of course, historical

56    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

4 Chinese Laundry, Canada Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Ruth Phillips.

5 New France streetscape, Canada Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Harry Foster, Canadian Museum of Civilization.

scenes are often more exotic than immediate to anything in the visitor’s experience, but over time and space Canada’s national history unfolds as a journey of identification. An inclusive array of ethnically diverse and specific components (a historic union hall in Winnipeg, a Chinese laundry, a Ukrainian church from Alberta) seeks to provide specific points of attachment and recognition for visitors from different backgrounds. Always, in fact, as we tread the uneven, cobble-like surface of the pathway, we are kept aware of following a trail, and if we look up, we sometimes catch a glimpse of the next or the previous stops along the way—rooftops or ships’ masts from other tableaux. But wherever we are on this pathway, no scene stands wholly unto itself; each one takes its place as a moment in the nation-building journey that the museum was built to celebrate and promote. Against the stasis of the Grand Hall, here the movement is inexorably toward contemporaneity and progress. For reasons that are museological as well as ideological, the cmc offers an idealized vision of a national past. Although the separatist movement in Quebec and other divisive regional and ethnic tensions continue to mark Canadian politics, in the Canada Hall the visitor moves seamlessly from one region to another and experiences a vision of the nation that is unified and without rupture. It incorporates without any obvious sense of tension the Native-European exchanges of the fur trade, the Metis buffalo hunters of the prairies, the Chinese and Ukrainian immigrants in the West. When we finally arrive at the Pacific, the spotlight falls once again on an indigenous theme—a Native fishing boat, but one constructed for its Nisga’a owners by Japanese-Canadian boat builders after their return from internment during the Second World War. This more recent component of the Canada Hall, constructed almost fifteen years after the first displays were put in place, reflects the way that the evolving multicultural and postcolonial historical consciousness of contemporary Canada is intervening in the cmc’s original construct of settler nationhood. The effect is still to assimilate immigrant and First Nations histories within the dominant settler narrative. (As the narrator in the accompanying video says, putting the “Nisga’a Girl” in the Canada Hall is “a reminder of the hard work and courage of two families.”) Yet the decision to place this particular artifact toward the end of the national journey both highlights and brings together the first Brit-

58    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

ish Columbia indigenous nation to achieve self-government and one of the most difficult episodes in recent national memory. It also emphasizes that the building of Canada has been as much a product of intra-“ethnic” group collaborations as of the interactions of ethnic minorities with the French or English “founding nations” who were long positioned as the nation’s controlling cultural and political forces. When we review the Grand Hall and the Canada Hall—two displays so different in their effect—it takes a moment to recognize that the same picturesque aesthetic operates in each. The difference is largely a matter of scale. In fact, a number of the individual scenes in the Canada Hall could easily be enlarged to create the monumental; all that would be needed is the space to stand back. (Given Canada’s regionalism, for instance, one could imagine a curatorial revolt—a sort of Prairie putsch—in which towering grain elevators would take the place of totem poles as icons of the nation.) Nonetheless, in terms of historical representation, the effect of this treatment of scale is decisive. In the Grand Hall, the cost of monumentalism is that the Northwest Coast village is encountered from offshore, its dominant vista a view from the outside. The Grand Hall is a magnificent tribute to the artistic achievements of Northwest Coast First Nations, but it denies them a sense of history equivalent to that which unfolds in the Canada Hall two floors above. The all encompassing moment of the panorama simply subsumes any idea of a before or after. It should be pointed out, however, that this impression of timelessness converged with an important goal of First Nations representatives, who were actively lobbying Canadian museums during the period of the cmc’s development to represent their histories and their present ways of life more accurately. Indigenous leaders urged museums to present not only stories of colonial repression but also those of resistance and the survival of cultural traditions against great odds. The project of researching and constructing the six tribal houses that are displayed along the imitative seafront of the Grand Hall must be seen in this context. It drew together a group of people— Native and non-Native—who were engaged in an important and in many respects successful effort to recover and renew traditional cultural and aesthetic forms. Nonetheless, though the agendas of the museum and the First Peoples converged for a time, ultimately they led in different directions.

contesting time, place, and nation    59

the task force on museums  and fir st peoples

From the beginning the plans for the new Canadian Museum of Civilization set aside a huge space behind the Grand Hall for a First Peoples’ Hall that would present exhibits on indigenous peoples outside the Northwest Coast. Initially this was envisioned as a standard culture-area display that would emphasize traditional subsistence patterns. Early on, however, its development was put on hold so that the museum could devote its resources to getting the Grand Hall and the Canada Hall ready for the opening. By the time the museum returned to the project in the early 1990s, deep fissures had begun to appear in the familiar modernist terrain of Canadian museum anthropology. During the late 1980s the reform of museological practices had been invested with particular urgency by important debates that developed around temporary exhibits organized by two major Canadian museums. The first controversy concerned The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples (1988), an exhibition organized by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, on the occasion of the 1988 Winter Olympics. Native activists seized on the occasion to initiate a boycott in support of the land claim of the Lubicon band of Cree, but the protest rapidly expanded to encompass a comprehensive critique of the power relations and representational practices that had been common to Western museums for much of the twentieth century.22 A year later, equally fierce debates erupted around Into the Heart of Africa, organized by Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.23 In retrospect, the boycott of this exhibit seems to have been sparked more by racial tensions in Toronto than by the exhibition’s curatorial content, which put forward a critique of the colonial origins of the Royal Ontario Museum’s African collections and the complicity of Victorian Canadians in the British imperial project. These two painful episodes marked a turning point in Canadian museology, and both contributed in a significant degree to the articulation of a new, pluralist museum ethos.24 The Spirit Sings controversy, in particular, led directly to the formation, in 1989, of a national Task Force on Museums and First Peoples—an initiative sponsored by the Canadian Museums Association and the Assembly of First Nations (Canada’s largest Aboriginal

60    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

political organization) and funded by the federal Ministry of Communications (now the Department of Canadian Heritage). The task force was made up of equal numbers of Native and non-Native museum professionals, who met over a three-year period and consulted with their provincial museum associations. Three staff curators from the newly opened cmc served as members and helped to develop the guidelines set out in its report, Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships between Museums and First Peoples, issued in 1992. These guidelines aimed at the creation of new models of collaboration and respectful partnership in all aspects of museum work, from research to exhibition development, and were informed by a key principle requiring consultation with Aboriginal communities when their cultures and heritages were being represented.25 The Museum of Civilization’s board of trustees endorsed the task force report just as the cmc was resuming work on the First Peoples’ Hall, and the museum duly proceeded to appoint an Aboriginal Advisory Committee to work with museum curators and staff on the development of the new hall.26 Although the cmc had worked closely with many Aboriginal consultants on earlier cmc exhibits, this structure marks a defining break with the traditional academic and disciplinary structures of curatorial authority.27 In a recent paper, Andrea Laforet, the cmc’s director of Ethnology and Cultural Studies, and Gloria Cranmer Webster, senior Kwakwaka’wakw curator and a member of the advisory committee, highlighted the impact of the numerous changes that occurred in the First Peoples’ Hall team over the eleven years of its development.28 The number of Aboriginal curatorial staff in the ethnology division increased, for example, while the Aboriginal co-chair resigned to take another job midway through the process, and a senior archaeologist withdrew, unhappy with the direction the exhibit was taking. Other curators of archaeology, all non-Native, were involved throughout the process, while the non-Native curators of ethnology were involved at the beginning and the end but were sidelined during the middle phases of development. These comings and goings undoubtedly increased the polyphony of the finished exhibits, which reflect not only the input of the advisory committee, but also the internal politics of the museum’s process and the different cultural, disciplinary, and professional formations of the individuals who worked on its component installations.

contesting time, place, and nation    61

the fir st peoples’ hall

At the entrance to the First Peoples’ Hall and across from the Kitigan Zibi welcome panel there is a second welcome installation. It is a video screen on which a diverse array of Aboriginal people addresses visitors directly in response to the question: “What do you want people to understand about being an Aboriginal person in Canada today?” Inuit, Indian, and Metis, young and old, male and female, reserve and urban, they nevertheless speak with one voice: “We are diverse”; “Our relationship to the land is central to our identity”; “We are proud of our Aboriginal identity”; “We value our traditions, but we are also fully engaged in the contemporary world.” As the visitor walks through the introductory section, these themes are reiterated through texts, objects, and images. This is the only section of the exhibition that foregrounds the beautifully crafted and artistically elaborated objects that have become standard features not only in the exhibits in anthropology museums but also of art galleries. But in place of the hushed quietude that fosters the appreciation of aesthetic singularity, and instead of the typological groupings that lead to analytical clarity, the First Peoples’ Hall presents us with a party—cheerful, noisy, and crowded. On the visitor’s right, text panels proclaiming “We are diverse” are embedded in a jumble of objects from different times and places. They jostle each other in purposeful but chaotic confusion, leaving an impression of color, variation, and vitality, but they also deny the possibility of focusing on the objects individually. Across the way, a thematically structured installation spells out the advisory committee’s key messages, on text panels and through visual materials that focus on the achievements of contemporary individuals. “We celebrate our long history in this land. We celebrate our work, our creativity, our creations. We celebrate our differences, our similarities, and our survival as Aboriginal people. We have not forgotten the land. . . . We have an ancient bond with the land. Our bond with the land is forged in knowledge. Our bond with the land is forged in centuries of hard work. Our bond with the land is forged in the prayers, offerings, and dances that hold our connections with other living beings of the earth. We speak of our bond with the land in the things we make, in the memories of our Elders, and in the voices of our own experience.” 62    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

6 We Are Diverse installation (Zone 2), First Peoples’ Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Pauline Wakeham.

In the next section of the exhibition, Ways of Knowing, these affirmations and assertions are addressed in more depth and through a strategy of calculated juxtaposition with the findings of Western ethnology and archaeology. The keynote messages continue to echo—literally as well as figuratively—for as we walk through the space we can hear in the background the audio track of a video entitled Relationship to the Land: “The land owns us, we don’t own land”; “Until land claims are settled, we’re trespassers . . . in our own way of life”; or “We are the memory of the land.” The message of this section is respect for the equivalent authority of traditional indigenous knowledge—particularly as articulated through oral traditions and stories—and Western scientific knowledge. This is achieved by inverting the usual proportion of space devoted to indigenous knowledge and Western anthropological and archaeological knowledge. The main archaeological installation is surrounded by an array of indigenous storytelling forms—Norval Morrisseau’s painted account of Ojibwa cosmology, A Separate Reality; Shelley Niro’s sculpture of the Iroquois creation story, Sky contesting time, place, and nation    63

Woman; a storytelling booth; and a large theater in which the cmc curator and Mi’kmaq elder Stephen Augustine narrates parts of the Gloosecap trickster-hero cycle. The archaeological exhibit is also theatrical. Through glass floor panels we see and walk over the recreated artifactual deposits that museum archaeologists have found at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon Territory, a 25,000year-old site containing the oldest deposits of human-made tools in Canada. Adjacent text panels describe the excavations and research, as well as the scientific arguments for climate changes thought to have controlled the movements of people into North America across the Bering Straits from Asia. In Ways of Knowing, the visitor is presented with two different kinds of stories that account for the human habitation of North America, but no attempt is made to resolve their discrepancies. Rather, they are presented side by side as coexistent, alternative, and competing forms of explanation. A text panel entitled “Our Origins” states: “Scientific research and our own traditions confirm that we, the First Peoples, have an ancient presence on this continent. We are not the first immigrants; we are the Native inhabitants of the land. We have been here since before the world took its present form.” In this section, as in the introductory welcome panel, two bodies occupy, with ambiguity and difficulty, the same space. When we enter the third section of the First Peoples’ Hall, An Ancient Bond with the Land, we could be forgiven for thinking that the initial 1980s plan for the First Peoples’ Hall had survived after all. As the introductory panel informs us, its six large semicircular bays “explore the role of whaling, fishing, communal hunting, farming and trading in supporting Aboriginal societies across the northern half of North America.” Structured according to classical anthropological frameworks, it purports to explain the traditional lifestyles of regional Aboriginal groups in terms of the formative interdependence of ecology, indigenous subsistence systems, technologies, and material culture. Large scrims evoking the natural environment form the backdrops for tableaux of pre-contact tools, hunting and fishing equipment, and dwellings. On closer inspection, however, we find numerous interventions and negotiations of these standard ethnographic tropes. In the People of the Longhouse bay, for example, the focus is on the role of women in Iroquois society, a revisionist stress that intervenes in the dominant patriarchal discourse of colonial anthropology. But the juxtapositions 64    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

are often uneasy. A text discussing Changing Human-Plant Relationships and the importation of corn from Mexico seven thousand years ago is followed by others identifying the earth as Turtle Island and discussing Clans and Clan Mothers, and Women’s Influence on the Men’s World. Adjacent to each bay, furthermore, is a small booth containing a video, texts, and artifacts that address contemporary issues. The booth adjacent to People of the Longhouse focuses on the Oka crisis. This was a historic confrontation during the summer of 1990 that was initially sparked by a dispute between the town of Oka in eastern Quebec and the Mohawk First Nation of Kanesatake over the town’s plan to build a golf course on lands claimed by the Mohawk which contain a burial ground and a sacred grove of pine trees. The crisis escalated when the nearby Mohawk community at Kahnawake barricaded the busy Mercier Bridge that links the city of Montreal with the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. A video in the booth shows modern-day clan mothers assuming traditional leadership roles during the armed standoff that resulted at Oka, together with an artifact in a glass case accompanied by a label that reads: “Razor wire . . .” This deadpan rendering of a typical museum “tombstone label” is surely a remarkable example of postcolonial mimicry. Similarly, the booth adjacent to the People of the Maritimes bay focuses on the confrontations between Native and nonNative fishermen at Burnt Church that followed the Supreme Court’s Donald Marshall decision. This video so well illustrates the complex negotiations of tradition and innovation, history and politics, and memory and modernity that characterize the First Peoples’ Hall that it is worth looking at it in detail. As the video opens, the voice of a young man begins to tell a story from the Gloosecap cycle about the lobster and the eel. The voice of an elder takes it up, explaining how the two sea creatures at first tried to inhabit the same river, but found in the end that each had to choose a different seasonal cycle in order to coexist in harmony. While we listen, we watch children in a modern-day Mi’kmaq school making enormous full-body masks with which they will enact the story for an annual festival. Such mask forms are not traditional to the Mi’kmaq but appear to have migrated in from Toronto’s Caribana festival. We then hear about the Donald Marshall case and watch familiar though still shocking newsreel footage of the tense confrontations and boat rammings that occurred during the summer contesting time, place, and nation    65

7 Contemporary Issue booth adjacent to People of the Longhouse section (Zone 3), First Peoples’ Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Ruth Phillips.

of 2000 when angry non-Native fishermen found they had to compete on new terms with Native fishermen for dwindling Atlantic fish stocks. The narrator concludes: “Today the Mi’kmaq are still waging political battles. Today the lobster and the eel continue to avoid each other, returning to the river at different times of the year.” The solution that is being offered here to the two-body problem is that of spatial separation and complementarity rather than integration—an option that is broadly favored by many contemporary Aboriginal political leaders.29 The final section of the hall is devoted to The Arrival of Strangers, and the enormous changes that have been enforced on Aboriginal people in the course of five centuries of contact with settler society. In installation terms, the displays in this section adopt conventional didactic forms––text panels and a rich array of artefacts, images, and documents, shown behind glass and on the walls. These displays are organized in a stately sequence along a linear path and are clearly structured according to thematic topics. Yet the themes reflect, summarize, and reduce to digestible proportions a generation of revisionist historical and ethnographic research. They pre­ sent stories that have not been told before in anything like this detail—not 66    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

only about the Fur Trade, the Explorers, and the Retention of Traditional Beliefs, but also about Conversion, Residential Schools, High Steel Workers, Canneries, Gambling, Agriculture and Traditional Lifeways, Legislation, Rodeos, and Veterans. The last section to be completed, it is a tour de force whose coherence is all the more impressive given that ten different curators worked on its various subsections. The Arrival of Strangers section—and the First Peoples’ Hall—ends with two grace notes, a display on Aboriginal Humour, complete with stand-up comedians and a montage of cartoons, and a wall of contemporary paintings and sculptures, in which the importance of Western genres of art is examined as a significant site of indigenous resistance and discourse. As we leave the hall, we encounter the words of the Aboriginal elder statesman George Erasmus: “The history of our people needs to be told. We need to present accurately what happened in the past, so that we can deal with it in the future. I don’t like what has happened over the last 500 years. We can’t do much about that. But what are we going to do about the next 500 years? What are we going to do about the next ten years?” The voices of the Aboriginal people who speak to visitors to the First Peoples’ Hall all argue, in one way or another, that the next five hundred years can only be different—and better—if non-Native Canadians can come to understand Aboriginal perspectives on land, history, and culture. The large questions of land and power will not, of course, be resolved in a museum. All a museum can do is to inform and to disrupt tired stereotypes and ways of thinking that lead only to dead ends. If, in other words, there is no resolution outside the museum, it would be dishonest to pretend to one inside the museum. In this, the First Peoples’ Hall, with all its discrepancies and dissonances, acts as an honest broker for the nation of nations it purports to represent. In this sense, too, the imperfectly merged images of nineteenth-century Algonquins and the twenty-first century Parliament buildings on the welcoming panel provide an appropriate point of entry to the First Peoples’ Hall. As in a stereoscopic projection the doubling of the images has given the viewer a new depth of perception. But the lack of identity between the historical and the contemporary realities also makes us conscious of their imperfect registration. Although the image forces a provisional alignment between the Aboriginal memory of unimpeded movement across the land contesting time, place, and nation    67

and the history of an alien occupation, the viewer is not deceived by the digital sleight of hand and must strain to keep the two images and their competing claims in mind as simultaneous and coincident rather than as historical and sequential. We remain aware that two different views are being held together by an act of will whose object is to deny the categorical separation of the “then” of imperial power and the “now” of postcolonial politics. There is no final merging, no stable integration. We leave the hall as we entered it, with the realization that the Aboriginal figures who stand before us are also coming after us. Collectively, we have yet to discover whether two bodies can occupy the same space, or whether they will have to find their parallel and separate paths. notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

The terms First Nations and First Peoples are both used in Canada. The term First Nations is more commonly used today, especially in western Canada. Fifteen years ago, when the exhibit we are discussing was being developed, First Peoples was more common. At the Museum of Civilization the greeting takes the form of a declaration of land ownership. Other interpretations of this protocol, such as the text provided by the Musqueam First Nation for display at the entrance to the exhibits in the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, take the form of a traditional welcome issued to visitors entering the territory of another people. See Cairns, Citizens Plus, 28. The White Paper is properly known as Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, presented to the First Session of the Twenty-Eighth Parliament by the Honourable Jean Chretien, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (1969). See Cairns, Citizens Plus, 51–53 and 65–70. On the precedent-setting negotiations over land in British Columbia see Culhane, The Pleasure of the Crown. At the same time, the government established a healing fund of $245 million. Both actions were responses to another landmark event of the 1990s, the issuing in 1996 of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. This report, which can be accessed at http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/ sgmm_e.html, presented the results of five years of comprehensive research and consultation regarding the relationship between Aboriginal people and Canada. It recommended a fundamental restructuring of this relationship and made numerous specific recommendations designed to redefine the terms of

68    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18

19

20 21

Aboriginal government and to improve health, education, housing, and many other inadequate conditions of life. For a statement of the founding mandate of the ethnology division of the National Museum of Canada, see Sapir, “An Anthropological Survey of Canada.” The National Museum of Canada consciously modeled its anthropology division after the tradition established at the American Museum of Natural History by Franz Boas. See Zaslow, Reading the Rocks, 268. On the museum projects, see Ord, The National Gallery of Canada. The Metis are a legally recognized ethnic group or “nation” of mixed Aboriginal and settler ancestry. On Cardinal’s architecture, see Boddy, ed., The Architecture of Douglas Cardinal. MacDonald was also influenced by the displays installed during the 1970s at the Royal British Columbia Museum (then the British Columbia Provincial Museum) and the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology. For McDonald’s vision of the cmc see MacDonald, “Crossroads of Cultures: The New Canadian Museum of Civilization,” 30–40; “Change and Challenge”; and MacDonald and Alsford, A Museum for the Global Village. For an example of the thinking that influenced MacDonald, see McLuhan and Powers, The Global Village. On the Grand Hall see Laforet, The Book of the Grand Hall. For a detailed discussion of the Grand Hall and the construction of the individual houses see the second chapter of Ostrowitz, Privileging the Past, 47–82. Like the sea for Northwest Coast peoples, the polished floor of the Grand Hall is, for the museum, an important source of wealth. The cmc, like many other museums, rents this, its most prestigious space, for formal governmental functions and also to private groups as an important source of revenue. This is one reason that the floor space has to be kept unencumbered by displays. See illustration in MacDonald and Alsford, A Museum for the Global Village, 81. See Laforet, “Time and the Grand Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization”; and Fabian, Time and the Other. MacDonald, “Change and Challenge,” 166. Following McLuhan, MacDonald wanted the museum to communicate its messages using new electronic media, performance, and other modes that could be tailored to individual needs and create “holistic” visitor experiences. The main sections of the Canada Hall were installed during the thirteen years between the opening of the museum in 1989 and the completion of the British Columbia section in 2002. Since then the museum has continued to add new components. On the Canada Hall see Rider, “Presenting the Public’s History to the Public.” MacDonald and Alsford, Museum for the Global Village, 94–96. Notable examples of the streetscape approach include, the Milwaukee Public Museum in the contesting time, place, and nation    69

22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

United States, the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature in Canada, and the York Castle Museum, York, England. Macdonald cited Disneyworld’s Epcot Centre as a particularly important model. A useful introduction to the debates is Harrison, “Completing a Circle.” See also R. Phillips, “Show Times.” For an excellent case study, see Butler, Contested Representations. See Canadian Museums Association (cma), Turning the Page; and Nicks, “Partnerships in Developing Cultural Resources.” On the broader context for the revolution in museum anthropology occurring during these years, see Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes. See Nicks, “Partnerships in Developing Cultural Resources,” 87–94. See Laforet and Webster, “The First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization”; and Andrea Laforet, personal communication, 2005. The members of the advisory committee were Kanatakta (Mohawk), Mandy Brown (Secwepemc), Denis Fraser (Metis), Tom Hill (Oneida), Alootook Ipellie (Inuit), Noel Knockwood (Mi’kmaq), Melvin Laroque (Dene), Lee Ann Martin (Mohawk), Emmanuel Metallic (Mi’kmaq), John Moses (Mohawk/Delaware), Tyrone Potts (North Peigan), Nicholette Prince (Carrier), Gloria Cranmer Webster (Kwakwaka’wakw), Tommy Weetaluktuk (Inuit), and Eldon Yellowhorn, (North Peigan). For a discussion of specific models of collaboration in museum exhibitions, see R. B. Phillips, “Introduction, Community Collaboration in Exhibitions.” Laforet and Webster, “The First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.” See Cairns, Citizens Plus.

70    r. b. phillips and m. s. phillips

“Unfinished Business” Public History in a Postcolonial Nation

Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton

the new millennium has had particular resonance in Aus­tralia for the process of “reconciliation,” the national term chosen to mark a putative turning point in the relationship between Australia’s indigenous peoples and the continuing legacy of European colonialism. Originally understood as a project that embraced both “the legislative pragmatics of national policy and the moral complexities of national memory and local historicity,”1 the rhetoric articulated and the actions carried out in the name of reconciliation were intended to focus and corral debate on how much the future of the nation was linked to the now fraught understanding of the colonial past. A prominent indigenous academic, Marcia Langton, has argued that reconciliation is condemned to remain “unfinished business” while there is no recognized treaty between Aboriginal peoples and white Australians. But “unfinished business” is also an apt description of the attempts so far made to understand or incorporate Aboriginal perspectives in the many sites and institutions that now represent Australia’s past to the public. Public history is an increasingly important subfield of theory and historical practice, where its practitioners are often

in the front lines, struggling to come to terms with new and conflicting interpretations of national history. Public history in Australia has been defined as “the practice of history by academically trained historians working for public agencies or as freelancers outside the universities.”2 Public historians may work in heritage conservation, commissioned history, museums, the media, education, radio, film, interactive multimedia, and other areas. They are people who have asked the question: “What is history for?”3 And they are concerned with addressing the relationship between audience, practice, and social context.4 Public history, however, is also an elastic term that can mean different things to different people, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. The “democratization” of history making and the rise of professional historians’ associations have also blurred simple definitions. Filmmakers, for example, are not described as public historians because they are usually trained in the techniques of filmmaking rather than history. Yet their work often reaches larger audiences than even national museums. The tension between these two directions—to apply proper standards of expertise and training to those working in the field on the one hand and the increasing number of history-making sites and audiences for public history on the other—has helped shape the field in Australia and led to many contradictions in practice. Professionally accredited public historians, for instance, are not necessarily those most likely to have an important influence on people’s knowledge and understanding of the past. A number of graduate courses over the last twenty years have made a significant contribution to the training and higher profile of public historians in various arenas, and a reflexive body of literature is emerging in Australian public history. With public history well established in Australia, this exploratory article begins to chart some of the issues emerging at a critical time of our history in relation to race and nation. Many of these issues are echoed in other Western countries at this time. The particular Australian inflections relate to a contemporary context. These include the struggle of indigenous peoples to have recognized a history which acknowledges custodianship of the land before the British invasion, the centrality of land to national discourses of Euro-Australian identity, and the treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people by the Australian state since invasion, particularly the “stolen generations” policy, whereby young Ab72    p. ashton and p. hamilton

original children were taken from their families and sent to institutions.5 For some non-Indigenous Australians, this involves coming to terms with a past in which their ancestors have been responsible for grievous wrongs. These vital issues are being played out in public arenas at a time when Australians are experiencing perhaps the most profound renegotiations of their histories to date. white austr alia

It has long been a commonplace in Australian history that one of the most pressing and ever-present dangers perceived to be confronting white races on the vast Australian continent was the potential degradation of their racial inheritance. Immigration programs and policies and official dictates pertaining to land settlement sought both to keep pure the “crimson thread of kinship” that the colonial premier of New South Wales, Sir Henry Parkes, claimed ran through all imperial veins and to build, as William Charles Wentworth had dreamt in 1823, a “new Britannia in another world.”6 As an “immigrant nation”—a “new world” society which emerged from the process of colonialism—Australia’s colonies, transformed in 1901 into a federation of states, were to evolve cultural institutions and public rituals derived almost exclusively from British models.7 All of these contributed to a public construction of a colonial and postcolonial history which, officially endorsed and predicated on dominant value systems and ideologies, located a shared past and present—and by implication a secure future—in a broader imperial context. Thus ethnic consciousness was a principal determinant of nationalism. Indeed, it was believed that British blood and stock mixed in the crucible of an ancient, pristine continent would produce a superior British race, the “Australian man.” Such an ideology underwrote the legend of anzac (the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) which cast a bronze, loyal, and laconic white Anglo male as the Australian national type after the disastrous First World War military defeat in 1915 at Gallipoli, Turkey, when Australian soldiers sacrificed themselves for country and Empire.8 The enormous social dislocation caused by the war, combined with the legend of Anzac, was to generate a flood of war memorials throughout Australian cities, suburbs, and country towns. (See fig. 1.) “unfinished business”    73

1 Detail from a frieze on the monumental Hyde Park War Memorial in Sydney. Photo: Paul Ashton.

Monuments and memorials, public landscapes, processions, rituals of “social integration,” art galleries, museums, and official histories became part of a process described in the second half of the twentieth century by Donald Horne as “the great drama, endlessly playing . . . of maintaining definitions of the nation and its social orders.”9 During the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, however, this great drama was ultimately an imperial, masculine narrative. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ stories were all but banished while their skeletal remains and artifacts were corralled in repositories of scientific imperialism such as the Australian Museum which, the first of its kind on the continent, was inaugurated in Sydney in 1827.10 In a modern new-settler society, advancement depended on perceiving the indigenous peoples as “primitive” even while romanticizing them as close to nature. Grass-roots public history making by Europeans was designed by and large to provide local and regional links in a historical chain of imperial being. Successive generations of pioneers—first pastoral and agrarian, later municipal and suburban—forged bonds of mateship and cooperation on outposts of the British Empire as part of a worldwide (albeit faltering in 74    p. ashton and p. hamilton

the twentieth century) imperial, organic community. This historical narrative was not significantly challenged until the emergence of civil rights movements and the rise of the New Social History in universities during the 1970s, marking the beginnings of critical public history. Imperial historical meanings, publicly inscribed on landscapes and transmitted through cultural institutions and practices, had also to accommodate the rise of Australian nationalism in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. There were some tensions in that period between the “imperial” and the “national,” though national identity was centrally predicated on race. For the first half of the twentieth century, Australia was kept “racially pure” through the “White Australia policy” (1901), an immigration restriction act and one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the new federal Parliament.11 Independence and individualism, derived historically from the notion of independent Australian Britons, remained the basis of the masculine social type which served as a means of normalizing and managing other definitions of Australianness, even with extensive immigration after the Second World War. Aboriginal and other diverse voices have in recent years challenged traditional and official interpretations of Australian history. But they have yet to change the dominant narrative thrust of what it means to be Australian. Monuments and memorials of the classical style were initially the primary vehicles for representing colonial versions of a public past. Leaving aside vice-regally inscribed obelisks, columns, and clock towers which were built to impose order and discipline on the landscape and its inhabitants, monuments, albeit in small numbers, began to be constructed in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania) from the 1820s.12 Significantly, the first few of these revered the English “discoverer” of Australia, Captain James Cook (along, in one instance, with Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on his voyage). Two decades later, homage began to be paid to governors who had advanced the political interests of free inhabitants in the penal colonies and fostered agrarian and other forms of capitalism. The earliest governors, tainted with convictism, were to be excluded from such memorialization until the close of the nineteenth century. A monument to the founding governor of New South Wales, Captain Arthur Phillip, was not erected in the City of Sydney until 1897.13 Convict origins, however, “unfinished business”    75

2 Part of the statue erected in 1897 in the Botanical Gardens, Sydney, to the first governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip. Below an imposing figure of a white woman reclining on a decorative base with the inscription “Commerce” is a small Aboriginal figure, symbolically at the end of a chain of being and literally under colonial rule. Photo: Paul Ashton.

were obscured in this sculptured narrative through a neoclassical treatment that took as its principal themes maritime trade between an industrialized homeland and commodity-rich colonies and an umbilical, if simplistic, cultural and biological connection with the motherland. (See fig. 2, above.) Exploration and discovery, principal themes in the founding myths of empire, dominated public representations of postinvasion nineteenthcentury history. Ironically extending imperial maritime endeavor into arid parts of the continent, many early colonial explorers perished while in search of a supposed great inland sea. Others sought out navigable rivers or exploitable resources. A number of public edifices bore features commemorating and celebrating these men who helped push the frontiers deeper and deeper into Aboriginal territories. Sydney’s Land Department building, the first stage of which was completed in 1876, had statues of numerous explorers incorporated into its three-story sandstone façade. Among them were 76    p. ashton and p. hamilton

Charles Sturt, John Oxley, Hamilton Hume, William Hovell, and Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, the intrepid surveyor general of New South Wales from 1828 to 1855. From such icons of Crown land and empire, memorial links spread out to remote parts of the colonies, although there, on occasion, race and empire were configured under a different rubric.14 Near the tiny country town of Molong in New South Wales, a gravestone marks an individual Aborigine’s involvement with one of Mitchell’s expeditions:

to native courage, honesty and fidelity yuranigh who accompanied the expedition of discovery into tropical australia in 1846 lies buried here according to the rites of his countrymen and this spot was dedicated and enclosed by the governor general’s authority in 1852 Imperial demands—fidelity, courage, and sacrifice—had been reenforced in other ways. While Mitchell was instrumental in having the monument erected, he had also ordered a massacre of local Aborigines to facilitate European appropriation of land.15 Recently, as a testament to more inclusive times, this site has been added to the New South Wales Heritage Register, with carved trees by Yuranigh’s Wiradjuri countrymen surrounding the headstone, in a sign of bicultural respect. Until recently, Aboriginal figures were largely absent in urban representations of colonization, apart from their role as treacherous menace.16 A statue to Burke and Wills unveiled in Melbourne during 1865 shows a swaggering and muscular Robert O’Hara Burke standing next to William Wills, his second in command, both staring death boldly in the face. From a landowning Irish Protestant gentry family, Burke, the daredevil son of empire—a “death or glory man . . . [who] achieved both”—entered in 1860 into what the governor of Victoria later called “the glorious race across the continent.”17 Bizarre, perplexing, and ending in disaster, the expedition cost over sixty thousand pounds and the lives of seven of its eight members. “unfinished business”    77

One member of the party survived, having been taken in by local Aborigines. Burke’s ignorance and imperious manner, however, led him to fire at Aborigines who were attempting to bring fish to the exhausted explorers. Those who led parties in search of Burke were to open up fresh lands for profitable pastoral expansion. Publicly, the fate of Burke and Wills provided a tragic element to the saga of colonial progress. Their loss as ultimate sacrifice for King and Country was reclaimed by the nouveau riche colony of Victoria, flush with capital from the recent gold rushes, in two figures of imperial heroism. Filmmaker Bob Weis was to satirize the crazy exploits of this expedition in his film Wills and Burke: The Untold Story (1985), alternatively known as “Lost.” Much of the significance of the bronze memorial was lost on municipal authorities toward the end of the twentieth century. Burke and Wills perished in the desert. After a number of relocations over many years, the memorial found its final resting place in a Melbourne city square above a waterwall.18 memor ials

Memorials remain one of the most contested and enduring forms of public history. They are both central objects for cementing shared cultural meanings about the past and blunt statements impossible to ignore. Anachronistic histories evident in nineteenth-century commemorations of explorers, battles, and pioneers now jostle for space in public places with broader, more democratized or diverse forms and monuments. Older memorials have also been contested in attempts to “remake history.” In recent years there has been a gradual increase in the number of memorials to groups that were previously marginalized in the national psyche. The absence of earlier memorials to Aborigines, says Bronwyn Batten, is as significant as their increasing presence in the landscape since the 1980s. She refers to a growing desire by Aboriginal people to rework existing memorials or create new ones for memorializing their own people.19 During the Victorian sesquicentenary in 1984–85, a plaque was erected at an Aboriginal “keeping place” museum at Shepparton, a large country town, to commemorate a group of Aborigines who were massacred at Mount Dispersion—which was named by Europeans to commemorate the clash—during Major Thomas Mitchell’s epic overland journey from Syd78    p. ashton and p. hamilton

3 This public drinking fountain in the Sydney inner-city district of Glebe was originally unveiled by the governor, Lord Chelmsford, on August 2,1909, to mark a municipal jubilee. It was restored in 1996 as part of a general refurbishment of the gateway to Glebe. Opened by another state governor, the fountain then took on a new layer of meaning as a memorial to the famous Aboriginal boxer Dave Sands. Photo: Paul Ashton.

ney to Victoria in 1836.20 A public drinking fountain in the Sydney inner-city district of Glebe, erected in 1909 to mark the jubilee of municipal incorporation, was rededicated in 1996 to include a memorial to the popular Aboriginal boxer Dave Sands, who among eighty-seven wins out of one hundred fights had knocked out Britain’s Randolph Turpin in the 1949 Empire middleweight championship. (See fig. 3, above; also fig. 4, p. 90) Acknowledging past atrocities by Europeans, a monument erected in 1972 at Polson cemetery in Hervey Bay, Queensland, gives voice to the role of South Sea Islanders in Queensland’s development. Sixty-three thousand “Kanakas” were kidnapped between 1860 and 1901; their virtual slave labor underwrote the viability of the state’s vital sugar industry. Racial tensions and an underlying culture of violence become palpable through this local monument, which marks fifty-five graves of the “unknown dead.” Officially, nevertheless, narratives of conflict are often represented as events remote in time, as tales of disunity now superseded. Stories of nationhood have usually emphasized unity based on a cohesive collective memory. Despite the rhetoric of inclusivity in later years, national history still largely erases oppositional interests and produces some awkward juxtapositions. “unfinished business”    79

There is a memorial to Australia’s indigenous people on the pavement in Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens near the sea wall, a place of leisure and contemplation. It is also in a space that people walk, ride, or run over. It was painted as part of a sculpture walk set up for the 2000 Olympics, along with a number of other creative works decorating the Olympic torch relay route. Though the project was initiated by local authorities, councils, government departments, and other bodies, Brenda Croft, the indigenous artist who created the work, has ensured that the purpose of the memorial is clear, though the meaning of the sculpture leaves much to the imagination. On the side is a commemorative plaque explaining it, in the manner of labels in a museum. Croft’s own ambivalence to the state is revealed in her opening reference to the way her mother would embarrass her at school by scribbling in the margins of her (white) Australian history book, “This is not the truth.” She uses this metaphor first to describe the installation as perhaps her own way of “scribbling in the margins” but then changes her mind: “or perhaps it’s part of the frontline of indigenous history.”21 This refers to the way she and other indigenous artists like Gordon Bennett and Leah King use their creative visual medium to subvert the traditional written historiography and also to document their own histories and create an interaction between the past and the present. This is indeed an ambivalent memorial at a number of levels. Croft herself, though an “authentic” indigenous artist, comes from the Northern Territory and is therefore unfamiliar with the intimacies of the “local.” (She had to consult with the local Cultural Heritage Officer, an employee of the state). The intention is to create a sanctioned “blackfella site of origin” that reflects a community bound principally by color and race—a “community” equally created by nonindigenous peoples for political purposes that call for “black and white” reconciliation at the national level. Croft aims to overcome the problems of earlier memorials and histories to indigenous people, that of assuming they are “of the past” and not a dynamic, creative society in the present, by drawing a link between the meaning of the site to the traditional local tribe and the role of the site in 1988 as the focus for Aboriginal contestation of the Bicentenary celebrations, two hundred years after the European invasion. In the process we move from a group imagined in the past as having ties to place to a group today who are imagined as a community bounded by race. 80    p. ashton and p. hamilton

Although ostensibly place-centered, this is also a memorial without anchoring—a history that cannot bridge the gulf between traditional localized cultural practices and late twentieth-century genealogies of the struggle for survival, a fracturing so profound it cannot be grafted onto Western understandings of the past and made whole. Like almost all recent memorials to indigenous peoples, this one is about loss yet determined not to be an elegy. Angelika Bammer raises the issue of “the relationship between the experience of cultural displacement and the construction of cultural identity”—a relationship “marked by the tension of the historically vital double move between marking and recording absence and loss, and inscribing presence.”22 Croft attempts to overcome that break here with only limited success. new sites of contention

Debates about the past have been circulating through an increasing number of sites in recent years, along with a significant shift to popular culture as the principal forum for playing out these conflicts. Increasingly our notion of public history has broadened: it now encompasses not only traditional institutions such as museums and national parks but also many areas of the media. Newspapers, for example, have become intensely history conscious, highlighting profound changes in our attitude to the past. Journalists and filmmakers often compete with historians to tell the stories of the past. There seems almost to be an excess of history in the public sphere. Historical reenactments are gaining popularity, and cultural tourism, both internal and external, has also exploded.23 Significant changes have taken place in Australia over the last three decades. Until 1997, under the federal Labour government of Paul Keating — and with a historian, Don Watson, working as the prime minister’s speechwriter—there was the beginning of an acceptance of a new narrative of Australian history that recognized a “dark past.”24 This interpretation cen­ trally underpinned Native Title legislation, conceived of as a form of compensation for past wrongs. But the conservative federal Liberal government, which was in power from 1996 until November 2006, was strongly opposed to what it calls a “black armband” version of Australia’s history, since land claims are predicated on a perception of Aborigines as survivors “unfinished business”    81

of two centuries of abuse under colonialism. Such heated debates demonstrate that both land and the “dark past” remain at the center of national discourses of Euro-Australian identity. Legal challenges—the logical outcome of several years of agitation by Aboriginal peoples themselves as well as white historians and many others—are one of the most recent arenas in the contestation over traditional interpretations of our history. This is particularly evident in native title claims. In the balance is reconciliation as a political cause and a cultural and social reality.25 If nervous courts are reluctant to deal with difficult histories, certainly anniversaries can no longer be the simple uncomplicated “celebrations of a nation” they once seemed to be. The 1988 Australian Bicentennial was called the Year of Mourning by many Aboriginal communities. At the year’s opening, some twenty thousand Aborigines—Kooris, Murris, Nyungars, Yolngu, and Anangu—converged on Sydney. They met to lay wreaths at Botany Bay “in remembrance of the deaths of thousands of their countrymen since 1788” and gathered on the foreshores of the bay to protest against the reenactment of the British.26 Joined by non-Aboriginal supporters, they led marches down the main streets of major cities across Australia. In Sydney on the “Day of Mourning”—Australia Day, January 26—one large group marched under the banner “Veterans of the 200-Year War.”27 Since then, during public anniversaries the politicized Aboriginal population has consistently contested the traditional version of white history, and the federal government, in the lead-up to the Centenary of Federation, attempted to search for a new National Day that might be less fraught. But the official celebrations surrounding federation, culminating on January 1, 2001, failed entirely to capture the public’s imagination. There was little enthusiasm about the uneven process by which dead, white, bearded men had led six squabbling colonies to form a nation. And it was politically difficult to exalt a compact that was in large part forged around the White Australia policy that was as much about controlling indigenous populations as it was about keeping out unwanted races.28 public history

Two principal concerns characterize the practice of public history across a range of forms, though they affect some forms more than others. The 82    p. ashton and p. hamilton

first is the complex question of representation: how to make indigenous people visible in the historical landscape as a continuous, indeed central, presence without reinforcing existing stereotypes through that representation. This is particularly challenging when previous museum collection strategies, heritage assessment criteria, and the like reflect the dominant culture’s hegemony. And it is not just a question of adding people in to existing frameworks. Rather, in many arenas, the problem is how to rethink the European colonizing stories to change traditional categories of historical significance and national meaning. The second issue concerns the politics of perspective. How can an indigenous point of view be incorporated into interpretation when there are few trained Aboriginal public historians in the field? (Aboriginal people make up about 2 percent of the Australian population, and there are few academically trained Aboriginal historians.) With the best of intentions, consultation with indigenous communities alone, while central to the politics of representation, does not change the institutional structure and culture providing interpretations of the past to the public. This concern is particularly relevant to government cultural institutions such as museums, government departments, heritage and conservation agencies such as national parks, and living history sites, such as Sovereign Hill at Ballarat, Victoria. Nonetheless, there has been a considerable degree and variety of change within individual institutions. For example, the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, established in 1962 and now incorporated into the Department of Conservation, has made some progress, particularly since the state’s Heritage Act of 1977 was amended in 1984 to include Aboriginal “relics.” Subsequent legislation and governmental agendas have resulted in a structure particularly oriented to Aboriginal sites: they have focused on physical fabric rather than intangible heritage. This and the fact that National Parks was given responsibility for carrying out all environmental impact assessments across the state, has spawned a whole archeological consulting industry of nonAboriginal people. The Aboriginal Heritage division set up within National Parks to manage sites is one of the few cultural organizations which has an Aboriginal employment strategy and employs many indigenous peoples in various positions, where amongst other responsibilities they develop interpretive material for sites. Since 1996 the Aboriginal Ownership Amendment “unfinished business”    83

to the Heritage Act allows for the handover of national parks to Aboriginal people. This has been particularly successful at Mutawindji, and quite recently in the far south coast of New South Wales the Yuin people took over majority management of the Gulaga and Biamanga National Parks. Nonetheless, there is still much to be done. There has been extensive consultation with local Aboriginal groups about sites since the 1980s, but this tends to position Aboriginal people as just one of many stakeholders. Reformers are working toward more power-sharing partnerships in the consultative process and the establishment of a Social Significance Assessment as a category in the Environmental Impact Statements, to take account not only of historical aspects but also the more emotional factors, such as memory and attachment to place.29 Some forms of public history are particularly resistant to reform. Commissioned history, for example, is by nature specific task-oriented work, bounded by an organization’s or corporation’s purpose and legal contracts. Public historians undertaking commissions may also face a number of dilemmas. Organizations, groups, or individuals commissioning history are by and large in privileged positions. Less powerful social groups and interests, with their limited resources, cannot generally commission history. Museums, on the other hand, which have seen a remarkable expansion in their number since the 1970s, have responded to shifts in the representational climate with some flexibility. Both the appointment of a generation of university-educated curators to the large museums and an increase in exhibitions with social history content have been instrumental in this context. As Gaye Sculthorpe has argued, the exhibition of Australian indigenous cultures has been the impetus for a substantial redevelopment of many Australian museums during this period.30 New Aboriginal galleries opened at the Australian Museum in 1996 and in Perth in 1999 (with a rare exhibition featuring Aboriginal popular culture). Adelaide and Melbourne opened major new Aboriginal galleries in 2000, and they have been followed by almost every major museum in the country. But both the form of exhibitions and the circulation modes of the Aboriginal past limit the possible representations. One dilemma is how to “nationalize” Aboriginal culture when it was and remains essentially local, tied to specific places and lands. Another is how to address racial conflict or the history of invasion within the museum context and still make it palatable 84    p. ashton and p. hamilton

to visitors. As well, museums in Australia, like those elsewhere, are still largely driven by objects. Aboriginal people have not left behind a great material inheritance. Given their nonmaterial culture and their entrapment in a cycle of poverty since invasion, belongings tend to be ephemeral. Museum curators have had to be especially creative, therefore, in representing the indigenous past in museums, and the appointment of Aboriginal curators has given impetus to the need for such imagination. Despite the successes at institutions such as the Melbourne Museum and the controversial exhibits at the Museum of Victoria, the results have been mixed. And progressive museum professionals have in recent years been faced with a politics of reaction. national museums

Since it opened in 2001 the National Museum of Australia (nma) in Canberra has averaged about eight hundred thousand visitors per year, both foreign and domestic. These are very good numbers for a country of just twenty million, and they reflect the successful reorientation of the museum sector away from education and toward leisure and tourism in the last few years, as well as the museum’s role in the national capital circuit. But the museum has been the object of attacks. There is a kind of inevitability about these set pieces. Initially, there was quite strong media criticism: one reporter insisted that the nma represented “A Nation Trivialized.” Conservatives both in and outside the museum condemned it for its “sneering ridicule at white history.” Some visitors claimed that it was “profoundly offensive,” “letting the country down, [with] too much ‘blackfella history.’ ”31 One of the most controversial areas is the section in the Gallery of First Australians which deals with dispossession and death and the problematic nature these events pose for object-based institutions in terms of representation. The main caption for this exhibit states: “Guerilla wars were fought along a rolling frontier for a century and a half.” This caption reflects almost thirty years of scholarship, but according to Peter Read, a scholar of Aboriginal history, it is, “if anything, a pretty conservative depiction of frontier violence.”32 Conservatives contest what they see as a story of unremitting violence and destruction, particularly the massacres of indigenous people, as the “unfinished business”    85

“black armband” view of our history. Chief among these is Keith Windschuttle, a conservative journalist and author, and while the focus has been on statistics, the “facts” of what happened—how many? is it documented in written records?—his real purpose is ideological, aiming at the explanatory frame for events, the meaning. In this context, he has attacked the nma exhibit of a massacre at Bell’s Falls Gorge, which is located within the large Contested Frontiers section of the exhibition.33 This incident illustrates both the number of ways in which memory is articulated at the museum and the challenges to the legitimacy of remembering over documentary history.34 The controversy surrounding this exhibit seems out of all proportion to its size, but nevertheless this was one of the most innovative and risky representations in the museum. It is one wall and a single glassed-in frame depicting a massacre at Bell’s Falls Gorge near Bathurst in rural New South Wales.35 It utilizes local knowledge and oral memory as the only source of knowledge presented about the event and draws on the work of the historian David Roberts, who has researched the incident and published his work in academic journals. The exhibit does not actually tell the story; it just reports a massacre occurring there in the 1820s in which Aborigines were pushed over a cliff, with an accompanying caption by a Wiradjuri elder: “This is a place of great sadness. Our people still hear echoes of the women and children who died there (Bill Allen 2000).” It is a story owned by both indigenous and European local inhabitants of the region and comes through into written evidence as collected tales from a shearer published in the 1960s and from other people moving around the district, though it is unclear whether it has a continuous genealogy. But it is a story, repeated often but now shorn of specific detail, like many told in rural areas where there are still remnants of community rooted in place over a long period.36 Scholars tell us that the stories about Aboriginal people being driven over cliffs are legion all over Australia. And one might speculate that this would certainly be an easy way of murder, but also a useful dramatic narrative device to deal with being consigned to oblivion. Thus Bell’s Falls Gorge has a symbolic truth—as a way of bringing together two different knowledge traditions, two different understandings of the past. This seemed to be part of the reconciliatory mission of the museum.

86    p. ashton and p. hamilton

Even before the museum opened, David Barnett—a museum council member, a former Liberal party staffer, and the authorized biographer of Prime Minister John Howard—had attempted to intervene in the development of content. The director of the council ordered a review of the labels. The respected historian Graeme Davison took on this task and vindicated curatorial authority. As a result, the majority of exhibits then went ahead unchanged. But after the opening, Keith Windschuttle launched his attack, claiming that the museum was a “profound intellectual mistake.” The “shock jocks” of tabloid talkback radio, who are particularly influential in Australia, went into overdrive. Windschuttle’s views were supported and given further credence by equally conservative opinion columnists in the press. Within two years of the museum’s opening, the council agreed to a review of the exhibitions and public programs. The four-member review panel delivered its report in July of 2003 and recommended changes that would provide a more chronologically based and coherent story of the progress to nationhood.37 Some have since speculated that the debate generated was a deliberate strategy by those in power to position their constituents against intellectuals and the elite culture represented by the museum, and this would certainly explain the strength of the controversy and the degree of outrage. But the vast majority of visitors, who we know from standard visitor surveys and the like are university educated, declare themselves satisfied with it, according to figures presented by the former director Dawn Casey in an article published in 2003. Casey estimates that about 91 percent of reactions to the museum are positive: “I like the way important people and ordinary Australians are given equal emphasis,” says one; “you can really relate to a lot of what is on exhibit.” Another comments that “it’s a courageous museum, and the only one I have visited which both informs and creates a platform for debate.”38 Richard Handler argues that the whole idea of “having a culture” has become central to the rhetoric about nation. The search for distinctiveness is integral to it, and we have a kind of mission to express that which makes us different. The idea of nation has always bedeviled Australians, even when the imagined concept of nation in this case is synonymous with the geography—as an island continent where there have been no border wars;

“unfinished business”    87

an immigrant nation constantly worried about population, invasion from the north, and now the poisoned well of the not so distant colonial past. Some have argued that white Australians have always seen themselves as “victims” (those colonized by others), given the nation’s beginnings as a remote British penal colony, making it even more difficult to see themselves as “perpetrators” (or colonizers) in relation to indigenous people. The indigenous historian and writer Tony Birch claims that the history of dispossession and violence in Australia is not a story to be owned by indigenous people—that is, as something done to them. It is a shared story. As Ruth Phillips has argued of Canada, “Postcoloniality describes only the official ending of imperial arrangements of governance, not the undoing of centuries of social and cultural intervention.”39 Despite the sophistication of the nma exhibition and its representation of a darker side to Australian history, the museum still operates within the affirming national frame. Its principal message is to produce a shared vision that reconciles conflicting views and absorbs difference. In some ways, it is a kind of wishful thinking. Australians are looking here—and looking away again. And it has not, in John Urry’s words, “broken the spell of a national memory.”40 To create a national history museum that discards unitary national narratives as well as causal trajectories (the teleology of the nation)— in effect to subvert the form—is probably impossible. other sites of public history

As many commentators have noted, the expansion of sites of public history since the 1960s has meant an increasing role for public arenas in shaping historical consciousness as well as linking it to the commodification of history and heritage. But a central question remains: How are audience views of the narrative of the nation and its past engaged, challenged, and changed? Ever more high-tech resources do not seem to offer new solutions. For many public historians, the problem is not one of presenting a black-andwhite history, but rather of how to indicate history’s complexities within the constraints of their respective form or commissioned brief. Several elements in the representation of indigenous peoples are common to a range of public history forms, both in mainly institutional contexts and in the public debates. Until very recently, Aborigines were regarded as of the 88    p. ashton and p. hamilton

past with no link to the present. “Authentic” Aboriginal culture is presented as pre-contact or prehistoric. Similarly, the only “real” indigenous peoples are outback peoples of the Centre or the Northern Territory (where a tiny minority of the total Australian population lives). Even rare urban monuments to the conserving and more cooperative nature of Aboriginal social organization have framed Aboriginal people in terms of antimodern Arcadian paradigms, as exemplified by a monument erected in 1944 by the Rangers’ League, an environmental conservationist group in New South Wales. Consequently, indigenous peoples have been seen as “of the past” and not part of the present and the future. The 1970s and 1980s saw the development of popular understandings of the Aboriginal “dreaming” or “dreamtime” as timelessness; a line is drawn across time “where Aborigines end and settlers (and white history) begin.”41 These understandings are currently being challenged by the Native Title legislation, under which claimants need to demonstrate continuous association with and use of the land. They are also being challenged by largely urban-based indigenous people who have been defending postinvasion sites of significance. These have included the Australia Hall—where a Day of Mourning protest was held in 1938 during the national sesquicentenary celebrations in the City of Sydney—and the Tent Embassy in Canberra. Indeed, the success of the battle over the Australia Hall can be read as an important precedent in environmental law if not a sea change in urban heritage practice. In recent years aspects of Aboriginality have been appropriated into the nation. Most important, as Bain Attwood and others have rightly insisted, is the claiming of a venerable Aboriginal past to give our culture a depth that it is perceived to be lacking in the rhetoric of a “young country.” Spanning at least forty thousand years—a time frame that is often repeated—the Aboriginal past is seen to be at one with the land. This has important implications for determining heritage significance. Managers of the national estate have emphasized the significance of the Aboriginal past in seeking World Heritage listing for particular places. Tourist operators and government corporations have also been quick to grasp opportunities in the selling of an “ancient” culture to visitors.42 Some arenas of public history have been more successful than others in their conceptualizing of these nationalist myths of origin. This is in part because some areas are more progressive or innovative than others. “unfinished business”    89

4 Monument erected in Sydney’s Camperdown Cemetery during 1944 by the Rangers’ League of New South Wales to commemorate “Mogo, Perry, Tommy and Wandalina”¾four Aboriginal people buried in the cemetery¾and “the whole of the Aboriginal race.” The effect was to recast Aboriginal people as “noble savages.” (Tommy, an Aboriginal boy, had died at age eleven in 1863. Burial records show that his full name was unknown and that his internment had been “common”; his occupation was given as “labourer.”) Photo: Paul Ashton.

Narrative strategies and forms utilized by Aboriginal people in telling their stories also tend to work better in such media as film, documentary, multimedia, or oral histories. Penny van Toorn argues that by publishing in popular forms of memory-writing, such as autobiographies or factionalized stories, oral histories, and songs, Aborigines have bypassed canons of historical scholarship, or “tricked” history. Even though the “ascribing [of] historical authority is still largely in the hands of non-indigenous individuals and institutions,”43 many of those stories are now essential readings in Australian history courses in universities and schools and have had a huge national audience. These interventions represent a profound challenge to Western understandings of history, and in the process they are changing many traditional modes of researching and writing history. But much of this has yet to translate into mainstream public history. In searching for an understanding of Australia as different from other modernist nations of the late twentieth century, some have argued that recourse to traditional whiteness or Britishness as a fount of the national is untenable for a number of reasons. These include the massive postwar immigration program which has made Australia a nation of people from over sixty different nations of origin (many of them nonwhite); attendant govern90    p. ashton and p. hamilton

ment policies of multiculturalism; the process of decolonization; and strategic economic alliances in the Asia-Pacific region. The myths of an older nationalism have been exploded by the social changes resulting from the demographic shift of postwar immigration and by protest movements that have mobilized their own versions of the past based partially on scholarly work.44 Though a significant monarchist minority continue to worship at the ruins of the British Empire, a new official paradigm has emerged to replace the old. Coinciding with the democratization of history and constructed in the process of making the Australian Bicentenary, the new national identity is predicated on a consensual multiculturalism.45 Displacing lost English ancestry for the promise of a republic, a classless egalitarian multiculturalism has become the new nationalism. To be Australian was once to be a patriotic loyalist with an intact British inheritance (though some Irish Australians would disagree). Official dictate now has it that to be Australian is to be multicultural: “We are all wogs,” as a saying has it, though this new identity has been welded onto the Anzac legend. With white racism becoming obsolete if not entirely abandoned, Aboriginality has been adopted as a useful framing device and a central image of difference. Likewise, Aboriginal relics were finally afforded legislative protection when governments were “ready to graft a reified version of Aboriginal culture onto the national identity.”46 Cultural policy directly affecting the historical representation and configuration of national identity in cultural institutions now rests in part on these assumptions. Racial diversity and conflict can now be accommodated in official versions of the past as long as they remain positivist and consensual. Radical rereadings of the past in public places are often censured, however, as in the case of the Migration Museum in the South Australian capital of Adelaide. After visiting the museum early in 1995, an influential member of the federal parliament wrote to the curator, declaring that Any visitor to the Migration Museum would see immigration as a story of tragedy and disaster. In fact, immigration has been the foundation of modern Australia, which I think is by far the best country in the world in which to live. . . . It seems so unnecessary for a museum . . . to project a sense of shame about what our community has done, instead of pride in our achievement. Compared to most countries, we have very little to apologise for.47 “unfinished business”    91

Local and regional museums ranging across the country in rural areas face this and other problems. They have made a range of responses to the new narratives emerging about Australia’s past, depending on the impact of cultural tourism, local Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations, and political climates. Competing accounts of the past are increasingly contesting cultural authority. An example can be found at La Perouse, over looking Botany Bay, the so-called Birth Place of the Nation. Here, a strong indigenous community vies to have its story heard above British and French imperial narratives, nationalist and racial discourses. Maria Nugent, in her book Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet, has examined “Aboriginal people’s efforts to limit the power of colonial storytelling to hurt and dehumanise them” through their own interpretation and use of stories about Botany Bay. She is “concerned moreover to show how they use their own forms of historical storytelling to make a place for themselves within local and national communities, from which they have been and at times still are excluded.”48 Heritage industry practices also reinforce the process of marginalizing or making invisible Aboriginal presence. Complex procedures and official paradigms for ascribing cultural significance effectively mask much Aboriginal history. As Denis Byrne has argued, during the four decades that archaeology has been professionally practiced in Australia, scant attention has been given to the postinvasion Aboriginal existence. “This,” he contends, is reflected in the heritage inventories maintained by Federal and State agencies where pre-contact Aboriginal sites vastly outnumber postcontact sites. Whatever disciplinary fashions have produced this imbalance it is difficult to separate it from the larger European colonial project of possessing and reinscribing the Australian landscape. In quite a real sense the failure to acknowledge the imprint on the landscape of the post-1788 Aboriginal experience has created a vacuum which has been filled by a heroic settler heritage, and increasingly the pre-contact sites are appropriated as “sacred sites” for a white culture which seeks to indigenise itself by discovering a spiritual affinity for the land, a form of white Dreaming.49 When the “structures of forgetting” falter or fail, raw political power can come to the fore.50 In 1955 the Australian Heritage Commission listed on 92    p. ashton and p. hamilton

its Register of the National Estate the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, which had been nominated for inclusion by the Ngunnawal Aboriginal Land Council. The was the site of the first Aboriginal protest, which took place outside Canberra’s old parliament house in 1927. A new Tent Embassy was set up there in 1972, and a continuous presence had been maintained there. With both the Olympic Games and the centenary of Australian Federation then looming, however, Prime Minister John Howard ordered the removal of the Tent Embassy in 1996 on the pretext that log fires there were a hazard. Unlike the North American or New Zealand experiences, Europeans in Australia did not sign treaties with indigenous peoples. Nor did they enter into formal warfare or negotiated peace settlements. Thus there has not been the official burden of representation as witnessed in other frontier “settler societies.” In latter years though, Aboriginal versions of past events have had to be taken into consideration in official investigations when it was politically expedient. Growing concerns and debates in the early 1980s over British atomic tests in remote parts of Australia, for instance, led to radical reassessments of both the context and the impact of these experiments on indigenous and non-indigenous people. These concerns emerged from the establishment of a Royal Commission (the highest-level public inquiry that can be held in Australia) on British Nuclear Testing in Australia in 1984 as well as a substantial history of the tests commissioned the previous year by the Department of Resources and Energy as a “basic reference” for the Royal Commission.51 After the first British atomic bomb was exploded on the Monte Bello Islands off the north coast of Western Australia on October 3, 1952, the West Australian mouthed the official frame for this and subsequent tests. “The real significance of the Monte Bello explosion,” the newspaper observed on the following day, lies at this moment . . . in the simple fact that it has occurred. It gives the world indisputable proof that Britain has the material, the skill and the installations for the independent production of atomic weapons and that she will yield the initiative to none. In a situation of critical doubt whether a third world war can be prevented, that is essential to the military power of the British Commonwealth and to its prestige and influence in international councils. “unfinished business”    93

When in 1956 a sole Australian Patrol Officer, Walter MacDougall, made official his fears for the health and safety of local Aborigines in the lead-up to the Maralinga test, he was reprimanded for his “lamentable lack of balance in outlook” and accused of “placing the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”52 Radioactive emissions from tests at Maralinga between September 1956 and October 1957 poisoned and permanently contaminated the surrounding land, leaving Aboriginal people with a brutal legacy of blindness, cancer, and skin diseases. As a result of the Royal Commission, in 1995 the British government officially apologized to Aboriginal people affected by the tests, and some compensation was awarded. But both the British and the Australian governments had little to lose and much to gain by these gestures in a postcolonial context. As with the Empire, the imperial narrative in which these stories had been incorporated or repressed was defunct. Witness films such as Breaker Morant, released in 1980, which portrayed three Australia soldiers who were court-martialed and executed by British authorities during the Boer War as pathetic, albeit heroic, marionettes dancing on imperial strings. History has been publicly enlisted to address and redress contemporary social injustices with colonial and racial origins.53 And older historical representations of our place in Empire and its relation to race and national identity have been reconfigured, given in part the tutelage of American imperialism from the Vietnam War and the democratization of history making from the 1970s.54 At times, however, hysterical debates over Australia High Court decisions such as Mabo and Wik, strengthening indigenous land rights, shine a light on the darker side of public representations of race and empire that suggest residual yearnings for Sir Henry Parkes’s ideal society of white, Anglo-Celtic, independent Australian Britons. remember ing and forgetting

In the late 1990s Ken Inglis, a well-known historian, published a comprehensive book on Australian war memorials. Both he and GovernorGeneral Sir William Deane, who had launched the project, made comments in their speeches at the Australian War Memorial, and later in print, about the absence of memorials in Australia to the “war” between Aborigines 94    p. ashton and p. hamilton

and European invaders.55 Inglis claimed that some form of commemoration had been under consideration by the War Memorial Council for some years but nothing had materialized. He and Deane were supported in their comments by Aboriginal leaders, other historians, and journalists.56 The vigorous public debate that ensued was revealing of the many groups who still have much invested in a particular story about the white Australian past and those who now eschew such a narrative. War Memorial representatives claimed that prefederation conflicts were not their brief. For them, this was the role of the National Museum of Australia’s new Aboriginal Gallery, then under construction. Major-General “Digger” James, former president of the Returned Soldier’s League (rsl)—a powerful lobby group in Australia—criticized the governor-general for his remarks, asserting that such a memorial was completely “inappropriate.”57 Many other RSL members were also outraged. The “black wars” of the last century were neither officially declared nor fought in uniform in defense of the continent. Aborigines who had served in overseas wars, it was claimed, were properly acknowledged within the memorial’s existing framework. Later this position was somewhat modified by another former president of the RSL, Alf Garland, who asserted that a memorial of this nature should be built in the parliamentary triangle—not at the Australian War Memorial— since the “black wars” were akin to a civil war in Australia.58 Finally, Prime Minister John Howard reiterated that such a use of the War Memorial was “inappropriate,” arguing that, legally, Australia was “settled” rather than “invaded” and that a state of war had not officially existed.59 Many letter writers to The Australian supported the call by Inglis and Deane for an official memorial to the “black wars.” One mentioned the monument already erected by the Yugambeh people of the Gold Coast Beaudesert region “to the Aborigines who have died in defense of their country, whether at the Somme or on the shores of Moreton Bay.”60 Nicolas Rothwell, a journalist for The Australian, suggested, unlike the newspaper’s leader writer, that “a war memorial does much more than merely recognise that something very like a war took place here during the settlement era. It points the way towards a salutory new public conception of the Aboriginal people. You fight wars against enemies, not helpless and unresisting victims. You defeat them rather than writing their struggles out of your history.”61 “unfinished business”    95

At one level, it was remarkable that such a public debate was possible in Australia less than thirty years after the dismantling of the White Australia Policy. Many have since been able to make a leap of imagination that would have been unthinkable a few years ago and are prepared to contest the state when the stakes will define the nation’s future. Nonetheless, a nationalism centrally forged through notions of white masculine sacrifice at Gallipoli and shored up through countless rituals and monuments expressing official versions of the past remains largely unshaken, if slightly tarnished. Today it is being reasserted by a small, emergent group of right-wing nationalist historians who, formerly with the encouragement of the Howard government, exploit the indigenous past not as a vehicle for reconciliation but as a justification for reaction.62 Michael Connor, in his recent book The Invention of Terra Nullius, published by Keith Windschuttle, concludes wistfully that what Australians need is a touch of “tactful forgetting,” as opposed to divisive remembering.63 He had obviously never heard of Baal Shem-Tov’s injunction, that “in remembrance lies the secret of redemption.” notes

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

“Negotiating Difference” (editorial), 9–10. Davison, “Public History.” See Ashton and Hamilton, “Streetwise.” See Curthoys and Hamilton, “What Makes History Public?” From the 1920s until the 1960s, approximately one hundred thousand indigenous children were taken from their families by government agencies. The policy was based on white-supremacist assimilationist ideology. Attempts to thus break up Aboriginal communities have been branded as genocide. In 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission published a report on the “stolen generation” entitled Bringing Them Home. Cole, “ ‘The Crimson Thread of Kinship,’ ” 511–25; McQueen, A New Britannia, 9. See Smith, “State-Making and Nation-Building.” See Thomson, Anzac Memories. Horne, The Public Culture, 21. On the term “social integration,” see Hobsbawn and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 263. Rigg, “Curators of the Colonial Idea,” 188. See also Reynolds, Frontier, 194; and Bennett, “The Political Rationality of the Museum.” See, for example, Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia. Davison, “The Use and Abuse of Australian History,” 56.

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13 Henderson, Monuments and Memorials, 179–80. 14 Ashton, “The Past in the Present.” 15 Bulbeck, The Stone Laurel, 5. See also Bulbeck, “Aborigines, Memorials and the History of the Frontier.” 16 See, for example, Scates, “A Monument to Murder.” 17 See Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Burke, Robert O’Hara,” Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978) 3: 302. 18 See Davison, “The Use and Abuse of Australian History,” 59. 19 Batten, “Monuments, Memorials and the Preservation of Australia’s Indigenous Past.” 20 “Memorial Plaque to Murray River Aborigines,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 9, 1986, 8. 21 Sydney Morning Herald, Sept. 13, 2000, 14. 22 Bammer, ed., Displacements, xiv. 23 See, for example, Grogan and Mercer, The Cultural Planning Handbook; Hall and McArthur, eds., Heritage Management in Australia and New Zealand; and Hamilton and Ashton, eds., Australians and the Past. 24 Broome, “Historians, Aborigines and Australia.” See also his Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. 25 Robert Mann, “Whitewashing Our Dark Past,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 22, 1999, 17. 26 Sydney Morning Herald, Dec. 31, 1987, Jan. 26 and 27, 1988. 27 See Harris, Australia’s Too Old to Celebrate Birthdays. 28 Waterson and Ashton, “Commonwealth Games.” 29 Byrne, Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Standards and Guidelines. 30 Sculthorpe, “Exhibiting Indigenous Histories in Australian Museums.” 31 Casey, “Culture Wars.” 32 Professor Peter Read, interviewed by Keri Phillips, February 20, 2003, abc Radio National Perspective Program; accessed on the abc Radio website, www .abc.net.au, Nov. 20, 2005. 33 See Windschuttle, “How Not to Run a Museum.” For a response to his various attacks on their scholarship, see Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars. 34 See also the account by Cameron, “Transcending Fear.” Our interpretation is somewhat different from Cameron’s. 35 Roberts, “The Bell’s Falls Massacres and Oral Tradition.” 36 Foster, Hosking, and Nettlebeck, Fatal Collisions, offer an extended study of such events passed down orally in local communities. 37 For detailed accounts of the controversy see Hansen, “White Hot History,” which is an insider’s response; and Macintyre and Clark, History Wars. The report, “Review of the National Museum of Australia, Its Exhibitions and Programs: A Report to the Council of the nma” (Canberra: nma, July 2003), “unfinished business”    97

38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63

can be downloaded from the nma website www.nma.gov.au; a summary can be found in Georgina Sale, “Museum Told It’s Lost the Plot,” The Australian, July 16, 2003, 5. Casey, “Culture Wars.” R. B. Phillips, “apec at the Museum of Anthropology,” 183. See also Curthoys, “Constructing National Histories.” Richard Handler, “Is Identity a Useful Concept?” in Gillis, ed., Commemorations, 27–40; and Tony Birch, “Death Is Forgotten in Victory,” in Lydon and Ireland, eds., Object Lessons, 186–200. John Urry, Consuming Places, 3. Byrne, “The Archaeology of Disaster,” 18. Attwood, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, 3. Van Toorn, “Indigenous Australian Life Writing,” 46. See also Haebich, “The Battlefields of Aboriginal History.” See Burgman, Power and Protest. On the Bicentenary see, for example, Alomes, A Nation at Last?; Bennett, Buckridge, Carter, and Mercer, eds., Celebrating the Nation; and Janson and MacIntyre, eds., Making the Bicentenary. On multiculturalism see, for example, Castles, Cope, and Kalantzis, Mistaken Identity. Byrne, “The Archaeology of Disaster,” 22. Quoted in Szekeres, “A Place for All of Us,” 61. Nugent, Botany Bay, 4. Byrne, “The Archaeology of Disaster,” 21. “Structures of forgetting” is Paula Hamilton’s term; “The Knife Edge,” 13. See Clements, A History of British Atomic Tests in Australia. Quoted in Goodall, “Colonialism and Catastrophe,” 55. See, for example, McGrath, “Working for the Royal Commission.” See Ashton and Hamilton, “Streetwise.” See The Australian, Nov. 18, 1998, and “Opinion” column, The Australian, Nov. 19, 1998, 15. See Paul Turnbull, “No Morality in Denying Aboriginal War Memorial,” The Australian, Nov. 27, 1998, 15; and Nicholas Rothwell, “A Black Mark in Colonial History,” The Australian, Nov. 30, 1998, 16. The Australian, Dec. 18, 1998, 2. The Australian, Dec. 19, 1998, 3. The Australian, Nov. 23, 1998, 3. F. Beenleigh O’Connor (Queensland), Weekend Australian, Nov. 21–22, 1998, 18. Nicolas Rothwell, The Australian, Nov. 30, 1998, 16. See Reynolds, “A New Historical Landscape,” 6. The Howard government was defeated in November 2007. One of the first acts of the Rudd Labor government was to formally apologize to indigenous people on February 13, 2008. Connor, The Invention of Terra Nullius, conclusion.

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Exhibiting Asia in Britain Commerce, Consumption, and Globalization

Durba Ghosh

the summer of 2002 was a busy time for Britons and tourists in London. The British Library at St. Pancras hosted an exhibit titled Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600–1834, commemorating the East India Company’s role in bringing luxury items such as tea, textiles, and spices from China, India, and the Indonesian archipelago for consumption in England.1 Across the city at the Victoria and Albert Museum was an exhibit on Bollywood film posters.2 For those wishing to bypass museums, Selfridges, the upmarket department store on Oxford Street, staged a well-publicized boutique of Indian goods that was visited by various Bombay film stars. Andrew Lloyd Webber produced a West End musical inspired by Bombay-made films, Bombay Dreams, with music by A. H. Rahman, a composer of some renown among diasporic South Asians, and a script by Meera Syal, a prominent South Asian comedian and novelist. For those wanting to experience Britain’s multiculturalism without leaving the comforts of home, Channel 4 aired a series of programs advertised as part of their celebration of “Indian Summer,” which also served to promote their telecasts of cricket matches between India and England.

It was not a particularly unusual summer; events commemorating the different ethnic, religious, and racial populations of the United Kingdom have become popular destinations for Londoners and tourists alike who desire to see what multicultural Britain is all about. Some might even call London a “destination museum,” because it is a global city, full of museums and itself an open-air museum of Britain’s cosmopolitan and imperial heritage.3 What was noteworthy, however, was the dominance of public events devoted to Britain’s colonial and postcolonial interests in Asia. This essay considers the particular resonance of Asia in the public imaginary of contemporary Britain and the role of public exhibitions in shaping narratives of British national and imperial history. The Trading Places exhibit crystallized many of these trends. By focusing on Asia before the 1840s, this exhibit skirted the thorny later issues of slavery, colonial revolts, and Aboriginal and Native American land rights, and was able to draw on a period of British colonialism that is often seen to be more cooperative and perhaps less exploitative than the period of “high imperialism” of the post-1850 Victorian empire. Members of the Chinese communities in England protested the exhibit because it ignored Britain’s part in the Opium Wars, in which China was forced to concede several ports of entry so that Britain could keep up its drug trade in opium in exchange for Chinese goods, such as tea and silk. The library responded by modifying the exhibit and agreeing to show a film but also noted that the Opium Wars, which occurred in the 1840s, were after the period of the exhibit. It was further pointed out that “the Opium Wars were not fought by the East India Company but by the British Government and its French allies and it is right that this history is properly debated but they fall outside the scope of this current exhibition.”4 By focusing on the East India Company and trade, rather than conquest or military coercion, organizers were able to cordon out some of the unseemly excesses of British imperial activities, such as the drug trade, and emphasize some collaborative enterprises between Britons and Asians. In the exhibit and its accompanying catalog, flyer, and website, Britain’s eighteenth-century history in Asia was recast under the dominant categories of twenty-first-century globalization—capital, consumption, commerce, and cosmopolitanism.5 One of the main sponsors of the exhibit was

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Standard Chartered, a London-based bank that has historically had a strong presence in British commercial enterprises in Asia, Africa, and Australia. This provided a highly visible link between twenty-first-century transnational capitalism and its early modern counterpart.6 By celebrating colonial commerce between Britain and India as an early form of globalization, or the “age of partnership,” the exhibit focused on an era that was marked by the collaboration between multilingual cosmopolitan Asian and European traders, bankers, and merchants in bringing Asian goods, such as tea, textiles, and spices to the European market and the spaces of the “home.”7 Indeed, the title of the exhibit, Trading Places, suggested multiple notions of reciprocity and exchange between the East India Company and Asia: places of trade in Asia (ports and marketplaces) and trading Asian goods to European places. The image of Anglo-Indian “partnership” was perhaps best represented by the image used in advertisements, flags, and posters, in which a red-coated Englishman hooked his right hand in the left arm of a native prince. (See figs. 1 and 2.)8 Housed at the newly built British Library, the exhibit acted also as an advertisement for the contents of the library, which markets itself on its website as “the world’s knowledge.”8 The texts that make up the British Library, which was established in 1973 to bring different collections together under a national institutional umbrella, were originally housed in the British Museum and the Boston Spa in Yorkshire. The building at St. Pancras, which opened in 1997 and is located next to St. Pancras and King’s Cross stations, is the largest public building constructed by the British government in the twentieth century. The building, designed by Sir Colin St John Wilson, is architecturally bold and innovative, representing (some argue) the best of British design. The wide open space of the plaza, complete with cappuccino stand, and the three exhibit halls are intended to be used by the public; the main research rooms are for scholars using the library’s collections. Among the most famous collections in the library are the Oriental and India Office Collections, which include the East India Company’s correspondence and proceedings as well as documents of the British government that superseded it in 1858. In spite of the library’s defense that the company ought to be distinguished from the government in discussing the Opium Wars, the coat of arms of the East India Company hangs at the head

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1 and 2 The two figures on the publicity materials of the Trading Places exhibition (fig. 1) are cropped from a painting of the Delhi School, 1850–70, “A Hindu nobleman and an officer of the Bengal Cavalry” (fig. 2) kept in the Oriental and India Office Collections, Add. Or. 4125. Used by permission of the British Library.

of the reading room of the Oriental and India Office Collections, aligning an important symbol of this joint-stock trading company with the nation’s library and archives. Both a museum and an archive, the British Library represents the nation on multiple registers. It is a national monument that serves as the repository of British treasures, which include the Magna Carta, Shakespeare’s folios, original drawings for Alice in Wonderland, Beatles memorabilia, and the detritus of empire, such as documents from British colonial archives and numerous Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese manuscripts. The library also stages exhibits of its collections, which in the past few years have included such diverse topics as stamp collections of Mauritius and the Lin­ disfarne Gospels. Folding artifacts of Britain’s national and imperial history into one building in the heart of London, the new British Library stands as a national symbol of Britain in the next millennium. The original eighteenth-century library, located in the British Museum in Russell Square, was Britain’s first public library open to “all curious and studious persons.”9 Representing the “exhibitionary complex” of the state, the museum and its library were the repository of knowledge that educated and disciplined generations of Britons into forms of citizenship appropriate to the modern state. As Tony Bennett has pointed out, “museums, galleries, and, more intermittently, exhibitions . . . have proved remarkably influential cultural technologies in the degree to which they have recruited the interest and participation of their citizenries.”10 In the early history of the British Museum, which was founded in 1753, its trustees were afraid of allowing “mobs” to view their collections. After the Great Exhibition in 1851, however, reformers agitated for an open-door policy in which the laboring classes were allowed to visit the nation’s treasures. It was felt that a museum visit might inculcate the working classes with taste, a sense for art, and comportment appropriate to visiting a museum.11 Although it is tempting to suggest that the goals and representational strategies of the new British Library of the twenty-first century are continuous with the old British Museum, the new library is faced with radically different challenges.12 Britain’s twenty-first-century citizen-subjects identify themselves in racially, ethnically, and religiously different ways than did the museum-going public of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; moreover, the British state identifies its constituents in the British Isles in exhibiting asia in br itain    105

racial terms, as well as by class, location, and region.13 The library opened in 1997, the same year that “Cool Britannia” became the catchphrase of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s New Labour party, representing Britain’s advance into the third millennium as artistically hip, multicultural, cosmopolitan, and technologically savvy. “Cool Britannia” became the logo of the government’s tourist board, rebranding Britain’s image for global tourists.14 Thus, the nation that the new British Library speaks to is one that is self-consciously trying to integrate Britons who are not racially or socially white, but descendants of parts of the former British empire who eat, pray, and live differently than conventionally defined Britons. This historical shift requires the British Library to resort to new technologies and different kinds of knowledges to draw these newly constituted citizens and national subjects into the state’s power through a transformed set of exhibitionary practices. Exhibits in the twenty-first century can no longer rely on classification practices that mark distance between racial others to create a sense of superiority and solidarity among (white) Britons, as they did in the case of the highly sexualized Hottentot Venus of the nineteenth century.15 Instead, contemporary exhibits in Britain must find new ways of bringing Britons of Asian, African, and Caribbean descent into museum culture and incorporating them into the new national formation of multicultural and cosmopolitan subjects; these exhibits are also charged with the job of educating white Britons on Britain’s multiculturality. For modern-day subjects, a visit to an exhibit is not necessarily “a surrogate for travel” as it once was for a generation of museum-goers;16 indeed, many of these subjects are likely to have been born in or traveled to and from the places in the world that are represented in exhibits of the British Library. Trading Places was particularly effective at articulating Britishness in both nationalist and multicultural terms. In doing so, the exhibit simultaneously effaced and emphasized racial, cultural, and temporal differences among those who identify as British. Although the exhibit narrated the history of the East India Company, it collapsed time, putting Britain’s colonial pasts and postcolonial, multicultural present together, creating a timeless vision in which citizens descended from Britain’s colonies were integrated into a seamless imagining of multicultural Britain.17 Within the structure

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of displays and travel narratives of “exotic” commodities such as tea, the modern-day visitor to the exhibit was invited to consume the exhibit, much as eighteenth-century Britons were invited to consume the goods of the East India Company. Boxes of tea packaged by the recently reinvigorated East India Company were offered for sale in the British Library gift shop.18 These pretty packages with maritime paintings of ships at sea enticed a globalminded consumer and museum-goer without revealing the not-so-pretty history of labor on tea plantations, American revolts over excessive import taxes, or the relationship between tea and slave-produced sugar. Buying tea packaged by the East India Company allowed twenty-first-century Britons to imagine themselves as their eighteenth-century counterparts, presiding over genteel tea tables with beautiful porcelain cups from China that were also carefully showcased in the exhibit. In these acts of consuming, Britishness as it was exemplified by eighteenth-century (female) tea drinkers was made contiguous with tea-drinkers of the twenty-first century, smoothing away the racial, class, gendered, and historical differences between these different consuming subjects. Indeed, the welcoming placard of the exhibit shows how “we” of England-Britain might be identified as consumers of Asian goods: “Imagine an England without tea in china cups, without pepper, chintz or chutney; travel back 400 years in time . . . and discover how everyday things we now take for granted were once exotic and exciting; and learn how the Asian communities in Britain today first started. . . . The exhibition reveals the beginnings of what is now a 400-year cultural exchange between Asia and Britain.” The “exotic and exciting” Asian goods mentioned are varied: porcelain and tea from China, pepper from the Indonesian archipelago, chintz and chutney from the Indian subcontinent. Britain’s commerce in Asia is brought to the (dining) table in the form of domestic goods and domesticated people who used these goods in a centuries-old “cultural exchange.” “England’s” modernity is thus aligned with a culture of consumption that defines who can call themselves subjects of “Britain.”19 A section of the exhibit titled “Britain-Asia / Asia-Britain” explained how common goods and practices in Britain, such as coffee shops and shampoos, were introduced by overseas migrants and trade. That Britain is imagined in the twenty-first century to include Asian communities transplanted to Britain is a further

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public elaboration of Britain’s history being reconstituted to include racially diverse populations.20 Much like exhibitions of the nineteenth century, in which participants were invited to consume goods within the exhibition halls, there is a close relationship between consuming an exhibit and consuming the goods of that exhibit. As Peter Hoffenberg has suggested, “The culture of the market—that is, the practice and language of consumption and production—provided a seemingly neutral and natural representation of these oppositions. . . . Here was the empire as market and the market as empire.”21 “Trading places,” in this sense, has multiple trading places: the market at Bantam, which is one of the first panoramic views of the exhibit, and the market of the British Library gift shop.22 (See fig. 3.) The “homogenous class of the consumer,” offers the possibility of democratization, although as Hoffenberg has noted, “Exhibitions implied a sense of cultural and economic participation, but not political equality.”23 On the surface, the parallel narratives of consumption appear to bring the consumer closer to the producer, making it seem as if we live in a “world without boundaries,” a world without racial or national differences or economic disparities. Yet, as Caren Kaplan has warned, transnational capitalism thrives precisely because it is highly dependent on racial, national, and economic divides: in desiring goods that are marked as different or exotic, consumers instantiate a world with national, race, class, and gender boundaries.24 Although the goal of Trading Places is to make Asian processes, products, and people seem less foreign to museum-goers in Britain by reminding Britons that many of their cherished household goods originate from Asia, the exhibit recreates geographic and cultural distances putting “Asian” and “Britain” on opposing sides of cultural and material exchange. Britons buy, Asians produce. This seems to be true whether one were a factor looking to buy pepper in the market in Bantam for the European market in the 1660s or a museum-goer in the bookshop hoping to buy little jeweled bags, wallets, and notebooks that were made in India in 2002. A painting done by a Kashmiri artist in the 1850s is among the most appealing items in the exhibit because it produces for the viewer an approximate understanding of how textiles were produced in South Asia. (See fig. 4.) The painting shows two men artfully producing a dyed piece of cloth. Captioned in Persian, the top half of the plate shows a turbaned man 108    durb a ghosh

3 The great market at Bantam, from Historie van Indien by William Lodewijckszoon, Am­ sterdam, 1598, British Library 1486.gg.18. Used by permission of the British Library.

hand-blocking a piece of fabric dyed in indigo, while his assistant sits on the ground mixing white dye. The bottom half shows a series of moments in the production process: blocking, mixing the dye, dying the cloth, hanging it to dry. Although indigenous textile production was greatly diminished by the influx of industrially produced textiles from Britain, this image offered an opportunity to visually travel to the workshop of an Indian weaver and dyer. By bearing witness to the process, consumers can feel closer to those who crafted their cloth. And yet one can imagine that different viewers of this particular image might have had a very diverse set of responses to the individual elements: some spectators may have felt the painting represented their bond with the clothing fashions of their ancestors, while others might have experienced an ancestral bond with the laborers in the painting or with the painter whose labor is represented in the British Library. Either interpretive act represents how labor is alienated in the act of consumption, whether one is buying or viewing.25 Rather than “trading places,” this exhibit reinstates spaces and relationships between those who consumed and those who labored and produced. What may be historically unique now is that this newly constituted consumer of global goods is perhaps of Asian, African, Caribbean, or Middle Eastern descent, marking the diversification of Britain’s populations within the bounded territories of Britain’s nation-state. Nonetheless, the body of exhibiting asia in br itain    109

4 A cloth printer, using a hand-block, and a dyer, by a Kashmiri artist, Add. Or. 1714. Used by permission of the British Library.

this new multicultural consumer bears the traces of Britain’s colonial history, a history in which not all British subjects observed putatively British sensibilities when it came to legal regimes, political formations, or cultural practices, whether they were on the British Isles or within the colonies of the British empire.26 Through the text of its placards, the Trading Places exhibit attempts to engender a sense of national belonging and citizenship based on shared consumption, yet the distances that are newly inscribed by participation in the consumption and production process cannot but remind viewers of the racial and ethnic distinctions implicit in their status and respective histories as citizens, consumers, and laborers. As Kathleen Wilson has argued, “if the discourses of nationality sought to construct homogeneities . . . , they also sought to identify and assert difference, and those differences, however artificial and tenuous, . . . divided the citizens within its own boundaries.”27 By focusing primarily on the histories of commodities and the ways they were used and produced, Trading Places represents capital, commerce, and consumption as seemingly universal languages that facilitated Asia’s 110    durb a ghosh

movement into modernity. The exhibit’s contents and its message remake Britain from the first nation to industrialize to the first nation to become global through finance and commerce.28 With Britain marking its ascent to modernity, not through industrialization, but through the globalization of capital, commerce, and consumption, newer economic histories of Britain and its colonies have shown that colonial industries were drawn into global economic networks; the old historiographical paradigms of industrialization and its corollaries of deindustrialization and underdevelopment are deferred or downplayed.29 Indeed, the website for the exhibit states: “The successors to the Company’s trade are perhaps the great industrial and financial complexes which it helped create—Bombay, Calcutta, and Singapore—which symbolize Asia’s continuing success as a major force in today’s global economy. Asia is once more a major manufacturing force, balancing western imports and ideas with its eastern heritage.” Showing Asia as taking up commercial activities after the departure of the East India Company, the exhibit relied on a progressive narrative of glob­­ alization to explain why Asia is “once more a major manufacturing force.” The concluding placard restated this more starkly: Maritime trade to Asia proved to be one of the historical forces which created our modern “globalised” world. . . . Trade led on to Empire and the enforced colonial domination of Asia. In economic terms many of India’s traditional exports such as textiles were deliberately killed off to be replaced by the output of Britain’s industrialization. It is ironic that following the demise of Britain’s empire, powerful new Asian economies have emerged once again exporting sophisticated manufactures to the rest of the world. Globalisation has come full circle. Thus, the exhibit puts forth an appealing vision of globalization, one in which “colonial domination” and deindustrialization of Indian textile manufacturing is cast as a way station in the process of Britain’s trade with Asia, eventually giving way to globalization as the rising sun of modernity. In returning “full circle,” the exhibit is part of a circuit that Renato Rosaldo has called “imperialist nostalgia,” in which colonizers recreate representations and images of societies that they have destroyed.30 Globalization is hardly a new concept, nor is its cultural counterpart, cosmopolitanism.31 As Asianists and others have long argued, Asia before Europe was a dynamic exhibiting asia in br itain    111

trading zone, one in which diasporas of Armenians, Jews, Banjaras, Arabs, Chinese, and other mobile and migrant groups engaged in highly profitable trade based on sophisticated networks of banking and monetary exchange.32 Before 1700, cities such as Surat and Aleppo were dynamic urban centers, sites of global exchange perhaps more advanced than London in the same period. As the exhibit suggests, Europeans were drawn to these areas precisely because trade and commerce were so well developed and profitable. But the entrance of European trading companies in Asia created the opposite of globalization by dividing up regions and their markets between the Netherlands, France, and, Britain. The vision the exhibit presents is of an early modern world, circa 1600 to circa 1800, that was highly cosmopolitan and global, but disrupted by the narrow-minded greed of European traders and the inability of the Mughal empire to maintain its political authority. This narrative within the exhibit balances the benefits of Anglo-Indian trade against its negative consequences, but because the exhibit ends in 1834 with the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly to trade, viewers are spared from hearing more about the expansion of the colonial government in India, the Opium Wars, the rebellions of 1857, and so on. This exhibition was not alone in addressing the connections between the history of Britain’s empire in Asia and the history of domestic Britain. For instance, in 2004, Encounters: The meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800 at the Victoria and Albert Museum revisited some of the themes of Trading Places by emphasizing the exchange of luxury goods based on mutual cooperation between Asians and Europeans. As the placards for this exhibit noted in welcoming visitors, “the meeting of Asia and Europe signaled not only the beginnings of a global market but also a profound change in taste and lifestyle that still influences our lives today.”33 Divided into three parts, Discoveries, Encounters, and Exchanges, this exhibit focused on the ways that commerce and the consumption of goods such as spices and tea had created a zone of cooperation and cultural assimilation between Europe and Asia, between Europeans and Asians. As the writer Pankaj Mishra noted in a review of the exhibit, “The concepts of fluidity and hybridity are much cherished today in our globalised, multicultural societies; and the v&a has done well to attempt a contemporary spin on the early encounters of Asia and Europe. But, as with present-day globalisation, it is hard to marvel at the free flow and consumption of diverse commodities and artifacts 112    durb a ghosh

without wondering whether they advanced understanding and sympathy across nations and cultures at the same time.”34 Much like the Trading Places exhibit at the British Library, Encounters at the Victoria and Albert concluded by gesturing to the end of this period, 1800, as a moment in which such cultural understanding declined, due to European military dominance over India and the decline in Mughal authority. Nonetheless, the chronological limits of the exhibit preserved the idea that the early modern period, from 1500 to 1800, had marked an earlier moment in the history of globalization, one in which commerce allowed all nations and their peoples to participate as equals. The museum’s choice to focus on Asia in the early modern period allowed the curators and visitors to avoid having to consider whether, as Mishra asked, this project of exchange was successful or, perhaps more crucially, to what degree violence or coercion had structured these encounters. Both Trading Places and Encounters focused on the transformative value of commerce and consumption in producing cosmopolitan and multicultural subjects among those who traded and consumed, both during the early modern period and in the contemporary period for those who visited these exhibits in the 2000s. This kind of narrative allowed museum visitors to skip from prior centuries of globalization to the present century of globalization, bypassing memories of the destructive processes that colonial activity unleashed in the intervening period, such as slavery, famine, economic underdevelopment, and so on. In the historical context of the start of the third millennium, these exhibits have developed in the context of a burgeoning interest in how to integrate studies of Britain’s empire into contemporary British life and a recognition that empire sells. In marketing their products, British museums, libraries, television programs, publishers, and academics have relied on cultures of empire to reach their audiences. The selling of imperial culture has become a way of folding empire into nation by relying on concepts and grammars, such as globalization and consumption, that are accessible to consumers, spectators, and subjects of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. In the past few years, there have been numerous museum exhibits, television programs, and best-selling books that have contributed to a public history for Britain that is both national and imperial. To name just a few more exhibiting asia in br itain    113

museum exhibits: in 1999, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich opened a permanent installation in the Wolfson Gallery titled Trade and Empire, which showcased the development of Britain’s maritime and naval technologies and their role in enabling trade.35 In 2001, the Victoria and Albert Museum organized The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain, which, in a kind of time-travel experience, helped visitors visualize what a Victorian might have encountered in Britain and abroad.36 In addition to exhibits in major London museums, the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum opened in Bristol in the fall of 2002.37 The bbc aired the third volume of Simon Schama’s A History of Britain, subtitled The Fate of Empire, in May and June of 2002. Not to be outdone, Channel 4 aired Niall Ferguson’s Empire, a four-part television series, in January and February 2003. Publishers have been busy as well, marketing the British empire to reading audiences: David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, Linda Colley’s Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, and William Dalrymple’s White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century England are only a few of the titles that have been bestsellers in Britain in the past few years—in addition to the book versions of Schama’s History of Britain and Ferguson’s Empire.38 Empire, in other words, has become a series of multimedia events in Britain, offering a range of consuming activities for a public that is defined in ever more complex ways. In addition to the museum exhibits, television programs, and books, there are websites and virtual tours, gift shop items such as wrapping paper and postcards, and shopping experiences provided by department stores, such as Selfridges, modeled perhaps on Liberty’s Eastern Bazaar of a century ago.39 The reception of these events in the British press has been contested, reflecting the ways in which Britishness remains an unstable construct, still being imagined and invented from multiple sources.40 A basic divide exists between those who felt that Britain should acknowledge and apologize for its colonial wrongs—such as slavery and famine—and those who felt that Britain should be remembered for its appreciation of other cultures and for how well it administered its empire. Some of these public events, such as the Trading Places exhibit, have contributed to a serviceable historical narrative that might reconcile Britain’s status as “home” to a diverse population of Asians, Africans, Caribbeans, and Arabs with its history as one of the world’s largest colonizing nations, while others have shied from acknowl114    durb a ghosh

edging that there might be any conflict between Britain’s past and present relationships with its colonial and postcolonial subjects. The public debate occasioned by Niall Ferguson’s television series and book, titled in full Empire: How Britain Changed the Modern World, has been diagnostic of these dramatic tensions within Britain about how best to represent the history of empire to twenty-first-century Britons. Empire is both a historical account of the economic benefits the British empire provided to the world through the process of “Anglobalization” and a policy document for future global empire-builders.41 Ferguson emphasizes that British economic investments gave rise to crucial political, social, and cultural changes that were much needed in bringing many African and Asian economies and societies into “the modern world.” When Ferguson proclaimed that “Anglobalization” was a “Good Thing,” reviewers were polarized in their responses.42 One reviewer likened Ferguson to Leni Riefenstahl in glamorizing the “new imperial order” of George Bush and Tony Blair, while others praised Ferguson’s acuity in mapping the economic benefits of empire.43 Meanwhile David Cannadine, director of the Institute of Historical Studies, observed, “The notion of empire as good or bad is not helpful. Labeling the imperialists as the bad guys and the colonized as the good guys is far too simplistic. We are now moving towards a different phase of interpretation of empire as a means of managing multiculturalism.”44 That public histories of Britain and its empire might be a way of “managing multiculturalism” is reminiscent of Tony Bennett’s arguments about the exhibitionary complex of the modern state in educating its citizens in appropriate forms of sociability and civility. Cannadine’s assessment that such an education “now” requires complex historical knowledge that is “helpful” is highly suggestive, but raises the question of how public history can be managed and whose interests are served. The notion of training was resonant in the very acrimonious debate produced by the Trade and Empire exhibit at the National Maritime Museum in 1999, which included the controversial image of an Englishwoman drinking tea on the first-class deck of a transatlantic ship as a slave’s arm, complete with chains, reached through a grate below. The gallery was temporarily closed, then later reopened, giving visitors an opportunity to judge the exhibit. Critics charged that the exhibit was sensationalist, insufficiently exhibiting asia in br itain    115

celebratory of Britain’s maritime power, and pandered to “multiculturalism and environmental awareness.”45 The director of the museum, Richard Ormond, responded by arguing that the museum was “confident that is it is achieving its aim of engaging a broader and younger audience than our traditional ‘nautical’ one. . . . We have had a request to use the Image of Empire film for police training, on the ground that it engages issues central to modern race relations.”46 An emerging public discussion over how museums and the heritage industry in the United Kingdom should mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Parliament’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 also reflects some of the deep and continuing tensions over the legacies of colonialism and slavery in contemporary Britain, particularly in addressing the concerns of a racially and ethnically diverse population. The Heritage Lottery Fund, which distributes funds from the National Lottery, received an additional £16 million in January 2006 from Parliament to distribute to local groups and associations, schools, historic homes, and museums, for public projects on slavery and antislavery in Britain.47 In the hopes of coordinating “Slavery 2007,” as the commemorations for this bicentenary have been called by the government, a parliamentary advisory group was formed, with Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott as its chair. Prescott was appointed in part to honor the efforts of one of Prescott’s nineteenth-century predecessors as Member of Parliament from Hull, William Wilberforce, who was a key figure in Britain’s abolition movement.48 Shortly after the government’s announcement of Slavery 2007, the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, said in a keynote speech to the Fabian Society conference, “Just as it was in the name of liberty that in the 1800s Britain led the world in abolishing the slave trade—something we celebrate in 2007—so too in the 1940s in the name of liberty Britain stood firm against fascism. ”49 New Labour’s support for Slavery 2007 has encouraged commemorating the abolition of the slave trade as part of Britain’s historical commitment to honoring human rights and equality. Critics noted that such a Whiggish construction of history is insufficiently cognizant of the ways in which Britain’s global and industrial dominance was based on the slave trade.50 A documentary titled The Empire Pays Back aired by Channel 4 in August 2005 had noted that much of Britain’s wealth, architecture, and culture—major

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port and industrial cities such as Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, as well as its historic homes—were built on the profits of the slave trade and that this should not be overlooked in the process of planning Slavery 2007. In a comment on this documentary, Richard Drayton, a historian at Cambridge, noted that Atlantic and Caribbean slavery was not isolated from Britain’s other imperial activities: textiles and other luxuries from Asia had been used to purchase slaves for several centuries prior to slavery’s abolition.51 When Drayton reminds us of ways in which the British empire was dependent on trade with Asia in order to carry on the trade in slaves from Africa, we start to see why colonial horrors, such as the slave trade (and there are other horrors), cannot and should not be separated from other histories, as they so often neatly are in museum exhibits such as Trading Places, which emphasize the consumption of household goods without addressing the costs and profits of procuring those goods and the effects on the laboring populations who produced them. This ongoing discussion on how public institutions might best represent the legacy of slavery in order to serve the ethnically diverse populations of Britain through Slavery 2007 has demonstrated how public intellectuals, historians, and members of the museum and heritage industry continue to grapple with how to represent Britain’s colonial legacy.52 In this contested terrain, most parties do agree on one point: the legacies of empire are considered a problem for multicultural Britain to overcome yet can be used as a training ground for future racial tolerance and understanding.53 As these recent articulations of British history and its iterations in exhibits and museums suggest, the empire, broadly construed, has become crucial terrain for representing Britishness in the early twenty-first century. Although Britain is no longer an imperial power, its history as an imperial power partially explains how England became modern Britain and how modern Britain became colonial and postcolonial. When large numbers of Scots, Welsh, and some Irish entered the service of the English East India Company and engaged in other imperial activities, empire provided venues for the construction of a new composite British identity.54 When Britain became defined explicitly as a multicultural nation, it was largely due to the labor, migration, and political involvement of Asians, Africans, and Caribbeans in the British Isles in the aftermath of decolonization. Whether we

exhibiting asia in br itain    117

refer to migration, territorial conquests, or the creation of new subjects who call themselves “British,” empire has profoundly shaped the histories and cultures of Great Britain. In spite of empire’s expansive and catholic place in imagining Britain and Britishness anew, in the context of public histories of Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century, empire can also be a limiting term that reproduces and consolidates Britishness and Britain by reinstating the material and cultural “progress” produced by imperial activities. Although an exhibit like Trading Places tries to put a positive spin on Anglo-Asian trade relations by characterizing it as partnership or exchange, it also reconstitutes and solidifies what it meant to be stereotypically British in prior centuries: tea-drinking, fashionably dressed white women and white men who bravely sailed the seas, collecting and classifying numerous treasures and artifacts from travels to Asia. What this kind of representation of the early modern period does is to create a narrative script for the present that sanitizes some of the bumpy patches of Britain’s imperial history in the service of managing multiculturalism. Slavery, the opium trade, and famine are cast aside as exceptional or rare moments, discontinuities in a British narrative of colonialism that was largely seen to be benevolent, liberal, and paternal by bringing the world closer together through tea drinking and curry. The seemingly continuous existence of consumption, cosmopolitanism, and globalization in the form of commerce and transnational capital from the early modern period to the twenty-first century overshadows any violent ruptures as Britain sails on from being colonial to postcolonial and incorporates Asian goods and disciplines Asian peoples into the British nation. Rule Britannia thus merges into “cool Britannia” as the image of the Indian textile worker and the echoes of African slaves below deck are carefully submerged. notes 1 2

The Trading Places exhibit was at the British Library May 24 to Sept. 22, 2002. Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, June 26–Oct. 6, 2002.

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3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20

Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, Destination Culture, 131. See Julian Barnes’s novel, parodying the emergence of Britain’s heritage sites in a theme park, England, England. For London’s status as a global city, see Gilbert, ed., Imagined Londons; Sassen, The Global City; and Schneer, London 1900. See Ian Gledhill, “Protests from Chinese lead the British Library to show damage caused by trade in opium,” Independent, May 27, 2002. For the library’s press release, see the website of the British Library, www.bl.uk (accessed May 28, 2006). The term globalization has had many iterations; I have relied on those offered in Appadurai, Modernity at Large. See also Cheah and Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics, esp. essays in part 3. The relevance of Standard Chartered’s sponsorship was not lost on critics in the Guardian, May 24, 2002; and the Financial Times, June 1, 2002. The other sponsor was the politically conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph. Kling and Pearson, The Age of Partnership. For a recent critique of the term, see Subramanyam, “Frank Submissions,” who prefers “contained conflict” over “age of partnership.” See the top of the British Library home page (accessed May 28, 2006). The British Library Souvenir Guide, 7. Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 129. Ibid., 133–39; see also Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem, 122–24. Macgregor, “The Best of Britishness,” 15–16. Macgregor is the director of the British Museum. See The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, part 1; also Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack and Against Race. “Cool Britannia” was promoted in Mark Leonard, Britain TM. Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 146; Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.” The phrase is from Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, Destination Culture, 132. For a useful study on cosmopolitan subjects and travel, see C. Kaplan, “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Orient.” The collapsing of time is a crucial form of “writing the nation”; see Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 145–46. The exhibits Web page provided a link to the website of the East India Company: www.theeastindiacompany.com (accessed May 28, 2006). Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society. Histories of the past few years have drawn attention to the longtime presence of Asians in Britain: see Burton, At the Heart of Empire; M. Fisher, ed., The

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38

39 40

Travels of Dean Mahomet; M. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism; Visram, Asians in Britain. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 23. The relationship between exhibitions, advertising, and department stores is raised by Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England; see esp. 30–33. Hoffenberg, 240. On the “homogenous class of the consumer,” see Grewal, Home and Harem, 125; Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 19. C. Kaplan, “ ‘A World Without Boundaries.’ ” Stewart, On Longing, 156–66; cited in Grewal, Home and Harem, 120–30. See, for instance, Talal Asad, “Multiculturalism and British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair,” in Asad, ed., Genealogies of Religion, 239–68. Wilson, The Island Race, 49. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000. For an early dispute over the issue of deindustrialization and textiles, see Morris, “Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History”; and critical responses in Indian Economic and Social History Review 5 (March 1968): 1–100. For a recent review of this debate, see Parthasarathi, “The Great Divergence.” Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 68–87. See Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, and Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms.” K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe. See the website for the Victoria and Albert Museum, www.vam.ac.uk (accessed May 28, 2006). Pankaj Mishra, “The Barbarian Invasion,” Guardian, Sept. 11, 1999. See reviews in the Independent on Sunday, May 16, 1999; Guardian, Aug. 23, 1999. When the gallery reopened, the National Maritime Museum issued a press release, which can be seen at its website, www.nmm.ac.uk (accessed May 28, 2006). In 2000, the museum marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the East India Company with a conference, out of which emerged a volume: Bowen et al., eds., The Worlds of the East India Company. For a brief review of the Victorian Vision exhibit, see Burton, “Déjà vu All Over Again.” Essays accompanying the exhibit were published in Mackenzie, ed. The Victorian Vision. The website of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum is at www .empiremuseum.co.uk (accessed May 28, 2006). See Schama, A History of Britain, vol. 3. The Fate of Empire, 1776–2001 (2002). The first two volumes were published and shown in the previous years: vol. 1, At the Edge of the World? 3000 b.c.–a.d. 1603 (2000); and vol. 2, 1603–1776 (2001). N. Chaudhuri, “Shawls, Jewelry, Curry and Rice in Victorian Britain,” 236. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness.

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41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

When the book was released in America, the subtitle was changed to The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. See also Ferguson, “The Empire Slinks Back: Why Americans Don’t Really Have What It Takes to Rule the World.” “Battling for the heart of the empire,” Guardian Book Review, Jan. 11, 2003, and see Ferguson, Empire, xx. Jon Wilson, “False and dangerous,” Guardian, Feb. 8, 2003; Max Hastings, “The Right Way to Run an Empire,” Daily Telegraph, Feb. 27, 2003. Cannadine quoted in John Crace, “The Empire Strikes Back,” Guardian, Education Weekly, Jan. 14, 2003. David Lister, “Revising Maritime History,” Independent, May 3, 1999. Richard Ormond, Letter to the editor, Daily Telegraph, Aug. 20, 1999. The pamphlet outlining how to apply for these funds is in “Remembering Slavery in 2007: A Guide to Resources for Heritage Projects,” is available at the website of the Heritage Lottery Fund, www.hlf.org.uk (accessed May 28, 2006). Press release from the Home Office, http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk (accessed May 28, 2006). Gordon Brown, “The Future of Britishness,” speech given on January 14, 2006, to the Fabian Future of Britain conference at Imperial College, London. Tristram Hunt, “Easy on the Euphoria,” Guardian, March 25, 2006. Richard Drayton, “The wealth of the West was built on Africa’s exploitation,” Guardian, Aug. 20, 2005. Heywood, “Breaking the Chains.” Thanks to Robert Travers for making this point clearer. Colley, Britons, 117–32; Ferguson, Empire, introduction; Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, chaps. 1 and 6.

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The Alamo Myth, Public History, and the Politics of Inclusion

Richard R. Flores

the alamo in san antonio is one of the major sites of public history in the United States as well as the most-visited location in the State of Texas. Established as a monument in 1905 by the State of Texas, the Alamo is an old Spanish mission where the forces of Antonio López de Santa Anna defeated 187 men led by William Barrett Travis, Jim Bowie, and David Crockett on March 6, 1836. This battle was of some merit in the Texas Independence Movement—although those who died inside the mission never knew their compatriots had in fact voted for independence on March 2—and stories of the Alamo have entered the annals of public history as a heroic and mythic rendition of the events of 1836. At the center of this myth is the reduction of the political issues between the government of Mexico and its province of Tejas into a racialized binary of brave and freedom-loving Texans and tyrannous Mexicans. Over the last fifteen to twenty years numerous scholars have taken issue with the dominant portrayal of the Alamo battle, providing alternative readings and strategies so as to rewrite its public narrative. The struggle to rewrite the story of the Alamo as a more representative event of the past has been an impor-

1 One of the many “historical” plaques that surround the Alamo. Photo: Richard R. Flores.

tant yet, I offer, insufficient tactic. This essay, therefore, has three objectives: first, to provide a brief overview of the dominant narrative of the Alamo; second, to examine the various strategies that historians and community leaders have wielded to critique the public history of the Alamo; and third, to offer a historical reading of the public history itself in order to examine the foundation of the Alamo myth. myth as public history

Let me begin with the overview of the dominant historical narrative for the Battle of the Alamo. While this narrative is reproduced in various genres, from historical texts to fiction to film and even poetry, I will address the view once presented at the Alamo itself through a short film shown there. The film was shown under the tutelage of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (drt), the official custodians of the Alamo. Since 1905, when the State of Texas entrusted the Alamo to them, the drt has held sole authority over the interpretation of this site. Today, with little or no accountability to the state or the local community, the drt continues to control the alamo   123

the Alamo grounds and, more critically, the public history they have enshrined. Approximately three times an hour, visitors to the Alamo are encouraged to visit the long barracks of this old mission where they can view a visual narrative of the Alamo battle in a small room known as the Driscoll Theatre. Beginning with a brief reference to the Spanish friars, who founded the mission, the film moves to the events surrounding the Battle of the Alamo.1 The year, the film states, is now 1835, and the Mexican General Martín Perfecto de Cos, charged with protecting the Province of Tejas from Anglo-American unrest, is defeated at the siege of Béxar, now San Antonio. After being captured, he and his soldiers are sent south of the Rio Grande River. With unrest in the province growing, Sam Houston takes charge of the Texas forces, and after Cos’s defeat, orders Colonel Jim Bowie to destroy the Alamo lest it become occupied and fortified by Mexican forces. But Bowie, according to the film, becomes “fascinated” with the old mission, declares that he “would rather die in these ditches than to give them up to the enemy,” and refuses to destroy the fortress. Soon, Lieutenant Colonel William Barrett Travis and Bowie assume joint command of the Alamo and are joined by David Crockett and his dozen or so volunteers from Tennessee. There are about 150 men in the Alamo, few of whom are trained soldiers. The majority of these men are from outside Texas, with a number from European countries. “They had come to aid the revolution.” The only outside help the defenders receive are thirty-two men from Gonzalez, Texas, who believed that “this was the place and this was the hour to stand opposed to tyranny.” On February 22, “governed by the ruthless will of the dictator, Santa Anna’s cavalry arrived” in Béxar. Upon arriving, Santa Anna orders the men in the Alamo to surrender. Unwilling to do so, Travis answers with a cannon shot aimed at the Mexican forces. “One hundred fifty valiant volunteers against the dictator’s trained brigades. The siege had begun.” The men at the Alamo begin the battle alone. No help is delivered, other than the men from Gonzalez, as the battle carries on for thirteen days. Bowie, sick and bedridden, passes the full command of the Alamo forces to Travis. The narrator declares: “According to legend, Travis drew a line on 124   r ichard r. flores

the ground with his sword, offering every man a choice to remain or save his life. According to the legend, only one man fled. History records that 187 remained to die.” After twelve days of fighting, Santa Anna, on the morning of March 6, sounds the deguello, the Mexican bugle melody that announces “that no prisoners will be taken, no quarter will be given.” As the Mexicans begin their attack, Travis gives the order, “The Mexicans are upon us. Give them hell!” The Texans fight bravely, pushing back two assaults on the Alamo. The third assault breaks the Texans’ forces, and the Mexicans soon reach the inner fortress of the old mission. Travis falls holding his sword, Crockett dies fighting in the plaza, and Bowie, still bedridden, fights with his pistol and knife in his hand. All the defenders are killed. The battle of the Alamo was not in vain, however, for Santa Anna’s army is tattered and needs weeks to recuperate from this victory. Less than six weeks later, Sam Houston’s army defeats Santa Anna’s forces at San Jacinto, screaming: “Remember the Alamo! The Alamo! The Alamo! The Alamo!” I have written about this narrative elsewhere; suffice it to say here that this film is founded on the following binary structure:2

leaders character purpose soldiers outcome

texans

mexicans

Travis, Bowie, Crockett Santa Anna brave, valiant men ruthless dictator independence, liberty, freedom tyranny volunteers trained brigade victorious even in death tattered in victory and defeated six weeks later

We learn from the film that the Battle of the Alamo was fought between the tyrannous forces of Santa Anna and the brave, valiant, and independenceseeking Texans. Little effort is made to present the political complexities of this era. Instead we are offered a highly structured narrative of good and evil, including the highly suspect and totally incorrect project of racializing this event as one between Texans and Mexicans. By contrast, structures such as that described above bring into relief the underlying principles that the alamo   125

give credence to these narratives in the first place. As such, this binary narrative form is not that of historical discourse, where the murky waters of the past are defined by their sheer multiplicity and ambiguity, but reflects the structural features of myth and collective memory that serve to underscore the social order of those who write this story. Before continuing, let me briefly reinscribe this narrative with several key elements erased by the drt. For one, 12,000 Anglo-Americans had entered Mexico by 1827 and were living in the province of Coahuila-Tejas, outnumbering the resident Mexicans by 5,000. Foreigners continued moving into the province in large numbers, and by 1835 Mexican citizens in Tejas numbered 7,800, compared to 30,000 Anglo-Americans. The growing number of Anglo-Americans alarmed Mexican officials, and in an effort to curb immigration from the United States, in 1829 the Mexican government passed an emancipation proclamation, outlawing slavery. Slavery was not a practice in Mexico; the law was purely intended to discourage U. S. citizens from moving into the Mexican provinces. Another factor causing concern among citizens of Tejas—whether of Mexican or Anglo-American origin—was the great distance between Tejas and Saltillo, far to the south, where government offices and appellate courts for the province were housed. In 1833, Stephen F. Austin traveled to Mexico City to try to persuade President Santa Anna to allow Texas to become an independent Mexican state with control over its own affairs. Santa Anna refused, adding to the growing unrest. Tensions came to a head when in 1835 Santa Anna discarded the Mexican Constitution of 1824, causing great consternation among Mexicans and Anglo-Americans in Tejas. Perhaps the biggest misrepresentation in the annals of Texas history concerns the immediate effects of Santa Anna’s annulment. Historians agree that his actions led ultimately to the military engagements that resulted in the independence of Texas, but it is also quite clear that the move to independence was not the immediate stance taken by all, especially among the older settlers. Many had come to Tejas seeking new ways of life and were slow in responding to the call to arms, and even fewer fought at the Alamo. As the historian Stephen L. Hardin demonstrates, “few of the real Texians were there, for few of the old settlers had originally sought independence or war.”3 126   r ichard r. flores

There are numerous factors to consider in attributing a motive to those who bore arms against the Mexican state. The most common, at least in the initial stages of the revolt, was the intent of local citizens to return Mexico to a federalist republic. In fact, as settlers in Tejas organized during the early months of conflict, their efforts at forming a provisional independent government led to open feuding about the issue of independence. These initial efforts in November 1835 led to the formation of a provisional government “as a state within the Mexican federation,” not a separate independent Texas republic.4 (A republic was, however, only a few months away.) The rationale for statehood was that local citizens of Tejas believed many of their difficulties with the Mexican government would be resolved if local decisions were left in their own hands. Federalistas and centralistas, then, bear the primary responsibility for the eruption of open hostility in 1835. But among these two camps, ethnic or national origin was not a primary factor in choosing sides. Some Mexican citizens sided with the federalists, opposing the dictatorial regime of Santa Anna; some Anglo-Americans backed the centralist forces of the dictator. In an effort to suppress the federalist movement in Texas, Santa Anna led his forces north, making his move on Béxar and the Alamo. The aftermath of the battle was one of blood, carnage, and utter death and destruction. José Enrique de la Peña described Santa Anna’s arrival at the battle scene: “He could see for himself the desolation among his battalions and that devastated area littered with corpses, with scattered limbs and bullets, with weapons and torn uniforms. . . . The bodies, with their blackened and bloody faces disfigured by a desperate death, their hair and uniforms burning at once, presented a dreadful and truly hellish sight.”5 Those who died defending the Alamo did so for a “borrowed cause,” claims Hardin: “the majority had only recently come from the United States to fight for Texas independence. Among them were Scots, Welsh, Danes and English, as well as U. S. citizens. Few of the real Texians were there.”6 But there is no doubt that news of the defeat, and the death of all of the Alamo defenders, gave impetus to the independence movement. Critical to this historical portrait are several factors. First, as noted above, the initial dispute in Texas stemmed from the efforts of both Mexicans and Anglo-Americans to restore a federalist government in Mexico. Mexicans in the province also tired of Santa Anna’s despotism and of the tedious political the alamo   127

circumstances resulting from their distance from the provincial and national capitols in Coahuila and Mexico City. Second, in spite of his unilateral control of Mexican affairs and politics, and his egotistical and personal ambitions, Santa Anna’s actions can be viewed as an effort to control an internal uprising in his own country. Finally, an element that seems quite overlooked is the identity of the men who died. The public version of this event provided by the drt claims that this was a battle between Texans and Mexicans. This is not correct. There were only thirteen native-born Texans in the group, and eleven of them were of Mexican descent. Of those remaining, forty-one were born in Europe, and the rest had been born in the United States. Thus, the portrayal of the Battle of the Alamo as a conflict between Texans and Mexicans is a misrepresentation. Prominent Mexican citizens fought on both sides, dividing their allegiance along political and ideological lines rather than according to the ethnically or nationally circumscribed positions popularized at the Alamo. The public narrative of the Alamo as a Manichaean drama of noble Texans and ruthless Mexicans continued to shape the understanding about the Alamo with little resistance until the mid-1960s. In the last thirty years, however, through parody, critique, and other strategic interventions, this dominant narrative has come under intense scrutiny.7 While some challenges have emanated from the realm of popular culture (Peter Ustinov’s film Viva Max being the earliest), here I will focus on those efforts made by academics and community leaders. public history as myth

The primary method of contemporary critique in relation to the Alamo builds on a model of inclusion. While numerous historians have participated in this process, Gilberto Hinojosa, a notable Tejano historian teaching in San Antonio, is perhaps the best known. In 1986 Hinojosa advocated recognizing the often-neglected role of Mexicans who fought inside the Alamo. “Tejano participants,” he stated, “appear to have shared political ideals with their Anglo-Texan compatriots and exhibited acceptable if not equivalent determination to see Texas free of centralist rule.”8 More recently, in 1997, Hinojosa claimed, “Including Tejano participation in the 128   r ichard r. flores

powerful Alamo story—since bravery and defiance for the sake of selfdetermination was manifested by all the Alamo defenders—will produce a founding epic for all Texans in the state’s 21st-century society.”9 Hinojosa is not alone in his sentiments. Félix Almaráz Jr., another San Antonio historian, has expressed similar views, as has the local radio announcer Henry Guerra, who has read the list of Alamo defenders—including the names of Tejanos—in commemoration ceremonies held each year at the Alamo.10 These efforts, while only partially successful, warrant significant recognition. The Alamo battle was not a race war, and efforts to write the history of this battle as one between Texans and Mexicans, as do the drt through their video presentation, do a great disservice to how we understand this event. A second inclusionary model concerns the expansion of the public history of the Alamo to provide a broader representation of the Alamo’s past, specifically the Spanish colonial period. Efforts in this direction have coalesced in the last few years as Mexican-American scholars and community leaders join ranks with Native Americans and African Americans. At issue is the fact that the Alamo, as Mission San Antonio de Valero, contained within its walls, as did most mission compounds, a campo santo, or burial ground, for Native Indians, Spanish missionaries, and later on for slaves and mestizos from San Antonio. According to Gabe Gabehart, president of the Inter-Tribal Council of American Indians, census records from the Spanish colonial period indicate 1,006 people buried in the Spanish mission of the Alamo, out of which 883 were North American Indians. Such claims have led to various efforts both to recognize the presence of these plots and to recuperate these long-forgotten remains. Responding to this issue, in 1994 the city council of San Antonio established an Alamo Plaza Study Committee to recommend a plan of action. One strategy put forward by several members of the committee called for closing several streets surrounding the Alamo and leveling buildings that now stand on the original mission compound. The goal of the proposal was to restore the Alamo to its original mission plot of land. What the drt recognizes as the Alamo is only a reconstructed version of the mission church, which was in ruins at the time of the battle. The original walls to the compound have long since been destroyed and built over, actions partly supported by members of the drt themselves.11 In support of the alamo   129

this idea, Richard Santos, chairman of the Bexar County Historical Commission and himself of Mexican descent argued, “Enough of John Wayne, show us some blacks, some Mexicans, some Indians. We’re proud of our heritage. Why should we take a back seat?”12 The drt, however, has vehemently worked against any effort to shift the historical focus of the Alamo from 1836 to a more inclusive historical portrait. Still, the popularity of the Alamo as a site of public history continues to grow, attracting several million people a year even as criticism persists. Carlos Guerra, a San Antonio newspaper columnist claims, “I think if you talk to Hispanics overall, you’ll find they are very uncomfortable with the symbol of the Alamo. They find it a symbol not of liberty but of racism.”13 The efforts and strategies proposed in these two models of inclusion serve as important efforts to rethink and rewrite the story of the Alamo from a position that represents a sense of the past beyond the events of 1836. The first model aims at recognizing that “good” Mexicans fought alongside the traditionally acknowledged heroes against the “treacherous” Mexicans. The second model, which further expands the history of this site, aims to incorporate the Spanish colonial period, giving more credence to a full range of historical actors whose lives were associated with the Alamo. In both cases, Hinojosa can claim: “I’m not against the Alamo story or the Alamo epic. The question is what does the story say.”14 While both of these models serve an important role in rethinking and expanding the story of the Alamo, they have made little headway, I suggest, because they remain, as Hinojosa’s comment states, at the level of story, epic, or myth. Recognizing the mythic elements of the Alamo story is not new. The historian David Weber, for example, writes that “a number of the cherished stories about the Alamo have no basis in historical fact, but have moved out of the earthly realm of reality into the stratosphere of myth.”15 But myths are not, in fact, stratospheric tales; they are deeply grounded narratives through which communities express deeply held convictions. Myth, as the literary critic Fredric Jameson explains, is a type of “storytelling that seals the unity of the tribe, confirms their common past through the celebration of the heroic founders of culture . . . through a shared symbolism and a shared ritual.”16 Thus, contemporary critiques that follow these inclusion models fail to move beyond the heroic and mythic elements embedded in the structure of the Alamo narrative. Lest I be misunderstood, let me 130   r ichard r. flores

clearly state that any effort to expand the Alamo story is an important and necessary one. Strategies of inclusion, however, do not question the roles that binary and mythic constructions serve in the formation of the larger social order. Deciphering the Alamo myth is not a task of picking through the rubble of fact and fiction, discarding the invented and upholding the real. Criticism of the Alamo myth must examine the contents of the story and come to terms with the raw materials of fact and fiction as genuine elements in a story that must now be recovered. This recovery must, in turn, recast the materials of the myth as inflections of a society coming to terms with itself in real historical time. Such expressive and important cultural forms are not unique to the modern world, nor is the convergence of myth with narratives of the past. What is unique about such narratives is their particular relationship to the past. A criticism of the Alamo myth, therefore, must examine the story told as a means of accounting historically and socially for its own presence. In our case, we must return to the late nineteenth century when the myth became organized, both as a real moment of the past and as a marker for an era of social transition I have termed the Texas Modern. the alamo as tex(mex) master symbol of modernity

Several critical changes affected the Texas economy between 1880 and 1900: the closing of the range, the introduction of the railroad, and the beginning of commercial farming.17 Between 1900 and 1920 these changes accelerated, leading to increased social pressure and conflict. Overall, the period between 1880 and 1920 was marked by the working out of new relationships, habits, and practices brought forth by the rapid transitions of this period, which resulted in the establishment of a social order segmented into various ethnic and class divisions. By 1915 these struggles for position erupted into violent conflict, including a series of border skirmishes that took place around San Diego, Texas. The various social and class contradictions of the period could no longer be restrained by earlier social and ideological arrangements, like those between elite ranchers and their workers, revealing the depth and magnitude of social erosion in the Mexican community of South Texas. the alamo   131

These eruptions constituted a “cultural revolution,” an unsettling and transitional period in which new practices and customs, forged from new relations of material and ideological production, became dominant.18 The changes associated with the Texas Modern are evident in the increased and rapid transition to commercial farming and the erosion of local agricultural and cattle-related practices. In deep South Texas, farmers from Kansas and Illinois played a principal role in this transformation, influenced by developers promising cheap land worked by even cheaper Mexican labor.19 Between 1910 and 1920 these Midwest transplants were responsible for doubling the number of farms in Cameron County, while in neighboring Hidalgo County farms grew more than sevenfold in this same period. These increases resulted in a population boom in South Texas—mostly from outside the state—as the area grew from 79,974 inhabitants in 1900 to over 159,000 in 1920.20 While these events affected all sectors of the population, the displacement of Mexican skilled workers, landowners, and vaqueros was disproportionate to their overall numbers. Urban areas were equally affected. The population of San Antonio’s West Side, an enclave of Mexican social and cultural life, had mushroomed by the early 1900s. Although the city’s founders and early civic and business leaders had been Mexican, by 1915 Mexicans were primarily poor and were kept that way by their “forced social and economic segregation.”21 The effects of the Texas Modern on the lives of the local Mexican population were severe: most experienced underemployment that insured living in poverty; lack of access to public institutions was enforced by practices and policies of segregation; and political power was lost through gerrymandering and the institutionalization of poll taxes. These tactics, reproduced through the political and social apparatus of the state, served to assure a social body defined along racial, ethnic, and class lines. The Alamo, I offer, served as a key symbolic formulation, or master symbol, that legitimates the exploitation and displacement of Mexicans during this period. It must be remembered that the Alamo, unlike Gettysburg, did not become a public memorial immediately after the battle. Instead, this former mission, which was already in ruins at the time of the conflict, served variously as a grain storage facility for the U.S. Quartermaster’s Depot, a supply store, and saloon. It was not until the 1890s that efforts by the drt to purchase the property, then in private hands, were initiated. My 132   r ichard r. flores

argument, therefore, is that the Alamo emerges as a site of public history and culture in the midst of the Texas Modern as a means of justifying the deep social and racial cleavages of the moment.22 Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of plot, events, and historicality assists in developing my position. Historical events, he claims, serve to advance “the plot” of a particular narrative, endowing them with historicality. At the level of the narrative, historical accounts represent “the aspects of time in which endings can be seen linked to beginnings to form a continuity within a difference.”23 It is through this model that the Alamo must be understood. Why, I ask, was this location not recognized as a site of public history until the late nineteenth century? It is not a coincidence, I suggest, that the events of 1836 were not thought historically significant until the advent of modernity in Texas. As a transformational process, modernity serves to reproduce society “within a difference.” In Texas, this difference is found in the rearrangement of relationships between Anglos and Mexicans into a hierarchical structure. The events of 1836 serve as an episodic element that advances a plot of dominance by linking the modern episteme of difference with a myth of origin. While historians, both professional and amateur, may debate the “factual” details of how Davy Crockett died, or the location of various persons during the engagement, or the names and racial or ethnic identities of those involved in the battle, the “meaning” of such discussion is warranted only as a result of the formative weight we give to 1836 as an explanatory factor for the present social order. The Alamo exists as an event in history, but it emerges in culture in the way it unifies experience and social context. Invoking the past, as a fact of history or a mythical reality, is to judge according to the needs of the present. Richard Slotkin persuasively argues how mythic complexes inform the westward expansion of the United States.24 Critical to his discussion is the way violence serves as a mechanism of social and cultural reproduction that shapes notions of power and dominance over nature and the Other of the Western frontier. Is it coincidence that the heroic, mythic tale of the Alamo is itself a story about the birth, not merely of Texas, but the United States and the Western frontier? I hardly believe so. This is not to suggest that the Alamo was without meaning or significance prior to the Texas Modern. Immediately after 1836, the death of the the alamo   133

Alamo defenders fueled anti-Mexican sentiment throughout the Southwest for many years. But the production and representation of the Battle of the Alamo during the Texas Modern serves as a key symbolic formulation that is constitutive, and not merely reflective, of the material and social changes of the moment. As importantly, the significance of the Alamo is itself reconstituted in this process. The coupling of the Alamo with the Texas Modern brings its significance out of the narrow confines of the past into a story that resonates with the present, a narrative in which social actors present at the Alamo are remade into heroes in the service of a modernist agenda. Precisely because of these issues, most contemporary critiques of the Alamo are in need of rethinking. Any effort to expand the “myth” of the Alamo serves only to offer a more inclusive reading without considering what symbolic work is being accomplished by the myth in the first place. Perhaps John Sayles is correct when he concludes his film Lone Star by having Pilar, who has just learned of her mixed Mexican-Anglo ancestry, exclaim: “Forget the Alamo!” notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

Quoted material in this section references the Alamo film from notes I took on various occasions during my research at the Alamo. For a more complete discussion of these issues, see my essay, “Memory-Place, Meaning, and the Alamo.” Hardin, Texian Iliad, 156. Ibid., 57. De la Peña, With Santa Anna in Texas, 52. Hardin, Texian Iliad, 156. This is not to say that the formation of the Alamo as a place of public history has gone uncontested until this time. There have been numerous “second battles” over the Alamo. Nearly all, except for that waged by Adina De Zavala, did not concern the myth in a public forum but rather were political postures on how best to preserve the myth in a public forum. Most concerned various beautification efforts by the City of San Antonio to preserve the space around the Alamo as this area has grown in size and density. On De Zavala, see her History and Legends of the Alamo and Other Missions in and around San Antonio. Quoted in Linenthal, “ ‘A Reservoir of Spiritual Power,’ ” 527. Originally from an interview in the San Antonio Light, April 6, 1986. San Antonio Express-News, March 2, 1997.

134   r ichard r. flores

10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Linenthal, “ ‘A Reservoir of Spiritual Power,’ ” 527. For a discussion of this history, see my introduction, “Adina De Zavala and the Politics of Restoration,” in De Zavala, History and Legends of the Alamo and Other Missions. Houston Chronicle, Oct. 9, 1994, Sunday Star Edition, 1. Houston Chronicle, March 6, 1994, Sunday Star Edition, 1. Austin American-Statesman, March 6, 1994, Sunday News Section, A1. Weber, Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest, 135–36. Jameson, “Criticism in History,” 126. See Flores, Remembering the Alamo. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 85. Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986, 109. García, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 27–28. For an overview of how the Alamo came to be a site of public history and culture in the 1890s, see my essay “Private Visions, Public Culture.” Quoted in White, The Content of the Form, 52. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence.

the alamo   135

Ellis Island Redux The Imperial Turn and the Race of Ethnicity

Daniel J. Walkowitz

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be “white”—they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic and gender struggles over resources and identity.  Cornel West, Race Matters

on july 22, 1920, the Steamship Hellig Olav departed from Copenhagen carrying Sisze and Chaje Walkowitz and their four children. One of the two sons, five-year-old Solomon, was my father.1 According to family folklore, they had fled Lodz, Poland, in 1914 to avoid Sisze’s threatened conscription into the czar’s army. They had bided their time in Denmark for the next five years as the First World War raged throughout the rest of Europe, waiting for the opportunity (and perhaps funds) to emigrate to America.2 Unlike most of their landsmen, who traveled in steerage, they went tourist class with tickets paid for them by Chaje’s brother-in-law, Joe Katz, their sponsor in Paterson, New Jersey. Ten days later, on August 3, they arrived at Ellis Island, the 27.5-acre island in New York harbor that housed the immigration station. For them, as for their 12 million fellow immigrants who passed through Ellis Island from its opening on January 1, 1892, to its closure in 1954, the immigration

station was the last hurdle before entering the Golden Door. Indeed, the Statue of Liberty was a stone’s throw away on adjacent Liberty Island, and a mere one mile away the towering New York skyline beckoned. But for the Walkowitz family “Golden America” would have to wait a while longer: despite traveling tourist class, they were all confined for three days, reportedly because of a epidemic of lice in steerage. But whatever made these radical Jewish trade unionists—Chaje had been an active member of the socialist Bund—think America would be a more hospitable home than the one they had left? America in 1920 was a cauldron of class, racial, and ethnic hostilities, fueled in part by state repression directed at radicals and Jews. In fact, Ellis Island was at that point also being used as a detention center. Only a year before, when the government rounded up hundreds of radical aliens and detained them on the island, Immigration Commissioner Frederic C. Howe despaired, “I have become a jailer.”3 Much about the New York region after the war made it an equally problematic new home. Following the Armistice (and, not incidentally, the Russian Revolution in 1917), doughboys sought their old jobs back, and manufacturers pressed to turn back wartime labor gains. Black workers, many of them new migrants to northern cities who had taken wartime jobs in industry, resisted efforts to turn back the clock on their gains, and race riots erupted across the urban industrial landscape.4 At the same time, from Seattle shipyards to Pittsburgh steel mills to Boston police yards, major and often bitter strikes fed public hysteria that there was a Bolshevik conspiracy to overthrow the constitution. Enter the American Legion and what was to become the fbi. The former was founded on May 8, 1919; the latter, three months later, when the Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer formed the General Intelligence (or antiradical) Division of the Bureau of Investigation, with J. Edgar Hoover as its head. The Legionnaires meted out vigilante justice; the Justice Department, in the infamous Palmer Raids, provided much the same, under the guise of legality. All told, thousands of innocent people were jailed or deported, and many more were arrested or questioned. On January 2, 1920, alone, over four thousand alleged radicals were arrested in thirty-three cities.5 Although by the summer of 1920 the Red Scare was waning, it remained a vivid memory for radicals, and the possibility of its resumption was a chilling threat. ellis island redux   137

So how does one make sense of the arrival of the radical Walkowitzes— a family that would become active in the American Communist Party—at the very time that anarchists and syndicalists (and disproportionately Jews) were being deported as “radicals”? Had public fears of radicals evaporated overnight by the summer of 1920? Or had the one hand of the state, Immigration and Naturalization, not known what the other hand, the nascent fbi, was doing? This answer may be a testament to alternative local knowledge; or it may be a story in which the promise of “opportunity” in Paterson outweighed the fear of repression. But if the latter, we might ask whether opportunity meant jobs and “riches” or, more broadly, the “opportunity” to advance free of discrimination, to “invest,” as one historian has suggested, in the fruits of “whiteness”?6 In addition to “radical,” the Walkowitzes had a multiplicity of identities from which to choose; they could imagine themselves as “European,” “Polish,” “Danish,” “Jewish,” or “Hebrew” as in the ship’s log, or indeed, as “white.” I wondered if the Ellis Island Immigration Museum could provide any answers. I had visited the island and its museum in 1991, shortly after it opened, but had not previously considered the ironic timing of my own family’s immigration. The explosion in postcolonial writing and whiteness studies as well as the resurgence of American nationalism and Pax Americana in the wake of September 11 invited a return by 2004. The museum had presumably matured in the intervening years, but I wondered how (or if ) any changes in the interpretative framework that had developed over the past decade now illuminated my family’s experience. Of course, I also wondered how these changes bore the weight of American geopolitics in the post-9/11 era. This essay is, then, a doubled return to the Ellis Island experience on several levels. Literally, it reports on a second visit and a reexamination of the site. But it is also a return in two roles: as a visitor interested in my own family story and as a professional public historian concerned, in a further doubling, both with the politics of public space and with the meanings attributed to the proliferation of immigrant and “minority” voices. Clearly public interests have shaped the meanings and uses of public history sites like Ellis Island—in both the use of the site by politicos as a staging ground for patriotic pronouncements and the personal and nationalist expectations that American visitors and international tourists bring to it. At the same 138   daniel j. walkowitz

time, while the New Social History since the 1960s has mobilized oral histories, census data, and local histories to tell stories of workers, women, “minorities,” and other “others” from the bottom up, various postmodern scholars have also reminded us that history is not simply a container of stories.7 In the celebratory tale of the Nation, as important are which stories are told, how stories change over time, which are not told, and who gets to make the determination. Moreover, Ellis Island is more than a place of stories; it has symbolic meaning to its visitors as a site of national citizenship. post 9/11 ellis

I had not been to Ellis Island for more than a decade, although I live and work in lower Manhattan. The two are contiguous spaces, but I did not realize how much the recent traumatic history of the latter had become imbricated into the experience of the former. Ellis is a ten-minute boat ride from Liberty Island and its statue. The National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior administers both sites, and visitors are encouraged to tour both when they come. Indeed, a single brochure introduces visitors to both sites, and the same boat carries people to the two islands. (See fig. 1.) Indeed, before the Ellis Island Immigration Museum opened in 1990, the American Museum of American Immigration was located on Liberty Island and was the local source for Ellis Island’s history. The events of September 11, 2001, merely gave new life and meaning to a relationship between narratives of liberty and immigration that was already overdetermined. September 11 has, not surprisingly, had an impact on the Ellis Island experience. The annual number of visitors to Ellis and Liberty Islands fell dramatically in the year after the attack, from more than 4 million to 2.5 million. In the time since the attack, new fears have resulted in widely broadcast new restrictions: as far away as Belfast, for instance, newspaper headlines in 2002 warned readers that “stepped up” security measures in New York now prohibited any vessels from sailing within 150 yards of the United Nations, Ellis Island, or Liberty Island.8 But the “Ellis Experience” actually begins in lower Manhattan Island, where it is framed by the events of 9/11. Bowling Green, a lovely park with a wide central path several hundred yards long, provides a grand boulevard-like introduction to the National Monuments. Since March 11, 2002, the six-month anniversary of the ellis island redux   139

1 Sign before the entrance to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, showing its affiliation with the Statue of Liberty Monument. Photo: Dylan Yeats.

attack on the World Trade Center, midway down the path visitors come face to face with a sculpture that rises some fifty feet in the air and consumes much of the pathway. The Sphere, signage explains, had stood in the World Trade Center plaza. It is now a “temporary memorial” to those who died during the attacks. The preservation of the sculpture, “conceived by artist Fritz Koenig as a symbol of world peace”—and the “eternal flame” beside it—now serves as a scarred memorial to American resilience implicitly tied to the nation’s foundational story as a beacon for liberty, freedom, and democracy. (See figs. 2 and 3.) The meta-narrative of 9/11 is represented, in turn, in the pervasive security apparatus that is apparent at the outset of a visit to Ellis Island. While commonplace in post-9/11 New York, this focus on security gave new meanings to the Ellis experience; it begins as one enters the first of three integrated national park sites, the Castle Clinton National Monument. It is here that one buys tickets to Ellis and Liberty Islands. At Castle Clinton, the site of the first New York immigration station, one learns from the Park Service’s brochure of the heightened “Security Awareness” provisions for 140   daniel j. walkowitz

2 and 3 The Sphere and the plaque in the central pathway of Bowling Green Park, leading to Castle Garden and the boats to Ellis and Liberty Islands. Photos: Dylan Yeats.

visitors. Liberty Island had closed on September 11, and the statue remained off-limits for several years as new security measures were put in place. Brian Feeney, the public affairs officer for the National Park Service, notes that both islands have “always had some of the highest security of any monument in the nation,” but assures us that it is now even further heightened. Passengers go through an airportlike security checkpoint before boarding one of the boats, but, Feeney states, “There’s a lot of security in place that is not something visible to the visitor.”9 The obsession with security has enveloped the Ellis experience in a resurgent chauvinism, which the Bush administration pressed as a national project, with the consent of much of the American public. On the one-year anniversary of the attack, Bush addressed the American public from Ellis Island.10 Subsequently, the Bush military and political machine justified its incursion into Afghanistan and its war on Iraq and its dictator with repeated reference to the attack, now linked to its unprecedented policy of “preventive intervention.” For the most part, American liberals joined conservatives in supporting the Iraq war, arguing human rights violations uniquely justified intervention. While both the deepening Iraqi political and military morass and official investigations undercut the Bush administration’s justifications for war and invited disquiet if not skepticism about U.S. policy, the shadow of the World Trade Center and 9/11 remains long. Ellis Island has become a key element in this wartime national project for tourists, both real and virtual. Thus, writing in the Times of London, in an essay provocatively entitled “History is not bunk, but most historians are,” the critic Simon Jenkins celebrated the 50 million hits Ellis Island’s immigration records’ website got the first day it went online in 2001 as popular refutation of what he imagined was left-wing skepticism of the popularity of a patriotic national site. (I am not sure what he would make of the fact that some, like myself, are on the left politically and were among these early users.) Ellis Island’s popularity, he avers, contrasts with accounts in “most school history” written by historians who “hide behind ‘social science’ ” and feminists’ accounts of “herstory.” Jenkins then goes on to cite approvingly, albeit if somewhat out of context, the Cambridge historian Peter Mandler’s call for historians to “stop feeling either guilty or irritated for fear of ‘stirring up the chauvinist embers.’ ”11 Ellis is the national project— the reassertion of America as the Golden Door of opportunity, the “land of 142   daniel j. walkowitz

the free and the home of the brave”—and 9/11 has fanned the nationalist embers. How does this Ellis meta-text relate to the script visitors encounter on the museum walls and in its guided tours? America’s contemporary imperial (and imperious) projects shaped meanings visitors bring to the museum, but does the tour itself consider the role the national imperial projects a century earlier might have played? The Ellis Island Immigration Museum has had a good track record for avoiding historical pieties and advancing responsibly nuanced social history. When the museum opened in September 1990, the radical historian Mike Wallace evinced delight (and surprise) that it had largely managed to resist the well-documented commercial and political pressures led by Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca and former president Ronald Reagan to open the museum as a historically inflected theme park.12 Nearly fifteen years on, I wondered what had changed, especially in the wake of September 11. To be sure, as suggested above, meta-narratives of liberty and success associated with the museum’s relationship to the Statue of Liberty and the boat tour that the two sites share, has always overdetermined Ellis’s larger context. But since 2001, even the most literal-minded critic would be hard pressed not to accept that the immigration experience has transcended Ellis. Ellis Redux, however, comes as the National Park Service mounts efforts to rehabilitate and ultimately incorporate into its museum the two-thirds of the island that remain in disrepair. But as it does so, the nps will have the opportunity to confront and draw upon a rich lode of new scholarship that promises to enrich this historical account: most especially, the literature on postcolonialism and whiteness studies.13 returning to ellis

My return to Ellis was on a bright but cool Sunday afternoon in the early spring of 2004. After taking off my belt, coat, and shoes and emptying my pockets, I cleared security, reclaimed my belongings, and waited in a holding pen alongside the dock adjacent to Castle Clinton—with about a thousand others. Miss Liberty had just docked, and from my vantage point in the front of the queue, I surveyed the group returning from the two islands. The profile of the nearly seven hundred who departed Miss Liberty was ellis island redux   143

something of a surprise. Ellis had been in operation from 1892 until 1954, and the overwhelming preponderance of immigrants it received during the heyday of immigration before the 1924 restrictions were Europeans. Only a handful of the visitors who departed the ship appeared to be African American, but as many as a quarter were East and South Asian and Hispanic. Looking behind me at those who would be my fellow passengers, I saw the same rainbow mix. In my subsequent interview with Barry Moreno, the head historian at Ellis Island since 1991, he could not tell me if this mix was new. After all, he reminded me, African Americans of Caribbean ancestry and thousands of Chinese had passed through Ellis Island. Indeed, the Chinese story reminds us that Ellis is also a story of immigration restriction: the Chinese Division, created to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act, was one of twelve staff divisions of the immigration service. Two other factors, however, illinformed expectations and the changing character of race—both factors that speak to larger contemporary interpretative challenges at Ellis—may have helped account for the mix of attendees. As Moreno bemoaned, complaints to guides and curators demonstrate that many people persist in thinking Ellis Island is the general and universal story of American immigration. He noted, for example, that some misinformed folks think their slave forebears passed through the island. But “race” and who I “saw” on the boat may have been equally problematic. Moreno’s experience is that increasing numbers of “African Americans” are in fact people of mixed ancestry where one parent, of European descent, could trace an ancestor to Ellis.14 The social construction of race might have obscured my view of my fellow passengers, but did it inform what they and I saw at Ellis Island in 2004? And how did the Park Service deal with visitors’ expectations and misunderstandings? Physically, the place remained largely unchanged from my previous visit. The museum occupies the main three-story building, an imposing red-brick structure with limestone trim and four turrets. Though cleaned up and dressed for tourists, the exterior looks largely as it did when it operated as an immigration station. Inside, one enters the Baggage Room, a vast hall with, appropriately, a pile of baggage in the center rear. In a corner is a modern addition: the information center and facilities for renting headsets—the gathering spot for tours. The Park Service knows Ellis represents a specific immigrant history, but since visitors often see the 144   daniel j. walkowitz

museum as a national history, tours and the history described on placards are a balancing act, trying to accommodate visitor expectations of both a larger national narrative and a story of their own family’s history with the curators’ mission to tell a more generic Ellis story. Behind the baggage area is another large room with an exhibit entitled The Peopling of America, which sets the Ellis immigrants in the context of those who came before and after. I found it an uninviting, underutilized space, dominated by a world map linked with lights to countries of origin. I thought this section overly relied on uninspiring demographic material and charts. However, the audio tour does not begin in this room or with its broader immigration context. Instead, the audio tour moves upstairs from the Baggage Room to the Immigration Station, focusing on the specific Ellis experience, even as it claims to tell a national story: the baggage, it begins, “symbolizes the many peoples and backgrounds that make up the nation.” The focus on “peoples” and “peopling” comes at an analytic price, however: Ellis Island introduced immigrants to the national cultural terrain in which citizenship was planted; “peoples” implies a certain egalitarianism that belies immigrant “others” like the Asian immigrant whom, as the historian Lisa Lowe has noted, “the American citizen has been defined over against.”15 Uniting the industrial and medical obsessions of the age, the audio track suggests a possible alternative title that has class resonance: it nicely explains to visitors that the place is organized “like an assembly line” with the goal of admitting a “healthy workforce.” Ignoring the Peopling just behind the baggage, the tour instead moves visitors along that assembly line. While the next rooms sustain the industrial image, the overall thrust of the exhibit, especially as it moves to the third floor, is implicitly one of adjustment, assimilation, and, ultimately, the “whitening” of the immigrants. Moving up the stairs, one enters the cavernous Great Hall or Registry Room, largely left empty today, probably to make space for tourists rather than the stuff of its history. (See fig. 4.) I thought the red-tiled floor and vaulted ceilings allowed voices to echo eerily, evocatively hinting at the awesome din when the room was once packed with immigrants. From the Registry Room one views the hospital wards across the ferry slip with operating rooms, psychopathic wards, and the contagious disease wards. Fundraising plans are in place to develop these facilities, operated by the U.S Public Health Service, in the next decade. ellis island redux   145

4 The Registry Room on the second floor of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. Photo: Dylan Yeats.

The audio tour continues to the east and west of the Registry Room with two other exhibits that I remember from a decade ago, Through America’s Gate and Peak Immigration Years: Immigrants to the U.S., 1886–1924, respectively. Moreno confirms they are basically unchanged. America’s Gate seeks to recreate the experience of the place—how it would have felt to immigrants during those years. Both exhibits rely heavily on enlarged photos, text liberally quoting from immigrant oral histories, artifacts, and oral history soundtracks, but in America’s Gate they are used to dress the sets recreating the supervisory regime which immigrants experienced: fourteen small rooms trace the medical and legal inspection routine immigrants followed. Peak Years focuses on these immigrants before and after Ellis. These dozen or so rooms are less recreations than stories on walls, but with all the analytic power Mike Wallace had felt when they were first mounted nearly fifteen years earlier. While the exhibit has the virtue of allowing a complex story to emerge, it does so as if immigration were an ethnic food fair where visitors get to 146   daniel j. walkowitz

sample and appreciate the wares (stories) as “equal” slices of the American pie. Neither the Asian immigrant nor the African American “other” nor the history of capitalism (and inequities of power that accompanied it) is present.16 Rather, stories of opportunity and hardship predominate. Two examples illustrate how, within these limits, the exhibit empowers a range of immigrant voices. A wall text in At Work in America complements sober data of low wages, sweatshops, and hard life with an Old Italian’s story: “Well, I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things: first, the streets weren’t paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them.” This story is juxtaposed with an adjacent excerpt from Sam Birnbaum’s 1985 oral history. Sam, who had passed through Ellis in 1907, recalled, “I realized that I am in a country where I am a free man. . . . I have a fighting chance to make a living. That means everything.” On the third floor, the tone of the museum changes from a brittle realism to nostalgia. These exhibits, too, are little changed, although newly donated artifacts are evidently added from time to time. The main exhibit on this floor is Treasures from Home. Consistently one of the most popular exhibits, it displays artifacts donated by immigrants’ families—from spoons and Bibles to clothes worn at the time. With little but basic descriptive text, this exhibit allows visitors to mix nostalgia with a “modern” romance for a life safely in the past. Three other small exhibits, which move the story from the immigrants to that of the island itself, do extend the focus outside the immigration station era, but again, in a circumscribed narrative. One section, Ellis Island Chronicles, covers the history of the island from Native American settlement to the closing of the station in 1954. Silences, basically a series of cases with old equipment, picks up the story of its abandonment, while Restoring a Landmark is a heroic tale of rebirth. The artifacts had changed little; the rooms largely focused on the same story. Someone at the information desk did tell me that the audio tour was new, however, supposedly “more professional” and with greater use of immigrant oral histories. So I listened to see if I could detect any influence of the last decade’s writing on postcolonialism or whiteness. All I heard in an hour and a half was one specific reference to whiteness. In one of the latter sections of Peak Immigration Years, the narrator illustrates the racism immigrants encountered in America during the 1920s by quoting Colgate ellis island redux   147

University President Dr. George B. Cotton: “The melting pot is destructive to our race. The danger the melting pot brings to our nation is the breeding out of higher divisions of the white race, and the breeding in on lower divisions.” So there it was: a reference to “whiteness” as an ethnic rather than racial characteristic! But it was simply quoted, and the narration moved on. I looked in vain to find a comparable wall text, to hear another like-minded tidbit. But that was it. what has been and can be done?

However a curator in the future might wish to incorporate postcolonial or whiteness studies into the Ellis interpretative framework is likely to be contained by the limits of the politically possible. The mandate to focus on the immigration station’s own history also limits the curatorial-historian staff’s ability to make connections to contemporary immigration, a limitation about which Barry Moreno has misgivings. The bureaucracy that ran the station and the Immigration and Naturalization Service remain largely invisible in the present account, however, and that can be rectified. At present the human stories of immigrants leave out the voices and authority of the bureaucracy, implying immigrants were masters of their fate. “What’s lost,” Moreno suggests, “is the story of the bureaucrats who ran Ellis Island—ins.”17 Missing are the voices and perspectives of the inspectors, matrons, doctors, missionaries, and social workers who structured the alternatives—the agency—these immigrants had. Tensions between life inside Ellis and the possibilities outside, from job opportunities to destinations, were shaped by encounters between local elites and steerage passengers in a foreign land, encounters in which elites and government authorities usually had disproportionate power. Moreno, his staff, and the able historians who advise them have plans for the museum’s expansion that hold the promise of illuminating many of these tensions. As noted earlier, projected development of the remaining two-thirds of the island will especially focus on public health. Moreno appreciates, though, the political and public obstacles he and his curators face in doing more. Fueled by post-9/11 chauvinism, politicians, veterans groups, and the political Right generally will continue to monitor Ellis’s 148   daniel j. walkowitz

patriotic ur-text. Visitors too will, on the one hand, continue to bring expectations that Ellis is a national story but, on the other hand, also often bring specific identity concerns—the expectation that their own ethnic story will be highlighted. Curators must constantly navigate the tensions between serving the identities of those whose story is missing and the devolution of site into one of endless competing claims.18 The site also must serve a cottage industry in family genealogy. The American Family Immigration Center opened in 2001 with online access. At the website or at the museum one can locate one’s relatives and view and order handsomely framed copies of the ship’s manifest on which they arrived. Where available, pictures of the ship can also be purchased. Consumer demand has made this service a new centerpiece for the museum. Meanwhile, the museum’s mandate will remain the history of the Ellis Island Immigration Station from 1892 to 1954, even as the ur-text will undoubtedly continue to speak to liberty and opportunity for all in America. Ellis Island as a geographic space does get its pre-and-post-station history properly told, but the experiences of immigrants before 1892 and after 1954 will continue to be largely peripheral at the museum. As noted above, the audio tour does defer to the public’s presumption that the island’s history is a national story, but in practice the exhibit focuses on the immigrants who passed through Ellis in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Peopling exhibit does provide some context for the Ellis immigrants’ story, but it is dry-as-dust demographic data that privileges the site as a “container” rather than a “cauldron.” In any case, tacked on to the end of the exhibit as it is, it appears much like an afterthought. Beyond that, one small room hosts rotating exhibits that do occasionally extend the museum’s reach. Future designs for the museum promise to expand its chronological reach, but those remain in the future and as add-ons to the tour proper: the Peopling of America room will focus on pre-1892, and expansion plans call for developing the kitchen-laundry building to tell the post-Ellis story of Hungarians, Cubans, Asians, and Mexicans.19 However, according to Moreno, the Park Service has departmentalized the larger history of American immigration by authorizing the development of a series of additional immigration museums around the country, each at the locale of specific immigration stories. Like Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, referenced in the exhibition as “the Ellis Island of the West” (Ellis is not the Angel Island ellis island redux   149

of the East!), these would be Ellis Island supplements. A San Diego Museum on New Immigration is to chronicle postwar immigrants from Asia; a museum at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is expected to cover more than the Chinese story told on Angel Island; and in El Paso, Texas, a new museum planned at the University of Texas branch there would detail the Mexican American experience.20 These new museums do not preclude the need for an enriched interpretative analysis of the Ellis experience; nor do they substitute for a discussion of Ellis’s role in the history of U.S. government policy before and after. To be sure, the expansion of the American immigration story to these other sites will be welcome. For one thing, it will not necessitate travel to New York to learn something about American immigration. It will also pay attention to those who did not pass through Ellis Island, most notably Hispanic and Asian Americans. These additions do not by themselves offer a new conceptual framework for understanding the American immigration process, however. For one thing, they do not expand the definition of the “immigrant” as a social rather than a merely legal category. Transnational migration studies dissolve the legal distinction between the immigrant who crosses only national borders and migrants within borders, drawing attention to the similar processes which affect them both and often place them in competition with one another. In traditional U.S. immigration studies, internal migrants, the undocumented, and Native Americans remain an invisible world apart. Transnational and postcolonial studies of race, whiteness, and empire would make them visible, for a postcolonial and transnational framework locates immigrants’ arrivals in the imperial history of world labor markets and the cultural imaginings of the Other. A candid discussion of race and empire also might provide a fresh perspective on my grandparents’ willingness to immigrate in 1920 in the wake of the Red Scare. For the era covered by most of Ellis’s immigration, 1892 to 1924, was witness to two major complementary experiences in America that are not usually seen as related. With the end of Reconstruction, African Americans migrated north to precisely the American cities in which these immigrants so often settled. Literature on Jews, Irish, and Italians “becoming white” reminds us that these southern and eastern European immigrants, often outcasts at home, had a rocky reception in America that was tempered by the presence of large numbers of these newly migrated 150   daniel j. walkowitz

African Americans, who occupied the very bottom of the social hierarchy. If the Walkowitzes were a “racialized other” in anti-Semitic Poland, they found themselves “Hebrew” upon their arrival—even when they spoke Yiddish and were secular—and were able to become “white” in Paterson.21 More to the point, as one leading postcolonial scholar has noted, their experience shows how those who have become assimilated and part of the dominant culture can, “to the extent they participate in life-worlds subor­ dinated by the ‘major’ narrative of the dominant institutions,” have subaltern pasts. Rather than simply constituting “minorities”—but one more voice to be added to the immigration mosaic—subaltern pasts point to the inequality of power among those marginalized and subordinate, a very different analytic line from the multitude of individualized personal stories that are knit into the triumphant national story in the exhibition on the Island at present.22 American imperial ventures during the time of Ellis Island reflected some of this domestic racial valence, especially as informed by an orientalist discourse that saw Asian and other non-Western peoples both exoticized and demonized in a hegemonic colonial regime.23 Unfortunately, as the historian William A. Williams noted long ago, “one of the central themes of American historiography is that there is no American empire.”24 And so we have persisted in believing, even as a half-century later American historians have recognized how the prospect of incorporating Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines into the nation as “black” states raised “white” fears. Against the concern that the country no longer had a frontier and needed to expand into new markets, industry welcomed immigrants (preferably “white” European immigrants) as cheap labor in the world market. In what Donald Pease refers to as their “inextricable relation to various forms of imperial domination,” in both continental and internal expansion, an imaginary of whiteness and empire played a critical role in the cultural construction of American national identity.25 Both external colonies and the internal immigrant labor colonies within emerging American migrant and immigrant “ghettos”—Lower Canadas, Little Italies, and Chinatowns—shaped American cultural identity. And as Moreno points out, the agency responsible for Ellis’s policy, the ins—or its recent successor, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice)—remains the same agency responsible for hotly contested contemporary immigration ellis island redux   151

policy, even as broader issues of immigration policy continue to remain outside the Ellis Island museum’s purview. Doctors or ins agents detained 20 percent of Ellis’s immigrant clients, some for days, some for months. Two percent of all immigrants were sent back for medical or political reasons. In the latter case, agents might have deemed them too radical (“anarchists”) or, after 1921, sent them packing because the ethnic quota (“excess quotas”) for the year had been reached.26 And, of course, as at least one critic has noted, incarceration of domestic and foreign “aliens” by ins and by U.S. military authorities on Guantánamo Bay since September 11—while different in scale and legal status—continues the preemptive imperial policy followed on Ellis Island both in 1919 and the McCarthy era.27 The present American empire continues to reflect how immigration—whether of Vietnamese after 1970 or of Middle-Easterners today—may be embedded as much in U.S. imperial ambitions as in local politics and family sagas. Whether the commentator lauds the tie as civilizing or opportunistic or bemoans it as imperialistic or exploitative is one thing; to ignore it as a salient element in shaping immigration policy and experience in the past and today is quite another. Focusing on those who oversaw the supervisory regime at Ellis during the past—a goal the curatorial staff embraces—holds the promise of opening up some of this history. It may not tell me more about why my family chose to immigrate in 1920, but it does help explain the controlling apparatus in place that made them relatively “safe” to agents in power. It also helps establish the world economy that both drove them from their original home and attracted them to America. For “white” immigrants fleeing conscription and the memory of pogroms for low-paid textile work in Paterson—and for the American elite as well—African American migrants to northern cities served as an alternative lightning rod for anxieties about social dislocations. The American empire which was put in place during these years would also establish a context and discourse for managerial responses to labor markets and competition that would become legitimized over the course of the twentieth century as the product of “natural” market forces: clothing firms would get cheap raw materials and, in time, as Jewish immigrant labor organizers mobilized, move their mills to alternative global labor, initially in the South, but in time to Asia and Central America. Ellis Island then is where the American discourse on both opportunity and 152   daniel j. walkowitz

liberty is forged, a story that naturalizes the mobility of capital alongside that of people. notes 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16

I wish to thank Daniel Bender, Lisa Maya Knauer, Judith Walkowitz, and Rebecca Walkowitz for helpful readings of drafts of this essay. Ellis Island Database, www.ellisisland.org. Belle Bernstein, oldest of the Walkowitz children, interview with the author, June 12, 2004, Fair Lawn, N.J. Howe is quoted in the Ellis Island website essay entitled “Closing the Open Door,” www.ellisisland.com (accessed March 25, 2004). The most famous of these riots took place in Chicago and is well described in Tuttle, Race Riot. I have seen (ca. 2003) an anonymous unpublished manuscript submitted to a historical journal that has catalogued upwards of fifty race riots in the postwar period in cities in every part of the country. On the red scare, see Feuerlicht, America’s Reign of Terror; Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare; and Szajkowski, The Impact of the 1919–20 Red Scare on American Jewish Life. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Lowe, Immigrant Acts. “Security Is Stepped up in New York,” Belfast Telegraph, May 22, 2002. Feeney quoted in Elizabeth Llorente, “Deserted Islands: Tourism Down Sharply at Ellis and Liberty,” The Record, Dec. 27, 2002, A1. “Bush Says US Must Defend Ideals,” Agence France-Presse, Sept. 11, 2002. Simon Jenkins, “History is not bunk, but most historians are,” The Times, July 5, 2002. Mandler, writing about the need for professional historians to become involved with popular history, especially in film and television, urges that they “raise the professional flag” and standards, but at the same time does accept the national project. Wallace, “Boat People.” This essay is a synthesis of three earlier essays by Wallace that appeared between 1987 and 1991. The foundational texts in both areas are not new books. Said’s Orientalism was first published in 1978, and Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness appeared in 1991. Barry Moreno, nps historian, telephone interview with the author, June 2, 2004. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 4. Thanks to Dan Bender for this insight. This theme is foreshadowed in Lynn Johnson’s look at the early planning of Ellis. See Johnson, “Ellis Island”; and Lowe, Immigrant Acts. ellis island redux   153

17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27

Moreno interview. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Brodkin, When Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; and Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 98–101. See Hall, “Remembering Edward Said (1935–2003).” Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy” (1955), quoted in A. Kaplan, “Left Alone with America,” 3. See Pease, “New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and Imperialism,” 27; and A. Kap­ lan, “Left Alone with America,” 3–21. As a first stage in immigration restriction of “alien” peoples, Congress established quotas after 1921 that limited entry to numbers commensurate with the country of origin of immigrants counted in the 1910 census. Richard A. Serrano, “The Nation: Detained without Details,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 1, 2003, A1.

154   daniel j. walkowitz

A Cultural Conundrum? Old Monuments and New Regimes The Voortrekker Monument as Symbol of Afrikaner Power in a Postapartheid South Africa

Albert Grundlingh

this essay addresses the ambiguities of historical symbolism and the processes by which cultural contracts are transacted when there has been a reversal of power relations in society. It focuses specifically on the trajectory of the symbolism of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, South Africa—a dominant symbolic expression of earlier Afrikaner nationalism in a postapartheid South Africa that has witnessed the loss of a great deal of formal Afrikaner political power to the African National Congress (anc) government. The way in which symbolism was remolded in this case depended on the interplay between ethnic historical consciousness, wider socioeconomic developments, and the nature of political imperatives. architects, academics, and the monument

Prominently situated on a hill overlooking the southern entrance to the city of Pretoria stands the Voortrekker Monument, a giant square granite structure that looks like an ancient fortress guarding access to a city that during the apartheid years

1 T  he Voortrekker Monument. Courtesy of the Voortrekker Monument and Nature Reserve.

gained notoriety as the nerve center of National Party government. (See fig. 1, above.) The monument was completed in 1949 as a tribute to the Voortrekkers, who colonized the interior of South Africa in the nineteenth century. Their migration from the Cape Colony, known as the Great Trek, resembled American westward expansion and was characterized by numerous clashes with indigenous communities. The eventful history of the trek is illustrated by twenty-seven panels of overpowering marble friezes inside the monument, reportedly one of the largest historical representations of its kind in the world. Conceived and completed during a period of feverish Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s, the portrayals make no concessions: black people are uniformly represented as barbaric savages standing in the way of brave and heroic Boers claiming to bring civilization to the interior. In this representation serving the foundational myth of exclusive Afrikaner power, there is no room for subtlety or any admission that the opposing chieftains might have had their own very compelling reasons for resisting white encroachment. 158    albert grundlingh

2 A frieze in the center of the Voortrekker Monument depicting the clash with the Zulu in 1838. Symbolically this sought to convey a victory of “civilization” over “barbarism.” Courtesy of the Voortrekker Monument and Nature Reserve.

Architecturally there are similarities between the Voortrekker Monument and well-known European monuments such as the Dôme des Invalides in Paris and the Volkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig, which boast domes, sculptures, granite walls, and arched windows. While European architectural concepts dominate, African influences are evident in the decorative zigzag patterns on the outside of the Voortrekker Monument. The architect, Gerard Moerdijk, was unrestrained in his vision and planning of the monument; it “had to remind people for a thousand years or more of the great deeds that had been done.”1 Little could Moerdijk have foreseen that within forty-five years his interpretation of what constituted great deeds would be largely discredited politically. (See fig. 2, above.) The monument nevertheless left a distinct impression on the built environment in certain South African cities. The idea of a fortlike structure as a defiant and defining symbol of Afrikanerdom can be detected in the construction of urban landscapes of power. It was arguably replicated in 1960s buildings such as the inward-looking formation of the Rand Afrikaans University, a concrete citadel in Johannesburg with small windows and large exterior walls, and the overwhelming squareness and impenetrable design a cultur al conundrum?    159

of the South African Broadcasting Corporation in the same city. These overbearing buildings create the impression that they were built, almost in a fit of megalomania, to celebrate Afrikaner power and achievement and to complement the earlier triumphalism of the Voortrekker Monument.2 Given its prominence, the monument has attracted its fair share of academic attention. There are detailed descriptions of the protracted attempts to coordinate the building of the monument. More important, the historical representation of the monument and its alignment with Afrikaner nationalism, ethnic mythmaking, and apartheid have been the subject of several analyses.3 While these contributions did much to highlight the specific symbolism of the monument, they are limited in the sense that African perceptions of the monument are blithely ignored or at best only partially presented, and Afrikaners are depicted as if caught in an immutable form of historical consciousness. One author recently made one aspect of the assumption explicit by stating that Afrikaners cannot escape from the “spell” of the monument; they “are trapped by racism, by religion, by their myths and by their history.”4 While myths of their own history indeed held sway over Afrikaners and contributed to apartheid mindsets, these myths are also not static. The way in which the symbolism of the Voortrekker Monument is negotiated in a postapartheid cultural and political landscape needs to be disaggregated. To continue describing the significance of the monument in similar terms as when Afrikaner nationalism was dominant ignores the seismographic shifts in South African society during the past decade. Writing on monuments in the United States, Kirk Savage has made the salutary point that “the world around the monument is never fixed. The movement of life causes monuments to be created, but then it changes how they are seen and understood.”5 the monument and a  changing afr ikaner society

The idea of dedicating a monument to the Vootrekkers was given considerable impetus by the 1938 centenary celebrations of the Great Trek. The trek, which commanded pride of place in Afrikaner history, was commemorated by nine ox wagons slowly making their way from Cape Town to the north. 160    albert grundlingh

It turned out to be unprecedented cultural and political theater: frenetic crowds dressed in period Voortrekker garb welcomed the procession as it approached the towns and cities. Streets were renamed after Voortrekker heroes. Men and women were moved to tears by the spectacle. Young people were married and couples christened their babies in the shade of the wagons. Although this “second trek” had been carefully orchestrated by Afrikaner cultural entrepreneurs, even they were impressed by the tumultuous response to the event. This symbolic trek paralleled the economic journey of Afrikanerdom out of a debilitating depression that had reduced large numbers to the ranks of poor whites. For many Afrikaners who now found themselves in an urban environment, the centenary trek, symbolically rooted in an ideal (heroic) rustic past, gave powerful expression to the longing for a more prosperous future and to a nostalgia for a fast-eroding rural social order. At the heart of the 1938 celebrations lay the perception that Afrikaners were strangers in their own land, victims of British imperial capitalism and an alien political culture, and that the solution lay in unified economic, political, and cultural action. As fractured as Afrikanerdom might have been in class terms, the 1938 celebrations served as a powerful binding agent and represented a truly unique moment of cross-class ethnic mobilization. In the celebrations and in the evocation of the heroic struggles of their forebears, Afrikaners saw themselves mirrored in history and drew inspiration from it for their survival and for the future.6 Monumentalizing these aspirations took longer than originally anticipated, but eleven years later, on December 16, 1949, the monument was inaugurated. This date was significant. December 16 was a day of remembrance for the Battle of Blood River (Ncome in Zulu), officially named the Day of the Covenant, because it was believed that God had delivered a group of the Voortrekkers from a ferocious Zulu attack in Natal on that day in 1838 and had ultimately given them victory over the “savages.” So much store was placed in this event that the monument was designed so that each year on December 16, a shaft of light shines through an aperture in the dome onto a marble memorial block inscribed with the words (in Afrikaans) “We for thee, South Africa.” Equally important was the year 1949, one year after the National Party had come to power as the “true” representatives of Afrikanerdom. There a cultur al conundrum?    161

was a widespread perception that Afrikaners had at long last reclaimed “their” country from British dominance. Not surprisingly, with Afrikaners riding the crest of a nationalist wave and the official opening of the monument attended by thousands of Afrikaners, the scene was set for a theater of ethnic indulgence and self-glorification.7 The monument retained some of its luster and appeal until about the mid-1960s, but the spectacle of 1949 was not to be repeated. National Party rule coincided with, and at times induced, profound changes in Afrikanerdom. A major demographic revolution occurred as Afrikaners became urbanized at an even faster rate than before. By 1974, over 84 percent of Afrikaners lived in the cities and towns. No longer did the stereotype of cleavage between urban-English and rural-Afrikaner hold. In impressive numbers Afrikaners moved into higher positions in urban employment, often state-provided (such as the railways, postal services, and civil service), in fulfillment of National Party promises of protection for the Afrikaner poor. Between 1948 and 1975 the proportion of white-collar jobs held by Afrikaners rose from 28 to 65 percent. Until the mid-1980s, these positions were effectively reserved for Afrikaners (and other whites) by jobreservation legislation and stringent controls on African urbanization and occupational mobility. Afrikaner agriculture was also well served by nationalist policies, while the economic nationalist movement flowered to produce a powerful capitalist Afrikaner class of mine owners, manufacturers, and financiers. Whereas Afrikaners controlled only 8 percent of the nation’s commerce in 1939, by late 1964 this had risen to 28 percent. Afrikaner control of industry rose from 3 to 10 percent, control of finance from 5 to 14 percent, and control of mining from 1 to 10 percent over the same period. By 1975, Afrikaner control of private industry had increased to 21 percent. Including the public sector, Afrikaners came to control 45 percent of nonagricultural output during this period. The proportion of Afrikaners in the professions also doubled.8 Although the economic boom of 1960 to 1970, which facilitated this development, petered out in the early 1970s, by this decade the Afrikaner bourgeoisie had already firmly established itself. In these circumstances of structural change and the transformation of the social composition of Afrikanerdom, the significance of cultural markers such as the Voortrekker Monument also had to be renegotiated. This 162    albert grundlingh

need became more pressing during the 1980s, when the apartheid state was under increasing pressure as a result of internal African insurrections, international economic sanctions, and cross-border raids from the then-exiled anc. In response, the National Party government embarked on a halting process of political reform that culminated in the watershed 1990 decision to rescind the ban on the anc and other proscribed movements. These developments had a divisive cultural effect on Afrikaner society. To the right of the ruling National Party, several splinter groups emerged, claiming to be the custodians of the “soul” of Afrikanerdom, and at the monument on the annual Day of the Covenant they argued vociferously for a return to the days of “pure” nationalism and hegemonic apartheid. Politically, the National Party could not completely abandon the cultural terrain and the symbolism of the monument. Pragmatically, it therefore called for a reconsideration of the usual message from the monument—the Day of the Covenant had to be “depoliticized” and its religious connotations emphasized, instead of commemorating the victory of white over black people.9 The earnestness of these appeals could barely conceal the declining historical significance of the monument for a certain section of Afrikanerdom. An entrenched and relatively wealthy middle class, exposed to popular consumer culture and adopting a reformist political position, started to evince some embarrassment at aspects of ethnic exclusivity redolent of an earlier era. The Afrikaner right wing, however, which tended to consist of less affluent supporters, still clung to the ethnic “safety blanket” of the monument’s perceived significance at the imminent collapse of apartheid.10 In the postapartheid world of the 1990s, these cultural strands in Afrikaner ranks were to unravel even more, although this happened gradually and unevenly as Afrikaners sought to reposition themselves in a new environment. When it became abundantly clear in the early 1990s that a predominantly black anc government was set to take over the reins, alarm bells went off in some Afrikaner cultural circles. Of particular concern was the future of the Voortrekker Monument with its brazen display of apartheid ideology; a black government, it was feared, would not tolerate a monument that could be interpreted as extremely offensive to the new political masters. Their fears, as it turned out later, were rather exaggerated, but at the time it was thought prudent to act decisively and take control of a cultur al conundrum?    163

the monument out of the hands of a future government. A consortium of Afrikaner cultural organizations, which managed to draw in culturalists of varied political hues, formed a Section-21 company, legally constituting a privatized nonprofit organization. The chair of the newly established Voortrekker Monument Company, Christo Kuhn, argued that this was done to preserve the Afrikaner cultural heritage “and to keep the monument out of politics.” The anc protested, somewhat demurely—they wished for a measure of control but were not prepared to make too much of a stand—and after the 1994 election that brought them to power, continued to fund the monument, albeit in pro rata reduced amounts.11 The attempt to safeguard the monument also signaled the end of an era. Whereas earlier the monument was volksbesit (literally the “property of the nation”), it was now privatized and controlled by those with specific and dedicated cultural interests. From a monument for an Afrikaner nation at large, which could bank on unconditional Afrikaner government support, it now became a monument dependent on its own resources and on the largesse of a black government. The act of privatization had the effect of shrinking the history of the monument—the history was no longer considered powerful enough to roam freely outside the precincts of its immediate environment. Its very soul had to be protected. “The less memory is experienced from the inside,” Pierre Nora, the French historian, alerted us, “the more it exists through exterior scaffolding and outward signs.”12 Following the new government’s decision to rename the holiday celebrated on December 16 from the Day of the Covenant to the Day of Reconciliation and echoing the discourses prevalent during the dying days of apartheid, there have been brave attempts to project the monument as a symbol of reconciliation. Since 1994, speeches at the monument on this day have had a religious motif, emphasizing that the Afrikaners’ bond with God also called on them to live in peace with their neighbors.13 Such noble efforts from the podium, however, were less than convincing. The domineering structure of the monument and the explicit portrayals militate against well-meaning reformulations to cast its symbolism and its interior in a more acceptable guise. Apart from the need, under a different government, to derive new imagery from a congealed set of historical understandings, committed Afrikaner culturalists had to deal with their own constituency. Although an Afrikaner 164    albert grundlingh

sense of identity has not been dealt a death blow by the new political dispensation, it no longer seeks to express itself predominantly through an attachment to monuments. Arts festivals in country towns and websites on the Internet have replaced traditional ethnic bonding and cultural exchange. This shift has been facilitated by an influential Afrikaner middle class, which, as I have noted, grew rapidly under National Party tutelage. Despite affirmative action policies under black rule and some other setbacks, on the whole this class has been adaptive and resilient, maintaining and even in some cases enhancing its socioeconomic status. In the process, its cultural tastes have become even more eclectic than before, and those values have also been transmitted to a younger generation that has only a partial memory of earlier Afrikaner power and apartheid.14 The trend away from ritualized ethnic behavior generally associated with the monument, already discernable in the 1980s, became distinctly pronounced in the 1990s. The monument could no longer function as the holy shrine of Afrikaner nationalism, as Afrikaner nationalism itself had ceased to exist in its earlier form. Now, for the first time, the monument even appeared as an object of slight derision. Half-mockingly it was described as a “pop-up toaster,” “a 1940 art deco radio,” or an “Andy Warhol drawing, a somewhat absurd, even kitsch symbol.” The monument’s changed status was also reflected in a somewhat unexpected and gender-insensitive way when it served as a backdrop to a woman posing naked in the first Afrikaans soft-porn magazine, published in 1995.15 Apart from such reappropriations, for sophisticated Afrikaner urbanites the marketing displays at the monument show an embarrassing lack of innovation. “What has changed dramatically at the monument since 1948, and what has become more interesting?” a dismayed visitor asked. “The yellowish old postcards, slides and pamphlets at the counter are not up to standard.” And significantly, he added that the “narrative” as portrayed by the friezes should be better explained because it is difficult to understand.16 There was a time when an understanding of the events depicted at the monument was common Afrikaner knowledge. While the Voortrekker Monument Company acknowledged the need to reconceptualize the monument and the adjoining terrain, at the same time it exerted close control to ensure that functions and meetings did not undermine the “cultural frame” of the monument. It allowed sedate Afrikaans a cultur al conundrum?    165

musical evenings, but applications for multiracial “rave” and symphonic pop concerts were turned down. One of the organizers of a planned “UNite rave,” the young Afrikaner Evert Botha, opined that such an event could help to save “what is fast becoming a white elephant” and that it had been scheduled for the monument “in an effort to eradicate the stigma attached to the building.” Botha was not without a sense of the past or occasion. “We might have made new history,” he remarked.17 It was, however, not that easy to make history. If anything, the bulk of Afrikanerdom was fleeing from aspects of its past. Unsettling revelations by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, convened to look into political crimes during the apartheid years, alerted many Afrikaners, some of them for the first time, to the nefarious deeds committed in the name of Afrikanerdom. Afrikaner politicians who had promoted apartheid were condemned by Afrikaners themselves. There were fewer and fewer Afrikaners who were prepared to defend the apartheid past; it was no longer a history of which they could be proud. As the distortions of the past were uncovered, the Voortrekker Monument was also categorized as an episode of nationalist deception.18 Even part of the Afrikaner right, traditionally associated with the monument, had become splintered in the late 1990s, as each faction sought its own salvation. It therefore seldom spoke in unison or to any significant effect on cultural issues.19 While the dynamics of Afrikanerdom after 1994 explain the waning interest in the Voortrekker Monument, the very act of monumentalizing memory itself insinuates an inherent decline. J. E. Young has emphasized that “once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember.” The monument becomes a sealed-off past and is no longer a living past. As a result, “the traditional monument’s essential stiffness and grandiose pretensions to permanence thus doom it to an archaic, pre-modern status.”20 Following this logic, it can be argued that the status and symbolism of the Voortrekker Monument have been in decline since its inauguration in 1949, but its loss of standing has been greatly hastened by the political changes in South Africa since 1990. Devoid of an earlier purchase, its grip on the Afrikaans cultural marketplace weakened considerably in the immediate postapartheid phase; its former clients rejected its political message as they turned toward new areas of cultural expression in a globalizing consumer economy. 166    albert grundlingh

Yet all of these developments did not imply that the tide could not be turned, or at least to some extent arrested, and funneled into new furrows. As an increasingly Afrocentric Thabo Mbeki replaced a conciliatory Nelson Mandela and followed what was perceived to be a policy of malignant neglect of Afrikaans language concerns, there have been incipient signs since 2001 of an Afrikaans (as opposed to old-style apartheid Afrikaner) intellectual revival. This emerging movement cuts across class lines and focuses specifically on language and related cultural matters, cast in the terminology used by minority cultures universally. This has prompted a further reinvention of the Voortrekker Monument, as prominent Afrikaans cultural organizations have quite literally aligned themselves with the monument by moving their head offices to the complex. The monument also serves as repository of Afrikaner artifacts of a previous dispensation now deemed to be politically incorrect.21 While this is a noteworthy development, it needs to be placed in perspective. It does not necessarily mean, as suggested by one author, that the monument as a result “has become more rather than less significant over the years for Afrikaners.”22 The emergence of more recent Afrikaans cultural concerns only points towards a revisioning of the Voortrekker Monument as one player among many in South African cultural life, and it is a much more modest project than was the case in the halcyon days of Afrikaner nationalism. the monument and black perceptions

In March 1990, soon after the unbanning of the African National Congress and at a time when the National Party and the formerly exiled movement were both groping their way toward a political middle ground that could serve as a basis for negotiations, Jacob Zuma, the head of anc Intelligence (and a future South African deputy president), secretly flew to meet the head of the South African Security Police, Basie Smit. It was an informal meeting as the two sides gathered around a barbecue and shared a few strong drinks. Smit and his colleagues then conducted a late-night tour of Pretoria for the anc emissaries. Their main stop was none other than the Voortrekker Monument.23 Some hidden meaning may be embedded in this anecdote a cultur al conundrum?    167

or, more prosaically, perhaps the group was simply too inebriated to care much about the significance of its visit. If one chooses, however, to think that it was more than just false bonhomie, the outing can be construed as a symbolic act of tentative accommodation, since members of the Afrikaner elite in power were prepared to share what was usually regarded as an exclusive site of Afrikaner might with the “enemy,” secure in the knowledge that precisely because they stood at the monument that act was a firm indication of political change. Also implicit in this nocturnal venture was a certain ambiguity as the “old” tried to speak to the “new” through the monument; the monument acted as a signifier for both parties. It was, however, merely a fleeting moment and not a stable symbolic position. Black perceptions of the monolith on the hill vary. There are those who, if they take the trouble to visit the site, find it a completely insensitive structure—“for a politically aware black person to even approach the thing requires some profound self-examination.”24 For others, not quite as aware or concerned about the precise meaning and symbolism of the building, it is “just a monument.”25 A multilingual black guide at the monument who takes the occasional tour keeps to a truncated, confined interpretation: “To me the monument tells the history of the voortrekkers and how they got the land in the interior. Nothing else.”26 Since a predominantly black government assumed power in 1994, black people have been claiming or reclaiming public spaces as equal citizens with equal rights. The shift in power relations has also, by the same token, bestowed on them the freedom to ignore or display indifference to that which they might have found offensive in the past. It is an attitude that stems from the knowledge that they are now ensconced in power; they have actually managed to conquer the past.27 This trend became more pronounced under Mbeki. Such a sense of triumphalism is evident in the historical overview Mbeki gave on the eve of the millennium, when he presented “our national history” as one of “centuries of dispossession and resistance” and as “a tapestry painted with blood and tears of grief,” but ultimately a history that was celebrated with “tears of victory” in 1994.28 A self-confident historical outlook of this kind has enabled Africans to deal with the symbolism of the monument from a position of strength. Performing at the monument in April 2000, the black singer Abigail Kubeka stated that “the last inch of the country is now part of the nation.”29 Her 168    albert grundlingh

public presence and statement signified a wider claim and appropriation of what used to be exclusive Afrikaner property. Some local black politicians in Pretoria, having had a taste of official executive power, do not see the need to pay such attention to symbolic power, and they argue that the monument should be allowed to stay unchanged. Its symbolism belongs to the past; after all, what the monument stood for—apartheid—has been defeated. Implicit in this assertiveness is an inversion of symbolism; the monument is seen as a signifier of what blacks had to overcome and also as a tribute to the black labor that assisted in building the monument. “A person can always drive past it and say it was one of the bastions of apartheid,” a prominent councilor, Donsie Khumalo, commented. “Anyway, our black people provided all the labor for building the thing.”30 Equally pertinent in an analysis of engagement with the past is the swift expansion of the black middle class. Black-owned companies increased their share of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange from R4.6 billion in September 1995 to R66.7 billion in February 1998, and in the civil service black people filled 30 percent of management posts in 1996, compared with only 2 percent in 1994.31 Although a relatively small segment of the black population has benefited from these developments, it is an influential section. Usually, from these ranks emerge nationalist leaders who promote cultural projects to bolster the position of new regimes.32 In South Africa, though, it seems as if the cultural trajectory of the new elite has taken a different turn. One sociologist has argued that the anc has [turned] its back on a history of struggle that once had racial capitalism as its main target. In that distant past activists romanticized the simple, modest life with survival wages for unionists. Bourgeois lifestyles were denounced as those of the class enemy. At the most, Toyotas, not German luxury cars, were to be the signature of successful revolutionaries. Nowadays . . . some parliamentarians almost panic at the thought of being overlooked for directorships and other private sector appointments where the real power is seen to be located. When former activists become instant millionaires by what is called “overdue career changes” they not only bury their own history but confirm the triumph of nonracial capitalism.33 a cultur al conundrum?    169

Another scholar has observed that the black South African subject of the 1990’s bears very little resemblance to the feted “revolutionary worker of the struggle” as she/he hurries home fitted out by Sales House, in an entrepreneurial taxi, to watch The Bold and the Beautiful on television. To put it baldly, the newly available and energetically distributed discourses of libertarian democracy, upward mobility, and the free market are a volatile mix.34 Such an immersion in consumer culture, somewhat ironically akin to that of blacks’ Afrikaner counterparts, has had a stultifying effect on general remembrances of the past. While there may still be a nostalgic interest in a mythical Afrocentrist past, if packaged in a modern format and delivered as part of the current discourse on an “African Renaissance” led by South Africa, there is a general sense that certain celebrations and commemorations of the past are superfluous.35 The preoccupation is with the contemporary material world, which promises to be infinitely more rewarding than any reflections on anti-apartheid battles already won. Unless invocations of the legacies of apartheid can serve a material purpose in the present, they do not on their own appear to have much historical cultural purchase. Under these circumstances, the symbolism of the Voortrekker Monument barely registers. The government itself has adopted a fairly low-key approach to former symbols of apartheid. Apart from removing from certain public spaces statues of H. F. Verwoerd, prime minister from 1958–66 and “architect of apartheid,” renaming airports that carried the names of white politicians in the apartheid era, and redecorating Parliament, there has not been any concerted attempt to wipe the symbolic slate clean. Instead, the anc government has chosen to reinscribe the past by developing its own legacy projects, so far eschewing huge monumental structures and opting instead for practical, “living,” open museum sites. One such project, billed as a flagship undertaking and situated close to the Voortrekker Monument, is that of Freedom Park—a huge landscape narrative of South African history stretching back into the “mists” of time and projecting well into the future.36 Such juxtaposition of the monument and the new heritage venture is not necessarily construed as controversial but emphasizes the outcome of 170    albert grundlingh

social and political processes that have already been generally accepted in South African society. The Afrikaans press met the news of the projected monument with equanimity. It was argued that in the same way as the Voortrekkers had struggled in a specific historic era, blacks had struggled in another, and it was only fitting that the outcomes should be noted. More important were “not the symbols on the hills, but how the country was governed from the city behind the hills.”37 This remark reflects a concern with the present, not the past. toward a tour ist her itage site

Since the monument has lost much of its of symbolic status, can it be also be considered as increasingly irrelevant in the “new” South Africa? One academic commentator has recently remarked that the monument stands now only as a “forgotten and lonely giant”—an almost derelict relic of apartheid.38 It may well be a relic, and it is certainly a reminder of some of the ideological impulses that helped to shape apartheid, but labeling the monument “forgotten and lonely” oversimplifies the way in which historical symbolism can operate and the new guises it can assume under altered circumstances. Developments in the field of tourism have assured that the monument is not that lonely. Since the official abolition of apartheid and the lifting of sanctions, the tourism trade in South Africa has grown significantly. In 1990 South Africa was rated fifty-sixth in the world as a tourist destination, and a decade later the country had jumped to the twenty-fifth spot.39 One of the beneficiaries of the tourist boom was the Voortrekker Monument. Often the monument is one of the first cultural sites that tourists visit after they disembark at Johannesburg International Airport. In 1999, 90 percent of all visitors were foreigners. It is rather ironic that Afrikaners have all but deserted the monument, but now foreigners, once regarded with a fair degree of xenophobia as inimical to the ideal of a pure, self-contained Afrikaner nation, help pay the upkeep of what was a semireligious shrine of Afrikaner nationalism. The number of visitors to the monument increases annually and in 2000 reached a monthly high of thirteen thousand. “We are flooded by tourists from all over the world,” a hard-pressed official remarked.40 a cultur al conundrum?    171

3 T  he Voortrekker Monument from the side. The indigenous garden visible in the rear is a recent innovation designed to have a softening effect. Courtesy of the Voortrekker Monument and Nature Reserve.

The tourist industry has also ensured an ongoing reassessment of the monument and its surrounding area. Guidebooks in German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese, in addition to those in Afrikaans and English, bear testimony to the monument’s new international clientele. While the monument itself remains as imposing and explicit as ever, it has been made more tourist-friendly through the installation of an elevator that allows visitors to travel rapidly to the top of the building instead of laboring up the hundreds of stairs. In addition, recent remodeling has softened the monument’s immediate environment through the addition of a nature reserve with indigenous trees. There are also plans to add features such as a hiking and bike trail and a bush camp to house 250 people.41 Naturalizing the area also has had a neutralizing effect. In the official Yearbook of South Africa for 1999 the monument appears under the rubric of tourism, not as a symbolic site of former Afrikaner power but as a place “where spectacular views of the city can be enjoyed.”42 (See fig. 3, above.) The extent to which the emphasis has shifted is evident in the response of a high-ranking official associated with the monument who, when asked about the projected anti-apartheid memorial overlooking the Voortrek172    albert grundlingh

ker Monument, replied smoothly, “It can be positive for the Voortrekker Monument, and it may have the potential of promoting tourism.”43 Clearly, as long as the cause of tourism can be served, the possible symbolism of a “black” memorial close to a “white” one can quite easily be accommodated. Some foreign visitors to the monument are not necessarily concerned about or even particularly aware of the full import of the building’s earlier significance and status. What seem to impress them most are the scale of the building, the technical craftsmanship of the sculptures, the dome with its ray of sunlight on December 16, and the natural habitat surrounding the monument.44 Only occasionally does a tourist comment on the nature of the historical representation, as is evident from a single entry in the visitor’s book— defying the many “interesting,” “nice,” and “awesome” entries—from an American who commented critically, “Interior of monument beautiful, but presentation very one-sided.”45 While this comment shows an awareness of historical distortion per se, for the uninitiated to realize that the distortion also served a purpose in the consolidation of Afrikaner power in the mid-twentieth century calls for—in the absence of any such public exposition—a quantum conceptual leap. The “tourist gaze” then ultimately adds to the further depoliticization of the site; cocooned in a “tourist bubble,” the monument now emits signals of a different kind, and its political voltage hardly registers, nor is it meant to do so.46 Its status as a tourist site not only sanitizes the monument, but also places it outside the arena of contested history. In effect, space has been opened up for the monument’s reinvention as heritage. “Heritage,” as David Lowenthal has remarked, “reshapes a past made easy to embrace.” In this process historical distortions are not that serious; as a matter of fact “heritage’s greatest sin—fabrication—is no vice but a virtue.”47 History and heritage and the different popular appeal of the two representations of the past have been succinctly highlighted in the general literature on the growth of heritage. Heritage has a great appeal, it has been suggested, because in many ways it outshines history—in visual skills, in alertness to public mood, in access to popular memory in regard to environmental issues, sense of place, and “public history” of all kinds. Unlike history proper, heritage is backed by a myriad of volunteers, enjoys state a cultur al conundrum?    173

support, and commands corporate patronage. It is also popular because, like Hollywood, it combines a historical imprimatur—“based on a true story,” say all the ads—with the emotional credibility of being “so morally unambiguous, so devoid of tedious complexity, so perfect.”48 The recognition that heritage is bogus history and can be turned into a product fit for tourist consumption has worked in the monument’s favor. Heritage, of course, has its own set of political determinants, but these do not neatly correlate with those relating to the past as history. Controversies about the monument have until fairly recently centered around questions of historical (mis)representation, but in the meantime the monument has quietly moved into the heritage sphere, which will call for a different mode of analysis. Currently, with its proven tourist appeal and its near impotency as a cultural political symbol, it is probably well placed to fight possible future battles along lines that will differ from those of the past. conclusion

Viewing the monument in terms of heritage helps to explain how the paradox of a symbol of Afrikaner power in postapartheid South Africa has been negotiated. The process was marked not by dramatic interventions, but by the steady disintegration—under the twin impacts of the increasing appeal of consumer culture and the adjustment to new political forces—of a specific form of Afrikaner ethnic historical consciousness earlier expressed in the symbolism of the Voortrekker Monument. As certain influential sectors of both Afrikanerdom and the black middle class perceive themselves to be modernizing elites (although they may be politically opposed at times), the monument represents a bygone era for both groups. With the Voortrekker Monument’s message no longer appropriate for Afrikaners living under a changed set of socioeconomic, cultural, and political conditions, and with a concomitant loss of capacity to insult black people who have ascended to and are secure in power, the monument has been free to follow a new career, relatively unencumbered by the past. Already in 1991 a returning exile noted that although the “fascist sculpture of the boertrekkers” remains, “somehow people have forgotten its purpose, they don’t understand its meaning in the context of a whole new system.”49 Precisely 174    albert grundlingh

because the monument’s raison d’être has become less than clear, it has been able to shift into heritage—which, as Didier Maleuvre has pertinently noted, “means we view reality as something already forgotten”; heritage is the “reminiscence of something which is no longer quite possible in reality.”50 As heritage the monument can also serve as an innocuous focal point for renewed Afrikaans cultural interests. Grasping this as the essence of the monolith on the hill makes it less of a cultural conundrum than one would have assumed. notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

Vermeulen, Man en Monument, 129. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. See Mail and Guardian, Dec. 21, 1998. Coombes, History after Apartheid, 19—53; Delmont, “The Voortrekker Monument; Leslie, “Bitter Monuments; Ebr.-Vally, “The Voortrekker Monument”; Prinsloo, “Die Oorsprong van die Ideal om ‘n Monument Ter ere van die Voortrekkers op te rig.’ ” Leslie, “Bitter Monuments,” 36. Savage, “The Past in the Present,” 3. See Grundlingh and Sapire, “From Feverish Festival to Repetitive Ritual.” Botha, Die Huldejaar. Charney, “Restructuring White Politics”; Welsh, “The Political Economy of Afrikaner Nationalism”; and Welsh, “Urbanisation and the Solidarity of Afrikaner Nationalism.” See also Meara, Forty Last Years, 139–44. Grundlingh and Sapire, “From Feverish Festival to Repetitive Ritual,” 31, 33. See also Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid, 236–37. Grundlingh and Sapire, “From Feverish Festival to Repetitive Ritual,” 29, 33. Sunday Times, April 10, 1994. See also Beeld, Nov. 19, 20, 1993, Feb. 27, 1994, and April 25, 1997; and Die Burger, Dec. 20, 1993. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 13 Beeld, Dec. 16, 18, 1994, Dec. 17, 1999. See Financial Mail, April 7, 2000; Insig, Oct. 1998; Beeld, Dec. 29, 1999; Rapport, Dec. 5, 1999; Schlemmer, “Factors in the Persistence or Decline of Ethnic Mobilisation,” 158–63; and Stephney, “Reworkings of Afrikaner Identity on the Internet,” 110; and Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Mophfu, “National Symbols,” 53. Sunday Times, April 10, 1994; Insig, Oct. 1996; Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Mophfu, “National Symbols,” 53.

a cultur al conundrum?    175

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Beeld, July 17, 1998. The Star, Aug. 21, 28, 1995; and Eastern Province Herald, Aug. 23, 1995. See also Beeld, April 24, 28 1999. Louw, ’n Ope brief aan W de Klerk; and Beeld, May 11, 2000. For the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, see, e.g., Krog, Country of My Skull. Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Mophfu, “National Symbols,” 53; Beeld, Dec. 16, 1994. Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory,” 3. Rapport , March 17, 2003; Cape Argus, May 9, 2003. Coombes, History after Apartheid, 52. Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle, 158–59. The Star, Nov. 7, 1992. Sunday Star, Aug. 14, 1988. Ibid. Tokyo Sexwale, for instance, the premier of Gauteng in 1996, made a much publicized visit to the monument to demonstrate precisely this point. Sunday Times, Dec. 15, 1996. See, for example, information on Mbeki at the website of the anc, www.anc. org (accessed July 27, 1999). Beeld, April 17, 2000. Insig, Dec. 31, 1996; my translation and emphasis. Lodge, South African Politics since 1994, 108. See, for example, Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 340. Adam, Van Zyl Slabbert, and Moodley, Comrades in Business, 202–3. Bertelsen, “Ads and Amnesia,” 240. Lodge, South African Politics since 1994, 108 See President Mbeki’s speech at the launch of Freedom Park, June 16, 2002. Available at the South African Government Information website www.info .gov.za (accessed May 23, 2006). Beeld, June 2, 2000. Ebr.-Vally, “Voortrekker Monument,” 16. Pretoria News, Aug. 28, 2000. Beeld, April 16, 1999, and Sept. 4, 2000. See also Insig, Dec. 31, 1996; Gauteng Rapport, Sept. 24, 2000. Beeld, Aug. 1, 1998, and Sept. 4, 2000. Yearbook of South Africa (1999), 170. Beeld, June 2, 2000. Monument official, interviewed by the author, Sept. 5, 2000. Entry in Voortrekker Monument and Museum Visitor’s Book, July 3, 2000. For the notion of a “tourist bubble,” see McIntosh and. Goeklner, Tourism, 187–88.

176    albert grundlingh

47 48 49 50

Lowenthal, “Fabricating Heritage,”1. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, 170. B. Fleish, “Letter from Johannesburg,” Searchlight South Africa 27 (July 1999): 91. Maleuvre, Museum Memories, 59.

a cultur al conundrum?    177

Narratives of Power, the Power of Narratives The Failing Foundational Narrative of the Ecuadorian Nation

O. Hugo Benavides

When one examines the History of the Kingdom of Quito, one must proceed without love or hatred, nor with false patriotism, nor with the objective of supporting the Institute [the Church] to which the author belonged, nor his native city, but rather, with the noble aspiration of the truth, the only licit undertaking of the investigator, the only one; pure in those dedicated tirelessly to understand the past.  Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño “Examen Crítico de la Veracidad de la Historia del Reino de Quito” (1918).

the ecuadorian nation is an anomaly within the already anomalous postcolonial landscape of South America. Ecuador was created as an independent political entity in 1830 when it broke from Gran Colombia, itself a brand-new nation founded by Simón Bolívar; to this day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecua­ dor share the same three colors (red, yellow, and blue) in their flags. This double breakage, from Spain and Gran Colombia, the generic name of Ecuador, which highlights an imaginary equatorial line that circles the globe, and the territory’s secondary role in the colonial structure of the region mark a national identity that has been frail since its inception.1 It is in this context of fragile pre-national constitution that the narrative of an ancient pre-Hispanic Kingdom of Quito was hailed as the most important textual evidence of the raison d’être for the emerg­

1 Eastern view of Quito, the capital of Ecuador, which took its name from the mythical Quitu tribe described in Juan de Velasco’s original narrative, La Historia del Reino de Quito, a legend still reinforced by the nation’s official textbooks. Photo: O. Hugo Benavides.

ing Ecuadorian identity. The name Quito was already present when Ecuador was founded, as the name of the city-capital of the colonial territory, and was more or less inherited into the Ecuadorian nation-state. Meanwhile, the account of the Kingdom of Quito has persevered in the contemporary psyche of the nation, as is evident in the arenas of education and mainstream historiography. (See fig. 1, above.) The pervasiveness of the narrative of a mythical Quito nation makes it a useful entry point for analyzing public history in Ecuador. Part of being Ecuadorian is defined by this ostensibly traditional knowledge of an ancestral Quito polity, which frames the contemporary nation-state’s public space. Whether or not you believe in a Quito nation as an article of faith, you are nonetheless implicated within it. Therefore even when one argues against these national public narratives, one’s own argument belies a commitment and allegiance to contemporary Ecuador that always seems to be the ultimate benefactor of this ancient narrative. It is ultimately in this public narr atives of power, power of narr atives   179

2 Indigenous and mestizo celebrations of the Inti Raymi (summer solstice) in June 1997. Photo: O. Hugo Benavides.

space of contestation that the narrative of the Quito nation unfolds and is incorporated into the contemporary discussion of the Ecuadorian nation. The initial and only original description known of the ancient Kingdom of Quito (referred to in the literature as el Antiguo reino de Quito) was written by the Jesuit priest Juan de Velasco in 1789, while he was living in exile with the rest of his religious community in Faenza, Italy. Velasco was born in the territory of what is now Ecuador. Since then this narrative has become a source of national pride and identity even though the existence of this kingdom has never been confirmed, either by archaeological evidence or by independent ethnohistorical accounts.2 The ideology of a productive, yet fictitious, account of a Kingdom of Quito belies a more pervasive racist discourse of the Ecuadorian nation in which Indians are good fodder for politically infused past representations but continuously excluded from the confines of the modern nation. It is this particular enabling national racist structure that the Indian movement (principally the National Confederation of Indian Nationalities of Ecuador, known by the Spanish acronym conaie) has quite powerfully addressed over the last two decades. (See fig. 2, above.) 180   o. hugo benavides

3 Textbook cover, Historia, geografica y civica, by Mario Navas Jimenez. Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

However, the historical inconsistencies in Velasco’s account have never stopped Ecuador’s Ministry of Education from supporting the idea of an ancient “Quitu” nation and encouraging the teaching of the kingdom’s history in primary and secondary schools.3 The fictitious Kingdom of Quito is still part of the state’s official seventh and tenth grade history curricula and is hailed as “the foundation of the Ecuadorian nation.”4 This essay will analyze the Ministry of Education’s version of the Kingdom of Quito as it is expressed in five high-school history textbooks: Luis García González’s Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica (Summary of geography, history, and civics); Historia del Ecuador published by the Librería Nacional Salesiana (L.N.S.); Alejandro Martinez Estrada’s Historia del Ecuador; Mario Navas Jimenez’s Historia, geografía y cívica; and Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseo’s Breve Historia del Ecuador. The contents of the five textbooks are strictly controlled by the Ministry of Education, which decides what is or is not appropriate to be taught as Ecuadorian history. To this degree, these textbooks represent the nation-state’s officializing (although not necessarily hegemonic) version of a pre-Hispanic national past. (See fig. 3, above.) narr atives of power, power of narr atives   181

Since these five textbooks are used in different grades, they vary in complexity and analytic depth. All were in use in the late 1990s, and all have been reprinted from earlier versions from several years, even decades, ago. Ecuador’s lax regulations concerning publication and copyright make it hard to judge actual reprinting dates, which also explains why the L.N.S. textbook does not even have an original publication date. This particular textbook is also interesting in that it is published by the Salesian Catholic order, which has had a long history of involvement in primary and highschool education in Ecuador during the past century, although no overt religious element is present in the text. Diezcanseco’s Brief History also stands out because unlike the other authors, Diezcanseco has a national reputation as a gifted fiction writer and historian, and not surprisingly his best novels have substantial historical elements. However, in this text Diezcanseco looks to synthesize and simplify the rich analytical insights present in his more mature historical texts. Although these five books were written by different authors and at different historical moments, they are remarkably homogenous in their reproduction of Juan de Velasco’s historical narrative, Historia del Reino Quito, which they present as fact. These texts are among the limited selection of textbooks that are authorized by the Ministry of Education to be used by Ecuadorian educational institutions. My analysis focuses on three themes stressed in all of the texts, which are critical building blocks of this revisionist Ecuadorian historiography: (1) the characteristics of the Quito nation; (2) the Quito resistance to the Inca invasion; and (3) the discussion of the historical validity of F. Juan de Velasco’s work. In the final section, I discuss how this failed (empirically speaking) national narrative has proven essential to the contemporary workings of the Ecuadorian nation. the quito nation

In all of these texts, the history of the Kingdom of Quito begins with the Caras, a mythical ancient indigenous group that landed on the Ecuadorian Pacific coast near the Chone River many hundreds of years ago and founded the city of Carán (where the current city of Manta now stands). Their leader was called Schyri, which in their language meant “Lord of 182   o. hugo benavides

All Men and Warriors,” and he wore a headband with a central emerald as his crown. The Caras continued their migratory habit and made their way up to the “Kitua Valley,” the current Guayllabamba basin. Here they conquered the supposedly much more primitive Quito polity in 980 a.d.5 The Caras maintained the name of Schyri for their leader but took on the name of Quito for their own polity. There were eleven Schyris, who reigned for a total of 320 years, from 980 to 1300. All eleven leaders continued strategies of conquest and incorporated many groups into their Quito kingdom, such as the Imbayas of Imbabura, the Llactacungas and Pantzleos of Cotopaxi, and the Puruguayes of the Central Ecuadorian Andes. The Puruguayes were not overpowered militarily, however, but were diplomatically incorporated into the kingdom by means of a strategic marriage.6 This episode has all the hallmarks of a fairy-tale romance; Navas Jimenez admits as much when he advises students, “Let’s see, dear students, this romantic episode enveloped in the mythic fog.”7 As leadership in the Kingdom of Quito was patrilineal, when the eleventh Schyri had no son, this prompted a crisis of succession. The Schyri met with other leaders, who proposed that the Schyri’s daughter, Toa, be married off to the heirapparent of the Puruguayes kingdom, Duchicela, thus uniting the two kingdoms. The solution was facilitated by the fact that the two had been secretly in love. After the marriage, Duchicela was crowned as the twelfth Schyri, and the united kingdom retained the name of Quito. All of the chronicles note that although Duchicela’s father, Condorazo, had accepted this arrangement, he refused to live under any other man’s rule, including that of his son. After the wedding he walked off to die by himself at the skirts of the snow-capped volcano that since then has carried his name, Condorazo.8 According to the textbooks, Duchicela, the twelfth Schyri, reigned with “justice, love and wisdom for both Quiteños and Puruguayes for seventy years.”9 Upon his death in 1379 he was succeeded by his son Autachi Duchi­ cela, who governed as the thirteenth Schyri until 1430. Autachi’s secondborn son, Hualcopo Duchicela, the fourteenth Schyri, governed until 1463 and was the first Schyri to resist the Inca invasion. And finally, Hualcopo’s son, Cacha, was the fifteenth and last Schyri, who actually died in the war against the Incas.10 The numerous cultural, social, and religious characteristics attributed to the Quito nation cannot be fully described here. But among the most narr atives of power, power of narr atives   183

salient features was the fact that they were organized along family lines and in ayllus.11 These ayllus later were grouped together to become tribes, confederations, and ultimately nations, constituting a type of primitive communist society. The polity also had three social classes: the highest was the leader and his family; the middle class was composed of administrative and communal leaders; and at the bottom were the commoners.12 According to these texts, the Quitos believed in the sun and moon as their supreme deities, although they also worshipped local gods, embodied in mountains, lakes, and rivers. They supposedly constructed a temple to the sun on the hill of the Panecillo, a shrine that was later reconstructed by the Incas.13 However, they also believed in a supreme God whom they called KonTicci-Viracocha, similar to the Peruvian polities.14 (See figs. 4 and 5.) The sources also claim that the Quitos buried their dead in deep holes within earthen mounds (tolas), of which there were thousands in their territory. They had developed an ideographic form of writing using pieces of wood and stones, which these Ecuadorian historians claim was vastly superior to the “Peruvian Quipus.” Depending on the sizes and colors of the stones and their locations on the board, the Quitos were able to describe the most important events. Finally, Quito women were described as being subservient to male authority, and they were expected to farm, prepare the food, rear the children, and clean the house (hut) and the clothing.15 Interestingly enough, these authors—all of whom are male—describe this situation as very different from the status of women in contemporary Ecuadorian society.16 Although all the authors acknowledge the multiple contestations of the existence of the Kingdom of Quito, they all agree and “concretely say, [it] existed, [that] it was a historical geographical and sociological reality.”17 Significantly, the reality of an ancient Kingdom of Quito supports the territorial claims of the Ecuadorian nation, since “in consequence, Ecuador must reclaim all the territory that was ours during the prehistoric state of the Kingdom of Quito.”18 the “quitus” and the incas

The textbooks’ descriptions of the Inca invasion of the Quiteño territory are infused with nationalistic imagery: “And it is exactly this imperialist 184   o. hugo benavides

4 and 5 The Panecillo with its monument of the Virgin of Quito on top, as seen against the snow-capped volcano Cotopaxi and rising above the old city. Both archaeological and natural icons are used in modern-day constructions of Ecuador’s Indian past. Photo: O. Hugo Benavides.

invasion of the sons of the Inti [“sun” in Quechua], commanded by the Inca Tupac-Yupanqui and later by his own son Huayna-Capac, that did not manage to undermine the national unity; on the contrary, this invasion was the most powerful stimulus to consolidate the sociological link of the Quito nation.”19 Tupac Yupanqui was the first Inca to penetrate the realm of the Kingdom of Quito. His first enemies, the Huancabambas and Paltas, offered very little opposition, and they were easily overpowered by the Inca’s army of two hundred thousand men. Many of the Palta were then sent (as mitimaes) to other areas of the Inca empire.20 The next group in the Inca’s line of conquest of the Kingdom of Quito were the Cañaris. In their initial confrontation, the Cañaris handed the Inca army its first defeat, which forced the Inca to regroup to attack a second time. In this instance the Inca army was so overwhelming that the Cañaris did not even attempt to fight, but surrendered to the Inca forces.21 Tupac Yupanqui immediately colonized the region and constructed the Inca city of Tomebamba (the contemporary city of Cuenca), which according to observers at the time, rivaled the Inca capital of Cuzco in its splendor. Tomebamba was also said to have been the birthplace of the next Inca, Tupac Yupanqui’s son, Huayna Capac. Tupac Yupanqui’s next battle was against the Schyri leader himself, Hualcopo Duchicela, and his chief general, Eplicachima, at Tiocajas. The death of Eplicachima led to another Inca victory. The Quiteño forces then regrouped in the fortress of Mocha, and Eplicachima’s son, Calicuchima, was named supreme general of the Quito army. The textbook writers place great emphasis on the presence of generals within the Quiteño force. In addition to Eplicachima and Calicuchima, they single out several others, such as Nazacota Puento, Pintag, and Quisquis, who, they argue, symbolize the enormous valor and courage displayed in defending the national territory against the foreign invaders. According to several sources, their courage was even recognized by the Inca Tupac Yupanqui himself, who asked for drums to be made from the skin of a couple of these generals to honor their valiant spirit.22 At this point in the narratives, the Inca once again offered the possibility of surrender, as they had to the Cañaris, but the Schyri leader vehemently refused the offer, stating “with a profound sentiment and love for the terri186   o. hugo benavides

tory of his ancestors that only death would make him lose his kingdom and freedom.”23 Tupac Yupanqui made his final offensive and captured Quito, while Hualcopo and the remains of his army fled to the region of Atuntaqui. Afterward there was a general respite from fighting, since Tupac Yupaqui returned to Cuzco to take care of other affairs of his empire. When the Inca conquest of the Kingdom of Quito resumed there were two different characters on the historical stage. Cacha inherited what was left of the Quito nation from his father, Hualcopo, while Huayna Capac had become the supreme leader of the Tahuantinsuyu (the Quechua name for Inca empire), after mourning the death of his father, Tupac Yupanqui.24 Huayna Capac had to reconquer many of the groups and territories over which his father had earlier gained control. He did this fairly easily, using his birth city of Tomebamba as his imperial center. His punishments of many of these groups were quite exemplary of the Inca’s power. After slaughtering the Caranquis of the northern region, the Inca forces threw their bodies into the local lake of Yaguarcocha, meaning “lake of blood” in Quechua.25 He also finally ended the last Quiteño resistance to the Inca empire by killing the Schyri leader, Cacha, in the battle of Atuntaqui and marrying Cacha’s daughter, Princess Pacha, who had been proclaimed as the new Schyri leader.26 Out of this marriage was born Atahualpa, claimed to be the last ruling Inca, born both of Inca and Quiteño blood in the capital of Quito.27 (See fig. 6.) At his death Huayna Capac divided the Tahuantinsuyu into two equal parts. He gave the south, or Collasuyu, to his first-born son, Huascar, while the north, the ancient Kingdom of Quito, or Chichasuyu, was left to Atahualpa. However, there was rivalry between the brothers. After an initial attack by the “effeminate” Huascar, Atahualpa and his generals Quisquis and Calicuchima, who was discussed above, killed Huascar and all the members of his lineage and ransacked the capital of Cuzco.28 This enabled Atahualpa to proclaim himself sole ruler of the Tahuantinsuyu and the Kingdom of Quito. As García Gonzalez explains: With the triumph obtained in Quipaipán, Atahualpa not only maintained his control of the Kingdom of Quito, but also became the only ruling head of the Inca empire. For this reason he took possession of the imperial capital, Cuzco, where in an official manner he proclaimed himself narr atives of power, power of narr atives   187

6 Pyramid no. 9 of the north Andean site of Cochasquí, where in the 1930s the Ecuadorian military looked for the remains of the Queen of Quilago, supposedly the mother of the last Inca, Atahualpa. Photo: O. Hugo Benavides.

emperor of the Tahuantinsuyu. . . . The government of Atahualpa lasted few months, because he was soon captured by the Spaniards, who had just arrived in his territory, and later was to be killed by them.29 Ironically enough, fratricide is one of the reasons, along with adultery and promiscuity, that would be used by the Spaniards to condemn Atahualpa to death in Cajamarca.30 the histor ical validity of velasco’s account

We are far from believing that Father Velasco made no errors, especially in the chapters that are dedicated to the history of the Indians before the Inca conquest; but we have the firm belief that he proceeded in good faith, that he did not invent anything, and that he knew how to consider with critical intelligence the relative value of the traditions which he had collected, and tried to coordinate and present them as plausible. Without his work, the majority of the tradition that is supplementary to written sources in groups without writing would have been lost forever.31 188   o. hugo benavides

Indeed, the enormous inconsistencies of F. Juan de Velasco’s account of the ancient Kingdom of Quito are so readily apparent that not even the textbooks can ignore the enormous controversy this history has produced in the last two centuries. Most of the critics of Velasco’s history question its empirical validity because there is no independent evidence to support it. With the emergence of an archaeological discipline in the country in the late 1800s, it became clear that there were no archaeological remains to verify the existence of an ancient Quito nation. Not only did most of the protagonists appear to be made up, but the polity itself seemed to have been invented, since there were no material cultural remains to support its existence.32 Velasco’s supporters attempted to explain the lack of archaeological evidence by arguing that the Inca and Spanish invasion had ravaged the Kingdom of Quito’s material remains. This claim seemed unreasonable since these early archaeologists had uncovered an enormous amount of evidence of other pre-Columbian and pre-Inca groups. This led this first generation of archaeologists in the late 1800s and early 1900s to view Velasco’s history as “a conspiracy inspired to give the much-loved country, from which he was exiled, a grand aura in its past history that the nostalgic Jesuit did not want to be any less than the one of the empire of the Incas.”33 The history of the Kingdom of Quito was also questioned on many other counts. Not only was (or is) there no archaeological evidence; neither was there any other ethnohistorical or linguistic evidence to empirically ground Velasco’s narrative. Velasco seemed to have based his account purely on oral traditions he heard while living in the colonial Royal Court of Quito. Furthermore, he actually wrote this history decades later, while in exile and without any aid other than his memory. Finally, many of the structural elements within Velasco’s narrative closely resembled the ethnohistorical descriptions of the Inca empire itself, such as a cosmology based on worship of the sun and of the Spanish monarchy system of the period. The textbooks themselves note that some scholars question the veracity of Velasco’s history along similar lines.34 But, perhaps not surprisingly, in the last two centuries many Ecuadorian scholars have come to the rescue of Velasco’s narrative of a Quito nation. Among them are many renowned historians, politicians, and writers such as Juan León Mera (who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem), Pedro Fermín Cevallos, Jorge Salvador Lara, Gabriel Cevallos García, Isaac narr atives of power, power of narr atives   189

Barrera, and Julio Tobar Donoso, all established national historians. All of them were willing to admit there might be some minor inconsistencies due to the scientific period in which Velasco lived and wrote, but they defended the overall validity of the narrative. Some argued that Velasco had not written the history from memory and that he actually had documents to help elucidate his narrative. Most agreed that the interest of “Peruvianphile” critics in decentering the importance of the history of the ancient Kingdom of Quito was responsible for casting doubt on Velasco’s history.35 All the textbooks embrace this last, almost untenable position of Peruvian bias, agreeing with the above-mentioned scholars who support Velasco’s narrative, hailing Velasco as “a pride to the country.”36 They also argue—against all the evidence—that modern archaeological finds now support the existence of a Quito nation and that many other Spanish cronistas validate the existence of the Kingdom of Quito, claiming the cronistas “categorically express that the Kingdom of Quito existed and the Schyris lived in our territory.”37 For the textbooks and for Ecuador’s official history, there is no doubt that “we can never do without—not to historicize Ecuador or get to know America—his [Velasco’s] ‘History of the Kingdom of Quito.’ ”38 Another author proclaims that every Ecuadorian student should read Velasco’s history, and know that in it they will find pleasure, inspiration, and patriotic pride, because beyond question Juan de Velasco is one of the spiritual founders of the country.39 It is clear then that if the Quito nation resisted and outwitted the onset of the Inca conquest, it can also survive the treacherous attack of modern historiography. the parts and the whole of a public narr ative

In Velasco’s account and in the state’s official backing of his history, archaeology occupies an important space in the maintenance of the Ecuadorian nation. Archaeological knowledge, as instituted in public sites or narrated in official textbooks, informs a national past in ways that are congruent with the modern representation of the nation-state. Therefore, though subtly articulated and seldom acknowledged in public forums, archaeological reconstructions are always implicated in the process of nation-building and state formation.40 190   o. hugo benavides

In the state’s official account of the Kingdom of Quito the central narrative is in many ways a simple war story, that is, a tale of a smaller polity resisting the onslaught of an invading imperial enemy. It is also a story of reconquest and vengeance, as the defeated Kingdom of Quito reconquers the conquerors, the Incas, at the end. In the textbooks the Incas are first hailed as enemies of the Quito nation (read Ecuador), but interestingly enough they are in turn conquered by the region’s geography (in the cities of Tomebamba and Quito) and by the beauty of its women (Princess Pacha). The Incas themselves are seduced, and thus the Inca heir Atahualpa was born on Ecuadorian soil. Atahualpa not only rightfully reigns over the Quito polity but usurps the Peruvian throne of the Tahuantinsuyu, once the enemy and plunderer of the Quito state. In the state’s reproduction of Velasco’s account there is little factual evidence in comparison to pervasive mythical elements. It is unimportant for the state’s agencies to prove that any of these characters and sites actually existed. The fact that they were brought to life by Velasco himself is accepted as proof of their reality. In this manner you have well-documented historical figures, such as Atahualpa, next to a whole series of Schyri leaders and generals, such as Cacha and Calicuchima, for whose existence there is no independent evidence. At the same time these elements create a perfect mythical realm in which the story develops. It is precisely because all the characters point to an ancient past impossible to disprove that it becomes mythical. The mythical figures do not hinder the factual ones. To the contrary, the whole narrative is enveloped in a mythical quality that secures its founding elements. The known factual characters secure its validity even more and secure the knowledge of such minute details as the crown the schyris wore or the moods that the characters felt at particular moments in the story—for example, Condorazo’s anger and sadness at having to give up his crown to his son, Duchicela. The textbooks’ pervasive mythical qualities also allow them to be hailed as a founding history for the nation-state, an official national history. However, this mythical quality has not gone unquestioned through the centuries.41 It is a result of the historical incongruity that Velasco himself becomes a character in his narrative and the textbooks consider it necessary to provide an exegesis for this martyred historian. In this fashion Velasco joins the few factual characters and adds credence to his mythical story. He narr atives of power, power of narr atives   191

is hailed as a victim assaulted by unpatriotic historical discourses, just as the Kingdom of Quito was treacherously assaulted by its southern neighbors. Although some of Velasco’s shortcomings are accepted as a result of the historical limitations of his time (e.g., lack of archival material and the remoteness of forced exile), these limitations ultimately reinforce the validity of (and urgent need for) his account. Velasco’s own failings are used as independent proof for the veracity of the account. Ultimately, the mythical quality of the failed narrative content helps prove (or, rather, makes it impossible to disprove) the account’s validity and, therefore, the existence of the Kingdom of Quito as the precursor of the Ecuadorian nation. As Velasco’s critics point out, the structure of the account and its emphasis on royal protagonists is evocative of European narratives, with actually very few elements of an Andean or even American reality. Some of these European elements are central to the nature of the story. The story of the political and military struggle between two state polities is told in a great epic manner. On the one side, there is a smaller, less aggressive, and more vulnerable state polity, the Quiteños, and on the other, there is an imperialistic organization, the Incas, overpowering their more pacific neighbor with force. And it is not only a war story but also one of love. However, these romantic relationships are inconsistent with sex and marriage practices in Andean polities, especially the Incas.42 Twice in the narrative love-struck couples are essential for the restructuring of political relationships, first Hualcopo and Toa, and later Pacha and Huayna Capac. It is through this last couple that the ultimate vengeance is achieved, and love rights that which military aggression had wronged. Ultimately, the Quiteño polity gains with its feminine counterpart what had been militaristically lost through its men. It is not surprising that Velasco would use a European structure for his account, for writing in the late 1700s would have offered him very few alternative American models to follow. Under these conditions it was natural for Velasco to fall back on previous models he had read while living in the Americas or during those years in exile in Europe. There are, however, a few narrative points that are particularly striking because of their “colonized” construction. An example of this is the similarity in structure between Velasco’s account and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s ethnohistorical document from 1609.43 Garcilaso’s document had also been 192   o. hugo benavides

written with the intention of legitimizing an Andean polity, the Incas, who not only had been conquered and decimated by the Spaniards but who also had been negatively portrayed in most, if not all, European documents. Paralleling the Inca Garcilaso, Velasco built his story with a pantheon of imperial rulers (the schyris) and dynastic struggles, and used these elements to legitimize American values in contrast to European notions of civilization and history. In many ways both Garcilaso and Velasco used an Andean setting with American characters and centered it on a completely European narrative structure. As part of Ecuador’s educational objectives Velasco’s official account of the Kingdom of Quito is an obligatory item in the history curriculum. Every Ecuadorian who attends primary and/or secondary school in the country is exposed in an authoritative fashion to Velasco’s narrative. This exposure is so successful that most Ecuadorians consider the Kingdom of Quito to have existed, even in light of wide and varied empirical evidence to the contrary. The notion of an ancient Kingdom of Quito is also reinforced in different arenas, such as tour guides to archaeological sites or national magazines. The belief in an ancient polity of Quito rulers is widespread in the population itself, and the polity’s nonexistence is seldom discussed in a public setting. The popular media’s collusion in disseminating the myth is exemplified by Velasco’s representation as the “father of the nation” in a series of layouts on national historic figures published in 1997 by the most popular magazine in the country, Vistazo.44 He is also commemorated on a postage stamp. Indeed, the debunking of Velasco’s account only takes place in academic or elite intellectual circles. There is no doubt that the use of official textbooks by both public and private institutions makes ubiquitous a historical account that had already been debated and questioned by the beginning of the twentieth century. The official medium used by the state to expound Velasco’s account for the maintenance of Ecuador betrays the nation’s essential need to legitimize itself historically. At the same time the mythical history supported by these texts is central to maintaining the racist structure of the nation. It is but one way to honor an Indian past while denying this same recognition in contemporary forms of political representation. The texts offer a façade of inclusion precisely because the actual Indian ancestors of the region have been so systematically decimated and excluded for over five centuries. narr atives of power, power of narr atives   193

Ironically, the multiple layers within the narrative of a Quito nation also demonstrate that there is no monolithic national history, not even an official one but rather, histories in the plural that are constituted by multiple versions.45 The construction of national histories is yet another play in the theatrical production of Ecuador’s past. Ecuador’s hegemonic national histories are not only actively contested but are very much based on this contestation, as is the nation itself. As outlined above, the number of actors and themes implicated in just one variant of the official national drama points to how all histories (official and not) are articulated and constituted under the guise of a nonexistent and yet hegemonic image of a unitary history of the Ecuadorian nation. notes 1 2 3

Silva, Los Mitos de la ecuatorianidad. Benitez Vinueza, Ecuador. The word Quito is written with either an o or u ending. The u ending, however, seems to imply an older form and therefore carries a much greater historical authority. The following summary of the study plan of the Quito Nation is included in Programa Anual, Informática—Cuarto Curso (Tumbaco: Colegio Nacional Tumbaco, 1996–97). All translations of Spanish sources are mine.

Unit #7: The Quito Nation —The tradition of the Quito nation and their Schyris leaders. Personality of Juan de Velasco and commentary on his work.—Characteristics of their economic, political, and social organization. Religion: cult and funerary rites: music, dance. Cultural aspects: science and art. Critical judgment. —The Quito nation as the basis of our nationality. The Inca invasion and the Quito resistance. Consequences.

4 5 6 7 8 9

Programa Anual, Historia General del Ecuador—Cuarto Curso (Tumbaco: Colegio Nacional Tumbaco, 1996). Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica, 32. Ibid.; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica, 48.

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10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica; Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica. Ayllus are Andean communal kin lineages, which express belonging to a specific territorial and social community. They are extremely central to the Andean way of life, since both political and territorial organization followed this kin mode of organization. For a more detailed discussion see Bruhns, Ancient South America; Murra, La Organización económica del estado Inca; and, Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas. Pareja Diezcanseco, Breve historia del Ecuador; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica; Martinez Estrada, Historia del Ecuador. There have been many stories and tales about the construction of the Panecillo and its ritual use by the Incas and other pre-Columbian groups. However, based on recent excavations funded by the capital’s municipal government there is very little evidence either for it to be a man-made mound or for there to have been elaborate ritual structures on its surface. However, it must be stated that a big part of its surface is under concrete and the massive monument of the Virgin Mary; see Dominguez, Informe sobre las excavaciones en Itschimbía; Silverston, “The Politics of Culture.” Pareja Diezcanseco, Breve historia del Ecuador; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. Martinez Estrada, Historia del Ecuador. García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica Martinez Estrada, Historia del Ecuador. Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica, 57. Ibid., 50–51. Ibid. Ibid., 50. Mitimaes was one of the social institutions utilized by the Incas both to mobilize labor and to maintain imperial order in the Tahuantinsuyu (Quechua for the Inca empire). It consisted of sending large populations of the newly conquered groups closer to Cuzco, the center of the empire, and sending loyal groups to the outskirts of the empire. In this manner the Incas fragmented hostile populations, controlled their labor, and pushed cultural assimilation by installing populations faithful to the Inca rule. See Murra, La Organización económica del estado Inca; and Patterson, The Inca Empire. Pareja Diezcanseco, Breve historia del Ecuador; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. Pareja Diezcanseco, Breve historia del Ecuador; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica, 169. Pareja Diezcanseco, Breve historia del Ecuador; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. narr atives of power, power of narr atives   195

25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45

Since Yagauarcocha literally means “water of blood” in Quechua, it is generally believed that the large number of people massacred and thrown into the lake tinted the whole lake red, giving it its name. The fact that there is a female head of the Quito nation tends to be overlooked by all of the textbooks. This is not so unusual, since at the site of Cochasquí itself we have ethnohistoric evidence of a female military leader of an ancient polity. What is significant is the total lack of discussion of it. Pareja Diezcanseco, Breve historia del Ecuador; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica, 85. García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. Andrade Reimers, Biografia de Atahualpa; Pareja Diezcanseco, Breve historia del Ecuador; García González, Resúmen de geografía, historia y cívica. Carlos Manuel Larrea in L.N.S. Historia del Ecuador 67. Jijón y Caamaño,“Examen crítico de la veracidad de la Historia del Reino de Quito del P. Juan de Velasco de la Compañía de Jesús”; Salazar, “La Arqueología contemporánea del Ecuador (1970–1993).” L.N.S., Historia del Ecuador. Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica, 54. L.N.S., Historia del Ecuador. Ibid., 68. Navas Jimenez, Historia, geografía y cívica, 55. Jorge Salvador Lara in L.N.S., Historia del Ecuador 68. Espinosa, “Padre Velasco.” Rabaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria. Jijón y Caamaño, “Examen crítico de la veracidad de la Historia del Reino de Quito del P. Juan de Velasco de la Compañía de Jesús”; Moreno, Antropología ecuatoriana; Salazar, Entre mitos y fábulas. Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva crónica y buen gobierno; Murra, La Organización económica del estado Inca; Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches. Garcilaso de la Vega, “El Inca.” See Espinosa, “Padre Velasco.” Benavides, Making Ecuadorian Histories.

196   o. hugo benavides

Affective Distinctions Race and Place in Oaxaca

Deborah Poole

in mid-january 2005, in one of his first acts in office, Ulises Ruíz Ortíz, the new—and, in most people’s opinion, fraudulently elected—governor of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, made the extraordinary announcement that he would be moving the state government to a working-class suburb outside the historic district of downtown Oaxaca City. The architecturally imposing Palacio de Gobierno (Government Palace), located along one entire side of the capital city’s central square, or zócalo, was to be emptied of its desks and file cabinets and converted into a Palace Museum and Space of Diversity (Palacio del Museo, Espacio de la Diversidad). The governor described the space as a forum for transforming “every Oaxacan” into “a citizen who always acts on behalf of the greatness of the Nation.”1 The state legislature, in turn, was to be moved from its home on a central thoroughfare named after Porfirio Diaz, the modernizing nineteenth-century dictator from Oaxaca, and converted into a theater named for the Zapotec statesman, Oaxacan governor, and national hero and president Benito Juárez. In this double move, Ruíz effectively rendered the architectural monument to state government that Juárez himself had

inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth century into a shrine for national culture, while simultaneously degrading Juárez into the symbolic figurehead for a new institution where the serious work of legislation would be replaced by the play-acting of cultural diversion. Why would the newly elected governor want to break with a political tradition set in place by the unassailable national hero Benito Juárez and, in the process, dismantle the architectural artifice of power that had helped to sustain Ruíz’s party, the pri (the Institutional Revolutionary Party), at the helm of state government for the last sixty years? Why, in short, would he want to distance his government from the aura of legitimacy and even sanctity that surrounded a palace and the historic center where Juárez and other Oaxacans had governed? Few local commentators gave credence to Ruíz’s own explanation that the move would help to bolster the tourist economy through the addition of yet another regional museum. Rather, given Ruíz’s history as a pri political operative, or mapache, Oaxacans reasoned that some other, more politically pressing motives must lie behind the governor’s surprising move. One frequently cited reason for the move was the recurring and longstanding plantones, or “occupations,” that had regularly cluttered the section of the zócalo immediately facing the Palacio de Gobierno and caused bothersome traffic jams in front of the legislature. Traditional plantones in Oaxaca had always been directed at the government officials who were (presumably) at work inside either the palace or the legislature. However, in recent years Oaxaca’s political and cultural organizations had begun to show both greater creativity and an increased awareness of the need to make their demands known to the public and the media. One group, for example, had staged a prolonged plantón under the windows of the governor’s office to protest the imprisonment of indigenous leaders and the ongoing military occupation of the Loxichas in Oaxaca’s southern sierra. Another group stationed themselves for several months across from the Palacio’s main door, using a live pig to portray the then pri governor José Murat and a loudspeaker to advertise their broad set of anti-neoliberal demands. While other governors had either ignored or politically co-opted such displays, Ruíz’s strategy was to remove his offices to a police barracks on the outskirts of the city, where plantones—if they were allowed to happen at all—would be much less likely to draw media attention or to distract 198    deborah poole

1 School poster showing the iconography of Oaxaca’s Seven Cultural regions, n.d. Purchased at the Proveedora Escolar, Oaxaca de Juarez, June 1998 (Impresa R.A.F., SA, (Mexico City). Photo: Deborah Poole.

the attention of Oaxaca’s many international tourists. Once “cleansed” of indecent displays of politicized behavior, the zócalo might then be rendered a neutral space to be filled by strolling tourists and temporary cultural displays. In addition to this pragmatic removal of government operations from the public eye, Ruíz’s promise to transform the empty Palacio into a “Space of Diversity” seemed to evoke a certain continuity with the popular image of Oaxaca City as the urban center for a state whose distinction lies in its many ethnically circumscribed places. As we will see, the pri has for many decades promoted an image of Oaxaca as first a “racially,” then an “ethnically,” and more recently a “culturally” diverse space. Indeed, when asked to define Oaxaca, most Oaxacans will respond by referring to the “seven cultural regions” into which the state’s territory is, somewhat arbitrarily, divided and, more specifically, to the well-defined iconography of female costumes through which all public school children in the state are taught about Oaxaca’s cultural heritage.2 (See fig. 1, above.) affective distinctions    199

In his speech, however, Ruíz failed to mention Oaxaca’s indigenous cultures. He instead described the future Space of Diversity as an opening onto “the wide access routes of knowledge that will elevate the collective conscious into a superior understanding of the contemporary world, so as to make of each Oaxacan the citizen who always acts on behalf of the greatness of the Nation.”3 As such, the Space of Diversity seemed less concerned with the aura of cultural distinction that supposedly surrounds Oaxaca as a place, than with promoting the political project summed up in Ruíz’s governmental slogan: “Oaxaca: Facing the Nation” (Oaxaca: Cara a la Nación). This shift in Oaxacan cultural policies did not go unnoticed. Local political columnists quickly condemned the proposed museum as “part of a centralist and colonizing move” in which Oaxaca’s distinctive diversity and aesthetic tradition would be pawned to the federal government and national political interests.4 A first point of contention had to do with the intellectual authority for the proposed museum. Rather than inviting local anthropologists, artists, and academics to collaborate in the creation of the museum, Ruíz proposed to graft the museum onto an ongoing museum project mounted by Mexico’s largest university, the unam (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in Mexico City. The actual inauguration of the museum one year later further highlighted Ruíz’s modernist vision of culture. Timed to coincide with the two-hundredth birthday of Benito Juárez, the museum was inaugurated by the rector of unam on March 21, 2006. Rather than framing diversity as a quality inherent to or distinctive of Oaxaca (or assigning responsibility for mounting the inaugural exhibition to the Oaxacan university, named after Benito Juárez), the opening instead featured a unam-created traveling exhibit of the Mexico City ruins of Teotihuacan. Breaking with long-standing aesthetic and philosophical discourses through which Oaxaca’s artistic and cultural elites had celebrated Oaxaca’s distinctive provincial sensibility, colonial architecture, and indigeneity, the remaining exhibits focused on science and technology as routes to greater national integration.5 In short, Ruíz’s goal in creating the museum would seem to have been twofold: to thumb his nose at local artists and intellectuals who had, for decades, worked to create an image of Oaxaca as a national—indeed international—center of culture and the arts, while simultaneously announcing the centrality of Oaxaca for Mexican national

200    deborah poole

agendas—including especially the (by March 2006, floundering) presidential campaign of Ruíz’s fellow pri comrade, Roberto Madrazo. On the one hand we might say that Ruíz’s decision to transform the Palacio de Gobierno into a museum was motivated by some combination of a modernist sensibility and belief in “progress,” a disdain for local cultural initiatives, and a desire to shelter Oaxaca’s lucrative tourism industry from an increasingly contentious political arena. On the other hand, however, Ruíz’s actions also speak clearly to the ongoing, very local struggle over who can best speak for an urban space that is understood to embody, somehow, the essence of Oaxacan political and civic life. The high stakes in this contest became apparent some weeks after the governor first announced his plan in 2005, when the state government began to dismantle the zócalo itself. (See fig. 2.) As one-hundred-year-old trees came crashing down and cobblestones were hauled away to be replaced with poured concrete, public outrage swelled at Ruíz’s unilateral decision to redesign the city’s beloved historical square. Political commentators denounced the “restoration” as a maneuver meant to funnel state funds into pri’s presidential campaign. Members of the architecture faculty denounced the renovation as illegal and as an attempt by Ruíz to display his own impunity before the law.6 The internationally celebrated artist Francisco Toledo early on expressed his outrage at the zócalo’s destruction and successfully intervened at least to have the cement benches changed for more historically sensitive wrought iron ones. unesco authorities joined in, raising the troubling possibility that they could remove Oaxaca from their list of World Heritage Sites.7 The National Institute for Anthropology and History (inah), which holds legal jurisdiction over all historic and archaeological monuments, similarly denounced Ruíz’s destruction of the historical park as a violation of federal laws governing national patrimony.8 Despite early attempts to justify the project as a move to restore historical authenticity and to replace the imported or “Spanish” laurel trees with native ahuehuete trees, criticism intensified. Protests were organized and petitions signed. Interestingly, much popular outrage focused on the destruction of several large laurel trees which the Oaxacan architects who launched the project with Ruíz had condemned as “foreign” and lacking the “spirituality of [Oaxaca’s] native species.” Opponents of the restoration defended the laurels as part of Oaxaca’s

affective distinctions    201

2 Palacio de Gobierno and zócalo. April 22, 2005. Photo: Indymedia Oaxaca.

historical heritage, accusing the project’s designers of “botanical racism.”9 At stake were two racially driven visions of Oaxaca—one which allowed for foreign and “mixed” species, another which sought to locate the “spirituality” of Oaxaca in the botanical purity of its native species. Yet work on the zócalo continued. Faced with public outrage, the government was forced to construct high metal walls around the construction site to prevent people from observing and commenting on the construction, which soon shed its pretense to historical and botanical authenticity. Trees continued to be cut down and hauled away under cover of night. The police were called in to quell demonstrations. (See fig. 3.) Eventually the Oaxacan artists working with the government bailed out, denouncing the betrayal of their original plan—including the idea of replacing “foreign” trees with “native species.”10 Once unveiled, the new, rather dreary, cement-gray zócalo, with its industrial lighting, was widely criticized for its dramatic break with Oaxacan architectural sensibilities. For Oaxacan artists and intellectuals, Ruíz’s vision of this civic space was far removed from both the indigenous realities of rural Oaxaca and the particular forms of sentiment, nostalgia, and aesthetic sensibilities that have been celebrated, since at least the early 1930s, as the essence of Oaxaca’s “provincial soul.”11 While both visions of Oaxaca’s urban space appeal, at least implicitly, to the “very Mexican” notion of mestizaje, or mixture, they do so in ways that assign markedly different values to place, time, and presence. Thus, whereas Ruíz’s vision of mestizaje as nation-building (and hence political party building) frames 202    deborah poole

3 Demonstration against the remodeling of the zócalo, May 2005. Photo: Indymedia Oaxaca.

“diversity” as a leveling engine for creating a more modern, homogeneous future, the genealogical imagination underlying Oaxacan ideals of both cultural identity and “race” relies on a particular, historically contingent appeal to place as a form of historical, and racial, presence. In this essay, I explore the histories of state intervention and cultural pedagogy that have gone into creating and fostering this distinctively genealogical imagination of mestizaje, and the forms of affective attachment to place through which genealogical belonging is expressed. I suggest that Oaxacan understandings of mestizaje, although not exempt from either racism or racialized forms of discrimination, nevertheless invoke a genealogical understanding of the local that allows for the presence of (certain forms of) “diversity.” The nationalist and revolutionary doctrine of mestizaje, by comparison, holds mixture and homogeneity as a constantly receding goal for cultural, racial, and national “improvement” in the future. Within this modernist imagination, public places such as the zócalo are imagined as empty spaces waiting to be filled, while disturbances such as plantones are read as signs of a public “indecency,” precisely because they reveal affective distinctions    203

that space is never truly empty. Ruíz’s appeals to “diversity” and national unity thus seem to share much with the language and images of mixture and diversity that circulate as synonyms for culture and identity in Oaxaca. What they do not share—and, indeed, seek to undo—is the high value placed on those modes of affective attachment to place that animate Oaxacan understandings of both mestizaje and diversity. sovereignty and locality

To understand how concepts of racial distinction and mestizaje figure in the struggle to control public space and cultural patrimony in the state of Oaxaca, it is useful to start with two historical facts. The first concerns Oaxaca’s peculiar place in nineteenth-century liberalism and, in particular, in the disputes over federalist versus centralist forms of governance; the second has to do with the demographic facts of indigenous presence in Oaxaca. As citizens of the first state to establish its own legislature, Oaxacans, with some exceptions, remained staunch supporters of a federalist form of government throughout the nineteenth century. The most famous Oaxacan liberal, Benito Juárez, served twice as Oaxaca’s governor before going on to fame and fortune as the national hero who ousted the would-be French emperor Maximiliano and then restored the liberal Mexican Republic. As an icon of the Mexican nation, Juárez is today seen to embody at once the quintessentially liberal ideals of popular sovereignty, state’s rights, and the rule of law, and the revolutionary nationalism of a state in which the federalist framework has been preserved, until very recently, through the unifying apparatus of single-party rule. Indeed, part of Juárez’s mystique as national hero has to do with his ability as a “Zapotec Indian made good” to straddle the somewhat contradictory foundationalist myths of liberal individualism and popular sovereignty, on the one hand, and the authoritarian nationalism of first Porfirio Diaz and then the pri that succeeded him.12 Juárez’s extraordinary symbolic potential as an icon of both locality and nation-building is not coincidental to the fact that Ruíz chose to inaugurate his Espacio de la Diversidad on the bicentennial of Juárez’s birth. Similarly, Juárez’s legacy was often cited by Ruíz’s critics as that which was most betrayed by Ruíz’s authoritarian decision to transform Oaxaca’s Palace of

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Government into a monument to national culture, engineered and administered by intellectuals from Mexico City.13 Juárez’s Indian or Zapotec origins are seldom directly referenced in these symbolic appeals to his authority. Yet in Oaxaca, at least, it is his Indianness that lends credence to the idea that Oaxaca’s liberal and cultural traditions bear a distinctive, nonassimilationist status with respect to both Mexican nationalism and its companion ideology of mestizaje. It is in this capacity as a symbol of the local—rather than as a marker of indigeneity per se—that the figure of Juárez is racialized in Oaxacan popular political culture: As a Zapotec Indian turned president, Juárez stands for the irreducible status of “Oaxaca” as both origin and other of Mexico’s mestizo polity. Oaxaca’s strong federalist traditions are not unrelated to the striking diversity and fragmentation of its administrative, ethnic, and political system. The state is home to sixteen different ethnic or language groups. Its 570 municipalities account for almost 25 percent of all the municipalities in the entire country of Mexico. More striking still, over one-third of all the indigenous municipalities in Mexico are located in Oaxacan territory. According to the 2000 national census, 37 percent of the state’s adult population speaks an indigenous language.14 Not coincidentally, along with its equally indigenous neighbors Chiapas and Guerrero, Oaxaca is also one of the poorest states in Mexico and home to 356 of the 400 municipalities classified nationally as falling within the category of extreme poverty.15 Of these southern states, Chiapas has presented the most publicized recent challenge to Mexican centralism via the militant challenges of the ezln (Zapatista National Liberation Army). Oaxaca and Guerrero, however, are also home to numerous very influential and outspoken indigenous organizations, as well as to some lingering guerrillas.16 While its neighbors Guerrero and Chiapas also have large or even majority indigenous populations, Oaxaca is the state to which pri politicians point most often when discussing the virtues of cultural diversity. Such claims speak to Oaxaca’s status as a sort of testing ground for neoliberal multiculturalism in Mexico. Under the governorships of Heladio Ramírez López (1986–92) and Diodoro Carrasco Altamirano (1992–98), Oaxaca’s pri-dominated governments worked energetically to forge legislative and political initiatives that would recognize indigenous cultural rights and “customs,” expand the

affective distinctions    205

geographical reach of the state’s cultural programs, consolidate the state’s reputation for tourism, and promote the idea of Oaxaca as “the cradle of cultural diversity” in Mexico.17 As many theorists have noted, the spatial politics inherent to neoliberal governmentality place increasing emphasis on the redistribution of “autonomy,” risk, and responsibility to localities and communities. In Mexico, one of the most notable of these initiatives was the 1998 Law of Indigenous Rights, passed during the final year of Carrasco Altamirano’s six-year term. Held up initially as a model for how indigenous rights could be defended outside the framework of the Acuerdos de San Andres, Carrasco’s law served, in the short term, to bolster his party’s control over key municipios, while respecting the neoliberal imperative to privilege locality and community as sites of governance. It also served, however, to confirm the image of Oaxaca as, if not the cradle of Mexican diversity, then, at the very least, as one available model for how multiculturalism might work in a nation that has long looked towards mestizaje as the unquestioned panacea for resolving the “problem” of cultural diversity.18 Carrasco’s successors have placed relatively more emphasis on reinforcing the juridical framework through which the state government might appear as a defender of indigenous rights, while paying comparatively little attention to the sorts of cultural policies fostered by Carrasco’s administration. pri governor José Murat (1998–2004), for example, did little in the way of building local cultural institutions, and his administrative and political interventions on behalf of indigenous diversity and rights were all geared towards the national political arena. Murat’s announcement of the creation of a new Oaxacan Ministry of Indigenous Affairs coincided with the March 2001 Zapatista march to Mexico City and was announced in the official government newspaper on Juárez’s birthday, March 21. Murat’s other intervention on behalf of indigenous issues was as opponent to the watered-down national constitutional reform on indigenous rights that was approved by the federal legislature in response to ezln and indigenous demands. Following this dramatic—and well-publicized—foray into the politics of indigenous rights, Murat’s remaining years as governor brought few substantive additions to existing laws and programs promoting indigenous rights and cultural diversity in Oaxaca itself. The policies of his successor, Ruíz, toward Oaxaca’s indigenous population have consisted, for the most part of repressive measures, including 206    deborah poole

tightened party control over rebellious municipalities, autonomous indigenous organizations, and popular political projects. These measures include traditional clientelist practices, as well as targeted assassinations of grassroots, opposition, and indigenous leaders, and the use of police violence to quell popular demonstrations.19 Framing culture as an issue of importance primarily for tourism, his cultural politics have been restricted, on the one hand, to increasing the number of performances of such popular festivals as the Guelaguetza and Bani Stui Gulal, and on the other, to reconfiguring public spaces such as the zócalo, the government palace, and other urban parks and monuments. While such policies and projects may well be intended to expand opportunities for generating tourist dollars, they also play a key role in domestic (state-level) politics where celebrations of cultural unity and “Oaxacanness” (oaxaquenidad) are held up as counters to those who would dare criticize the state government. In conjunction with appeals to local cultural pride, racialized discourses of “decency” and civility are also used to dismiss the plantones and other forms of popular political protest that annually threaten to disrupt the public spaces and official cultural performances that attract both national and international tourists. The annual strike and plantón organized by the Oaxacan teachers’ union, for example, is consistently described by government newspapers as an “invasion” or “assault” on the propriety, hygiene, and civility of Oaxaca’s historic center. One editorialist for a Mexico City newspaper, for example, described the 2006 plantón as a scene of “degradation” in which the teachers’ “annual encampments in the zócalo [de Oaxaca] would seem to be raw material for a documentary on Animal Planet. The Oaxacan teacher . . . [who] descends each May to the city to cook, sleep and procreate in public thoroughfares . . . thus acquires his pathetic annual salary increase, from a similarly brutalized government, and then returns to his village with his females [hembras] fertilized, to confront another year of work.”20 Here the condition of occupying a public space is likened to a form of bestiality that invalidates the uniquely human quality of articulating political desires and demands. Such pronouncements can easily be cited as exemplary of a neoliberal multiculturalism in which local claims to cultural and political distinction are tolerated, and even celebrated, as long as they are not articulated as part of oppositional, contestatory, or class-based political projects.21 Yet what is affective distinctions    207

both unique and instructive about the Oaxacan case is that the racialized debate over culture, propriety, and moral decency is not by any means restricted to overtly indigenous actors or demands. Rather Ruíz’s attempts to appropriate and rework public spaces such as the zócalo have encountered fierce public resistance from middle-class and urban “mestizo” sectors, and attacks against the morality or decency of participants in plantones and other forms of political activism are directed at mestizo subjects whose improprieties make them like Indians and animals by virtue of their unauthorized occupation of public space. In this respect, it is important to note that in Oaxaca intellectual and political projects are conjugated as at once external to and constitutive of broader, national discourses in which both mestizaje and indigeneity are alternately invoked as sources of cultural authenticity. To explore the history of Oaxaca’s contentious relationship with national ideals of mestizaje and its relevance for present day struggles over the moral and cultural configuration of public space in Oaxaca, I now turn, briefly, to the late 1920s and the years of what we might well think of as Oaxaca’s “cultural revolution.” unity through diver sity

While the Mexican Revolution in 1910 was at heart a struggle against the political monopoly on power exercised by Porfirio Diaz and the economic and social injustice promoted by his model of capitalist “progress,” it was also a struggle to forge a national state capable of governing Mexico’s multiple patrias chicas or “little fatherlands.” Culture was, of course, key to the forging of this nation and the revolutionary ideologies that would hold it together for the next sixty or seventy years. Manuel Gamio and other early intellectual leaders of the Mexican Revolution viewed the patrias chicas of states such as Yucatán and Oaxaca both as a problem, in that they housed potentially troublesome local elites, and as inspirations for how music, art, and culture could be used to integrate Mexico’s many unruly patrias chicas into a unified, national project. In the case of Oaxaca, the challenge of taming the cultural independence of the patria chica was sharpened by the fact that Oaxacan liberal elites had aggressively defended the sovereignty of the Oaxacan state against the new national constitution and national revolu-

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tionary state. In this respect, the nationalist revolutionaries’ commitment to creating a unified national culture ran up against the recalcitrant federalist tradition of Oaxaca’s liberal elites.22 To understand the complementary roles of culture and race in this postrevolutionary struggle to control the patria chica, it is useful to begin with the “Oaxacanization” program of Genaro V. Vásquez, who served as interim governor of the state from 1924 to 1929. Like other governors of the period, Vásquez was charged by the national government with bringing the rebellious provincial elites of his state into the fold of the nationalist revolutionary project. For this task, Vásquez’s principal tool was a sort of soft-core socialism that he assiduously pursued through both anticlericalism and the cultural programs that would be the hallmark of his administration. Land reform did not take place during his governorship, and, other than educational programs and school-building, few organizing activities were attempted among the peasant and indigenous sectors of the state. Faced with a rather remarkable proliferation of local socialist and communist parties, Vásquez’s first step was to form the Socialist Party Central of Oaxaca. Beyond its obvious function of placing centrifugal forces of popular and student socialism under state control, the Central also served as the principal site for the many cultural events including Cultural Saturdays, poetry and song competitions, recitals, and exhibitions mounted by Vásquez’s industrious team of cultural engineers.23 Vásquez’s goal as governor of a fractious and politically divided state was to unify it through the two means summed up in his administration’s slogan: “Roads and Schools.” While roads would facilitate communication and commerce between Oaxaca’s contentious regions, schools would provide a platform for the novel cultural policies through which Vásquez and the circle of intellectuals who surrounded him hoped to create and disseminate a “cultural sentiment” capable of overcoming the political and economic differences that had prevented centralization of power in the state in the past. Vásquez himself was an ethnologist and self-proclaimed indigenista, who claimed affiliation with the “Zapotec race of the Sierra Juárez” through his mother’s side. As interim governor he continued to intervene in cultural debates with his own writings and speeches on music and racial diversity in Oaxaca.24

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In many respects this project echoed on a regional level the challenge facing the new national state in its task of uniting the different regions and states of Mexico under a single revolutionary mantle. Indeed, in their quest to build a new Oaxacan culture, Vásquez and his followers made use of such federally imposed and sponsored projects as the Cultural Missions created by another Oaxaqueño, José Vasconcelos, for the specific purpose of championing racial and cultural assimilation as the route to revolutionary nation-building. Vasconcelos’s influential concept of “the cosmic race” celebrated the strength and vitality of Latin America’s mixed races as innately superior to the degenerative weakness of the Anglo-Saxon races. 25 Vásquez and his followers, however, set out to solve the problem of unity, not by calls for either cultural or racial mixture, but rather by naturalizing the divisive political factions within the state as cultural and “racial” territories or regions. To achieve this, the intellectuals around Vásquez repackaged the cultural genealogies through which nineteenth-century Oaxacan intellectuals had attempted to trace a link between the pre-Columbian Zapotec and Mixtec kingdoms and Oaxaca City’s modern liberal culture.26 In designing the curriculum for the Institutos Sociales, which the federal Secretariat of Public Education organized for the different regions of Mexico, Oaxacan intellectuals and educators emphasized the resistance of the Oaxaqueño “tribes” to domination by the Mexica and Aztecs of Central Mexico. They also encouraged the use of regional iconographic styles and sponsored competitions in which the songwriters, artists, poets, and painters who won were routinely those who were judged to best represent both the specific spirit of their region and the general “soul” of all Oaxacan people. Finally, they worked to construct a visual inventory of the different cultural and racial types found in the territory.27 While similar projects emerged in other Mexican states in the turbulent years of Mexico’s nationalist revolution, Oaxaca was in many ways unique for the way in which the nationalist racial rhetoric of mestizaje was joined with a regionalist discourse in which the language of diversity would become the means for inventing the new Oaxacan citizen. The cultural projects of the 1920s peaked in the Racial Homage (Homenaje Racial) held in Oaxaca in 1932. Organized as part of the fourth centennial celebration of the founding of the city of Oaxaca, this predecessor 210    deborah poole

4 Homenaje Racial, 1932, showing the Delegation from the Isthmus Region in front of Miss Oaxaca’s throne. Photo: Deborah Poole, courtesy of Fundacion Bustamante Vasconcelos.

of the modern Guelaguetza festival was sponsored by Vásquez’s successor, Governor Francisco López Cortez (1929–32). The organizing committee, however, was made up of the three leading architects of Vasquez’s Oaxacanization programs (Policarpo T. Sánchez, Alberto Vargas, and Guillermo A. Esteva). Described by its scenographer, Alberto Vargas, as a “great festival of the races to the Sultaness of the South,” the Racial Homage brought five “racial ambassadresses” (embajadoras raciales) to the city of Oaxaca to render homage to Miss Oaxaca. (See fig. 4, above.) As symbolic representative of the state capital, Miss Oaxaca was imagined by the organizing committee as “a beautiful dark-haired woman [morena] svelte in build [and] of solemn bearing.” As her subordinates, however, the ambassadresses—all of whom came from the most powerful (and conceptually “whitest”) families of their respective regions—were required to wear the “autochthonous garments” proper to their supposedly discrete cultural territories. In their instructions to the regional committees charged with raising monies and costuming the ambassadresses and their entourages, the Central Organizing Committee in Oaxaca cautioned the regional committees to “make a careful selection of types” so as “to give a perfect idea of the moral, ethnic, and social character affective distinctions    211

[talla] of the race.”28 In those cases where the regional committees respectfully disagreed with the choice of costume or cultural affiliation for their region, the central committee moved to enforce its selection: if necessary, they instructed, costumes were to be borrowed from other places.29 Miss Oaxaca’s status as a mestiza—and hence “national”—subject was further reinforced by the entourage of charros and chinas, representing the iconic male and female figures of Mexican revolutionary nationalism. Here it is important to note how Vásquez’s revolutionary intellectuals mapped the grammar of racial distinction along an urban-rural divide. As an idealization of the mestiza woman, Miss Oaxaca represented, first, the racial superiority of the City of Oaxaca over her provinces and, second, the importance of the City of Oaxaca as a meeting place between these “regional races” and the national mestiza race (la raza), embodied in the contingent of charros and chinas who accompanied her. In this way, the inventors of the Homenaje Racial sought to negotiate the contradictory semantics of contemporary racial discourse: “Oaxaca” consisted, on the one hand, of the many different races found in the provinces of Oaxaca and, on the other, of La Raza, the national race, which was at once singular, urban, and mestiza. The sponsors and creators of the Homenaje Racial clearly intended to promote a shared Oaxacan identity that could be both singular in its racial grounds (mestizaje) and diverse in the forms of cultural allegiances it invoked. This cultural affiliation that was “Oaxaca” was, however, unevenly distributed across space and time. Thus, the Homenaje Racial assigned ethnic or racial types to each of Oaxaca’s regions, while leaving Oaxaca City to stand as a sort of cultural marketplace—a site where ethnic costume (traje) was not so much an “identity” as a fashion to be assumed by any mestiza oaxaqueña. The important point was to police the territorial, administrative, and political boundaries that the festival would establish for Oaxaca’s seven different “cultures,” while at the same time creating a central urban space and pageant that could project what the Organizing Committee repeatedly referred to as “an agreeable impression of the whole.”30 As a racial project, the cultural programs promoted by the early postrevolutionary governments of Vásquez and López Cortez shared a certain basic grammar with the language of mestizaje and cultural nationalism promoted by Vasconcelos, Gamio, and other revolutionary nationalists. Both celebrated, for example, a general principle of unification and a desire 212    deborah poole

to create an “agreeable impression of the whole.” Both too shared in the general consensus that saw Mexico’s cities as the spaces in which mestizaje could be made to prevail over the divisive racial and cultural allegiances of the country’s rural inhabitants. Where Vásquez’s project differed was in its particular conjugation of time in relation to the places—or territories—that were made to stand for the primordial affective ties associated with “race.” Whereas the nationalist political project of mestizaje contained within it a future orientation in which racial difference was to be eventually erased, the Oaxacan notion of a “racial region” was a timeless one whose continuity had as much to do with the stability of its spatial location as with the continuities that could be continually evoked through references to racial genealogies, aesthetic dispositions, and very particular historical pasts. As the urban center for these dispersed “racial regions” Oaxaca City was imagined as at once both mestizo and indigenous. stopping time

The decades following the cultural revolutions launched by Governors Vásquez and López Cortez brought a gradual consolidation of the nationalist revolutionary state’s hold over education, culture, and politics in Oaxaca. As elsewhere in Mexico, the National Indigenista Institution carefully administered claims to distinctive ethnic identities, while other pri-sponsored organizations bridged the political needs of the governing party and the economic and social demands of the country’s indigenous municipalities and communities. In this way, Oaxaca’s indigenous majority remained, with some exceptions, strategically linked with the institutional politics of the pri and its client organizations. At the same time, in its cultural policies, the state government continued to promote an image of peaceful, unify­ ing diversity. The Homenaje Racial, for example, was performed regularly in both Oaxaca and Mexico City during the 1930s and 1940s. Then, in 1975, the pageant was moved to mid-July (in part to displace the religious festival of Carmen) and officially rebaptized as the Guelaguetza, a Zapotec word meaning “mutual aid.” As a successor to the Homenaje Racial, the Guelaguetza—which contin­ ues as the centerpiece of Oaxacan cultural allegiances—retains many of the same formal attributes: Delegations from the seven officially recognized affective distinctions    213

5 The Guelaguetza, delegation from the Central Valley cultural region; Oaxaca, 1998. Photo: Deborah Poole.

ethnic or cultural regions of Oaxaca perform highly stylized versions of dances or ceremonies considered “autochthonous” to their regions. (See fig. 5, above.) Following their performance, the delegations offer gifts to the governor of the state, who sits on a raised platform facing center stage. They then throw smaller gifts to the tourists and Oaxacans who attend the spectacle. Among the elements that have remained unchanged during the years from 1932 to the present are this offering of gifts (now to the governor; then to Miss Oaxaca); the rhetorical celebration of diversity per se as the basis of a unified Oaxacan culture; and the visual mapping of regional diversity onto the highly standardized costumes of the female dancers. In addition, today the Guelaguetza has been extended over a two-week period to include numerous public pageants, parades, and performances in the city’s zócalo and historic center. On one level, then, the Guelaguetza offers an opportunity for Oaxaca’s many different indigenous and regional “cultures” to establish a certain sort of presence in the city’s urban public spaces. Indeed, the young provincial dancers who make up the regional delegations consider an invita214    deborah poole

tion to dance at the Guelaguetza as both an opportunity to pursue careers as cultural performers and a means to establish politically crucial ties to representatives of the Oaxacan state. In this respect, their presence in the city might be considered a sort of invasion—yet it is an invasion whose “decency” (unlike the plantones) is not contaminated by either politics or spontaneity. The state makes its presence—and its control over urban space—felt at all levels of the Guelaguetza. To obtain an invitation to dance in the Guelaguetza, the performers first have to pass the rigorous scrutiny of the powerful Committee of Authenticity. During the months before the Guelaguetza, the twelve senior folklorists who make up this committee travel to each of Oaxaca’s seven “ethnic regions” to preside over auditions. Their task, as one of the committee members explained to me, “is to take care [cuidar] that the delegations really present themselves with the authenticity and dignity of their ethnic group.” At the same time, the committee chairwoman was careful to emphasize that their vigilance not be read as an actual intervention into the performers’ ways of life. “We do not impose on them. They present themselves to us. They simply present us what they have, and we accept what they give us. We do not want to change their ways of thought and ways of being. We only arrive, look, observe, and that’s it.” In describing how they reached their judgments about appearance, dignity, and authenticity, however, committee members stressed the importance of detail. “We focus [fijamos] on the details of the dress, hairstyles, braids, ponytails, earrings, necklaces, in all the details,” the chairwoman explained. “Choreography is another important detail” they watch out for. Through such passive policing of the distinction between general “ways of being” and the extremely concrete details of costume, choreography, and appearance that constitute evidence of “authentic cultural expression,” the committee establishes certain limits for the ways in which claims to cultural distinction can be made.31 Two things interest me in this negotiated conversation about detail and effect: First, the committee authorizes its judgments (and hence its power) through unarticulated “feelings” or “sentiments.” The legitimacy or “authenticity” of these “feelings” is, in turn, grounded in the committee member’s simultaneous (and rather privileged) access to both the specific traditions of the particular regions to which they have genealogical or family ties and the general authorizing history of the capital city, its state affective distinctions    215

apparatus, and cultural tradition. As the committee’s chairwoman explained to me when I asked what archival or photographic documents they used to judge historic authenticity: “What is authentic in my region I just know,” she told me (in a rather sharp voice). “Why? Because I was born there. I lived the customs of my land. . . . It is a sentiment that we are interpreting.” At the same time, she was careful to point out that her own instinctive feel for the authentic differed from the opinions of the dancers and delegates who live in that region in that they were not able to see their own “details” as part of the “agreeable impression” that their performance must make as part of the Guelaguetza. Second, I am interested in understanding how the shadow of the state invades and authorizes the genealogical and historical grounds from which these “sentiments” and claims to knowledge are authenticated or authorized. Here place enters as a palpable dimension of the sensuous context within which the grammar of culture is learned. Genealogical ties to places—articulated through the idiom of history, as well as race—legitimate both the Authenticity Committee’s claims to an intangible knowledge of the authentic and the performers’ presumed natural ability to re-present their culture as an unbroken inheritance from the past. Yet the material signs through which this bond with place and history is acknowledged reside in the plasticity of culture, clothes, and choreography. The ability to recognize that which is “authentic,” or truly from Oaxaca, is what binds both performers and “authenticators” as Oaxacans. The African-descended populations from Oaxaca’s coast and southern sierra serve as a limit case for this calculus of cultural recognition and territorial inclusion. For the Authenticity Committee, these “Afro-mestizos” from Oaxaca are “a race, not a Oaxacan ethnic group” (“una raza, no una etnia de Oaxaca”). This distinction is, in turn, itself grounded in the perception that “blacks” do not originate in—or have genealogical ties to—the territory of Oaxaca. Thus, in 1999 when the elected representative from the coast finally managed to convince the Authenticity Committee to allow a group of Afro-mestizos to dance, the Oaxacan press uniformly dismissed their presence as both unaesthetic and unintelligible in that it fell outside the bounds of that which could be assimilated as a “Oaxacan cultural sentiment.”32 For one journalist, the alien character of black music and dance remained so far removed from the sanctioned domain of “culture” that 216    deborah poole

their dance merely “provoked boredom among the spectators,” whereas another described the Afro-mestizos’ dance as a clear “break with the indigenous context and rhythm” of the Guelaguetza.33 Excluded politically and culturally from the Oaxacan polity, the Afro-mestizos represent that which cannot be rendered “intelligible” within the grammar of cultural distinction proper to the Guelaguetza, as Oaxaca’s official doctrine of cultural diversity. As the ultimate outsiders, their racial alterity offers Oaxacans no imaginable sentimental links to the forms of cultural distinction through which inclusion and belonging have been mapped. As the head of the Authenticity Committee commented to me in a 2002 interview: The public whistled at the [black] Chaquina dance because it was all the same, very monotonous. For that reason, it is not appealing [no tiene atractivo] and the public rejected it totally. We [on the Authenticity Committee] understand and that is why we don’t schedule those dances. It is not that we don’t value them [no es que las menospreciemos]. We do want them to continue preserving their dances, but we want them to do it in their own context [and] in their own origin place.34 (emphasis added) If the map of Oaxaca is one of diversity, it is a diversity that has been carefully crafted to reflect only two sides of the official dance of mestizaje—the indigenous and the Spaniard. the place of r ace

So what do these cultural practices and politics tell us about the place of race in the struggle for control of Oaxaca’s public spaces? For governor Ruíz and his party apparatus, the zócalo represented an opportunity for some creative budgetary maneuvers, carried out, perhaps, in the hopes of extracting some extra cash either for pri’s lagging presidential campaign or simply for their own pockets. In choosing to start his campaign of urban “renewal” in the zócalo, however, Ruíz also chose—no doubt intentionally —to take on the cultural elite of Oaxaca and to show them, as well as the federally controlled inah, that his government was intent on carrying out whatever infrastructural improvements they deemed necessary to advance the Oaxacan tourist economy and the political fortunes of the pri. Perhaps thinking of the successful internationally advertised mobilization some affective distinctions    217

years earlier against a proposal to open a Macdonald’s franchise in the zócalo, Ruíz no doubt hoped to make clear that his government would not tolerate any interference in its plans to “modernize” Oaxaca. Indeed, we can imagine that Ruíz acted in anticipation of the negative response to his plan for the zócalo when he recruited some of Oaxaca’s top opposition architects and intellectuals to do the “historic restoration”; when he framed the need for secrecy and unilateral government action as part of a declaration of Oaxacan autonomy vis-à-vis such federal agencies as the inah; and, finally, when he attached the word “diversity” to his proposal to convert the Palacio into a museum of science and technology. Through such idioms Ruíz invoked long-standing Oaxacan traditions of federalism, state sovereignty, and diversity. Yet these gestures failed all the same to assuage the profound resentment that was stirred up along with the centuries-old cobblestones and streetlights of Oaxaca’s central square. My suggestion is that they failed to do so, at least in part, because they broke so dramatically with the genealogical and racial languages through which previous instantiations of the Oaxacan state had manipulated affective ties to the place of Oaxaca. As we have seen, in Oaxaca the concept of race runs throughout the history of state projects to ground identity in place. As a hegemonic project, the revolutionary concept of mestizaje is best understood not by reference to the “facts” of racial mixture in Mexico, nor by the idea that early twentieth-century Mexican politicians and intellectuals actually aspired to construct a mixed-race nation. Rather, mestizaje was an ideal, a never-to-be accomplished possibility, an affective goal that operated quite independently of the messy racial and class realities of Mexico itself. It is in this guise as a belief or aspiration that revolutionary intellectuals and politicians, such as Gamio, Vasconcelos, and—to a lesser extent—Vásquez, hoped to use mestizaje as a weapon to undermine the local cultural allegiances of recalcitrant regional elites. Ruíz’s ill-fated intervention in Oaxaca’s zócalo can be read, on one level, as an attempt to resurrect this sense of mestizaje as nationalist and modernizing project, and to do so in a way that was clearly designed to remind people of his willingness not only to ignore democratic process but also to flaunt the impunity that underwrote his power (and partisan commitments).

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6 Graffiti mural in the arcades of the abandoned Palacio de Gobierno produced during the 2006 plantón, Oaxaca, June 2006. Photo: Deborah Poole.

Yet what is at stake in this struggle over Oaxaca’s public square goes beyond partisan politics and competing political styles. Ruíz’s zócalo project was driven by a vision of urban public space that has been “cleansed” of local political life—including its own state government. Not only did such a vision of Oaxaca’s historic center run counter to the history of Oaxaca and its distinctive cultural policies. It also proved to be remarkably short-lived. Less than one year after its inauguration, the newly remodeled zócalo was once again the site of an extensive and long-lasting plantón staged by the powerful Oaxacan teachers’ union. Although the plantón was originally inspired by salary and education-related demands, following the violent (yet ultimately unsuccessful) police intervention ordered by Ruíz on June 14, 2006, the teachers’ strike extended into a broad-based political movement demanding the ouster of the governor himself, as well as other members of the pri administration. (See fig. 6, above.) The plantón, which was initially attacked in the government-controlled press as a “contamination” of the city’s public spaces, continued and was strengthened by the formation of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of

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7 Graffitti showing Ulises Ruíz as a PRI political operative, or mapache (raccoon), stealing money from the Guelaguetza, June 28, 2006, Oaxaca. Photo: Deborah Poole.

Oaxaca (appo) and by the successful organization of a series of “Megamarchas” in which hundreds of thousands of Oaxacans from all over the state came to express their support for the demand to remove Ruíz from public office. Several factors contributed to the broad popular support among Oaxaca’s urban residents for the 2006 teacher’s strike. The first was the June 14 police intervention, and the second was government corruption. The third most often cited reason, however, was continuing anger over Ruíz’s destruction of Oaxaca’s zócalo and other culturally symbolic urban sites. While an assault on public space may not have been sufficient in and of itself to generate a demand for Ruíz’s impeachment, the zócalo and other symbolic urban parks and monuments figured prominently in the 2006 demonstrations and in the impassioned phone calls that soon swamped the newly formed opposition radio station, where Ruíz’s cultural policies were frequently denounced as contributing to the “privatization” of both the zócalo and the Guelaguetza. (See fig. 7, above.) The plantón continued until it was violently ousted by federal military police forces in November 2006. Among its more significant immediate 220    deborah poole

8 Poster for Megamarcha calling for Oaxaca’s Seven Cultural Regions to converge on the city of Oaxaca; July 2006. Author’s collection.

outcomes was the historic defeat handed to the pri by Oaxacan voters in the July 2006 presidential and national legislative elections. In the long run, popular outrage at Ruiz’s repression of the plantón and his earlier incursions into the historical zócalo have contributed to the strength of the appo, whose political demands include a call for an end to the “privatization of the Guelaguetza” and the formation of alternative and free “Popular Guelaguetzas,” such as those organized by the Oaxacan teacher’s union and the appo in July 2006, 2007, and 2008. Moreover, in turning their anger on Ruíz’s state, Oaxacans have effectively mobilized the entire repertoire of cultural imagery—the Seven Cultural Regions, women’s dress, Juárez, and the Guelaguetza—that had been sanctioned and, indeed, created by the Oaxacan state. (See figs. 8 and 9.) Even this brief survey of the 2006 plantón and demonstrations makes abundantly clear that the extraordinary affective attachments that fueled discontent with Ruíz’s zócalo project in 2005 derived at least some of their power from cultural pedagogies in which sentimental ties to the space of Oaxaca have been articulated as embodied and racial genealogies of place. Oaxacans’ responses to the perceived destruction of their zócalo, the debate affective distinctions    221

9 Protest poster from the fourth Megamarcha, showing Governor Ruíz dressed as a Tehuana (one of the cultural regions), July 2006. Photo: Deborah Poole.

concerning native and foreign trees, and the deference to Mexico City’s cultural authority in the construction of the Palacio museum must be read against the long history of Oaxacan state involvement with the politics of sentiment, nature, race, and space. In this respect, race has served in Oaxaca not only as a mechanism of spatial exclusion—as occurs daily with respect to Oaxaca’s rural indigenous population—but also as a genealogical discourse that grounds individuals’ emotions, ideals, and aspirations in a politically charged, and historically constructed, geography of “racial regions,” “cultural territories,” and “mestizo” urban squares. notes 1 2 3 4

Ulises Ruíz O., quoted in Humberto Torres R., “Será Museo del Palacio, Espacio de la Diversidad,” El Imparcial (Oaxaca), March 16, 2005. On the language of racial type informing this regional imagery, see Poole, “An Image of ‘Our Indian.’ ” Ruíz quoted in Torres R., “Será Museo del Palacio.” Guillermo Marín, “Sobre el Museo del Palacio de Gobierno,” El Imparcial (Oaxaca), March 23, 2005.

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5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13

14 15

16

17

18

“Inauguran en Oaxaca Museo del Palacio, Espacio de la Diversidad,” La Jornada, March 22, 2006. Reynaldo Bracamontes, “Es El Zócalo un caso de ilegalidad e impunidad,” Noticias (Oaxaca), Oct. 23, 2005, 1. Noticias (Oaxaca), Sept. 9, 2005. On federal control of public spaces, see Melé, “La Construcción jurídica de los centros históricos.” For a chronology of public mobilization against the cutting of trees and the zócalo project in general, see Ernest Reyes, “Remodelación forzada del Zócalo,” Contralínea (Oaxaca), 1, no. 11 (Aug. 2005): 12–16. On the trees, see Mark Stevenson, “Oaxaca Residents Battle Over Shade Trees,” Associated Press, May 22, 2005; also on the website of the Oaxaca Hotel group, www.oaxacainfo.com/ oaxaca/zocalo.htm (accessed May 10, 2008). “Artists Quit Controversial Oaxaca Project,” Associated Press, June 12, 2005; http://www.oaxacainfo.com/oaxaca/zocalo.htm (accessed June 1, 2006). On Oaxacan provincialism, see among others, Campbell, ed., Zapotec Renaissance; Holo, Oaxaca at the Crossroads; Martínez Vásquez, De la milpa oaxaqueña; Poole, “An Image of ‘Our Indian.’” On Juarez and Oaxacan federalism, see Hamnett, Juárez; and Guardino, The Time of Liberty. One critic, writing for the pro-government newspaper El Imparcial, suggested that a more appropriate use of the palace would be as a museum dedicated to Juárez and the period of liberal state and economic reform known as La Reforma; Marin, “Sobre el Museo.” XII Censo General de Población y Vivienda 2000. (Oaxaca. Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, 2000); hereafter cited as inegi. On ethnic and linguistic diversity in Oaxaca, see Barabas, Bartolomé, and Maldonado, eds., Los pueblos indígenas de Oaxaca. On poverty, see inegi; and Silvia Chavela Rivas, “Es Añeja la marginación municipal en Oaxaca,” Noticias (Oaxaca), March 31, 2005, 1. On indigenous politics in Oaxaca, see Hernández-Diaz, Los Reclamos de la identidad. For recent pronouncements of the Oaxacan guerrillas, see “Ulises Ruíz atenta contra la libertad: EPR,” Contralínea (Oaxaca) 1, 11 (Aug. 2005): 7–11. On political uses of culture in Oaxaca, see Campbell, Zapotec Renaissance. Diodoro Carrasco Altamirano, cited in “Presencia de Oaxaca en Paris: Oaxaca, principal nicho de la diversidad indígena de México,” Noticias (Oaxaca), Sept. 29, 1998, 5A. On Ramirez’s and Carrasco’s cultural policies, see Muñoz, “Explaining the Politics of Recognition of Ethnic Diversity and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Oaxaca, Mexico.” On neoliberal multiculturalism in Mexico and Latin America see, among others, Speed and Sierra, eds., Critical Perspectives on Human Rights and Multiculaffective distinctions    223

19

20

21 22

23

24

25

turalism in Neoliberal Latin America; and for Oaxaca, Martínez, “El Proceso de reforma constitucional en material indígena y la posición del estado de Oaxaca.” On the 1998 indigenous rights legislation, see Martínez, “El Proceso de reforma constitucional”; Muñoz, “La Política del reconocimiento en Oaxaca”; Recondo, “Usos y costumbres”; Sitton, “Autonomia indigena y la soberania nacional”; and Velasquez, El Nombramiento. On political violence in Oaxaca, see “Situación de los derechos humanos en Oaxaca,” VI Informe de la Red Oaxaqueña de Derechos Humanos, Jan. 20, 2006; http://www.rodh.org.mx/SPIP (accessed May 2008). On the sharp escalation of repression in the first fifteen months of Ruíz’s term, see, among others, “Van 10 muertos en el Sexenio,” Noticias (Oaxaca), Feb. 12, 2005; Ivan Rendon, “Suman en Oaxaca 24 Reos políticos,” Noticias (Oaxaca), Feb. 24, 2005; Reynaldo Bracamontes, “Violencia en Oaxaca,” Noticias (Oaxaca), Dec. 4, 2005; and Juan Balboa and Octavio Velez, “Matan a tiros a activisita del Sol Azteca en Oaxaca,” La Jornada, May 20, 2006. Claudio Lomnitz, “El Hábito y el monje,” Excelsior (Mexico, D.F.), June 29, 2006. Lomnitz’s editorial fails either to mention or to reflect on the “decency” of the 1,700 armed police forces and helicopter sent in by the Ruíz administration on June 14, 2006, to forcibly and violently evict the teachers from the zócalo. Similarly racialized discourses of “decency” and public immorality were routinely deployed to describe the unsanitary conditions and disruptions occasioned by the plantón in the pro-Ruíz newspaper El Imparcial. See, for example, “Genera toneladas de basura plantón masivo,” El Imparcial, May 23, 2006, 1; Humerto Torres R., “Convertido en macro tianguis al Centro Histórico,” El Imparcial, May 25, 2006; “Alerta ante posible ola de enfermedades,” El Imparcial, June 5, 2006; Yadira Sosa Cruz, “Continuye la cuarta semana de movilización magisterial,” El Imparcial, July 5, 2006, 1. Hale. “Does Multiculturalism Menace?” Gamio, Forjando Patria. On the Oaxacan sovereignty movement, see esp. Cervantes, La Revolución en Oaxaca. On the revolutionary period, see Martínez Vásquez, ed., La Revolución en Oaxaca, 1900–1930. For histories of this period, see Arellanes Meixueiro, Mutualismo y sindicalismo en Oaxaca, 1870–1930; Arellanes Meixueiro, Martínez Vásquez, and Ruis Cervantes, Oaxaca en el siglo XX; Martínez Vásquez, Historia de la educación en Oaxaca 1825–1930; Martínez Vásquez, La Revolución en Oaxaca, 1900–1930; and Sánchez Pereyra, Historia de la educación en Oaxaca (1926–1936). See Vásquez, Indios de Mexico. For Vázquez’s views on music, see esp. his Música popular y costumbres regionales del Estado de Oaxaca and “El Aspecto pedagógico del folklore.” Vasconcelos, La Raza cósmica.

224    deborah poole

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

On nineteenth-century Oaxacan celebrations of Zapotec and Mixtec indigenous culture, see Poole, “Siempremuertas.” On the visual iconography of racial types in Oaxaca, see Poole, “An Image of ‘Our Indian.’ ” “Argumento Escenificado del Homenaje Racial,” El Mercurio, April 20, 1932, 3. Circular del comite organizador, March 18, 1932. Archivo Histórico de la Municipalidad de Oaxaca. Carta circular de Policarpo T. Sánchez, Dec. 10, 1931. Archivo Histórico de la Municipalidad de Oaxaca. All citations are from interviews with members of the Authenticity Committee, conducted by the author in Oaxaca in 1998, 2003, and 2004. Rosy Ramales, “De Nuevo, la magia y el color de los dias cultivaron a propios y extraños,” Noticias (Oaxaca), July 25, 2000, 3. Jesús García, “Guelaguetza, muestra del valor que da Oaxaca a sus tradiciones,” Noticias (Oaxaca), July 25, 2000, 1A; Noticias (Oaxaca), July 26, 2000, 2. Margarita Toledo, interview with author, July 2002, Oaxaca de Juárez.

affective distinctions    225

Marking Remembrance Nation and Ecology in Two Riverbank Monuments in Kathmandu

Anne M. Rademacher

spaces designated as natural , whether in rural or urban settings, often function as sites for articulating national history and reinforcing national order. Particularly in moments of political volatility or perceived urgency, the overlapping contingencies of national identity and landscape history can become apparent through contests over the integrity of natural spaces.1 In Kathmandu, the capital city at the center of over a decade of political turmoil in Nepal,2 debates over how to restore the urban reaches of the Bagmati and Bishnumati Rivers are inflected with competing ideas about the Nepali nation. These debates make explicit the particular power of ecologically infused national imaginaries, while demonstrating their plurality and dynamism.3 This essay focuses on one particular debate among the many that circulate between state officials, environmental activists, and development agents over how best to restore the Bagmati and Bishnumati Rivers. It compares how two different monuments—one imagined and one extant—would represent Nepali national history and identity on an ecologically “restored” riverbank. I consider the national and natural imaginaries espoused

by the primary advocates of these monuments and explore how their proposed landscape markers would simultaneously salvage a river ecology and a nation perceived to be in crisis. In this essay, I am interested not only in the kinds of place attachments that underlie these advocates’ ideas of the nation, but also the natural order of things that is expected to follow once those place attachments are articulated and established. Since the legacy of the colonial era circulates both implicitly and explicitly in river restoration debates, I begin with an overview of Nepal’s nominal independence from colonial domination. The continuities of this legacy are made clearer in a subsequent comparison of the two riverbank monuments and an analysis of the competing perspectives of their primary advocates. While one monument both depends upon and would honor the international development networks that some critics have analyzed in terms of their resonance with colonial power, the other explicitly critiques Nepal’s experience with international development and calls instead for an independent, postdevelopment Nepal. Central to both advocates’ convictions, though, is the steadfast assertion of an interconnection between the ecological integrity of the riverscape and the ordering of Nepali national identity. national stor ies in an  uncolonized “postcolony”

Contemporary debates about reviving the ecological integrity of Kathmandu’s natural environment are also debates over the kinds of national stories that a restored urban landscape should evoke. Of particular importance for understanding these stories are Kathmandu’s geographic and symbolic centrality to the nation-state, Nepal’s nominal independence throughout the colonial period in South Asia, and the role that this independence has played in modern constructions of Nepali national identity. At the height of British rule on the Indian subcontinent, the government in the Kathmandu Valley officially portrayed Nepal as a refuge of Hindu territorial and cultural order. The contemporary persistence of official claims that Nepal is the world’s only Hindu kingdom underlines the enduring relevance of a national identity rooted in a sense of relative and absolute “purity.”4 230    anne m. r ademacher

Both the nation-state of Nepal and the designation of its capital city as Kathmandu are modern creations. Prior to 1769, when Prithvi Narayan Shah conquered a territory now called Nepal, the term “Nepal” referred only to the Kathmandu Valley itself—then called the Nepal Valley, Nep¯almandala, or, quite simply, Nepal.5 The everyday conflation of Kathmandu and Nepal persists; outside the valley, Kathmandu is regularly referred to as Nepal, and it is common for recent migrants to the city to recount a rural-to-urban journey by explaining why they “first came to Nepal.” The capital is the contemporary site of concentrated wealth and bureaucracy in the country, as well as its historical locus of power and authority. It is Nepal’s largest and most politically important city and one of the region’s fastest growing urban centers.6 An unprecedented wave of rural-to-urban migration during the 1990s brought increasing diversity to an expanding population in the valley, and by the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, this wave had grown to accommodate thousands of refugees fleeing war-related violence in the countryside. Prominent among the many contemporary debates about Kathmandu’s future are concerns about the environment, and the Bagmati and Bishnumati Rivers are among the urban features characterized in official and popular discourses as increasingly degraded.7 Worsening river conditions have motivated a variety of restoration initiatives, from both the state and international groups; these, in turn, have drawn steady criticism. Few dispute that the rivers are seriously degraded or that degradation has both scientific and cultural facets. Yet precisely why river quality continues to deteriorate and exactly how to reverse it are points of considerable contestation. The cultural politics of river restoration in Kathmandu derive their intensity, in part, from the past cultural and political importance of urban river territory. The Kathmandu reaches of the Bagmati and Bishnumati Rivers converge at Teku, in the heart of the old urban core. Teku is the mythological point of origin of the city, where the king Gunakamadeva (r. 980–98) founded Kathmandu in accordance with instructions he received in a vision. A v¯amshaval¯ı account, as translated by Daniel Wright, recounts: While this Raja was fasting and worshipping Mahalakshmi, the goddess appeared to him in a dream, and told him to found a city at the junction of the Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers. This was the sacred place where, marking remembr ance    231

in former times, Ne Muni had performed devotions and practiced austerities, and here was the image of Kanteswara devata. To this spot Indra and the other gods came daily, to visit Lokeswara and hear puranas recited. The new city was to be built in the shape of the kharg or sword of the Devi, and to be named Kantipur (later Kathmandu); and dealings to the amount of a lakh of rupees were to be transacted in it daily. The Raja, being thus directed, founded the city at an auspicious moment, and removed his court from Patan to Kantipur.8 The rivers at the heart of the city became, over time, rivers at the heart of the capital of the nation-state of Nepal. refuge and colonial power

To appreciate the stakes of contemporary river restoration debates, it is useful to briefly review the nature of colonial power in Nepal and the ways that it reproduced the nominally independent nation-state. Although the British never established full formal control in Nepal, colonial power had clear effects, and complicity and cooperation with the British went a long way toward reproducing state power. Nevertheless, the fact of independence has combined over time with narratives of bravery and defiance to form a fundamental theme in official constructions of Nepal’s national history and identity.9 After their conquest of the Nepal Valley and the unification of Nepal under Prithvi Narayan Shah, the Gorkhalis continued an expansion campaign that eventually led to clashes with the British East India Company and the Anglo-Gorkhali War.10 The war settlement outlined in the Treaty of Segauli (1816) reduced the territory of the defeated Gorkhali and instituted the presence of a British Resident in Kathmandu. The settlement did not, however, establish clear political domination by the British, a condition that might have been included had trade routes through Kathmandu not already declined in importance by the early nineteenth century. The apparent deterrence of formal colonial domination despite a blatant military defeat had the effect of strengthening and perpetuating an official narrative of locally perceived purity relative to colonized territory. As Mark Liechty has shown, Gorkhalis self-consciously thought of theirs as a 232    anne m. r ademacher

region distinct from, and ritually superior to, much of the land to the south, primarily because it remained “uncontaminated” by the Muslim and later British rule that dominated India.11 Precautions against the defilement of the valley translated to strict policies controlling the movements of merchants and imports. Most Europeans and Muslims were automatically excluded from entry, and those who were admitted were closely watched.12 Inhabitants of Kathmandu were encouraged to live self-sufficiently, wear locally produced cloth, and consume local goods, rather than risk contacts that might bring “contamination” to the valley. A simplistic accounting of local purity and extra-local impurity, however, fails to capture the nuances of Nepal’s relationship to colonial power in South Asia. By the time of Rana rule (1846–1951), for instance, Nepal’s utility as a potential source of labor for the British had increased dramatically.13 In the aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857, the British lost confidence in the loyalty of Indian soldiers and turned instead to the socalled Gurkha soldiers of Nepal’s hills.14 The Ranas facilitated a steady flow of Gurkhas in exchange for British allowance of their sovereignty.15 The deliberate cultivation of a singular Nepali identity by the state began after the fall of the Rana regime.16 Although certain private groups—both underground in Nepal and from exile in India—had been working for decades to foster a national consciousness, it was not until 1951 that the state began an official campaign to build a collective sense of Nepaliness, or Nepa-lı-pan.17 This effort relied on the theme of unity-in-diversity, and often invoked Nepal’s brave past of defiance and autonomy during the colonial period. development and colonial continuities

The fall of the Ranas corresponds roughly with the start of a postcolonial era on the subcontinent. In Nepal, this period witnessed the rise of the Panchayat system (1962–90),18 during which the nation-state and its ruling elite became increasingly dependent on bilateral and multilateral aid. Situated between India and China, Nepal occupied a strategic geographic position in the decades after 1951, receiving development assistance from countries on all sides of the cold war. Staggering sums entered the Nepali economy in the form of international aid, and the development industry flourished marking remembr ance    233

in the capital.19 Massive revenue inputs generated specific official policies and government bureaucracies to manage them, and the mostly urbanbased state apparatus grew exponentially as a result.20 Nanda Shrestha has estimated that during the Panchayat era, only 10 percent of aid actually reached the rural poor, while 30–40 percent went directly to the royal palace.21 Liechty suggests that the percentage of aid that benefited royalty and the elite was even higher in the post-Panchayat period, noting that by the mid-1990s, a full 70 percent of Nepal’s total annual budget went to running the national government, headquartered in Kathmandu.22 Despite deep public frustrations with the legacy of foreign aid and its influence in Nepal’s national development, Kathmandu witnessed an explosion of nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in the decade after the reinstatement of democracy in 1990.23 Those ngos were initially portrayed as the key to reorienting Nepal’s development industry toward better coverage, accountability, and autonomy, but at the same time they remained fully dependent on continued flows of foreign aid.24 A critical reading of the association between foreign aid and the Nepali state points to continuities between colonial forms of power and the post1951 experience of development. Contemporary debates about the proper role of foreign aid and foreign involvement in Nepal’s future therefore link to a much longer history of colonial influence and territorial sovereignty, both real and imagined, in Nepal. This essay now turns to one such contemporary debate, embodied in two riverside monuments. In this debate, alternative postures toward colonial and postcolonial power weave into competing visions of Nepal’s national past, its most appropriate future, and the reclamation of urban environmental vitality. national stor ies in natur al space:  two r iverb ank monuments

“In Memory of Nepali Service”: Imagining a United Nations Pillar In July of 1995, a group of current and former state ministers, influential scholars, and development professionals proposed that a park be built on the Bagmati riverside to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations. In its earliest formulation, the un Park plan called for a greenspace to replace sandy flats of exposed riverbed on the banks of both 234    anne m. r ademacher

Map 1 Sketch of un Park. The map depicts the planned un Park zone, which covers only the Bagmati River. Hence one river—the Bishnumati—is far to the east and not pictured. The Bagmati Bridge is also outside the park zone, and therefore not pictured. The spot for the imagined pillar was never formally specified and so is also not depicted. The map was drawn using the official un Park proposal map. Source: The un Park Development Committee, 2001.

the Bagmati and the Bishnumati. In addition to providing a recreational space, the project was intended to commemorate Nepal’s contributions as a member state to the United Nations. Part of the park’s stated purpose was “to mark respect for those Nepalese army, police, and civilians who have died in un peacekeeping endeavors.”25 In the early stages, park boundaries fluctuated, but by 1999 a master plan covered river corridors along much of the two rivers in Kathmandu.26 (See map 1, above.) From its inception in 1995 until 2004, however, the physical manifesta­ tion of the un Park went largely unrealized. Vegetation was planted along the rivers in the designated park area, cement edges were built on both sides of the river, and some migrants settled in the designated area were evicted or relocated, but a park was never fully built. Global festivities marking the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations came and went in marking remembr ance    235

the mid-1990s, but a lack of interested donors left Kathmandu’s un Park vision largely unfunded and unimplemented.27 It remained, however, a formidable and widely discussed proposal that, if given the needed funding, many considered capable of dramatically reshaping and in many ways restoring the high-visibility riverscape in the Teku-Thapatali area.28 Operating from an office in the Ministry of Housing and Physical Planning complex, the un Park Project employed a director, Laxman Shrestha, along with periodically active teams of consultants. The proposed layout of park components changed over time, usually in response to perceptions of donor interest. Facilities ranging from children’s play and picnic areas to parking lots and other public services were included in most versions of the park layout. One notable, but short-lived, feature of the un Park plan gives an explicit sense of how national identity was to be constructed and displayed in the riverside park setting. Referred to as “Mini Nepal,” this was an interactive exhibition of the myriad forms of ethnic and cultural diversity throughout Nepal—identities captured within Nepali national identity. Mini Nepal was intended to attract both Kathmanduites and international tourists, and Shrestha, the project director, explained with great enthusiasm that it was intended to represent “all of Nepal.” Mini Nepal, he told me, would display a “typical” house, staffed with people wearing “typical” dress and preparing “typical” foods, for every ethnic group in the country. He pointed to a variety of benefits that such a theme park could bestow; among these was an opportunity to educate the population of the Kathmandu Valley about their fellow nationals from other regions. “I myself would love to visit such a park,” he told me; “I would like to see a real Sherpa house, and a real Tharu house.”29 The education that one would glean in Mini Nepal, then, was cultural and national—a performance of the makeup of the nation and its unity-in-diversity, laid out in an urban park at the center of the capital city. Shrestha noted that “especially in times like these,” referring to the ongoing civil war, a project like Mini Nepal could “remind” Kathmandu residents of the social diversity beyond their valley. Implicit in his vision, though not explicitly stated, was the fact that situating Mini Nepal in the heart of the Kathmandu Valley and constructing it under the auspices of a un commemorative park would also reinforce the geographic and political dominance of Kathmandu in the history of Nepalese state-making. At the same time, it would restate the legitimacy of the ruling regime and its 236    anne m. r ademacher

predecessors that entered into membership in the United Nations in the first place.30 For Shrestha, such symbolism was positive: “As the center of Nepal,” he said, “we should have a natural place we can go to experience the whole country.” If that center could become a place with contemporary meaning, he told me, its ecological as well as its political health could be rescued and safeguarded. Like many other aspects of the un Park, however, the Mini Nepal theme park idea was abandoned when it failed to attract donor interest. In fact, there was just one element of the park vision that, to Shrestha’s mind, was an indispensable, defining element: a memorial pillar to honor the Nepali soldiers who had served and died in United Nations peacekeeping missions worldwide. The pillar would signify the park’s un affiliation, Shrestha explained, and in so doing would endow the park with a physical marker of Nepal’s contemporary global significance and its long legacy of interna­ tionally exhibited bravery. During an interview in the winter of 2002, Shrestha suggested that we take a walking tour of the proposed park area. From Thapatali, we walked briskly to the site where the proposed memorial pillar would one day, he told me, be built. There, in a confiding tone, Shrestha said that after many years of struggling to make the park vision a reality, he found himself willing to compromise on nearly every detail of the proposed layout and area—except this one. The memorial pillar was the single feature of the park upon which he could accept no compromise. After carefully describing the pillar’s imagined features, he rubbed his hands together for warmth against the winter cold and declared, as though to an audience of many, that the pillar must be built, “Nepa- lı- seba-  samjhanako la- gi” (in memory of Nepali service). It was this service to the international community that Shrestha saw as one of the greatest, most important features of modern Nepal—a marker of Nepaliness and a point of tremendous pride. He then explained that there was no more appropriate place to commemorate Nepali un peacekeepers than the banks of the Bagmati, where for centuries Nepal’s rulers have built temples and other memorials, making it the traditional site of Hindu life-cycle rituals. Then, in a rhetorical moment that brought his hopes for the un Park into the direct purview of riverscape ecology, Shrestha outlined the potential ecological benefits marking remembr ance    237

that he believed would follow even the most modest implementation of the park plan. The memorial pillar, he explained, would make an important contribution to river restoration because it would endow the banks of the Bagmati with contemporary meaning for the city’s modern, globally conscious population. The only way to cultivate a real sense of care and responsibility for the ecological condition of the rivers, he argued, was to draw Kathmandu’s populace to steward them by granting them a new relevance. A pillar honoring Nepal’s modern national identity and its place in an international community was, in his view, the most essential part of such an effort. The pillar was indirectly—but still fundamentally—ecological, insofar as it would reattract attention to the riverscape and in so doing act as a catalyst for river stewardship. After we returned from the proposed pillar site, Shrestha explained that the memorial pillar was more than just a feature of the un Park vision; it had become his personal commitment, to himself “and to Kathmandu.” He told me: “Perhaps this un Park will never receive the financial backing it requires, in which case I am willing to concede defeat. There is one thing that I cannot abandon, however. The pillar must be built. Even if I have to build it myself, the pillar must be built. Even if we do nothing else, we can do this.”31 Shrestha envisioned the un Park as a gathering place for citizens of Kathmandu as well as a site that would draw tourists; in this way, both Nepalis and the international community would be reminded of Nepal’s service and sacrifices, which extended far beyond the polity. Whenever the topic of funding arose in our conversations, however, the tone of Shrestha’s statements turned to anxiety and disappointment. Nepal’s assistance to other countries, he explained—whether providing peacekeepers to the un in the present or supplying the British with Gurkha soldiers in time past—was consistently ignored. “This is recognition that does not come easily to Nepal,” he said. Even as he sought to commemorate Nepal’s place in a global order of nation-states, then, he lamented having to fight to simply be noticed by donors, let alone to have his proposals carefully considered and financially supported. For Shrestha, the ecological health of the riverscape would improve only as cosmopolitan urbanites came to value what he saw as the river’s modern meaning. The key to cultivating this value would be to fashion a restored riverbank as a place where Nepalis were honored for their place 238    anne m. r ademacher

in, and contribution to, the global political order. Before this could happen, however, that global order had to “honor” Shrestha with a different sort of recognition—international development assistance. Participation in and entitlement to belong to the global arena were central to Shrestha’s idea of a modern Nepali national identity. By facilitating modern usage of the Bagmati riverbank, while still retaining its historical and ritual symbolism, his imagined un Park pillar marked both a present­ist, contemporary vitality and continuity with the past. The pillar would commemorate Nepali service to the international community, through which development assistance flowed and the nation-state was reproduced. This service was, for Shrestha, a paramount feature of modern Nepal—a point of pride and an important referent for national identity. Despite his frustrations over funding, he maintained an optimistic posture toward the international development community, and he waited for the day that funding would bring his imagined pillar, and the restored riverbank that would frame it, into being. In Memory of Defiance: The Bhim Sen Pillar By contrast, another pillar evoked both critiques of the entire international development community and calls to amplify a nationalist history inflected with pride in Nepal’s autonomy and independence. While Shrestha aspired to place a new pillar at the center of a restored Bagmati riverbank, a noted activist criticized the quiet displacement of an existing historic pillar. This activist was Huta Ram Baidya, a well-known and outspoken advocate for the preservation of what he describes as Kathmandu Valley’s cultural heritage. Over the past decade, Baidya’s views have been displayed prominently in public media, from Nepali- and English-language newspapers to Nepal Television and Internet websites.32 Baidya has explained river degradation through a complex critique of the international development community and the irresponsible actions of “outsiders,” often in ways that resonate with claims linking development and colonial power. Baidya’s narratives of what he calls the Bagmati Civilization focus in large part on linking international development interventions to a collective national amnesia. He argues that a distorted relationship between the Nepali state and foreign aid donors has created a climate in which development projects on the Bagmati and Bishnumati Rivers almost always result marking remembr ance    239

in both ecological and cultural destruction. Baidya’s critique of the international donor community and a complicit Nepali state contrasted sharply with Shrestha’s enthusiasm for international cooperation and Nepali service to a global community. In the first few weeks of my acquaintance with Baidya, late in 1997, our conversations focused almost exclusively on his anger about a particular pillar and its place on what was then a newly constructed bridge over the Bagmati River. The bridge had just been completed with donor assistance from India, replacing a former structure that was near collapse. The new bridge was larger and sturdier than its predecessor, but a particular feature gave it continuity with past architectural styles in the Kathmandu Valley. A large stone pillar, topped with a gleaming brass lion and secured in a stone base carved in the likeness of a tortoise, was placed at the bridge’s north end. Although majestic, its precise origin and age are impossible to determine for the passerby, as the pillar itself was unlabeled. Baidya found the pillar’s anonymity both significant and infuriating. He argued that the marker had been improperly relocated, and then left unlabeled, in order to deliberately obscure its origin. (See fig. 1.) That origin was linked to General Bhim Sen Thapa, leader of the Gorkhali army during the Anglo-Gorkhali War, and later prime minister of Nepal (1806–37). In both roles, Thapa’s defiance of British colonial authority is legendary. As an army general, he boldly encroached on British territories; as prime minister, he maintained a policy of isolation and nonengagement with foreigners of any kind, including the British Resident placed in Kathmandu as a requirement of the Treaty of Segauli. The pillar originally stood on a bridge over the Bagmati that was built during Thapa’s rule.33 Baidya claimed that the Bhim Sen Pillar, as it was called, was moved to the new Bagmati Bridge in violation of all existing archaeological laws, thus making it “archaeologically displaced.” He found it outrageous that there was no official acknowledgement of the pillar’s history and argued that without a plaque, the pillar’s historical significance would be lost—refashioned, and therefore co-opted, by the state and development powers that now employed the marker to decorate their own symbol of progress and power. In newspaper editorials and many personal conversations, Baidya called for the pillar to be labeled with its origin and original location. In a letter to the Kathmandu Post, he wrote, 240    anne m. r ademacher

1 A view of the Bhim Sen pillar on the Bagmati Bridge. Photo: Anne Rademacher.

“The pedestal deserves this honor. If [this is] not done, history will be distorted.”34 On this and many other river-related issues, Baidya tirelessly challenged the relationship between the state and the international development community. He emphasized Kathmandu’s haphazard contemporary history of urban planning in general, and planning on the rivers specifically, to directly link the dependent relationship between the Nepali state and foreign aid to Bagmati degradation. Baidya argued that restoration of the urban river system was possible only through autonomy from the international development community and with the creation of an accountable, truly democratic state. In detailing the ways that development projects damaged the landscape and riverscape, he also blamed the citizens of the Kathmandu Valley for allowing the transgressions in the first place. Baidya argued that all ecological damage in the capital should be understood as evidence that valley residents had forgotten their true history and identity and had consequently failed to protect the valley’s cultural and natural integrity. To demonstrate how development itself was a crucial culprit in urban environmental decay, Baidya pointed to specific river development projects and infrastructure. For instance, most bridges built during the 1990s marking remembr ance    241

were engineered according to the degraded morphology of the riverbed at the time of construction. Over time, the overharvesting of sand from the riverbeds to be used in cement and mortar for new building construction had channelized river flows and dramatically reduced the width of Kathmandu’s rivers. A primary aim of river restoration initiatives was to repair and raise the deeply channelized riverbed, thereby raising and widening river flows. However, every new bridge that was constructed in the degraded riverbed—each one a huge investment of development aid—seemed to render real riverbed restoration both more costly and less likely. Therefore, even as major river management plans like the Bagmati Basin Management Strategy identified raising the riverbeds as fundamental to restoration, actual official practices made achieving this goal both difficult and improbable.35 Furthermore, the sand extraction practices that drove riverbed morphological change were permitted to continue in an unregulated manner, implicating state failure to enforce existing extraction limits.36 Baidya thus pointed out that new state-approved and developmentsponsored bridge construction directly undermined the feasibility of river restoration itself, bringing into question state-development motives for river management. He argued that development interventions, in the form of infrastructure projects, spoke louder than the commitments to national history, cultural heritage, or ecological improvement that were written into planning documents, or espoused in official rhetoric. Baidya also criticized the territoriality of development, noting that donor relationships seemed to allot particular development objectives—or even parts of the city—to certain donors or countries. This territoriality was said to distract Kathmandu’s citizens from an active recognition that these were their spaces, built by their ancestors to be rightfully claimed by Kathmanduites as part of their heritage. In the late 1990s, Baidya cynically referred to the Patan Bridge area as “Tokyo Plaza,” since much of it had been built or restored with Japanese development assistance.37 He was particularly frustrated with the way that an eighteenth-century temple, the Gopal Mandir, was marked after a partial restoration: a plaque was affixed in a prominent temple entranceway declaring that the temple had been “Built through the joint efforts of the Nepal Association for the Welfare of the Blind, the Tokyo Helen Keller Association, and funds provided by 242    anne m. r ademacher

the Japan Ministry of Postal Services, and Voluntary Deposit for International Aid.” He remarked that, as far as he was concerned, the inscription essentially declared the temple, “Built by the Japanese.” He thus took great pride in showing me, a few weeks later, that someone had scrawled a correction in black marker on the white plaque, making it now read, “RE-Built through the joint efforts. . . .” The plaque itself remained in place, however, and was displayed far more prominently than an original inscription identifying the temple’s founding patrons. According to Baidya, Nepal’s state-development alliance produced an uneven, distorted relationship between international aid, its experts and planners, and the Nepalese public; this relationship was seen as a primary factor in cultural and historical amnesia. River degradation, he argued, was a natural consequence of this amnesia. Despite over a decade of democracy in Nepal, Baidya noted, development and environmental policy remained profoundly undemocratic, largely dominated by international donors and their interests. Baidya’s critique hinged in this case on a displaced, unattributed, and misremembered monument. It carried with it a suspicion of the international development community, its institutions, and the state’s relationship to them. For Baidya, an ecological-cultural crisis on the Bagmati riverscape was driven, in part, by development and its processes, and river reclamation would require not only a revival of national social memory but also state autonomy from donor influences and foreign “experts.” defiance and service: telling the proper past

By emphasizing the origins of the Bhim Sen Pillar, Baidya sought to strengthen contemporary Nepali national identity by delinking national history from international institutions. Shrestha, on the other hand, sought to underline and reinforce the global attributes of national identity by honoring Nepal’s ties to the international community. Through their commitment to two different kinds of riverside monuments, one advocate evoked nationalist messages of independence and self-sufficiency, while the other emphasized the place of contemporary Nepal in a global order of nations. Both believed that realizing their aspirations for the built environment would cultivate a sense among Kathmandu’s citizenry that the rivers had marking remembr ance    243

specific relevance for their lives, which was in turn expected to lead them to steward the rivers and restore them. Ecological revival was expected, in turn, to foster an affective tie between the citizens of Nepal and a strong Nepali state—a critical outcome in a political moment marked by extreme state volatility and contingency. These contrasting visions of the proper markers for a restored urban riverscape underline the ways that public history is continually retold in naturalcultural landscapes. They demonstrate how claims to place attachment are reinforced through claims to ecological order and environmental restoration. While the pillars in question in this case would archive particular national memories on the built landscape, the complementary environmental outcomes claimed by their advocates suggest overlapping national and ecological imaginaries in which identity is rooted in the mutual production of ideas of nature and ideas of nation. If memory work, as Aletta Norval suggests, is “always embedded in complex class, gender, and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and to what end,”38 then so too is the work of making the natural spaces within which memories are negotiated, revised, and revived. By fusing physical representational space with ideas of natural functionality, Shrestha and Baidya imagined riverscape pillars that were both referents for national identity and symbols of the ecological potential embedded within that identity. notes 1

2

As Aletta Norval points out, conceptions of nationhood are part of the myth of the state, and “new myths typically emerge during and as a result of periods of deep dislocation”; “Reconstructing National Identity and Renegotiating Memory,” 182. Between 1996 and 2006, the Nepali government was embroiled in a bloody conflict with fighters for the army of the Communist Party Nepal-Maoist. This “People’s War” had claimed over thirteen thousand lives by 2006. The latter period of the People’s War was marked by a series of national states of emergency, the first of which was declared in November 2001 after intense clashes between the Royal Nepal Army and Maoist fighters. On February 1, 2005, King Gyanendra seized direct power, which lasted until massive protests around the country led the king to reinstate Parliament in April 2006. See Hutt, Himalayan People’s War; Thapa, “The Maobadi of Nepal.”

244    anne m. r ademacher

Recent attention to the idea of “ecological nationalism” in South Asia is best captured by K. Sivaramakrishnan and Gunnel Cederlof in their “Introduction: Ecological Nationalisms: Claiming Nature for Making History,” in Cederlof and Sivaramakrishnan, eds., Ecological Nationalisms. There the authors define ecological nationalism as “a condition where both cosmopolitan and nativist versions of nature devotion converge and express themselves as a form of nation-pride in order to become part of processes legitimizing and consolidating a nation. This concept . . . links cultural and political aspirations with programs of nature conservation or environmental protection, while noting their expression in, and through, a rhetoric of rights that includes civil, human, and intellectual property rights” (6). 4 The monarchy was officially stripped of its power in a parliamentary declaration in May 2006, but the legacy of “kingdom” in Nepal remains critical for understanding the historical and contemporary cultural idea of the state. -  5 Nepalmandala means “circle of the country of Nepal”; see Slusser, Nepal Mandala. Michael Hutt defines a mandala as a “ritual diagram with a principal deity at its center and the other divinities of this deity’s retinue arranged geometrically around it. The mandala is the model for the design of Nepal’s square pagoda temples and also, though less obviously, for the layout of the royal cities of the Valley during the Malla period.” The name Nepal is linked to the Newars, the valley’s oldest continuous inhabitants; one interpretation of the name is that it combines the Tibeto-Burman word ne (cattle) with the Sanskrit pala, which means guardians. Ne could also reference a mythical saint. Hutt, Nepal, 229, 14. 6 In the mid-1990s the urban population growth rate was 6.5 percent, or double the average for the region. This growth rate continued into the early twentyfirst century, with the 2001 census reporting a Kathmandu growth rate of 6 percent and a 2004 figure of 6.5 percent. Nepali Times no. 178, Jan. 2004. 7 River conditions in Kathmandu have been linked to many interconnected factors. Comprehensive policy and development studies such as that by Stanley International, The Bagmati Basin Water Management Strategy and Investment Plan, identify the main causes of river pollution inside the urban area as the discharge of untreated sewage and the widespread dumping of solid waste into the rivers and on their banks. Excessive sand mining in riverbeds and banks, which supplies mortar and cement materials to the city’s construction industry, is blamed for severe morphological and flow-pattern changes. In addition to these factors, most policy and development discussions of river degradation identify human encroachment on the banks, floodplains, and riverbeds exposed by falling water levels as an element of the degradation process. Likewise, deteriorating templescapes that line both rivers in their urban reaches are sometimes included in characterizations of river degradation. 3

marking remembr ance    245

8

9 10

11

12

13

14 15 16

Wright, History of Nepal, 154. The va- mshavalı-  is “a genealogical and historical text detailing the succession and pious acts of kings. These are the primary sources for the reconstruction of Nepal’s early history”; Hutt, Nepal, 233. See Onta, “Ambivalence Denied” and “Creating a Brave Nepali Nation in British India.” In the years following the initial unification under Prithvi Narayan Shah, Shah rulers referred to the territory under their control as Gorkhali territory, Gorkha, or “The Entire Possessions of the Gorkha King.” It was not until 1930 that the region was officially and exclusively referred to as Nepal. The Anglo-Gorkhali War (1814–16) was fought over the boundaries of Nepal; General Bhimsen Thapa’s encroachments into Company land provoked a formidable response, and the British easily defeated Thapa’s army. Liechty, “Selective Exclusion.” As Richard Burghart notes, Prithvi Narayan Shah “claimed that the Hindu rulers and nobles of the plains had given themselves up to the enjoyment of pleasure so that they no longer possessed the ability to preserve their independence from the British. . . . Prithvi Narayan thought that the kingdom of Gorkha could become a ‘true Hindustan’ (asa-l Hindusta-n)”; “The Formation of the Concept of Nation-State in Nepal,” 115–16. Liechty, “Selective Exclusion,” 12. It is also important to note, as Liechty does, that Nepali Buddhists presented a sometimes-complex dilemma, as some, such as Tamangs, were classified as beef-eaters. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, Tamangs were prohibited from entering the valley. In 1846, Jung Bahadur Kanuwar murdered nearly all of his political competitors in the Kot Massacre. Jung Bahadur retained control until he died in 1877; during the course of his rule he set up a system of hereditary Rana prime ministership in which the Shah kings, although still on the throne, acted in practice as figureheads of state. The title of Rana invoked military power and royalty. Until 1945, the prime ministers of Nepal were all nephews of Jung Bahadur. A close alignment with the British characterizes the Rana Era; the Ranas sent Nepalese soldiers to aid the British in 1857 and allowed recruitment of Gurkha soldiers inside Nepal from 1887 onward (recruitment had taken place outside Nepal from 1815). With this exception, isolationist policies were strictly enforced, and most of the enormous tax revenues amassed by the government were put to personal rather than state use. Elaborate palaces, high courtly culture, and an expanded military characterized Rana rule. Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, 96. Liechty “Selective Exclusion,” 9; see also English, “Himalayan State Formation and the Impact of British Rule in the Nineteenth Century.” In November 1950, King Tribhuvan, who had been kept as a virtually powerless figurehead by the Rana prime minister, fled Kathmandu and sought political asylum. The move precipitated the demise of the Rana regime, and by

246    anne m. r ademacher

17

18

19

20 21 22 23 24

February 1951 King Tribhuvan returned as ruler. The political instability that followed delayed elections for a constituent assembly. On the groups fostering national consciousness, see Onta, “Creating a Brave Nepali Nation in British India”; James Fisher, Living Martyrs. A nation-building campaign in the most classic Western sense was launched by King Mahendra after his succession in 1955: official claims to a singular, unified, unique Nepali identity were made to officially challenge and counter the idea of multiple political parties. Nepali was declared the official national language, a national dress and anthem were established, and ideas of a Hindu kingdom—the only Hindu kingdom in the world—with the political autonomy of a nation-state were vigorously promoted. When Tribhuvan’s son Mahendra became king, Nepal began to establish important international ties, including diplomatic links with the United States and contacts with China. Nepal also became a member state of the United Nations. By 1959, King Mahendra proclaimed that free elections would be held, which resulted in an overwhelming victory for the Congress Party. After an outbreak of violence in Gorkha, Mahendra invoked emergency powers, dismissed the elected prime minister, Bisheswor Prasad Koirala, and arrested elected members of Parliament and the cabinet. Mahendra announced that the democratic experiment had failed and replaced it with his idea of a democratic system “more suited to the needs of Nepalis.” His Panchayat constitution, which vested nearly all power in the hands of the king, was introduced in December 1962. In her “Comments,” in Udaya-Himalaya Network, eds., Aid in Nepal’s Development: How Necessary? Proceedings from a Panel Debate Organized by UdayaHimalaya Network (Kathmandu: Udaya-Himalaya Network, 1992) Meena Acharya demonstrates that foreign aid as a percentage of development expenditure rose steadily from the First Five-Year Plan (1956–61) through the Fourth FiveYear Plan (1970–75). It then rose more sharply from the mid-1970s through 1990, the end of the Seventh Plan and the point at which democracy was reinstated. By 1990–91 the outstanding external debt was nrs.46 billion, or 46 percent of estimated gdp. By 1997, well over half of the government’s budget came from foreign aid, according to Dixit, “Foreign Aid in Nepal,” 175. This followed the trend set in the 1970s and 1980s in which Nepal maintained one of the highest per capita levels of foreign aid in the world, as demonstrated by Seddon, Nepal. Fujikura, “Technologies of Improvement, Locations of Culture.” Shrestha, Landlessness and Migration in Nepal, 18. Liechty, Suitably Modern, 48. Tiwari, “Planning, Never without Aid.” See Rademacher and Tamang, Democracy, Development, and ngos in Nepal. marking remembr ance    247

25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38

Cosmos Engineering Services, Final Report in Preparation of Conservation and Development Master Plan for Bagmati, Bishnumati-Dhobikhola Corridor, xi. The study area extended about 50 meters on either side of the rivers in each corridor. See ibid., xi. Through its government affiliation with the Ministry of Housing and Physical Planning, the un Park Development Committee, also called the BagmatiBishnumati Conservation Program, has managed to obtain some funding from the government—enough to keep the project afloat, but never enough to implement more than the most basic elements of its overall management plan. There was opposition to the proposal, however, captured in press pieces such as Sailash Gongol, “ Un-parking the un Park,” The Kathmandu Post, Sept. 29, 1996, which predicts, among other things, that the cemented edges that featured in the park plan would cause a “bottleneck” along the rivers and lead to flooding. See also “Disaster Unpreparedness,” Nepali Times no. 104, July 26–Aug. 1, 2002), in which un Park area flooding is reported. Field notes, interview with Laxman Shrestha, Kathmandu, Dec. 5, 2001. See note 18 to this essay. Field notes, interview with Laxman Shrestha, Kathmandu, Jan. 8, 2002. Baidya is perhaps best known for his writings on the “Bagmati Civilization.” See Rademacher, “Culturing Urban Ecology,” chap. 8. Wright, History of Nepal, 15, 264. Huta Ram Baidya, “Suggestion,” Kathmandu Post, Jan. 29, 1996. The Bagmati Basin Water Management Strategy was the main planning document of the Bagmati Basin Water Management Strategy and Investment Program. The findings of this study were released in 1994 with assistance from the Japanese Grant Fund and the World Bank, in collaboration with the Nepali Ministry of Health and Physical Planning, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the consultant group Stanley International. There are several cases in point in Kathmandu. Sand excavation is blamed for the sinking of the Thapatali Bridge connecting Patan and Kathmandu in September 1991, as well as the Sobha Bhagawati (on the Bishnumati) and Shankhamul (Bagmati River) bridges that collapsed earlier. When each of these bridges was replaced, they were constructed to the specifications of the degraded riverbed. See also “Nine Bridges on the Verge of Collapse,” Daily News Summary 3, no. 241 (Dec. 31, 1998). Japan was Nepal’s most important donor at this time. Norval, “Reconstructing National Identity and Renegotiating Memory,”187.

248    anne m. r ademacher

Saving Rio’s “Cradle of Samba” Outlaw Uprisings, Racial Tourism, and the Progressive State in Brazil

Paul Amar

advocates for racial justice can make little progress when forced to choose between political alternatives that do no more than prop up the same status quo in different ways. For example, U.S. political culture and available public discourses push activists and policy makers to choose between agendas of “racial blindness” or “racial essentialism.” The former ignores race, racism, and their historical and social formations, and proposes individualistic or economic remedies in place of collective justice and affirmative approaches. The latter purges race-centered histories of contradiction and complexity to naturalize segregation or celebrate identity. Either agenda can leave unchallenged the powers that produce, discipline, police, institutionalize, and hierarchically order racialized bodies, spaces, and histories. Brazil’s history of racial injustice is different from that of the United States, as is the nature of progressive politics in that country. In Brazil, a new progressive coalition has emerged as a bold force that is both distinct from the global “New Left” of the 1960s and 1970s and much stronger than any compa­rable political force in the United States. As one of the success stories of what

1 The governor of Rio, progressive leader Benedita da Silva, campaigns in 2002. Source: Globo News, 2002. Printed with permission.

Sonia Alvarez (1999) has called the Latin American “ngo boom,” today’s Brazilian left has been strengthened by struggles against military dictatorship in the 1970s, reaffirmed by impeaching a corrupt president in 1992, revitalized by feminist, ecological, black, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender social movements, pushed by mass movements against landlessness and homelessness, enhanced by leftist factions of religious groups that would be politically conservative in other countries, driven by movements against both police and drug-trafficker violence, and now inspired by regional trends against neoliberalism, privatization, and U.S. hegemony. (See fig. 1, above.) But until recently, Brazil’s postdictatorship left has been sandwiched between two racialized justice agendas—one, exclusively concerned with security questions, the other, focusing on the power of black culture to redeem and integrate. Should activists and policy makers “rescue” black communities by advocating police action to crush trafficker organizations, punish and incarcerate criminals, and secure favelas (Brazilian Portuguese for shantytown communities or “slums”), so that the poor can be integrated into state services and economic developments? Or should activists and policy makers ignore violence, be “soft on crime,” and instead celebrate the contributions of Afro-Brazilians to national heritage, offering cultural 250    paul amar

and music training to slum residents, and marketing racially identified communities and commodities to global tourists? Certain black community and state-level leaders of Brazil’s political left have grown tired of choosing between agendas of security or samba. They know the limitations of these hegemonic forms. Security politics claims to ignore race while turning black communities into zones of unending police and trafficker warfare, racketeering, and impunity. And samba politics, once the hallmark of the authoritarian Estado Novo (new state) of the 1930s and now the favorite of some ngos and left-liberal policy makers, tends to celebrate race while favoring small-scale entrepreneurship and photo opportunities rather than any structural changes in the economic, state, or legal spheres. These leaders understand that both sets of policy options reproduce the myths of the racial nature of historical and social inequality, providing “cover stories” for state violence and continuing processes of social and political disenfranchisement. This essay analyzes the police-security and samba-tourism projects that have defined the parameters of progressive governance in the neoliberal era and reconfigured the racial formations of Brazil’s unique modernity. I pre­ sent my research on efforts to remake and market an urban slum referred to as Rio’s “cradle of samba” and begin by taking the reader to the state of Rio de Janeiro in September 2002, a unique moment, when Rio was governed for the first time by a black woman, Benedita da Silva, born and politically forged in a local favela. Da Silva headed a government of visionary new leftists and movement leaders who wanted to free politics from the securityor-samba trap. I will trace how a much misinterpreted trafficker rebellion crippled this innovative government, forcing policy makers to return to a neoliberal agenda defined by police-militarization and samba-celebration projects that facilitate the racialization of violence and the fetishization of national history in urban heritage spaces. With Benedita da Silva’s electoral defeat in October 2002, more innovative projects for racial justice were remarginalized, though not forgotten. br azil’s september 11th

On September 11, 2002, trafficker organizations and prisoner networks, referred to popularly as the “parallel power,” or “shadow state,” initiated a set of uprisings in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.1 In coordination with corrupt saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    251

prison guards and militarized police officers, inmates in Bangu Penitentiaries I and III burst through doors that bribed guards had left opened. The inmates wreaked havoc on the facilities and hung sheets painted with slogans demanding full human rights and better prison conditions. Claiming to stand in solidarity with the disenfranchised working classes of Brazil, the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), one of the orchestrating trafficker organizations, issued a manifesto protesting “the arbitrary treatment suffered by the prisoners of Bangu I at the hands of the Shock Battalions [Brazil’s swat teams] and the whole state. They do not enjoy even the minimum of human and legal rights.”2 The rebels proclaimed sympathy with the actions of the militant group al-Qaeda, interpreting the attack on the World Trade Center exactly one year earlier as a strike against a repressive world system. But less radical motives also drove the rebellion. Da Silva’s progressive government had launched a campaign against corruption in the police and prison system and had begun shuffling inmate trafficker leaders and corrupt guards and policemen, in order to break up their networks and protection rackets. During the previous month, an exposé had revealed that Militarized Police (Policia Militar, or pm)3 in Bangu prison had actually printed up and distributed a price list specifying how much (between R$200–$400) a prisoner would be charged if he needed to secure a gun, cell phone, or temporary release, or wished to have the guards organize a catered birthday party for him. Entrepreneurial guards and cops had developed a crafty practice of counting bodies in cells, rather than verifying prisoner identities and presence. Guards could say they were “doing their jobs” while allowing children, women, and homeless people to be substituted in the cells so inmates could “run errands,” or attend meetings or soccer matches, or access money or drugs on the outside.4 (See fig. 2.) Although prison uprisings with Attica-like political declarations are regular occurrences in Brazil, this one was unique in its ability to coordinate cells of violence throughout Greater Rio and draw on national-scale cartel support. This uprising triggered tactical collaboration among “gangs” (militarized, urban narco-transshipment organizations known in Brazilian Portuguese as comandos) that usually saw each other as blood rivals. This uprising brought together comando groups including the Red Command, the Friends of Friends, and the Third Command, and even São Paulo’s First 252    paul amar

2 The Comando Vermelho leader Fernandinho Beira-Mar is shuffled between prisons in 2002. Source: Globo News, 2002. Printed with permission.

Command of the Capital. (The prison rebellion and street war in São Paulo that fascinated the international media four years later, in May 2006, was led by the First Command of the Capital and replayed many of these themes.) Rio’s 2002 Bangu prison rebellion spread to other prisons, then to urban favela neighborhoods as comandos mobilized their neighborhood enforcers. The rebellion then spread to the state apparatus as prison-guard unions, who had gone on strike just four months before, threatened to strike again.5 On September 30, the comandos, in a show of force, sent messages to the press and media that Rio’s business leaders and government would need to recognize and negotiate with them. To flex their muscle, they demanded that all businesses close in the beach zones and international tourism meccas of Copacabana and Ipanema. The comandos’ orders were obeyed. On a day that came to be called “Black Monday,” stores, shops, and restaurants barricaded themselves. And although no mass violence took place, residents and tourists locked themselves in, terrorized by this dramatic display of the power of organized crime.6 The public was reminded that criminal protection rackets provided “governance” in much of the city and could, at will, suspend the rule of law in even its most privileged quarters. The saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    253

final blow to the government of Benedita da Silva came when the federal government sent in the national military, against her wishes, on the eve of the October elections to reoccupy the city with more than forty thousand troops—more than those deployed during the un Earth Summit of 1992 or even during the military coup in the 1960s. The armed forces claimed that the actions of organized crime had necessitated this move in order to “restore the principle of authority.”7 Did this revolt represent an uprising of the “wretched of the Earth,” mobilizing as a popular front for emancipation? On the contrary, evidence suggests that this politically timed violence represented a show of force by what I analyze elsewhere as a “para-statal order” that emerged at the end of the dictatorship in the 1980s and has since only flourished and expanded in the climate of privatization, impunity, and deregulation. In this regard, I follow the argument of Alba Zaluar, who stated, “The illegal drug trade is integral to the character of Brazilian democracy, as much as threatened by it.”8 Corrupt police, comando leaders, and paramilitary vigilantes did not want to submit to the reformist justice and security agenda launched by the agencies of the state captured by the progressive coalition. reform in question

For decades, Brazil’s prisons have served as the command centers of the comandos. Neoliberal privatization policies and crime-war militarization have helped regularize this paragovernmental role for prisons. Low-paid, entrepreneurial prison guards working in overpopulated and understaffed facilities have often given in to the temptation to profit from rather than repress criminal entrepreneurs. Prison employees like Bangu’s notoriously flamboyant guard Marcus Gavião, nicknamed “Playboy,” worked to coordinate communications, smuggle cell phones and arms, and maintain links between arrested comando leaders confined to different prisons.9 The neoliberal state closed or privatized many schools, hospitals, and job-creation programs. And in their place, some very illiberal institutions, the prisons and jails, not the free market, have emerged as the regulatory apparatuses for much of society. Prisons have become the universities of the criminal economy, the command centers of social militarization, and nodal points where police, prison guard, and gang rivalries and relations are worked 254    paul amar

out. These functions have become so normalized and institutionalized that it hardly makes sense to call them corruption, although their norms and agendas stand diametrically opposed to the projects of legality, citizenship, and development that concern the more visible spheres of the elected and policy-making state. Enrique Desmond Arias has provided a sophisticated network analysis of how state, civic, and criminal actors share information, plan activities, and minimize danger by mobilizing proxies and flexible modes of mediation that minimize visibility while maximizing collaboration and impunity.10 Paradoxically, from the standpoint of these powerful paragovernmental networks, it is the statist, public agenda of the new progressive coalition with its emphasis on making linkages between state and crime visible that seems like “perversion” or “corruption.” At the start of September 2002, with national and local elections less than a month away, and with a unique government of bold leftists and reformists in power in the state of Rio de Janeiro, comandos as well as corrupt and militarized factions within the state were feeling nervous. Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known simply as “Lula,” seemed unstoppable as the center-left candidate for president and he did go on to win a sweeping victory. Although his power base was among the trade unions of São Paulo, Lula did not stand against free-market ideologies and had earned some acceptance among national and international financial elites. But Rio’s brand of leftism—uniting community organizations, the black movement, evangelical churches, anti-neoliberal forces, communist party elements, bohemians, and social movements against dictatorship and corruption—was in some ways more threatening to the status quo and to the paragovernmental “security state” than Lula’s syndicate-based nationalism, which would take a few years to sort out how it would articulate coherent racial, religious, security, and social justice policies. By 2002, Rio’s progressive state government was no longer willing to accept the violent order of things that orbited around prisons. It did not want to continue the game in which the poor, nonwhite areas of the megacity were left to be controlled by armed rivalries between comando units and Militarized Police battalions. They refused to accept the continued use of working-class communities as staging grounds for transshipments of cocaine and arms.11 Rio’s government wanted to bring the state back in, to extend the rule of law and the rights of the citizen, and to sever the links saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    255

between comandos and corrupt police. But their breed of reform proved hard to articulate in national and international public discourse. “Reform” had become such a confusing proposition. On one side, when investors cried for reform, they meant a neoliberal push for more privatization. On another, when the press called for reform, they usually meant getting tough on crime, advocating more hard-line police tactics, surveillance of public space, and restriction of liberties in the war on crime. But an alternative coalition of community and progressive leaders had promised to take Rio on a path to a different kind of reform. Benedita da Silva, elected vice governor of Rio in 1998, ascended to the governor’s office in October 2001 when Governor Anthony Garotinho resigned to run unsuccessfully for president of the republic. By 2002, Bene­ dita, then the head official representing left and progressive parties in the state, dared to face down massive police corruption and brutality while simultaneously going after organized crime and the comandos and their stranglehold on black favelas. Even more daringly, she and her security czars, Luiz Eduardo Soares and, subsequently, Roberto Aguiar, had for the past four years developed policies that sought to rein in the protection racketeers, elite development speculators, machine politicians, and absentee landowners, all of whom fed off the power of corrupt police and traffickers. As Mercedes Hinton asks, “If elected officials often got away with stealing millions, what was to deter a police officer earning a pittance from income supplementing through whatever means were available?”12 From the start, Soares’s policies met with opposition from the comandos as well as the state security establishment.13 Just a few months before the prison uprising, inmate comando leaders had ordered the assassination of Rio’s secretary of human rights. The targeting was designed as a protest against the new government policies for ridding prison cells of communications paraphernalia that allowed inmates to network with each other and control organized crime from inside. This cleanup was proclaimed a human rights abuse by the traffickers.14 Between 1998 and 2002, da Silva and her public-security team had refused to rely upon racist language and militarized discourses that proclaimed a need for “war” on slums and delinquent youth in the name of saving Rio’s civilization of conviviality, cordiality, and supposed racial integration. Instead of pursuing racist militarism and permitting arms trafficking, protec256    paul amar

tion racketeering, and bribe-trading to cement relationships between some police, traffickers, and local officials, da Silva’s government had begun the task of making the nation’s metadiscourses of racial historiography and urban social conflict speak to each other—that is, her team began to make policies based on an analysis of racial exclusion which linked that exclusion to problems of corruption and militarization in the criminal justice sector and the privatized state. They refused the tradition of linking crime and violence to the degraded moral-cultural character and/or marginal socioeconomic status of black Brazilians themselves. Although the Federal Police in late September 2002 belatedly opened an investigation into possible political machinations behind the timing of the prison revolts and comando threats, and da Silva launched a last-minute R$130 million Integrated Security-Commercial network to protect local businesses and public spaces, it was too late.15 The trafficker revolt and the powerlessness or complicity of police and prison guards broke the will of Rio’s voters, who on October 1st voted da Silva out and replaced her with a corruption-friendly evangelical conservative populist, Rosinha Garotinho, the wife of Benedita’s former boss, Anthony Garotinho. This loss ended—for the moment—Rio’s historic experiment with courageous, progressive reform and antiracism. With the election of a conservative governor and subsequent reelection of a conservative mayor, Rio de Janeiro’s public institutions once again focused their energies on a more typical priority—restabilizing patterns of denial. The city and state returned to investing in making its denial concrete, in urban landscapes and development projects that reevoked and celebrated Brazil’s heritage of racialized culture and interracial conviviality. Simultaneously, however, they resecured the urban borders that segregated predominantly black and mixed-race areas from upper-middle-class settlements, and abandoned efforts to root out police impunity and comando complicity in governance. This crime rebellion of 2002 reflected the stakes and strategies of a crucial battle over the deconstitution or reconstitution of the neoliberal state and its hegemonic organizing ideologies. However, this spectacle also exposed strange forms of complicity among the organizers of state and non-state violence and triggered resistance from broad sectors of elites, comandos, police, and the public. In order to explore these developments, this essay will leave the scene of the 2002 events and explore “progressive” state projects in a saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    257

more geographically marginal favela, Serrinha, where the state has launched a very visible model project that liberates markets and opens spaces for cultural-economic development and the promotion of tourism. Serrinha has also served as a space where new racial and militarized agendas of the police war on drug trafficking have been tested and deployed in the most deadly of patterns. rescuing samb a

The Favela-Bairro Project was developed and launched by the Inter-American Development Bank (idb, the Latin-American branch of the World Bank) in the early and mid-1990s, in association with Brazilian sociologists and municipal leaders interested in rationalizing Rio’s slums and making them accessible to development.16 The project aims to restore municipal security through rescuing national history, particularly through its model project, Saving the Cradle of Samba in Serrinha, one of Rio’s most black-identified, culturally rich shantytowns. Serrinha is, not coincidentally, a crucial policetrafficker battleground and a strategic node of political party clientelism and vote-mobilizing in the working-class quarters of Rio. Crystallizing the dominant mode of governance in Brazil—which until recently avoided facing the realities of spatial resegregation and violent corruption while it elaborated projects that celebrate and racialize national history and sell it through the global tourism economy—Serrinha’s Favela-Bairro Project is a useful site for interrogating “business as usual” in neoliberal Brazil. (See fig. 3.) Serrinha is located in the northwest of the city of Rio de Janeiro, in the borough of Madureira. This vast zone of slums and lower-middle-class suburbs serves Rio as a secondary node of commerce, Afro-Brazilian cultural production, retail shopping, and residential settlement.17 The favela of Serrinha is a small but nationally renowned and culturally significant settlement that occupies a hillside on the north of the main thoroughfare of Madureira. Serrinha appears in the mappings of public imagination for many reasons. It is where the first “modern” government-backed samba school (Império Serrano) was founded in the 1930s, during the populist modernizing regime of Getúlio Vargas. Serrinha was also home to many black leaders of the port workers union that, given their strategic position on the docks from which Brazil accessed the world economy, successfully 258    paul amar

3 Photo opportunity for favela children wearing Favela-Bairro T-shirts. Source: Municipal Government of Rio de Janeiro, 1999.

fought for labor rights and then against racial discrimination during the first half of the twentieth century. Serrinha is also where many traditional Bantu religious and cultural practices, such as Umbanda and Jôngo, have survived in a supposedly pure form. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Serrinha was a focal point of Madureira’s internal tourism and Afro-cultural “parallel economy,” serving as a pilgrimage site for white Brazilian and international devotees of Afro-Brazilian spirituality, dance, and culture.18 According to the old guard of Império Serrano, Serrinha was the place where the white Portuguese immigrant Carmen Miranda came to learn how to samba. But since the 1980s, Serrinha has become a node in another set of racialized, transnational economic and cultural formations: cocaine transship­ ment. The wider zone of Madureira has become a distribution hub and Rio’s most violent borough. In this contemporary context the Brazilian and idb experts who designed the Favela-Bairro Project wanted to take Serrinha back to its “golden age,” while using it to show the world how an Afro-Brazilian shantytown slum can be integrated into the municipal fabric. The project for Serrinha thus elaborated an entrepreneurial model for improving infrastructure, marketing racial-cultural heritage, and reinstating the image of saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    259

“racial democracy” and black cordiality—Rio’s unique model of racial and global integration. Favela-Bairro aimed to roll back the forces which during the past three decades had dismantled the favelas’ previous integrative and cultural functions. During the 1970s and 1980s, two shifts eradicated the viability of favela integration into public life in Serrinha and similar settlements: first, the spread of drug and arms trafficking among the dispossessed sectors in an age of economic austerity; and, second, the police’s turn from battling dissent against the dictatorship to battling illicit activities in the favelas.19 Since the eighteenth century, Brazil has served as a central intersection of commerce, labor migration, and cultural flows between Africa, Andean South America, and North America; and Rio has functioned until recently as one of South America’s largest ports and entrepôts, where the different classes, economies, and races of the region were most likely to mingle. But since the 1970s, the same intersectionality that had promoted an idealized image of Rio as a model of racial and global integration began to make it attractive for those who wanted to integrate and protect illegal trade networks. Rio became a hub for traffickers in African cannabis and Andean coca as well as for organized rackets and gun smugglers from Florida, Colombia, Africa, and Europe. Favelas have been attractive to traffickers also because of the density, informality, and impenetrability of their streets and public spaces—paradoxically, the same factors that had given the favelas their reputation for conviviality, intimacy, informality, and cultural and social richness. The same dense spaces and fuzzy boundaries that had nurtured so much cultural and political innovation, labor militancy, and the very esprit of Rio and its samba culture were transformed into a spatial liability. Favela intersectionality became identified as a miasma of danger as the military-authoritarian junta began, in the 1960s, to categorize all sites of social conflict, identity mobilization, or ambiguity, and particularly the black favela, as threats to national security and urban modernity.20 Serrinha has been violently transformed since this period. Military struggles between gangs and between police and comandos (beginning in the late 1970s and increasing during the 1980s) effectively shut down vending and production stalls, often run by women or the elderly. Women lost opportunities to work in the community as vendors and shop owners, or as spiritual guides or musical performers for tourists. They had to commute out 260    paul amar

to white areas to serve as maids, working for others instead of themselves, or enter the touristic, service, or sex-work economies outside the shelter of their community context. Gone were the opportunities to raise children communally and to supervise their recreation and their adoption of cultural proficiency and solidarity. Also gone were the spaces where outsiders could dance, play, visit Afro-religious shrines, and spend their money. In the context of this crisis the public role of the municipality overseeing Serrinha also shifted. Back in the era of the populist Estado Novo in the 1930s, favela development had been funded by channeling government money through the offices of particular political party members, into Carnival-crafts units, trade union concessions, and the Império Serrano samba school. This form of direct patron-client linkages between the state, the party bosses, and the communities, criticized as vote-buying or clientelism by some, nevertheless distributed resources into the community and integrated the poor within the apparatus of citizenship and state planning. Thus Império Serrano, like other samba schools, acted as a hierarchical but functional and consensusbuilding local council and state organ. This clientelist-populist practice of incorporating Serrinha via its cultural institutions was literally called “samba citizenship” by the Vargas regime of the 1930s and 1940s.21 But in the 1970s, Brazil’s military dictatorship cut support to the samba schools and unplugged the clientelist networks of participation and redistribution. The dictatorship privatized organizations that provided economic and social control in the favelas. Samba schools officially became the wards of Riotur, a public-private partnership for tourism development. A new guard of Carnival leaders drew funding from the new favela economy of gambling rings, traffickers, and tourism companies, rather than from the state and local political-party apparatus. The directors of Império Serrano even moved their headquarters and dance space out of Serrinha during this era, to locate in a more central zone of Madureira. Serrinha still maintained clientelistic relations with city officials and opposition parties, but negotiations for votes and support came to revolve around providing elements of infrastructure such as electricity, sewage, trash collection, and building materials. Starting in the mid-1990s, the municipal government of Rio de Janeiro generated a new and ambitious plan to erase the boundary between informal slums and properly registered neighborhoods and to integrate favelas into the urban fabric of Rio. While other urban regimes throughout Latin America saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    261

4 An Inter-American Development Bank official meets with representatives of the Rio government to approve a map of Favela-Bairro. Source: Globo News, 1997. Printed with permission.

still evicted and relocated squats and slums, Rio’s plan envisioned the immediate opening of public spaces, the gradual provision of infrastructure and jobs, and the eventual legalization of property claims for the favela settlers. The project, originally called “Favela Is a Neighborhood,” became officialized as Favela-Bairro and went into operation in 1996, with US$180 million in funding from the idb and US$120 million from the municipality of Rio. Its first goal was to pave over the rough boundary zones between favelas and neighborhoods, and to open up free circulation and access between the two divided sectors of city settlement. (See fig. 4, above) For Serrinha, integration and entrepreneurial development were to draw first and foremost on the heritage of classic forms of carioca racial culture. The Favela-Bairro Project public relations brochure, entitled “Serrinha, a Pole of Popular Culture,” states this explicitly: The strong points [of Serrinha] are: •  black culture and northeastern culture vitality •  emerging manifestations of “youth culture”

262    paul amar

•  architectonic, urban, and landscape particularities • expressive community organizations, based in spatial or cultural interests •  sophistication and cordiality of its inhabitants22 The discourse of Favela-Bairro depicts Serrinha not as a political subunit of a municipality or as a set of economic actors or citizen populations, but as a lush landscape of sophisticated, expressive, racialized culture. Within the above list of five attributes, the word culture appears four times. Serrinha’s small size, of about three thousand inhabitants, and its particularly culturalized and racialized profile made it attractive for selection and transformation into the first model of the Favela-Bairro program. The above list captures the particular language of 1930s racial-democracy idealism, equating social expressivity with the sensuality of the tropical landscape and articulating the deferential and “cordial” (not demanding or aggressive) attitude of Afro-Brazilians with respect to white visitors in their communities, a trait that was imagined as conducive to interracial relations and the production of a uniquely miscegenated mixed-race future for the country. Serrinha’s cultural landscape, as a zone of racial-democracy heritage, thus remains attractive to certain of Rio’s progressive elites, who see their nostalgic image of Rio reflected in the blackness of the inhabitants. A Favela-Bairro official confided to me, “These are ‘good’ blacks, pure blacks, blue blacks. They are cultural aristocrats of the old regime.”23 (See fig. 5.) The brochure’s delineation of Serrinha’s strong points strives to reanimate the place of racial democracy’s culture of interracial cordiality that marked Serrinha’s golden age. But black-movement activists and theorists of racial politics, in the past two decades, have launched an intensive critique of the “cordiality doctrine.” France Winddance Twine and Edward Telles have demonstrated that high rates of interracial marriage, often cited as proof of a culture of cordiality, conceal the ways marriage markets reaffirm class and race hierarchies, limiting middle-class interaction to whites and light-skin “mulattos” while dark-skinned women are locked in poverty. Goldstein, Paixão, and Amar emphasize how notions of normative cordiality act as “the prejudice of not having any prejudice,”24 or “racial blindness.”25 Cordialism euphemizes “racial hegemony” and systematic

saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    263

5 The future of Serrinha’s Favela-Bairro sketched as a timeless, bucolic Afro-Brazilian village of culture, erased of its modern, and violent, realities. Source: Municipal Government of Rio de Janeiro, 1997.

violence, rendering racialization invisible and displacing blame for “aggression” onto non-cordial blacks. With neoliberal urban planning and tourism projects, cordiality is euphemized again, not through interracial marriage but through concrete and infrastructure that will sew the urban family together. The explicit goal of Favela-Bairro is to stimulate an “urban renaissance in Rio.” The 1999 Strategic Plan for the City of Rio de Janeiro highlights Favela-Bairro as one of its six major long-term projects (and the only one directly addressing the poor). The Strategic Plan describes the goal of the project as integrating the favelas into the surrounding urban fabric by “making disappear the physical and social conditions that can contribute to segregate them from the city or set them apart.”26 These measures include: Open squares for sports, like basketball and football . . . for the use of residents as well as the rest of the population. The favela will be illuminated at night, and the lengthening of roads will give access to arriving trash collection trucks. Landscaped parks will be installed at the gateways to various favelas, with benches and kiosks to smooth the visual shock of transition between the favela [and] the better neighborhoods, and attract the residents from both sides.27 264    paul amar

whose urb an renaissance?

The common theme of the project, articulated in its explicit “integrative” discourse, is to attract people to cross borders of fear and degradation, and to reinvoke a “historic” national spirit of racial mixing. “It is important to provide public spaces where people can come together to talk and to converse.”28 Here is where the racial-culturalist agenda of promoting cordiality is articulated with the neoliberal development objective of creating spaces for the orderly gathering of individuals and the free operation of market forces. The mayor’s Strategic Plan narrates a story about national and racial history, giving meaning and legitimacy to efforts to plow open and to exercise surveillance over community spaces. In these areas, residents are to “preserve and purify” the legacy of “samba blackness,” as detailed below, thus enhancing their cultural capital. In this framework, the state creates infrastructure, then pulls back; community residents are to establish themselves as cultural entrepreneurs and market the innate heritage value of Serrinha. This entrepreneurial cover story permits the state to push in aggressively, but in ways that make these moves seem to be responses to, or restoration of, a “marketreformed” version of the samba narrative, rather than as new initiative that promotes neoliberal governance and does nothing to interrupt the impunity of the paragovernmental sectors of the security state. The strict racialisms hiding behind these technoscientific state discourses of surveillance, markets, and culture reveal themselves when contrasted to an alternative favela project, in Rio’s settlement of Jacarezinho. As analyzed by João Vargas, this community decided in 2001–2002 to install its own high-tech security cameras and community gates to control drug trafficking and keep an eye on police abuses.29 Although gated communities, closed condominiums, and private security cameras have become nearly universal in white middle-class Brazilian neighborhoods, the idea that working-class blacks would install such protective mechanisms was regarded as ludicrous, intolerable, and an act of criminal aggression.30 The state banned private security technologies in favelas. Privately deployed security is natural for white communities, while poor black communities must remain the objects and not agents of security. State-related interests behind the push to highlight black cultural agency through projects like Favela-Bairro include the police interest in expanding saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    265

its militarization and preserving its impunity, political-party interests in expanding clientelistic dependency of local communities on petty projects, and the state’s fiscal interests in bringing in tourist dollars so that it can meet its debt payments while continuing to privatize public patrimony. Through this kind of project, the state’s globalization objectives can appropriate a progressive symbolic imaginary of racial and spatial desegregation. In Serrinha, Favela-Bairro aims to liberate a classic bourgeois public sphere of dialogic exchange while also stimulating both the development of a touristic culturalized public landscape in line with Serrinha’s historical advantages and Rio’s identity as a capital of hospitality, racialized culture, and creativity. Favela-Bairro articulates classical principles of individualist liberalism with contemporary notions of cultural marketing. In 2000, the City of Rio planned to attract two million foreign tourists and five million Brazilian visitors, according to its 1999 Plano Maravilha.31 In line with this goal, the mayor’s brochure portrays one of its strategic objectives for Serrinha to be “to attract consumers of Serrinha’s goods and services in the milieu of culture and leisure and in activities related to the samba and civil infrastructure.”32 In the newspapers, the city made itself clearer: “Serrinha will become a tourism magnet.”33 Favela-Bairro’s strategic focus on replacing violent, degraded urban barriers with open spaces of dialogue, tourism, and amusement reflects the good intentions of progressive urbanism governed by liberal conceptions of the abstract “opening” role of public life and public space, the nostalgia for racial democracy and the marketing of samba culture, and the insistent blindness of municipal authority in facing the violence and differential barriers of policing and trafficking that fracture the favela. (See fig. 6.) The Favela-Bairro Project pours cement over the militarized front lines of police-trafficker wars and declares the area a playground for free commerce and an “open museum” of racial democracy. But does it resolve the conflicts that produced the violence and face down those who profit from segregation? Urban boundaries in Rio de Janeiro are produced by antagonistic clusters of social protagonists whose “public” manifestations may only be made more dangerous by unilateral bulldozing of frontiers. How are the spectacular visibility of police violence and the structural violence of accords between police and comandos (and, as in September 2002, the occa­sional mega-violent renegotiation of the terms and territorial front 266    paul amar

6 Cement poured over favela frontiers produces “urban renaissance.” Source: Municipal Government of Rio de Janeiro, 1997.

lines of these accords) rendered invisible—or more unaccountable and incomprehensible—by the overwhelming focus on race-heritage projects and samba narratives? police and tr afficker projects

In 1997, the popular newspaper Jornal do Brasil published an article headlined “Police Violence Scars Favela-Model: On Serrinha hill, display window of the Favela-Bairro project, it’s best not to look, hear, or speak about police atrocities.” The article went on to describe the ways in which police act with impunity as they occupy public spaces and trafficked areas: A 37-year-old vendor was among those who felt on their skin the reality of police violence, which came in the form of a punch resulting in a fracture below the right eye. His crime was to witness the beating of a suspected trafficker, known as The German, on the 20th of February [1997] at 1:25 a.m. The vendor was having a beer with a couple of friends when, saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    267

according to him, he saw the police of the Ninth Batallion stuffing a boy’s head in a plastic bag and punching him repeatedly in the stomach. The torture happened on the most public and busy point in this favela in Madureira, but according to the vendor, one of the pms did not like being observed and gave him a punch. Immediately, the officer began beating on his own chest and bellowing, “I am officer Paulo Roberto.” All while he was being observed by the police captain.34 Reports of police abuse in Serrinha had begun to increase around 1996, not necessarily caused by, but coinciding with, the implementation of Favela-Bairro. Public bars at the busy border of the favela, like the one frequented by the man whose face and skull were fractured, had to begin closing at 10 p.m., instead of staying open all night. Police began to increase the force and disruptive effects of their blitz (Brazilian argot for militarized police incursion) into the favela. In Serrinha, the pm have appropriated the newly redesigned Favela-Bairro public spaces as surveillance and access corridors. Favela-Bairro’s elimination of shacks, shadows, and liminal spaces at the border has only increased the urban border-zone’s availability as a field of struggle between cops and comandos. Those found loitering or observing police activities in this public zone—supposedly designed to cultivate free exchange and attract tourism and investment—could find themselves interrogated, arrested, or beaten. The Favela-Bairro Project’s neoliberal discourse of opening dialogic public space had ignored or displaced questions of how police interpret public visibility and interaction as they monitor streets, coerce informants, and stage blitzes of drug-identified communities. Community claims to civil rights and public presence are understood by police as threats to their security imperatives, their prerogative power, their privileges of controlling visibility, exposure, openness, as well as invisibility and impunity as they appropriate the favela’s public space and resources. The security mindset of the pm has deep historic roots. In 1969, Rio’s local pm battalions were commandeered by the national armed forces in the creation of the security state that followed the coup. Since the beginning of the democratic transition in the early 1980s, the state has maintained the militarization of its police force and a policy of security totalization, which merges internal security with national security, eliminating the distinction 268    paul amar

between a citizen suspected of a crime and a foreign enemy combatant. Thus, despite the stabilization of electoral democracy, the sociopolitical legacy of authoritarianism has only extended and aggravated its hold on society. In the current era of more open democracy, why has Brazilian politics until recently avoided facing the authoritarian legacy of the militarized police? Here we must turn to the post-abolition historiography of race and its important role in substituting legends of cultural mixing for the realities of corruption, segregation, and police-comando regimes. In a clause held over from the era of military dictatorship, Brazil’s constitution mandates the autonomy of the Militarized Police from municipal control and its separation from the Civil Police, which is the agency that investigates crimes, interrogates arrestees, and holds them for court. The pm has thus maintained its capacity to extort, torture, and set up protection rackets.35 Paul Chevigny argues that the militarized and autonomous structure of these police forces, grounded in a history of racist practices, accounts for the pm’s unrestrained use of deadly force, torture, and house invasions during their occupations of favelas.36 According to Jaqueline Muniz, the police are also driven by their own masculinist traditions of asserting their dominance over certain strategic spaces. She quotes an experienced pm officer: “The street criminal says that he gets his crime diploma from prison. For the police, the diploma is in the street. The street is the school of the police. All that you want to see is there, you just have to look. I learned to have a specialist’s eye for the street. What I’ve seen there I could never tell you about.”37 In the eyes of the police, the visual profile of the street is often a euphemism for the social profile of Afro-Brazilian communities. In the favelas, understandings of race linked to the nature of “the street” depoliticize issues around who is responsible for crime and who is accountable for violence. The high visibility of Afro-Brazilian communities and their purported association with crime draws attention away from the role of police militarism, paragovernmental outlaw organization, and state privatization and deregulation in shaping criminal organizations and crime-related violence. The internal masculinist identity of the Militarized Police and its external practices of racial identification fuse in an obsession with controlling territory and mastering the street. For the pms, the street is a battlefield, saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    269

not a space of commerce and citizenship where encounters are negotiated and social conflicts mediated. It is the pms’ task to master the art of distinguishing the properly educated elites or doutores (“phds”) who must be defended from those enemies of national and public security who must be liquidated. In Copacabana or downtown, Rio’s Militarized Police officers, see their job as eliminating the few marginais (marginals, hoodlums) from among the doutores. But the police often treat the streets of the favelas as wholly behind enemy lines and may assume civilians there to be enemy combatants. In addition, the trafficker donos (owners, chiefs) themselves cultivate battlefield representations of favela territory. community projects:  alternatives to favela-b airro

The Serrinha residents’ associations have developed alternatives to both the comandos’ militarized doctrines and Favela-Bairro’s romanticization of black agency. Serrinha’s own community projects mobilize black agency, samba heritage, and urban reintegration efforts to push for reforms of the police and criminal justice systems, to promote citizen enfranchisement over militarized securitization, and to replace petty clientelism and privatism with a new apparatus of integrated state social-welfare organisms. Dovetailing with the reform agenda of Governor Benedita da Silva, Serrinha’s community projects turn neoliberal racial projects inside out and make them tools not of market liberalization but of political accountability. These projects serve as vehicles for building claims against errant organs of the state as well as against violent organized crime. Serrinha’s resident association and its organizational efforts do not stick to the Favela-Bairro Project’s purist narrative of racial heritage but draw instead upon several notions of racial identity, even conflicting notions that may seem to be imported and “essentialist.” As described below, community tourism and cultural entrepreneurs have sought to detour around police degradation and violence by advocating pride in atypical forms of Afro-Brazilian heritage. Black cultural innovators in the favela have sought to culturally reidentify, distinguish, and domesticate their own contested public spaces and border zones as sites where tourists, Brazilian visitors, 270    paul amar

and community residents can translate negative social capital into positive cultural capital that can be leveraged to bolster citizenship, demilitarize public life, and bring the state back in. In community plans, the border of the favela would become an economically lucrative, culturally empowering black-heritage trail, rather than a stigmatizing rift though the city. Serrinha’s residents’ association has elaborated several tourism-development plans and cultivates Afro-Brazilian cultural-education projects, such as the training of youth in Afro-Brazilian dance, music, athletics, and Carnival fantasia textile and costume production. Serrinha’s entrepreneurs do not fit easily into dominant accounts of identity politics. The street politics of appropriating racial identities to lure tourists and create a non-criminalized public sphere through culture do draw upon the narratives and achievements of identitarian social movements, nonessentialist racial-democracy mulatismo, and even nostalgic myths about the black subaltern aristocrats of the old plantations. But these efforts aim towards a spatially defined community solidarity that has the potential to generate a basis for security and citizenship for community residents, regardless of their racial appearance or identity. favela tour ism

While small-scale community projects struggle for visibility, funding, and markets, more mainstream state and idb favela-tourism projects simplify or ignore the alternatives launched by communities like Serrinha. Mainstream favela tourism, like the Favela-Bairro project analyzed above, works to liberate and integrate the favela into the globalizing urban economy of Rio, all while portraying the favela as alluringly external, other, and savage compared with the civilized parts of the city. As a neoliberal project, favela tourism thus brings the global economy into the urban margins while rendering invisible the state interests and militarized accords that continue to flourish under the cover of the discourse which produces the effect of favela externality, or describing the community as a zone of extranational territoriality. Paradoxically, this kind of favela tourism emerged as an international niche market only after white Brazilian visitors had stopped coming in force to favelas. Throughout the twentieth century, white Brazilians had come saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    271

to the shantytowns of Rio in order to partake of their reputed musical, religious, culinary, and sexual vitality. Only when favelas had become occupied by the police-comando war in the 1980s did the favela landscape become reimagined as terrifying and impenetrable. It was in this context that internationalized and culturally “enlightening” favela tourism emerged, fusing exploitation of previous racialized cultural allure with the marketing of discovery: that is, the discovery of what sociological and cultural realities lurk inside the realm of narcotraffic power associated with spectacularized blackness as it had been displayed in several internationally popular films and media representations.38 In the 1990s, favela tourism, whose local version Serrinha residents claim began in their shantytown back in the 1930s, developed into its new statepromoted mainstream form. To a much greater extent than in Serrinha, favela tourism has flourished in Rio’s largest favela, Rocinha, a huge, longsettled community of about three hundred thousand residents, which borders the exclusive beach zones of Rio’s Zona Sul. Favela tours have here taken on a mission of education and community service that aims at demonstrating the “reality” of the favela and countering the prejudice of the media. “A visit to the favela can assist the effort of forming frameworks,” proclaimed one French visitor in a newspaper interview. “It is a rapid sociological incursion, it could be better than reading about this reality in a book or newspaper.”39 Enterprises such as Jeep Tours and Favela Reality Tours emphasize and idealize the safety and diversity within favelas. Guide Camilo Ramirez insists that Rocinha is “the safest place in the city. Here no one steals, it is the law of the favela. Ninety-seven percent of those who work here are honest workers.”40 The typical favela tour, like the Favela-Bairro Project itself, works to erase the boundaries between the elite visitor and the shantytown resident, by insisting on the sameness of lifestyle. In the sociological narrative of the progressive tours, favela residents are hardworking, television-watching, morally upright citizens who aspire to and often achieve the dream of middle-class status. But the titillation of this sameness is delusional, for it exists in a realm that is externalized from the normal city by the militarization of the comandos’ parallel regime and, further, by the racialization of the favela as a whole. The presence and reality of the operations of police and comandos are projected outside the favela by the tours, which like to portray the favela 272    paul amar

community as untainted, as merely confined, by these occupying powers. Externalization occurs as the visits highlight and reinforce how the sameness of the favelados is shocking and exotic precisely because of the violence of the police-comando war and its impact upon public space. Militarization and racialization are theatricalized by the vehicles in which tourists are introduced into the community. Foreign or elite Brazilian guests on favela tours are confined to large military jeeps, a spectacle resembling the entry of military vehicles into a bombed city at the end of the Second World War or the journey of green safari cruisers into the jungles of a Jurassic Park. Favela tours insist that borders and differences between the favelados and the “normal” population can and must be overcome. But the drama of the tour itself restages and spotlights the fear and exhilaration of crossing a taboo frontier and entering an outlaw zone, all while highlighting the dangerous nativeness of the local versus the detached immunity of the international observer. “Gringo, gringo, gringo!” the guide shouts out continuously from his jeep, to signal to the community and the comandos that these passengers are of international status; they are not plainclothes police officers making a military raid. This hailing process and the confinement of the tourists to the jeeps belie the claims of the guides that favelas are “the safest place in the city.” The shantytown territory is reinstated as radically “other,” appealing and threatening. (See fig. 7.) Favela tours limit the contact of tourists with favela residents and businesses, preselecting a nice shop, a deserted panoramic viewpoint, or a children’s crafts center in order to provide photo opportunities and a bit of souvenir shopping. Although perhaps sincerely dedicated to overcoming the borders between favela and city, these tour guides, as border entrepreneurs, end up policing and restricting contact between tourist and local. Local residents and entrepreneurs have developed other forms of tourism and visitation that are less sociologically enlightening and more blatantly exploitative of the cultural, racial, and pleasurable “attributes” of favelas. Promoters in Rocinha have developed a tourist map of their community entitled “Rocinha Tour 2000.”41 Significantly, this map is geared toward local Brazilian visitors who come on their own as consumers, shoppers, or casual tourists, and not in an organized tour group. The idea behind this kind of tourism is to stimulate an appreciation of the shows, dance clubs, ice cream stands, clothing stores, cafés, samba venues, bars, and even saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    273

7 Military jeeps bring tourists into the favela. Source: Globo News, 2002. Printed with permission.

clinics and schools in Rocinha. The fact that this marketing strategy, run by a new agency called Nucleus for Tourism Development, is considered “tourism”—as a visit “abroad” to an exotic locale, even when sold to white Brazilian residents of the same City of Rio—seems to indicate that for Brazilians as well as foreigners, the favela is another country. While the jeep-based favela tours insist on the immateriality of favela borders and differences, all the while underlining the militarized threat, the locally produced marketing schemes of Rocinha present the experience of crossing the border of the favela as a gateway to positive difference and attempt to revive the advantageous image of the shantytown as a place of warm interaction and great places to eat, dance, and be merry, and as a space endowed with a specifically racialized, spatialized cultural heritage that makes it not another safe zone of hardworking middle-class folk, but something better—an unusually creative zone for diverse, unbounded interaction. Efforts of tourism innovators in Serrinha have paralleled the developments of the much larger Rocinha, but with an overwhelming emphasis on its racial heritage and less on the military aspects of invading a parallel world. Claudio Renato, after conducting an interview with the director of 274    paul amar

the Favela-Bairro Project, Maria Lúcia Petterson, reported that Serrinha was selected as a model recipient of development aid because “it is one of the few places in Brazil that maintains century-old cultural traditions and is where jôngo, a black slave dance ancestor of samba, is still cultivated . . . [and because the community] lives surrounded by three samba schools, Imperio Serrano, Portela, and Tradicão [and thus] will become known by Brazilian and foreign tourists already tired of the artificial mulatta shows prepared for them.”42 Renato went on to report that Serrinha would also draw visitors to its samba-crafts production enterprises, its unique children’s samba school, and its eight terreiros de umbanda (sites of syncretic BantuYoruba Afro-Brazilian worship) dedicated to the patron orixá (deity) of war and fertility, Xangó. The Favela-Bairro Project administrators describe the heritage of Serrinha using a language that designates the favela as a locus of an authentic origin for Brazil’s narrative of racial democracy, or “samba nationalism.” This is echoed in press accounts of Serrinha’s efforts to cultivate tourism through cultural development. In the language of racial democracy the nation’s collective identity is a positive tropicalist blend of white rationalism and black musical and spiritual vitality. As drawn from the work of the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, this national myth posits that the blending of these two essential components first took place on the plantation, in the zone of encounter between the master’s house and the slave quarters, and continued, more recently, with the crossing of the boundary between favela and the paved, proper city. But as mass-marketing of Carnival and of the “mulatta shows” has commodified the trope of racial blending within the schemes of a mass tourism industry, and as racial identity politics has grown more vocally critical of the idealizations of miscegenation, and how the concept romanticizes the interracial encounters on the plantation, the sanctity and authenticity of the foundational myth has crumbled. In Serrinha, the municipality of Rio had found a rare example of a socalled pure black community that had maintained its plantation music, dance, and religious traditions, and had founded the first modern samba school. Without the preservation and visitation of heritage sites like Serrinha, the founding racial-democracy myth might lose its territorial claims to Rio, the cultural and tourism capital of Brazil, as well as its “empirical” claims to historical truth. Favela-Bairro and favela tourism erase saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    275

the boundary between Serrinha and the wider city, designating slum borders as spaces of encounter and cultural exchange. These projects con­ tend for globalizing spaces and imaginaries of Rio as they implement lawenforcement, modernization, integration, and security goals. These efforts also draw from and intervene in national racial politics, regrounding through heritage-tourism development the contested myth of the plantation encounter as the cradle of Brazilian collective identity and national uniqueness. conclusion

This study highlights the historical, cultural, and political contingency of state-and elite-driven urbanization projects and their racializing renarrations of national samba history and Afro-Brazilian identity. The entrepreneurial Favela-Bairro Project draws upon nostalgic Brazilian racial ideologies while refusing to push police reform. The project does not challenge, and may mask and thus indirectly facilitate, the power relations that link narcotraffic commanders, paragovernmental prison-police-guard corruption, and neoliberal order. Historically, police projects have originated in a twentiethcentury context of national-security management and militarization that drove the escalation of violence and pushed cultures of masculinist mastery over black-identified streets and populations. Research explored here leads us away from romanticized notions of the cultural purity of black samba entrepreneurs and instead traces links between militarization in the security sector in Brazil and international bank-funded projects, police strategies, and touristic appropriations. While many powerful state, international, and community actors all identify Serrinha as the “Cradle of Samba,” community actors contest what this means in terms of the racialization and nationalization of local culture and the deployment of culture in the service of (or in opposition to) neoliberalism and crime-war discourse. Community dissent around race-culture projects resonates with and generates support for the bold agendas of leftist leaders and rising black political figures, like Governor Benedita da Silva. In this essay, I have analyzed how outlaw uprisings and police violence, as well as highly visible urban-integration and favela-tourism projects in276    paul amar

directly enforce each others’ prerogatives and naturalize neoliberal governance. Do these favela projects rescue the cradle of samba or instead salvage the myths that preserve racial hierarchy, accelerate disintegration of the public sphere and its patrimony, and promote state violence? As further research continues to explore this question, we can cling to a degree of hope that the intensity of violence in urban Brazil today reflects the desperation of repressive forms of power that now face a new generation of black and progressive leadership, buoyed by mass mobilizations for public citizenship, accountability, demilitarization, and antiracism. notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

See “O Poder Paralelo,” O Globo, Oct. 1, 2002, 23. Renato Garcia, “O ordem foi do tráfico,” O Globo, Oct. 2, 2002, 23. All translations are my own. Policia Militar may be translated directly as Military Police, but that causes confusion since in English that suggests law-enforcement units within the armed forces. Following other Brazilianists, I translate the term here as “Militarized Police,” underlining that they are independent, and often rivals to the Brazilian Military pm is the Brazilian abbreviation. Vera Araujo, “Presidios de Papel,” O Globo, Sept. 29, 2002, 30. Renato Garcia, “Agentes do Desipe fazem greve de 24 horas,” O Globo, May 29, 2002, 16. Ben Penglase, “The Shutdown of Rio de Janeiro: The Poetics of Drug-Trafficker Violence,” Anthropology Today 21, no. 5. (Oct. 2005). Rogerio Daflon, “Eleicoes no Rio” O Globo, Oct. 6, 2002, 24. Alba Zaluar, “Brazilian Drug Worlds,” 338. This is not unique to the Brazilian state; Jonathan Simon has made a convincing argument about the U.S. states’ dependence on drug crime in Governing Through Crime 2007. “Playboy,” aka Marcus Vinicius Tavares Gavião, the 27-year-old prison guard and smuggler-networker had been arrested on September 23, 2002, by draco (the police organized crime investigation squad), as reported by Vera Araujo, O Globo, Sept. 24, 2002, 16. Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro, 47–51. Procópio, O Brasil no mundo das drogas. Mercedes Hinton, The State on the Streets, 181. Luiz Eduardo Soares, A segurança tem saida; Soares, Cabeça de porco. Dimmi Amora and Renato Garcia, “Atentado,” O Globo, May 16, 2002, 17. “Poder Paralelo,” O Globo, Oct. 1, 2002, 19. saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    277

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

Magalhães, “Pobreza Urbana, un fenômeno da esclusão,” 5. Lindgren, Leituras em Organização Espacial; Ribeiro, “The Formation of Development Capital.” Gandra, Jongo da Serrinha. Pedrosa, Violencia que Oculta a Favela. Zaluar, Condomínio do Diabo. Sepúlveda dos Santos, “Mangueira e Imperio,” 131. Inter-American Development Bank, “bid Extra: Renascença Urbana: Suplemento de O bid,” 4. Author’s interview with unnamed Favela-Bairro official, Oct. 13, 1999. Marcelo Paixão, “Anthropofagai e racismo: uma crítica ao modelo brasileiro de relacões raciais.” Paul Amar, “Tácticas e termos da luta contra o racismo institucional nos sectores de polícia e de segurança.” City of  Rio de Janeiro, O Plano Estratégico (www.rio.rj.gov.br/planoestrategico, 1999). The plan is a public-private partnership governed by the city council. Inter-American Development Bank “bid Extra,” 4. Ibid., 4–5. João H. Costa Vargas, “When a Favela Dared to Become a Gated Condominium,” Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 4 (2006): 49–81. Teresa P. R. Caldeira, City of Walls. O Plano Estratégico (1999). Campaign Committee of Luis Paulo Conde, “Jornal do Conde,” no. 2 ( July 2000): 2. Claudio Renato, “Favela Serrinha vai virar pólo turístico oficial,” O Estado de São Paulo, Aug. 4, 1996. Mauro Ventura, Jornal do Brasil, April 13, 1997, 8. Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” defines racketeering: “Someone who produces both the danger and, at a price, the shield against it is a racketeer. Someone who provides a shield but has little control over the danger’s appearance qualifies as a legitimate protector, especially if his price is no higher than his competitors” (173). See also Bayley, Patterns of Policing. Chevigny, Edge of the Knife. Muniz, “Ser Policial é Sobretudo,” chap. 3. Films include Boca (1994), where Rae Dawn Chong takes on Rio’s drug lords; Orfeu (1999), a remake of the 1959 classic Black Orpheus, but with the hero’s descent to hell reframed as a battle with narco-warriors; the beautiful, controversial City of God (2003); CSI: Miami, which extradited its 2006 season to Rio; and the recent Turistas (2006) that plunged buff white Americans into Brazil’s jungles, portrayed as controlled by traders in human organs and drugs.

278    paul amar

39 40 41 42

Mauricio Stycer,“Europeu faz ‘tour sociologico’ em favela,” Folha de São Paulo, March 24, 1996. Ibid. Nucleo de Turismo do Fórum de Desenvolvimento Econômico da Rocinha, “Rocinha Tour 2000.” Claudio Renato, “Favela Serrinha vai virar pólo turístico oficial.”

saving r io’s “cr adle of samb a”    279

Afrocuban Religion, Museums, and the Cuban Nation Lisa Maya Knauer

on a sunny afternoon in January 2004 the streets of Old Havana are crowded with tourists, hustlers, and Habaneros (Havana residents) going about their daily routines. Making one’s way around on foot, bicycle, or taxi requires creativity, patience, and constant vigilance, as the historic center of the city seems to be in a permanent state of renovation and repair. Crumbling buildings are shored up with wooden poles, and more than a few are surrounded by scaffolding. Parts of several streets are closed for building repairs or repaving. On the street in front of Casa de Africa (Africa House), a museum established in 1986 under the auspices of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana, there is a flurry of activity. Natasha, a briskly professional white woman in her early forties, looks harried as she dashes around shouting directions to the stilt-walkers, puppeteers, and gaily costumed dancers and musicians. The scene is colorful and carnivalesque, as the drummers start to pound out rapid polyrhythms and an elderly couple with regal bearing, in colonial-era finery, take their places as king and queen of the parade. (See fig. 1.) As the procession begins to snake its way through the streets of Old Havana, some with macadam

1  T  he King and Queen of the Cabildo, Havana, January 2006. Although the photographs in figures 1 and 2 are from other years, what they depict is very similar to the 2004 celebration. Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

2  A  n enthusiastic bystander dances in place on the sidewalk, January 2005. Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

surfaces and others newly cobblestoned, pausing at one freshly refurbished colonial-era plaza after another, the drumming, singing, and dancing pull people out of their homes or workplaces onto balconies or the sidewalk to watch. Tourists point their cameras, and some start to follow the parade. And a small number of local residents are so enthused by the sights and sounds that they join in or dance in place on the sidewalk. (See fig. 2.) For many of the tourists, this may be simply another part of the festive ethnoscape that Old Havana, a unesco-designated World Heritage site offers to visitors. On the surface, there is little to distinguish this procession from the performative spectacles that visitors encounter on a daily basis in the Plaza de la Catedral in front of Havana’s majestic sixteenth-century cathedral. Strolling musicians serenade patrons at open-air cafés or corner bars. Lithe young brown-skinned women outfitted in flowing, colonial-era dresses stroll around the plaza and approach visitors with megawatt smiles and baskets of flowers for sale, and gladly pose for photographs. Older dark-skinned women wrapped in voluminous white skirts and shawls, draped with beaded necklaces, and puffing fat cigars—all visual markers of the various “popular religions of African origin”—sit at small tables and offer spiritual readings to passersby. They, too, are more than willing to be photographed. This parade, however, called the Salida de los Cabildos, is not an everyday occurrence but an annual event sponsored by Casa de Africa. The Casa is one of several institutions in Cuba that can claim to have inherited the mantle of the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, widely heralded in both scholarly and bureaucratic discourse as “the third discoverer of Cuba” for his efforts to document and legitimate African-derived religious and musical practices as authentic and essential components of the ajiaco or “stew” of Cuban national cultural identity.1 And the date of this procession—January 6—was not randomly chosen. The procession purports to be a recreation of the Día de los Reyes (Day of the Kings), which during Spanish rule was the only day when Havana’s substantial population of Africans and their descendants—both free and enslaved—were permitted to go out onto the streets of the old city with drums and costumes and “perform themselves.”2 At each of the central plazas, the procession stops, and performers pre­ sent a short set piece of music and dance from one of the major sacred 282    lisa maya knauer

Afrocuban traditions: the Regla de Ocha or Santeria (derived from practices of Yoruba-speaking peoples), Palo Monte (based on Bantu or Congo cultures), and the masked dancers of the all-male Abakuá secret society (based on similar sodalities in the Calabar region of what is now Nigeria), who are called by the Calabar name iremes or the Spanish word diablitos, “little devils.” When the procession stops in front of the Plaza de la Catedral, there is a brief display by the stilt-dancers. Several of these dancers carry long strips of brightly colored fabric in their hands, and as they move through their stilt ballet, the fabric streams and billows out behind them or over their heads as they raise their arms. They are members of Giganteria, a troupe of young performers who are trying to revitalize the tradition of grassroots street performance. However, the cultural significance and historic context are left to the viewers’ imaginations. The organizers have not written a brochure or provided a master of ceremonies. The tone of the parade is festive and boisterous, rather than didactical—somewhat anomalous for state-sponsored public culture in Cuba. The route of the parade passes through the part of Old Havana that has been the site of the city’s most intensive historic restoration and tourist development, where “heritage” has been mostly purposefully directed, in the view of many critics, toward the global stage.3 The refurbished cityscape is densely packed with attractions: it is hard to walk more than a few paces without encountering a museum (or a commercial attraction labeled a museum), an officially designated historic site, or a monument. But tourists are unlikely to casually stumble across the Historical Museum of Guanabacoa, although it is recognized nationally and internationally for its displays on Afrocuban religion, since the museum is not located in the historic center but in the municipality of Guanabacoa, perched on a hillside on the other side of the Bahía del Este (Eastern Bay) from Havana proper. Getting there by anything other than a chartered bus requires time, dedication, patience, and a working knowledge of Havana’s cranky public transportation system. Although the Museum of Guanabacoa was founded by local residents as a local history collection, it was the first museum in Cuba to have a permanent exhibition on “syncretic cults” as they were once called, or “religions of African origin” in current official parlance, and the museum is widely afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    283

3  The carved wooden figure of a babalawo, or ritual diviner,   Historical Museum of Guanabacoa. In his hands, he holds a cigar and a divining chain. Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

identified by those exhibits. A carved wooden statue of a babalawo, or ritual diviner, that was created to illustrate an exhibit at the museum, has become an icon not only of this museum, but of Afrocuban religion more broadly, at least in the touristic realm. Its image is reproduced on the museum’s promotional literature and also on postcards and miniatures available throughout Havana. (See fig. 3, above.) During the past decade, as the Cuban government has continued to focus on tourism as a source of state revenue and a motor for economic development, Afrocuban religion has grown in popularity and visibility, at both a grass-roots level and as a commoditized icon in the tourist industry. It is hard to walk more than few blocks without seeing people, men and women, old and young, dressed in the all-white garb of the iyawó—a per­ son newly initiated in the Regla de Ocha. Staged performances of ritual music and dance are a regular feature at hotel cabarets charging hefty admission fees (payable in hard currency), and both government-sponsored 284    lisa maya knauer

and independent tour operators offer visitors the opportunity to visit “authentic” ritual houses and attend ceremonies. But while official discourse promotes African-derived cultural forms as universal patrimony and national heritage, many Cubans still view them as unruly and backward, cosas de negros (black folks’ stuff ). This apparent dichotomy—celebrating black culture on the one hand, while treating it as something that needs to be controlled or transcended on the other—reflects a larger ambivalence surrounding race that has inflected discussions of national identity since the nineteenth century. This ambivalence, this essay will argue, continues to shape the repre­ sentation of Afrocuban cultures—and particularly, but not exclusively the “religions of African origin”—in contemporary Cuban public culture. The Salida de los Cabildos, its sponsoring organization Casa de Africa, and the Historical Museum of Guanabacoa provide rich opportunities to examine how varied social actors—museum professionals, Afrocuban cultural performers, local residents—reinterpret the intertwined legacies of slavery and colonialism and the sedimented meanings of blackness as the government tries to reinsert Cuba into the global economy through tourist development. I am interested in exploring the multiple registers in which the parade and two museums function. All are sponsored by state cultural institutions and to a degree represent efforts to governmentalize and “contain” Afrocuban religion and black public culture through preservation and reenactment. However, they also provide opportunities for other readings and engagements, since performers and community residents lay claim to these spaces with their own agendas. By juxtaposing the museums and the parade, this essay seeks to explore the relationship between public spectacle and ethnographic display. Both types of cultural production, I will argue, utilize performative and aesthetic strategies as well as historical and ethnographic modalities. They are all, to a degree, “objects of ethnography.” 4 Each one references, in distinct ways, a lengthy history of folkloricized performances and ethnographic displays of black-identified cultural forms in Cuba. I am also interested in contrasting the two museums, for in each, Afrocuban religion is inserted into a different museological agenda, as well as a distinct socio-spatial context.

afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    285

exhibiting “religions of afr ican or igin”  in guana b acoa

The Historical Museum of Guanabacoa is located in a restored colonial-era building a few blocks from Guanabacoa’s main plaza. A sign just inside the museum’s entrance provides a brief sketch of the slave trade that gave rise to “cultural expression that forms part of our national identity.”5 The following discussion is based on several visits I made to the museum over the course of more than a decade. I came as a casual visitor in 1993; when I returned as a researcher in 2001, the museum was closed for restoration. The description of the current exhibitions came from visits in 2005, 2006, and 2007. The staff hastened to point out on those visits between 2005 and 2007 that the museum was still undergoing restoration and the installation on view was a work in progress, but it is instructive to note that the museum had decided to reopen the halls devoted to “the religious expressions of African origin” (along with one small room devoted to local history) before the restoration is complete.6 This decision, as I will discuss later, was most likely prompted by considerations about what would appeal to foreign and national visitors rather than local residents’ needs. The exhibits begin with the Regla de Ocha or Santeria. The first room contains four distinct tableaux, animated by life-sized figures. One display features a domestic space: a wooden table set with chairs. Behind the table is a set of shelves with religious items and, against another wall, a small altar for the dead. Moving clockwise, the next tableau features a life-sized mannequin of a white woman under a white satin canopy. She is dressed in all-white garments and beaded necklaces, surrounded by porcelain tureens. The third tableau, which takes up one entire wall, is oddly jarring: a mannequin of a young black man dressed in white satin garments floats above an elaborate altar. (See fig. 4.) And finally, to one side, the well-known lifesized carved wooden figure of the babalawo, a gnarled, elderly black man, who beckons the viewer, his divining chain suspended between his fingers. The effect is dramatic, and there are no tags or captions to disturb the illusion that the visitor has been transported to a ceremonial space. Without the narration of the museum staff, or one’s own prior knowledge, however, almost none of this would be intelligible to a viewer, as the explanatory text (on a freestanding pedestal) gives only a brief and fairly ahistorical 286    lisa maya knauer

4  I nstallation in the regla de ocha room, Historical Museum of Guanabacoa. Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

description of the religion’s origins. But there is no explanation of what each tableau is supposed to depict or of the ritual significance of any of the objects. The first tableau represents mesa blanca (white table) spiritualism, with origins in Europe and New England, which gained popularity among Cuba’s white urban elite but also spread among the black and rural populations, where it mingled with folk beliefs and practices (African and European) concerning ancestors and the deceased. Ironically, in the early twentieth century, spiritualism (at least in some variants) was lauded as progressive and scientific by the same media and legal sources that castigated the more overtly African religions as “backward” and “witchcraft.”7 The second represents an initiation ceremony, and the third dramatizes a santero (priest) celebrating his cumpleaños de santo (santo birthday)—the anniversary of his initiation. Since Afrocuban religions do not claim that practitioners magically float above the ground, it is hard to understand what is meant by this aspect of the display; the only explanation offered by the staff was that it added drama.8 afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    287

5  Masked figure ( ireme or diablito) at the entrance to the Abakua room, Historical Museum of Guanabacoa. Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

In sharp contrast, the next room is crowded with vitrines. Six of them contain brightly colored garments, porcelain tureens, and other items, and each vitrine is labeled with the name of the deity (or orisha) represented by those artifacts. The labels are only somewhat helpful to a viewer who is not familiar with the religion.9 The dramatization is even more striking as one moves to the a third room, for the open doorway is nearly filled with a semi-realistic replica of a tree trunk and a life-sized masked figure; a second masked figure is visible in the background. The impact is intensified as one enters the room to find other masked figures, along with a small display of drums and other artifacts. It is hard not to feel ambushed or surrounded by these mannequins outfitted as iremes—the masked figures who dance in some of the ceremonies of the Abakuá Secret Society. (See fig. 5, above.) The last rooms are devoted to the Reglas Congas, an umbrella label for Palo Monte and other Congo/Bantu religions. Here, there are no life-sized 288    lisa maya knauer

human figures, but a mural on the wall behind the artifacts—large metal cauldrons filled with sticks of wood and pieces of metal—sets the viewer in a lush tropical landscape with ships visible on the horizon and a nearly naked black male figure with his arms raised heavenward. We seem to be transported to Africa at the moment the slave ships arrive. The Museum of Guanabacoa is unique among Cuban museums in that it was not established by central government planners but, as noted, by local residents. The political and economic upheavals immediately preceding and following the 1959 Revolution had led to the deterioration of Guanabacoa’s once-thriving business district, which aroused fears among area residents that their local heritage was imperiled. José Luis Llerena Castellano, a local journalist, photographer, and self-taught historian, convinced the municipal authorities to donate a building, and in 1964 the Historical Museum of Guanabacoa opened its doors. The original collection was a somewhat random repository of local memories. People simply donated items that they wanted to have preserved. According to its current director, the museum was “just a great collection of things.”10 Among those things were items associated with the Afrocuban religions that had deep roots in the surrounding area. To understand how these items came to be donated to the museum, and the performative poetics of the museum’s installation practices, it is necessary to explore how the Revolutionary government inherited a legacy of racial ambivalence from colonial and republican governments. the r acial-cultur al dynamics  of postcoloniality

Although the Spanish colonial authorities viewed African religious practices as barbaric and vulgar, their policies of residential segregation and the formation of cabildos—ethnically based mutual aid societies nominally under the sponsorship of the Catholic Church—ironically provided the conditions for the re-creation of African-based cultural forms. The cabildos were allowed to parade in the streets on January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, or Día de los Reyes in Cuba. Each cabildo elected a king and queen and organized a comparsa (street band), and the elite watched from the safety of their balconies.11 The “white” carnival, rooted in medieval European practices, afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    289

was held around Lent; blacks were permitted to participate in a limited way in the pre-Lenten carnivals but not to form comparsas. Some saw these African-derived cultural and religious practices as colorful and entertaining.12 But given Cuba’s history of slave revolts, the presence of so many unruly black bodies in public spaces also evoked fears. As the independence movement gained strength in the 1860s, the authorities clamped down on the cabildos, and banned the Día de los Reyes entirely in 1884.13 The independence movement itself was initially divided over the abolition of slavery and over the role of blacks in postcolonial Cuba. Although blacks played an important role in the wars of independence, segregation and discrimination persisted after the ending of Spanish rule in 1898. The myth that Cuba was a racial democracy served to silence discourse about race, and blacks were urged to channel their discontent through the existing political parties. But even the limited citizenship offered to those of African descent was based on their eventual adoption of white social and cultural norms. The authorities had suspended pre-Lenten Carnival during the war of independence, but reinstated it in 1902. Blacks demanded the right to participate in Carnival, and numerous comparsa groups, as well as black war veterans, contributed a boisterous, energetic presence. The early twentieth-century carnivals featured aspects of both “white” and “black” traditions: white beauty queens on floats followed or surrounded by black comparsas.14 But both whites and upwardly mobile blacks saw African religions as deterrents to black social mobility and political participation. This was made evident during the witchcraft (brujería) scares that started around 1904. Newspapers carried frequent reports of white children kidnapped or killed by black sorcerers (brujos) so that their bodies could be used for ceremonial purposes.15 The brujería scares unleashed a wave of legal repression against all forms of Afrocuban cultural production. The government again banned the Afrocuban comparsas from Carnival. As part of this campaign, the police broke up ceremonies and confiscated ritual objects, to be used as evidence against suspected sorcerers. Although very few people were actually brought to trial, at least one man, known as Bocourt or Bocú, was convicted and executed. Many of the confiscated items were then turned over to early Cuban anthropologists like 290    lisa maya knauer

Fernando Ortiz, who began his career seeking a “scientific” explanation for black criminality. The first presentation of Afrocuban religious objects in a Cuban museum was an exhibit on “criminal ethnology” at the University of Havana’s Medical School, on view from 1921 to 1925.16 A small remnant of this exhibit is still on display in the Museum of Anthropology of the Medical School, which is occasionally used for pedagogical purposes with medical students. (Although it is listed under “Museums” in the Havana phone directory, most Cubans do not know that it exists and it is only accessible to researchers by appointment.)17 But in the late 1920s, some Cuban intellectuals started to reevaluate Afrocuban religion and popular culture in an effort to define a national cultural identity uncontaminated by foreign influences.18 Although Ortiz’s early writings about the “black underworld” portrayed Afrocuban religions as atavistic, he had a change of heart and joined the Afrocubanismo movement. He participated in the campaign to reinstate the comparsas in Havana’s Carnival, and he arranged the first theatrical presentation of Afrocuban sacred music in a Havana concert hall. But in order for the Afrocuban religions to be converted from the exclusive property of a racialized, marginalized group into national culture, they had to be transformed from religion into culture and thus into folklore. Ortiz launched a decades-long effort to document Afrocuban religious practices, publishing numerous studies and amassing an extensive collection of musical instruments and ritual objects. Theatricalized renderings of Afrocuban “folklore” became a regular feature of cabaret performances, but the authorities (and polite society) still viewed the originals (and the original settings) as dangerous cosas de negros. museums, r ace, and folklore

The Revolutionary government saw the development of an authentic national culture as a key part of nation-building. However, policies and official discourse concerning Afrocuban religions and traditional cultural practices like Carnival reflect an ongoing ambivalence concerning race. While the Revolution made important moves towards ending racial discrimination, its declaration that Cuba was a raceless society effectively quashed discussion of the matter. But the government simultaneously promoted the idea afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    291

that Cuba was an “Afro-Latin” nation and African-derived cultures were part of a national culture that transcended race. As part of its ambitious cultural policy, the government established a national Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, which published studies of Afrocuban religion and music.19 However, official pronouncements celebrated Afrocuban religions for their aesthetic qualities and their historical contributions to the formation of national cultural identity; the religious aspects were downplayed or viewed as something that had to be transcended.20 The “folklorization” of the pre-Revolutionary period acquired an institutional infrastructure and became “folkloricization.”21 The government also called for the establishment of museums throughout the country. There were only seventeen museums in the entire country in 1959; that number was doubled by the end of the 1960s.22 The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore’s plans for a Museum of Ethnography, however, were never realized.23 The fact that people in Guanabacoa were willing to donate their family treasures to its museum reflects this legacy of ambivalence. The authorities discouraged religious involvement and actively repressed the Abakuá societies.24 While the donors’ ancestors may have been religious practitioners, the donors themselves were evidently not.25 So Afrocuban religious objects were seen as worthy “objects of ethnography” that belonged in a museum (rather than in the police archives), but the religions that produced them were sealed off in the past. The museum staff in Guanabacoa developed a Hall of Afrocuban Religion, drawing upon a “realistic” style pioneered by Lydia Cabrera, an ethnographer trained by Ortiz, who in 1956 had organized a temporary exhibit at the Fine Arts Museum of Havana titled The Afrocuban Part of Cuban Ethnology. In contrast to the “criminal ethnology” exhibit of the 1920s, where objects were categorized by type and encased in vitrines, Cabrera sought to bring the ambience of religious ceremonies into the museum space—or, rather, to bring the museum-goer into a simulacrum of a ritual space by creating lifelike settings that replicated religious ceremonies.26 Following Cabrera’s lead, the staff of the Museum of Guanabacoa created a separate installation for each Afrocuban religion; each installation dramatized a moment of a religious ritual, including a highly controversial depic-

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tion of a ritual animal sacrifice. In 1972, the museum remodeled these halls adding the now-famous figure of the babalawo. A separate “didactic hall” was also added, in order to orient visitors. The museum was closed for restoration between 1975 and 1982. It was during that interval that the Cuban government established municipal museums throughout the island. Researchers for a proposed national ethnographic atlas worked with these new museums to set up temporary exhibitions on Afrocuban religions. However, once the exhibitions were over, the objects were returned to their owners. A plan for municipal museums to develop permanent ethnographic displays was approved but never implemented.27 The Museum of Guanabacoa was incorporated into the new admin­ istrative infrastructure when it reopened. The exhibits on Afrocuban religions had been remodeled yet again, and were now called Halls of Syn­ cretic Cults, in keeping with current thinking. The new mounting retained an aestheticized, theatricalized recreation of ritual spaces (although the scenes of animal sacrifices were eliminated), and the museum staff had added more “didactic” elements: rows of ritual objects in vitrines and a few text panels.28 These were the displays that I saw on my first visit in 1993. However, there was a disjuncture between the various elements, and little or no explanation of the ritual function or historical origin of the objects in the vitrines. The objects were not connected with any real people, living or dead. Everything existed in an indeterminate ethnographic moment.29 A casual visitor, for example, would not learn from the displays that the religions themselves were hardly “museum pieces” but were, in fact, living practices. One notable exception was a room devoted to the Society of the Sons of St. Anthony, a local ritual community similar to a colonial-era cabildo, where text panels provided historical and contextual information about the objects.30 In general, however, the museum “experience” took precedence over sociohistorical contextualization. There is, as noted earlier, no national ethnographic museum; nor is there a national historic museum that tells the story of Cuba and its peoples—a Cuban counterpart to the Canadian Museum of Civilization or the Smithsonian. The ethnographic collection assembled by the Academy of Sciences in the 1960s—largely based on Ortiz’s collection—was distributed

afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    293

among several institutions. Musical instruments went to the Museum of Music, and artifacts relating to Afrocuban religion went to Casa de Africa when it opened in 1986. When I first visited Casa de Africa in the late 1990s, I was struck by a curious bifurcation of the exhibits. The lower floors contained an assortment of objects from various African nations, almost like an old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities—elaborately carved wooden chairs, leopard skins, and cotton textiles. On the top floor several rooms were devoted to Afrocuban religions, combining collections of objects in vitrines—figurines representing orishas or the corresponding Catholic saints, along with beaded necklaces and other attributes of the various deities—and small three­dimensional installations. With the exception of an introductory wall text about Fernando Ortiz, there was almost no explanatory material. The two parts of the museum did not seem especially integrated with each other. This exhibitionary dualism betrays a dualism in the museum’s purpose: according to the current director, Alberto Granado, Casa de Africa was founded to acknowledge Cuba’s debt to the African slaves who helped build the country and to illustrate that they were not peoples without culture—and, he added, to showcase the gifts Cuba had received from African heads of state, affirming Cuba’s commitment to African liberation.31 Its “primordial objective” was to display the contemporary culture of the African continent. In order to explain “how Africa gets to Cuba,” it was necessary to discuss the cultural contributions of African descendants on the island. That was the logic, according to museum staff, for the exhibits on Afrocuban religion. The somewhat static quality of the exhibits was justified because the objects on display had been collected in the early part of the twentieth century, and therefore the displays were meant to correspond to that time period. According to Casa de Africa staff, the Casa did not want to duplicate the efforts of other museums such as the Museum of Guanabacoa that told how the religions had evolved since the time of Ortiz. However, even with that bracketing, the displays were static and ahistorical. The repression by colonial and Republican authorities was not mentioned. Ortiz was presented in an unambiguously heroic light for his efforts to preserve Afrocuban religious artifacts; his criminological past was

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glossed over, and the fact that many of the objects on display had been “collected” in police raids on practitioners’ homes is also not mentioned. Casa de Africa was closed for renovations in 2000 and was scheduled for reopening in 2006.32 The new layout (as described in interviews in 2005) called for the Afrocuban religious displays to be relocated to the ground floor, although the challenge, according to Granado, was to ensure that visitors know they have arrived at the House of Africa and not the House of the Orishas.33 It remains to be seen exactly how the museum will resolve the dilemma of linking the two parts of its collection, and whether it will include a more critical and contextual discussion of Ortiz and his legacy. Unlike the Museum of Guanabacoa, Casa de Africa does not belong to the Ministry of Culture. It was founded by a unique, hybrid governmental agency called The Office of the Historian of the City of Havana (ochc). ochc was established in 1981 to oversee the restoration of Old Havana, which was declared a World Heritage site by unesco the following year. The ochc was a semi-autonomous agency, with funds initially provided by the state. However, the collapse of the socialist bloc brought restoration projects to a halt. The rebuilding of Old Havana took on increased urgency with the Cuban government’s turn to international tourism as a source of funds to jump-start the Cuban economy, and in 1993 the ochc was granted extraordinary powers to set up revenue-producing enterprises (a travel agency, hotels, museums with hefty admission fees for foreign visitors) to gather funds to continue the restoration work. The restoration efforts have been aimed at re-creating the ambiance of a colonial-era city. However, urban spaces are dynamic palimpsests and are rarely “naturally” uniform; the variety of structures in the built environment usually reflects “different eras, tastes and investment cycles.”34 Historic preservation usually involves a degree of artifice, when planners or developers decide that one era of a multivalent site’s history is more “authentic” or more significant than the preceding or subsequent ones. Elite narratives are usually foregrounded, and other stories are silenced. History is often turned into a vehicle to promote popular consumption. Further, planning decisions are usually made by developers, bureaucrats, and experts; present-day residents of the surrounding area are either left out or given limited voice.35

afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    295

6 Plaza Vieja, Havana, January 2006. In 1996, in order to restore the Plaza to its   eighteenth-century appearance, the ochc tore down the amphitheater and shade trees that had occupied the site since 1952 and that were well used by neighborhood residents. Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

The restoration-development efforts have been geared towards tourists, and although they are nowhere near complete, the transformations of the built environment have been dramatic. Plazas have been laid with cobblestones, building façades have been restored and repainted, and the streetscapes are dotted with art galleries, restaurants, and shops. While local residents recognize the need to provide amenities for tourists, some complain that their living and working conditions have not improved and in some respects have deteriorated. (See fig. 6, above.) Havana now boasts some 260 museums and “specialized houses,” mostly concentrated in the historic district of Old Havana. They range from the birthplace of José Martí, to the studio of the Ecuadorian painter Oswaldo Guayasamín, to a Museum of Chocolate.36 Many of the historic sites represent the Spanish crown and the Catholic church: churches and related institutions, colonial-era fortresses, palaces, and jails. (See fig. 7.) Twenty-one of these fall under the aegis of the ochc, while the remainder are registered with a variety of governmental entities. A few are joint ventures with foreign governments or corporations. 296    lisa maya knauer

7 Cuban patrons waiting outside the so-called Museum of Chocolate. This joint   venture with the Belgian government is actually an odd hybrid: a café and retail shop   that includes some museological elements. Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

But what is equally significant is what is not represented. Although colonial Havana had a substantial slave and free black population (and the present-day inhabitants of Old Havana are largely black and mulatto), no slave quarters were restored or recreated.37 The historic markers recently erected in some of the restored plazas do not discuss slavery and its traces.38 Matthew Hill likens the aestheticization of preservation to a “whitening” or “whitewashing” of Cuban history.39 Cuba, interestingly, was one of the original countries that launched unesco’s Slave Routes initiative. However, the centerpiece of Cuba’s Slave Routes project—a proposed museum about slavery—is in Matanzas province. While race and slavery are largely absent from these heritage narratives, Afrocuban cultural performance is perhaps almost too present. Alongside this intense museumizing, there has been explosion in the popularity of Afrocuban religious practices and cultural performances among Cuba’s population—practices that were formerly considered backward, marginal, and deviant, but are now potentially social capital for their practitioners. This is not to suggest that the increased visibility of racially marked cultural afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    297

practices is solely based on their market appeal. But it is undeniable that both state and non-state actors are engaged in commoditizing and merchandizing these, along with other forms of black cultural production, for tourist consumption. Although the “folkloricization” of Cuba’s “religions of African origin,” as they are now called in museum parlance, predates the upsurge in tourism by at least a few decades, the tourist boom has created new conditions and contradictions.40 r ace, tour ism, and local interests

The Museum of Guanabacoa closed again in the late 1990s for several years, this time for structural repairs and to expand the museum’s exhibition space. For part of this time, largely to satisfy the demands of foreign visitors (and some Cubans) who made the pilgrimage to Guanabacoa precisely to see its religious ethnology collection, the museum maintained an auxiliary display, called the Bazaar of the Orishas, which I visited in the summer of 2001. The title alone betrays the conflation of museology and commerce and the foregrounding of Afrocuban religion as the museum’s main selling point. Inside, it was hard to distinguish the didactic parts of the exhibit from the merchandise on sale at the gift shop. (See fig. 8.) According to museum staff, while local residents are proud of their local museum’s national and international reputation, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction that the rest of the collection—what many Guanabacoa residents see as the part that is uniquely local—is not on view. They resist, to a degree, the way that the current installation appears to reduce Guana­ bacoa’s culture and heritage to the religions of African origin. While the local remains packed away at the museum, which is already out of the way of tourists, the local is not packed away with the Salida de los Cabildos. Pre-Lenten Carnival was suspended by the Batista dictatorship in the late 1950s to avoid rowdy public celebrations that might turn political. The religious origins had long been obscured and overridden by a mixture of pageantry, commerce, and politics. The new Revolutionary government revived Carnival once again, but attempted to turn it into a vehicle for the promotion of socialist values. Che Guevara announced that Cuba’s was a revolution with pachanga (a form of music and dance popular in the 1960s), and the commandantes marched in Carnival processions in 298    lisa maya knauer

8 The aesthetic, the commercial, and the ethnographic at the Bazaar de las Orishas of the Historical Museum of Guanabacoa. This room was both a display and a retail shop, and staff stressed that many of the objects for sale could be used in ritual contexts.   Photo: Lisa Maya Knauer.

the early 1960s. In 1970, Carnival was moved from February to July so as not to interfere with the sugar harvest.41 It was cancelled during the early 1990s for economic reasons but reinstated once again in 1995 and scheduled in July or August or both July and August. Carnival is promoted as something that belongs to all Cubans and not specifically an Afrocuban celebration, and in the late 1990s it became more “commercial” and geared toward tourists.42 It is not always held in July: It has been “suspended” on a few occasions since 1995—at least once for economic reasons so the resources could be used for school construction. In 2003 it was held in November. In 2005 it was held in February and March. In 2006 and 2007, it was back to August. Although the parade includes floats filled with long-legged beauties from the Tropicana and other reopened cabarets and popular orchestras, the traditional Afrocuban comparsas are what dominate the streets. While Cubans of all colors participate in Carnival, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is, largely, a “black” thing. Nearly all the participants in the comparsas are black, and the Cuban public that crowds the bleachers on the Malecón is also mostly black. Carnival is afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    299

also associated, in the minds of many Cubans, with excessive consumption of alcohol and boisterous behavior, which are also cast in racialized terms, and it is thus subject to intense policing.43 Both the Museum of Guanabacoa and Casa de Africa began to include performances of folkloric music and dance as part of their regular pro­ gramming in the 1990s. These performances were held in part to satisfy the desires of tourists, but also as a way of reaching out to the communities surrounding the museums.44 The folkloric boom of the 1990s sparked a renewed interest in Ortiz’s writings, and several out-of-print volumes were republished.45 Casa de Africa organized a scholarly symposium on Afrocuban culture called Between Cubans, and out of that came a proposal to revive the Día de los Reyes celebration for Casa de Africa’s tenth anniversary in 1996.46 Using an essay that Ortiz wrote in the 1920s as a guide, the museum professionals planned a parade and mapped out a route, and contracted folkloric performers to enact the parade.47 Throughout my conversations with the professional staff, they reiterated a concern with authenticity and cultural preservation and continually invoked Ortiz as a touchstone. There is some irony in using Ortiz as a guide to an “authentic” recreation of the Día de los Reyes celebration since it is almost certain that he never witnessed one: he was no more than a few years old when the event was banned by the Spanish authorities. Although in 1920 he surely would have been able to find surviving participants to interview, his articles are based largely upon nineteenth-century written sources. His descriptions of the processions are drawn almost entirely from accounts by costumbrista writers and European visitors to Havana. However, popular memories of the Día de los Reyes processions were still very much alive in the Old Havana neighborhoods that surrounded the Casa de Africa, and people had continued to mark January 6 with smaller, more private festivities. While most of the original cabildos no longer ex­ ist, they remain a powerful symbol of black cultural resistance.48 The Salida de los Cabildos has been popular with local residents, as are the occasional musical performances sponsored by Casa de Africa. The heritage professionals, for their part, have tried to present a faithful recreation of a nineteenth-century event; in addition to Ortiz’s writings, they have looked at work by nineteenth-century artists. However, these artists tended to exaggerate the “colorful” and exotic elements of Afrocuban 300    lisa maya knauer

cultural performance.49 Ironically, then, the colonialist gaze embodied in these drawings and paintings is used as a guide to cultural authenticity. At the same time, the museum staff—none of whom has any personal background in Carnival or Afrocuban music—is conscious of the way that the procession must “play” to contemporary audiences. The event is choreographed and theatricalized, drawing upon the established conventions of state-sponsored folkloric spectacles. It is selective and representative. The organizing committee maps out the parade route itself, so that there is a beginning, middle, and end, and plots the various set pieces that are performed in the plazas along the way. As I discuss below, the heritage professionals try to make sure that the procession proceeds as planned and that the “sets” start and stop when they are supposed to (thus there is limited room for performers to improvise or elaborate). As in the museum displays, all three major Afrocuban religious-cultural traditions are included but are presented separately. However, the presentation relies upon expertise and embodied knowledge of folkloric performers, and therein lies an interesting and complex process of collaboration and negotiation, as the “culture bearers” often have different performative criteria, and there are occasionally disagreements and minor clashes over the shape of the procession. The musical director of the Salida de los Cabildos, Daniel Rodriguez, is a well-respected middle-aged folkloric performer, and also a religious practitioner, so he brings knowledge from both the ritual and theatrical realms. For him, participation in the Salida de los Cabildos represented a conscious and strategic choice; he wanted to ensure that the music and dance were of high quality and “correct” (at least to the conventions of folkloric performance), but he also saw this as a way of opening a space for black cultural production and maintaining the vitality of the traditions by teaching them to children and teenagers. He established a company of young musicians and dancers called Los Ibeyis, which forms the core of the performers in the Salida de los Cabildos and also performs sacred and secular folkloric music in other public venues. And while the agendas may not seem that far apart—the performers are also interested in validating Afrocuban cultural expression and the right to perform it in public—there are questions about who controls the spectacle. There have been efforts to make this a “national” and not a “local” event, afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    301

and so exact authenticity is sometimes overridden in the interests of showcasing a variety of regional or local musical styles—styles that would not have been found in Havana in the nineteenth century. In 2005, the organizers brought Ojun D’gara, an acclaimed group of traditional performers from Matanzas province. However, as they were performing, Natasha, the organizer, decided that she needed to keep things moving and she signaled to another group of performers to start although Ojun D’gara had not finished their set; they were, in fact, in mid-song when the other group started. The musicians did not confront the directors but simply packed up and got on the bus that would take them back to Matanzas—they had come to Havana solely for this performance. In speaking to both the musicians and Natasha, I could see that there were two distinct sets of performative criteria. Natasha felt justified in making sure that the audience did not get bored. The musicians were deeply offended because they felt that neither their tradition nor their professionalism as performers was being respected. Events like the Salida de los Cabildos evoke contradictory reactions from Havana residents and those most concerned with Afrocuban cultural production. Although it is a state-sponsored folkloric reenactment, many of the performers, as well as some community residents, see it in a positive light, as a means of reclaiming and preserving cultural traditions that might otherwise be forgotten or marginalized. It is also, quite literally, an intervention into or reclamation of an increasingly privatized public sphere, as more and more of the Old Havana streetscape is turned over to touristfriendly enterprises (hard-currency shops featuring luxury items beyond the reach of most Cubans), and local residents sometimes feel like their neighborhoods no longer belong to them.50 However, black cultural performances in public spaces—even when sponsored by state cultural institutions—still evoke anxiety and fears of social disorder. The Salida de los Cabildos is usually held on a weekday afternoon and draws only small crowds. And despite efforts to carefully choreograph it, it is not completely controllable and often threatens to overspill its bounds. As Natasha commented in our discussion, the staff has to work to maintain a semblance of order since people from the neighborhood tend to insert themselves (meterse) into the comparsa along with the musicians. Events that draw large crowds—such as the revived Carnival celebrations—are constructed as unruly and heavily policed.51 The Giganteria 302    lisa maya knauer

troupe, which is not affiliated with any state-run cultural institutions, puts on street theater performances (using stilts, puppets, and juggling) every week in Old Havana, and their shows are often broken up by the police.52 However, the police are especially vigilant at cultural performances and spaces that are identified as “black,” such as outdoor performances of rumba music in neighborhood settings and hip-hop concerts. I attended a reggae concert in January 2006, a few days after the Salida de los Cabildos, in a playground near the parade route. This concert had an official imprimatur from the Union of Young Communists (ujc), and a ujc official gave the introduction—marking an important step toward legitimizing a musical form and religious practice that are often viewed as criminal and marginal (in much the same way that Afrocuban religions were treated a few decades ago). Over the past few years, individual reggae performers have sometimes performed at public venues associated with folkloric genres, but this was the first stand-alone reggae concert that carried the state imprimatur. The small, well-behaved audience included Rastafarians, tourists, and neighborhood residents, along with children who amused themselves on the playground equipment. Aside from the inevitable technical glitches with cables and microphones, everything seemed to be going smoothly when the organizers abruptly started packing up the equipment. When I inquired about why the concert was cut short, an organizer told me that the neighbors had complained about the noise. This is in a city where people regularly play their stereos so loudly that the music can be heard two or three houses away and in a neighborhood full of outdoor cafés with strolling musicians. It seemed clear that it was the musical genre and the racialized associations it carried, and not the decibel level, that upset the neighbors.53 The Salida de los Cabildos (and similar spectacles) is not, in my view, solely a folkloric curiosity for tourists, although many Cubans (including folkloric musicians and religious practitioners) dismiss it as such. When I started visiting Cuba in the mid-1990s, there were several dozen functioning Abakuá societies in Havana and Matanzas, and there are now over a hundred.54 In the 1990s a national federation of Abakuá societies was established, licensed by the Cuban government. In January 2005, a few days after the Salida de los Cabildos briefly reclaimed the streets of Old Havana, several of the Abakuá societies organized a public procession through the streets of Regla, a nearby municipality.55 afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    303

Of course, in Cuba as elsewhere, achieving official status is not an unmixed blessing. These developments represent the “governmentalization” of “black” cultural forms like hip-hop or Abakuá—and thus an effort by the state to co-opt or control—but they also reflect the agency of rappers, santeros, and Abakuás in seeking visibility and resources.56 Many of these national institutions were, in fact, founded by the state, while there are other, and in some cases competing, federations or organizations that were founded by practitioners. But I cite these examples to signal that “black” cultural forms like Abakuá and la Regla de Ocha are hardly moth-eaten relics that cultural bureaucrats have trotted out for their own purposes. It is not, in fact, uncommon for the dancers who portray Abakuá iremes in these spectacles to be members of the Abakuá secret society, and many of the performers in the Salida de los Cabildos are devotees of one or more Afrocuban religions.57 And while these religions do not have an evangeliz­ ing or missionary ethos, many of the performer-practitioners see public performances as a way to dispel some prejudices about black culture. By contrast, few if any of the heritage professionals who designed these museum displays or produced the Salida de los Cabildos are practitioners of Afrocuban religions.58 Before 1991 religious believers could not be members of the Communist Party, and it was rare for professionals of any sort to openly display religious affiliation.59 While as I indicated earlier, there has been an explosion of open religiosity (including evangelical Christianity), it is still rare for professionals in public institutions to claim religious involvement. Museum employees do attend specialized classes in ethnography, Afrocuban religions, and technical aspects of museology. The director of the Guanabacoa museum assured me that the staff consulted with members of the local religious communities and noted that the museum had changed certain aspects of the exhibition as a result. But most of the heritage professionals, by their own admission, did not grow up in environments where these religions were part of the fabric of everyday life. (Luis Pedroso of the Municipal Museum of Regla is a notable exception.) This somewhat distanced perspective reflects the larger national heritage narrative that undergirds this and other museum exhibits on Afrocuban religion.60 The descriptive materials highlight the “immense aesthetic value” of the ceremonial objects, and express gratitude to “the children

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of Africa who have . . . left upon our culture their indelible imprint.”61 Religion is thus narrowed to aesthetics and is primarily dealt with in the past tense. The phrasing is reminiscent of Enlightenment writing about “primitive” cultures that had vanished but left their traces upon “modern” civilization. On the surface, it might seem that the museum is taking Afrocuban religion more seriously than does the parade. However, I would argue that the spectacular nature of the parade does not differentiate it from museological practice but instead locates it squarely within that tradition.62 In addition, the multiple meanings given to the parade by participants and spectators as well as its historical significance as a space for the performance and production of a black or African identity, further problematize such a conclusion. The museums have a didactic mission, but their presentations do not hint at the dynamism or contemporary social context of Afrocuban religions. While the claims to authenticity of public performances like the Salida de los Cabildos are certainly open to scrutiny, the fact that they take place in the street and are slightly unpredictable and not entirely controllable adds a dynamic quality. The theatricalized representation of real-life practices in state-sponsored spectacles—what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes as the transformation of culture as habitus into culture as heritage63—may shape the context in which everyday manifestations occur, but it does not replace or cancel them. Afrocuban religious performances—and I use this term to refer to both explicitly spectacularized and more quotidian or ritual settings—continue to be an important realm in which both the state and ordinary citizens negotiate the complex meanings of race, culture, and citizenship in contemporary Cuba. notes

I am deeply indebted to the staff of Casa de Africa and the Museo Histórico de Guanabacoa for their time and cooperation. Several other Cuban colleagues shared their research and ideas, including Luis Alberto Pedroso, Tomás Fernández Robaina, Lázara Menéndez, and Daniel Rodríguez. Robin Moore, as always, was generous with advice. Katherine Adams Gordy and Reinaldo Román read and commented upon earlier drafts. This essay is undoubtedly much improved by their collective advice.

afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    305

1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10

11

12

Ortiz introduced the metaphor of Cuban culture as a stew blending many disparate ingredients—including some on the verge of putrefaction—in 1939, in the essay “Los factores Humanos de la Cubanidad,” which has been reprinted several times, including, most recently in Suarez, ed., Fernando Ortíz y la Cubanidad, 1–35. The label “the third discoverer of Cuba” comes from an essay written by Juan Marinello shortly after Ortiz’s death; “Fernando Ortiz, 1891–1969,” Casa de Las Americas 55, no. 4. This date coincides with the Feast of the Epiphany. In other parts of the Caribbean it is sometimes called El Día de los Tres Reyes Magos (the Day of the Three Wise Kings). Hill, “Globalizing Havana.” See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography.” Standing sign, Historical Museum of Guanabacoa. All translations are mine. Ibid. For a discussion of the counterposition of sorcery and science in Cuba, see Palmié, Wizards and Scientists. For a much more nuanced analysis of spiritism and the scholarly accounts of this socioreligious complex, see Román, “Governing Man-Gods,” and Governing Spirits. Unnamed docent, personal communication, January 2005. For example, a label on one vitrine reads “Obbatala. Owner of peace and tranquility. Our Lady of Mercy.” Our Lady of Mercy is the Catholic saint who “corresponds” to Obbatala. Exactly how devotees understand the relationship between the African deities and Christian figures is a subject of some debate, however, and nothing in the museum narrative illuminates or explains this. Interview with Grisel Fraga, director of the Historical Museum of Guanabacoa, Aug. 23, 2005. All interviews cited were conducted in Spanish, and the translations are mine. Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness; Ortiz, “La antigua fiesta Afrocubana del día de los reyes,” 41–78. Ortiz wrote this essay in 1920, just as Cuban intellectuals and artists were beginning to revalorize African-derived cultural expressions. It was reprinted (with minor changes) several times during Ortiz’s lifetime and has been included in at least one posthumous anthology, Ensayos Etnográficos, coedited by Ortiz’s former student Miguel Barnet. The French painter Victor Landaluze was noted for his “colorful” and “picturesque” portraits of Havana’s black population; these images draw upon exoticized stereotypes. His depiction of the Día del los Reyes is widely reproduced in literature concerning Carnival and the Día de los Reyes celebrations. For a critical analysis of the work of Landaluze and other nineteenth-century costumbrista artists, see Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets. Several of Landaluze’s paintings still hang in the National Gallery in Havana. There are no texts beyond a simple

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13

14 15 16

17

18 19

20 21 22

23

24

identification of the painter, title, and year. I am grateful to Tomás Fernández Robaina for calling these paintings to my attention. Cuban sources give different dates for the suspension; the most authoritative seems to be 1884, during the last gasp of the Spanish empire. See Moore, Nationalizing Blackness. Ibid. Also, Enrique Insua, interview with the author, Oct. 21, 2000, Miami. For a detailed discussion of the brujería scares, see Palmié, Wizards and Scientists. The exhibit was designed to show the harmful effects of “witchcraft and ñañigüismo.” Exhibition brochure, cited in Pedroso, “Las exposiciones de ‘cultos afrocubanos’ y la necesidad de su reconceptualización.” The museum, which occupies two small rooms in an obscure building at Havana’s Calixto Garcia hospital, is a fascinating study in its own right as a relic of the early-twentieth-century criminological gaze. Many of the objects—including artifacts that were used as evidence in some of the most infamous brujería trials—still carry their original labels, small typewritten index cards. Several historians and researchers of my acquaintance in Cuba had no idea that the museum still existed. See Moore, Nationalizing Blackness. “Folklore” was nearly synonymous with “Afrocuban religion” and vice versa. Most of the articles published in the institute’s two journals, Actas del Folklore and Etnologia y Folklore, focus on Afrocuban culture. Actas del Folklore, a monthly journal, was abruptly terminated after a year of publication. In 2001 the Fundación Fernando Ortiz reprinted all twelve issues in a single volume. Etnologia y Folklore was published from 1966 to 1969. See, among other sources, de la Fuente, A Nation for All. Hagedorn, Divine Utterances. Pedroso, “Las exposiciones de ‘cultos afrocubanos.’ ” For a succinct discussion of Cuban anthropology in the post-Revolutionary period, see HernandezReguant, “Cuba’s Alternative Geographies.” Pedroso, “Las exposiciones de ‘cultos afrocubanos’ ”; Tomás Fernández Robaina, interview with the author, Dec. 31, 2003, Havana. I have not located any written sources that explain why the museum was never built. The “new socialist man” heralded by Che was an atheist, so while adult devotees of Afrocuban religions were allowed to practice, the initiation of children was prohibited. Ceremonies were restricted to certain hours and police permission was necessary. Both scholarly sources and people I interviewed differed on the extent to which Afrocuban religions were restricted during the 1960s and 1970s and whether this constituted persecution. See, for example, Hagedorn, Divine Utterances; and Vélez, Drumming For the Gods.

afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    307

25

26

27 28

29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36

37

When a devotee of one of the Afrocuban religions dies, special ceremonies are held to determine the fate of his or her sacred objects. If their family members were also devotees, they might be directed to care for the items in their homes. Items that were donated to museums had clearly fallen out of use. Lydia Cabrera was a pioneering anthropologist who exhaustively documented Afrocuban religion and music in the 1940s and 1950s. She left Cuba in the early 1960s, settling in the United States. Much of her work was published in the United States and therefore was unavailable in Cuba (except in samizdat editions); her contributions to Cuban anthropology were barely discussed by scholars. There has been a reassessment of Cabrera in recent years, signaled by the publication in 1993 of her master work El Monte by Editorial Union in Havana. See Rodriguez-Mangual, Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an AfroCuban Cultural Identity. Luis Pedroso, “Las exposiciones de ‘cultos afrocubanos,’ ” 129. Practitioners had objected that the scene of animal sacrifice was not completely accurate and that moreover, sacrifices were only supposed to be viewed by initiates. Luis Pedroso, personal communication, August 2006. See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Although I visited the museum in 1993 and viewed these installations, I have drawn upon photographs in the museum’s collection and Luis Pedroso’s descriptions of these other rooms to refresh my recollection as I took neither notes nor photographs in 1993. At the time that Casa de Africa opened, Cuba had thousands of soldiers, as well as doctors and other professionals, stationed in southern Africa. The plan was to reopen on the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Casa de Africa, January 6, 2006. When I visited Cuba in January 2006, none of the exhibitions were officially open to the public, but the ground floor was opened for an anniversary celebration attended by several African ambassadors and other dignitaries. It was not clear whether what we saw there would be a permanent exhibit or whether it was assembled for the anniversary. From what I saw during a brief visit in June 2007, little had changed. The material in this section comes from interviews conducted in August 2005 with Alberto Granado and Adriana Pérez at Casa de Africa. Hill, “Globalizing Havana.” Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. The ohch website states that twenty-one “museums and specialized houses,” two galleries, and five cultural centers are under its auspices. At least two hundred other museums, galleries, and historic sites are run by other entities (www .ohch.cu, accessed June 20, 2006). An interesting contrast is provided by Pelourinho in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Here, old slave quarters are the center of the unesco-designated World Heri-

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38

39

40

41 42

43

44

tage site. However, race plays an equally complicated role in the construction of baianidade (Bahianness) and Brazilian national identity. See de Araujo Pinho, “A Bahia no Fundamental.” See also Paul Amar’s essay in this volume; and Sansone, Blackness without Ethnicity. Some seem strangely out of place—for example, small parks dedicated to Britain’s late Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, who have no particular relationship to Cuba. Hill, “Globalizing Havana.” In 2005 I saw a plaque in the Plaza Vieja with a blandly celebratory quote about Cuban identity from the nineteenth-century writer José Antonio Saco. The plaque did not mention that Saco had forcefully argued that blacks had no place in a free Cuba and urged increased European immigration to “whiten” Cuba. For a more complete discussion of the complex and often contradictory racial politics of the independence movement, see Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba. There is substantial literature on the cultural transformations of Cuba’s “special period” and the impact of tourism on Cuban culture, especially music. See Fernandes, Cuba Represent!; Hagedorn, Divine Utterances; Hernandez-Reguant, “Cuba’s Alternative Geographies”; Knauer, “Translocal Afrocubanidad”; Moore, Music and Revolution; Perry, “Los Raperos,” among others. Hagedorn coined the term folkloricization. This was the year that Fidel announced a target of 10 million tons of sugar—a target that was not met. The temporary refreshment stands that line the Malecón during Carnival were set up earlier, and there are now some permanent or semi-permanent open-air cafés selling food and beer. There were also several cabarets opened along the Malecón, where after the Carnival parade those who could afford the admission price could enjoy a stage show and those who could not hung around outside to enjoy a partial view. Other than the various iterations of Ortiz’s 1920 article and a single chapter in Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness, there is very little scholarship about Havana’s Carnival. Most of the existing scholarship about Carnival in Cuba focuses on Santiago de Cuba in Oriente province. See, for example, Bettelheim, ed., Cuban Festivals. Historically, at least, Carnival was very localized, and there were significant differences between the musical, religious, and other cultural practices in Santiago and Havana, and other cities as well, although there have been intra-island cultural “flows” and some homogenization. I suspect the lack of scholarship on Havana’s Carnival reflects widely held views about Santiago’s “authenticity” versus Havana’s “commerciality.” The ochc seems to be aware that many Cubans view the ever-expanding exhibitionary complex of museums and historic sites as something for tourists and not for them; in the summer of 2000, the ochc launched a community afrocub an religion and the cub an nation    309

45

46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63

outreach program called Rutas y Andares offering groups of local residents reduced admission prices to attractions in the “Historic Center.” See Fernández, “The Changing Discourse of Race in Contemporary Cuba”; and Hernández-Reguant, “Cuba’s Alternative Geographies.” The numerous contradictions in Ortiz’s legacy are rarely discussed by Cubans. See Bronfman, Measures of Equality. The title of the conference comes from a book published by Ortiz in 1913 or 1914. Ortiz, “El Día del los reyes o los diablitos.” There are some interesting parallels to Brazil, another country that claims to be a racial democracy. See, for example, Harding, A Refuge in Thunder. See Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets. Several Cuban acquaintances who live in the historic center expressed these sentiments repeatedly and without prompting. I discuss the policing of black culture in more detail in “Translocal and Multi­ cultural Counterpublics.” The racial, cultural, and spatial politics of Cuban hip-hop are discussed in Perry, “Los raperos”; and Fernandes, Cuba Represent! Agustina Lagarifa, personal communication, January 2006. For a discussion of how race figures into the construction of musical genres, see Tricia Rose, Black Noise. Miller, “A Secret Society Goes Public,” 64. Stefan Palmié, personal communication, January 2006. Contextualized discussions of the relationship between the Cuban state and cultural producers can be found Perry, “Los raperos”; and Fernandes, Cuba Represent!, among other sources. See Miller, “A Secret Society Goes Public.” For a more problematized discussion of Abakuá and its origins, see Routon, “Unimaginable Homelands?” In 1998 or 1999 I saw a museum technician at Casa de Africa wearing a beaded bracelet that marked her as a practitioner. According to Tomás Fernández Robaina—who is both a professional and a practitioner—it would have been highly unlikely for a museum administrator to either be a religious believer or openly display religious beliefs. Tomás Fernández Robaina, personal communication, August 1999. Involvement in Afrocuban religions was not prohibited outright, but it was discouraged. Michelle Tisdale Flikke, an anthropology graduate student at Harvard, is working on a dissertation on heritage narratives in Cuban museums. Arjona, “Museum of Guanabacoa,” 9. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” argues that festivals are museums of living traditions. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “World Heritage and Cultural Economics,” 195.

310    lisa maya knauer

Haunting Delgrès Laurent Dubois

in the heart of Paris, paces from the Sorbonne, is an im­ pressive (if structurally faulty) building devoted to the worship of French heroes—the Pantheon. On the upper floor, statues, paintings, and a Foucault’s pendulum vie for visitors’ attention, along with occasional temporary exhibits. But it is below, in a cold, dark stone crypt entered through descending stairs, that the soul of the building resides. Visitors gather next to the deco­ rated tombs of Rousseau and Voltaire, the first to be placed in the building when it was transformed from a church into a Temple of French Heroes during the French Revolution. Ex­ tending beyond are many other crypts containing the French dead, some famous, others barely known, placed there each in their own time of conflict and mythmaking. During the nine­ teenth century the Pantheon repeatedly changed in its func­ tion, at times reconsecrated as a church, then made into the nation’s temple again by Republicans. Ideally, entrance into the Pantheon would be a permanent thing; but there have been a few unlucky souls, like Jean-Paul Marat, who were moved in and then out during the struggles of the Revolution. Embodied

in the Pantheon are the myths, stories, and forms of worship at the heart of French national identity. Far from the Pantheon, in the Caribbean department of Guadeloupe, are a series of monuments to a hero who has until recently existed on the margins of French national consciousness. If you drive up the slopes of the Soufrière volcano from the capital of Basse-Terre towards the village of Matouba, you will probably miss the small stone plaque that lies near a fork in the road—unless you are looking for it. The faded stone reads simply: “To the memory of Delgrès and his companions, 28 May 1802.” This plaque was placed there in 1948, two years after Guadeloupe became a department of France. Its placement represented the beginning of a series of attempts by local administrators to commemorate a man named Louis Delgrès, a military hero who died fighting against the French troops sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to reestablish slavery on the island in 1802. In 1989, the fort where Delgrès fought before retreating to Matouba was renamed after him. Still, Delgrès’s memory, and the echoes of slavery and racial conflict that it necessarily carries with it, remained contained within Guadeloupe itself. In metropolitan France, there was no monument that acknowledged his actions or the broader struggle of which it had been a part. This changed in April of 1998, with an official ceremony that brought the memory of Louis Delgrès, and another, better-known hero of the period, Toussaint Louverture, into the Pantheon. This ceremony represented the culmination of many decades of efforts on the part of Antilleans to have these men recognized as heroes who had died fighting for justice and free­ dom. Given that Louverture and Delgrès were both killed by the French state in the process of fighting against its policies, their inclusion among the ranks of Republican heroes was an official acknowledgement that they had chosen the side of right in taking up arms against France. The process of bringing them into the Pantheon, then, reflected a broader process of rein­ terpreting history, of rethinking France’s history of colonialism and slavery. The presence of Delgrès and Louverture in the Pantheon, however, is dif­ ferent in one crucial way from that of the other “French heroes” who sur­ round them. All of the previous induction ceremonies involved the transfer of the honored individual’s remains into the crypt. No one knows where Delgrès’s bones are; he was likely buried in a mass grave with the other insurgents who died at Matouba. And there is controversy about the exact 312    laurent dubois

whereabouts of Louverture’s bones. Given the absence of their remains, itself a powerful reminder of how they died, Delgrès and Louverture were instead given plaques dedicated to their memory. The story of how Delgrès came to be commemorated, first in Guade­ loupe and then in Paris, highlights the complex process through which the memory of slavery and racial oppression, and the resistance to it, has been both silenced and evoked in contemporary France. The ceremony at the Pantheon was the result of important shifts that have occurred in the way France’s history of colonization and enslavement in the Caribbean has been written and discussed. It signified the (at least partial) dialogue between and merging of divergent and conflicting historiographical and commemora­ tive traditions that developed in parallel in the past decades in metropolitan France and the French Antilles. The form given the public evocation of Delgrès and Louverture in the Pantheon can be read as a claim that their struggles laid the foundation for the eventual abolition of slavery in France in 1848. This claim is a departure from traditional mainstream French ac­ counts of how and why abolition occurred in that year, and represents an important shift of emphasis in commemorative practice from a concen­ tration on metropolitan heroes, such as the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, to Caribbean revolutionaries of African descent. This essay explores these links between historical work and the construction of public monuments in order to highlight how historical memory has been part of a continuing struggle over the relationship between metropolitan France and the French Caribbean departments. The nineteenth-century historian Jean Jaurès, in a passage taken up a half century later by C. L. R. James, noted that through a “sad irony of human history” slavery and the slave trade had propelled the French Revolution by providing the economic foundation that gave “the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.”1 Jaurès’s discussion of the colonies, however, was exceptional among historians of the French Revolution, who have consistently ignored the issue of slavery and emancipation in their writings. As Yves Benot has noted, even Jaurès didn’t mention in his magisterial work the fact that slavery was abolished in 1794, if only temporarily. Despite the fact that during the 1790s a massive and unprecedented experiment in slave emancipation was launched in the Caribbean by French Republican administrators and emancipated slaves, haunting delgrès    313

with profound effects on the economy and society of the Americas, this has remained to many what Michel Rolph Trouillot has termed an “unthink­ able history.” Trouillot argues that the radical events that shook the Carib­ bean during this period so profoundly undermined Western ideas about slaves and slavery that they were essentially uninterpretable within existing frameworks of thought.2 It is also true that, for French historians partici­ pating in the construction of a nationalist historiography, the end of this process of transformation—the massive military defeat of French troops in St. Domingue and the unprecedented brutality of the reestablishment of slavery in Guadeloupe and Guiana—has tended to overshadow an interest in the causes and ramifications of the process of slave emancipation that preceded it. Any engagement with the history of slavery, emancipation, and revolution in the Caribbean forces a reevaluation of the history of the French Republic and its ideals, and until recently such a reevaluation has not been very welcome among mainstream French historians. If this has been true in the historical profession, it has also obviously been the case in the realm of public discussion and commemoration of the history of slavery within the French empire. The absence of a discussion of slavery or slave emancipation in Pierre Nora’s massive compendium of Les Lieux de Mémoire (published in English as Realms of Memory) is a sign of this.3 The same has not been true in Guadeloupe, where a long tradition of historical work has existed, led by figures such as Henri Bangou, Jacques Adélaide-Mérlande, and Lucien Réne Abenon. Perhaps because these scholars have published with smaller presses and held academic or political positions in the Caribbean, their work has often been overlooked by schol­ ars in metropolitan France. This long-standing lack of dialogue continues in many ways today. At the same time, however, especially since 1989, there has been an increasing acknowledgment both of the work of scholars from the French Caribbean and of the importance of the history of the region. In the context of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution, a series of books were published dealing with the Caribbean, by both schol­ ars based in Guadeloupe, notably Bangou, and scholars based in metropoli­ tan France, such as Yves Benot and Michelle Vovelle. Although the issue of slavery was barely integrated into the broader celebrations, these aca­ demic efforts contributed to a larger trend. In 1994, a well-established his­ torian of the French Revolution, Marcel Dorigny, organized a conference 314    laurent dubois

that brought together various scholars working on the abolition of slavery, which then led to the publication of an important collection of essays on the subject.4 It was not until 1998, however, with the commemorations of France’s second (and final) abolition of slavery in 1848, that those interested in creat­ ing a broader public discussion about slavery and emancipation succeeded. During these commemorations, historians, writers, visual artists, musi­ cians, archivists, and museum curators all participated in a set of public debates, exhibitions, and events that changed the way slavery and abolition were talked about in France. Although these events were initially imagined as a commemoration of the victory of Republican ideals in the abolition of slavery of 1848, Antilleans—including the director of the commemora­ tion, Daniel Maximin—forced an expansion of the idea of what was to be commemorated into the broader history of slavery and resistance in the Caribbean. Those seeking to highlight the role of Caribbean figures in the abolition of slavery often turned to the history of the 1790s and the insur­ rectionary and revolutionary movements that shook the region during that period. In doing so, they concentrated on and made productive use of the fascinating figure of Louis Delgrès. To understand why the figure of Delgrès has been so important in this capacity, we must of course understand his role in the events that shook Guadeloupe in 1802, and the transformations that led to them during the decade of the 1790s. During the early 1790s, slave insurrections exploded in St. Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. Gens de couleur—free people of African descent—also agitated for change, demanding equality with free whites. As they responded to these threats, whites themselves were deeply split between those who supported the French Republic and those who op­ posed it and increasingly advocated for a return to royal power. In the end, a surprising transformation took place, thanks to the convergence between slave insurrection and the actions of radical Republicans from France. In St. Domingue 1793, the Republican administrator Léger Felicité Sonthonax, isolated and attacked by white royalists in league with the nearby British, granted freedom and citizenship to those insurgent slaves who would fight for the Republic. The proclamation quickly reversed the balance of power on the island, and within a few months Sonthonax and other admin­ istrators had liberated all of the slaves of France’s most valuable colonial haunting delgrès    315

possession. News of this decision was brought to France by a “tri-color” group of representatives (one was African-born, another an homme de couleur, the third white) to the Jacobin-dominated National Convention. The abolition of slavery in St. Domingue was ratified and expanded to all of the French colonies. In a radical gesture, slaves were granted universal and immediate emancipation, with no indemnity to the planters and no period of apprenticeship. They were mobilized in large numbers to fight the Brit­ ish in a conflict that in the Caribbean became a war over the existence of slavery itself.5 Louis Delgrès was a Martinican homme de couleur, a free man, who embodied the possibilities opened up by these radical transformations. He first rose to prominence by fighting with the Republicans on Marti­ nique against their Royalist enemies during 1792 and 1793. He was one of a group of hommes de couleur who were participants in the first racially integrated election in French history, which took place in October of 1792 among exiled Republicans from Martinique and Guadeloupe. Delgrès was captured by the British when they finally conquered Martinique in 1794, and sent to England as a prisoner of war. He was eventually released to mainland France and there became a officer in the Bataillion des Antilles that was sent to Guadeloupe in 1795. In the next years, he served in the French campaigns against the British in St. Lucia and St. Vincent before being captured once again. Released, he traveled to Paris before return­ ing to Guadeloupe in 1800 as a high-ranking officer. Delgrès commanded a great deal of respect and loyalty among the troops of Guadeloupe, many of whom had served in various campaigns with him. These troops, many of them ex-slaves, had fought loyally for the Republic during the preceding years as they joined with insurgent slaves on British colonial islands against the institution of slavery.6 By 1802, however, these soldiers, and officers like Delgrès, were con­ fronted with alarming news from metropolitan France. The radical policies of emancipation that had transformed their lives had come under increas­ ing attack from exiled planters and even former abolitionists who lamented what they perceived to be the violence and economic collapse brought on by the sudden passage from slavery to freedom. With the war against Brit­ ain ended by the Treaty of Amiens (briefly, as it would turn out), Napoleon Bonaparte decided to reestablish slavery. He delivered secret instructions 316    laurent dubois

to two generals, Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc and Antoine Richepanse, who were sent to St. Domingue and Guadeloupe respectively to gain control of the islands and then return them to their “pre-1789” state. Many of the sol­ diers of the Antilles understood what was happening, and when Leclerc’s mission arrived in St. Domingue, it met with quick and fierce resistance, led by Toussaint Louverture, who had become the de facto leader of the colony. Louverture, however, was captured and sent to a prison in the Pyrenées, where he died soon afterward. Resistance weakened in St. Domingue until shocking news from Guadeloupe helped reignite it, and ex-slave generals such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe led the way to the independence of what became Haiti in 1804. Events had taken a very different course in Guadeloupe. By the time Richepanse’s expedition arrived in early 1802, the metropolitan administra­ tor who had been sent a few months earlier had been expelled from the is­ land by angry black and de couleur soldiers who resented his attacks against their role in the military. Among the participants in the uprising was Louis Delgrès, who had grown suspicious of the intentions of the French and ad­ vocated preparing for an armed struggle against any arriving troops. Unlike Delgrès, the officers who had taken over the governance of the colony af­ ter the revolt had faith that Bonaparte would treat them justly, and they greeted the Richepanse expedition with open arms, allowing the French troops to take over the island’s main city. These troops immediately began disarming and arresting black soldiers, making clear their intentions, and many black soldiers escaped and gathered under the leadership of Delgrès in Basse-Terre. There, he took over the fort that would one day carry his name and issued a proclamation, addressed to “the entire Universe,” explaining why he was determined to fight the French. The insurgent troops were joined by thousands of poorly armed ex-slaves, men and women, and for several days pitched battles took place around Basse-Terre, with heavy casualties on both sides. Finally, the French managed to surround the fort with cannon and began bombarding it.7 Delgrès and his fellow officers decided to abandon the fort. They split up into two groups, and while one group sought to incite insurrection on local plantations, Delgrès retreated to a plantation stronghold on the vol­ cano that towers above Basse-Terre. Preferring death to surrender, Delgrès had the plantation mined with ammunition, and when the enemy soldiers haunting delgrès    317

arrived, he lit the wicks, and a huge explosion engulfed Delgrès, several hundred of his followers, and the advance guard of the French troops. Al­ though the fighting continued for several months after Delgrès’s death, with the French using brutal repression in fighting the small bands of insurgents who spread throughout the island, the explosion at Matouba essentially ended the war. Slavery was reestablished in Guadeloupe in an unprecedented transformation of large numbers of women and men who had been free for eight years back into property. Delgrès’s defeat and the brutality of the repression exercised by the French made clear to the people of St. Domingue that their survival and freedom depended on defeating the French, so that while the officers’ death signaled the end of hopes for a free Guadeloupe, it ultimately contributed to the birth of the second republic in the Americas, and the first founded on the ashes of slavery. As the freedom that had existed for eight years in Guadeloupe was elimi­ nated, the fort where Delgrès had fought was renamed after his enemy, General Richepanse, who only a few weeks after Delgrès’s death, died of fever near Matouba. It would be nearly fifty years before emancipation, this time final, was instituted in Guadeloupe in 1848. Even in the wake of slavery, however, the memory of the Guadeloupeans’ reenslaver remained in the name of the Fort Richepanse. In 1946 Guadeloupe, along with Mar­ tinique and Guiana, became departments of France with full political and juridical rights. Two years later, the plaque commemorating the site of Del­ grès’s death at Matouba was installed. Then, in 1960, by a decision of the military commander of the French Caribbean departments, the Fort Riche­ panse was given back its original name of Fort St. Charles. In the same year, Aimé Césaire published a poem in honor of Delgrès, proclaiming him the “herald of a distant vintage.”8 During the next decades, a number of French Antillean historians wrote about Delgrès, including Jacques AdélaïdeMérlande, who asked: “Will Fort St. Charles one day be called Fort Delgrès?”9 In 1989, with the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution in full swing, a small group of local administrators in the town of Basse-Terre decided to honor the memory of Louis Delgrès by changing the name of the fort. The impetus for this change came in large part from the writer Daniel Maximin, whose first novel, L’Isolé Soleil (translated as Lone Sun), dramatized the struggles of Guadeloupeans during the period of the revo­ lution and the battles Delgrès led in 1802. At the time, Maximin was work­ 318    laurent dubois

ing as the director of cultural affairs in Basse-Terre, and he discussed the possibility of renaming the fort with Philippe Cherdieu, who worked in the Conseil Général in Basse-Terre. As Maximin told me: “It struck me that this was the only place I could think of where there were monuments to our oppressors. Are there statues of Hitler in France or of King George in the United States? Why should we honor a man who came to the island to reenslave us?” Because of a 1982 law, promulgated by Mitterand’s Social­ ist government, establishing decentralized decision making with regards to changes in the names of streets and monuments, the local administra­ tion in Guadeloupe had full power to change the name of the fort without consulting anyone higher up in the government. The decision was an easy one to make; it was carried out after a meeting of local administrators in Basse-Terre and signed into law on July 5, 1989. It took a few years for the decision to manifest itself, but by 1996 new signs pointed to Fort Delgrès, and two new plaques had been placed within its walls. One presented a chronology of the fort’s history, highlighting Delgrès’s struggle. The other reproduced the full text of Delgrès’s moving 1802 proclamation.10 In 1996, Daniel Maximin was chosen to manage the commemorations of the abolition of slavery of 1848, which were meant to take place in met­ ropolitan France and the Caribbean during the entire course of 1998. He moved from his office in Basse-Terre to the Ministère d’Outre-Mer in Paris, which manages the administration of all French overseas territories. There, he worked closely with the minister of culture, Catherine Trautmann, and other administrators in developing a program of events for the year. Ca­ ribbean residents in Paris had long been issuing requests for some kind of monument for Delgrès; in particular, some had requested that Richepanse Street be renamed after Delgrès. Because of the position of power he held in 1998, Maximin was able to bring about what was in some ways a more radical gesture: the addition of Delgrès, and Toussaint Louverture, to the Pantheon of French heroes. Created as it was during the French Revolu­ tion, the Pantheon, has long been an explicitly political space in which the incorporation of the bones of the dead has served to consolidate—and, at times, reframe—official narratives of the French nation. The inclusion of Delgrès and Louverture, then, had major symbolic significance for the broader process of the incorporation of the history of slavery and empire into narratives of French history.11 haunting delgrès    319

1  T  he 1946 monument at Matouba, in Guadeloupe, dedicated “To the memory of Delgrès and his companions.” Photo: Laurent Dubois.

2 A recent sign near the entrance to Fort Delgrès. Photo: Laurent Dubois.

3 The battlements of Fort Delgrès. Photo: Laurent Dubois.

4 A recent sign identifies for visitors the back exit through which Delgrès and his troops escaped from the besieged fort before retreating to Matouba for their last stand. Photo: Laurent Dubois.

5 The battlements and rusted cannons of Fort Delgrès. Photo: Laurent Dubois.

6 At the highest point of Fort Delgrès is the military graveyard, whose central tomb is that of General Richepanse. Photo: Laurent Dubois.

7 The entrance to Fort Delgrès, with a sign listing the fort’s previous names. Photo: Laurent Dubois.

The request to commemorate these two figures in the Pantheon was of­ ficially issued by an association that has a long history of struggling over the terms of historical memory in France, the Comité National de Souvenir. This group, founded by the Antillean politician and writer Gaston Mon­ nerville, was responsible, in the wake of the Second World War, for the first incorporation into the Pantheon of figures of importance to France’s co­ lonial history. They successfully lobbied for the inclusion of the remains of two figures: Victor Schoelcher, the French abolitionist who was the archi­ tect of the abolition of slavery of 1848, and the Guiana-born Félix Eboué, who in 1940 as the Governor of Chad was the first colonial administrator to rally to De Gaulle’s call for support against Vichy France and who in 1944 oversaw the famous Brazzaville Conference. Until the inclusion of Delgrès and Louverture, Eboué was the only person of African descent in the Pantheon. (Louverture and Delgrès have since been joined in the Panthéon by the writer Alexandre Dumas, whose grandmother was a slave in St. Domingue.) Significantly, the bones of Schoelcher and Eboué were placed in a crypt alongside the socialist politician and historian Jean Jaurés. haunting delgrès    323

It was along the hallway leading to this crypt that the Comité requested that Louverture and Delgrès be commemorated. On the April 27, 1998, on the 150th anniversary of the 1848 decree that abolished slavery in the French colonies, two plaques were unveiled in the Pantheon, to the memory of Toussaint Louverture and his death at Fort Joux in the Pyrenées, and to Delgrès, “hero of the struggle against the rees­ tablishment of slavery in Guadeloupe” who died “so that liberty could live.” During the ceremony, Minister of Justice Elisabeth Guigou declared: “The French Republic wishes to honor these heroes of the Republic who faith­ fully and zealously defended justice and the equality of rights and fought against discrimination and inhumanity.” France, she continued, honored these men as “precursors of decolonization.”12 A pile of stones was placed at the top of the stairs going down to the crypt, and for several months after the ceremony visitors were invited to carry a stone down to place it on the tomb of Schoelcher, near the new inscriptions. The decision to invoke these Caribbean heroes of the 1790s in the major official event commemorating the abolition of slavery in 1848 was symboli­ cally charged, as was the placement of the plaques themselves. In order to see the tomb of Schoelcher, visitors must now first pass by the inscriptions commemorating these heroes of African descent, who set the stage for the abolition of 1848. This spatial organization literalizes an important but often unacknowledged feature of the thought of Schoelcher, who wrote one of the first biographies of Toussaint Louverture and used the histori­ cal example of the 1790s to argue in 1848 that if the new republic did not abolish slavery, the slaves of the Caribbean would rise up in revolt. Delgrès and Louverture also stand sentinel on the way for visitors seeking to see Jaurès, a pioneer in the historical evocation of slavery in French history, and Eboué, who like the Caribbean insurgents and soldiers of the 1790s, distinguished himself fighting for a republic in peril. The historical claim symbolically made in the Pantheon is a radical one that goes beyond the role granted to Caribbean peoples by most historians of France and the abolition of slavery. Their incorporation in the Pantheon can also, of course, be seen as an attempt at recuperation, aimed at claiming their political heroism for an official narrative of French history. Louverture and Delgrès both died in the pursuit of independence, without ever seeing or being assured of its 324    laurent dubois

fruits—or having the opportunities to tarnish their reputations that other revolutionary leaders did. They died on the cusp of liberation and are both (to very different degrees) founders of independent Haiti. The violence of their deaths itself marks the form of their inclusion in the Pantheon, for their bones have never been found. Unlike the other heroes in the building, they are there only as names, as specters, without the solidity of bones ly­ ing in a coffin to accompany their invocation on the walls. Both in 1998 and since, there has been an important dissonance between the ways in which commemoration of Delgrès, and more broadly of slav­ ery, have taken place in metropolitan France and in the Caribbean depart­ ments. From the beginning of the planning for the 1998 commemoration, the issue of how to distribute events and resources between Paris and the Caribbean departments was extremely controversial. In the end, ceremo­ nies of various kinds were held in all of these areas. Some groups, unsatis­ fied with the official commemorations, organized their own events, most famously a silent march of “descendants of slaves” that was held in Paris on the May 23, 1998.13 On the 27th of May in 1998, meanwhile—two hundred years after eman­ cipation was actually decreed in Guadeloupe—an official ceremony of commemoration was held in the walls of Fort Delgrès. Minister of Culture Catherine Trautmann gave a speech in which she quoted Delgrès’s 1802 proclamation, paraphrasing its condemnations of the policy of reenslave­ ment to declare that what had happened in Guadeloupe during that period was one of the “most unacceptable pages in the history of France.” She condemned the “violence” and “terror” that was aimed at “women and men who had as their only flag that of the rights of man, as their only weapons dignity and equality, and as their sole aim liberty for all.” She pro­ claimed that the story of Delgrès should be a part of educational and civic programs, as a way of cultivating the memory both “of the crime” of slav­ ery and of the “victory of the slaves over the criminals.” She also declared that the resistance of the slaves of the Caribbean had created a “new world, a new humanity,” which represented a model for the future of “men and their rights.” She ended her speech by reading the words of the inscription of the Pantheon, noting that it was fitting that these words resound in the fort where Delgrès had fought in 1802. Her speech brought together the process of transformation that had led to the renaming of the fort and the haunting delgrès    325

installation of the inscriptions in the Pantheon, weaving a symbolic bond between Paris and Guadeloupe.14 What does it mean to commemorate Delgrès? Daniel Maximin himself, in L’Isolé Soleil engaged in detail with this question. If in his work first as director of cultural affairs in Guadeloupe and more recently as the orga­ nizer of the 1998 commemorations of the abolition of slavery, he has con­ sistently championed the memory of Delgrès, the novel that propelled him into these positions highlights the ambiguities of remembering this figure. The work chronicles the attempt of the character Marie-Gabriel to write the history of her island. It describes the roles women played in the struggle for freedom and the ways the memory of struggles such as those of Delgrès, silenced in official histories, were carried through the songs and stories told by slaves and descendants of slaves. But as Marie-Gabriel works on her his­ tory, she also confronts the ambiguities of celebrating Delgrès, a male hero who chose to commit suicide in a grand gesture, while generations of forgot­ ten women struggled in other and perhaps more powerful ways against the degradation of slavery. In Maximin’s work, the terrain of cultural memory emerges as a complex arena through which the myths of the past must al­ ways be reworked in relation to present demands. “The present always invents a past for itself out of its own desire,” pro­ claimed Maximin in an interview, and his contribution to the transforma­ tion of the sites of memory both in Paris and in Guadeloupe illustrates the continuing nature of this process.15 He and other writers, intellectuals, and administrators have, in the years since 1998, continued to reshape the terms within which the past of slavery and emancipation are evoked. Along with the celebration of Delgrès, the year 1998 saw the construction and dedication of two statues in Guadeloupe along an avenue in Pointe-à-Pitre that was renamed the Boulevard des Héros. One showed Joseph Ignace, an officer who fought with Delgrès in 1802, and the other a woman named Solitude, who was part of a band of insurgents who fought in the area of Trois-Rivières in 1802 and whose life was popularized in a 1971 novel by André Schwartz-Bart.16 The work of memory that was launched in 1998 has continued in Gua­ deloupe and Martinique, as well as in metropolitan France. In 2002, a series of conferences, events, and historical reenactments commemorated the events of 1802 in Guadeloupe. A new statue to Delgrès joined the exist­ 326    laurent dubois

ing statue of Solitude and Ignace on the Boulevard des Héros in Point-àPitre. Since then, commemorations of the past of slavery and of acts of resistance—including dramatic reenactments of the battles of 1802—have multiplied in Guadeloupe and Martinique. And on both sides of the Atlan­ tic the past years have seen an increasingly broad and often violent debate about the question of how to remember and commemorate the past of slavery in France. As these debates churn on in the coming years, the living will continue to haunt Delgrès.17 notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8

Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution Française, 1: 141; James, The Black Jacobins. Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies; Trouillot, Silencing the Past, chap. 2. Nora, ed. Les Lieux de Mémoire. For the Guadeloupean scholars, see Abénon, La Guadeloupe de 1671 à 1759; Adélaïde-Mérlande, Delgrès; Bangou, La Révolution et l’esclavage à la Guadeloupe, 1789–1802. For other works published in France, see also Benot, La Révolution; Dorigny, ed., Les Abolitions de l’esclavage de L. F. Sonthonax à V. Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848; Vovelle, ed., Révolutions aux colonies. I explore this transformation in detail in Les Esclaves de la République as well as in A Colony of Citizens, part 1. See also Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery; and Fick, The Making of Haiti. For biographical details on Delgrès, see two works by Antillean historians that were crucial in bringing his role to the attention of the public: AdélaïdeMérlande, Delgrès; and Saint-Ruf, L’Epopée Delgrès. Delgrès’s story is also woven into general accounts of Guadeloupe during the period, such as Bangou, La Révolution et l’esclavage à la Guadeloupe; and Dubois, A Colony of Citizens. See also the collection of documents surrounding the battles of 1802, Jacques AdélaïdeMerlande, René Bélénus, and Frédéric Régent, eds., La Rébellion de la Guadeloupe, 1801–1802 (Gourbeyre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 2002). Delgrès’s proclamation is known to us through the work of a nineteenthcentury Guadeloupean planter, Auguste Lacour, Histoire de la Guadeloupe (1858); on the proclamation and details on the battle see Adélaïde-Mérlande, Delgrès; and Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, part 3. Aimé Césaire, “Memorial for Louis Delgrès,” in Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire. The poem was originally published in Césaire’s Ferrements (Paris: Seuil, 1960).

haunting delgrès    327

9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

Adélaïde-Mérlande, Delgrès, caption for cover page. Daniel Maximin, interview with the author, April 23, 1996, Basse-Terre. During this interview Maximin generously gave me the “Rapport au Conseil Général” and the “Conseil Général” dealing with these changes; my thanks also go to Philippe Cherdieu, who discussed the name change with me. On the history of the Pantheon, see Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France. The speech was posted at the website of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, www.culture.gouv.fr (accessed May 1, 1998). On this silent march, and more broadly on political organizing among Carib­ bean groups in metropolitan France since 1998, see Faes and Smith, Noir et français! The speech was posted at the website of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, www.culture.gouv.fr (accessed May 1, 1998). Maximin, Lone Sun; the interview is in the Introduction, by Clarisse Zimra, xxvii. See my “Solitude’s Statue.” For a detailed study of the commemorations of slavery in recent years in both Guadeloupe and Martinique, see Catherine Reinhardt-Zacair, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean and Yarimar Bonilla, “Seizing Control: The Politics of Labor and Memory in Postcolonial Guade­ loupe,” paper delivered at the American Anthropological Association (aaa) Conference, Chicago, Illinois, November 19–23, 2003.

328    laurent dubois

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contr ibutor s

paul amar , is assistant professor in the Law and Society Program, University of California, Santa Barbara. A political scientist and urban sociologist specializing in security politics, police-military relations, humanitarian law, and authoritarian states, he is the coeditor of The Middle East in Brazil: South-South Relations, Migrations, and Recognitions (in progress) and author of Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (2006). paul ashton is associate professor in public history at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is coeditor of the e-journal Public History Review http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/phrj and codirec­ tor of the Australian Centre for Public History. His latest publication, which he coauthored, is a history of Sutherland Shire, the second largest municipality in Australia. o. hugo benavides is associate professor of anthropology at Fordham University. He is the author of Making Ecuadorian Histories: Four Centuries of Defining Power (2004), The Politics of Sentiment: Imagining and Remembering Guayaquil (2006), and Drugs, Thugs and Divas: Telenovelas and Latin American Narcodrama (2008). laurent dubois is professor of history and romance studies at Duke University. He is the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1802 (2006). r ichard flores is senior associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and professor of anthropology and Mexican American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He works in the areas of critical theory, performance studies, semiotics, and historical anthropology.

He is the author of Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol (2002) and Los Pastores: History and Performance in the Mexican Shepherd’s Play of South Texas (1995) and editor of Adina De Zavala’s History and Legends of the Alamo (1996).

durb a ghosh is associate professor of history at Cornell University where she teaches courses on modern South Asia, gender, and British colonialism. Her recent publications include Sex, Family, and Intimacy in British India (2006), and she is the coeditor with Dane Kennedy of Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (2006). albert grundlingh is professor and chair of the History Department at the University of Stellenbosch. He has published monographs on Boer collaborators during the South African War of 1899–1902 and on South African black people and the First World War, and coauthored Beyond the Tryline: Rugby and South African Society. He has published numerous articles in the fields of social and cultural history and historiography. paula hamilton is associate professor in history at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she has taught oral and public history for several years. She has worked in a range of projects with community groups, museums, heritage agencies, and local councils. She is codirector (with Paul Ashton) of the Australian Centre for Public History; they also jointly edit the journal Public History Review. She has written a number of essays on public memory and historical consciousness in Australia and is currently completing a book with Paul Ashton, History Today: Australians and the Past, which explores historical sensibilities in contemporary Australia (2007). She recently coedited (with Linda Shopes ) Oral History and Public Memory (2008). lisa maya knauer is assistant professor of anthropology and African and African American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She was coeditor (with Daniel J. Walkowitz) of Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (2004). charlotte macdonald is associate professor of  history, Victoria University of Wellington / Te Whare Wananga o Te Upoko o Te Ika a Maui, Aotearoa / New Zealand. She is most recently the author of Women Writing Home: Female Correspondence Across the British Empire (2006). mark salber phillips is professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa. His most recent books are Questions of Tradition: Exploring the Concept of Tradition Across the Disciplines (coedited with Gordon Schochet, 2004) and Society and Sentiment: The Genres of Historical Writing in Britain 1740–1820 (2000). He is currently completing a study of the idea of “historical distance,” to be published by Yale University Press. 354   contr ibutor s

ruth b. phillips is Canada Research Chair and professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa. She works in the areas of Native North American art and critical museology and was director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology from 1997–2002. Her books include Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art, 1700–1900 (1998), Native North American Art (with Janet Catherine Berlo, 1998), and Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture (coedited with Elizabeth Edwards and Chris Gosden, 2006). debor ah poole is professor of anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her books include Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (1997), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (2004, with V. Das), and A Companion to Latin American Anthropology (2008). anne m. r ademacher is assistant professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is an environmental anthropologist with an interest in urban ecology and political transformation, particularly in the cities of the Global South. Her current research explores the cultural politics of environmental restoration initiatives in Kathmandu. daniel j. walkowitz is the director of Experiential Education at New York University, and professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of History. In 1999 he published Working With Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle Class Identity (1999) and with Lisa Maya Knauer, coedited the companion volume to this collection, Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (2003). He is presently completing a book and film on “English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk.”

contr ibutor s   355

index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abakuá societies (Cuba), 303–4 Abenon, Lucien Réne, 314 Aborigines (Australia), 72–73, 91–94; Australian public history and, 13–14, 30, 74, 77, 78–81, 83–90, 94–96; political activism by, 13, 82, 89, 93 Adélaide-Mérlande, Jacques, 314, 318 Africa House (Casa de Africa, Havana), 280, 282, 294–95 African Americans, 100, 144, 147, 150–51, 152 African National Congress (anc), 157, 163, 164, 169, 170 Afrikaans cultural revival, 167, 175 Afrikaners, 160–67. See also Voortrekker Monument Afrocentrism, 167, 170 Afrocuban religion, 282–83; folkloricization of, 285, 292, 298; government policies toward, 284–85, 289–92, 293, 304; in museums, 283–84, 286–89, 292–93, 294, 298, 304–5 Afrocubans, 282, 289–90, 297; cultural performances of, 280–83, 284–85, 297, 298, 299–304, 305; national cultural

identity and, 282, 291, 292. See also Afrocuban religion Afro-mestizos, 216–17 Aguiar, Roberto, 256 Alamo, the, 122, 129–30; background to battle of, 126–28. See also Alamo myth Alamo myth, 15, 122, 123–26; attempts to counter, 122–23, 128–31, 134; modernism and, 9, 15, 131–34; origins of, 131–34; racial categories and, 22–23, 100, 128–31 Almaráz, Félix, Jr., 129 Alvarez, Sonia, 250 American Family Immigration Center website, 142, 149 Anglobalization, 14, 123 Anthropologists, 10, 12, 23, 24, 52, 60–61, 275; Cuban, 290–91, 316n26. See also Ortiz, Fernando Aotearoa/New Zealand. See New Zealand Apartheid, 160, 163, 166, 169, 170, 171 Archaeologists, 11, 92, 189, 190; Canadian Museum of Civilization and, 61, 64. See also MacDonald, George Arias, Enrique Desmond, 255

Artifacts, 105, 112–13, 147, 167; in Canadian Museum of Civilization, 56, 58–59, 64–65; in Cuban museums, 288–89, 292, 294, 307n17; indigenous, 10–11, 38–39, 64, 65, 74, 85, 91; in Te Papa museum, 37, 38–39 Asian immigrants: to Britain, 107–8, 114, 117–18; to U.S., 144, 145, 147, 150, 152 Attwood, Bain, 89 Australia, 13–14; colonialism and, 71, 73, 75, 92, 94–96; national identity in, 75, 90–91, 96; tourism in, 13, 81, 85, 89. See also Aborigines; Australian public history Australian Museum, 74, 84 Australian public history, 13–14, 72; Aborigines and, 13–14, 30, 74, 75, 77, 78–81, 83–90, 94–96; controversies over, 13, 85–87, 94–96; multiculturalism and, 13, 30, 91; in museums, 74, 84–88, 91–92, 95; war memorials and, 73, 74, 94–96 Baidya, Huta Ram, 18–19, 239–44 Bammer, Angelika, 81 Bangou, Henri, 314 Barnett, David, 87 Barrera, Isaac, 190 Batten, Bronwyn, 78 Bennett, Gordon, 80 Bennett, Tony, 11, 105 Benot, Yves, 313, 314 Bhabha, Homi, 1 Bhim Sen pillar, 18–19 Biculturalism, 4, 8; in New Zealand, 12, 31–32, 33, 38, 40, 45, 46 Birch, Tony, 88 Blanqueamiento (whitening), 22 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 316–17 Botha, Evert, 166 Brazil: legacy of dictatorship in, 268–70; progressive politics in, 249–51, 252, 255–57. See also Rio de Janeiro 358    index

Britain: immigration to, 107–8, 114, 117–18; multiculturalism in, 101–2, 105–8, 110; slavery and, 115–17, 316. See also British empire; Trading Places exhibit British empire, 93–94; Australia and, 74–75, 76, 91, 93–94; Nepal and, 230, 232–33, 240; New Zealand and, 12, 32, 35, 39, 41–42, 43, 46, 51; present-day British depiction of, 14–15, 99, 108, 110, 113–18 British Library, 14, 103–6. See also Trading Places exhibit British Museum, 105 Burke, Robert O’Hara, 77–78 Burton, Antoinette, 1, 2 Byrne, Denis, 92 Cabildos (in Cuba), 289–90 Cabrera, Lydia, 292, 308n26 Canada: Aboriginal people in, 49–51, 59–61; museums in, 52, 60. See also Canadian Museum of Civilization Canadian Museum of Civilization (cmc), 12–13, 49, 52–61; Aboriginal representation in, 12–13, 49–52, 54–55, 58–59, 62–68; architecture of, 53–56; changes in Canadian museology and, 60–61 Cannadine, David, 115 Cardinal, Douglas, 53 Carnival, 298–300 Carrasco Altamirano, Diodoro, 205–6 Casa de Africa (Africa House, Havana), 280, 282, 294–95 Casey, Dawn, 87 Castellano, José Luis Llerena, 289 Celebratory narratives, 12–13, 23, 27n29, 139, 156; in New Zealand, 32, 35, 45 Césaire, Aimé, 318 Cevallos, Pedro Fermín, 189–90 Cherdieu, Philippe, 319 Chevigny, Paul, 269

Christophe, Henri, 317 Citizenship, 8, 22, 271, 290, 315; Ellis Island Immigration Museum and, 139, 145; Trading Places exhibit and, 99, 105, 106, 110 Colonialism, 8, 14, 20, 99, 125; Australia and, 71, 73, 75, 92, 94–96; Cuba and, 289–90; French, 20–21, 228, 312–18; Nepal and, 230, 232–33, 240; New Zealand and, 31, 32, 35, 37, 43, 45; Trading Places exhibit and, 102–3, 110–11, 113. See also British empire Comité National de Souvenir (France), 323 Commercialism. See Commodification Commodification, 29, 88, 99, 284; of Afrocuban religion, 284, 298; “heritage” and, 9, 23, 88; multiculturalism and, 99 Commodities, 14; in Te Papa museum, 41, 42, 51; in Trading Places exhibit, 107, 110–11, 112–13. See also Commodification Connor, Michael, 96 Consumer culture, 107–8, 109–10, 169–70, 174. See also Commodification; Commodities Cook, Captain James, 75 Croft, Brenda, 80–81 Cuba, 20; government policies in, 284–85, 289–92, 293, 304; museums in, 280, 283, 291, 292, 293–94, 296, 304–5, 308n36, 309–10n44; national cultural identity in, 282, 291, 292; Spanish colonial rule in, 289–90; tourism in, 20, 282–85, 295, 296, 298, 299, 302, 303. See also Afrocubans; Casa de Africa; Historical Museum of Guanabacoa; Old Havana Cultural identity, 81, 151, 203; Cuban, 282, 291, 292

Cultural marketing, 266. See also Tourism Culture wars, 4–5 Curators, 3, 5, 8, 9, 315; in Australia, 84, 85; in Canadian Museum of Civilization, 56, 61, 64, 67; in Ellis Island Immigration Museum, 145, 148, 149, 152 Da Silva, Benedita, 250, 251, 252, 256–57, 276 Da Silva, Inacio Lula (“Lula”), 255 Daughters of the Republic of Texas (drt), 123–24, 126, 129, 130, 132 Davison, Graeme, 87 Deane, Sir William, 94–95 Decolonization, 1, 21, 50–52, 117, 324 Delgrès, Louis, 20–21, 228, 312, 315, 320; fort named for, 318–19, 320–22; in Pantheon, 312–13, 319, 323–25 Democratization, 108; of history making, 72, 91, 94 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 317 De Zavala, Adina, 134n7 Diaz, Porfirio, 197, 204, 208 Diezcanseo, Alfredo Pareja, 181, 182 Diversity, 5, 218; incorporation of, in official narratives, 5, 14, 91, 205, 206, 210, 213, 214, 217, 218, 236; unity in, 233, 236. See also Biculturalism; Multiculturalism Donoso, Julio Tobar, 190 Dorigny, Marcel, 314–15 Drayton, Richard, 117 Dumas, Alexandre, 323 East India Company. See Trading Places exhibit Eboué, Félix, 323, 324 Ecological nationalism, 245n3 Ecuador, 21, 178; indigenous people in, 180, 193; national identity in, 17, 21, 178–79, 190; state-sponsored textbooks in, 8–9, 181–83, 184, 186, index    359

Ecuador (cont.) 189, 190, 191, 193, 196n26. See also Kingdom of Quito myth Ellis Island Immigration Museum, 16, 138, 139, 143–49, 150–53; future plans for, 145, 148, 149–50; multi­culturalism and, 14; narrow perspective of, 16, 100, 138, 147–48; 9/11 and, 139–43; visitors to, 143–44, 149 Empire: founding myths of, 76; multiculturalism and, 14–15; U.S., 151, 152. See also British empire; Colonialism; Imperialism Estrada, Alejandro Martinez, 181 Exhibitionary complex, 11, 20, 105, 115 Favela-Bairro Project (Rio de Janeiro), 19, 258, 262–67, 275–76 Favelas (in Rio de Janeiro), 265, 269–76; tourism and, 271–76. See also Serrinha favela “Feel-good” multiculturalism, 27n29 Ferguson, Niall, 14, 114, 115 Films, 4, 11, 72, 78, 94, 116, 278n38; Alamo myth and, 123, 124–25, 128, 134 First Peoples Hall (of Canadian Museum of Civilization), 12, 49–52, 62–68 First World War, 41, 42, 47–48n9, 73, 136 Folklore, African-derived cultural practices seen as, 20, 22, 285, 291, 292, 298, 300. See also Folkloricization; Guelatguetza; Salida de los Cabildos Folkloricization, 285, 292, 298 Foreign aid (in Nepal), 234, 239–40, 241, 247n19 Fort Delgrès, 318–19, 320–22 Fort Richepanse, 318. See also Fort Delgrès France: changing historical attitudes in, 20–21, 312–15, 319, 323–27; national identity of, 312; Pantheon in, 311–12,

360    index

319, 323–27. See also Guadaloupe; Martinique; St. Domingue Franklin, John Hope, 3 Freyre, Gilberto, 275 Gabehart, Gabe, 129 Gamio, Manuel, 208, 212, 218 García, Gabriel Cevallos, 189–90 Garcilaso de la Vega, 192–93 Garland, Alf, 95 Garotinho, Anthony, 256, 257 Garotinho, Rosinha, 257 Gated communities, 265 Genealogy, 142, 149 Gift shops, 107, 108, 298 Giganteria troupe (Havana), 283, 302–3 Globalization, 46, 102–3, 111–12, 113, 118, 266, 271 González, Luis García, 181 Granado, Alberto, 294, 295 Guadeloupe, 312, 314, 315–19, 325–27; as department of France, 312; memorials in, 320–23; slavery and resistance in, 312, 314, 316–18. See also Delgrès, Louis Guanabacoa, 283. See also Historical Museum of Guanabacoa Guelaguetza, 207, 213–17, 221 Guerra, Carlos, 130 Guerra, Henry, 129 Guevara, Che, 298 Guigou, Elisabeth, 324 Handler, Richard, 87 Hardin, Stephen L., 126, 127 Havana. See Old Havana Heritage, 5, 9, 17, 27, 173–75, 228, 283, 305; as bogus history, 24, 273–74; commodification of past and, 9, 23, 88, 89; as industry, 92, 116, 117; modernism and, 9, 227; professionals, 8–9, 23, 300, 301, 304; tourism based on, 19, 23, 24–25, 271–76

Hill, Matthew, 297 Hinojosa, Gilberto, 128–29, 130 Hinton, Mercedes, 256 Historians, 5, 9, 10, 142, 153n11; Alamo myth and, 15, 23, 126–27, 128–29, 133; French, and slavery, 20–21, 313–15; indigenous groups and, 82, 104; Kingdom of Quito myth and, 17, 24, 184, 189–90; new social, 3–4, 5, 13, 75, 139. See also Public historians Historical Museum of Guanabacoa (Cuba), 283–84, 286–89, 292–93, 294, 298, 299, 308n32 Historic preservation, 20, 295–96, 297 Hoffenberg, Peter, 108 Homenaje Racial (Racial Homage festival, Oaxaca), 17, 18, 210–13. See also Guelaguetza Horne, Donald, 74 Howard, John, 93, 95 Iacocca, Lee, 143 Ignace, Joseph, 326, 327 Immigration: to Australia, 75, 90; to Britain, 107–8, 114, 117–18; to New Zealand, 39–40, 45. See also Immigration to United States Immigration to United States, 100, 136– 37, 138, 143, 145, 150–53; Asian, 144, 145, 147, 150, 152; Jewish, 22; policies on, 144, 151–52; whiteness and, 7–8, 16, 22, 100, 138, 143, 147–48, 150–51. See also Ellis Island Immigration Museum Imperialism, 4, 14, 42–43, 74–75. See also British empire; Colonialism Império Serrano samba school (Rio de Janeiro), 258, 259, 261, 275 Incas, 183, 186–88, 191, 192–93 Indigenous groups, 10–11; in Canada, 49–51, 59–61; in Ecuador, 180, 193; in Mexico, 17–18, 23, 199–200, 210–17. See also Aborigines; Maori

Inglis, Ken, 94–95 Institute of Ethnology and Folklore (Cuba), 292 Inter-American Development Bank (idb), 258, 262. See also Favela-Bairro Project Jacarezinho favela (Rio de Janeiro), 265 James, C. L. R., 313 James, “Digger,” 95 Jameson, Fredric, 130 Jenkins, Simon, 142 Juarès, Jean, 313, 323, 324 Juárez, Benito, 197–98, 204–5 Kaplan, Caren, 108 Kathmandu, 231–33; competing monuments in, 18–19, 229–30, 234–44 Keating, Paul, 81 Khumalo, Donsie, 169 King, Leah, 80 Kingdom of Quito myth, 17, 156, 178– 80, 182–88, 191, 193–94; controversy over, 189–90, 191–92, 193; Ecuadorian national identity and, 17, 178–79, 190; historians and, 17, 24, 184, 189–90; lack of evidence for, 179, 189, 191; in monuments, 185; in state-sponsored textbooks, 8–9, 181–83, 184, 186, 189, 190, 191, 193, 196n26 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 305 Kubeka, Abigail, 168 Kuhn, Christo, 164 Laforet, Andrea, 61 Langton, Marcia, 71 Lara, Jorge Salvador, 189–90 Leclerc, Victor-Emmanuel, 317 Liechty, Mark, 232–33, 234 Lopez Cortez, Francisco, 211–13 Lowe, Lisa, 145 Lowenthal, David, 173 Lula (Inacio Lula da Silva), 255 index    361

MacCannell, Dean, 23 MacDonald, George, 52, 55, 56, 69n18 MacDougall, Walter, 94 Maleuvre, Didier, 9, 175 Mandela, Nelson, 167 Mandler, Peter, 142 Maori, 11, 45, 47n4, 47–48n9; biculturalism and, 12, 31–32, 33, 38, 40, 45, 46; present-day activism of, 31, 38; representation of, in Te Papa museum, 11–12, 35–39; Treaty of Waitangi and, 11, 31–32, 33, 45, 46, 47n4 Martí, José, 27n24 Martinique, 315, 316, 318, 326, 327 Masculinity, 74, 75, 96, 269–70, 276 Maximin, Daniel, 21, 315, 318–19, 326 Mbeki, Thabo, 167, 168 McLuhan, Marshall, 53, 69n18 Memorials, 77–81, 140, 172–73. See also Monuments; Statues; War memorials Memories, 8, 16, 24, 244 Memory, 7, 24, 86, 164, 244; historical, 20, 21, 321, 331; monuments and, 166; national, 31, 79, 88, 326. See also Memories Mera, Juan León, 189–90 Mestizaje (racial mixing), 18, 202–3, 210, 213, 218 Mexican Revolution, 208–9 Mexico, 23, 199–200, 204–5. See also Oaxaca City; Oaxaca (state) Migration Museum (Australia), 91 Mishra, Pankaj, 112, 113 Mitchell, Thomas Livingstone, 77, 78–79 Modernism, 4, 9, 203, 218; Alamo myth and, 9, 15, 131–34; heritage projects and, 227–28; museums and, 12, 30, 50, 52, 62, 100, 155, 200, 201; neoliberalism and, 9, 23; postcolonialism and, 2, 5, 6 Modernity. See Modernism Moerdijk, Gerard, 159 362    index

Monnerville, Gaston, 323 Monuments, 185, 312, 320; in Australia, 13, 74, 75–78, 79, 89, 90, 95; in Nepal, 18–19, 229–30, 234–44. See also Voortrekker Monument; War memorials Moreno, Barry, 144, 146, 148, 149, 151 Multiculturalism, 13, 18, 30, 91; in Britain, 101–2, 105–8, 110, 115, 118; “feel-good,” 27n29; as management technique, 5, 15, 18, 115, 118; national identity and, 91, 106, 117–18; neoliberal, 23, 205–6, 207. See also Biculturalism Muniz, Jacqueline, 269 Murat, José, 206 Museum of New Zealand. See Te Papa museum Museums, 9, 10–11, 84, 85; in Australia, 74, 84–88, 91–92, 95; in Canada, 52, 60; in Cuba, 283, 291, 292, 293–94, 296, 304–5, 308n36, 309–10n44; in Oaxaca City, 197, 199–201. See also under names of individual museums Myths, 76, 130, 160. See also Alamo myth; Kingdom of Quito myth Nation, representation of, 2, 8. See also Citizenship; National identity; National narratives; Public history National Confederation of Indian Nationalities of Ecuador (conaie), 180 National history museums, 10, 88. See also Canadian Museum of Civilization; National Museum of Australia; Te Papa museum National identity, 12, 22, 151, 230, 291; in Australia, 75, 90–91, 96; in Cuba, 285; in Ecuador, 17, 21, 178–79, 190; multiculturalism and, 91; in Nepal, 18, 229–30, 236, 238, 239, 243–44; in New Zealand, 11–12, 31, 40, 46 National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), 114, 115–16

National Museum of Australia (nma), 85–88, 95; visitors to, 85, 87 National narratives, 2, 17, 79 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act of 1991, 27n21 Navas Jiminez, Mario, 181, 183 Neoliberalism, 9, 23, 31, 251, 265; modernism and, 9, 23; multiculturalism and, 205–6, 207 Nepal, 18–19, 227–28, 230–34, 244–47; British colonialism and, 230, 232–33, 240; controversy in, over monuments, 18–19, 229–30, 234–44; foreign aid in, 233–34, 239–40, 240–43; na­ tional identity in, 229–30, 236, 238, 239, 243–44; tourism in, 25, 236, 238. See also Kathmandu New social historians, 3–4, 5, 13, 75, 139 New Zealand, 11–12, 31, 33–34, 43, 45–46; biculturalism in, 12, 31–32, 33, 38, 40, 45, 46; immigration to, 39–40, 45; national identity in, 31, 40; tourism in, 11, 46. See also Maori; Te Papa museum 9/11, aftermath of, 139–43, 148 Nongovernmental organizations (ngos), 234, 251 Nora, Pierre, 164, 314 Norval, Aletta, 244 Nostalgia, 111, 147, 161, 202, 266 Nugent, Maria, 92 Oaxaca City, 199; cultural festivals in, 207, 210–17, 221; modernism in, 201, 203–4; museums in, 197, 199–201; plantones in, 198–99, 203–4, 207, 215, 219–21; public space in, 197–204, 207–8, 217–18, 219–21 Oaxaca (state), 17–18, 156, 197, 205–7; Afro-Mestizos in, 216–17; ethnic diversity of, 199–200; governors of, 205–6, 211–13; “seven cultural

regions” of, 199, 213–14; tourism in, 18, 156, 199, 207. See also Juárez, Benito; Ruíz Ortíz, Ulises; Vasquez, Genaro V. Office of the Historian of the City of Havana (ochc), 280, 295, 296, 308n36, 309–10n44 Old Havana, 280–83, 295–305; Afrocuban culture in, 280–83, 294–95, 298, 300–302, 303, 304, 305; as World Heritage site, 282, 295 Omi, Michael, 22 Opium Wars, 102 Orange, Claudia, 11, 29 Ormond, Richard, 116 Ortiz, Fernando, 282, 291, 292, 294–95, 306n1 Pantheon, the (Paris), 20, 311–12, 319, 323–27 Pease, Donald, 151 Pedroso, Luis, 304 Performative spectacles, 22, 280–83, 285, 301–2. See also Salida de los Cabildos Petterson, Maria Lúcia, 275 Phillip, Captain Arthur, 75, 76 Phillips, Ruth, 88 Plantones (in Oaxaca City), 198–99, 203–4, 207, 215, 219–21 Plaza de la Catedral, 282, 283 Plaza Vieja (Havana), 296, 309n39 Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (appo), 219–20, 221 Postcolonial theory, 1, 2, 10, 23, 24, 29, 30, 45, 88, 151; conflict of, with modernism, 5, 6; whiteness and, 138, 143, 147, 148, 150, 151 pri (Institutional Revolutionary Party), 199, 201, 205–7, 213, 217, 221 Privatization, 9, 164, 302; in Brazil, 254, 256, 257, 261, 266 index    363

“public, the” (term), 3 Public historians, 5, 29, 30; in Australia, 72, 83, 84, 88 Public history, 9, 29–30, 71–72, 82–85; broadened notions of, 81; funding of, 9–10; as professional field, 72. See also Australian public history; Public historians “Public history” (term), 72 Race, 22, 23, 156; immigration to United States and, 7–8, 16, 22, 100, 138, 143, 147–48, 150–51; in Latin America, 8, 22, 216–17, 222, 249–51, 263–64. See also Indigenous groups; Racial democracy, claims of Racial democracy, claims of, 263, 266, 275, 290, 292 Racial Homage festival (Homenaje Racial, Oaxaca), 17, 18, 210–13. See also Guelaguetza Rafferty, Max, 3 Read, Peter, 85 Reagan, Ronald, 143 Reconciliation, 71, 82 Renato, Claudio, 274–75 Richepanse, Antoine, 317, 318 Ricoeur, Paul, 133 Rio de Janeiro: drug traffickers in, 19, 251–54, 258, 260; police in, 19, 258, 260, 265–66, 267–70; state government and, 251–58; tourism in, 19, 266, 271–76. See also Favelas Rocinha favela (Rio de Janeiro), 272, 274 Rodriguez, Daniel, 301 Rosaldo, Renato, 111 Rothwell, Nicolas, 95 Ruíz Ortíz, Ulises, 197–205, 206–7, 217–21 Saco, José Antonio, 309n39 Said, Edward, 1 364    index

St. Domingue, 315–16, 317 Salida de los Cabildos, 280–83, 298, 300–302, 303, 304, 305 Santos, Richard, 130 Savage, Kirk, 160 Sayles, John, 134 Schoelcher, Victor, 313, 323, 324 Schwartz-Bart, André, 326 Sculthorpe, Gaye, 84 Second World War, 42, 48n9, 58, 323 Serrinha favela (Rio de Janeiro), 19, 258–61; community projects in, 270–71; Favela-Bairro Project in, 19, 258, 262–67, 275–76; police in, 265–66, 267–70; tourism in, 274–76 Shem-Tov, Baal, 96 Shrestha, Laxman, 236–39, 240, 243–44 Shrestha, Nanda, 234 Slavery: Britain and, 115–17, 316; in Cuba, 126, 290, 297; depictions of British history and, 115–17; in French colonies, 312, 313–17, 318; incorporation of, into French history, 20–21, 312–15, 319, 323–27 Slotkin, Richard, 133 Smit, Basie, 167 Soares, Luiz Eduardo, 256 Solitude (insurgent in Guadalupe), 326, 327 Sonthonax, Léger Felicité, 315 South Africa, 160–61; economic and political change in, 24, 157, 162–71, 174–75. See also Voortrekker Monument Spivak, Gayatri, 1 Statues, 13, 76–78, 170, 228, 284, 326–27 Task Force on Museums and First Peoples (Canada), 12, 60–61 Telles, Edward, 263 Te Papa museum (Museum of New Zealand—Te Papa Tongarewa),

11–12, 32–46; commodities in, 41, 42, 51; Maori representation in, 11–12, 35–39; references to empire in, 32, 35, 40–43, 45; visitors to, 33, 44–45 Thapa, Bhim Sen, 240. See also Bhim Sen Pillar Toledo, Francisco, 201 Tourism, 5–6, 22, 24–25, 89, 106, 171–74; in Australia, 13, 81, 85, 89; in Cuba, 20, 25, 282–85, 295, 296, 298, 299, 302, 303; in Nepal, 25, 236, 238; in New Zealand, 11, 46; in Oaxaca, 18, 156, 199, 207; in Rio de Janeiro, 19, 266, 271–76 Toussaint Louverture, 20–21, 228, 312, 317, 319, 324–25 Trading Places exhibit (in British Library), 101, 103, 104, 106–12, 118; commodities in, 107, 110–11, 112–13 Trautmann, Catherine, 319, 325–26 Treaty of Waitangi, 11, 31–32, 33, 45, 46, 47n4 Trouillot, Michel Rolph, 314 Twine, France Winddance, 263 unesco, 201, 282, 295, 297 United States: museums in, 149–50. See also Alamo, the; Ellis Island Immigration Museum; immigration to United States Unity-in-diversity, 233, 236 Urry, John, 88 Van Toorn, Penny, 90 Vargas, João, 265 Vasconcelos, Jose, 210, 212, 218 Vasquez, Genaro V., 209–10, 212–13, 218 Velasco, Juan de, 180; “Kingdom of Quito” myth and, 180, 182, 188–93 Verwoerd, H. F., 170

Victoria and Albert Museum, 101, 112–13, 114 Voortrekker Monument (Pretoria), 16–17, 155, 157–66, 174–75; architecture of, 159; black perceptions of, 167–71; privatization of, 163–64; as tourist site, 17, 24, 171–74 Voortrekker Monument Company, 164, 165–66 Vovelle, Michelle, 314 Wallace, Mike, 143, 146 War memorials, 5, 73, 74, 94–96 Watson, Don, 81 Weber, David, 130 Websites, 142, 149, 165, 239 Webster, Gloria Cranmer, 61 Weis, Bob, 78 Whiteness, 90, 211; European immigrants to United States and, 7–8, 16, 22, 100, 138, 143, 147–48, 150–51. See also Whiteness studies; Whitening Whiteness studies, 7–8, 99, 138, 143, 147, 148, 150 Whitening (blanqueamiento), 22 Williams, William A., 151 Wills, William, 77, 78 Winant, Howard, 22 Windschuttle, Keith, 86, 87, 96 World Heritage sites, 89, 201. See also Old Havana World War One, 41, 42, 47–48n9, 73, 136 World War Two, 42, 48n9, 58, 323 Young, J. E., 166 Zaluar, Alba, 254 Zapatista National Liberation Army (ezln), 205, 206 Zuma, Jacob, 167

index    365

daniel walkowitz is the director of Experiential Education and professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University. He is the author of Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (1999) and Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855–1884 (1978). He has edited (with Lisa Knauer) Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Duke, 2004); (with Lewis H. Siegelbaum) Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989–1992 (1995); (with Michael H. Frisch) Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (1983); and (with Peter N. Stearns) Workers in the Industrial Revolution: Recent Studies of Labor in the United States and Europe (1974). lisa maya knauer is an assistant professor of anthropology and African and African American studies in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She edited (with Daniel J. Walkowitz) Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Duke, 2004).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contested histories in public space : memory, race, and nation / edited by Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer. p. cm. — (Radical perspectives) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4217-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4236-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Public history. 2. Public spaces. 3. Nationalism. 4. Race. 5. Postcolonialism. I. Walkowitz, Daniel J. II. Knauer, Lisa Maya. III. Series: Radical perspectives. d16.163.c66 2009 909—dc22   2008048029