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REMAKING HISTORY

Dia Art Foundation

Discussions

in

Contemporary Culture

Number 4

REMAKING HISTORY

Edited by Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani

B

AY PRESS

SE

ATT L E

19 8 9

—

©

1989 Dia Art Foundation

All rights reserved.

No

part of this

form without permission

book may be reproduced

in

any

from the publisher and author.

in writing

Printed in the United States of America

94

95

92

93

91

4

5

3

2

1

Bay Press 1 1

5

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Washington 98119

Design by Bethany Johns

The Sarabande

Typesetting by

Press,

New

York

Printing by Edwards Brothers, Lillington, North Carolina Set in Perpetua

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(Revised for no. 4) Discussions in Contemporary Culture.

Nos. 1-2 edited by Hal Foster. No.

3

edited by Gary Garrels. No. 4

edited by Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani.

Contents: no. no. 1.

I.

3.

[without special

1

History and culture.

Kruger, Barbara.

2.

II.

Carol Squiers's

Historiography.

700'.

article,

November

III.

1

Dia Art Foundation.

87-71579

'03

(no. 4: pbk.)

"At Their Mercy,"

version of articles published in

1988,

2.

4.

Mariani, Phil.

N72.S6D57 1987 ISBN 0-941920-12-0

— no. Vision and visuality. — no. Remaking history.

title].

The work of Andy Warhol.

1988, and

is

a compilation

and edited

Ar forum, Summer 1988, September

March

1989.

© Artforum

and the author

1988, 1989; reprinted here by permission of the author and Artforum.

Homi

K. Bhabha's article,

"Remembering Fanon,"

originally

appeared

as the preface to the British edition of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin,

Masks (London: Pluto Press Limited, 1986), and permission of the author.

iv

is

reprinted by

White

CONTENTS Barbara Kruger and

Phil

Mariani

INTRODUCTION

Edward W. Said

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

Paula A. Treichler

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

WORLD:

A

IN

THE THIRD

FIRST WORLD CHRONICLE

Cornel West

BLACK CULTURE AND POSTMODERNISM

Michele Wallace

READING 1968 AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WH

I

TE

WAS H

Janet Abu-Lughod

ON THE REMAKING OF HISTORY: HOW TO

REINVENT THE PAST

Homi

K.

Bhabha

REMEMBERING FANON:

SELF, PSYCHE,

THE COLONIAL CONDITION

AND

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

THEWELEIT AND SPIEGELMAN: OF MEN AND MICE

J.

Hoberman

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

Carol Squiers

AT THEIR MERCY: A READING OF PICTURES

FROM 1988

Victoria

de Grazia

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE: HOW AMERICAN PUBLICITY SUBVERTED THE EUROPEAN

POSTER, 1920-1940

Bernard Tschumi

DE-, DIS-, E X

-

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

WHO CLAIMS ALTERITY?

A

NOTE ON THE SERIES

In 1987, the Dia Art Foundation initiated a ical

discussion and debate through a

commitment

program of

to crit-

and

lectures

symposia, with related publications in some cases, called "Discussions in

Contemporary Culture." Events

ganized usually by

and

artists, scholars,

in the series are or-

critics

from outside the

Dia Foundation. More ambitious lectures or symposia are transcribed and edited, sometimes with related contributed essays,

furthering the "Discussions in Contemporary Culture" publication series.

We

look forward to the continuation of this series as

a chronicle for topics of

downtown Manhattan

concern to cultural communities

in

and, through our publications, to broader

national communities.

This

is

the fourth volume

we

have published.

lectures that took place over several

cludes several commissioned essays,

months all

It

documents and

in 1987-88,

ous perspectives alternatives to the received, standard, or

We

histories of different cultures, eras, ideas.

the lecturers

who

in-

of which treat from variofficial

are very grateful to

who

participated in the series and the writers

contributed to this publication for their research and thought on the question of "remaking" history.

The

entire project

was con-

ceived and organized by Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani. Phil

Mariani also acted as coordinator of

this publication,

particularly grateful to her for her careful

The Dia

staff

lecture series

worked under pressure both and

and we are

and thoughtful work. in the planning of the

in the production of the publication.

We

also

thank Bethany Johns, our designer, and Thatcher Bailey, our publisher at Bay Press.

As always, the continued support of our programming by the Board of Directors of the Dia Foundation has

made

this

project possible.

Charles Wright

Executive Director

Dia Art Foundation vii

Barbara Kruger and

Phil

Mariani

INTRODUCTION

The Questions: What administers the euphoria of the panorama?

What

the souls of the dead?

What

is

is

the neatly voluptuous

plenitude which, arranging sequences and ordering events, locks in the world?

What

revels in the site of the so-called objective

with the abandon usually reserved for the body, but has no body? The Answer: History. There

is

only one answer because

there has purportedly been only one history: a bulky encapsulation of singularity, a univocal voice-over, an instructor of origin,

power, and mastery. History has been the text of the dead dictated to the living, through a voice

The

which cannot speak

ventriloquist that balances corpses

on

its

for

itself.

knee, that gives

speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences,

The

is

none other than the

teller of the story.

But what happens is

historian.

if

is

"history," but a chorus of

What might

commentaries, a crowd of reckonings. is

this: a display

the text.

the answer to the preceding questions

not a singular response which

tell

The keeper of

The worker of mute mouths.

of expository

be attempted

moments and happenings which

not only of events and proper names, but of their places

within a broader construct of forces and relations.

pens

when

hap-

the formalities and franchises of "history" are dis-

placed into a dispersal of stories? are their methodologies?

What

What

How

Who

has stories to

do they speak to

tell?

What

their readers?

are the tones of their voices? If

traditional history writing has

of collecting, ting. Still,

it

it

been

in a sense a process

has also been a process of marginalizing, omit-

speaks at us,

if

not

to us,

with the authority of

all

ix

The

discourses that seek to demonstrate cause-and-effect. several years have seen the

development of alternate

past

histories,

recoveries of neglected and "forgotten" cultures and the re-

cuperation of names and faces. Simultaneous with the elaboration of critical theories problematizing the construction of the subject

and the relationship between knowledge and power,

this

process of recovery has been essential to challenging masculinist

and Eurocentric visions

mote

that rely

on

linear narrative

The foundation of

totalizing concepts.

riography, the document, has

now become one

among many, and which ones

such questions

to

tell,

as race, gender, class,

itself,

and

is

trying to develop

which one works "to specify the conceive of

discontinuity. "

The new

institutional affiliation.

own

its

.

.

.

it,

a

"new form

theory" and one in

concepts that enable us to

is

not necessarily a History of the Vic-

notion of the "major" event.

It is

anti-

and questions the narratives of chronology.

cross-disciplinary:

its

of

And, one might add, difference.

historicism

tors. It disrupts the

hierarchical

bringing into focus

the voices of "others," the plurality of stories

has produced, as Foucault describes

history [that]

discursive text

the historian chooses for his or

her analysis becomes a crucial issue in

The awareness of

and pro-

traditional histo-

most productive

It is

tools of analysis are ori-

ginating in feminist literary-critical studies and in their rereadings of psychoanalytic texts; in poststructural, sociolinguistic

examinations of ideology construction and

its

operation through

the political, cultural, and social; out of cultural studies

from

the perspective of race and experiences of exclusion; and out of

power of the image,

a recognition of the

ological formations

and

its

its

centrality in ide-

usefulness in analyzing change

and

re-

formation. Official History, increasingly

putable fact through

One ies

x

site

its

repetitions

made

for

TV, becomes

indis-

and powerful alignments.

of struggle against this imperialism that colonizes bod-

and minds centers on the

text. Texts

empower; they grant

authority, tives has

and

their deconstruction

become

from race-gender perspec-

a kind of anti-imperialist strategy that has re-

verberations for political action.

This

work

is

ongoing and urgent. The confusion of

dis-

courses generated by the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses is is

paradigmatic: a "fiction" that includes a critique of Islam

published in the West where racist attitudes toward Iranians

have been promoted and utilized with great profit over the past decade. This text provokes violent threats to the author from a religious counterrevolution that cannot bear to be criticized.

This text generates a spectrum of corroborations and dissenting opinions from Muslims worldwide. This text

is

presumably re-

sponsible for generating bloodshed that threatens the stability of

the regime of a female president of a incidentally,

Muslim country (who, co-

was the subject of one of the author's previous

books), that simultaneously, then, raises issues about Islamic

tudes toward

women and

atti-

the complicated conflation of Western

feminism and education with imperialism. This text becomes the focus of nightly

news accounts

as a struggle

between liberalism

and fundamentalism and their respective stands on "personal freedom," "individualism,"

etc.,

which

leaves little

room

for dis-

cussion of other possible social orders. Conventional methods of historical analysis

— which create polarities or tend to choose the

most "dramatic" moment or end

in the typical trajectory of

linearity — cannot excavate and disentangle

complicated

Which

much

of the

the voices in this

has been and continues to be the motivation behind

new

to speak, to focus

historical writing: to allow the

on the process and not

the scene and not just the individual, the figure.

all

text.

The new

history

is

chorus of voices

just the

moment, on

on the body and not

just

not only about the pain of the

past, or the struggles of the present, but implicitly

and

proposes inclusive definitions for democratic futures.

explicitly

REMAKING HISTORY

Edward W. Said

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

Yeats has

now been

almost completely assimilated to the canon

as well as the discourses of

modern

English literature, in addi-

tion to those of European high modernism. Both of these institutions of course reckon with

him

as a great

modern

Irish poet,

deeply affiliated and interacting with his native traditions, the

and

historical

dinarily

political context of his times,

complex

English. Nevertheless,

in

and despite

Yeats's

obvious and,

who

articu-

the experiences, the aspirations, and the vision of a people

suffering

under the dominion of an offshore power. From

perspective, Yeats ally

would

European modernism, he does present another fascinating

aspect: that of the indisputably great national poet lates

I

presence in Ireland, in British culture and literature,

say, settled

and

and the extraor-

situation of being a poet in Ireland writing in

considered

imperialism

a poet

is

his, that

now — that

twentieth centuries

who

this

belongs in a tradition not usu-

of the colonial world ruled by European is,

during the

late

nineteenth and early

— bringing to a climactic

insurrectionary

stage the massive upheaval of anti-imperialist resistance in the

colonies,

and of metropolitan anti-imperialist opposition

been called the age of decolonization.

way of

interpreting Yeats for those

not a customary

If this is

who know

that has

a great deal

more

about him as an Irish European modernist poet of immense ure than

am

I

sure to

do, then

many

I

I

others in the Third World, to belong naturally

to the other cultural domain, ize. If this also

stat-

can only say that he appears to me, and

sheds

more

which

light

I

shall

now

on the present

try to characterstatus of Yeats's

3

Edward W. Said

role in post-independence Ireland, then so

The age

of imperialism

in the late 1870s,

me

is

to be perfectly clear that there are

if

we

the better.

with the scramble for Africa. Yet

well as political indications that

Even

much

conventionally said to have begun

seems to

sorts of cultural as

all

began

it

it

a

good

deal earlier.

speak only about the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies, Britain

and France, which dominate the history of Euro-

pean imperialism

until

World War

II

(Britain especially), are to

be found already present in those very territories that will

become formally

central during the heyday of imperialist ideol-

North

ogy. India,

later

and South

Africa, the Caribbean, Central

America, many parts of Africa, China and Japan, the Pacific chipelago, Malaysia, Australia,

ar-

North America, and of course

Ireland: all these are sites of contention well before 1870, either

between various

local resistance

pean powers themselves; stance, the

two

in

groups or between the Euro-

some

cases, India

struggles are going

and Africa for

1857, and long before the various European congresses Africa at the end of the century.

in-

on simultaneously long before

The point here

is

on

of course that

no matter how one wishes terminologically to demarcate high imperialism

— that period when everyone in Europe and Amer-

ica believed

him or

tional

herself in fact to be serving a high civiliza-

and commercial cause by having an empire

— from earlier

periods of overseas conquest, rapacity, and scientific exploration,

imperialism

and

itself

was

a continuous process for at least a century

a half before the scramble for Africa.

I

don't think

matters to an Indian or an Algerian that in the

first

it

much

half of the

nineteenth century he or she did not belong to the age of imperialism

whereas

their land

whom

after

1850 both of them

did.

For both of them,

was and had been dominated by an alien power

distant

hegemony over nonwhite peoples seemed

for

in-

scribed by right in the very fabric of European and Western

Christian society, whether that society was liberal, monarchical,

or revolutionary.

4

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

I

ism

would

itself

is

also

want to

domination from

seas

say that

and

a constitutively

modern European

earlier forms.

all

imperial-

radically different type of over-

Sheer scale and scope are

only part of the difference. Certainly neither Byzantium, nor

Rome, nor Athens, nor Baghdad, nor Spain and Portugal during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries controlled anything like the territories controlled

teenth century.

by Britain and France during the nine-

The more important

differences are

first

power

traordinary and sustained longevity of the disparity in

between Europe and

its

the ex-

and second, the massively

possessions,

organized rule, which affected the detail and not just the large outlines of

life,

of that power. By the beginning of the nine-

teenth century, Europe

begun the

— and in this Britain leads the way — had

industrial transformation of

its

economies; the feudal

and traditional landholding structures were changing; the new mercantilist pattern of overseas trade, naval power, and colonialist

settlement was firmly established; the bourgeois revolution

had

finally

entered

its

triumphant

stage. All these things gave the

ascendancy of metropolitan Europe over

its

far-flung

and distant

possessions a profile of imposing, and even daunting power. the beginning of

World War

some

cent of the earth's surface in This,

I

as the result of a distracted

came about

for a

whole

brary of systematic

work

that

It

sort of colonial subjugation.

hasten to add, did not happen in a

whimsy or

By

Europe and America held 85 per-

I,

fit

of absentminded

shopping spree.

series of reasons,

now

exists

which the

li-

on imperialism, begin-

ning with Hobson, Luxemburg, Schumpeter, and Lenin, has ascribed to largely economic and terized political processes.

the

somewhat ambiguously charac-

My own

theory,

book from which these comments

which

I

put forth in

are an extract,

is

that cul-

ture played a very important, indeed indispensable role. At the

heart of European culture during the

expansion

lay

what could be

called

many decades

of imperial

an undeterred and unrelent-

ing Eurocentrism. This accumulated experiences, territories,

5

Edward W. Said

peoples, histories,

them; but above

it

studied them,

all, it

it

them,

classified

it

verified

subordinated them to the culture and in-

deed the very idea of white Christian Europe. This cultural process has to be seen if not as the origin

the

vital,

and

cause, then at least as

informing, and invigorating counterpoint to the eco-

nomic and

political

machinery that we

center of imperialism.

And

it

must

centric culture relentlessly codified

concur stands

all

noted that

also be

at

this

the

Euro-

and observed everything

about the non-European or presumably peripheral world, in so

thorough and detailed a manner

as to leave

no item untouched,

no culture unstudied, no people and land unclaimed. subjugated peoples had

it

in

common

All of the

were considered

that they

to be naturally subservient to a superior, advanced, developed,

and morally mature Europe, whose world was to

role in the

rule, instruct, legislate, develop,

times, to discipline,

war

against,

non-European

and

at

the proper

and occasionally exterminate

non-Europeans.

From

these views that were held in Europe and America

there was no significant divergence from the Renaissance on,

and

a society as

embarrassing for us to remark that those elements of

if it is

empire

we

have long considered to be progressive were, so far

concerned, uniformly retrograde,

is

afraid to say

it.

When

vanced writers and

I

say "retrograde"

artists,

of the working

we

still

mustn't be

speak here of ad-

I

class,

and of women,

groups whose imperialist fervor increased in intensity and perfervid enthusiasm for the acquisition of

dominance over innumerable wogs,

as the

and sheer bloodthirsty

niggers, bog-dwellers, babus,

and

competition between various European and Ameri-

can powers also increased in brutality and senseless, even profitless,

control.

What is

enables us to say

theoreticians, militants, like Frantz

6

all

of those things retrospectively

the perspective provided for us in the twentieth century by

and insurgent analysts of imperialism

Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, C.

L. R.

James,

Aime

Cesaire,

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

Walter Rodney, plus many others

and on the other, by the great tion

think, belongs in this group, for

enough he commonly

card-carrying

him

sketch in

I

.

and

Senghor, Yeats. Yeats,

thought of

I

return to Yeats and the case the general

have been attempting hitherto. As imperialism increased

mounted. Indeed

I

would go so

Europe the accumulation on

colonial

a

world

far as saying that just as

scale that gathered the

domains systematically into the world market economy

was supported and enabled by

a culture giving

empire an

ide-

imperium there was

ological license, so too in the overseas

a

massive political, economic, and military resistance that was self carried

challenging culture of resistance. all

tive

in its

their historical, interpretive,

efforts to have identified the culture of resistance as

a cultural enterprise possessing a

power

has been the substantial

It

of the intellectuals, and of course of the

movements they worked with, by and analytic

it-

forward and informed by an actively provocative and

achievement of

own

right,

long tradition of integrity and

one not simply grasped

as a belated reac-

response to Western imperialism.

A rialism a

or

as a natural,

now complete

can

I

.

sorts of reasons, although

all

isn't

me

let

.

scope and in depth, so too, in the colonies themselves, the re-

sistance in

member. But

a little later, so that

the one hand,

like Tagore,

Darwish

Vallejo, Cesaire, Faiz,

strangely

them on

nationalist artists of decoloniza-

and revolutionary imperialism,

Neruda,

for

like

word

great deal, but by no

means

was conducted

name of

that has

ated ways, but

in the

been used

it still

in

all

all

of the resistance to impe-

nationalism. Nationalism

sorts of sloppy

and undifferenti-

serves quite adequately to identify the

bilizing force that coalesced into resistance against

many

and language. Yet

for

all its

mo-

an alien and

occupying empire on the part of peoples possessing history, religion,

is

a

common

success in ridding

countries and territories of colonial overlords, nationalism

has remained, in

my

opinion, a deeply problematic ideological, as

well as sociopolitical, enterprise. At

some

stage in the anti-

7

Edward W. Said

resistance phase of nationalism there

tween the two

were led by bourgeoisies

nationalist struggles

formed and

to

a sort of

is

dependence be-

sides of the contest, since after all

that

some degree produced by the

these are the national bourgeoisies of

many

of the

were partly

colonial power;

which Fanon spoke so

ominously. These bourgeoisies in effect have often replaced the

new

colonial force with a

class-based and ultimately exploitative

force; instead of liberation after decolonization

the old colonial structures replicated in

That

is

new

one problem with nationalism:

one simply gets

national terms.

its

results are writ-

ten across the formerly colonized world, usually in the fabrics of

newly independent

Ahmad

whose pathologies of power,

states

has called them, bedevil political

The other problem

is

common

ticipate in

a cooperative venture. it,

and both grow up

the salient traits of set

as

Eqbal

as

we

speak.

history of colonizer and colo-

movement

nized assumed by the nationalist all is

even

that the cultural horizons of nationalism

are fatally limited by the

after

life

itself.

Imperialism

Both the master and

in

it,

slave par-

One

albeit unequally.

modern imperialism

is

that in

of

most places

it

out quite consciously to modernize, develop, instruct, and

civilize the natives.

An

across five continents

entire massive chapter in cultural history

grows up out of

it.

The

annals of schools,

missions, universities, scholarly societies, hospitals in Asia, Africa, Latin

America, Europe, and North America

and have had the

effect over

fill its

pages,

time of establishing the so-called

modernizing trends in the colonial regions,

as well as

muting or

humanizing the harsher aspects of imperialist domination

them bridging

—

all

territories. In paying respect to

combined experiences same time note how

that

at its

it,

acknowledging the shared and

produced many of

center

it

us,

we must

at

the

nevertheless preserved the

nineteenth-century imperial divide between native and Westerner.

The

great colonial schools, for example, taught genera-

tions of the native bourgeoisie important truths about history,

8

of

the gap between imperial center and peripheral

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

science, culture.

And

out of that learning process millions

grasped the fundamentals of modern

life,

yet remained subordi-

nate dependents of an authority based elsewhere than in their

Since one of the purposes of colonial education was to pro-

lives.

mote the

history of France or Britain, that

demoted the

same education

also

There were always the Englands,

native history.

Word,

Frances, Germanys, Hollands as distant repositories of the for

all

the contradictions developed during the years of produc-

tive collaboration.

one

who

Stephen Dedalus

a

is

famous example of some-

discovers these facts with unusual force.

The culmination of

moment

this

dynamic of dependence

is, I

said a

ago, the resurgent nationalism of the various indepen-

dence movements. Right across the Third World (including land) in the period

1940s and 1950s,

from World War

new

I

and concluding

national states appear,

ing their independence

of

all

Ire-

in the

them

declar-

from the various European powers whose

rule of direct domination

had for various reasons come to an

end. Nationalism in India, Ireland, and Egypt, for example, was

rooted in the long-standing struggle for native rights and inde-

pendence by

nationalist parties like the Congress, Sinn Fein,

and

the Wafd. Similar processes occurred in other parts of Africa

and

Asia.

Bandung

Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah: the pantheon of flourished, in

all its

suffering

and greatness, because of

the nationalist dynamic. Crucial works like K.

M.

Panikkar's Asia

and Western Dominance (1953), George Antonius's The Arab Awakening (1938), and the various works of the

were produced out of political

own

Irish Revival

Nevertheless, there were

it.

moments during

two

distinct

the nationalist revival, each with

its

imaginative culture, the second unthinkable both in politics

and history without the

first.

One was

the period of nationalist

anti-imperialism; the other, an era of liberationist antiimperialist resistance that often followed

it.

The

first

nounced awareness of European and Western culture alism, as a reflexive

moment

was

a pro-

as imperi-

of consciousness that enabled the

9

Edward W. Said

African, Caribbean, Irish, Latin American, or Asian citizen inch-

ing toward independence through decolonization to require a theoretical assertion of the

end of Europe's

cultural claim to

guide and/or instruct the non-European or nonmainland individual.

Often

was

this

first

done

as

Thomas Hodgkin

has argued,

"by prophets and priests," among them poets and visionaries, versions perhaps of Eric dissent.

Hobsbawm's

The second more openly

and

precapitalist protest

liberationist

during a dramatic prolongation after World

moment occurred

War

of the West-

II

ern imperial mission in various colonial regions, principal among

them

Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine, Ireland, Guinea, Cuba.

Whether tion, or

in

its

general statements such as the Indian constitu-

Pan-Arabism and Pan- Africanism, or in

forms such

its

particularist

as Cusack's Gaelic or Senghor's negritude, the na-

tionalism that formed the initial basis of the second

moment

stood revealed both as insufficient and yet as an absolutely crucial first step.

strong

new

Out of

paradox comes the idea of liberation, a

this

post-nationalist

theme which

is

already implicit in

the works of Connolly, Garvey, Marti, Mariategui, DuBois, for instance, but

sometimes requiring the propulsive infusion of

theory and sometimes armed, insurrectionary militancy to bring it

forward clearly and unmistakably. Let us look closely at the literature of the

ments, that of anti-imperialist resistance.

Its

first

of these

mo-

literature develops

quite consciously out of a desire to distance the native African, Indian, or Irish individual

American master. Before

from the this

British, French, or (later)

can be done, however, there

is

a

pressing need for the recovery of the land that because of the

presence of the colonizing outsider,

through the imagination.

Now

if

is

there

recoverable at is

distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism,

macy of

the geographical in

it.

first

only

anything that radically

Imperialism after

it is

all is

the pri-

an act of

geographical violence through which virtually every space in the

world

10

is

explored, charted, and finally brought under control.

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

For the native, the history of his/her colonial servitude rated by the loss to an outsider of the local place, crete geographical identity

somehow from

also

restored. a

is

whose con-

must thereafter be searched

From what? Not

just

from

inaugu-

and

for

foreigners, but

whole other agenda whose purpose and processes

are controlled elsewhere.

Let izing

is

me

important,

how ple

to

give three examples of

how complex and how

the geographical morte main of imperialism, and,

how

radical,

how

win back control of

heroic

one's

is

own

the effort needed some-

W.

Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,

Crosby

says that

900-1900

away from Europe

America and Australia into images of what they process was never-ending, as a huge

and farming

diseases,

tions for the

matter.

system

A

it

into a

as

left

South

behind. This

plants, animals,

methods invaded the

new

place,

complete with

environmental imbalances, and traumatic disloca-

overpowered natives who had

changed ecology

that, in the eyes of the nationalist

seemed retrospectively

little

also introduced a

choice in the

changed

mythmaking went

life,

political

poet or visionary,

to have alienated the people

authentic traditions, ways of deal of

number of

as well as building

colony and gradually turned

new

(1986).

aim was to trans-

local habitat; their conscious

territories in places as far

crops,

exam-

first

Crosby, Ecological

wherever they went, Europeans immediately be-

gan to change the

form

The

territory.

offered in a recent study by Alfred

is

total-

more

from

political organizations.

their

A

great

into these retrospective decoloniza-

by which the land was seen again, revised so to speak,

tions,

state that

antedated

its

alienation by imperialism. But

in a

we must

not doubt the extent of the actual changes wrought by imperialism,

however much we

his or

fault

the nationalist poet and writer for

her excessive romanticism.

A

second example

by the Indian

is

to be

political theorist

found

in

an extraordinary book

and historian, Ranajit Guha,

Rule of Property for Bengal (1963). Guha's study

is

A

an account of

11

Edward W. Said

how

the Act of Permanent Settlement for Bengal was enacted in

1826

at

the instigation of Philip Francis, a functionary of the

Company.

East India

In a painstaking archeological investigation

of the legal decree that

made

all

the rents in Bengal permanent

and uniform, Guha describes the rope of so important a physiocrat;

ideas

were

in

Eu-

was

intellectual

he was also an Enlightenment rationalist whose

entirely Western, although they acquired the enforce-

able status in India of an unbreakable law. literal

worth of

toms of

to Indians the

— abstract, rationalistic,

— preempted and then displaced the traditional cus-

a

My

Thus

and produce was deter-

their land in currency

mined by Englishmen whose thought inflexible

background

a piece of legislation for India. Francis

complex native last

example

society.

also derives

from recent

research. In his

book Uneven Development (1984), the geographer Neil Smith provides a brilliant formulation of lar

how

the production of a particu-

kind of nature and space under historical capitalism

essential to the

unequal development of

is

a landscape that inte-

grates poverty with wealth, industrial urbanization with agricul-

The culmination of

tural diminishment.

this

process

is

imperialism, which achieves the domination, classification, and universal commodification of

metropolitan center.

Its

all

space,

under the

cultural analogue

is

phy, whose perspectives (for example in the

Mackinder and George Chisolm) sult of

aegis of the

commercial geogra-

work of Halford

J.

justified imperialism as the re-

"natural" fertility or infertility, of available sea lanes, of

permanently differentiated zones, ples (p. 102).

ism," which

Thus is

is

territories, climates,

"the differentiation of national space according to

the territorial division of labor"

(p.

146).

Following Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs, Smith duction of

and peo-

accomplished "the universality of capital-

this scientifically "natural"

calls

the pro-

world, a second nature. To

the imagination of anti-imperialism, our space at

home

in the pe-

ripheries has been usurped and put to use by outsiders for their

12

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

purpose.

therefore necessary to seek out, to map, to invent,

It is

or to discover a third nature, which historical

("Romantic

one which derives

Ireland's

not pristine and pre-

is

dead and gone"

poems

and among

collected in

its

most

on the

me

Antilles, Faiz

the color of face

And

the

The

light of heart

The

salt

warmth

of body,

and

eye,

of bread and earth

the

new

.

.

.

ally

grounded on

the Motherland.

and

a

whole

more congenial

vided by colonial history, for a

23)

(p.

set of further

them

identifications, all of

quite liter-

The

this poetically projected base.

authenticity, for a

and

comes

territoriality there

assertions, recoveries,

on

Palestine:

— "A Lover from Palestine" With

call car-

"The Rose," Neruda's various poems chart-

and Darwish on

Restore to

what we might

is

striking examples are Yeats's early

ing the Chilean landscape, Cesaire Pakistan,

but

and abductively from the depriva-

historically

tions of the present. This impulse then tographic,

says Yeats)

search for

national origin than that pro-

new pantheon

religions, these too are enabled

of heroes, myths,

by the land.

And

along with

these nationalistic adumbrations of the decolonized identity,

there always goes an almost magically inspired, quasi-alchemical

redevelopment of the native language. Yeats ing here.

He

shares with Caribbean and

the predicament of a lord,

common

and of course he belongs

Protestant Ascendancy

were confused. There

from

whose is,

I

is

especially interest-

some African writers

language with the colonial overin

many important ways

Irish loyalties, to

put

with

its

Celtic preoccupations

themes, to his later systematic mythologies as set

Vision.

like

to the

mildly,

think, a fairly logical progression then

Yeats's early Gaelicism,

grammatic poems

it

"Ego Dominus Tuus" and

down

and

in pro-

in the treatise

A

For Yeats the overlappings he knew existed between his

Irish nationalism

and the English cultural heritage

that both

13

Edward W. Said

dominated and empowered him an overheated tension, and

and secular tension

litical

try to resolve

it

on

it is

that

as a writer

was bound to cause

the pressure of this urgently po-

one may speculate caused him to

a "higher," that

nonpolitical level.

is,

Thus

the deeply eccentric and aestheticized histories he produced in

and the

Vision

tension to an extra-worldly

what must stand

In

count of vivals

poems

later quasi-religious

A

are elevations of the

level.

as the

most interesting and Seamus Deane

Yeats's idea of revolution,

brilliant ac-

in Celtic Re-

(1985) has suggested that Yeats's early and invented Ireland

was "amenable to

his imagination

finding an Ireland recalcitrant to

.

.

.

it."

[whereas] he ended by

Whenever

Yeats tried to

— as in "The — the results, Deane says correctly, are strained. Because

reconcile his occultist views with an actual Ireland Statues"

Yeats's Ireland

Ireland's

was

a revolutionary country, Yeats

backwardness

was

able to use

as the source of its radically disturbing,

disruptive return to spiritual ideals that had been lost to an

overdeveloped modern Europe. Moreover, in such dramatic realities as

the Easter 1916 uprising, Yeats also saw the breaking of a

cycle of endless, perhaps finally meaningless recurrence, as

sym-

bolized by the apparently limitless travails of Cuchulain. Deane's

theory therefore

is

that the birth of an Irish national identity co-

incides for Yeats with the breaking of the cycle, although

it

also

underscores and reinforces the colonialist British attitude of a specific Irish national character.

and

his recourse to fascism,

linings of the colonial

Thus

Deane

Yeats's

return to mysticism

says perceptively, are

under-

predicament to be found, for example, in

V. S. Naipaul's representations of India, that of a culture indebted

to the

mother country

for

its

own

and

self

for a sense of

"En-

glishness" and yet turning towards the colony: "such a search for a national signature

becomes

ferent histories of the a search has

been

two

colonial,

islands.

Yeats's poetry."

on account of the

The

dif-

greatest flowering of such

And Deane

goes on to con-

clude that far from representing an outdated nationalism, Yeats's

14

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

willful

mysticism and incoherence do embody a revolutionary

potential in the poet's insistence "that Ireland should retain

culture by keeping awake tions." In a

its

world from which the harsh strains of capitalism has

removed thought and

poet

reflection, a

who can

stimulate a

sense of the eternal and of death into consciousness

whose

rebel, a figure tive

colonial diminishments spur

is

the true

him

to a nega-

apprehension of his society and of "civilized" modernity. This

final

Adornian formulation of

appears to the contemporary critic is

its

consciousness of metaphysical ques-

attractive. Yet

Yeats's

quandary

as

it

of course powerful and

is

might we not suspect

it

a little of

it

wanting to

excuse Yeats's unacceptable and indigestible reactionary politics

— his outright fascism, his fantasies of old homes and — by seeking to

families, his incoherently occult divagations

translate

them

into an instance of Adorno's "negative dialectic,"

thereby rendering Yeats more heroic than a crudely political reading would have suggested? As a small corrective to Deane's conclusion, could larly

we

not more accurately see in Yeats a particu-

exacerbated example of the

nativist (e.g., nigritude)

phenom-

enon, which has flourished elsewhere as a result of the colonial encounter?

Now

it is

true that the connections are closer between

England and Ireland than between England and India, or France

and Senegal. But the imperial relationship

The colonized may have

a sense of

is

there in

all

cases.

England and France, speak and

write in the dominant language even as he or she tries simultaneously to recover a native original,

may even

ways that

act in

directly conflict with the overall interests of his/her people, still

the divide remains. This,

it

seems to me, has always been

the case in every colonial relationship, because principle of imperialism that there erarchical distinction

is

And

it

it is

a clear-cut

between ruler and

the

first

and absolute

hi-

ruled. Nativism, alas,

reinforces the distinction by revaluating the

vient partner.

and

weaker or subser-

has often led to compelling but often

dem-

15

Edward W. Said

agogic assertions about a native past, history, or actuality that

seems to stand free not only of the colonizer but of worldly time itself.

One

sees the drive backwards in such enterprises as

Senghor's nigritude, or in Soyinka's explorations of the African

movement, or

past, or in the Rastafarian

tion, or

in the Garveyite solu-

through the Islamic world, the rediscoveries of

all

vari-

ous unsullied, precolonial Muslim essences.

Even

if

we

tremendous

leave aside the

be found in nativism (for example, in tosis,

1984), there are

two reasons

for rejecting, or at least re-

conceiving, the nativist enterprise.

incoherent and yet, by

its

its

says that

it is

seems to me, if

is

to

into the

fall

nativism were the only alter-

and decolonizing nationalism. The main

reason therefore to refuse

dence of

it

too willingly, as

native for a resisting

Deane

negation of politics and history, also

heroically revolutionary. That, nativist position

Jalal

ressentiment often to

Al Ahmad's Occiden-

it is

rather that

ravages elsewhere to regard

charity: to accept nativism

it

we

have enough evi-

today with very

much

to accept the consequences of im-

is

perialism too willingly, to accept the very racial, religious, and political divisions

imposed on places

like Ireland, India,

Lebanon, and Palestine by imperialism ical

itself.

world for the metaphysics of essences

ness, Islam,

and Catholicism

Most often

this

often led to

is,

abandonment

some

in a

it

leave the histor-

word, to abandon history.

in the post-imperial setting has

sort of millenarianism,

any sort of mass base, or

To

like negritude, Irish-

if

the

movement

has

has degenerated into small-scale pri-

vate craziness, or into an unthinking acceptance of stereotypes,

myths, animosities, and traditions encouraged by imperialism.

No

one needs to be reminded that such programs are hardly

what great resistance movements had imagined

The other reason now Yeats's case as

for

tempering the

as their goals.

nativist and, in

formulated by Deane, the specifically Irish colonial

attitude with a decent admixture of secular skepticism,

course that nativism

16

is

not the only alternative. Here

I

is

of

return to

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

what

I

said at the outset, that the first

imperialism brought forth

pendence movements

the various nationalist and inde-

all

still

bulence in

continues with us, and

many

instances

perialism courses on, as

it

still

disman-

and the birth of many new

throughout the world. The second

however,

of resistance to

that culminated in the large-scale

tling of the great classical empires, states

moment

its

moment

(liberation),

complexities and tur-

defy resolution. In this phase, im-

were, belatedly and in different forms

perhaps, but the relationship of domination continues. Even

though there was an in fact partially

for

it is

Irish

Free State by the end of his

belonged to

his sustained anti-British sentiment.

the experiences of

nam, Cuba,

numerous

Palestine,

life,

And we know from

colonial regions

— Algeria, Viet— that the strug-

South Africa, and others

gle for release continued.

in this

It is

phase that

I

would

suggest that liberation, and not nationalist independence,

new

Yeats

second moment; the evidence

this

alternative, liberation that

by

its

like to is

the

very nature involves, in

Fanon's words, a transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness.

From

the perspective of liberation then, Yeats's slide into

incoherence and mysticism, his rejection of

politics,

rogant but often charming espousal of fascism (or

if

and

his ar-

not fascism

then authoritarianism, perhaps even of the South American kind) appear as something not to be excused, something that

should not too quickly and alchemically be dialecticized into the negative Utopian easily situate

and

mode. Later

I

want to argue

criticize those

that

one can quite

unacceptable attitudes of Yeats

without throwing out the baby with the bath water, without changing one's view of Yeats the

moment,

nativism

is

I

should like to

as a

poet of decolonization. But for

make

the case that the

way beyond

figured in the great turn at the climax of Cesaire's

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal,

when

the poet realizes that, after

the rediscovery and reexperiencing of his past, after reentering the passions, horrors, and circumstances of his history as a black,

17

— Edward W. Said

and then emptying himself of

after feeling

his anger, after

accepting J'accepte

ma

.

.

j'accepte

.

.

.

.

entierement, sans reserve

race qu'aucune ablution d'hypsope et de lys meles

ne pourrait purifier

ma ma I

race rongee de macules

mur pour

race raisin

accept ...

my

I

accept

.

.

.

pieds ivres (p. 72) totally,

without reservation

race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with

lilies

could purify

my my

— after

race pitted with blemishes

race a ripe grape for drunken feet

all this

"comme un il

he

is

suddenly assailed by strength and

life

taureau," and begins to understand that

n'est point vrai

que l'oeuvre de l'homme

que nous n'avons rien

a faire au

que nous parasitons

monde

qu'il suffit

le

est finie

monde

que nous nous mettions au pas du monde

mais l'oeuvre de l'homme vient seulement de

commencer et

il

reste a

l'homme

a

conquerir toute interdiction im-

mobilisee aux coins de sa ferveur et aucune race ne possede

le

monopole de

la

beaute, de l'intelligence, de

la

force

est place

pour tous au rendez-vous de

et

il

et

nous nous savons maintenant que

tour de notre terre eclairant

la

la

le soleil

conquete tourne au-

parcelle qu'a fixee notre

volonte seule et que toute etoile chute de ciel en terre a

commandement for

it is

that

we

sans limite. (p. 76)

not true that the work of

man

is

have no business being on earth

done

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

that

we

that

it is

parasite the

enough

world

for us to heel to the

world

whereas the work has only begun

and man

wedged

still

must overcome

the interdictions

all

in the recesses of his fervor

monopoly on and there

beauty,

room

is

conquest and

on

and no race has

intelligence,

a

on strength

for everyone at the convocation of

we know now

that the sun turns

around

our earth lighting the parcel designated by our will alone

and

that every star

nipotent

The

falls

from sky

to earth at our

om-

command.

striking part of this are phrases like "a conquerir toute in-

terdiction immobilisee aux coins de sa ferveur" and "le soleil eclairant la parcelle qu'a fixee notre volonte seule."

give in to the rigidity

move through them rendez-vous de

la

race,

moment, or

to an animated

milieu; instead,

don't

mean

sistance,

passe.

more

fully to associate a

etc.

Seamus major strand

poetry both with the poetry of decolonization and re-

and with the

historical alternatives to the nativist im-

For in so many other ways, Yeats

is

very

much

the same as

other poets resisting imperialism in his insistence on a rative for his people, his

enthusiasm for

its felt

the celebration and

about a

you

and expanded sense of "au

to use Cesaire against Yeats (or

Deane's Yeats), but rather in Yeats's

.

conquete," which necessarily involves more

than your Ireland, your Martinique, your Pakistan, I

.

and interdictions of those self-imposed

come with

limitations that

.

You don't

new

anger

at

new

nar-

the scheme for partition (and

opposite, the requirement of wholeness),

commemoration of violence

in bringing

order, and the sinuous interweaving of loyalty

and

betrayal in the nationalist setting. Yeats's direct association with

Parnell

and O'Leary, with the Abbey Theatre, with the Easter

Uprising, bring to his poetry what R.

from Jung,

calls

P.

Blackmur, borrowing

"the terrible ambiguity of an immediate experi-

19

Edward W. Said

ence." As one reads Yeats's

work

into the early twenties, there

is

an uncanny resemblance to the engagement and ambiguities of Darwish's Palestinian poetry half a century ings of violence, of the

later, in its

render-

overwhelming suddenness and surprises

of historical events, of the role of politics and poetry, as opposed

and guns

to violence

(see

"Roses and Dictionaries"), of the

search for respites after the

sky flown

in.

last

border has been crossed, the

"The holy centaurs of the

hills

last

are vanished," says

Yeats sixty years earlier, "I have nothing but the embittered sun.

One

feels in

reading poems like "Nineteen Hundred and

Nineteen" or "Easter 1916," and "September 1913," not the disappointments of

life

commanded by

"the greasy

just

or

till"

the violence of roads and horses, of "weasels fighting in a hole,"

but also of a terrible

community,

also of its fine it,

beauty that changes utterly the old po-

and moral landscape. Like

litical

Yeats struggles to ideal

new

all

the poets of decolonization,

announce the contours of an "imagined" or crystallized not only

by

its

sense of itself but

enemy. Imagined community, Benedict Anderson's

phrase for emergent nationalism,

so long as

we

is

apt here as

I

have used

are not obliged to accept his mistakenly linear

periodization of unofficial and official nationalism. In the cultural discourses of decolonization, a great ries,

forms

circulate.

many

languages, histo-

As Barbara Harlow has shown

in Resistance

Literature (1987), there are spiritual autobiographies,

protest, prison

them

all is

a sense of the instability of time,

made and remade by Yeats's

the people and

its

which has to be

leaders.

accounts of his great cycles invoke this

the easy

commerce

speech, folk

tale,

Eliot called the

poems of

memoirs, didactic dramas of deliverance, but in

in his poetry

The

shifts in

instability, as

does

between popular and formal

and learned writing. The disquiet of what

T. S.

"cunning history, [and] contrived corridors" of

— the wrong turns, the overlap, the senseless repetition, the occasionally glorious moment — furnish Yeats, as they do history

all

20

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

the poets of decolonization, with stern martial accents, heroism,

and the grinding persistence of "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor."

II

In the

volume of

first

his

memoirs, Neruda speaks of a writer's

congress in Madrid held in 1937 in defense of the Republic. "Priceless replies" to the invitations

One was from

"poured

from

in

Yeats, Ireland's national poet; another,

all

over.

from

Selma Lagerlof, the notable Swedish writer. They were both too

which was

old to travel to a beleaguered city like Madrid, ily

stead-

being pounded by bombs, but they rallied to the defense of

comes

the Spanish Republic" (Memoirs, p. 130). This passage

someone who,

surprise to

like myself,

by Conor Cruise O'Brien's famous account of essay

when

whose claims

are,

it

as a

had once been influenced an

Yeats's politics,

seems to me, hopelessly inadequate

contrasted with the information and analysis put forward

by Elizabeth Cullingford's also refers to the

saw no

Neruda

Yeats, Ireland

and Fascism (1981) (which

difficulty in thinking of himself as a

with internal colonialism

in Chile

we

throughout Latin America,

an Irish poet with more than plications.

Neruda takes him

the Irish nation in

its

war

Neruda himself

recollection). Just as

poet

who

dealt both

and with external imperialism

should think of Yeats,

strictly local Irish as a national

poet

I

believe, as

meaning and ap-

who

represents

against tyranny and, according to

Neruda, Yeats responded positively to that unmistakably fascist call, despite his

anti-

frequently cited dispositions towards Eu-

ropean fascism.

There

is

a justly

famous poem, "El pueblo," by Neruda in

the 1962 collection Plenos Poderes (a collection translated by Alastair Reid,

whose version

I

have used, as Fully Empowered, 1975).

The resemblance between Neruda's poem and erman"

is

striking, because in

an anonymous

man

Yeats's

"The

Fish-

both poems the central figure

of the people,

who

in his strength

is

and lone-

21

Edward W. Said

liness

is

mute expression of the

also a

began/ To day for

I'd

up

call

race/

And

What

I

that

man, and when

still

had eyes

when

I

still

had

I

sought him

pressing his

in

a voice

among

arm

I

could

the tombs and

that

still

was not

let

said to him,

still

be

living.

is

yours."

no one be perturbed when

I

seem

I

am

and am not alone;

to be alone

not without company and

Someone

is

But those

I

hearing

me

I

speak for

without knowing

sing of, those

go on being born and

The poetic

I

dust:

set fire to life.

You made what So

I

All

my head, in my throat,

"Everything will pass, you will

You

this qual-

had hoped 'twould be/ To write

I

knew

it is

long since

the reality." Neruda:

when

I

is

and simple man./

to the eyes/ This wise

look in the face/

my own

people; and

the poet in his work. Yeats: "It

ity that inspires

all.

it,

who know,

will overflow the world, (p. 131)

calling develops out of a pact

made between people

and poet; hence the power of such invocations to an actual

poem as those provided by the popular but silent figures men seem to require. But the chain does not stop there, Neruda goes on

(in

"Deber

me, freedom and the sea/ heart," and Yeats in

del Poeta") to claim that

will call in

both since

"through

answer to the shrouded

"The Tower" speaks of sending imagination

forth "and call images and

memories/ From ruins or from an-

cient trees." Yet because such protocols of exhortation

and ex-

pansiveness are announced from under the shadow of

domination,

we would

not be

wrong

to connect

them with

the

new, and perhaps even underground narrative of liberation depicted so

memorably

in Fanon's Wretched of the Earth (1963).

whereas the divisions and separations of the colonial order

22

For

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

freeze the population's captivity into a sullen torpor, lets

.

.

.

ples" (p. 59).

Fanon

out-

specifies such things as declarations of the

man, clamors

rights of

for free speech, trade

union demands;

the violent confrontation escalates, there

later, as

new

"new

engender new aims for the violence of colonized peo-

is

an entirely

history that unfolds subterraneously, as a revolutionary class

of militants,

drawn from the ranks of the urban poor, the out-

casts, criminals,

and

declasses,

slowly to form cells of

armed

takes to the countryside, there activists,

who

return to the city

for the final stages of the insurgency.

The extraordinary power of Fanon's writing presented

as a surreptitious

ground force of the colonial regime, which Fanon's narrative

is

is, I

it is

in the teleology of

The

certain to be defeated.

tween Fanon and Yeats

that

is

counternarrative to the above-

difference be-

and

think, that Fanon's theoretical

perhaps even metaphysical narrative of anti-imperialist decolonization

is

cadenced and stressed from beginning to end with

the accents and inflections of liberation. Fanon's that anticipated triumph, liberation,

moment whose at

a discourse of

which marks the second

of decolonization. Yeats, on the other hand,

early

work sounds the

the very threshold

wrong

is

it

nationalist note

a

is

and stands

cannot actually ever cross. Yet

poet finally

it is

not

to interpret Yeats as in his poetry setting a trajectory in

common

with other poets of decolonization,

like

Neruda and

Darwish, which he could not complete, even though perhaps they could go further than he did. This

at least gives

him

credit,

for

adumbrating the liberationist and Utopian revolutionalism in

his

poetry that had been belied, and to some extent canceled

out,

by

his late reactionary politics.

It is

years as

He

is

interesting that Yeats has often

been cited

someone whose poetry warned of

in recent

nationalist excesses.

quoted without attribution, for example, in Gary

book, All

Fall

Down

(1985),

on the Carter

ling of the Iranian hostage crisis, 1979-81;

Sick's

administration's hand-

and

I

can distinctly

23

Edward W. Said

New

recall that the

York Times

correspondent in Beirut in

1975-76, James Markham, quotes the same passages from "The

Second Coming" Lebanese hold"

"Things

in 1977.

one phrase. The other

is

while the worst/ Are

ham both tide

he did about the onset of the

in a piece

war

civil

full

is

apart; the centre cannot

fall

"The

best lack

all

conviction,

of passionate intensity." Sick and Mark-

write as Americans frightened of the revolutionary

sweeping through a Third World once contained by West-

ern power. Their use of Yeats you're

doomed

to a frenzy

is

minatory: remain orderly, or

you cannot control. As to how,

an

in

inflamed colonial situation, the colonized are supposed to remain orderly and civilized

— given that the colonial order has long and has long since been discredited

since profited the oppressor

— neither Sick nor Markham

in the eyes of the colonized

They simply assume

that Yeats, in any event,

against the revolution.

It's

as if

both

men

is

on our

tells us.

side,

could never have

thought to take the current disorder back to the colonial intervention

itself,

which

is

what Chinua Achebe does

in 1958, in his

great novel, Things Fall Apart.

The

point,

I

believe,

precisely as he imagines

greatest decolonizing

is

that Yeats

and renders

works quite

at his

is

that very

literally

most powerful

moment

His

itself.

conceive of the birth

of violence, or the violent birth of change, as in "Leda and the

Swan," instants

at

which there

presented to his colonial eyes that, the

is

a blinding flash of simultaneity

— the

question "did she put on

girl's

his

power/Before the indifferent beak could uates himself at that juncture

rape,

and alongside

knowledge with let

his

her drop?" Yeats

where the violence of change

sit-

is

unarguable, but where the results of the violence beseech necessary, if

not always sufficient, reason.

greatest

theme

in the

far as decolonization

More

precisely, Yeats's

poetry that culminates in The Tower is

concerned,

ble violence of the colonial conflict

how

is,

so

to reconcile the inevita-

with the everyday

politics of

an ongoing national struggle, and also with the power of each of

24

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

the various parties in the colonial conflict, with the discourse of reason, of persuasion, of organization, with the requirements of

some point violence

poetry. Yeats's prophetic perception that at

cannot be enough and that the strategies of politics and reason

must come into play

nouncement

is,

my

to

knowledge, the

first

important an-

in the context of decolonization of the

need to

bal-

ance violent force with an exigent political and organizational process. Fanon's assertion, almost half a century later than Yeats, that liberation cannot be accomplished simply

(though he

says,

"Even the wisest

man grows

sort of violence"), underlines the importance

by seizing power tense with

some

of Yeats's insight.

That neither Yeats nor Fanon offers a prescription for undertaking the transition tion

when

a

new

from

direct force to a period after decoloniza-

political

part of the difficulty

we

order achieves moral hegemony,

live

with today

is

in Ireland, Asia, Africa,

the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

How

one can assure the marriage of knowledge to power,

or of understanding with violence, are themes in Antonio sci's

work, undertaken and

elaborated in a

text. In the Irish colonial setting, Yeats

Gram-

wholly different con-

can only pose and re-

pose the question provocatively, using his poetry, Blackmur as a

technique of trouble. Yeats goes somewhat further than ask-

ing questions, however, in great like

says,

"Among

poems of summation and

vision

School Children," "The Tower," "A Prayer For

My

Daughter," "Under Ben Bulben," and "The Circus Animals' Desertion." These are

poems most eminently

of genealogy and

recapitulation of course. In the colonial context their significance is

that they reverse the slenderizing, the reductiveness,

and the

slanderous encapsulation of Irish actualities that, according to a

very learned book by Joseph Leerssen (Mere 1986),

had been the

fate of the Irish at the

Irish

and Fior-Ghael,

hands of English

writers for eight centuries. Displacing ahistorical rubrics such as "potato-eaters," or "bog-dwellers," or "shanty people," Yeats's

poetry joins his people to

its

history, the

more

imperatively in

25

Edward W. Said

man," or

that as father, or as "sixty year old smiling public

as

son and husband, the poet assumes that the narrative and density of personal experience are equivalent to the experience of his people.

The range of

"Among

references in the closing strophes of

School Children" suggests that Yeats was reminding his

audience that history and the nation were not separable, any

more than

a dancer

was separate from the dance.

The power of Yeats's accomplishment

in restoring a sup-

pressed history, and rejoining the nation to

when we

matic

Colonialism

the native's brain

perverted logic, torts, disfigures,

What

Fanon:

not satisfied merely with holding a people in

is

and emptying

recall

it

its

and

turns to the past of the oppressed people,

and

destroys

it.

grip

of aliform and content. By a kind of

(p.

dis-

210)

the efforts of Mangan, Ferguson, and Dinneen did in the

of cultural nationalism, Yeats does after

field

rendered dra-

it, is

more

challenging way.

He

rises

from the

them

in another,

personal expe-

level of

rience to that of national archetype, without losing the

diacy of the former or the stature of the

imme-

Moreover

latter.

Yeats's

unerring choice of genealogical fables and figures speaks to another aspect of colonialism, as described by Fanon: for separating the individual

from

his or

her

own

its

capacity

instinctual

life,

thereby breaking the generative lineaments of the national identity:

On

the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be con-

sidered by the native as a gentle loving mother

from

who

a hostile environment, but rather as a mother

strains her fundamentally perverse offspring from

suicide

and from giving free

its

biology,

and

its

managing

rein to its evil instincts.

mother protects her child from ogy,

protects her child

who unceasingly

itself

from

its ego,

own unhappiness which

commit

The colonial

and from

is its

to

its

physiol-

very essence.

In such a situation the claims of the native intellectual [and

26

re-

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

poet] are not a luxury but a necessity in any coherent program. The

who

native intellectual .

.

.

who

body,

is

takes

up arms

willing to strip himself

to defend his nation's legitimacy,

naked

to study the history

of

his

obliged to dissect the heart of his people, (p. 211)

is

No wonder

that Yeats instructed Irish poets to

Scorn the sort

now growing up

All out of shape

from toe to

top,

Their unremembering hearts and heads

Base-born products of base beds.

That

in the process, again

according to Blackmur, Yeats ended

up creating not individuals but types

come

the abstractions

that "cannot quite over-

from which they sprang"

(p.

to the extent that the decolonizing program and

its

118)

is

true

background

in the history of Ireland's subjugation are ignored, as

Blackmur

was wont to do

and yet so

ahistorically.

we

in interpreting poetry so masterfully

When

the colonial realities are taken into account,

get "insight and experience," and not merely "the allegorical

simulacrum churned with action" ever, that Yeats's full

lay

And when

it

in the

from what he would is

how-

symbolizes his understandable

from the colonial turbulence before

at-

his

Byzantium poems he asks to be gathered

into the artifice of eternity, the

malade"

will confess,

hold of an extremely distant and extremely orderly

reality felt as a refuge eyes.

I

system of cycles, pernes, and gyres in any

case seems important only as

tempts to

(p. 119).

later call

even more starkly

need for respite from age and

"the struggle of the at

work. Otherwise

fly it is

in

mar-

difficult to

read most of Yeats and not feel that the devastating anger and genius of Swift were harnessed by

him

Ireland's colonial afflictions. True, Yeats

to lifting the burdens of

stopped short of imag-

ining the full political liberation he might have aspired toward,

but

we

are left with a considerable achievement in decoloniza-

tion nonetheless.

27

Edward W. Said

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things

Ahmad,

Berkeley:

Mizan

London: Heinemann, 1958.

Fall Apart.

Jalal Ali. Occidentosis:

A

Robert Campbell.

Plague from the West. Trans.

Press, 1984.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities:

Reflections on the Origin

and Spread of

London: Verso, 1983.

Nationalism.

Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement.

London: H. Hamilton, 1938. Blackmur, R.

P. Selected Essays

of R.

P.

Blackmur. Ed. Denis

New

Donoghue.

York:

Ecco Press, 1985. Cabral, Amilcar. Return

to the Source: Selected Speeches.

New

York: Monthly Review

Press, 1973.

Eshleman and

Cesaire, Aime. The Collected Poetry, 1939-1976. Trans. Clayton

Annette Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Crosby, Alfred

W.

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,

900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Cullingford, Elizabeth.

Yeats, Ireland

and

Fascism.

New

New

York:

York University

Press, 1981.

Darwish, Mahmud.

Victims of a

Map. Trans. Abdullah al-Udhari. London: Al Saqi

Books, 1984.

Deane, Seamus.

Celtic Revivals: Essays in

Modern

Irish Literature,

880- 1980. Lon-

1

don: Faber and Faber, 1985.

DuBois,

W.

and Democracy: Colonies and

E. B. Color

New

Peace.

York: Harcourt,

Brace and Company. 1945. Faiz, Faiz

Ahmad. Poems

by Faiz. Trans. V. G. Kiernan. London: Allen

& Unwin,

1971. Faiz, Faiz

Ahmad. The

True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz

Ahmed

Faiz.

Trans.

Naomi

Lazard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the

Earth.

New

York: Grove Press, 1963.

Garvey, Marcus. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. 2

vols.

New

York:

Arno

Press, 1968-1969.

Gramsci, Antonio. thews.

New

Guha, Ranajit.

A

ment. Paris:

Harlow, Barbara.

Selections from Political Writings,

Rule of Property for Bengal:

Hill,

An

Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settle-

Mouton, 1963. Resistance Literature.

James, C. L. R. The Future

rence

1910-1920. Trans. John Mat-

York: International Publishers, 1977.

New

York and London: Methuen, 1987.

in the Present: Selected Writings.

Westport, Conn.: Law-

1977.

Mariategui, Jose. Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. Trans. Marjory Urquidi. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971.

28

YEATS AND DECOLONIZATION

New

Marti, Jose. Major Poems. Trans. Elinor Randall.

York:

Holmes Meier Pub-

lishers, 1982.

Marti, Jose. Marti on

Southern Neruda, Pablo.

the U.S.A.

Illinois

Selected and trans. Luis A. Baralt. Carbondale:

University Press, 1966.

Fully Empowered. Trans. Alastair

Reed.

New

York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1975. O'Brien, Conor Cruise. Writers and Panikkar, K.

M.

Politics.

Asia and Western Dominance:

Asian History, 1498-1945.

New

ed.

New A

York: Pantheon Books, 1965.

Survey of the Vasco da

London: Allen

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped

Africa.

& Unwin,

Gama Epoch of 1965.

Washington, D.C.: Howard

University Press, 1972.

Senghor,

L. S. Liberte, Vol.

1:

Nigritude

et

humanisme. Paris: Editions

du

Seuil,

1964.

Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

29

Paula A. Treichler

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

WORLD:

IN

THE THIRD

WORLD CHRONICLE

A FIRST

my

struggle to read

and interpret widely

contradictory reports about

AIDS and HIV

infection in the

This essay grows out of

Third World. At firsthand

more

I

first

attributed this struggle to

I

knowledge of the regions

read, the less this

clear that understanding

volves understanding

it

seemed

AIDS

I

to be the issue.

as a

my

lack of

was reading about. But the

While

it is

medical phenomenon in-

as a culturally specific

phenomenon,

it is

also clear that excessively positivist notions of cultural specificity limit

our

ability to

AIDS

recognize

as a

complex, contradictory,

and multilayered discursive construction. Even Western commentators

who

struction of

readily acknowledge the multiply-complex con-

AIDS

single materially

in the First

World

habitually imagine that a

grounded truth about AIDS can be established

for the

Third World. This essay accordingly explores the ques-

tion of

how we

are to

make

the Third World, focusing

AIDS and HIV

sense of

on

epidemic.

I

first

recent analyses of

and conceptualize the

discuss the general question of

course, then use an essay about cursive construction of Third

AIDS

World

selected First and Third

publications that attempt to chronicle

AIDS

infection in

AIDS

AIDS

dis-

in Haiti to explore the dis-

World AIDS.

I

review several

internationally, contrasting the statistical

chronicle of the epidemic with alternative constructions; these

examples show

how

differing conceptualizations can

promote

differing material consequences. Further, however, the produc-

tion of knowledge

and

a given

is

a key feature of this international chronicle,

Third World country's

inability to

produce

a tech-

31

Paula A. Treichler

nically sophisticated

account may simultaneously establish

need for external aid and reproduce perialism. In the final section,

I

its

a legacy of intellectual im-

discuss the question of narrative

coherence and contradiction in the context of two published reports

on

the politics of

AIDS

in Kenya.

I

suggest in conclusion

AIDS

that understanding the discursive dimensions of the is

a necessary if

tual

not sufficient prelude to addressing

its

crisis

concep-

and material complexity.

The Problem of Discourse: The Voice

We

Hear May Be Our

Own

to infect: to taint with contaminated matter; communicate a pathogen or a disease; invade, usually by penetration; impregnate with deleteri-

ous qualities; communicate or affect as if by some subtle contact; deprave. Also to stain or dye.

All accounts of the

1

AIDS epidemic

in the

Third World, whether

they are medical reports, patient testimony, media observations, investigative journalism,

World Health Organization news

bul-

or government reports, are at some level linguistic con-

letins,

structions.

These diverse representations of AIDS

World draw credentials

their authority

in the

Third

from many sources, including the

and persuasive powers of individual authors, consis-

tency with accepted beliefs and knowledge about

AIDS and

about the Third World, compatibility with social and political perspectives, and resonance with established discursive traditions.

The

influence of discourse

is

powerful and pervasive, yet

least likely of all these sources of authority to

is

be explicitly rec-

ognized by readers, or by writers for that matter. The Third

World

typically enters First

World discourse more or

less

un-

consciously as a stereotypically reliable explanatory figure for the exotic and alien. Reviewing

And

the

Band Flayed On,

book about the AIDS epidemic

Randy

Shilts's

States,

Frank Browning

for example,

in the

in Tikkun especially praises

United

its

dissection

of the major interest groups and subcultures involved in the cri-

32

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

sis:

tific

"To

rely

on The

Post

or The Times, to plow through the scien-

journals, or to listen to

version of the

AIDS

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

story

is

government

officials tell their

to read about a people as strange as

Bantu twig gatherers." 2

Browning

chastises

Western AIDS

analysts for constructing

the subjects of their discourse (primarily the gay

members

community)

as

of an alien culture. As trained anthropologists can ex-

plain the strange world of the "Bantu," so Shilts

is

cast as the

expert qualified to decode exotic subcultural practices. Thus stripped of

Browning

its

AIDS

discursive camouflage,

as a fully

is

laid bare for

comprehensible medical phenomenon. This

dismissal of language as camouflage reflects the widespread

among AIDS

experts that science can

view

somehow be combined

with "accurate information" and "clear communication" to

AIDS

of

its

short

its

entire connotative

politics, its

infectious disease

from

a

metaphors,

its

and

life,

strip

terrifying murkiness, in

at last reveal it as it

is,

an

and nothing more. The following statement,

book on AIDS,

ethics,

and public policy,

is

representative

of this view:

It is

time

.

.

.

to speak plainly.

There

rhetorical Jlourish to drive our pens

encouraged

to carry a

.

is

.

.

much

too

AIDS

at stake to permit

has been permitted and

moral meaning, but that morality

minds, not in the disease.

.

.

.

[I]t

is

in our

time for us to confront the inner

meanings our language betrays and then

to rid

not only our speaking

and writing but

also our thinking of these metaphors.

For Browning,

it is

AIDS and HIV

is

3

precisely such misguided rhetoric that

transmission confusing.

makes

Though he concedes

that

"innumerable mysteries about AIDS" remain, the arcane circumlocutions of scientists and journalists obfuscate even well-known facts.

One

lessly

perplexed about heterosexual transmission

there

is

of Browning's female colleagues, he

a "rather simple explanation" of

women and men

why

are differentially at risk of

tells us, is

when

need-

in fact

heterosexual

becoming

infected:

33

Paula A. Treichler

Gay men

get

it

because during anal intercourse infected semen can mix

with blood once the penis has caused abrasions on the rectal wall.

women

more subject

ally

And

are at greater risk because their reproductive systems are generto infection

than are men's. Men, who generally do

not have bleeding sex organs, are not usually exposed during intercourse because the virus, which

seem

may

be present in vaginal fluids, does not

do other venereal

to survive the urinary tract as

diseases.

4

This passage perfectly illustrates the apodictic reflex characteristic

of

much Western AIDS

aspect of the

AIDS

story

reporting; and especially

when one

declared impenetrably mysterious,

is

reason and control must be elsewhere recuperated. Here, the

numerous uncertainties

that

HIV

remain concerning

transmis-

sion are discursively suppressed by a series of seemingly simple declarative sentences that admit

no

possibility of

the same time unequivocally assert yet one

explanation of

why

differential risk

is

doubt and

at

more gerrymandered

related to gender. This

is

presumably the kind of "plain speaking" called for by the author quoted above: yet these simple words can be unpacked to reveal a formidable jumble.

may

Those familiar with the discourse of AIDS

wonder how the "rugged vaginas" of 1985 have

well

in 1988

evolved into "bleeding sex organs." 5 Browning's claim that

"women

are at greater risk" than

linguistic

men and

men

rests

on

his

marking of gay (and presumably bisexual)

straight

men

asymmetrical

men

as

gay

as simply men. This language obscures

by

needlessly gendering the correct underlying generalization: that

having (unprotected) sexual contact with an infected person puts

you

at

tact

with an uninfected person. Indeed, the epidemiology of

AIDS

greater risk of becoming infected than having sexual con-

in

many Third World

countries,

are infected in equal numbers, that general patterns of cal:

HIV

so long as gay/bisexual

is

where women and men

widely interpreted to confirm

transmission are mainly mathemati-

men

in the U.S.

were the group most

widely infected, the virus was most likely to infect their sexual partners 34

— primarily gay/bisexual men but also some women;

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

mathematically, the group least that increasing infection

is

THE THIRD WORLD

was straight men.

at risk

occurring

IN

among

straight

users and their partners and their partners, straight

Now

IV drug

men

are at

greater risk of infection whether they develop "bleeding sex

organs" or not.

By no means do such

assertions exhaust the narrative re-

AIDS commentary.

pertoire of

We may

be thankful that Brown-

ing does not return to the "Bantu twig gatherers" and attempt to account for the equal prevalence of

women and men

in

HIV

many Third World

infection in both

countries. But a 1988 ed-

the Journal of the American Medical Association, reviewing

itorial in

several co-factors thought to facilitate

HIV

transmission (such as

presence of prior sexually transmitted disease), offers this explanation: "central African heterosexual populations similar to

men

homosexual

than to most heterosexuals in the

United States." 6 The sweeping nature of ranted,

if

typical of First

The "populations"

may be more

this

statement

World writing about AIDS

unwar-

is

in Africa.

implicated involve people of different coun-

tries, regions, social

and

political units, ages, religions, classes,

and genders, whose diverse occupations, behaviors, biological and genetic

characteristics, linguistic practices, sexual practices,

and health histories are only beginning to be spect to

HIV

most

involve small

all

infection and AIDS.

Many

identified

with re-

studies are flawed; al-

numbers of people. The only

"similarity"

between "African heterosexual populations" and "homosexual

men"

that

disputed

—

can be claimed is

prevalence of hardly news.

at this

point

— and even this would be

that, in the aggregate, these

HIV

infection than

What we

see

is

groups share a higher

some other groups. This

is

American medicine's perennial

quest for the magic bullet, this time in the form of that missing piece of information that will

make

the

AIDS

puzzle manageable:

the magic bulletin.

Discourse about of past epidemics.

An

AIDS draws on widely accepted underlying premise

is

that

AIDS

narratives is

a

35

Paula A. Treichler

knowable biological phenomenon whose strange and seemingly contradictory aspects will ultimately prove to be illusory: de-

coded by experts,

its

mysteries will one by one be revealed as

controllable material realities. Discourse about

Third World shares but exaggerates the Third

World

AIDS

in the

this premise, first

equating

(especially Africa, "the dark continent")

with

the savage, the alien, or the incomprehensible, then asserting the

importance and achievability of reason and control. Though these

two

may

features

initially

seem

to be in conflict, they exist

in fact in a relationship of discursive symbiosis: the

metaphors of

mystery and otherness produce the desire for control, which in

turn

fulfilled

and

justified

is

by the metaphors of otherness and

mystery. 7

The performative work

that such narrative structures

can be identified, challenged, recuperated, reassigned; be eradicated. Language about AIDS,

illness,

ready informed with metaphor (influenza got illnesses

ject

were believed to be under the

it

cannot

and epidemics its

web even

is

al-

name because

influence of the stars; in-

means "to contaminate," "to communicate," and "to

or dye," a connotative

do

stain

the most vigilant housekeeping

cannot sweep away). To believe that information and communication about

AIDS

from metaphor day is

life.

is

will separate fact

Further, to inform

also to construct

exist, it issues

from

fiction

and

reality

to suppress the linguistic complexity of every-

and

from and

is

also to

perform; to communicate

interpret. Information does not simply in turn sustains a

behaving toward the world;

it

way of looking

at

and

shapes programmatic agendas and

determines capital investments.

The Third World for the process of

therefore creates

making sense of AIDS.

some

specific challenges

Efforts to

meet these

challenges are not always best served by the positivist "plain

speaking" voice of reason that holds that accurate information

and

clear messages will bring about desired behavioral change.

As others have noted, the seemingly simple message to "use

36

a

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

condom" probably truth

that the

is

moving chorus

The

more questions than

raises

AIDS epidemic

that takes

chestrations wherever

it

THE THIRD WORLD

it

answers. 8

The

unprecedented^ complex,

is

on new

voices

Nor

goes.

World experience

First

IN

leaves

a

and produces new or-

are these always harmonious.

no doubt about

this.

To sup-

pose that the discursive dimensions of the epidemic are some-

how

less

complex

in the

Third World

indeed. Although any crisis

may

ticulation for multiple voices

the Third

World

is

and

specificity

become

interests, the

a point of ar-

AIDS

crisis in

of pressing concern for three reasons: (1) di-

culturally localized is

cultural imperialism

inevitably

and

verse interests are articulated around cially

is

a necessary

if

and

AIDS

in

specific; (2)

ways that are sounderstanding

this

not sufficient condition for effectively

mobilizing resources and programs to address the epidemic in a given country or region; and (3) institutional forces and cultural

precedents in the First World prevent us from hearing the story of

AIDS

in the

Third World

as a

complex

To analyze the discourse of AIDS ful

material consequences. Far

is

narrative.

not to evade

from being

a

power-

its

detached activity re-

stricted to an idealized realm, analyzing discursive constructions

of

AIDS

in the

Third World

is

a pressing practical task

pressing as basic laboratory research,

I

would argue,

— as

for inter-

preting and influencing the everyday course of the epidemic. Especially in developing countries

where AIDS/HIV education,

prevention, and treatment will inevitably be labor-intensive efforts,

questions of language are central to such tasks as pro-

ducing effective public service announcements, employing print

and electronic media, communicating to people read,

communicating

in countries

who do

ferent languages are spoken, mediating

by the church leaders central to many prevention

human

resources

healers) for face-to-face education

dif-

between the forthright

language of "safer sex" and the spiritual formulations

marshalling various

not

where seventy or eighty

(e.g.,

demanded

efforts,

and

traditional herbal

and counseling

in rural areas.

37

Paula A. Treichler

The

cultural choice in African countries

between the slogans

"love carefully" and "love faithfully," the effectiveness of rock

music

promoting AIDS awareness, the distinction between

in

prostitutes shift

and "free women"

from "promiscuity"

as epidemiological categories, the

to "sexual partner change" in

education, the implications of thinking of socks," the distinction between

presuppose some

infection and

level of linguistic analysis.

the overt subject of debate in politics in the

HIV

condoms

many

9

as

AIDS

"American

AIDS — all

Further, language

discussions of

AIDS and

is

its

Third World. For example, the editors of AIDS

in

Africa, a

1988 collection of essays on policy, write that the "lan-

guage of

crisis

AIDS

and catastrophe has permeated the discussion of

in Africa. In this

book the

editors

and contributors have

tried to curb the language while not side-stepping the real prob-

lems that HIV/AIDS poses for Africa." 10

The within

and

close analysis of such examples

AIDS

their positioning

discourse enables us to identify the key issues of

that discourse

— what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

call

nodal points, or privileged discursive points that serve in part to fix

meaning and center

a field of discourse

— and, without auto-

World account

matically privileging every Third

as

somehow

more authentic than accounts explicitly mediated through the West, begin to assemble and articulate a different course about

There

AIDS

is

in the

a certain degree of

in believing the privilege

Western

of dis-

cultural imperialism

and task of conceptualizing

ours, the question of representation ours, the ours. For our benefit, African countries are

holding facts about AIDS.

field

Third World. 11

Once

again,

this crisis

is

need to know

rebuked for with-

Western discourse

re-

produces the perspective of "a development doctrine that treats Africa as a problem to be solved rather than a voice to be

heard." 12

If

centralized

we can

find ways to circumvent the increasingly

and professionalized handling of the epidemic, per-

haps the voices of the Third World

38

may

lead us to scrutinize the

— AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

linguistic imperialism that has constructed the very

AIDS and

question:

U.S.

Doctor Unmasks Truth

We had come

.

.

in Haiti": Third

for almost

.

.

.

Coming

in First

World Media

at the

end gave us certain advan-

six

The IKung had been observing anthropologists

years and had learned quite a bit about them. Precedents

set that the

IKung expected

— Marjorie Shostak, Woman, The very

World AIDS

But as time passed we became aware that we had also inher-

.

ited serious problems.

had been

hear

near the end of a long line of anthropologists working in

these remote villages tages.

we

and inevitably have been only our own.

will not always

"A

terms of the

Third World. In that case, the voices

activity

textualization

1981

Nisa:

us to follow.

The

Life

and Words of

IKung

a

11

of ethnographic writing

seen as inscription or

— enacts a redemptive Western

structure needs to be perceived

allegory. This pervasive

and weighed against other

possible

em-

plotmentsfor the performance of ethnography.

—James

Clifford,

"On Ethnographic Allegory," 1986 14

Almost any account of AIDS

Third World

in the

demonstrate problematic aspects of struction.

A

linguistic

and

visual con-

highly visible story was written for Life magazine by

physician-author Richard Selzer,

mid-1980s

its

will serve to

in

who

visited Haiti in the

an effort to learn the truth about

government's apparent attempts to downplay

The metaphor of

the article's

title,

its

AIDS behind

the

prevalence. 15

"A Mask on the Face of

Death," invokes the government's denials in the language of exotic tropical rituals like carnival

AIDS Ravages

Haiti, a U.S.

and voodoo. The

Doctor Finds

a

subtitle

is

"As

Taboo Against

Truth"; while very likely not Selzer's words, they suggest to the reader not only that

demic but

official denials

mask the

brutality of the epi-

also that Selzer, the expert medical observer, can per-

ceive the reality beneath the mask. Selzer's article

is

in the

39

Paula A. Treichler

tradition of the privileged First

ethnography and

travel literature, the stranger in a strange land

whose representation of AIDS by

World informant of conventional

in the

Third World

legitimated

is

phenomena

claim to be an objective (scientific) account of

its

observed or experienced firsthand. As Mary Louise Pratt argues, travel writing has

provided ethnographic description with a dis-

cursive legacy, despite the ethnographer's desire to repudiate

both, in turn, permeate representations in other genres.

opens with the conventional

Selzer's article

dual legacy: "It

Copacabana,

is

10 o'clock at night as

a dilapidated brothel

we

16

it;

Thus

arrival scene of this

up

drive

to the

on the rue Dessalines

in the

red-light district of Port-au-Prince" (p. 59). Outside the bar,

Selzer

importuned by

is

men and women

offering a variety of sex-

ual pleasures; inside, he interviews three female prostitutes

the Dominican Republic

problem

who

describe

for them, not a health problem.

tion of the native informant server accounts; in

AIDS

is

Life story,

The

as

direct interroga-

it is

seem

often prostitutes

full skirt

is

glamorously

of her red dress fanned out across a

bed; an April 1988 news account of the fear of basa, Kenya, reports

AIDS

an exchange between a U.S.

prostitute, a "23-year-old

Ugandan woman

Newsweek photograph of a

woman

sailor

in red leggings

and

men

examines

The following a large

illnesses for

Selzer

little

carefully

and indeed speculates

and

skirt

a

is

in

day, Selzer talks with physicians

number of

whom is

Mom-

in

in red shorts"; a

captioned: " 'Avoid promiscuity': Prostitute with Zaire." 17 )

who

to be wearing red. (For

one of the Dominican prostitutes

photographed, the

from

an economic

another staple of privileged ob-

narratives,

are interviewed, and they always

the

AIDS

and

patients with apparent HIV-related

in the

way of treatment

is

available.

nonjudgmental with respect to street

that the virus

may

life

have entered Haiti as

an accidental feature of First World exploitation: Could ists,

40

it

have comejrom the American and Canadian homosexual tour-

and, yes, even some U.S. diplomats

who have

traveled to the island

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

to

have sex with impoverished Haitian

men

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

all too willing to sell

them-

to feed their families? Throughout the international gay commu-

selves

nity Haiti was

known

as a

good place

to

go for

sex.

64)

(p.

Selzer pursues this characterization of Haiti as sexual victim rav-

aged by Western ficial at

capitalists.

Acting on "a private tip from an of-

the Ministry of Tourism," Selzer and guide drive to a

once luxurious hotel

fifty

miles from Port-au-Prince that was a

prime vacation spot for gay men. Because the two French

who own are

men

the hotel are out of the country, Selzer and his guide

shown around by

a staff

member,

a

man

of about thirty

who

clearly

is

desperately

empty

hotel.

ill.

Tottering, short

of breath, he shows us about the

The furnishings are opulent and extreme

the wall, a live leopard in the garden, a

bathtub with gold faucets.

Is it

—

on

tiger skins

bedroom containing a giant

the heat of the day or the heat of

imagination that makes these walls echo with the painful

cries

my

of

pederasty? (p. 64)

This passage reveals both the white American male,

among

travel writer at

AIDS

mately, for Selzer, tale

at ease

the tiger skins of a hotel in Haiti, and the traditional

Western

men

ill

about the

evils

work on Third World AIDS. in Haiti

is

of sexual excess: as northern homosexual

ravaged Haitian boys, so does

AIDS

ravage Haiti. Nostalgia

for the observed culture's original innocence gives at its exploitation

Ulti-

an unambiguous mor(t)ality

way

to regret

by decadent foreigners and speculation about

the deadly effects of exotic customs and sexual practices. Selzer's

account therefore tivities, his

tells

us something about his concrete daily ac-

heated imagination, and his strategies for transform-

ing selected experiences into prose, but his desire to bring the country's plight to world attention

AIDS

about

The served

is

as

much

about language as

in Haiti.

status of Selzer's article as a firsthand report of ob-

phenomena does not

rest

on our

firsthand

knowledge

Paula A. Treichler

about AIDS, the Third World, or Haiti. In certain concrete ways, just as cinematic convention represents scenes viewed

through binoculars

as

two

intersecting circles,

discourse transforms a culture so that

it

Western AIDS

ceases to recognize itself

What

but paradoxically becomes recognizable in the West.

needed the

AIDS epidemic — which

Grover puts

it,

We may tory in First

opening

has in part evolved, as Jan Zita

as a "creature of language." 18

begin this process by reviewing the elements of

account of

Selzer's

AIDS

in Haiti that are

now

virtually obliga-

World chronicles of Third World AIDS.

arrival scene, as

AIDS

I

— a culture that,

note below, the term

Third World presupposes an analysis founded

on such concepts

capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, modernity,

velopment. Second, the

statistics

AIDS

sonal observations about the prevalence of

the next section). Third, statistics

the First

structural

specialized

more perreturn to

(I

sta-

more broadly show

World chronicle incorporates within

demands the

as

and de-

provided by Haitian physicians

function in part to anchor in objective fact Selzer's

how

the

chronicles, almost always belongs to the fallen world of

postcolonial development. Indeed, as

tistics in

First,

have noted, situates the First World

I

observer in relation to the Third World culture in

is

and subtexts of

to sort out the multiple voices, texts,

is

its

own

knowledge of expert native

informants whose on-the-scene experience equips them to reveal the truth behind the official mask. (In Selzer's story, the inside

informants assert that admit; but in other

AIDS

AIDS

is

more widespread than

stories, insiders

officials

may function

cuse the government and the media of exaggerating the crisis for political gains.)

A

fourth element

is

informant

is

condemnation of voodoo, whose facilitate

monic

42

demonstrated by

religion, a cancer

whose unrehis moralistic

rituals are believed

the spread of HIV: voodoo, he

on Haiti"

that

by some to

tells Selzer, is is

AIDS

provided by "the

reigning American pastor," a nonnative informant liability as a cultural

to ac-

"a de-

"worse than AIDS"

(p.

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

62).

Though such

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

AIDS

cultural subtexts can function in

narra-

prepare the ground for epidemiological hypotheses, the

tives to

purpose here seems different. In positioning himself against his fellow American, "a

handsome Midwesterner with an

tall,

siastical smile," Selzer

own

secures his

nographers quote descriptions of

much

reliability,

a given culture

by

eccle-

as eth-

earlier travel

writers to repudiate the bias of such unscientific observations.

element;

Selzer's visits to health care settings constitute a fifth

with Haitian physicians, they demonstrate

like his discussions

the inadequacies of a devastated health care system, an economic fallen

world that

parallels his

image elsewhere of Haiti

victim of First World sexual exploitation.

ment by

in

AIDS

Selzer's talk

stories

is

A

as the

sixth familiar ele-

"the view from the street," represented

with the three healthy Dominican prostitutes.

Their remarks seem designed to underscore the ignorance and

dangerous silence.

false security

One

engendered by the government's

of them, Carmen, scoffs

at Selzer's

prostitutes as a population are sick with

"AIDS!" Her is

lips curl

about the

AIDS:

"There

is

no such

thing. It

a false disease invented by the American government to take advan-

tage of the poor countries. The so

syllable.

official

suggestion that

now he makes up AIDS

nod vehemently,

The notion

(p.

that

American President hates poor people,

to take

away

the little

we have." The others

60)

AIDS

is

an American invention

element of the international

AIDS

story, yet

a recurrent

is

one not

easily in-

corporated within a Western positivist frame, in part, perhaps, because

it is

political,

colonialism; the

with discursive roots in the resistance to

Western response, accordingly,

attributes

it

to

ignorance, state propaganda, or psychological denial. 19

Carmen's theory of AIDS invokes two other ratives.

The

first,

a tale of

difficulty of finding

good

significant nar-

postmodern scholarship,

is

native informants these days.

Shostak's introduction to her ethnographic study Nisa

about the

As

makes

43

Paula A. Treichler

clear, native

informants are quite likely to be already wise in the

ways of Western

inquisitors. Discussing Nisa, Pratt convincingly

argues that Shostak

nevertheless able ultimately to transcend

is

the "degraded" ethnographic culture of too-knowing informants

and achieve ing of

a

redemptive resolution for her story.

Carmen accomplishes something

second narrative, to which

I

Selzer's

similar, together

fram-

with

a

have already alluded, concerning the

construction of the subject in a fallen world. Pratt suggests that

ethnographic characterizations of the !Kung changed in the course of foreign colonization. Precolonial ethnographers ren-

dered them

as sly, bloodthirsty,

untrustworthy, appetitive, ma-

nipulative; after colonization, they

helpful, friendly, innocent, good,

may be occurring

came

to be represented as

and vulnerable.

in the course of the

A

parallel shift

AIDS epidemic

in the

U.S. in mainstream representations of gay men, as illness and

death are perceived to transform a threatening and alien com-

munity

and sympathetic one

into a vulnerable

challenged by

many AIDS

activists). In

Carmen's speech takes place narrative

moment, and

denial of

AIDS

as a

hear Violetta in the Selzer finally

this

at

what

transformation

(a

the global

AIDS drama,

presented as a pivotal

is

encourages us to hear her emphatic

prelude to tragedy

— perhaps as we would

act of La Traviata. 20

first

sums up:

This evening I leave Haiti. For two weeks I have fastened myself to this lovely fragile

land

like

an ear pressed

break a traveler's heart.

.

.

.

to the

ground.

It is

a country to

Perhaps one day the plague will be ren-

dered in poetry, music, painting. But not now, not now. (p. 64)

Here the stance of physician sician's ear

as

ethnographer

is

the body of a patient. But though the diagnosis

guage

is

Utopian: the First

repelled the threat of

World AIDS

human

is

it

phyto

grim, the lan-

narrative has successfully

postmodern disruption

sage of transcendent, universal

44

clearer, the

pressed to the body of Haiti as he might press

to deliver a

tragedy.

mes-

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

Visual representations are

The

ones.

no

Selzer article's facticity

less

is

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

problematic than verbal

buttressed by color photo-

graphs that reproduce familiar representations of the Third

World and reinforce what we think we already know about

AIDS

in those regions: frail, wasting bodies in

gloomy

clinics;

small children in rickety cribs; the prostitutes in red. Photo-

graphs in a 1986 Newsweek story on

"Third Worldness" of with AIDS

lies

its

AIDS

in Africa depict the

health care system: in Tanzania, a

on

hospitalized

a plain cot

man

with none of the

high-tech paraphernalia of U.S. representations; a widely reprinted photograph shows six "emaciated patients in a

AIDS ward," two

in cots, four

physicians shown.

A

on mats on the

on AIDS

story

Uganda

floor; rarely are

in Brazil carries similar

non-

technological images. In contrast, African publications often run

photos of African scientists and physicians, and tographs in a 1987 story on

Newsweek

is

one of

AIDS

among

the pho-

in the Brazilian equivalent of

equipped operating theater complete

a fully

with masked and gowned physicians and nurses. 21

A

problem occurs

different

story called "Uganda: trait

in a

1988 National Geographic

Land Beyond Sorrow." The

of unrelieved despair

is

oddly challenged by the magazine's

characteristically stunning photographs.

AIDS

A young woman

in a long flowing dress, for example, stands

her mother,

who

is

story's por-

wearing vivid pink; the caption

woman, Jane Namirimu,

is

with

supported by tells

us the

pregnant and already too weak to

stand alone. Yet the beauty of the composition, even the adjacent

photograph of her grave taken when the photographer returned three months

later,

transforms the

text's

bleak assertions into an

almost Utopian narrative of elegiac fatefulness in which aesthetic universality

A

final

redeems individual

problem

is

suffering. 22

the literal appropriation of images.

J.

B.

Diederich's photographs for the Selzer story were at least original for Life; but

some AIDS photographs

are familiar not simply

because they invoke a familiar tradition but because precisely the

45

Paulo A. Treichler

same images

circulate

among

diverse publications. In one of

Diederich's photographs, a large striking study in brown and

woman

white, an emaciated Haitian fully

on

a

wooden bench and

caption reads, "Tuberculosis

in a

white dress

sits

looks out at the camera.

is

grace-

The

but one of the wasting infections

of what Haitians call maladi-a." Selzer's text does not define maladi-a; nor does

it tell

us whether tuberculosis

Haiti as a disease that signals

of

many wasting

diseases;

AIDS

nor

is it

or

like

is,

is

counted in

AIDS, simply one

woman

clear that the

photograph has actually been diagnosed with AIDS. But

produced months

later in the

re-

Canadian news magazine Maclean

the identical photo, no longer ambiguous,

AIDS

in the

is

's,

captioned: "Haitian

victim: a former playground for holidayers." 23

What

constitutes the

AIDS

narrative

sentational elements, narrative voices,

is

a layering of repre-

and replicating images.

Moreover, one cannot find the truth about AIDS simply by

dis-

pensing with First World mediation in favor of voices that originate in the Third World. For these voices are often in conflict as well:

even the observations of trained journalists or health care

professionals within a country

the West's scenarios but

may

differ radically

from each

not only from

an

other's. In central Africa,

area widely characterized in the Western media as being "devastated" by

AIDS, some people

disease

largely imaginary, the latest

is

believe, as

the Third World's population in the

Carmen

Western

wake of

does, that the

trick to reduce

failed birth control

strategies in the past; others believe the disease exists, but

"white man's disease";

rimuuta and Rosalind research on

AIDS

still

J.

is

a

others, such as Richard C. Chi-

Chirimuuta, argue that most Western

in Africa

is

based on racist preconceptions

rather than scientific evidence, and hence the true extent of the illness is

unknown. 24 Discrepancies between doomsday predic-

tions by the

Western media and

official denials

governments introduce another complicating cial

46

imaginary"

— what

it

dreams

itself to be.

by Third World

factor: a state's "so-

As Ann Anagnost

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

observes, a country's explicit declarations and official statistics are likely to be pervaded by the language of this implicit social

dream. 25 The dream of controlling

blood supply,

ling the

statistical

dia coverage, biotechnology, or

well declare itself in a

AIDS — whether

of control-

and epidemiological

me-

studies,

moral and sexual behavior

— may

Western tongue. The Brazilian photo-

graph of a surgical operating theater, that famed invention of

Western high technology, accurately documents the existence Brazil of sophisticated

tion of "the

AIDS

in

medical capabilities. But as a representa-

AIDS epidemic,"

victim." Symbiosis

is

it

may be

as

bogus

as the

"Haitian

self-perpetuating: while Third

World

representations function as icons that can be seamlessly decontextualized and appropriated by the First

the Third

World media, dependent

World

narrative voice,

in varying degrees

on

First

World sources and technology, may recontextualize these images as their

own. As Edward Said argues, modern representation

on

the decolonized world depends increasingly

of media

power

in

a concentration

in metropolitan centers; this contributes to the

monolithic nature of Third World representations, which are in turn a major source of information about Third World populations not only for the "outside world" but also for those popula-

tions themselves. 26

dominance but

it

Dependency, of course, may perpetuate

also fosters resistance.

To

believe otherwise

dream

to adopt the social imaginary of the neocolonial, a

which shrewdly invested

is

in

— in the form of infor— earns a predictably

linguistic capital

mation, communication, or consultation satisfactory return.

Many make enable

people throughout the world are

now

pressed to

sense of AIDS, to develop a working conception that will

them

to proceed with

AIDS and HIV. seen for what effort, to

It is

it is

life,

including for

some

life

with

increasingly clear that this goal needs to be

— a working conception — and that any global

work, needs to involve voices that ultimately may be

neither harmonious nor reconcilable. Politically appealing as

it

47

Paula A. Treichler

may be as false,

Western representations of Third World AIDS

to dismiss

we should not

simply privilege as true our most trusted

alternative sources in their place. is

Why?

ultimately as paternalistic as the

challenge the assumption that what

mined. But

if

we

resentations of

Because such a strategy

and because

first, is

it fails

to

true can actually be deter-

relinquish the compulsion to separate true rep-

AIDS from

false

ones and concentrate instead on

the process and consequences of representation and discursive

production,

we can

begin to sort out

how

particular versions of

work they

truth are produced and sustained, and what cultural

do in given contexts. Such an approach illuminates the construction of

much

AIDS

complex narrative and

as a

about truth

stand the ways

AIDS comes

rules

is

is

not determining whether

true or false but identifying the underlying

and conventions

ceived as true or

false,

that determine

whether that account

is

re-

by whom, and with what material conse-

quences. Richard Selzer's essay on

AIDS

in Haiti provides useful

AIDS

information: not necessarily about the true nature of the Third World, but about the

Western mass print media representations of

not so

to be articulated within particular

major problem

cultural contexts, the a given account

raises questions

about power and representation. To under-

as

to

power of

in

individual authors and

produce and transmit particular

AIDS according

to certain conventions

and

in

doing so sustain their acceptance as true. 27 Other forms of representation, drawing

may make

on

different conventions, different rules,

claims to truth in different ways. Diverse voices then

represent not diverse accounts of reality

we must choose among

but significant points of articulation for ongoing social and cultural struggles.

mediated,

Once we adopt

we become

process; such voices

the view that reality

is

inevitably

ourselves participants in the mediation

may then provide important models

challenging existing regimes of truth and disrupting their effects

m

— in the Third World, as in the First.

28

for

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

The Country and the

It is

City:

Dreams

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

World AIDS

of Third

not impossible that in the future, as in the past, effective steps in

the prevention of disease will be motivated by an emotional revolt

against some of the inadequacies of the

and power may

—Rene

A

arise from

modern

is

induces

—John

.

.

Knowledge logic.

that circular relation which truth has to the sys-

tems of power that produce and sustain it

.

Dubos, Mirage of Health, 1959 29

regime of truth

which

world.

dreams as well as from facts and

and which

Tagg,

redirect

it,

and

to the effects

of power

it.

The Burden of Representation, 1988 i0

You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries.

— Ronald Reagan,

statement to the press after visiting Latin

America* 1

"The

statistical

mode

of analysis," argued

Raymond Williams

in

The Country and the City, was "devised in response to the impossibility

of understanding contemporary society from experi-

ence." Characterizing preindustrial English society as knowable

through experience this

(if

only partially

so),

Williams contrasted

"knowable community" with the "new sense of the darkly

unknowable" produced by urbanization and

The metaphor of darkness was of the rise of est

London."

cities:

industrialization.

routinely invoked in discussions

the East End, for instance, was called "Dark-

Statistical analysis

was one of the new forms of

knowledge "devised to penetrate what was rightly perceived to be to a large extent obscure." 32

Given pectedly,

is

its

historical mission, statistical analysis, not

unex-

widely seen as the most powerful way to understand

the latest incarnation of the "darkly unknowable":

Third World.

Statistical data, at the least, are

AIDS

in the

seen as the neces-

sary foundation for other knowledge. Further, the ability to pro-

49

Paula A. Treichler

duce

statistical

information

of development, predict

and determine if a

its

is

used to measure

ability to

its eligibility

country cannot produce

for its

some forms of external

own numbers

cope can be demonstrated

ity to

with external studies.

AIDS and HIV

33

as a willingness to

World

is

But even

why AIDS

when

is

estimates

specific

nounced, the use of numbers reality

cooperate

shaped on a day-

to-day basis by statistical findings and projections.

sisted.

Even

its abil-

Certainly the international discourse on

infection in the Third

reason

crisis,

aid.

internally,

bers are generated and publicized, they take on a

own — one

degree

a nation's

cope with the AIDS

Once numlife

of their

may sometimes be

re-

numbers are questioned or de-

as a

fundamental measure of AIDS'

not.

Data with regard to AIDS/HIV in Third World countries are regularly generated by several sources: the ganization's

(WHO)

Global

World Health Or-

Programme on AIDS (GPA), which

includes a Surveillance, Forecasting, and Impact Assessment

Unit; the U.S. Public Health Service Centers for Disease Control

(CDC); the Center

for International Research

Bureau of the Census, whose AIDS/HIV

(CIR) of the U.S.

Statistics

Data Base

is

supported in part by the U.S. Agency for International Develop-

ment (USAID); and the London School of Hygiene. other agencies gather

more

A number

localized data, including the

of

World

Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the

Kenya Medical Re-

search Institute (KMRI), the International Medical Research

Center (Gabon), and individual hospitals and laboratories. 34 Let us briefly examine

some of the numbers produced by

this statis-

tical enterprise.

Of

these sources,

WHO headquarters in Geneva

is

widely

recognized and accepted as a legitimate and "politically neutral" producer, synthesizer, and interpreter of international numbers.

By January

GPA was 50

31, 1989, the

number of countries reporting

177, of which 144 had reported one or

more

to the

cases of

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

AIDS cases

(up from 175 and 138 in three months): a total of 139,886

worldwide had been reported to

close to 7,000 over the previous realistic total

of actual

and estimates

worldwide totals

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

(a

mean

somewhere

AIDS

that 5 million

million or

that at least in the

WHO,

an increase of

WHO considers a more

month;

cases to be 250,000 to 350,000,

more

more

are infected (with

HIV)

infected in Africa alone). These

one new case of AIDS

is

being reported

world every minute, or 60 new cases every

hour and 1,440 each day. Projections about the worldwide

dis-

tribution and future prospects of AIDS and HIV infection led

Jonathan Mann, director of the GPA, to conclude in mid- 1988 that "the global situation will get

brought under control."

This assessment did not

before

it

can be

come

readily to the

World Health

WHO ofacknowledged AIDS as a global health problem — in many

Organization: indeed, ficially

much worse

35

countries,

some

it

was not

five years into

until late

1986 that

the epidemic.

the existence of AIDS, however,

WHO's

Once committed

surveillance reports

to

and

seroprevalence data were sufficient, by the end of 1987, to suggest three broad global patterns of

WHO,

Pattern

I is

AIDS. 36 As constructed by

typical of industrialized countries with large

numbers of reported

cases (the First World, roughly, including

the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Zealand): late

HIV

infection in these countries

first

appeared in the

1970s and began spreading rapidly, primarily

bisexual

men, and IV drug users

cipients of blood products.

New

among

gay,

urban coastal centers and re-

in

Though

infection

and

illness are at

present slowly increasing in the heterosexual population, the

male to female

ratio

is still

between

transmission (from mother to infant) fection in the overall population

is

10:1 or 15:1, perinatal is

not yet

common, and

estimated to be

less

in-

than one

percent (though greater than 50 percent in "some groups practicing high-risk behavior"). In Pattern

World countries (primarily

central

II,

characteristic of Third

and eastern Africa, the Ca-

51

Paula A. Treichler

some

ribbean, and

peared in the

AIDS

American

Latin

countries),

HIV

infection ap-

1970s, though was not widely identified with

late

until 1983. Heterosexual transmission

is

the norm, with

the male to female ratio about one to one and prenatal transmis-

common;

sion therefore

transmission via gay sexual contact or

IV drug use appears to be low or absent. In tributed to the Second well as cific

North

Pattern

World countries of the

Africa, the

Middle

(excluding Australia and

East, Asia,

New

Zealand),

III,

at-

Soviet bloc as

and most of the Pa-

HIV

is

judged to

have appeared in the early to mid-1980s; only small numbers of cases have so far been reported, usually in people

Pattern

I

who

have

and had sexual intercourse with infected persons

traveled to

or

II

areas,

in

with only recent documentation of "indige-

nous homosexual, heterosexual and IV-drug-use transmission." 37

What Again,

will

we can

be the material effects of the global epidemic?

identify a widely-accepted set of predictions. In

developed countries national product

like the U.S.,

where

spent on health care,

is

13 percent of the gross

AIDS and HIV-related

illnesses are already straining the health care system; in

many

Third World countries, where annual expenditures on health care are often less than $5 per person and totally inadequate

even for current needs, future prospects are grim. Further, despite the

widespread stereotype of people with AIDS

as the dis-

advantaged of society, the twenty- to forty-year-old age group,

most vulnerable worldwide,

is

central to the labor force, to

childbearing, to caring for the dependent ironically, to marshalling

dressing the thesizing a

Rockwell

AIDS epidemic and

number of

spell

old, and,

studies

for ad-

other health problems. 38 Syn-

on AIDS

in Africa, Miller

and

out more specific consequences: (1) the highest

risk in age

group

25-29, for

men

health of

young and

and managing the resources

is

for those

between 20 and 40

(for

women

30-34); (2) prenatal infection threatens the

newborn

children; (3) at highest risk are city dwellers

and the geographically mobile (commercial and government

52

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

military

elites,

and paramilitary personnel,

prostitutes); (4)

become

(current thinking

ill

tween 50 percent and 90 percent

who

police, truckers,

under current treatment regimens, the majority

of those infected will

ten years and

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

many

will die); (5)

that be-

is

show symptoms within

will

many people

become

will

ill

won't understand their symptoms or their infectiousness

and role in spreading infection;

"medical care systems

(6) the

will

be inadequate to the task of caring for the

and

their

kinsman

will

ill;

(7) victims

embark on desperate searches

for cures,

with large expenditures of savings and an aggressive search for health care and ways to finance

peatedly

is

that education

it."

39

A

further point

and prevention, the major

made

re-

strategies at

present for controlling the spread of the virus, have proved cult

enough

in

diffi-

media-rich Western countries; the task of com-

municating complex health messages to the diverse populations

and geographical

A and

its

global

sites

of Third

World countries

AIDS/HIV epidemic

formidable.

existence widely authorized as true. 40 Despite the reluc-

tance of

some nations

to

acknowledge

taken formal steps to address the global

is

now been documented

has

AIDS

it,

crisis

many

others have

by endorsing

now

WHO's

statement and policy and the United Nations state-

ment, distributing information for travelers, and attending national

and international conferences and summits. International

assessments by the World Bank and others have reinforced a sense of global urgency by identifying the multiple adverse eco-

nomic

effects of

AIDS on Third World — and

countries; in Africa, such effects are avoidable.

The 1988

International

holm closed with the

WHO.

—

considered to be un-

AIDS Conference

in Stock-

AIDS and

that international support be

Halfdan Mahler, the director-general of

rebuked rich countries for "self congratulation" drives based

World

plea that the rich developed countries help

developing nations fight given to

now

First

in

WHO,

anti-AIDS

on blood screening, technology, and expensive edu-

cational campaigns far

beyond the reach of the African coun-

53

Paula A. Treichler

tries,

emphasizing that national self-sufficiency in an infectious

pandemic try, until

is

an

illusion:

The power and tions of

AIDS

all

numbers

centrality of

are obvious.

AIDS may appear

to these construc-

as a global issue

could not have

World chronicle of

to be unfolding smoothly as our

this

any coun-

Without the power and authority of

articulated. Yet while the First

grows, in fact

in

countries." 41

methods, the epidemic

statistical

been

"AIDS cannot be stopped

stopped in

it is

knowledge

is

global

knowledge

problematic in several ways. In-

deed, even the most fundamental meaning of the narrative re-

mains contested. Consider the following judgments about the epidemic in Africa, (1)

Africa

where

(2)

all

published in 1988:

"The continent hardest all

hit

by the AIDS pandemic

three infection patterns can be found."

is

(WHO)

"Medical experts consider the epidemic an accelerating

catastrophe that, in the words of one, 'will

famine look (3) In

like a picnic' "

many

make

the Ethiopian

(Congressional Research Service)

of the urban centers of central Africa, "from 5

to 20 percent of the sexually active age-group has already

infected with HIV. Rates of infection

among some

been

prostitute

groups range from 27 percent in Kinshasa, Zaire, to 66 percent in Nairobi, Kenya,

half of

all

and 88 percent

patients in the medical

in Butare,

Rwanda. Close to

wards of hospitals in those

currently infected with HIV. So are from 10 to 25

cities are

percent of the

women

of childbearing age, and that will

mean an

increase in child mortality by at least 25 percent; the gains

achieved with difficulty by child-survival programs over the past

two decades may be

nullified.

By the

early 1990s the total adult

mortality rate in these urban areas will have been doubled or tripled by (4)

AIDS."

(WHO)

"A Newsweek cover

story claimed one Rakai village [in

Uganda] had seven discos and

mud

Guardian )

54

'sex orgies.' In reality

huts, a handful of fishing boats,

and no

it

has 20

electricity." (The

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

(5)

"The

of

tale

AIDS

in Africa

is

devastation and the collapse of nations. in Africa

and AIDS

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

not one of widespread

There are 53 countries few of them."

exists substantially in only a

(Washington Post) (6)

"Like the tenacious theories put forward as explana-

tions for the heterosexual spread of

AIDS pandemic is

no

is

shrouded

reliable information

has percolated

of date and a Africa)

its

is

HIV

in Africa, the

whole

mystery and uncertainty. There

on AIDS and by the time one message

way down

new one

in

to the general population,

already

on

its

way

out

it is

to replace it." (West

42

Some

sources of confusion and contradiction are recog-

nized and articulated by epidemiologists and social scientists. Estimates of infection and actual cases of tions

may be

AIDS

for entire popula-

derived from inadequate data: too few studies,

studies of too small a sample size, nonrepresentative samples,

and so on. In Africa, "underreporting"

is

taken for granted and

estimates corrected upwards; at the same time, the positive cases actually diagnosed

may be too high

number of

or too low, de-

pending on the procedure used. Many studies presented ferences never

become

at

con-

available for scrutiny in published form;

and many published papers do not report important data about

how

the study was conducted. Finally, observations by experi-

enced medical experts in Africa, which tend to make lower mates of cases than

WHO,

are discounted as clinical

experiential rather than scientific and technical. 43

Though

creased international scientific dialogue about the global

and HIV situation has answered some questions, firmed the difficulty of answering others.

A

it

esti-

and in-

AIDS

has con-

1988 book edited by

the virologist Jay A. Levy, for example, includes detailed review

chapters on

AIDS

strate the diverse

HIV

in Haiti

and AIDS

and very different

infection in those settings

vised diagnostic

in Africa.

Both demon-

clinical manifestations of

and emphasize the need

and reporting systems. Treated

at

for re-

length in the

55

Paula A. Treichler

Haiti chapter are the

complex interaction of HIV infection with

tuberculosis (alluded to by Selzer), while the Africa chapter re-

views the controversial origin questions and challenges the various dubious explanations for the high rate of heterosexual transmission; both chapters emphasize remaining questions and

the need for continuing investigation. 44

The

provisional nature of science

funding agencies to

with. Rather, there

live

tive in

which

with; indeed,

live

is

is

difficult for policy

it is

and

hard for science to

pressure to produce a coherent narra-

qualifications

and ambiguities,

if

they must be

mentioned, become simply routinized features of the story, to be quickly forgotten; problems of data are perceived to be mere

temporary impediments to

AIDS

Yet

positivist

medical science, and

with the virus cial, its

a refined

and comprehensive

continually escapes the boundaries placed

Added

itself.

its

on

meanings mutate on

AIDS

inevitably political subtext.

resource;

it is

is

crisis is

not a precious national

something nobody wants. Wherever

it

appears,

quickly becomes political, and in the discourses of each

Third World country where the question of AIDS (even yet find

AIDS

has

itself)

AIDS

become an

living a dual

into the

life.

demands of

if

not

we

increasingly pressing problem,

While the dominant international

up pieces of the

narrative picks

them

by

a parallel

to the medical, epidemiological, so-

economic, and educational challenges of the AIDS

AIDS

analysis.

it

its

local setting

and incorporates

format, that narrative

is

itself

being

disassembled and grafted onto discursive structures and issues already at

however,

work

in those cultures.

when AIDS

epidemiological

is

These processes are disguised,

treated as an unmediated biological and

phenomenon

in

which

cultural differences (dif-

ferences in sexual practices, for example) can simply be factored into a universal transcultural equation.

Thus

it

may be

useful to

draw back from the power of numbers and explore other forms of knowledge produced about and by the

A 56

different kind of

AIDS

epidemic.

knowledge involves the interaction of

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

AIDS

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

AIDS

discourse with local concerns. In Africa, analysis of

must inevitably confront questions of decolonization, urbanizaendemic

tion, modernization, poverty,

AIDS

ignored in assessments of the

and

disease, development,

war

racism: in Uganda, for example, the legacy of civil

is

rarely

situation nor the influence of

the church in discussions of health education; in Kenya, for the

independent press

at

any

rate,

AIDS

used as an ongoing test of

is

the central government's ability to acknowledge and resolve conflict;

in

AIDS

many

crisis

failure of

countries the lack of resources to address the

simply confirms for a global audience the widespread

development policies and the deepening poverty they

are believed to have produced. 45 In France, as Jamie

found

in interviews

narrative forms a kind of bridge

the Third: pitals

on the one hand, the

of African patients with

tion as a "gay disease";

who met

his

like

between the

in

World and

First

early appearance in

AIDS prevented

its

French hos-

characteriza-

on the other hand, one French physician

American counterpart

AIDS Conference

Feldman

with French AIDS researchers, the AIDS

the Third International

at

Washington reported

an African." Feldman writes that

that

"He

treated

constructs Americans as condescending, perceiving the French

Europeans as backward "Third Worlders."

On

a deeper

attitudes towards Africans emerge out of this story

treated the

Frenchman

as the

Frenchman might

—

treat

level,

the

In his ethnographic study of

and other French

American

an African. The

narrative also reveals the impact that France's colonial past

African immigration have on French

me

this story

and

present

46 life.

AIDS

in

urban

Brazil,

Richard Par-

ker suggests that the epidemic needs to be linked to "the social

and cultural construction of sexual ideology," or what he the "cultural

grammar"

both the United States and Great Britain,

on health care systems already heid reproduces

itself in

calls

of the Brazilian sexual universe. 47 In

AIDS

in crisis. In

intensifies stress

South Africa, apart-

the government's public health cam-

57

Paula A. Treichler

community, the slogan

paign: in billboards targeted at the white

"AIDS

Now

is

South Africa" appears

in

banner over a picture of

a black family

writes David Seftel, "it were a

if,"

ket." 48

on

a wall; in

community, the slogan appears

billboards for the black

"as

as graffiti

huddled around

new brand

bold

as a

a grave

of burial cas-

Such conceptualizations have consequences, of course:

a

survey of black attitudes in the Johannesburg area revealed total

Many

confusion.

believed that there were

The one

kinds of AIDS.

through sexual and

ritual contact

The other was acquired by

sexuals

— white AIDS"

is

totally different

(p. 22).

was acquired

with baboons in central

Africa.

notes,

"two

that only affected blacks

sexual contact with

Such

homo-

a conception, as Seftel

reinforced by the material realities of apartheid: in

1986, black patients were treated

at

the state hospital in Johan-

nesburg for $19 per day while care for white patients cost $88 per day

the private hospital

at

(p.

18). In

Cuba, mandatory

testing of the general population has identified a small

infected people

who

have been placed, for the good of the

under permanent quarantine. For incarceration

in

HIV

number of state,

an AIDS sani-

torium, they are compensated with air conditioning and color television, capitalist amenities not available to the rest of the

population. 49

The reproduction

in

AIDS

discourse of existing social divi-

sions appears to be virtually universal,

whether

it is

white or

black AIDS, gay or straight AIDS, European or African AIDS,

wet or hot AIDS, central African or West African AIDS, or innocent AIDS. 50 manifests

itself in

A

First

diverse ways. In Africa,

some people simply

invert the figure of the Bantu twig gatherers

African people with as those of

gay white

fusion-related

HIV

guilty

World/Third World dichotomy

and characterize

AIDS

as

having sexual practices as strange

men

in

San Francisco. 51 In Japan, trans-

infection

among Japanese

is

nonexistent

thanks to the longstanding practice of sequestering the national

blood supply from foreign influences; the Japanese/foreign divi-

58

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

sion

is

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

an animating feature of AIDS discourse and policy mea-

sures in Japan, with suggestions that visas will be denied to

HIV-positive foreigners judged "likely to spread the virus to

many people

in Japan." 52

Great Britain's announcement that

HIV-positive applicants for visas from high-risk countries would

be denied entry provoked accusations of racial imperialism

were

central African countries

United States was not. 53 In to treat

AIDS

like

classified as "high-risk"

when

but the sought

Brazil, officials until recently

other blood-born endemic diseases, but this

position was challenged

when prominent

sociologist

Herbert de

Souza announced in September 1987 that he and his two brothers

were HIV

positive,

infected through the blood product

all

used to treat hemophilia; Souza went public to urge matter what the cause of

AIDS

in a given case, the

that,

no

powerful

stigma associated with homosexuality and drug addiction makes it

must "be viewed

a special condition that

as a social issue

and

not an individual [medical] problem." 54 Parker identifies a related

dichotomy involving the Brazilian medical community's

transition

from conceptualizing AIDS

accepting

it

(from 1985 on)

as a "foreign

as a disease that has

Does our knowledge of such

divisions in discourse

our understanding of AIDS? These divisions are,

produced by what Dubos the

modern world

cial

arrangements.

infect,

we can

— that If

is,

by

we keep

human

human body with

to illuminate the social

AIDS

at

it.

body

at

disease of development,"

it is

pography of recent history

produced

so-

the multiple meanings of

crisis, like

once

whole.

as a

When AIDS

tours of development

mind

and functions

moreover, compels us to look

keep looking

a set of historically

in

history, at

disease

add to

at least in part,

(cited above) calls the inadequacies of

see that the

tious diseases in

import" to

"taken root." 55

certain other infec-

infects the individual like a

A

dye or tissue stain

sustained

crisis,

the image thus produced and to in Africa or Brazil

is

termed "a

precisely the intractable social to-

that

is

invoked, the problematic con-

— environmental devastation, malnutrition, m

Paula A. Treichler

war, social upheaval, poverty, debt, endemic disease

— now un-

avoidably illuminated and scrutinized in the international light of

the

AIDS

As Rudolph Virchow wrote

crisis.

in 1948,

"Epidemics

correspond to large signs of warning which

tell

man

development of

that a disturbance has occurred in the

the true stateshis

people which even a policy of unconcern can no longer overlook." 56

Dubos

grow out

of

measures can

also suggested that preventive disease revolt.

The production of

phenomenon among human

differences

is

a persistent

beings, no doubt as pervasive as the

production of metaphors

— and

production of

similarities or the

as resistant to

termination by decree. Indeed, the identification

and articulation of differences and divisions may be resistance

and revolution

as the desire to erase

may

fact that specific divisions resist dissolution

nificant role in the social formation site for

and thus

as crucial to

them. Hence the signal their sig-

their potential as a

conceptual transformation, cultural resistance, or social

change. If

we

focus

on

I

we can

see examples of this

said earlier that the seemingly simple

dom" than

is

it

in fact very complicated

answers. Already the

and may

USAID,

that are too small

World

desires

the larger point

is

involves

57

con-

more questions

has returned to the

Ugly American who,

distributes in central Africa

inelastic.

(i.e.,

While we may

condoms

legitimately see

having the Third World by the

that, as

colleagues in Project

doms

as the

a

enactment of the dependency relationship the

this as a literal

First

and

raise

dis-

phenomenon.

message to "use

condom drama

world stage such familiar characters in the guise of

AIDS

a single issue in international

course, like condoms,

balls),

Brooke Grundfest Schoepf and her

CONAISSIDA

"much more than

argue, the adoption of con-

a simple transfer of material

culture." 58 Describing the project's experience in Zaire, Schoepf

demonstrates in detail the myriad ways the puts stress

60

on the

condom

question

entire fabric of social relations. She points

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

out, for example, that multiple partner relationships appear to be

economic

increasing in response to a continuing fects

men and women somewhat means of

prostitution as a

differently:

crisis that af-

women may

up

take

survival because their husbands,

under

current economic conditions, can no longer support traditional plural households.

Women's groups with

whom CONAISSIDA

has contact express interest in information about

AIDS, and

about condoms; but they also articulate resistance to the view that information

and condoms

sizing the role of

offer a total solution,

empha-

deepening poverty and the need for income-

generating activities for

women

to provide alternatives to

multiple-partner sex.

The important

(NGOs) and

tions

role in Africa of

private voluntary organizations

another dimension of the ferences.

include

condom

Many NGOs, though

AIDS

nongovernmental organiza-

(and thus

issue

(PVOs) shows

and the question of

already fragile causes with a

ally

dif-

reluctant to shift their agendas to

more

stigmatized one), are well organized with excellent international

and community networks. One organization

AIDS

the

tion,

issue

is

that has taken

up

the International Planned Parenthood Associa-

which has prepared and distributed

Preventing a

Crisis,

a

well-received manual on

AIDS

such efforts are

bring about increased U.S. aid for fam-

ily

likely to

for local as well as national use;

planning. 59 But as Schoepf and her colleagues point out,

Ideological issues also need to be addressed. In Zaire nationalist senti-

ment currently

links contraception

and condom

use to western popula-

tion control strategies, which are viewed as a form

Some husbands

also view contraception as

extra-marital sexual relations.

may

be preferable to separate

efforts,

.

.

.

of imperialism.

an encouragement for wives'

These considerations suggest that

AIDS

it

prevention from birth control

rather than to place responsibility for

AIDS

interventions

within family planning programs, (p. 219)

One

alternative

is

to emphasize division, to distinguish explicitly

61

Paula A. Treichler

between

conception," and what

contraception, "a barrier against

might be called

contrasepsis,

"a barrier against disease," carefully

articulating the specific purposes of the latter.

(A similar distinc-

tion was created between birth control and birth spacing, the latter

A

emphasizing voluntariness and degree.)

second strategy, being

widely pursued by women's groups and family planning organizations in a

number of

pressing nature of the

Latin

American countries,

AIDS epidemic

to

is

and the Catholic Church's policy toward controlled

A

third strategy

is

attitudes

Re-

fertility.

depends on reinforcing rather than

sistance to unprotected sex

collapsing the division

to use the

modify men's

between contraception and

to explore alternatives to

contrasepsis.

condoms

methods

as

of contrasepsis. Spermicides, for example, could potentially be

developed that would provide protection against be put in place by

women

social tensions created

HIV and

could

themselves, thus avoiding the multiple

by the condom drama. Here disease pre-

vention depends on resisting male attitudes toward condoms, the

equation of male and female sexuality the plies,

and the penis

fixation

on which

it

But acknowledgment of difference

condom

solution im-

seems to depend. 60 is

not accomplished by

formula. To take one final example with implications for use, the

of

condom

system of sexual classification that dominates discussions

AIDS

internationally

— heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual —

is

neither stable nor universal. Criticisms of this system applied to

AIDS

discourse in Western industrialized countries are

more

valid in other cultures; for not only

is

all

the

sexuality compli-

cated for individuals, with no fixed relationship between official definition, sexual desire, actual practice, tity,

but

it is

and self-perceived iden-

culturally complicated as well.

gues that the hetero/homo/bi classification tually, at

odds with "the

rary Brazil. 61

and are increasingly

media dissemination, they remain

62

seriously,

fluidity of sexual desire" in

While the medical model's

in Brazilian society

is

Richard Parker

ar-

concep-

contempo-

distinctions clearly exist familiar as a result of

largely part of an elite dis-

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

An

course introduced to Brazil in the mid-twentieth century. older,

more

tices to

pervasive classification system relates sexual prac-

gender

with both gender and sex constructed by a

roles,

fundamental division between a masculine atividade a

feminine passividade (passivity).

Two

tercourse would be distinguished by culine penetrator,

who

would necessarily perceive

do

so.

males engaged in anal in-

who was

the active mas-

their activity as

readily furnish

"homosexual," nor

them with

the lexicon

As Parker suggests, the potential implications of

for standard "risk

and

the passive feminine penetrated. Neither

would everyday language to

(activity)

group"

identification

this

and "safer sex" educa-

and dismaying. 62

tion are obvious

Parker's work, like other projects noted here, demonstrates

the contributions by observers

members

whose goal

is

nificant feature of such

knowledge

that these

is

be produced by or in cooperation with those tically ests.

what the

to analyze

of a culture find meaningful in relation to AIDS.

is

sig-

meanings must

who

have authen-

experienced that culture and are committed to

This knowledge

A

inter-

its

neither better nor less mediated than

knowledge or other kinds of "objective" ways of know-

statistical

ing a culture, but

from those

different

it is

available

and produces

through the

statistical

insights different

procedures and epi-

demiological categories developed and formalized by Western

And

medical science.

it is

a difference that

ulate alternative narratives. in international

model of

AIDS

reality;

can be used to artic-

Western medical science

is

conceived

discourse as a transhistorical, transcultural

when

cultural differences

among human com-

munities are taken into account, they tend to be enlisted in the service of this reality utilization

may

and

effectively

their status remains utilitarian. This

accomplish specific goals:

ported that some native practitioners cessfully

overcome men's

(e.g.,

it is

re-

of voodoo) have suc-

traditional resistance to the use of

condoms by describing AIDS

as the

work of an

evil spirit

uses sexual desire and the virus as secret weapons;

who

condoms

63

Paulo A. Treichler

provide a means to trick the signs. 63

One can

spirit

and escape

his lethal de-

certainly support a global anti-AIDS strategy

that mobilizes the scientific

model of AIDS

in culturally-specific

ways, yet acknowledge imperialist aspects of a strategy that val-

As the

orizes itself as universal rather than culturally produced.

foregoing examples suggest, experience within a cultural unit

produces a unique kind of knowledge. Indeed, the term ence

is

experi-

linked to the term expert, an etymological connection that

encourages a dissolution of the conventional division between expert knowledge

and

testify to its activities;

mean

it,

representing

it

or being able to

experience entails observation, awareness,

analysis: the self-conscious

Turner puts

Experience of a particular culture,

experience.

however, does not merely

development of expertise. As Victor

experience entails both "living through" and

"looking back." 64 Experiential expertise

is

thus not in the least

incompatible with theoretical sophistication.

But experiential expertise of

World

of the First World/Third professionals, often

culture

is

this

kind

is

not the currency

transaction. Experts are trained

American and European (but being born

no guarantee of experiential

do

expertise), trained to

expert advising of the Third World. Expert advising

is

now

major Third World industry: more than half of the $7 to 8

in a

a bil-

European and North

lion spent yearly

on

American expert

advisers. 65 Gathering information, reporting

facts, advising

aid to Africa goes to

the Third

World

are also mediated activities, per-

meated by history and convention. In Blaming Institute's its

Others, the

immensely useful 1988 sequel to and

indispensable 1986 dossier

Sabatier observes

how

ironic

AIDS and it is

Panos

self-critique of

the Third World,

Renee

that in the information age, in-

formation should be such an elusive resource, particularly with respect to a disease where explains the

first.

What

is

it is

so crucial. 66 But a second irony

elusive

is

not, precisely, the obtaining

and disseminating of "information" but rather the acknowledging of what information entails: that language

64

is

embedded

in cul-

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

I

perform

ture, that stories contradict each other, that narratives

information constructs

as well as inform, that

analysts in

many

fields are

acknowledging the

reality. Cultural

and

inevitability

indeed the necessity of such multiple and contradictory stories. Yet having recognized the theoretical complexity of

we

tion,

communication

are pressing

role that subordinates complication

communica-

into a purely pragmatic

and contradiction

to un-

equivocal assertion and scientific harmony — precisely the kind

of circular relation Michel Foucault called a regime of truth. 67

Tracing the historical relationship between the "country"

and the "city" and their evolution cial

thought,

Raymond Williams

in English literature

and

so-

argues that in the course of

nineteenth-century imperialism, these two ideas became a model for the world, dividing not only the rural a single state

model

one. Underlying this ization,

be striving to is

is

the notion of universal industrial-

underdeveloped countries always on their way toward

becoming developed,

that

from the urban within

but the undeveloped world from the developed

become

the logic of

gression

is

just as the

its

poor man

is

always assumed to

rich. "All the 'country' will

development." 68 Though

World. For the

its

new

deployment

ing to a reference

as

an agenda item for the Third

possibilities arising

demic, the "country"

is

work

out of the

a very fertile field.

called Emerging

but

in Africa

only 20 to 30 of at least

AIDS

nostic products

make

AIDS-related

World coun-

in research

on AIDS Third

development of diag-

and vaccines. 69 Recent reports about vaccine

explicit the

need for

test

populations that are "phar-

macologically virgin" and, further, are

high rates. Gay

in

likely to entail the use of

as trial subjects in the

epi-

Markets, 1,119

are based in Third

200 of them are engaged

and other projects

World populations

trials

them

AIDS

As of 1986, accord-

companies and other organizations are involved

tries

'city':

pro-

largely the social imaginary of late capitalism, that

does not impede

activities:

become

this linear

men and IV drug

still

becoming infected

users in the First

at

World do not

65

Paula A. Treichler

fulfill

the

these criteria, not only because infection

first

group and pharmacological

virginity

of the second, but also because any First

is

leveling off in

not characteristic

is

World population

is

too

educated, too exposed to the media, and too likely to take steps (including alternative treatments) to avoid infection or reduce clinical illness.

70 In the

mind of

the city, only the country can

furnish the unspoiled virgin material that the market needs, the naive informant

But there the

is

always another story, and a continuing one in

AIDS epidemic

stories

too ignorant to contradict instructions.

still

involves the untrustworthiness of other

— their sources, motives, data, presuppositions, meth-

odologies, and conclusions.

If statistical

analysis arose as a

form

of inquiry precisely as the instrument of the developed world,

followed that experience was

left as

the developing world itself was capable logic.

it

the only form of knowledge

But

of.

we can

reject this

Williams concluded that "we can overcome division only

by refusing to be divided." 71 One strategy for challenging the

dominant

statistical narrative

narratives.

come

is

to amplify destabilizing counter-

To paraphrase Williams

for the nineties,

contradiction only by demanding

First

History

is

—

V. Y.

and Third World Chronicles

Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa 72 trials in

reader's trials in

— Mary Louise

working

to

know another people now

making sense of the

Pratt,

"Fieldwork in

Resisting the temptation to conclude that Williams offers,

tradiction

AIDS

is,

archive

I

is

hence

this

Common

Places"

73

on the epigrammatic note

demand con-

acknowledge that the international

neither complete nor fully accessible.

is

be-

text.

will instead suggest that to

in practice, to

ent invents the past but the present ted:

can over-

a legend, an invention of the present.

The ethnographer's

come the

we

to be contradicted.

itself

The

pres-

has not yet been inven-

a narrative necessarily in fieri.

I

suggested

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

initially that a crisis serves as a

voices is

no

and

World,

First

and

interests,

My

different.

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

point of articulation for multiple

that the

AIDS

the Third

crisis in

(1) diverse interests are articulated

around AIDS

ways that are socially and culturally localized and understanding

this specificity

is

and cultural precedents

prevent us from hearing the story of

complex

AIDS

and

(3)

in the First

in the

World

Third World

narrative.

To guarantee that

specific; (2)

and programs to ad-

dress the epidemic in a given country or region;

as a

in

a necessary if not sufficient con-

dition for effectively mobilizing resources

institutional forces

World

goal has been to demonstrate that, as in the

one

that

will hear contradictions requires,

one forsake the coherent AIDS narrative of the professional

and technological agencies and obtain access to multiple sources about and within the Third World

— which means, at the very

multiple sources about and within a single country. Pub-

least,

lications

about

AIDS

in

Kenya exemplify

this

argument. In Janu-

ary 1985, the Nairobi Standard publicly reported the presence of

AIDS

in

Kenya for the

ease in Kenya" and

first

time in stories headlined "Killer dis-

"Horror sex disease

in

Kakamenga." 74 Subse-

quent accounts in state-owned newspapers repudiated the report, claiming the deaths

were from skin cancer rather than

AIDS, but Western press accounts speculated increasingly on the frightening implications of the presence of rica.

Then

series

in

November

on AIDS

in Africa in the

that the epidemic

AIDS

in central Af-

1985, Lawrence K. Altman's multi-part

New

York Times reported not only

was spreading rapidly

in Africa but also that

prominent U.S. researchers were convinced the disease started there. Altman's thesis that

opening sentence dramatically presented the

was to become most controversial: "Tantalizing but

sketchy clues pointing to Africa as the origin of

AIDS

have un-

leashed one of the bitterest disputes in the recent annals of icine." 75

Altman went on

med-

to say that these "sketchy clues,"

including blood samples,

67

Paula A. Treichler

have led

to

what has now emerged as the prevailing

and European medical

mune

circles that the

thesis in

American

worldwide spread of acquired im-

deficiency syndrome began in Central Africa, the

home of several

other recently recognized diseases.

But not everyone accepts The Africans vigorously lidity

this designation of the virus'

disagree,

and

there

is

some

criticism

homeland: of the va-

of the studies on which the theories are predicated. Indeed, con-

troversial

new

results point both to

Africa, a fact that

Much

is fueling

and against AIDS originating

the international Juror.

in

76

of the "furor" was caused by criticisms of the studies,

some of which

I

have noted above. Rates estimated for

Afri-

all

cans were often based on small studies in urban areas; rates esti-

mated

for prostitutes

were often derived from problematic

assumptions (for example, some studies identify tive single

women

as prostitutes); serious

raised by claims not based

on

studies at

all

sexually ac-

problems were also

all

but simply on rumor,

armchair speculation, anthropological reports taken out of context, ideological conviction,

and morality

tales.

These included

claims that Africans had sexual contact with African green

monkeys, or

ate

them, or kept dead monkeys

that Africans practiced strange sexual

women's bodies were

women; and

as children's toys;

customs and that African

radically different

from those of Western

that various other cultural practices or medical

conditions or environmental factors were responsible for the

spread of

HIV and AIDS.

In each case, cultural practices

were

taken out of context, exaggerated, and presented as the magic bulletin that

would explain AIDS. Further, the challenging voices

coming from Africa were ignored. These myths did nothing to dispel controversies over

A

major

AIDS about and within

effect of the Times series

to place Africa firmly

Africa. 77

on the Western press was

on the national agenda

for

AIDS media

coverage, culminating in the journalistic frenzy of late 1986 that

represented Africa as "devastated" by 68

AIDS and AIDS-related

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

illnesses.

78

was

In Africa, the effect

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

different.

When

Altman's se-

began to run in the International Herald Tribune in November

ries

1985, for example, outraged Kenyan officials confiscated the entire

shipment. The African offensive against the "African origin"

theory was launched with an editorial in Medicus, the

official

publication of the Kenya Medical Association, which hypothesized that tourists

from around the world had introduced AIDS

79 into Africa.

At

this

point the Kenyan news magazine, the Weekly Review,

published and edited in Nairobi by Hilary Ng'weno and widely

considered one of the best news magazines in Africa, took on the responsibility of keeping the public informed about

AIDS

re-

ports in the African and international press. In the face of increasingly vocal controversy

and government

silence, the

magazine's general position was that developing adequate public

more important than countering Western

health measures was

propaganda. The Weekly Review continues to summarize material printed in the West, cite the numbers of in Zaire,

analysis of scientific ical

mode

epidemic, the Weekly Review

porting.

patients reported

and press reports. Although

of the Kenyan government's

AIDS

AIDS

Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, and provide

What

Africa needs,

is

itself

often crit-

of responding to the

also critical of

Ng'weno

fairly detailed

Western

re-

told the Panos Institute,

is

concrete assistance, not "a never ending siren recounting a litany of disasters about to engulf the continent." 80

An

insightful analysis of the

the Weekly Review's contributions entist Alfred

he

is

Fortin in

J.

though Fortin

"The

AIDS is

situation in

Kenya and

provided by the political

Politics of

criticizes the actions of the

AIDS

sci-

in Kenya." Al-

Kenyan government,

primarily critical of the "development establishment," a

position he has

made

repeatedly clear in other papers. In

and the Third World: The

"AIDS

Politics of International Discourse,"

for example, he writes that the "current discursive framing of

AIDS

in the

Third World

is

a highly depoliticized

gues that while this way of seeing

AIDS may be

one" and

ar-

technically nec69

"

Paula A. Treichler

essary to get the job done,

power

relations.

politics," the fire

or

Given

its

it fails

to

"development establishment" must remain under

forces will reproduce the

its

acknowledge important

"aggressive bureaucratic and careerist

power

relations of

domi-

nance and dependency already in place. 81 In the Kenya paper, Fortin argues that the dominance-dependency relationship guarantees English as the international language of

language that ing."

is

AIDS

discourse, a

necessarily "blind to the African world of

He concludes

mean-

that despite Kenya's "comparatively well-

developed medical infrastructure and working coterie of West-

ern

scientists, its efforts

have fallen short of even the

requirements suggested by

its statistics."

minimum

82

However much the Weekly Review may

itself

be skeptical of

the "development establishment" as well as Kenya's response to

the

AIDS

epidemic,

it

does not buy Fortin's position either.

Calling his paper "a hard-hitting and indictive,

if

lopsided, crit-

icism of the Kenyan government, the ministry of health and the local press," the editor goes

Fortin's analysis. ters

83

An

on

to contest a

interesting

number of

points of

and complex discussion cen-

around language:

[Fortin's]

AIDS

paper questions the language of discourse at discussions on

in Africa. It argues that Africans

have chosen to use the Western

language when talking about the disease and since the language transplanted, Africa

is

dependent on the Westjor

continued development. Since the language Fortin says, hence

it is

is

its

is

meaning and

its

not indigenous to Africa,

"blind to the African world of meaning.

Students of African history have long argued that most of the diseases prevalent in Africa today were first witnessed with the advent

of the foreigners on the continent and most of the terminology used by the medical practitioners in Africa are also borrowed from the devel-

oped world. African governments and researchers have also been emphatic that the

AIDS

therefore,

it

virus

was first diagnosed in the United States and,

would follow automatically that the language used

in ref-

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

who diagnosed

erence to the disease should be that developed by those first,

(pp. 12-13)

intended to challenge — as — the entire discursive formation

Fortin's

argument about discourse

Parker's

is

with regard to Brazil

AIDS

of international in

some sense

is

discussions applied unthinkingly

imperialistically to diverse cultures;

most discourse

analysts

would

it is

"foreign" to Kenya and Kenyan leaders. a colonial legacy,

it

plays

many

Though

roles in

Mudimbe

today. (Zairean philosopher V. Y.

and hence a position

Ng'weno, however,

share.

the corollary implication of this view: that English

deed

it

is

somehow

English

Kenyan

rejects

is

in-

activities

argues that Western

discourse has contributed to but not monopolized what he calls

"the invention of Africa"; rather, the objects of that discourse

who

are also subjects

have produced an intricate interweaving of

European and African commentary, rendering the notion of "purely African discourse" an time,

Ng'weno makes

tionality

sustain

and

its

identity as a

is

At the same

with regard to AIDS helps

origin: to use English

— a home,

a

the political point that language marks na-

Western

adopting AIDS, to giving story

impossible dream." 84 )

it

disease. This resistance to

— in the words of the Altman

reflected elsewhere in the Weekly Review,

where supposedly indigenous African terms related terms (like "slim disease"

and "AIDS

for

AIDS and AIDS-

belt") are placed in

quotation marks and often explicitly rejected; the term magada, cited by Fortin as the

the Review. (This

not translate

is

name

AIDS terms

one acronym,

for

AIDS

not to say that

UKIMWI,

in Swahili,

many African

into their

own

is

never used in

publications do

language; for example,

appears in a number of Kenyan and

Tanzanian newspapers.)

The analyses

juxtaposition of these

makes

two complex and

clear that the chronicle of

AIDS

interlocking

in the

Third

World cannot be understood monolithically. Not only must understood

in

terms of the "rich history and complex

it

be

political

chemistry" of each affected country, but also as a heteroglossic 71

Paula A. Treichler

series of conflicted, shifting, ist

and contradictory positions

that ex-

within systems of cultural stereotypes and hegemonic power

relations. 85

And we may

ask, at last,

whether the

chronicle should not be interrogated as well.

What

is

the Third World?

more than

ease with

We

of this

title

What

is

AIDS?

are talking about an epidemic dis-

forty distinct clinical manifestations,

of which consist of the absence of manifestation,

some of which

and some of which

are unique to particular regions in the world,

immune

apparently have nothing to do with a deficiency of the

When we

system. 86

talk

about the Third World,

about more than 100 countries of the world. about Africa, large as the

we

we

are talking

When we

talk

are talking about a continent four times as

United

States,

which has more than 50 countries,

900 ethnic groups, and 300 language

families

74 languages). As Miller and Rockwell argue,

AIDS problem

about "the

some

(Zambia alone has it is

absurd to talk

in Africa" except for specific

well-defined purposes. As for "the Third World,"

and

we may

turn

to Carl E. Pletsch's discussion of the evolution of the concept of

the Third World,

which opens with

this

quotation from Alexis

de Tocqueville: The Deity does not regard the human race one glance and severally

and he

discerns in each

and

his fellows,

Pletsch's

own

totally bogus.

all the beings

man

collectively [hut] surveys at

of whom mankind

analysis suggests that the

is

him

to all

him from them. 81

term "Third World"

is

possible exception of the political cate-

gories of left and right," Pletsch writes, "the

worlds

composed;

the resemblances that assimilate

the differences that distinguish

"With the

is

scheme of three

perhaps the most primitive system of classification in

our social

scientific discourse" (p. 566).

This highly authoritative

conceptual framework has had a major influence on the organization of social scientific labor for the last three decades; yet as a

framework

which the

72

for genuine scientific investigation, societies outside of

Western

it

yields studies in

civilization (societies,

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

that

is,

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

belonging to the Second and Third Worlds) become, in

pure fantasies"

Pletsch's words, "almost that in the

mundane scheme

Bad enough

(p. 566).

of things, the three-worlds concept

perpetuates a self-serving innovation by postwar social scientists to

revamp modernization theory

large

scheme of

what we regard

things,

it

— in contrast to the

human

for the

Cold War

era. In the

enables us to continue to avoid doing

Deity

— seem to find so

difficult: to

beings simultaneously both "collectively" and

"severally," in multiple

ways both same and

To hear the story "AIDS

Third World" requires us

in the

to confront familiar problems in the

we know what we know? What

different.

human

cultural

sciences:

work

will

knowledge to perform? What are our own stakes

we

How

in the success

or failure of that performance? In the course of this essay, identified several analytic strategies

do

ask our

through which

have

I

we may

ex-

plore these questions and tried to suggest areas of discourse

where better understandings may be

particularly valuable: the

conventions of mass media stories, the discursive traditions and

modes of representation

that figure in the

AIDS

narrative told

by the sciences and social sciences (including tropes, stereotypes, linguistic structures,

and pervasive metaphors); the emer-

gence of a dominant international AIDS narrative and the linguistic and professional

management

its

role in

of the epidemic; the

exclusion or silencing of alternative narratives, including those originating in the "Third World," in part because they do not tell

the story in a "First

which AIDS

is

World" way; the processes through

conceptualized within given institutions for

everyday use; and the very terms through which

what chronicle

it is

we

think

we

are telling.

ances provided by the warring voices discursive points helps render

tion

— impossible, that

account of

AIDS

in the First. If

I

is,

it

at

we

identify

The checks and

bal-

each of these multiple

impossible to refuse contradic-

to argue that any single unchallenged

exists in the

Third World, anymore than

have succeeded in discrediting the phrase

it

does

"AIDS

73

Paula A. Treichler

Third World,"

in the

I

my

begun to achieve

will have

aim, one

World chronicle about

directed toward dismantling the First

Third World AIDS: a chronicle designed in part to strengthen or disrupt (as the case

may

World

be) specific First

discursive

chains and in doing so rearrange without redistributing the terial benefits that

must be allowed and

depend on them.

ma-

also a chronicle that

It is

to exist precisely so that

it

can be discredited

resisted.

Notes

Research for

this essay

was supported in part by grants from the National

Council of Teachers of English and the University of

Illinois at

Champaign Graduate College Research Board and by

a fellowship at the Society

for the Humanities, Cornell University.

ments and continuing

assistance.

am

I

I

thank Cary Nelson for

tance,

I

University of

at the

Illinois in

members

critical

com-

Kruger and Phil

also indebted to Barbara

Mariani, to Gayatri Spivak, to Simon Watney, and to

theory seminar

Urbana-

of the feminist

spring 1988. For research assis-

thank Anne Balsamo and University of

John

Illinois librarians

Lit-

tlewood (Documents) and Yvette Scheven (Africana).

The term AIDS and cultural broad

crisis;

clinical

in this essay refers to the

the

compound

AIDS epidemic

phrase AIDS and

broad social

as a

HIV infection

refers to the

spectrum of HIV-related conditions from asymptomatic infection

to the specific diseases presently used to define

medical condition only

if this

more

"AIDS"

restricted sense

is

(I

use

AIDS

to

mean

clear in context).

I

the

have

elsewhere discussed the status of these signifiers as "real" and "true" and will not do so here; see "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse:

demic of

An

Epi-

Signification," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas

Crimp (Cambridge,

Mass.:

MIT

Press, 1988), pp. 31-70.

See Philip Babcock Gove, ed., Webster's Third New International Dictionary of

1.

English Language (Springfield, Mass.:

Merriam, 1971), and James A. Murray,

Oxford English Dictionary, 1874-1928,

compact

ed. (Oxford:

the

ed.,

Oxford University

Press, 1971).

Frank Browning, "AIDS: The Mythology of Plague," Tikkun

2.

April 1988): 70.

and 3.

the

AIDS

Review of Randy

Epidemic

(New

York:

St.

And

the

3,

Band Played On:

no. 2 (March-

Politics,

People,

Martin's Press, 1987).

Judith Wilson Ross, "Ethics and the Language of AIDS," in

Public Policy, ed. Christine Pierce

n

Shilts,

A IDS,

and Donald VandeVeer (Belmont,

Ethics,

Calif.:

and

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

Wadsworth, 1988),

p. 47.

York: Farrar Straus

&

lan

See also Susan Sontag, AIDS and

that disease

Meaning of Epidemic Disease,"

is

(New

Metaphors

Its

Giroux, 1989). This positivist position

M. Brandt with the position

the Social

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

contrasted by Al-

is

"Toward

socially constructed in

Social Research 55, no. 3

(Autumn

1988): 413-432; Brandt also specifically addresses Sontag's position as articula-

ted in

Illness as

Metaphor

(New

York: Vintage Books, 1975).

4.

Browning, "Mythology of Plague,"

5.

For discussion of the "rugged vagina'V'vulnerable rectum" dichotomy and

related permutations, see

An Epidemic

my

p. 70.

"AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse:

of Signification," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis /Cultural Activism, ed.

Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.:

MIT

Press, 1988), pp. 31-70,

and "AIDS,

Gender, and Biomedical Discourse: Current Contests for Meaning," in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee

and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1988), pp. 190-266.

H. Hunter Handsfield, "Heterosexual Transmission of

6.

ciency Virus," Journal of

the

Human Immunodefi-

American Medical Association 260, no. 13 (October

1988): 1943. Cf.

7.

Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question — The

Stereotype and Colonial Dis-

course," Screen 24 (November- December 1983), and Chandra Talpade Mohanty,

"Under Western

Eyes: Feminist Scholarship

2 12, no. 3 (Spring 1984), and 13, no.

Advice to "use a condom,"

8.

like

and Colonial Discourses," Boundary

(Fall 1984).

1

many other seemingly unproblematic educa-

tional programs, can create unforeseen

and very complex problems. For discus-

sion of the nature and use of culturally-specific specific

AIDS

AIDS and

the Third

Worldwide

AIDS (Washington: Panos

Germs: The

Politics

10.

Norman

Policy Impact 1 1

.

and Cindy Patton,

Sex and

Press, 1985).

and other examples are readily

weekly News and

stitute studies,

End

and

Others: Prejudice, Race,

Institute, 1988),

of AIDS (Boston: South

Details of these

as the

Institute,

World (London: Panos Institute, in association with Nor-

wegian Red Cross, 1989), Renee Sabatier, Blaming

9.

information as well as

examples of problems in Third World contexts, see Panos

available in

such publications

Features Bulletin of the All Africa Press Service, the

Panos In-

and U.S. government reports.

Miller and Richard C. Rockwell, eds.,

(Lewiston, N.Y.:

Edwin Mellen,

AIDS

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and

Radical Democratic

Politics,

trans.

in Africa:

The Social and

1988), p. xxxi.

Winston Moore and

Socialist Strategy: Towards a

Paul

Cammack

(London:

Verso, 1985). 12.

Kenneth Prewitt, "AIDS

ed. Miller 13.

and Rockwell, pp.

Marjorie Shostak,

in Africa:

The

Triple Disaster," in

AIDS

in Africa,

xi-xii.

Nisa: The Life

and Words of a !Kung Woman

(New

York: Vin-

tage Books, 1983), p. 26. 14.

James Clifford,

"On

Ethnographic Allegory," in Writing

Culture, ed.

James

75

Paula A. Treichler

Clifford

and George

Marcus (Berkeley: University of California

E.

Press, 1986),

p. 99.

Richard Selzer, "A Mask on the Face of Death: As AIDS Ravages

15.

Doctor Finds

U.S.

documented

after 16.

Mary Louise

Clifford

The

17.

internally

by page number.

"Fieldwork in

Pratt,

Common

and Marcus collection

offers

Tom

on Mombasa by

J.

Places," in Writing Culture, ed.

for discussion of arrival scenes.

an extended reflection on relation-

between anthropology, ethnography, and

Photograph of "Mercedes" by

story

Haiti, a

10 (August 1987): 58-64. Here-

Life

and Marcus, pp. 27-50; see pp. 33-45

Clifford

ships

Taboo Against Truth,"

a

travel writing.

B. Diederich for Life 10 (August 1987): 60;

Masland, "AIDS Threat Turns Shore Leave into

Naval Exercise in Caution," Chicago Tribune, April 1988; Newsweek photo of prostitute in

Rod Nordland, with Ray Wilkinson and Ruth

Plague Years," Newsweek, 18.

19.

"A Matter of

Jan Zita Grover,

no. 6

(March 1988):

November

Is

and Death," Women's Review of Books

Life

the

AIDS

are reviewed by Robert Lederer, "Origin

West Responsible?"

CovertAction, no.

and no. 29 (1988): 52-67, and are reported regularly 20.

The ubiquitous

the person with like

in

ACT UP;

interpretation of the

AIDS

as

dying victim

see Douglas Crimp,

AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural

is

"How

in the

AIDS drama

New

to

With AIDS

Have Promiscuity

Native.

and

groups

activist

in

an Epidemic,"

Crimp, pp. 237-271, and Michael

Coalition, 1987-1988). Pratt, "Fieldwork in

pp. 44-50, discusses redemptive endings,

York

as inevitably tragic

one challenged by gay

Activism, ed.

and

28 (1987): 43-54,

Callan, Surviving and Thriving with AIDS: Collected Wisdom, 2 vols. ple

5,

3.

Conspiracy theories of

Spread of AIDS:

Marshall, "Africa in the

24, 1986, p. 46.

made

all

the

(New

York: Peo-

Common

Places,"

more imperative by

the

ethnographic commonplace that the innocent Other often becomes worldlywise through contact with "modern civilization" in the guise of ethnographers themselves. In Selzer's encounter, a further irony

that he pays the prostitutes

is

to talk to him, again paralleling ethnographic research

vestigator enters into a

change which,

commodity exchange with the

as Pratt puts

it,

where the privileged native informant

in-

— an ex-

turns the "anthropologist preserver-of-the-

culture" into the "interventionist corrupter-of-the-culture." 21.

See photographs in Nordland et

al.,

"Africa in the Plague Years," and Ken-

neth M. Pierce, "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide," Time, September Brazilian magazines' high-tech medical images

were described to

abeth Santos, M.D., personal communication.

Odd

captions, story

and text do not only occur

on AIDS

in the

in

Canadian journal

76

by

1,

Maclean's, for

1986.

Elis-

among photographs,

Third World contexts, of course.

graph of pedestrians on a crowded Toronto the pedestrians are

linkages

me

A

example, includes a photo-

city street; shot

from behind so

moving away from the camera, the photo appears

that

to illus-

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

trate the caption:

"Toronto sidewalk

August 24, 1987,

to general public," 22.

no.

growing

traffic:

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

fear as

AIDS

virus spreads

p. 31.

Robert Caputo, "Uganda: Land Beyond Sorrow," National Geographic 173,

4 (April 1988): 468-474; the Caputo photo of Jane Namirimu and her

mother

is

on

p.

Common

470. Pratt, "Fieldwork in

40 and 45,

Places," pp.

cusses respectively the fallen postcolonial world of ethnographic writing

dis-

and

the trope of Utopian universality. 23.

Selzer,

"Mask on the Face of Death,"

p. 63.

The Diederich photograph

is

reprinted in Maclean's, August 31, 1987, p. 37. To take another example, the

Newsweek photographs accompanying Nordland, "Africa in the Plague Years," have been widely reprinted. a

doorway, holding

(p.

The Newsweek

lap.

on the cover of the May

Search. Appearing

weekly journal Health

slightly different angle;

is

a

village of Kinyiga, Florence

both tested positive for the

now

virus."

Myths about AIDS the story.

The

(November-December

in Africa"; the

1988, p. 18, reprinted the

2 -month-old

credit line

shot at a

"Out of

daughter have

accompanying the

and the photographs were

(Al or Ed) also

1;

accompanied Catharine Watto Fight Epidemic," The

and the Weekly Review (Nairobi) of June

mother and

24,

child photograph with the caption

"Ugandan AIDS victims" and no picture

credit.

For a general discussion of the

documentary use of photographs and how "original meanings" may be Eric Margolis,

re-

1988): 26-31, as "Dispelling

AIDS Time Bomb: Region Scrambles

Guardian, June 17, 1987, pp. 10-1

woman

featured story,

photos were captioned only with text from

The Hooper photographs

son's "Africa's

"Two

— Picture

captioned as follows: "In the Ugan-

story reads "Photos by Al Hooper." Hilts's article

printed in Africa Report

identical

Hilts's J.

Masaka, 22, and her

AIDS

framed in

captioned

is

24, 1988 issue of the Washington

accompanying Philip is

woman

print

Ed Hooper

to

photograph of the

Africa," pp. 12-17, the photograph

dan

44) shows an emaciated

Uganda barmaid and son," and credited

victims:

Post's

One

baby in her

a thin

lost,

see

"Mining Photographs: Unearthing the Meanings of Historical

Photos," Radical History Review 40 (1988): 33-48. 24.

Sabatier, Blaming Others, p. 96, quotes a Nigerian prostitute

"Although white

follows: parts, as

I

I

am

will never

go to bed with

concerned,

Rosalind

J.

clients generally

AIDS

is

a

Chirimuuta, AIDS,

a

white

named

Juliet as

pay better than their African counter-

man

unless he wears a

condom. As

far

white man's disease." Richard C. Chirimuuta and Africa,

and Racism (Bretby, Darbyshire: R. C. Chi-

rimuuta, 1987; London: Free Association Books, 1987). 25.

Ann

S.

Anagnost, "Magical Practice, Birth Policy, and Women's Health in

Post-Mao China," Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory Colloquium, University of Illinois at Urbana, 26.

Edward

1985):

Said, "In the

December

7, 1988.

Shadow of the West,"

wedge, no. 7-8

(Winter- Spring

5.

27. Jean

William Pape,

a leading

AIDS

researcher in Haiti and one of the phy-

77

Paula A. Treichler

sicians Selzer consulted, expresses

disenchantment with the Western press for

consistently ignoring "the efforts of the Haitian people to fight, with almost

most devastating disease of

resources, the

He

century."

no

told the Panos Insti-

have given over 60 interviews to American and other reporters about

tute: "I

AIDS

in Haiti.

would

like to

two

this

my

what

that recorded

The others

very time-consuming and exhausting, and takes energy

It is

put into

I

work.

Of all

and the context

said,

AIDS

often painted a picture of

me." Quoted

I

those interviews there are only one or in

which

said

I

it,

accurately.

was unrecognisable to

in Haiti that

in Sabatier, Blaming Others, p. 90. (Selzer consulted

Pape too, but

I

have no evidence that Pape found his report objectionable.) But negative reactions to

Western media reports do not necessarily disrupt the cycle of represen-

Some African governments,

tation.

be inflations of their

statistics

problem, prohibited

AIDS

"One

the Western press. the

New

York Times

Institute in

heavily

November

result of such attempts at control," said

is

in

James Brooke,

an interview with the Panos

in those countries,

making

it

more

more

Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, AIDS,

in providing instances

Africa,

and Ra-

where the "authentically African point of

equally powerless to challenge prevailing conceptions. (Anecdotes

the U.S. gay

diffi-

convey an authentically African point of view." Quoted in

Sabatier, Blaming Others, p. 95.

view"

AIDS

1987, "has been to force foreign reporters to rely

on foreign researchers working

go further

what they believed to

researchers and physicians from giving interviews to

West Africa correspondent

cult than before to

cism,

for example, angry at

or simply wishing to deflect focus on the

community describe numerous

from

instances of journalists refusing to

photograph particular people with AIDS because they "don't look sick enough.") 28.

"Regime of truth"

is

Michel Foucault's term. See "The

Function of

Political

the Intellectual," Radical Philosophy, no. 17 (1977): 13-14. See also Treichler,

"AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse."

Rene Dubos, Mirage of Health:

29.

New 30.

Brunswick,

N.J.:

Utopias, Progress,

and

Biological

Change (1959;

Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 218, 219.

John Tagg, using Foucault to analyze the function of photographs in repre-

senting "the true" in The Burden of Representation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 94. 3

1

.

Ronald Reagan,

December

can

trip,

32.

Raymond

don:

New

Left

at a press

conference after returning from a Latin Ameri-

15, 1987.

Williams,

Politics

and

Letters: Interviews with

New

Left Review

Review Editions, 1981), pp. 164-165; Williams here

earlier analysis in The Country and the City of experience

different ways of producing

and

(Lon-

refers to his

statistical analysis as

knowledge (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973),

es-

pecially pp. 215-232. 33.

See, for example, the testimony of

and Technology, USAID, on funding

78

Bradshaw Langmaid, Bureau of Science

criteria for

AIDS

aid to African countries,

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

in

AIDS and

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

The Impact on Development, Hearing before the Select

the Third World:

Committee on Hunger, U.S. House of Representatives, 100th Congress, 2nd Session held in Washington D.C., June 30, 1988, Serial no. 100-29 (Washington,

Government Printing

D.C.: U.S. 34.

Office, 1988), pp. 33-34.

Most studies depend on some degree of cooperation between the

and

First

the Third World, and are thus influenced by the scientific and political commit-

ments of given agencies and

common grounds

their ability to find

of inquiry as

well as resources. In Africa, for example, scarce resources have created variation in scientific research, yet

Some

types about Africa suggest. stitute,

much more

facilities, like

wide

research goes on than stereothe Kenya Medical Research In-

have sustained fairly continuous research programs throughout the

period of decolonization and independence. Although the respected biomedical research programs of Makarere University and of the East African Virus Institute in

Uganda were

seriously disrupted

under

Amin,

Idi

Amin's para-

ironically

noia about viruses saved the physical facilities from destruction; these programs are

now

being rebuilt. Research contributions of the International Medical Re-

search Center in Franceville, Gabon, in central Africa, are described by James

Brooke, "Virus Discoveries Help an African Outpost of

AIDS Research Gain

Notice," New York Times, February 28, 1988. Needless to say, African attitudes

toward cooperation with Western

some respects the

Panos Institute study, Blaming

many long-term mentators collect

call

scientists are also highly variable, reflecting in

commitments of the

ideological

Others, pp.

state as a

whole. Sabatier's

108-109, distinguishes between the

collaborative projects that predate

AIDS and what

African com-

"parachute research," in which foreign researchers drop in "to

blood samples, data or

again, to write

up

and Chirimuuta, AIDS,

and critique of

clinical observations,

and

just as quickly [take] off

their findings for a (Western) scientific journal."

First

Africa,

Chirimuuta

and Racism, provide a well-documented analysis

World versus Third World research on Third World AIDS;

they also note, p. 85, the contradictory tendency of American and European

"Third Worldists" (including the Panos cite the findings of

35.

Jonathan M. Mann, James Chin, Peter Piot, and

ternational Epidemiology of also Peter Piot, F. A.

AIDS,"

Plummer,

An

Jonathan M. Mann, "AIDS: 573-579. Monthly

statistical

Mann

"AIDS: 37.

An

Mann

et

al.,

Scientific

F. S.

Mhalu,

Thomas Quinn, "The

American, J.-L.

October 1988,

In-

p. 82.

See

Lamboray, James Chin, and

International Perspective," Science 239 (1988):

updates are available from the PanAmerican Health

Organization in Washington, 36.

and

Institute) to simultaneously criticize

such "hit-and-run" research.

WHO's

regional health office for the Americas.

"International Epidemiology of AIDS," p. 84, and Piot et

al.,

International Perspective," p. 576. et

al.,

"International Epidemiology of

Union did not report tember 1988

its first official

— a pregnant

AIDS,"

p. 84.

"indigenous" death from

The

Soviet

AIDS

until Sep-

Leningrad prostitute named Olga Gaeevskaya; "Epi-

19

Paula A. Treichler

AIDS

demiologists were incensed that the woman's doctors failed to diagnose before she died," Edmonton Journal, October

cent "outbreak" of seven babies and

HIV

tion

anywhere

Some

and suggest

38.

see

John

else).

New

York Times,

Prevention

authorities blame unsterilized needles for the

F.

Burns, "Outbreak of

AIDS

Pergamon

son, R.

AIDS

M. May, and A.

in

Triples Testing in a So-

1989.

5,

Invited Presentations

AIDS

of Ministers of Health on Programmes for

World include AIDS and

was contracted while

have not seen the baby-to-mother explana-

(I

February

and Control:

ganization; Oxford:

a re-

is

"AIDS") among twenty-

that the mothers' infection

For a multinational assessment of the impact of

AIDS

More mysterious

1988.

infection (the headline says

breast-feeding the infected babies

viet City,"

1,

of their mothers in a hospital in Elista, capital of a region

five

along the Caspian Sea. babies' infection

1

AIDS on

the Third World,

and Papers from

World Summit

the

World Health Or-

Prevention (Geneva:

Press, 1988). Assessments centered in the First

the Third World: The Impact on Development; R.

R.

M. Ander-

McLean, "Possible Demographic Consequences of

Developing Countries," Nature 332 (1988): 228-234; Institute of

Medicine/National Academy of Sciences, Confronting AIDS: Update 1988 (Washington, D.C.: National

Robert

Academy

Press, 1988). Discussions of Africa include

AIDS, and Epidemiology,"

Biggar, "Overview: Africa,

J.

Africa, ed.

Miller and Rockwell, pp. 1-8;

in

Congress, 1987); Christine Hawkins, "AIDS Expected to Slow

Population Growth," New Africa 251 (August 1988): 25; Charles

W. Hunt,

"Africa and AIDS," Monthly Review 39, no. 9 (February 1988): 10-22; Krieger,

"The Epidemiology of AIDS

S.

Bertozzi, James Chin, B. N'Galy,

and Indirect Costs of HIV Infection

Nancy

in Africa," Science for the People 19, no.

(January-February 1987): 18-21; Miller and Rockwell, eds., AIDS

Over,

in

in Africa:

Research Ser-

Background/Issues for U.S. Policy (Washington, D.C.: Congressional vice, Library of

AIDS

Raymond W. Copson, AIDS

in

in Africa;

1

M.

and K. Nyamuryekung'e, "The Direct

Developing Countries: The Cases of

Zaire and Tanzania," paper presented at the International Conference

on the

Global Impact of AIDS, London, March 8-10, 1988; Panos Institute, AIDS and the Third World; in Africa, ed.

"Africans

Kenneth Prewitt, "AIDS

in Africa:

The

Triple Disaster," in

AIDS

Miller and Rockwell, pp. ix-xv; Sabatier, Blaming Others; Jane Perlez,

Weigh Threat of AIDS

1988, p. 16; Al

J.

Venter, "AIDS:

Economies," New

to Its

Strategic

International Defense Review 21 (April 1988):

York Times,

Consequences

September 22,

in Black Africa,"

357-359; Watson, "Africa's

AIDS

Time Bomb." 39.

Miller and Rockwell, "Introduction," in

40.

The

AIDS

progressive visibility and reality of the

Lawrence K. Altman, "New Support from Africa

AIDS," New

York Times,

Disease Before 1981, 16, 1987;

80

Thomas W.

December

Grows

22, 1985; Erik

into a

Netter,

in Africa,

pp. xiv-xxiv.

AIDS epidemic as

WHO

are illustrated in

Plans Effort

Eckholm, "AIDS, an

Worldwide Scourge," New

"AIDS Spurs Countries

on

Unknown

York Times,

March

to Act as Cases Rise

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

Around World," New

Awaken

A

Is

THE THIRD WORLD

22, 1987; Steven V. Roberts, "Politicians

to the Threat of a Global Epidemic,"

Now

"AIDS

March

York Times,

IN

New

June

York Times,

Global Public Health Crisis, Harvard

MD

7,

1987;

Stresses," American

Medical News, June 12, 1987, p. 19. 41.

Quoted

Marilyn Chase, "Rich Nations Urged to Help Poor Lands Fight

in

WHO

AIDS by Backing

Program," Wall

national cooperation, see

(March 1988): 32-34;

Times

Point: Dr. Gottlieb

Sabatier, Blaming Others;

WHO

Monekosso,

A

cerning a

R

AIDS Program,

achieve global cooperation; in an

New

global summit,

Traore, "Meeting

outlined in the document Con-

is

Committee of Ministers Recommendation

(87) 25, adopted at the 81st session,

director of the Global

Amadou

Public Health Policy to Fight the Acquired Immunodeficiency

Syndrome (AIDS), Council of Europe

No.

inter-

Regional Director for Africa," The Courier

cooperative international policy

Common European

On

Community) 105 (September-October

(Africa-Caribbean-Pacific-European 1987): 2-5.

17, 1988.

June

Street Journal,

Simon Watney, "Our Rights and Our Dignity," Gay

26, 1987. Jonathan

"AIDS Monitor" column on

February

Scientist,

November

Mann,

advocates aggressive, activist strategies to

4, 1988, p. 32,

Mann

the January 1988

states that the inter-

summit represents "an extraordinary

national declaration reached at the

consensus." 42.

(1)

AIDS

Mann

et

al.,

p. 84; (4)

Africa,

Mann

et

al.,

"International Epidemiology of AIDS,"

Watson, "Africa's AIDS Time Bomb,"

Mary Harper, "AIDS

Africa," p. 12; (6)

43.

"International Epidemiology of AIDS," p. 84; (2) Copson,

in Africa, p. 9; (3)

November

is

no more

"Data on AIDS

10; (5) Hilts,

"Out

of

— Plague or Propaganda?" West

7-13, 1988, p. 2072.

Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, AIDS,

reporting"

p.

in Africa

a

Africa,

and Racism, suggest that "under-

problem than "overdiagnosing." See

An

in Africa:

Assessment,"

in

AIDS

also Cynthia

in Africa, ed.

Haq,

Miller and

Rockwell, pp. 9-29; Barbara Boyle Torrey, Peter O. Way, and Patricia Rowe,

"Epidemiology of tions," in

of African

AIDS

AIDS

monds, "AIDS

HIV and AIDS

in Africa, ed.

studies

in Africa:

is

in Africa:

Emerging

A

general critique

provided by Margaret Cerullo and Evelynn

The Western Imagination and

Radical America 21, no. 2-3 (March-April 1987): 17-23;

demiology of AIDS in Africa."

An

attempt to place

broader political and economic perspective

Meredeth Turshen,

and Social Implica-

Issues

Miller and Rockwell, pp. 31-54.

"Briefings:

AIDS

27 (January-March 1986): 51-54.

An

is

the

Ham-

Dark Continent,"

and Krieger, "The Epi-

AIDS

statistics

within

a

presented in Carol Barker and

in Africa," Review of African Political

Economy

unexpectedly skeptical assessment of the

value of current theoretical analysis and statistical projections for the purposes

of strategic decision

making

in the private sector

and Frederick

I.

Products Review

(May 1987): 26-29;

of the

Scott, Jr.,

"AIDS market"

"AIDS:

for the

A

Glimpse of

is

Its

provided by

Manny

Impact," American

this article also suggests the size

development of

Ratafia

Clinical

and

diversity

clinical products.

81

.

Paulo A. Treichler

44.

Nathan Clumeck, "AIDS

Jay A.

AIDS:

in Africa" in

Pathogenesis

of Africa," and Torrey et

al.,

"Epidemiology of

HIV and AIDS

marize existing studies.

On

Warren D. Johnson,

and Jean W. Pape, "AIDS

Jr.,

pp. 65-78; interactions of 45.

and Treatment, ed.

Levy (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1989), pp. 37-63. Clumeck,

the clinical manifestations of

AIDS with

AIDS

"Out

Hilts,

in Africa"

sum-

in Haiti, see

in Haiti," in AIDS, ed. Levy,

tuberculosis are discussed

on pp. 11-11

Caputo, "Uganda: Land Beyond Sorrow"; Hilary Ng'weno, Weekly Review

(Nairobi); Lloyd Timberlake, Africa in Bankruptcy, ed. Jon

The Causes, the Cures of Environmental

Crisis:

Tinker (Philadelphia:

New

Society/Earthscan, 1986).

and the Process of Giving Meaning:

46. Jamie Feldman, "Identity, Illness,

French Medical Discourse on AIDS," unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign, July 1988. See

47.

David

Seftel,

"AIDS and Apartheid: Double Trouble,"

"AIDS 50.

Arrest:

Though

types of

"AIDS

Africa Report

1988): 21.

Nicholas Wade, "Cuba's Quarantine for AIDS:

periment," New

in Brazil," Medical

no. 2 (1987): 158, 159.

1,

(November-December 49.

Michael Pollack, AIDS and Cul-

Richard Parker, "Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

Anthropology Quarterly 48.

also

(forthcoming).

ture in France

February

York Times, editorial,

The Cuban

Solution,"

6,

Village Voice,

A

Police State's Health Ex-

1989; Richard Goldstein,

February

14, 1989, p. 18.

among

these dichotomies are primarily social, the differentiation

AIDS

is

also a scientific

and

in Africa," p. 43, states that

clinical question.

For example, Clumeck,

American, European, and African

isolates of

the virus are quite similar; the greater polymorphism of the African strains

may

suggest (according to Clumeck) a longer period of evolution and the problem of

developing a vaccine. acterizes the

The wet/hot dichotomy reported by Clumeck,

breakdown of

cases in Zaire,

study were diagnosed with "wet

with "hot AIDS" (weight

Clumeck argues needed for AIDS

now been

loss

AIDS"

with

where 80 percent of

At

two

least

and 6 percent with Kaposi's Sarcoma;

rently believed to produce the

immune more

addition, there are distinct strains of

make

a

new

case definition badly

related but different types of virus have

isolated in African patients; labeled

sidered to produce AIDS-like

one

(weight loss with diarrhea), 14 percent

fever),

that these clinical expressions in Africa.

char-

p. 52,

patients in

HIV-1 and HIV- 2, both are con-

deficiencies,

serious

HIV-1

though only HIV-1

syndrome that, to

that leads to

some

is

cur-

AIDS. In

extent, can be used to

trace different geographical routes of transmission, not only through the countries

but also the virology laboratories the virus has inhabited. Viral relation-

ships are evaluated according to the degree to

which the genetic structures

perfectly match. 51.

Hilts,

ance of

82

"Out of

AIDS

Africa," p. 12, notes the incredulity that greeted the appear-

in Africa.

He

quotes a pulmonary specialist in Uganda

who

first

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

saw AIDS there in 1983: us could believe

looked

"It

Many

it."

scientists

like the

IN

THE THIRD WORLD

new American

and reporters

the "African connection" theory so readily adopted in the

and Chirimuuta, AIDS,

Africa,

worked

to counter

West (Chirimuuta

and Racism, pp. 121-126, document this response);

but others in Africa began to place the blame for African people

But none of

disease.

in Africa

— always those

in

AIDS on

the loose morals of

other countries, classes, or ethnic groups. Thus

an editorial in the Kenya Times (Nairobi),

May

sexual behavior, noting that "nature has

its

26, 1987,

own

blamed Uganda

for lax

law of retribution." See discus-

sion in Sabatier, Blaming Others, p. 105. 52.

Clyde Haberman, "Japan Plans to Deny Visas Over AIDS," New

York Times,

1987. According to a report in the Independent (London), February 14,

April

1,

1987,

when

the death of a Japanese prostitute in

Kobe was attributed

to

AIDS,

the immediate conclusion was that she had been infected by sexual contact with a foreigner; as

one Japanese newspaper put

it,

"Her death was the

an

result of

infatuation with Europe." Sabatier, Blaming Others, p. 114, notes that "in the red light district of

Tokyo warning

signs suddenly appeared: 'Gaijin [foreigners] off

limits.'"

53.

Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, A IDS,

Africa,

and Racism, pp. 124-125; Sabatier,

Blaming Others, pp. 106-107. See also Robert Pear, "U.S. Seeks to Bar Aliens

with AIDS," New 'Hi Sailor' 54.

York Times,

March

27, 1988,

Get the Heave-Ho," New

Alan Riding, "AIDS in

ber 28, 1987. Blood

is

Brazil:

a pressing

York Times,

and Serge Schmemann, "Calls of

May

14, 1988.

Taboo of Silence Ends," New

problem

in Brazil.

cases represent 2 to 3 percent of the total

AIDS

Octo-

York Times,

Whereas blood transfusion

cases in the U.S., France,

and

the U.K., they account for 14 percent of the cases in Brazil (18 percent in Rio

de Janeiro).

"Some

senior health officials have fed the controversy by arguing

that

AIDS

here

— say, malaria, leprosy, and Chagas's disease, a chronic wasting disease

is

less

of a priority than other diseases that affect millions of people

caused by a parasite carried by insects." 55.

Parker, "Acquired Immunodeficiency

56.

Dubos, Mirage of Health,

"disease of development," torical Roots," in

AIDS

cited in Paul Epstein

for the People 19, no.

1

p. 218;

many

Syndrome

in Brazil," p. 157.

researchers characterize

among them Marc H. Dawson, "AIDS

in Africa, ed.

AIDS

Miller and Rockwell, pp. 58-69.

Virchow

and Randall Packard, "Ecology and Immunology," (January-February 1987): 10-17,

who

as a

in Africa: His-

also discuss

is

Science

AIDS

and development. 57.

Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Rukarangira wa Nkara, Claude Schoepf, Walu

Engundu, and Payanzo Ntsomo, "AIDS and Society

from Zaire,"

in

58.

228; the authors

Ibid., p.

USAID)

that

AIDS

in Africa, ed.

in Central Africa:

A View

Miller and Rockwell, p. 218.

make

condoms "which hurt

the observation (not obvious, apparently, to their

wearer or break during normal use

83

Paula A. Treichler

may

limit the effectiveness of

59.

Gill

viewed by Harper, "AIDS 60.

am

I

most

AIDS prevention

Gordon and Tony Klouda, in Africa

efforts."

(London: IPPF, 1988). Re-

Preventing a Crisis

— Plague or Propaganda?"

indebted to Emily Martin for pointing out the mysterious failure of

women

campaigns for

safer sex education

to advocate or even explore the

use of spermicides, except in conjunction with condoms, despite their proven effectiveness against HIV. 61.

Parker, "Acquired Immunodeficiency

62.

Ibid.,

pp. 160-163.

Syndrome

in Brazil," p. 161.

have greatly oversimplified Parker's intricate represen-

I

tation of Brazilian sexuality that, as he emphasizes,

Western ethnographer but permeates language, ongoing open debate about sexuality

as

not the mere overlay of a

is

slang, informal discussion,

an essential aspect of cultural

and

identity:

"Brazilianness." But the penetrator/recipient and other distinctions that con-

between same-sex partners occur elsewhere,

struct masculinity/femininity

cluding the U.S. See Charles

Moses, tional

F.

AIDS: Sexual Behavior and Intravenous Drug Use (Washington, D.C.: Na-

eds.,

Academy

Press, 1989), pp. 73-185, for an illuminating review of recent

research on "same-gender sexual behaviors" in several cultural settings. ysis

in-

Turner, Heather G. Miller, and Lincoln E.

An

anal-

of sexuality from a very different perspective, but one potentially helpful in

articulating

women's concerns,

are the conclusions

"adopted by the group of experts" 12-21, 1986:

"UNESCO: On

at a

UNESCO

and recommendations

conference in Madrid, March

Prostitution and Strategies Against Promiscuity

and Sexual Exploitation of Women," Echo (Newsletter of the Association of African

Women

63.

Sabatier, Blaming Others, p. 134.

Development)

for Research

no. 2-3 (1986): 16-17.

1,

Human

64. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The

PAJ Publications, 1982),

Seriousness of Play

65. Timberlake, Africa in

Crisis,

Sabatier, Blaming Others, p. 4.

67.

Foucault, "Political Function of the Intellectual."

68.

Williams, The Country and

69.

Emerging

Markets:

A

the City, p. 284.

Worldwide Study of Drugs, Vaccines, and Diagnostics

(New Haven: Technology Management Group, August Glaser,

"AIDS

York:

p. 8.

66.

AIDS

(New

p. 18.

Crisis Spurs

Hunt

for

New

1986). See also Vicki

Tests," High Technology Business, Janu-

ary 1988. 70.

See Gina Kolata, "Africa

ruary 19, 1988, the

is

Favored for

AIDS

"AIDS Monitor" column

Testing,"

in the

New

New

Scientist,

York Times,

1988, p. 36, and Jane Perlez, "Scientists

from Western Countries Pressing

AIDS

September

Studies in Africa,"

New

York Times,

18, 1988. Perlez,

various vaccine discussions at a conference in Tanzania writes:

84

Feb-

February 18,

on AIDS and

for

reporting Africa,

.

AIDS AND HIV INFECTION

In Africa, unlike the

United

States, the virus

is

through heterosexual contact. Officials believe use

condoms and

inevitable.

.

THE THIRD WORLD

IN

most commonly spread that, despite

warnings to

avoid multiple partners, further spread of the virus

is

.

Because of behavioral changes brought about by extensive education about AIDS, the spread of the infection

group, whether or not

The

among

Thus, there would be few

States has slowed.

its

scientists said they

members took

gay

new

men

in the

United

infections in a study

the vaccine, the scientists said.

regarded intravenous drug users, a group that

AIDS

continues to have a high incidence of able for the necessary follow-up that

is

in the

United

States, as unreli-

needed for

a study

group.

A

WHO committee developing guidelines for vaccine testing said the decision

to

go ahead should be made by three groups:

scientists developing the vaccine,

knowledgable about vaccine development but with no academic or

scientists

commercial stakes

in

and "government

it,

from the population where the vaccine

is

officials

and

to be tried."

their scientific advisers

No

representatives of the

population to be tested are mentioned. 71. Williams, The Country and the City, p. 306. 72.

Mudimbe, The

V. Y.

Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy,

and

the Order of

Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 195.

"Fieldwork in

Common

Places," p. 42.

73.

Pratt,

74.

Nairobi Standard, January 15 and 18, 1985. For the development of research

on AIDS

in Africa, see

Ruth Kulstad,

ed.,

AIDS: Papers from

Science,

1982-1985

(Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1986). Chirimuuta

history

and Chirimuuta, AIDS,

Africa,

and Racism, describe this same

from an African perspective, noting how African challenges and coun-

terevidence were repeatedly brushed aside. 75.

Lawrence K. Altman, "Linking AIDS to Africa Provokes

New

York Times,

76.

On

AIDS,

November

Bitter Debate,"

21, 1985.

the "international furor" see especially Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta,

Africa,

and Racism:

at

the end of a

symposium

in Brussels in

November

1985, for example, the African representatives issued a statement repudiating virtually

all

government rison,

the assumptions

made by European and American

officials (p. 122).

and Davis Gazi, "AIDS: The Spread of Racism," West

1987, pp. 261-262; and Gloria Waite,

and Africa," 77.

in

The most

Francis A.

AIDS

in Africa, ed.

"The

et

al.,

Africa,

Politics of Disease:

and

February

9,

The AIDS Virus

Miller and Rockwell, pp. 145-164.

publicized study of prostitutes

Plummer

scientists

See also Richard C. Chirimuuta, Rosalind Har-

"AIDS Virus

is

Joan K. Kreiss, Davy Koech,

Infection in Nairobi Prostitutes: Spread

of the Epidemic to East Africa," New England Journal of Medicine 314, no. 7 (Feb-

ruary 13, 1986): 414-418.

On

myths and

their refutation, see Sabatier, Blaming

85

Paulo A. Treichler

Others, Africa,

78.

Clumeck, "AIDS

in Africa,"

and Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, AIDS,

and Racism.

In the

Western media, AIDS

sions about the West.

Thus

in the

Selzer's

Third World

view that Haiti

is

is

used to draw conclu-

"devastated"

is

to serve as a cautionary lesson about gay excess. Stories about Africa

proclaimed the cover of Newsweek in December 1986, citing

"AFRICA:

AIDS

like-

"FUTURE SHOCK,"

wise serve to warn Western readers abcut themselves.

projections of

intended

may

new worrisome

increases in the U.S.; a related cover headline was titled

THE FUTURE

IS

NOW." On AIDS

and the media

in general, see

James Dearing and Everett M. Rogers, "The Agenda-Setting Process for the sue of AIDS," paper presented at the International

May 28-June 79.

Alfred

J.

2,

Communication

Is-

Association,

1988.

"The

Fortin,

Politics of

AIDS

in Kenya," Third World Quarterly 9,

no. 3 (July 1987): 907. 80.

Quoted by

81.

Alfred

J.

Sabatier, Blaming Others, p. 97.

"AIDS and

Fortin,

Discourse," paper presented

at

Political Science Association,

"The

Politics of

82.

Fortin,

83.

Hilary Ng'weno,

4,

"The

the Third World:

the 14th

The

August 28-September

AIDS

Kenya,"

in

Politics of

Politics of International

World Congress of the

AIDS

p.

1,

907.

in Kenya," Weekly Review,

1987, pp. 11-13. Another perspective on this debate

"The

International

1988, Washington, D.C.

is

September

provided by Waite,

Politics of Disease."

84.

Mudimbe,

85.

Miller and Rockwell, eds.,

86.

See Levy, ed., AIDS: Pathogenesis and Treatment.

87.

Carl E. Pletsch,

The Invention of Africa.

AIDS

in Africa, p. xxiii.

"The Three Worlds, or the Division of

Social Scientific La-

bor, circa 1950 to 1975," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (Oc-

tober 1981): 565.

Cornel West

BLACK CULTURE AND POSTMODERNISM

We

live

now

— that

forty-four years after the age of Europe

is,

an

unprecedented world-transforming historical period (1492-1945) in

which those countries

tains

that reside

between the Ural Moun-

and Atlantic Ocean discovered new

lands, subjugated those

peoples on these lands, degraded the identities and cultures of

non-European peoples (Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples), and exploited laborers of both European

and non-European descent. the heyday of

We

live

now

American world hegemony

seventeen years after

— namely,

a brief yet

pacesetting historical interlude (1945-72) in which the U.S.A.

emerged

as the

supreme military and economic power

world upon the eclipse of European domination and

in the

in the

wake

of European devastation and decline. Lastly and most importantly,

we

live

now

in the midst of the

colonization of the Third

moment

World

second stage of the de-

— specifically, a rather paralytic

in that world-historical process in

which those subju-

gated and oppressed, degraded and exploited peoples bring

power and pressure World neocolonial societies.

to bear against the status

nations,

quos in Third

North Atlantic and Eastern European

These three fundamental

historical coordinates

— the

aftermath and legacy of the age of Europe, the precarious yet still

prominent power of the United

States,

and the protracted

opposition of Third World peoples (here and abroad) scribe the discursive space

wherein "postmodernism"

— circumis

consti-

tuted as an object of investigation.

The current "postmodernism" debate a

is first

and foremost

product of significant First World reflections upon the decen-

87

Cornel West

tering of Europe that take such forms as the demystification of

European cultural predominance and the deconstruction of European philosophical States as the

edifices.

With

the emergence of the United

world center for military arms,

political direction,

and cultural production and the advent of Third World cally

independent nations, the making of a

seemed quite

most

likely. Ironically,

First

new world World

politi-

order

reflections

on

"postmodernism" remain rather parochial and provincial — that is,

narrowly Eurocentric. For example, Jean-Francois Lyotard's

well-known characterization of the postmodern condition, with its

increasing incredulity toward master (or meta) narratives, a

rejection of representation, and a

perimentation,

is

demand

for radical artistic ex-

an interesting but insulated Eurocentric view: a

kind of European navel-gazing in which postmodernism becomes a recurring

moment

within the modern that

character and aesthetic in content.

is

performative in

The major sources from

— Kant's notion of the sublime and Wittgenstein's idea of language games — are deployed to promote and which Lyotard borrows

encourage certain kinds of modernist practices: namely, nonrep-

and outlooks

resentational, experimental techniques

and shatter quests for and modernist

loyalties

that

shun

Eurocentric frameworks

totality. Similar

can be detected in Jacques Derrida's de-

constructive version of poststructuralism, and even in Michel Foucault's archeological

and genealogical

modern and modern modes

own

marginal status as Algerian

nial subject)

and

a

investigations into pre-

of constituting subjects. Derrida's (a special

kind of French colo-

Jew may indeed lead him

to highlight the

transgressive and disruptive aspects of Nietzsche and Heidegger,

Mallarme and Artaud. Yet

his project

rocentric and modernist one.

It

remains a thoroughly Eu-

could signify the absence and

si-

— Third World — as well as their relative political

lence of those viewed as other, alien, marginal peoples,

women,

impotence

gays, lesbians

in creatively transforming the legacy of the age of Eu-

rope. Foucault provides

more concrete

social

and

historical ana-

a

BLACK CULTURE AND POSTMODERNISM

lytical

substance to a discourse of otherness and marginality in

his focus

on the fundamental

role

and function of the insane and

the incarcerated. But even the "others" Foucault investigates re-

main within European boundaries, and remain transgressive modernists such Needless to

Bataille.

as

Nietzsche and Georges

two prominent opponents of post-

say, the

modernism, Hilton Kramer from the

Habermas from the not-too-far highbrow achievements and

his heroes, like Derrida's

left,

and

far right

do so

in the

the

intellectual "seriousness" of a

European/Anglo-American modernism and the cal

Jiirgen

name of

social

and

politi-

accomplishments and potentialities of a European Enlighten-

ment

project. Significant attempts to focus the

War

post- World

II

American

postmodernism debate on

cultural practices

and

artifacts (for

example, in architecture and painting) can be seen in the early

work of William Spanos and

Paul Bove. In their illuminating

neo-Heideggerian readings of American poets

like

Robert

Creeley and Charles Olson, postmodern notions of temporality, difference, at

and heterogeneity loomed

large, yet

remained

still it

the level of philosophic outlook and artistic enactment. This

observation also holds for the pioneering

Krauss and Susan Sontag,

complex

work of Rosalind

who view postmodernism

set of sensibilities

and

styles,

as either a

or as ideological beliefs.

Fredric Jameson, Hal Foster, and to a certain extent, Andreas Huyssen have brought a particular debate (as

it

were) by situating

society

and

it

in relation to larger

history. In short,

"down

to earth"

developments

Jameson and Huyssen try to

in

lay

bare the contours of the forest that goes beyond the useful

though limited squirrel work done by other postmodern

They do

this

by positing postmodernism

dominant yet diverse wherein certain as reactions ical

set of structural

sensibilities, styles,

and responses

to

new

critics.

as a social category

and

—

institutional processes

and outlooks are understood

societal conditions

and

histor-

circumstances.

89

Cornel West

The important point here with Jameson's laundry

lists

is

neither whether one agrees

of postmodern features

(e.g.,

depthlessness, persuasiveness of the image and simulacrum,

weakening of

historicity,

emotional intensities, and schizo-

phrenic subjects), nor whether one approves of his treatments of

what

individual cultural artifacts. Rather

World

reflections

is

crucial

is

that First

on postmodernism have become more con-

sciously historical, social, political,

and

ideological.

For too long,

the postmodernism debate has remained inscribed within nar-

row

disciplinary boundaries, insulated artistic practices,

vague formulations of

come

men and women moved more

for this debate to be

theory and historiography. To do so

is

and

The time

of letters.

has

forthrightly into social

to raise methodological

questions about historical periodization, demarcation of cultural practices

and

archives,

and

issues of politics

and ideology.

For instance, every conception of postmodernism presupposes some idea of the

when

it

declined,

modern — when

when

it

it

began,

And any such

ended.

ern bears directly and indirectly upon

when

it

peaked,

idea of the

how one

mod-

conceives of

change in the present. Secondly, different cultural practices have generally agreed

upon

uses of the term

"modern"

that require a

recognition of the diverse logics within specific disciplinary practices. For example, philosophers

modern

as a

"modernist" egies,

seventeenth-century

view the advent of the

affair

and shun the term

as a description of philosophical rhetorical strat-

whereas

literary critics

view nineteenth-century works

major examples of "the modern" and make

between modern and modernist

much

as

of the break

literary texts. Architects

under-

stand modernist works as those that valorize reason, technique, instrumentality, and functionality in thoroughgoing Utopian

terms.

On

the other hand, literary critics view modernist texts

as those that dismiss rationality, instrumentality,

tionality in favor of

and func-

myth, montage, simultaneity, and play

in

deeply anti-utopian terms. Adequate conceptions of historical

90

BLACK CULTURE AND POSTMODERNISM

periodization must keep track of these complex convergences

and divergences of different cultural

traditions, yet

of the larger social and historical forces ticular

moment. This means

at

not lose

any par-

that the very historical periodiza-

and cultural demarcations we make

tions

still

work

at

are, in part, ideological

constructs shot through with political presuppositions, prejudg-

ments, prejudices. Intellectual honesty requires that one

them

crystal clear

and give reasons

From my own

viewpoint,

term "postmodernism"

why one

make

holds them.

remain quite suspicious of the

two

basic reasons. First, because the

itself

has not simply been used to de-

for

precursor term "modern"

I

as to

value the cultures of oppressed and exploited peoples, but also

has failed to deeply illumine the internal complexities of these

Under

cultures.

out hope for the

the circumstances, there

is little

new term "postmodernism"

reason to hold

as applied to the

practices of oppressed peoples. Second, the sheer facticity of

black people in the United States historically embodies and enacts the

"postmodern" themes of degraded otherness and sub-

altern marginality. Black resistances have attacked notions of

exclusionary identity, dominating heterogeneity, and universality

— or, in more blunt language, white supremacy. Yet the

historical experience of black people in as Latinos,

that

women, workers,

gays,

and

North America,

as well

lesbians, always requires

one examine the relation of any Eurocentric (patriarchal,

homophobic) discourse to black

resistance.

The

issue here

is

not

simply some sophomoric, moralistic test that surveys the racial biases of the interlocutors in a debate. Rather the point

is

to en-

gage in a structural and institutional analysis to see where the debate

is

taking place, why at this historical

moment, and how

this

debate enables or disenables oppressed peoples to exercise their

opposition to the hierarchies of power. For example, does the

postmodernism debate seriously acknowledge the tural

and

political practices of

Americans? Or does

oppressed peoples,

this debate highlight

distinctive cule.g.,

African-

notions of difference,

91

Cornel West

marginality,

and otherness

Americans, Latinos, women, instrumental one, that

is,

way

in such a

ginalizes actual people of difference

am

I

My

etc.?

that

it

further mar-

and otherness, point here

e.g.,

African-

not a crude

is

not calling for some "vulgar"

populist discourse for mobilizing oppressed peoples. Rather,

am

some

asking whether postmodernism debates can cast

on

cant light

I

signifi-

cultural practices of oppressed peoples.

My own

hunch

is

that oppositional black intellectuals

must

be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate. Yet until the complex relations between race, class, and gender are

more adequately

theorized,

historiographical studies, and ideological

though plight

at

and

tom

fully delineated in specific

political practices, the

in our concrete

postmodernism debate,

times illuminating, will remain rather blind to the

and predicament of black America. Therefore

displace myself

keep

more

more fused

my

from the postmodernism

distance

from

its

of our present cultural

When

debate,

parochialism and view

I

do not

simply try to it

as a

symp-

crisis.

one turns to African-American cultural practices and

products during the historical

ernism debate begins,

it is

moment

in

which the postmod-

undeniable that U.S. mass culture

disproportionately influenced by black people. This cially in

Owing

I

popular music, linguistic innovation, and

to both a particular African heritage

and

is

is

so espe-

athletics.

specific

forms

of Euro-American oppression, black American cultural production has focused primarily

and spectacle

in music, sermons,

and sermons are rooted in black

on performance and pageantry, and certain

sports.

style

The music

in black religious practices; the sports,

male-bonding networks that

flaunt machismo,

promote

camaraderie, and, in some cases, lead to financial success. Black

— the indigenous cradle of African- American — principally attempt to provide hope and sustain sanity

religious practices

culture

in light of the difficult position of black

Americans and the ab-

— BLACK CULTURE AND POSTMODERNISM

surdity of transplanted European

the role of the promised land.

moderns

The

casting

America

in

black religious ideological re-

sponse was often to recast America as Egypt; and the concrete, everyday response to institutionalized terrorism

Crowism

— slavery or Jim-

— was to deploy weapons of kinetic orality, passionate

physicality,

and combative

spirituality to survive

and dream of

freedom.

By

kinetic orality,

rhetorical styles that

and

I

mean dynamic

repetitive

form communities,

e.g.,

and energetic

antiphonal styles

linguistic innovations that accent fluid, improvisational iden-

tities

and

that

physicality,

I

promote

mean

and polyrhythms

which

one's

survival at almost any cost.

By passionate

bodily stylizations of the world, syncopations

that assert one's

somebodiness

in a society in

body has no public worth, only economic value

laboring metabolism.

And

by combative

spirituality,

I

mean

as a

a

sense of historical patience, subversive joy, and daily per-

severance in an apparently hopeless and meaningless historical situation. Black cultural practices

ment of

a reality they cannot not

emerge out of an acknowledgknow

— the ragged edges of the

of necessity; a reality historically constructed by white su-

real,

premacist practices in North America during the age of Europe.

These ragged edges

— of not being able to eat, not to have shel— this infused into the strategies

ter,

not to have health care

and

styles of black cultural practices.

undergone some form of

all

is

Of

course,

all

peoples have

social misery, yet peoples of African

descent in the United States have done so in the midst of the

most prosperous and wealthy country

A

in the world.

distinctive feature of these black styles

jection of the self

is

pro-

a certain

— more a persona — in performance.

This

is

not

simply a self-investment and self-involvement in musical, rhetorical,

and

athletic

enactments;

tingency and even spectacular

be

it

solicits

it

also

acknowledges radical con-

challenge and danger. In short,

form of risk-ridden execution

a Charlie

that

is

it is

a

self-imposed

Parker solo, a Sarah Vaughan rendition,

Muham-

93

Cornel West

mad

tle

Martin Luther King,

Ali footwork, a

Brown dancing

act, a Julius

sermon, a James

interpretation of Handel. This feature not only results

what some anthropologists have accident it

Jr.,

Erving dunk shot, or a Kathleen Bat-

also

from

called the African deification of

— the sense of perennially being on a slippery tightrope;

comes from the highly precarious

historical situations in

which black people have found themselves. And with and economic avenues usually blocked,

become the space wherein black Ironically, black

and potency

in

reasons. First,

world power,

our

resistance

is

channeled.

American culture has surfaced with power

own

time principally owing to three basic

upon the emergence it

political

specific cultural arenas

of the United States as a

that black music — spirituals, gos— was the most unique cultural product

was quite clear

pels, blues, jazz, soul

created by Americans of any hue. So as the globalization of

American culture

escalated, black

tional exposure. Second, as the

music was given vast interna-

consumption cycle of advanced

multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production

more and more mass-commodity production. The

became

stress here

is

not simply on the new and fashionable but

also

and primitive. Black cultural products have

historically served as

a

on the exotic

major source for European and Euro-American exotic

interests

— interests that issue from a healthy critique of the

mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivist aspects of

modern

life.

Yet as black cultural products

become

the commodified

possession of Euro-Americans, they play a very different role in U.S. society. For example, they speak less of the black sense of

absurdity in America and

Needless to

say, the

more of

the "universal" values of love.

sheer size of the white consumer market

provides material incentives to black artists to be "crossover artists," i.e.,

94

more attuned

to white tastes

and

sensibilities.

There

BLACK CULTURE AND POSTMODERNISM

indeed are some cases where preserved by crossover

artistic

and

cultural integrity

Stone in the

artists (Sly

sixties,

is

Luther

Vandross and Anita Baker in the eighties). Yet the temptation to de-Africanize one's style and dilute one's black cultural content for

commercial reasons

The

is

often irresistible.

third reason black culture has recently

that

became

identified

with the

become

mass youth cul-

lient

is

ture,

an ever-growing world consumer market since the

it

first

so sa-

fifties.

This culture responded to the eclipse of First World Utopian energies

and waning

alternative political options by associating

modes of transcendence with music and

sexual liberation. Given

the European and Euro-American identification of Africans and

African-Americans with sexual licentiousness, libertinism, and liberation, black

music became both

white sexual freedom. vertising industry, sic hits

And

which now

symbol and

(as

rebellious white

of old), but also the cultural mainstream.

What

then

is

the oppositional potential of black cultural

practices in our time? ignate

mu-

of black popular music has

become thoroughly accepted by not simply youth

facilitator of

specializes in recycling black

much

of the recent past,

a

with the vast sexualization of the ad-

And

what extent

to

is it

legitimate to des-

some of them "postmodern"? Of the three major forms of

black cultural products practices

— musical,

— certainly the latter

is

sermonic, and athletic

the most incorporated and co-

opted of the three. Sermonic practices,

still

far

removed from

most white observation and consumption, are limited owing ecclesiastical ficult for

and denominational constituencies that make

ecumenical figures to emerge

in black institutional

own

life,

constituencies. Yet

Luther King,

Jr.,

who

yet attract peoples

when such

Malcolm X,

figures

Jesse Jackson

it

to dif-

can remain rooted

from outside

do emerge

their

— Martin

— they can generate

tremendous oppositional energy due to the paucity of and charismatic spokespersons on the American

left

articulate

and the po-

95

Cornel West

tentially positive role charismatic leaders

can play in empower-

ing people to believe in themselves and act in unity against the

powers that

be.

Black musical practices ords or

weak

live

performances

— packaged via radio or video, rec-

— are oppositional principally in the some sense of the agency and

sense that they keep alive

creativity of oppressed peoples. Yet this sense

removed from organized

so vague

is

and

far

one must con-

political resistance that

clude that most of black music here and abroad has simply be-

come

major means by which U.S. record companies have

a

colonized the leisure time of eager consumers (including myself). Yet since black music difficult to

is

so integral to black

imagine a black resistance

music does not play an important But what of

movement

Have

I

in

which

it is

black

role.

literary artists, visual artists,

intellectuals in general?

America,

in

life

and other black

not unduly neglected them? Are

they not the possible candidates for producers of postmodern

products black

— which thereby makes the term partly relevant to

life?

Granted,

culture. This

form of

is

social

tion and

I

have spent most of

so because

movements

momentum

my

time on black mass

interest in black resistance in the

leads

me

to look for the possible

of black people

for social freedom. But

done

my

much more

who

suffer,

work, and long

serious reflection

in regards to this crucial matter. This essay

mo-

is

must be

but a mere

gesture toward constructing possible critical positions for blacks

both in and around popular culture, the ways in which these positions can be viewed as sites of a potentially enabling yet resisting

96

postmodernism.

READING 1968 AND HE GREAT AMERICAN WHITEWASH

After 1968, none of the "other" groups in struggle neither

women

nor

racial "minorities"

—

nor sexual "mi-

norities" nor the handicapped nor the "ecologists" (those

who

refused the acceptance, unquestioningly, of the im-

peratives of increased global production)

— would ever

again accept the legitimacy of "waiting"

upon some other

revolution.

— Immanuel Wallerstein,

"1968, Revolution in the World

System: Theses and Queries," 1988

We

must become more

radically historical than

sioned by the Marxist tradition. By becoming ically historical"

myriad of

effects

I

mean confronting more

is

envi-

more "rad-

candidly the

and consequences (intended and unin-

tended, conscious and unconscious) of power-laden and conflict-ridden social practice

fluence of

human

—

e.g.,

the complex con-

bodies, traditions and institutions.

— Cornel West, "Race and Social Theory: Toward a Genealogical Materialist Analysis," 1987

You who understand the dehumanization of forced removal-relocation-reeducation-redefinition, the humiliation of having to falsify your

own

you know. And often cannot say trying to unsay in the blanks

— Trinh T.

it,

for

on your

if

reality,

it.

You

you don't they

behalf,

and you

Minh-ha, "Difference:

A

your voice

try

—

and keep on

will not fail to

will

be

Special Third

Women

fill

said.

World

Issue," 1988

9?

Michele Wallace

I

recently participated in a conference called "1968 in Global

Retrospective," which was built around a twenty-seven page

paper by Immanuel Wallerstein about 1968

we

kind

call

My

watershed events."

"one of the great

as

modern world-system,

formative events in the history of our

the

job was to talk about "The

Key Role of 'Minority' Revolutions," and to chair

a panel

on

"Representations of 1968: Invention and Use of Symbols," which included 1968 historians

Todd

man, and James

was eager to do

Miller.

people had criticized

Superwoman

I

my book

as inaccurate

David Caute, Jim Hober-

Gitlin,

this

because so

Macho and

Black

and overly harsh

the

my

in

many

Myth of

the

judgments of

the failures of black leadership and black female complicity in that failure in the 1960s.

Minority Revolutions

As

I

in

a Major Key

observe the emerging patterns of codification and inter-

pretation of U.S. and global 1960s history,

derstand

how Afro-American

fail

Crisis

arship and commentary. Therefore,

"minority revolutions." Yet

beginning to un-

of the Negro

to exist at the level of

marginal interest for those

American

am

intellectual history, despite the

publication of Harold Cruse's The

1967, continues to

I

it

who would

Intellectual in

most white schol-

continues to hold only reflect

upon

the fate of

precisely the caliber of Afro-

it is

intellectual reflection about itself, the

New

Left,

and

other "minority" revolutions that needs to be considered here.

Without doing at

so, first theory,

the level of collective

then history helps to consolidate

memory

the very segregation 1960s

youth were once so determined to undo.

Such Afro-Americanists Hortense

Spillers,

as

Cornel West, Manning Marable,

Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Hazel

Carby, Paula Giddings, and Bell Hooks have become instrumental in

revealing an underlying coherence in Afro-American intel-

lectual

98

and

cultural development. Collectively, such efforts begin

READING 1968 AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WHITEWASH

to reveal the degree to

which people of African descent have

demonstrated in writing and speaking a historical consciousness that connects Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass,

Harper to Ida

W.

B. Wells,

Hurston, to C.

L. R.

E. B.

and Frances

DuBois, and Zora Neale

James, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hans-

berry, to Stuart Hall, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison. Historical consciousness lectual grasp of 1968.

is

no

less

true of the black intel-

At the time, such figures

as

Angela Davis,

Stokely Carmichael, Nikki Giovanni, Martin Luther King, Sonia

Ron Karenga, and Harold Cruse were

Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, crucial to

how

the period imagined

its

goals.

the impact and significance of such figures indeed, unless, of course, the project history of 1968, but then that

nority" history.

My

for "history" in the

centric

would

intention here

is

Now,

in retrospect,

made

to

seem

becomes to write still

slight

a black

be "minor" and "mi-

to point out the tendency

major sense to corroborate

hegemony by always

a racist, phallo-

marginalizing, trivializing, and de-

centering the black subject, even as

may

is

involve an apparent focus

upon

its

specific historical object

issues of ethnicity, or ra-

cism, or, as in this case, "minority revolutions."

To put

it

an-

other way, somehow, ultimately, black subjectivity always seems irrelevant to any serious academic or political discussion of a

"black," "ethnic," or "minority" object. For instance, Daniel Patrick

Moynihan once used the scholarship of

to verify the distinction

between margin

center (the white family).

I

want

E.

Franklin Frazier

(the black family)

and

to decenter our present discus-

sion of "minority" revolutions in favor of a discussion of "black subjectivity." This habit of leaving the black subject out always

seems to coincide with

a preference for global or synthetic

views, and should continue no longer.

Therefore,

"world system" male

my

role here

as yet

is

to contest the notion of a

another attempt to universalize white

intellectual authority over the voiceless masses.

don't for a

moment

believe that

However,

I

high-minded collections of oral

99

Michele Wallace

history,

I

which allow "the people

autonomous

that

to speak for themselves," or

insular black intellectual debate will

fill

the gap.

have no objection to the notion of "world systems," in and of

themselves, especially since ries the

more

I

understand that in

this case

practical purpose of addressing the

increasingly global

economic arrangement

change and resistance

at the local

level of a specific issue

such

it

car-

problem of an

that stifles substantive

or the national

level,

or

the

at

as ethnicity, class, or sexuality.

I

un-

derstand that most of the people of color in the world are getting screwed as a function of a world system, so that amelioration

would propose

it

approach

a global

makes sense at

some

point.

Moreover, regarding the idea that there may be repetitions

and

parallels in events

patterns, conscious

around the globe,

and unconscious,

on the

tural

and

male

political leadership "style," in

intellectual reflections

in

I

have noticed certain

contemporary black

cul-

limits of 1960s black

terms of

its

failure to recog-

nize or

accommodate the question of

larly in

black film and literature from the U.S. and England,

sexual difference. Particu-

there has developed not only a conventional feminist critique of inequality within the Black Liberation

Movement, but

also a

trend toward subverting the male/female gender duality in favor of multiple sexualities, including homosexuality and lesbianism, as well as

inflexible

an increasing focus on the inadequacies of a rigid and concept of masculinity. Besides the considerable

litera-

ture that explores such approaches (novels and poetry by black feminist writers Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison,

Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and black

male writers Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wide-

man, Ralph Julien

Ellison),

I

see Spike Lee's School Daze (1988), Isaac

and Maureen Blackwood's The

(1986),

Passion of

Remembrance

and Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga (about the struggle

liberation in

Angola [1972])

all

as films in

which there

is

for

a re-

READING 1968 AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WHITEWASH

concern about the

lated

concept of "the black

loss of a unitary

(male) leader."

For instance, in School Daze

(at a level that is

perhaps un-

conscious to director Spike Lee), Dap's leadership (and his role as protagonist)

constantly questioned and challenged, not only

is

by the college administration, but

and sexual spectacle

more important

by

also

"women" and by

by the continuous flow of dance, song,

friends, as well as

seems to be saying that

that

his

style,

this film has

business to attend to than the telling of a linear

(phallic) narrative.

which more candidly embraces

In Passion of Remembrance, critique of sixties

male leadership, and

its

knee-jerk heterosex-

ism, the combination of carnivalesque spectacle, political

mentary, and archival footage than the English film that tributes, films of

Sammy and

is

is,

much more

finally,

most often lauded

it

com-

satisfying

for these at-

While

Rosie Get Laid (1987).

Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi,

lematic that Third

a

I

admire the

seems more prob-

Worldism becomes an excuse

for excessive

cynicism about the possibility for fundamental world change

coupled with an implicit hierarchizing of a

perous "Third World" (Indian) and an

literate

illiterate

and pros-

and im-

poverished "Third World" (poor blacks) in England. first

Sammy and

scene in

Rosie,

it is

most desperate and precarious

blacks

From

who occupy

social, sexual,

the

the film's

and economic

positions.

In Sambizanga, while the critique sious

on the

ratively

and

director's part, the black literally slain

the crying of the

men who

from the beginning of the

women and

can relate to them,

In real

Show

life

real life

the form of

seems thoroughly uncon-

male "leader"

is

who if

figu-

film. It

their context in culture,

in the U.S. —

both

is

and the

will carry on.

you can

call

The Morton Downey

— this critique of past black male leadership takes

Roy

Innis

and Al Sharpton's

fistfight at

Harlem's

Apollo Theater ostensibly over the case of Tawana Brawley.

101

Michele Wallace

Meanwhile, Brawley rape

is

somehow unimaginable and unspeakable

is

political discourse, as the debate rages over

fathom the black teenager's psychological,

now

than in 1968.

is

social,

economic, and

And no

better prepared to

we

should not dismiss

At the same time,

cast out the Sharptons.

to present black

whether Sharpton

no better prepared to

a "fake." Black male leadership seems

educational plight

whose

a fifteen-year-old black teenager

too quickly the inherent dangers that even progressive "world

systems" present. This

is

the danger of neocolonialism or neo-

imperialism in intellectual form and what makes

it

so

is

that

mostly only white males are empowered to engage in that course.

The problem then becomes,

out, "they

work toward your erasure while urging you

your way of

dis-

Trinh Minh-ha points

as

to keep

and ethnic values within the border of your

life

homelands. This

called the policy of 'separate development' in

is

apartheid language."

Somewhere Over

the Rainbow

no desirable transformation of the

Thirdly,

possible in the absence

capitalist

world-economy

is

of trans-zonal political cooperation by anti-

systemic movements. This trans-zonal cooperation would have to be

both strategic and tactical. establish the bases

of

It

might be easier

tactical cooperation.

(albeit still not easy) to

But strategic?

It is

probable

that strategic collaboration can only be on the basis of a profound radical ization

of the

— Immanuel I

am

objectives.

Wallerstein,

1988

not concerned to question here the nature of

Rather, tives,"

my

focus

which

is

is

upon "a profound

perhaps

this proposal.

radicalization of objec-

least accessible

through the theorizing

of "world systems." This theorizing, after

all,

in

no way subverts

or transforms white male academic authority and, therefore,

confirms our present unsatisfactory arrangements of cultural

hegemony. The only door through which "change" level 102

can enter

is

by altering the composition of

at a critical

that

community

READING 1968 AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WHITEWASH

that considers the

problems of "objectives." White

stop thinking that

it is

of our

their place alone to

So

am

I

not proposing that fine.

am

I

if

political goal

ing that

if

(though

I

my

have

Wallerstein were black, ev-

not a nationalist nor a postnational-

nor does "racial pride" make

uality

have to

lives.

erything would be ist,

men

determine the course

a lot of sense to

fair share).

me

Rather,

as a

am

I

propos-

the experiences of race, ethnicity, gender, and sex-

were made central

to future considerations of "world

systems" the process would be a

more convincing

lot

in

terms of

locating a "profound radicalization of objectives." Moreover, this

blindspot to ethnicity and sexuality transcends the problem of

"women and

"minorities" as

global minorities, but

who

who

blacks,"

are simply

knowledge production. Not only

is

are not, after

minor

there a failure to consider

the question of world systems or global perspectives

view of the

racial or sexual "other."

consider the other that

may

so-called majority white

There

is

from the

also a failure to

ultimately be at the center of even a

male existence, the other of ethnicity,

religion, sexuality, rationality, the other of homelessness,

geographical and existential, which

hind ity

this

all,

in the sphere of

may be

both

the driving force be-

compulsive white male Western insistence upon major-

and dominance. So the question for

stein

is

right or

dressed until perspective first

me

wrong. Such

we

itself,

is

a

not even whether or not Wallerquestion cannot even be ad-

have contended with the discrepancy in that the view

from which the history of 1968

is

recollected that obliterates the possibility of black

subjectivity.

Perhaps the clearest occasion upon which this occurs Wallerstein's Thesis 4: "Counterculture

tionary euphoria, but was not politically central to 1968."

subsequent explanation of

this thesis

in

The

goes on to define the

"counterculture" in a way that not only precludes relationship to

is

was part of the revolu-

Afro-American culture, but

its

historical

also renders 1960s

Hichele Wallace

A fro- American

Movement

culture, including the Civil Rights

and Black Power, entirely

invisible.

Afro-American cultural pro-

duction then becomes an incidental and minor aspect of U.S.

and European counterculture historical relationship

reversed; counterculture

is first

comes out of Afro- American culture out of rhythm

formance

'n'

and

style

— as in rock

belief structures of

bebop and black

street culture

jazz a

Norman

mukind

Mailer

in The White Negro.

Then,

in the

most preemptive move,

makes history irrecoverable by turning terculture to

coming a per-

coming out of

of Afro-American existentialism of the streets, as

proposed

no longer

'n' roll

coming out of

blues, the beat aesthetic

and American youth

sicians,

The

or, in this case, a nonentity.

is

defined as that which

no one, which

is

not culture

"We

against culture.

generally

is

it

gratuitous,

at all,

move

in the

that

into myth, the coun-

which belongs

but counter-to-culture or

mean by

counterculture," Wal-

lerstein writes, "behavior in daily life (sexuality, drugs, dress)

and

in the arts that

onysiac." a

more

There

useful,

is

unconventional, non-'bourgeois,' and Di-

is

never any doubt in this statement that there

mainstream, conventional, bourgeois, and Apollo-

The coun-

nian culture that will counteract the countercultural. tercultural

change.

is

Still,

then perceived I

would

like to

as entirely peripheral to

profound

claim this degraded form of culture

as the true location for a revolutionary potential in

American

is

Afro-

culture.

Afro-American culture has long been the starting point

for

white self-criticism in the U.S. Mid-twentieth-century white

youth and black youth observed the resilience and Afro- American culture

—

mestics with husbands

who

black

men who had

its

versatility of

working mothers employed could not find work;

labored for a pittance

invent songs of indescribable beauty in

all

its

its

do-

their lives yet could

which they accurately

weighed the material and psychological complexity of world;

as

poor elderly

tradition of black religious music,

their

which seemed

to

turn the hypocrisy of conventional white Protestantism inside 104

READING 1968 AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WHITEWASH

out;

churchgoing blacks

its

who would

lay their

down

bodies

be-

fore waterhoses, dogs, and white Southern racism and then get

up and

Freedom Party and

fight for the Mississippi

The recognition of ture, or the price that

against U.S.

Vietnam War.

military involvement in the

that culture, or the weight of that cul-

had been paid for

that culture,

was

a

prime motivating factor in the 1968 sense that U.S. dominance

and world hegemony were unconscionable and that the

"Old Left" lacked the

parasitic,

sensitivity to grapple

and

with real

people in a real world of cultural diversity. Afro-American cul-

New

ture has been crucial in forming the aspirations of the

minority revolutions

as well as

political activism this

— not so much by

— but precisely by

was always

it

formed

clearly

majority culture that tried to choke its

of

sex, drugs, dance, dress, music, its

ture

Left,

considerable

While

counterculture.

its

"minor" culture may sometimes be

protest,

its

difficult to explicate as

in the spirit of subverting a it

at

and

the root. Precisely by

style,

it

kept the record

discontents accurately and well. Perhaps this counterculis

the level at which mainstream culture

forcefully challenged, even as "revolutions"

Maybe there

are

many

life,

often by

by drug use and the

life

most go.

"countercultures," not just one. For

instance, today black youth resist total white

over everyday

is still

come and

hegemonic control

means considered counter

to culture,

of the streets, by their unwillingness to

go to school and their inclination to have babies. Clearly, such developments are socially constructed and economically predestined.

I

am

not claiming this culture of demoralization for

political radicalism.

I

am

saying that what they are doing

is

con-

nected, by influence and osmosis, to countercultural develop-

ments, white and black, in the 1950s and 1960s.

As for those decades,

I

am

certain of a deliberate and self-

conscious black counterculture because

who was

a jazz musician,

stepfather

who was

the 1960s came,

my

my

my

parents

mother who was an

their close friend

— my father

artist,

— were part of

father, Earl Wallace,

who was

it.

and my When

divorced from

Michele Wallace

my mother

and who was not a successful musician, was dead of

a heroin overdose. In 1965, the

Faith Ringgold,

my

sister,

and

summer he

newly inaugurated School of Black Arts. teacher then, Faith

became

A

my

died,

took classes

I

at

mother,

Amiri Baraka's

public high school

an active role

a 1960s radical, taking

United Federation of Teachers

in the black struggle against the

over "decentralization" of the public schools. In those years, the hardest thing to figure out

how

our everyday

commitment.

would bear the mark of our

lives

In 1963, Faith

had

also

begun

to

was

culture,

political

produce

a series

of paintings called "American People," in which she tried to

capture the drama and historical significance of the Civil Rights

Movement,

as

we then viewed

it

on our

affected race relations in the North, as

James Baldwin in The

Fire Next

television screens, as

it

was written about by

Time (1963) and Amiri Baraka

(LeRoi Jones) in Dutchman (1964). In 1970, student

at

in

New

when

I

became

a

I

was already struck by

politically active black students

were getting involved

the City College of

how many

it

York,

heavy drug use, and dying.

1968 Revisited

"Where take

is

tomorrow's avant-garde

on the

in art

and entertainment to

racial bias of the snowblind, the sexual politics of

the frigid, and the class anxieties of the perennially upper crust?"

ing to

When

make

ridiculous as

I

asked this question a few months ago,

light of it

something that

may seem,

a

abroad, has always believed art

not light

at all.

was

try-

As

white cultural avant-garde, here and it

possible to

make an

oppositional

without fundamentally challenging hegemonic notions of

race, sexuality,

and even

Of course, when tural

hegemony."

wash." artists

106

is

I

I

We

I

class.

was

called

a kid, it

we

didn't call

"white cul-

the "Great American White-

had the great good fortune to be raised

(my

it

stepfather Burdette Ringgold

in a family of

was not an

artist,

but

READING 1968 AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WHITEWASH

worked

at

GM

our creativity) in which resistance to

to finance

the old truism, "If you're white, you're alright; stick around;

and

if

I

find

still

it

art,

but basic to one's psychologi-

astonishing

when white people

tently conceptualize resistance in ways that

importance of race, or the tellectuals have

But

lem

in

I

was

1970

made first

when

vital

minimize the

contribution black artists and in-

struck by the true dimension of this prob-

Faith and

I

attended a guerrilla art action

which was,

"racism, sexism, war, and repression."

itself,

A

a protest against

group of famous white

by Robert Morris decided to withdraw their

artists led

work from

consis-

to the discussion of that issue.

protest against Art Strike,

male

you're brown,

you're black, stay back," was viewed not

only as paramount to making cal survival.

if

the Venice Biennale, a prestigious international ex-

hibition, in order to protest U.S. military involvement in Viet-

nam. Although the protest was supposed to be against "racism, sexism, and repression," Art Strike then expected to

counter-Biennale in

New

mount

a

York without altering the all-white

male composition of the show. This seems to be the key to understanding the intrinsic limits of Western cultural avantgardism: while

it

can no longer deny

premacist presuppositions, In the

first

ganization that

opening

own

white male sueither.

years of our feminism, working through an or-

we founded

for Black Art Liberation in

its

cannot be rid of them

it

called

Women

(WSABAL),

this exhibition to

Students and Artists

Faith and others succeeded

women and

people of color.

WSABAL was also influential in the subsequent development of Ad Hoc Women Artists, led by Lucy Lippard. This group repeated

WSABAL's 50

against the

Whitney

percent

Biennial,

women demand which was

in their protest

in the habit of includ-

ing white male artists almost exclusively. Specifically because of Faith's research

and support of Ad Hoc, black

women

artists

Barbara Chase and Betye Saar were included in the next

Whitney

Biennial.

107

Michele Wallace

Of course, begun

in 1970.

Faith's activism against the

really

It

began

Luther King's assassination,

worker

in the

museums had not Martin

in 1968, the year of

when

every black artist and cultural

country was galvanized into action. Only sixteen

years old at the time,

accompanied Faith to the

I

stration of black artists against the

demon-

first

Whitney Museum and then

to a series of free-for-all (Art Workers' Coalition) demonstra-

Museum

tions against the still

of

Modern

The museums were

Art.

reluctant to call in the police at that point. Yet, since the

Civil Rights

Movement, Black Power, and the

riots,

was no

it

longer tolerable to just "picket" in an orderly fashion, and these

demonstrations were very exciting and unpredictable, street theater

In

one

and

case,

creative I

mayhem, very

can remember

full

of

countercultural.

museum

administrators and

security guards standing helplessly by as Faith led a walking tour

through MoMA's

first-floor galleries

on the influence of African

modern

aspora on the so-called in

which academic and

torial staff

during which she lectured

and the

art

art of the African Di-

art displayed there.

critical expertise

The manner

and the museum's cura-

conspired to render the importance of that influence

either invisible, trivial, or instrumental shaped the force of her

remarks.

When we

finally

came

of a black artist were displayed

to a

—

room

in

which the works

perhaps two or three gouaches

from Jacob Lawrence's 1930s "Black Migration Series" designated

it

the location for the Martin Luther King

— Faith

Wing,

which was then the principal demand of the Art Workers' Coalition demonstrations at as

MoMA.

This wing was supposed to serve

an exhibition space that would revolve around

cation center, tive

which would

Americans

a cultural

train blacks, Puerto Ricans,

in art history

and museum administration. This

would not only lead to the canonization of some black and the hiring of nonwhite curators, but

mote an

increase in the

would be drawn

edu-

and Na-

it

number of young people of

to careers in art

and

artists

was intended to procolor

who

art education, to foster a

READING 1968 AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WHITEWASH

museums and "high

different relationship to

visit

the

museums every

culture" for the

who were

throngs of nonwhite public school children

For many, the Civil Rights Movement was their posure to the power of Rainbow Coalitions.

came during those

obliged to

year.

My

ex-

first

exposure

first

years of involvement with the Art Workers'

Coalition. But the lesson

was

a

hard one: there would be no

wing, no cultural center, only retrospectives for black

artists

Ro-

mare Bearden and Richard Hunt, which made them (no doubt because they were men) even

and Betye

The

more famous than Barbara Chase

Saar.

resulting tokenism of a few

black artists, or sic elitism

women

artists,

of the art world. Visual art

as the exclusive

thing seemed to be that

an

artist

few

for a

is still

perceived by

many

entertainment of the rich, as though the rest of

us didn't need something to look

as

museum shows

did not really change the intrin-

at.

my mother

was consistent with her

At the time, the important

was an

activist

politics,

whose work

although

pointedly

I

my own recollection of the 1960s in Black Macho. This was perhaps my greatest and most unfortunate oversight, since her politics were my politics in the

failed to

mention any such thing

1960s and even for

much

in

of the 1970s.

Now, however,

the im-

portant thing has become that as recollections of the 1960s

mount up — Todd James

Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope,

Miller's "Democracy

Siege of Chicago,

Is in

the Streets":

David Caute's The

forthcoming Daring

to

Politics:

Movement and

Be Bad:

A

Days of Rage,

Port

Huron

Year of the Barricades:

Through 1968, Sara Evans' Personal Liberation in the Civil Rights

From

to the

A Journey

The Roots of Women's

the

New

Left,

and the

History of the Radical Feminist

Movement, 1967-1975 by Alice Echols

— again we are facing the

Great American Whitewash in which the true breadth of the

Afro-American cultural presence and contribution either ceases to exist, or

becomes

so small

and

trivial,

we can

hardly see

it.

World map

in

equal area representation (Peters Projection). Copyright

Verlagsanstalt; English version by

Oxford Cartographers

Ltd.,

©

by Akademische

Oxford, U.K.

Janet Abu-Lughod

ON THE REMAKING OF HISTORY:

HOW TO REINVENT THE PAST

It

seems ironic that

book

1987

as recently as

entitled The European Miracle

in the face of stock

a

second edition of a

was published. Ironic because,

market "corrections"

were

that

still

seeking

bottom and of growing protectionism against what has been called the "Asian miracle" of Japan

countries of the Pacific rim,

we

and the newly industrializing

sense that the great

self-

congratulatory literature of the Rise of the West, which for so

may

long shaped our view of the past, should be reevaluated,

need to be "remade." Depending on one's point of view, process of revision

may prove

to be a blessing:

if

this

indeed the

power accumulated by Europe from the sixteenth century onward and then inherited by the United

States did not

from

of the West" need not

a

unique genius, perhaps the

"fall

emanate

be attributed to a decline in Western "virtue." Indeed, factors

may account

other than inherent capacity and intelligence the rise and

fall

to construct a

than

its

of nations in the world system. Perhaps

new

storia (the Italian

term

is

much more

for

we need honest

English counterpart).

To anyone concerned with creation of alternative histories

necessary and vital

issues of race

is

and gender, the

nothing new, and in

component of many

disciplines.

fact, a

But to the

traditional historian, the suggestion that historical writing

is

a

construction, perhaps as imaginative as any literary creation,

is

heresy.

(Do we

really

can certainly remake is

make up it.)

history? For

if

we

do, then

a

we

But what may be heresy to a historian

an ordinary working assumption to a sociologist. Scholarly in-

111

Janet Abu-Lughod |

many

terpretations of historical events are subject to

and distortions

biases

sociologists

of the same

must guard against when they

research contemporary events, whether through participant observation, the collection of narratives

surveys of knowledge and attitudes. difficulties are at least First,

what

from

participants, or via

The meta-methodological

of three kinds.

sociologists take as a truism

— namely, that ac-

counts of social events are "constructions" rather than descriptions isomorphic with

some

"objective reality"

when

studying ongoing social

there

is

life,

no archimedean point

same one used

as

is

the case

in historical reconstruction

system from which to

outside the

view historic "reality." The only antidote to

We

— has yet to be

methodology. Just

fully assimilated into historical

this

dilemma

the

is

in sociological research, namely, triangulation.

assume that somewhere between the accounts given, duly

dis-

counted for "distortions" due to partial perspectives and vested interests,

one can "find" an approximation of

social reality that

might have been constructed by an unbiased and virtually omniscient narrator, had such an observer for historical investigation

clear.

is

been

Any

history of "the other" or

actor or society can be only a partial telling of the

of

its

erudition. (This

Orientalism [1978]

is

lesson

from the perspective of only one

of a "world system" written

less

The

possible.

the point behind

storia,

Edward

regard-

Said's

and the work of the Indian historians who

call

themselves the "subalterns.")

Second,

we know from

are not only constructed but, backwards.

That

is, it is

sociological

what

tries to explain

work

that

all

accounts

worse, are constructed

only "after the fact" that narratives are

built, especially narratives that

One

is

seek to explain.

A

divorce occurs.

"why." One does not then construct the

equally plausible (and equally selective) account of

how happy

the marriage was. Freud perceptively acknowledged that diagnosis always precedes the etiological account. In history also,

only after events have run their course that

te

we

it is

build the narra-

ON THE REMAKING OF HISTORY

tive that

appears to

self-fulfilling

make them

How

inevitable.

to avoid these

hypotheses? Counterfactuals are one way to guard

against this, but they have an inauthentic ring.

It is

far better,

I

think, to stop along the way, assessing relative conditions at suc-

and then trying to analyze how these

cessive points in time

ous states could have

come

about.

If,

indeed, the end point

we need

inescapably determines the account, then ries of

end

among

accounts.

This

the

more important because

Think of an argument

ticipants,

ceived; their

tion they

own

may

at

the

is

our third

moment when

start at very different

a

acts are all "retaliatory."

have given

which

that escalates. Interviewing the par-

one notices that their narratives

Each begins

points.

determine

interests

where any narrator will begin his/her account, point.

to take a se-

same way we need to triangulate

points, in the

is all

vari-

is left

wrong Any

to

them

per-

is

prior provoca-

out of the account since

it

"predates" the narrative. Similarly, in accounting for a successful

outcome, the

false starts

and early defeats

will usually be ig-

nored, unless they have a twist. Consider the

champion of the world, asked to what he

An answer

that begins

bizarre — unless

came

"I

was

a very sickly

introduces a statement about

this. Similarly, a

fering

response such as

it

clearly detracts

baby" would be

how

he over-

"my opponent was

from indigestion and an abscessed tooth"

unlikely, since is

it

with

new heavyweight

attributes his success.

is

suf-

highly

from the accomplishment

that

enhanced not by the weakness of the defeated but only by the

strength of the victor.

What Here,

I

occupied

book

does

want to

my

all

of this have to do with remaking history?

relate

some of

attention for the past few years,

entitled Before Europe's Hegemony. In

plexly reticulated system of ized

the findings of a project that has

on

capitalist

and

it, I

now

published as a

analyze the

com-

world production and trade (organ-

state capitalist lines) that, in the

between ad 1250 to ad 1350

(e.g.,

century

the late thirteenth and early

Janet Abu-Lughod

fourteenth centuries, a period identified by Western historians as

"the commercial revolution"), integrated the economies of an

"archipelago of towns" located along several long-distance land

and sea routes that stretched western Europe. In

and farther Asia participant.

merely

when

time

a

way from China

a

to north-

— whose core lay in near still

marginal

time of general revolution;

it

into the preexistent world system.

certainly an anomalous finding since, as every

is

was

it

Europe underwent enormous changes as

became more integrated This

the

— Europe was but a recent and

was not, then,

It

all

world system

this

one

conversant with the Miracle of the West knows, Europe was

unique in forging capitalism out of feudalism. Furthermore, the

modern world system came tury

when Europe

into being in the long sixteenth cen-

achieved hegemony. According to this ortho-

doxy, Europe's leap into modernity was achieved solely by

own

strengths and virtues.

My

book seeks

accepted dogmas. But before offering a

how

such

a history got

One can earlier as

of

soon

as

West

"diagnosis"

is is

one examines

assumed, that complete.

is,

The

hegemony?"

selectively to

"

critically the chief

the

its

of these

we must

ask

mechanisms described problematic

The present hegemony

historical sociologists.

outcome

is

determined, the

task remains to account for why

outcome occurred. In short, the question rise to

"re-storicz,

all

first place.

see the operation of the

many Western

of the

written in the

to refute

is,

"Why

did the

this

West

Past historical events are then interrogated

answer

this question.

Two

biases immediately

follow. First, the narrative

outcome ble.

is

begun

just at the point

when

the

— not foreordained earlier — becomes relatively inevita-

Consider the time periods taken

such histories. The year 1400

marker we

find.

is

as the starting points for

almost always the earliest

The voluminous and

dazzling multi-volumes of

the corpus of Fernand Braudel's works begin with that year.

Even Eric Wolf's otherwise nonethnocentric work, Europe and

114

ON THE REMAKING OF HISTORY

the People

Most

Without History (1982), takes this as the starting point.

writers, however, begin even later with the sixteenth cen-

Max Weber, whose

tury.

Thus,

dealt

with business practices

first

in

dissertation had, in fact,

medieval Europe, then shifted

his focus to the later period. In the

introduction to his essays on

the Protestant ethic (1904-1905), for example, he

my

lengths (using an often involuted and, to to distinguish

between

(Oriental) capitalism, a

"true"

(i.e.,

went to great

mind, suspect

logic)

a preexisting but "spurious" spirit of

which he dismisses

European)

spirit

of

as

modern

mere

"avarice,"

capitalism

and

whose

source he traces to the religious reformation of the sixteenth century.

Immanuel

Wallerstein's account, The

System, shares this ambivalence.

1450,

it is

While the

Modern World-

narrative starts about

not until the sixteenth century that the process of Eu-

ropean domination

is

shown

to be established.

vered, originally seeing the origins of

Even Marx wa-

Western capitalism

thirteenth century but later revising his view by insisting

in the

on the

sixteenth century.

As earliest

I

argue on the basis of

moment

at

which

my own

a "rise of the

research, 1400

West"

to

hegemony could have been predicted with any

is

the

world

probability,

and

the early decades of the sixteenth century (the 1500s) constitute the

first

moment when European hegemony had become

tually inevitable.

the

Yuan dynasty

The in

late

fourteenth century saw the collapse of

China and

the mid-fifteenth century

vir-

a subsequent

Ming retrenchment,

marked the Ottoman spread

to

Con-

stantinople, the late fifteenth century witnessed the "discoveries"

of

Columbus and Vasco da Gama, while

circa 1510

marked the

decisive defeat in the Arabian Sea of the Egyptian-Indian fleet

Muslim

by Portuguese men-of-war. Everything followed from these

events. If

instead of starting the narrative at these points, however,

one looked

at

the impressive world system as

it

had evolved by

the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, one would,

I

115

argue, have been

more

likely to predict the continuation

and

in-

creased reticulation of an Asian-based world system, focused on the Indian

Ocean and China, than

Eurocentered one. to

know

not

why

My

the

to have foreseen a shift to the

problematic, then, was different.

West rose but why the East

fell,

wanted

I

for

fall it

did at the time when, and perhaps even before, the Portuguese

men-of-war entered tacked his

bill

Wittenberg

their waters,

and certainly before Luther

of particulars to the door of All Saints Church in

in 1517.

Western scholars not only begin the narrative "too

late"

but they take only partial testimony, thereby biasing the reconstructed account. In making this judgment one ought not to be harsh.

Given the challenge of making up

a credible story about

the past, there has been a natural and necessary division of labor

among

historians.

quires at least vists

At the minimum, "making up" history re-

two types of persons working

and the synthesizers,

The producers of the laborious task of

together, the archi-

at various levels.

the primary raw materials are engaged in

"new"

historical research;

it is

they

must spend years learning arcane languages and then

m

sift

who

through dusty archives in search of

a hitherto

undiscovered doc-

ument, meticulously piecing together the accidental sample of surviving fragments to

make modest

narrow parameters of time and

statements, qualified within

space. In the last analysis, these

workers become the informants, respondents synthesizers

who

happened" and why

it

was

you

will, for the

significant.

Synthesis takes place at

those

if

write the larger "fictive" accounts of "what

who compose

two

different levels. First, there are

the socio-economic or intellectual histories

of given societies or regions, and then there are the rarer synthesizers

who

attempt to construct global accounts covering

wider regions over longer

(whose

cycles.

Perhaps William McNeill

Rise of the West, published in 1963, gave us the

for our problematic)

and the

late

"name"

Fernand Braudel are today's

masters of this genre, as Arnold Toynbee was for the

last

generation.

Comparative

historical sociologists, including

and Wallerstein, work are thus chivists

at

an even higher

Max Weber

level of generality.

They

dependent upon both the raw materials harvested by

ar-

and the semi-processed goods prepared by regionally

117

Janet Abu-Lughod

and temporally specialized glossers whose "prejudices" go unrecognized, at least for a while. Furthermore, they cannot help

but be deeply influenced by the grand syntheses produced by the

was by Braudel). With each

globalists (as Wallerstein certainly

higher level of generality, there are reduced options for reconceptualization. That

we

are to get away

is

why

believe

I

it is

absolutely essential,

from Eurocentric views of the universe,

if

to

"pick our respondents" carefully and broadly.

This political

is

not as easy as

and economic;

sounds.

it

Scholars

works

work

in cognate languages

is

adopt the term used by

(to

this defect in Southeast

best in their

not merely

must, almost by definition, "de-

it

form" the history of the others van Leur to describe

is

intellectual as well. If history

it is

written by the victor, then

Hegemony

own

J.

C.

Asian studies).

languages and are able to access

more

easily

than those in very "for-

eign" tongues. Available in translation are accidental arrays of

documents

that someone thought

worthy of dissemination. Fur-

thermore, in seeking explanations from the plethora of data about the past,

we

naturally select out "relevant" facts

— their

relevance having been determined by our working hypotheses

drawn from

partial

and global

These are dangerous

glossers.

methods. If

someone presented us with what purported

count of

a football

team's supporters, clusions.

And

ing does.

It is

we can

to be an ac-

game, based on interviews with only one

we would

yet this

is

be justifiably skeptical of the con-

what much

historical sociological writ-

only by following the rules of triangulation that

escape the tautological process of confirming basic as-

sumptions. Non- Western histories and sources must be included

among

the "respondents"

Finally,

human

we must

behavior.

if

bias

is

not to reconfirm

take seriously what

Change

is

a

complex process

organism with potential for evolution,

vironment and the opportunities

118

we know

it

a

itself.

to be true of

that involves an

perception of an en-

offers,

an "objective" en-

ON THE REMAKING OF HISTORY

vironment that hinders or helps such development, action,

and

who may

a set of interacting others

block one's growth.

If

we

grant

this,

a capacity for

facilitate

or

then the "rise of the West"

cannot have been due exclusively or even predominantly to forces

"immanent"

in

Western

culture.

am amused by the contrast between Western "fall of Rome" and parallel accounts of the "rise I

the

accounts of of the

West." In the former, the prior existence of internal decadence is

always, albeit reluctantly, acknowledged, but the actual "fall"

is

always overwhelmingly attributed to Rome's inability to defend

itself against

barbarian incursions.

How

different,

however, are

the variables used to explain the "rise of the West." critically,

most

literature

congratulatory ring.

It

on

smug,

this subject has a

Examined self-

answers the question, crudely put:

won

"What

And even

was so special about the West

that

when

— to ask "what were the weak-

that question

is

inverted

nesses of the East that allowed

it

it

to be

the world?"

overcome and subordi-

nated so readily in the opening decades of the sixteenth century?"

— the variables turn out to be mirror images of those

used to prove Western superiority. The West was technologically advanced; the East

was "backward." The West was

institutionally developed in business techniques; the East

"irrational"

and "particularistic"

trial practices.

The West had

was monopolistic and In fact, had

all

statist.

in its

And

so on.

these things been true, there

underdeveloped

for the

would have

West

to attach

it-

and thirteenth centuries, nor would the

conquest of Asia have yielded so rich as

commercial and indus-

laissez-faire capitalism; the East

been no Asian-centered world system self to in the twelfth

was

as these

would not have been worth

a prize.

Had

the East been

accounts would lead us to believe, despoiling.

it

To the contrary, every

shred of historical evidence points to the exact opposite conclusion.

Take technology, for example. By the eleventh and twelfth

119

Janet Abu-Lughod

were already producing complex iron and

centuries, the Chinese

even

by highly advanced coal-powered techniques of metal-

steel

lurgy;

Europe would not reach

competence

cal

many

until

a

comparable

centuries

level of technologi-

By the eleventh

later.

century Chinese ships were navigated by the compass, a piece of

equipment that would not

second

diffuse to the Italians until the

half of the thirteenth century. Chinese

war

ships as early as the

twelfth or early thirteenth century were equipped with cannons

gunpowder

that used

fenses

trade,

were of

Europe

was

available

on European

vessels.

Middle Eastern tex-

the real "bread and butter" of medieval long-distance

tiles,

in

were

to propel missiles, long before such de-

a quality so

that, at least

a net exporter of

finished goods.

much

higher than what was produced

through the thirteenth century, Europe

primary products and a net importer of

European

silver

and gold continued to flow into

India throughout the fourteenth century,

and possibly

later, to

counterbalance the imports of Indian textiles and other items of trade.

In the areas of investment tions,

acumen and

business institu-

Westerners also had many lessons to learn from their

Eastern trading partners. Checks, investment partnerships and

commenda agreements,

credit, double-entry

exchange, and even paper state

were

all

money

bookkeeping,

of

bills

issued as legal tender by the

widely used in the East long before they were "in-

vented" in twelfth- to fourteenth-century

Italy (as

claimed by

Tawney, 1926). Checks were used in Sassanid Persia by the

and sixth centuries.

fifth

Commenda agreements were the usual way of

conducting the Arabian caravan trade even before the seventh century,

when

Islam codified and regularized these practices

with respect to credit and the apportioning of Bills

profits

and

risks.

of exchange and credit transfers were routine ways of con-

ducting long-distance trade in the advanced economies of the Orient. Merchant bankers formed investment partnerships with industrial producers

120

and wholesale

traders, served as

money

as-

ON THE REMAKING OF HISTORY

and changers, and kept careful records of debits and

sayers

backed by the govern-

credits for their customers. Paper script,

ment, was

legal

turies before

And

tender in twelfth-century Sung China

Europe would

finally,

Max Weber and Marx

many

cen-

system.

finally devise this

notwithstanding,

it is

very hard to find evidence in most cities of medieval Europe for

model of the emergence of an independent bourgeoisie en-

their

gaged in

laissez-faire capitalism,

with rural bases of power. At

unencumbered by

least in the

feudal lords

important towns of

France and Flanders, which provide two of the twelve "cases" in

my

book, one finds clear evidence of "statism," alliances (marital

and otherwise) between feudal and urban lies,

and even

elites, state

state capitalism. (In Venice, for

monopo-

example, the

state

even owned the basic means of production used by the marine mercantilist city

— namely, the galleys.) These systems were

really not very different

from those found

more

in the larger,

centralized imperial centers of, for example, Egypt and China.

The major

Weber Marx

difference was scale, not the sui generis difference

posited between the "true city" and the Oriental city or

posited between the Asiatic and Occidental capitalist

modes of production. If

we must

these allegations are indeed correct, then clearly

reformulate our questions.

The

rise

and

fall

of empires and even

of hegemonic powers within world systems have occurred before in history, just as the process

can

now

be observed in the

Japan and the Newly Industrializing Countries It is

rise of

— NICs — of Asia.

not legitimate "science" to seek explanations exclusively in

variables internal to the societies that rise

and

fall.

Nor

is

the

opposite approach, which takes historic cycles as "natural" events governed by their a

more

own

logic,

any more illuminating. Only

fine-grained contextual analysis of historic change that

pays attention to both extrinsic world-system transformations

and developments of more internal origin can

mum

satisfy the

mini-

requirements of credibility.

121

f Applying

this

kind of contextual analysis in

of global economic systems,

I

my own

have found that at least

study

two

"world systems" predated the one whose sixteenth-century evolutionary beginnings have been so cogently described by Wallerstein (1974)

and whose end now seems imminent:

Hellenic- Roman-Middle Eastern-Indian

around the beginning of the Christian

Ocean

era,

and

(1) the

partial system, (2) the

wider-

ranging eastern Mediterranean to China system from the ninth

century onward. While the ing, the at

second was

still

first

had aborted before

full

the end of the eleventh century, Western Europe attached

self to

through the

it

cial,

and

lated to

industrial

its

materials.

growth

radically

While

in

and

slaves

expanded access to new raw and processed

at first this

drained the European economy of

— chiefly

first

salt,

tim-

— eventually the imbalance of trade stimulated in-

dustrial production, largely of textiles in Flanders,

the

commer-

northwestern Europe, clearly re-

precious metals and some primary products ber,

it-

First Crusade.

This initiated a period of efflorescence of urban,

122

flower-

operating over extensive regions when,

which became

part of Europe to undergo an industrial revolution

—

all

I this

by the

late thirteenth

The heightened city-states in Italy to

and

early fourteenth centuries.

trade encouraged the inhabitants of a few

assume the banking and transport func-

tions for the continent during this Italian intermediaries,

lines of supplies that

ern Mediterranean:

Europe was firmly connected to Oriental

terminated

at

Sea and Central Asia;

same period. Through the

at

three points along the east-

Constantinople, which led to the Black at

ports on the Palestinian coast, which

connected through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf and then by sea to India

and even China; and

at

Alexandria, which led to

Cairo and then the Red Sea and Indian Ocean beyond.

Thus, during the second half of the thirteenth century,

which

consider to be a critical turning point, there was rapid

I

articulation

and reticulation of

height — around

and intermediate points into far

more

known. that

all

a true

"world system"

that, at its

1290-1300 — had drawn Western Europe, a

China,

production and exchange system

elaborate and extensive than the world had ever before

It

seemed probable

parts of the system

that this process

would

either

anced (which they appear to have been

would continue and

remain roughly

at

bal-

the time, each of the

123

Janet Abu-Lughod

major contenders dominant

in its

own

region) or that the

"heavyweights" would continue to be found mostly south and east of the Mediterranean.

This situation, however, proved unstable. Shortly after

had been effort. 1

set up,

As early

it

began to unravel.

as the 1330s, there

340s contractions were evident

1350s only remnants

— albeit

were

signs of strain,

many

points,

healthy

— were

at

still

by the

and by the

more complex and interwoven during the second

The

left.

of communication and trade that had broadened and

thirteenth century

it

was to prove an aborted

It

lines

grown

half of the

were fraying and snapping. By the second

half

of the fourteenth century, the trifold heartland system had been stripped

Egypt ter

down

to a single strand that connected Venice with

— the former dominating the European subsystem, the

lat-

monopolizing access to the Indian Ocean trade.

The

chief question

is

why. Any explanation that depends

upon long-term and deep-seated for so rapid a cycle of rise

"cultural" traits cannot account

and devolution; nor was the devolu-

where

tion greatest in the Orient, the region

it

would have been

predicted by Eurocentric theory. Indeed, the long cycles of In-

dian Ocean trade seem to have neither mirrored nor paralleled those identified for Europe. In

fact, it

withdrawal of the powerful Chinese 1435 (and dian

its

Ocean

from

until the final

that zone after

subsequent attrition through port rot) that the In-

cycle entered

Of one

was not

fleet

thing

I

am

its

downswing.

certain:

monocausal explanations are

completely inadequate. There was no single overriding fact like

some

that,

deus ex machina, accounted generally for the breakup.

Rather, there was a concatenation of trends that,

when

they

combined, shifted the vector of change.

Some

of these trends were major

— like the dissolution of

the Pax Mongolica that eventually split apart the circuit of trade that

had connected the land route across Central Asia with the

sea trade through southern Chinese ports, or like the

124

end of the

ON THE REMAKING OF HISTORY

Crusader

state at Acre,

which thus blocked Europe's land

between the Mediterranean and the Persian

minor

Gulf.

link

Some were

— like the conversion to Islam of the Ghazanids of Iraq,

which reduced

their tensions

with the Mamluks of Egypt, thus

permitting the reopening of the land route between Meso-

potamia and Egypt.

Some as the

of these trends were dramatically precipitant

— such

Black Death, which decimated populations from Central

The

Asia to the Mediterranean shores.

resultant labor shortage

caused transformations in business practices in Europe (the introduction of resident overseas "factors") and shook the bases of class structure in

ease

many

regions. In China, the devastations of dis-

weakened the power of the Mongol Yuan

state,

soon

after-

wards overthrown by the Ming.

Some changes were slower but such

as decisions to

in

ways more insidious,

export raw materials that had previously fed

local industries or to retain for local

production raw materials

formerly exported to others. This appeared in two

critical parts

of the world system in the early fourteenth century. First, the

Flemish textile industry was put into a permanent tailspin by English embargos on the export of high quality wool, needed to

produce the expensive cloth for which Flanders was famous. In reverse development, Italian merchants began to buy

a

up the raw

cotton and sugar that had formerly been processed in Syria and Egypt, thus undermining the industrial base of these societies. In Before Europe's Hegemony,

I

have studied the alterations

within and between the eight interlocking and overlapping subsystems that

I

believe cumulated synergistically to create the

near-global world system of the early fourteenth century, in or-

der to understand

Through usually

a

more

why

that system did not continue to

fine-grained historical inquiry than sociologists

employ and through

geopolitical context within

curred,

I

grow.

a

much

closer attention to the

which these

historical events oc-

have attempted to unpack the complex events that pre-

125

Janet Abu-Lughod

cipitated the abortion of this developed system

and

that allowed

the West, in the early sixteenth century, to gain hegemonic con-

next "world system" through a drastic reshaping of

trol over the

among them.

the subsystems and the connections

What

am

I

proposing

is

a rethinking of

The

able to "rise" in the sixteenth century. that the Eastern system

was already

power already

that Portuguese

the

is

by the

enormous vacuum

Ocean arena by

existed in the Indian

men-of-war entered

West was

argument

in severe decline

mid-fifteenth century and that, therefore, an

of

why

basic

that zone.

It

the time

was the unpre-

paredness of the East, even more than the strength of the West, that

was responsible for the ultimate outcome, the

West."

Of perhaps even

"rise of the

greater significance was the shift

the Mediterranean to the Atlantic,

from

which changed the location

of the center of gravity of the world system, hence to the greater

power of the countries of the was

shift

a

Atlantic rim.

To some extent,

this

temporary deviation from the usual focus of trade

from time immemorial, namely between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.

We may now this

time to the

be seeing a third

Pacific,

with a

of flanking countries and a

Ocean. Associated with

shift in

world geopolitics,

new enhancement

new backward

this shift

is

of the position

linkage to the Indian

the increased

hegemony of

Asian powers and, inevitably, of the west coast American ports that flank that ocean.

now undergoing

that led to almost five

The

first

ruled by

partial

We

might ask whether the world system

a crucial restructuring as significant as the

is

one

hundred years of "Western" hegemony.

world system focused on the Mediterranean,

Rome. The second world system moved

to the Indian

Ocean. The third, beginning roughly in the 1500s, centered on the Atlantic.

The new one appears

This brings us to our

"make up"

history,

make

as

126

it

up

we

we do

please.

to be shifting to the Pacific.

final point.

not have

The

line

While

full

it is

true that

and arbitrary

by Marx, to the

we

latitude to

effect that

ON THE REMAKING OF HISTORY

people

make

their history but not as they choose,

most relevant note on which to end. Something out there, and a knowledge of the past

our efforts to "read"

with

it,

interpret

may be

may be

real

is

the

going on

helpful to us in

and possibly even to deal

it,

it.

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129

Homi

Bhabha

K.

REMEMBERING FANON:

SELF, PSYCHE,

AND THE COLONIAL CONDITION

O my

body,

make of me

always a

man who

questions!

— Frantz Fanon The mention of Frantz Fanon

in left circles stirs a dim, deceiving

echo. Black Skin, White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, Toward the African Revolution

— these memorable

self-righteous rhetoric of "resistance"

titles

reverberate in the

whenever the

left

gathers

to deplore the immiseration of the colonized world. Repeatedly

used tily

as the

echo

idioms of simple moral outrage, Fanon's

a political spirit that

is

far

from

his

titles

emp-

own; they sound

the troubled conscience of a socialist vision that extends, in the

main, from an ethnocentric provincialism to large trade union internationalism.

When

that laborist line of vision

by the "autonomous" struggles of the der, or threatened

representation,

it

politics of race

challenged

and gen-

by problems of human psychology or cultural

can only make an empty gesture of solidarity.

Whenever questions of

race and sexuality

ganizational and theoretical "state,"

is

make

their

own

demands on the primacy of

or-

"class,"

and "party," the language of traditional socialism

is

quick to describe those urgent, "other" questions as symptoms of petty-bourgeois deviation, signs of the bad faith of socialist intellectuals.

The

ritual respect

the currency of his are part of the

titles in

ceremony of

accorded to the name of Fanon,

the

common

language of liberation,

a polite refusal.

Memories of Fanon tend

to the mythical.

He

is

either rev-

131

Homi

K.

ered as

Bhabha

as the

prophetic

spirit

of Third World Liberation or reviled

an exterminating angel, the inspiration to violence in the

Black Power movement. Despite his historic participation in the

Algerian revolution and the influence of his ideas on the race

and 1970s, Fanon's work

politics of the 1960s

sessed by one political

moment

will not be pos-

or movement, nor can

it

be

easily placed in a seamless narrative of liberationist history.

Fanon refuses tualities. It

is

commitment

to be so completely claimed by events or even-

the sustaining irony of his to the political task in

restless, inquiring It is

movement

work

that his severe

hand never restricted the

of his thought.

not for the finitude of philosophical thinking nor for

the finality of a political direction that to the ingenuity

and

we turn

artistry of Toussaint

to Fanon. Heir

and Senghor,

the iconoclasm of Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre,

Fanon

purveyor of the transgressive and transitional truth. yearn for the total transformation of

Man and

as well as is

the

He may

Society, but he

speaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of historical

change: from the area of ambivalence between race and sex-

uality; class;

and

out of an unresolved contradiction between culture and

from deep within the

struggle of psychic representation

social reality.

To read Fanon prefigures

to experience the sense of division that

is

— and fissures — the emergence of a truly radical

thought that never dawns without casting an uncertain dark. His voice

most

is

clearly

heard in the subversive turn of a familiar

term, in the silence of a sudden rupture: "The Negro

is

not.

Any

more than the white man." The awkward division that breaks his line of

thought keeps

alive the

dramatic and enigmatic sense of

the process of change. That familiar alignment of colonial subjects

— black/white,

Self/Other

—

is

disturbed with one brief

pause and the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed, whenever they are found to rest in the narcissistic myths cf nigritude or white cultural supremacy.

132

It is

this palpable pres-

REMEMBERING FANON

sure of division and displacement that pushes Fanon's writing to

the edge of things; the cutting edge that reveals no ultimate radi-

ance but, in his words, "exposes an utterly naked declivity

where an authentic upheaval can be born."

The

psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville

one such place

is

where, in the divided world of French Algeria, Fanon discovered the impossibility of his mission as a colonial psychiatrist: If psychiatry

is

the medical technique that aims to enable

owe

longer to be a stranger to his environment,

I

that the Arab, permanently an alien in his

own

of absolute depersonalization

.

.

it

to

man no

myself to affirm

country, lives in a state

The social structure existing

.

in

Al-

geria was hostile to any attempt to put the individual back where he 1

belonged.

The extremity of

person — this end — produces a restless urgency in

this colonial alienation of the

of the "idea" of the individual

Fanon's search for a conceptual form appropriate to the social

antagonism of the colonial relation. The body of

between

a Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, a

work

splits

phenomenological

affir-

his

mation of Self and Other, and the psychoanalytic ambivalence of the Unconscious,

its

turning from love to hate, mastery to servi-

tude. In his desperate,

erance,

doomed

search for a dialectic of deliv-

Fanon explores the edge of these modes

for thought: his

Hegelianism restores hope to history; his existentialist evocation of the "I" restores the presence of the marginalized; and his psychoanalytic framework illuminates the "madness" of racism, the pleasure of pain, the agonistic fantasy of political power.

As Fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible, transformations of truth and value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation,

its

displacement of time and person,

its

defilement of

culture and territory, refuses the ambition of any "total" theory

of colonial oppression.

The

Antillean evolue cut to the quick by

the glancing look of a frightened, confused white child; the ste-

reotype of the native fixed

at

the shifting boundaries between

133

Homi

Bhabha

K.

barbarism and

civility;

women

Negro: "Our

the insatiable fear and desire for the

mercy of Negroes

are at the

knows how they make

love"; the

symptoms of the

in the intrepid

God

Western

sexuality

—

it is

colonial condition that drive

Fanon from one conceptual scheme nial relation takes

.

deep cultural fear of the black

figured in the psychic trembling of

these signs and

.

.

to another, while the colo-

shape in the gaps between them, articulated

engagements of

the "scientific" fact

comes

his style.

As Fanon's text unfolds,

to be aggressed by the experience of

the street; sociological observations are intercut with literary ar-

and the poetry of liberation

tifacts,

is

brought up short against

the leaden, deadening prose of the colonized world.

What

this distinctive force of

is

forming even

as

I

Fanon's vision that has been

write about the division, the displacement, the

cutting edge of his thought?

It

comes,

I

believe,

from the

tion of the oppressed, as Walter Benjamin suggests;

guage of a revolutionary awareness that "the in

which we

live is

state of

not the exception but the

tain to a concept of history that

is

it is

in keeping

tradi-

the lan-

emergency

rule.

We

with

this insight."

must

at-

And

the state of emergency

The

struggle against colonial oppression changes not only the di-

is

also always a state of emergence.

rection of Western history, but challenges

of time as a progressive, ordered whole.

its

The

historicist "idea"

analysis of colonial

depersonalization alienates not only the Enlightenment idea of

"Man," but challenges the transparency of pregiven image of historicism

is

human knowledge.

human

the order of Western

disturbed in the colonial state of emergency, even

more deeply disturbed of the

If

social reality, as a

subject.

is

the social and psychic representation

For the very nature of humanity becomes

estranged in the colonial condition and from that "naked declivity"

it

emerges, not as an assertion of will nor as an evoca-

tion of freedom, but as an enigmatic questioning.

With

a

question that echoes Freud's what does woman want?, Fanon turns to confront the colonized world.

134

"What does

a

man want?"

he

REMEMBERING FANON

asks, in the introduction to Black Skin,

the black

To

man

this

down on

"What does

White Masks,

want?"

loaded question where cultural alienation bears

the ambivalence of psychic identification, Fanon re-

sponds with an agonizing performance of self-images: /

had

meet the white man's

to

An

eyes.

man of color

In the white world the

velopment of his bodily schema

.

.

.

unfamiliar weight burdened me.

encounters difficulties in the de-

I

was battered down by tom-toms,

cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, racial defects

my own

offfrom

presence

.

.

.

What

else

could

.

it

.

.

I took

be for

amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered

myselfJar

me but an

my

whole body

with black blood?

From within

the metaphor of vision complicit with a Western

metaphysic of lation.

The

Man emerges

the displacement of the colonial re-

black presence ruins the representative narrative of

Western personhood:

its

past tethered to treacherous stereo-

types of primitivism and degeneracy will not produce a history of

civil

progress, a space for the Socius;

and dislocated,

its

present,

dismembered

image of identity that

will not contain the

is

questioned in the dialectic of mind/body and resolved in the

epistemology of "appearance and reality." The white man's eyes

break up the black man's body and in that act of epistemic violence

its

own frame

of reference

is

transgressed,

its field

of vi-

sion disturbed.

"What does

the black

man

want?" Fanon insists and in

privileging the psychic dimension, he changes not only

understand by a

by which

we

political

demand but transforms

recognize and identify

its

human

what we

the very

agency.

means

Fanon

is

not principally posing the question of political oppression as the violation of a

human

"essence," although he lapses into such a

lament in his more existential moments. question of colonial

man

He

in the universalist

is

not raising the

terms of the

liberal-

humanist ("How does colonialism deny the Rights of Man?");

135

Homi

nor

K.

Bhabha

he posing an ontological question about Man's being

is

("Who

is

the alienated colonial man?"). Fanon's question

is

not

addressed to such a unified notion of history nor such a unitary

concept of Man.

It is

one of the original and disturbing

of Black Skin, White Masks that

experience. There that provide a

is

it

no master narrative or

background of

qualities

rarely historicizes the colonial

social

and

realist

perspective

historical facts against

which emerge the problems of the individual or

collective

psyche. Such a traditional sociological alignment of Self and Society or History

and Psyche

is

rendered questionable in Fanon's

who

identification of the colonial subject,

comes

is

historicized as

it

to be heterogeneously inscribed in the texts of history,

literature, science,

myth. The colonial subject

determined from without," Fanon writes.

and fantasy

It is

is

always "over-

through image

— those orders that figure transgressively on the — that Fanon most pro-

borders of history and the unconscious foundly evokes the colonial condition. In articulating the

problem of colonial cultural alienation

in the psychoanalytic language of ically

demand and

desire,

Fanon rad-

questions the formation of both individual and social au-

thority as they

Sovereignty.

come

The

to be developed in the discourse of Social

social virtues of historical rationality, cultural

cohesion, the autonomy of individual consciousness assume an

immediate, Utopian identity with the subjects upon confer a

civil status.

The

civil state is

the innate ethical and rational bent of the cial instinct is

the progressive destiny of

human mind;

human

from Nature to Culture. The

essary transition

individual interests to social authority sentative structure of a General Will

whom

they

the ultimate expression of

is

the so-

nature, the nec-

direct access

from

objectified in the repre-

— Law or Culture — where

Psyche and Society mirror each other, transparently translating their difference, social

without

loss, into a historical totality.

and psychic alienation and aggression

treason, violence

Forms of

— madness,

self- hate,

— can never be acknowledged as determinate

REMEMBERING FANON

and constitutive conditions of

civil authority,

bivalent effects of the social instinct

itself.

or as the am-

They

are always ex-

plained away as alien presences, occlusions of historical progress, the ultimate misrecognition of Man.

Man and

For Fanon such a myth of tally

undermined

Society

in the colonial situation,

fundamen-

is

where everyday

exhibits a "constellation of delirium" that mediates the social relations of feriority, the

its

white

subjects:

man

"The Negro enslaved by

life

normal his in-

enslaved by his superiority alike behave

accordance with a neurotic orientation." Fanon's demand for

in

a psychoanalytic explanation

emerges from the perverse

reflec-

tions of "civil virtue" in the alienating acts of colonial gover-

nance: the visibility of cultural "mummification" in the colonizer's

which

avowed ambition to

civilize

or modernize the native,

results in "archaic inert institutions [that function]

under

the oppressor's supervision like a caricature of formerly fertile institutions"; or the validity of violence in the very definition of

the colonial social space; or the viability of the febrile, phantas-

matic images of racial hatred that out in the

wisdom

come

to be absorbed

laborations of political

and psychic violence within

alienation within identity, drive

Fanon

civic virtue,

to describe the splitting

of the colonial space of consciousness and society as a

and acted

of the West. These interpositions, indeed col-

marked by

"Manichean delirium."

The suggest,

is

representative figure of such a perversion,

the image of post-Enlightenment

man

I

want to

tethered to, not

confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man, that splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his aries, repeats his action at a distance, disturbs

bound-

and divides the

very time of his being. This ambivalent identification of the racist

world

— moving on two planes without being in the least

embarrassed by ness

it,

as Sartre says of the anti-Semitic conscious-

— turns on the idea of Man as

his alienated image,

and Other but the "Otherness" of the

not Self

Self inscribed in the per-

137

Homi

Bhabha

K.

And

verse palimpsest of colonial identity.

it is

that bizarre figure

of desire, which splits along the axis on which

turns, that

it

compels Fanon to put the psychoanalytic question of the desire of the subject to the historic condition of colonial man.

"What Fanon

fact,"

wise.

is

often called the black soul

reveals the

It

relation

and

arti-

representations stage the division of

— black and white — of indi-

What emerges from

social authority.

the figurative

make such an argument,

have used to

I

white man's

that enacts the artifice of "identity"; a divi-

sion that cuts across the fragile skin

language

a

deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial

itself; its split

"body" and "soul"

vidual

is

writes. This transference, I've argued, speaks other-

are three condi-

tions that underlie an understanding of the process of identification in the analytic of desire. First: to exist is to

Otherness,

its

be called into being in relation to an

look or locus.

It is

a

demand

that reaches

to an external object and, as Jacqueline Rose writes, "it relation of this

becomes the that

demand

to the place of the object

it

basis for identification." This process

exchange of looks between native and

outward is

the

claims that

is

visible in

settler that structures

their psychic relation in the paranoid fantasy of boundless pos-

and

session

meet he

its

familiar language of reversal:

'They want to take our

who

does not dream

the settler's place."

Other

"when

[the settler] ascertains bitterly, always place.'

true for there

is

defensive,

no native

once a day of setting himself up in

at least

It is

It is

their glances

on the

always in relation to the place of the

that colonial desire

is

articulated: that

is,

in part, the

phantasmatic space of "possession" that no one subject can singly

occupy

that permits the

dream of the inversion of

roles.

Second: the very place of identification, caught in the tension of

demand and

the native

is

desire,

is

a space of splitting.

his place in the slave's avenging anger. is

138

The

fantasy of

precisely to occupy the master's place while keeping

not, for example, a neat division;

"Black skins, white masks"

it is

a doubling, dissembling

REMEMBERING FANON

image of being

two

in at least

places at once that

possible for the devalued, insatiable evolue (an rotic,

Fanon claims)

makes

it

im-

abandonment neu-

to accept the colonizer's invitation to

identity: "You're a doctor, a writer, a student, you're different,

you're one of us."

precisely in that ambivalent use of

It is

— to be different from those that are different makes you the same — that the Unconscious speaks of the form of Oth"different"

shadow of

erness, the tethered

deferral

and displacement.

It is

not the Colonialist Self or the Colonized Other, but the disturb-

between

ing distance in

Otherness

that constitutes the figure of colonial

— the white man's artifice inscribed on the black

man's body.

It is

in relation to this impossible object that

emerges the liminal problem of colonial identity and

its

vicissitudes. Finally, as has already

ures of

my

never the affirmation of a pregiven identity,

is

self-fulfilling

prophecy

—

it is

always the production of an

"image" of identity and the transformation of the subject in

suming that image. The demand of for an Other

identification

— that

illustrations above,

identity that bears the

from which

mark

we

Look a Negro

all

.

.

.

Mama, I

body

.

.

It

see the

already

historicity

poral schema crumbled, .

of splitting in that "Other" place like

mo-

Lacan, the primary

of certain uncer-

certifies its existence

and

dismemberment.

longer laugh, because

and above

inferred

always the return of an image of

The "atmosphere

limits of language.

its

as-

to be

a repetition of the self lie in the desire of the look

tainty" that surrounds the

threatens

is

comes. For Fanon,

it

ments of such and the

is,

— entails the representation of the subject in the

differentiating order of Otherness. Identification, as

from the

fig-

account of desire and Otherness, the question of

identification

never a

been disclosed by the rhetorical

.

its

.

.

Negro! I'm frightened

know

Then

.

.

.

I

could no

there were legends, stories, history

assailed at various points, the cor-

place taken by a racial epidermal schema

was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the 139

Homi

K.

Bhabha

third person but in a triple person

for

my

race,

for

my

.

.

In reading Black Skin, White Masks,

difference ity,

I

.

was responsible for

my

body,

ancestors.

crucial to respect the

it is

between "personal identity"

as

an intimation of

real-

or an intuition of being, and the psychoanalytic problem of

identification that, in a sense, always begs the question of the

subject

man

— "What does a man want?" The emergence of the hu-

subject as socially and psychically authenticated depends

upon the

negation of an originary narrative of fulfillment or an

imaginary coincidence between individual interest or instinct

and the General Will. Such binary, two-part

identities function

One

in a kind of narcissistic reflection of the

in the

Other

that

is

confronted in the language of desire by the psychoanalytic process of identification. For identification, identity

a priori, nor a finished product;

it is

is

never an

only ever the problematic

process of access to an "image" of totality.

The

discursive condi-

tions of this psychic image of identification will be clarified

we

if

think of the perilous perspective of the concept of the image

it-

— as point of identification — marks the of an ambivalence. representation always spatially — makes present something that absent — and temporarily deferred — the representation of a time that always elseself.

For the image

site

Its

split

is

it

is

it is

is

where, a repetition. The image authority and identity;

it

is

only ever an appurtenance to

must never be read mimetically

as the

"appearance" of a "reality." The access to the image of identity is

only ever possible in the negation of any sense of originality or

plenitude, through the principle of displacement and differentia-

tion (absence/presence; representation/repetition) that always

renders

it

a liminal reality.

The image

substitution, an illusion of presence

metonym,

a sign of

its

absence and

edge of meaning and being, from

is

140

once a metaphoric that

loss. It is

same token

precisely

this shifting

erness within identity, that Fanon asks:

want?"

at

and by

from

a this

boundary of oth-

"What does

a black

man

REMEMBERING FANON

When

encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness under-

it

goes the experience of desire ered. I

am

.

.

.

As soon

not merely here and now, sealed into thingness.

somewhere

else

and for something

.

occupied space.

I

.

I

I

else.

of my negating activity in so far as .

as 1 desire I ask to he consid-

demand

I

am for

that notice be taken

pursue something other than

I

moved towards

the other

.

.

.

and

life

the evanescent

other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared.

Nausea.

From

that

overwhelming emptiness of nausea, Fanon makes

answer: the black

man

wants the objectifying confrontation with

otherness; in the colonial psyche there

avowal of the negating, splitting the Other

must not be imaged

fixed phenomenological point,

is

moment

as

an unconscious of desire.

The

dis-

place of

Fanon sometimes suggests

opposed to the

sents a culturally alien consciousness.

self,

as a

that repre-

The Other must be seen

the necessary negation of a primordial identity

psychic

his

as

— cultural or

— that introduces the system of differentiation that en-

ables the "cultural" to be signified as a linguistic, symbolic, historic reality.

If,

as

I

have suggested, the subject of desire

simply a Myself, then the Other

is

never simply an

is

It-self a

never font

of identity, truth, or misrecognition.

As

a principle of identification, the

of objectivity but

its

representation

— be

Other bestows

the social process of

it

the law or the psychic process of the Oedipus bivalent, disclosing a lack.

tional distinction

tween "Justice" and flict

For instance, the

between "the

displays the otherness of

Law

judicial

letter

itself;

and

a degree

—

is

always

common,

am-

conversa-

spirit" of the

Law

the ambiguous grey area be-

procedure

is,

quite literally, a con-

of judgment. In the language of psychoanalysis, the

Law

of

the Father or the paternal metaphor, again, cannot be taken at its

word.

It is

a process of substitution

and exchange

that in-

scribes a normative, normalizing place for the subject; but that

metaphoric access to identity

and repression, precisely

is

exactly the place of prohibition

a conflict of authority. Identification, as

141

Homi

K.

it is

Bhabha

spoken

in the desire of the Other,

terpretation, for

it is

one-self, the elision of If

is

always a question of in-

the elusive assignation of myself with a

person and place.

the differentiating force of the Other

is

the process of

the subject's signification in language and society's objectification in

how

Law, then

can the Other disappear? Can desire, the mov-

ing spirit of the subject, ever evanesce? In his

more

analytic

mode, Fanon can impede the explora-

tion of these ambivalent, uncertain questions of colonial desire.

The

state of

emergency from which he writes demands more

surgent answers,

more immediate

identifications.

in-

At times Fanon

attempts too close a correspondence between the mise-en-scene of

unconscious fantasy and the phantoms of racist fear and hate that stalk the colonial scene; he turns too hastily

from the am-

bivalences of identification to the antagonistic identities of political alienation

name

and

cultural discrimination; he

the Other, to personalize

colonial racism

its

is

too quick to

presence in the language of

— "the real Other for the white man

continue to be the black man.

And

dream

in Fanon's words, to restore the

time and cultural space can, brilliant illustrations of the

is

and

will

conversely." These attempts,

at times,

to

its

proper

political

blunt the edge of Fanon's

complexity of psychic projections in

the pathological colonial relation. Jean Veneuse, the Antillean evolue, desires

not merely to be in the place of the white

down on

but compulsively seeks to look back and that position. fears

man

himself from

The white man does not merely deny what he

and desires by projecting

it

on "them": Fanon sometimes

forgets that paranoia never preserves

its

position of power, for

the compulsive identification with a persecutory "They"

ways an evacuation and emptying of the

is al-

"I."

Fanon's sociodiagnostic psychiatry tends to explain away the ambivalent turns and returns of the subject of colonial desire, its

masquerade of Western

perspective.

It is

sights: that the 142

as if

Fanon

is

Man and

the "long" historical

fearful of his

space of the body and

its

most

radical in-

identification

is

a repre-

REMEMBERING FANON

sentational reality; that the politics of race will not be entirely

contained within the humanist myth of sity

or historical progress, for

its

Man

or economic neces-

psychic effects question such

human

forms of determinism; that social sovereignty and

only realizable in the order of Otherness.

tivity are

subjec-

as if the

It is

question of desire that emerged from the traumatic tradition of the oppressed has to be denied, at the end of Black Skin, White

make way

Masks, to nal as

Why

it is

for an existentialist

humanism

that

is

as ba-

beatific:

not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other,

to explain the other to myself?

want the world

to recognize,

.

.

.

At

the conclusion of this study, I

with me, the open door of every

consciousness.

Such

a

deep hunger for humanism, despite Fanon's insight into

the dark side of

Man, must be an overcompensation

closed consciousness or "dual narcissism" to

the depersonalization of colonial man: "There one

body, with one's blackness or one's whiteness in cry,

own

each sealed into his

and then

a flash or so."

Hegelian sense with

its

It is

particularity

this flash of

indifference: it

.

.

ity." In the

.

"And

yet the

The former

— with,

body to

lies

where there

is is

now

true,

it is

— in — that

"recognition"

Negro knows there

slave

attributes

full narcissistic

transcendental, sublative spirit

to ignite in the colonial relation

wants

for the

which he

its

fails

only narcissistic a difference.

He

needs a challenge to his human-

absence of such a challenge, Fanon argues, the colo-

nized can only imitate, never identify, a distinction nicely

by the psychoanalyst Annie Reich: child holds the

newspaper

"It

is

imitation

like his father. It is

.

.

.

made

when

identification

the

when

the child learns to read." In disavowing the culturally differentiated condition of the colonial world or disappear" — the colonizer

is

— in demanding

"Turn white

himself caught in the ambivalence

of paranoic identification, alternating between fantasies of mega-

lomania and persecution.

However, Fanon's Hegelian dream for

a

human

reality in-

Homi

Bhabho

K.

ironized, even

itself-for-itself is

mocked, by

view of the Man-

his

ichean structure of colonial consciousness and

What he

division.

its

nondialectical

says in The Wretched of the Earth of the

demog-

raphy of the colonial city reflects his view of the psychic structure of the colonial relation.

The

and

native

settler zones, like

the juxtaposition of black and white bodies, are opposed, but

No

not in the service of "a higher unity." ble,

conciliation

he concludes, for of the two terms, one

is

possi-

superfluous.

is

No, there can be no reconciliation, no Hegelian "recognition,"

no simple, sentimental promise of

the You."

Can

there be

life

a humanistic

without transcendence?

without the dream of perfectibility? Unlike Fanon, nondialectical

moment

"world of

Politics

think the

I

of Manicheanism suggests an answer. By

— in the company of becomes that bizarre colonial figure, the tethered shadow —

following the trajectory of colonial desire

it

possible to cross, even to shift the

Where but

there

is

no human

nature,

Manichean boundaries. hope can hardly spring

emerges surely and surreptitiously

it

eternal;

in the strategic return

of that difference that informs and deforms the image of identity, in the

margin of Otherness that displays

identification.

There

may be no Hegelian negation but Fanon must sometimes be minded

that the disavowal of the

re-

Other always exacerbates the

"edge" of identification, reveals that dangerous place where identity

and aggressivity are twinned. For denial

tive process; a left its

is

always a retroac-

/id^-acknowledgment of that Otherness that has

traumatic mark. In that uncertainty lurks the white

masked black man; and from such ambivalent black skin, white masks

—

it is

possible,

I

identification

believe, to

—

redeem the

pathos of cultural confusion into a strategy of political subversion.

We

cannot agree with Fanon that "since the racial drama

played out in the open the black

conscious," but that places at once

is

man

has no time to

a provocative thought. In

make

it

occupying two

— or three in Fanon's case — the depersonalized,

dislocated colonial subject can

become an

incalculable object,

is

un-

REMEMBERING FANON

quite literally, difficult to place.

unify

its

message nor simply identify

egy of colonial desire

to stage the

is

mask

point at which the black

a tension of

and desire

slips

authority cannot

subjects.

its

drama of

For the

strat-

identity at the

to reveal the white skin. At

between the black body and the white body, there

that edge, in is

The demand of

meaning and being

— that

— or some would say, demand

the psychic counterpart to that "muscular

is

tension" that inhabits the native body:

The symbols of social order racks, military

—

the police, the bugle calls in the bar-

— are at one and

parades and the waving flags

same

the

time inhibitory and stimulating: for they do not convey the message

"Don't dare to budge"; rather, they cry out "Get ready to attack."

It is

from

that tension

— both psychic and political — that a

egy of subversion emerges.

It is

a

not to unveil the fullness of

Man

form of power

that

tation.

It is

identity it is

a

and authority,

in the

mode

strat-

of negation that seeks

but to manipulate his represenis

exercised at the very limits of

mocking

spirit

the lesson taught by the veiled Algerian

of mask and image;

woman

in the

course of the Revolution as she crossed the Manichean lines to claim her liberty. In Fanon's essay, "Algeria Unveiled," the colonizer's

attempt to unveil the Algerian

turn the

woman

symbol of resistance;

veil into a

of camouflage, a means of struggle — the

The

veil that

limits of

it

does not simply

becomes

veil

a technique

conceals bombs.

once secured the boundary of the home

woman — now masks

activity, linking the

Arab

city

the

woman

in

— the

her revolutionary

and the French quarter, trans-

gressing the familial and colonial boundary. As the "veil"

is

lib-

erated in the public sphere, circulating between and beyond cultural

and

social

norms and

spaces,

it

becomes the object of

paranoid surveillance and interrogation. Every veiled writes Fanon, became suspect.

And when

the veil

is

woman, shed in or-

der to penetrate deeper into the European quarter, the colonial police see everything and nothing.

An

Algerian

woman

is

only,

145

Homi

K.

after

Bhabha

a

all,

handbag

woman. But

the Algerian Jic/cn'

an arsenal and in her

is

she carries her hand-grenades.

Remembering Fanon disorientation.

a process of intense discovery

is

Remembering

tion or retrospection.

a painful

It is

gether of the dismembered past to the present.

It is

such

a

and

never a quiet act of introspec-

is

memory

re-membering, a putting to-

make

sense of the trauma of

of the history of race and ra-

cism, colonialism and the question of cultural identity, that

Fanon

reveals

with greater profundity and poetry than any other

What he

writer.

achieves,

nized, deeply fers the

woven

master and

"It

nize the

is

for a

something

far greater: for

native, the colo-

deeper reflection of their inter-

hope of

a difficult, even dangerous, free-

through the effort to recapture the

self, it is

men

that

is

into the psychic pattern of the West, he ofslave a

positions, as well as the

dom:

believe,

I

image of the Negro, the

in seeing the phobic

self

and to

scruti-

through the lasting tension of their freedom

will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence

human

world."

Nobody

writes with

more honesty and

freedom

which the

sight of this lasting tension of

peremptory

in

self

— disavows an image of

in-

— the

itself as

an

originary past or an ideal future and confronts the paradox of

its

own

self of the

present

making. For Fanon, in Black

Skin,

White Masks, there

is

the intricate

irony of turning the European existentialist and psychoanalytic traditions to face the history of the

Negro

that they

had never

contemplated, to face the reality of Fanon himself. This leads to a meditation

tion

—

on the experience of dispossession and

psychic and social

disloca-

— that speaks to the condition of the

marginalized, the alienated, those surveillance of a sign of identity

who

have to live under the

and fantasy

that denies their dif-

ference. In shifting the focus of cultural racism

from the

politics

of nationalism to the politics of narcissism, Fanon opens up a

margin of interrogation that causes tity

m

and authority. Nowhere

is

a subversive slippage of iden-

this slippage

more

visible

than in

REMEMBERING FANON

work

his

itself,

where

a range of texts

and traditions

— from the of

classical repertoire to the quotidien, conversational culture

racism

where

— vie to utter that is

last

word

No-

that remains unspoken.

this slippage more significantly experienced than in the

impossibility of inferring

from the

texts of

Fanon

a pacific

image

of "society" or the "state" as a homogeneous philosophical or

The

representational unity.

"social"

is

always an unresolved en-

semble of antagonistic interlocutions between positions of power

and poverty, knowledge and oppression, history and veillance

that

we

and subversion.

for this reason — above

It is

fantasy, surelse

all

—

should turn to Fanon.

Today, as a range of culturally and racially marginalized

groups readily assume the mask of the black, not to deny their

announce the important

diversity but to audaciously

cultural identity

and

its

difference, the

urgent. As political groups

from

artifice

of

need for Fanon becomes

different directions gather un-

der the banner of the black, not to homogenize their oppression

but to

make

of

it

a

common

cause, a public image of the identity

of otherness, the need for Fanon

becomes urgent. Urgent,

in or-

der to remind us of that crucial engagement between mask and

image and

identity,

identification,

from which comes the

lasting

tension of our freedom and the lasting impression of ourselves as others.

The time

has

with

a question.

How

can

a

come

How

human

to return to Fanon, as always,

can the

being

live

human world

I

believe,

live its difference?

Other-wise?

Notes

1.

Fanon's use of the

word "man"

of humanness, inclusive of

the question of gender difference. site

usually connotes a phenomenological quality

man and woman

and, for that very reason, ignores

The problem stems from Fanon's

desire to

the question of sexual difference within the problematic of cultural

difference

— to give them a shared origin — which

is

suggestive, but often sim-

147

Homi

Bhabha

K.

plifies

the question of sexuality. His portrayals of white

women

often collude

with their cultural stereotypes and reduce the "desire" of sexuality to the desire for sex, leaving

unexplored the elusive function of the "object" of

chapter 6 of Black

Skin,

White Masks, he attempts a somewhat

desire. In

more complex

reading of masochism, but in making the Negro the "predestined depository of this

aggression" (my emphasis) he again preempts a fuller psychoanalytic discus-

sion of the production of psychic aggressivity in identification and

its

relation to

cultural difference, by citing the cultural stereotype as the predestined

the sexual drive.

Of the woman

of color he has very

little

to say. "I

aim of

know noth-

ing about her," he writes in Black Skin, White Masks. This crucial issue requires

an order of psychoanalytic argument that goes well beyond the scope of ticle.

I

to elide

148

this ar-

have therefore chosen to note the importance of the problem rather than it

in a facile charge of "sexism."

Above and page 159 from Breakdowns, by Art Spiegelman. Copyright

©

1972 by Art Spiegelman;

reproduced by permission of Roter Stern, Frankfurt.

Pages 155, 156, 170 and 172 from Maus: Tale,

by Art Spiegelman. Copyright

©

A

Survivor's

1986 by Art

Spiegelman; reproduced by permission of Pantheon

Books, a division of

Random House,

Inc.,

New

York.

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

THEWELEIT AND SPIEGELMAN: OF MEN AND MICE

Too young

we

to

to have

make

known World War

but born of

II,

What can we

of our parents' history?

the great testimonies of survival in the death Levi, Bettelheim?

What

what are

it,

possibly add to

camps

— to Wiesel,

psychoanalytic insight, one generation

removed, could possibly equal those gleaned from the actual subjects of history,

countless interviews, vivid confessions,

The

Inside the Third Reich.

from

are retired

active

war

is

Speer

a

Among

on

chance

last

trial,

our

born.

It

can't

its

approach

object, a its

new kind

subject directly.

much

It

speaks sometimes not about the war but in spite of

know

how now.

it

about what

it

doesn't as about what

not what happened in that war, but

was prepared

Its critical

in language,

idiom,

its

mass culture forms of the

War

II itself is

enormous necessity in

what use

analytical tools fifties

and

how

it is

thinks of

World War

II

work on

It

worries

it

it.

say.

wants

It

was desired;

to speak of

it

were sharpened on the

sixties. It

not just a memory, but a

of

does have to

it

knows

memory

that

World

industry, with

political value. Bitburg, Gaza, Faurisson,

it

last

lie.

as

to

who was

they've borne their children.

As memory retreats from the

from

subjects of these books, this history,

life,

them, Klaus Barbie was perhaps our to catch the

— The — from

from the great diagnostic monuments

Mass Psychology of Fascism, The Authoritarian Personality

not in terms of

Le Pen: by

memory

but

terms of forgetting. All this could be said to apply

most acutely to two

seemingly disparate books that have appeared in an American

151

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

context in the past two years. Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies

about the Freikorps and the

is

Maus by Art Spiegelman about

S.S.,

the victims of Auschwitz. Male Fantasies

is

a psychoanalytic read-

ing extended over hundreds of pages and illustrated with art-

work, advertisements, and a hundred other visual documents.

Maus by

is

a

cartoon where Jews are represented by mice, Germans

by

cats, Poles

balloons.

an animal

It's

come out

Maus, the animals' words

pigs. In

fable,

an allegory adapted to the Ameri-

can comic strip genre. In Male

Fantasies,

German

Freikorps of-

speak their most revolting fantasies about murder and

ficers

rape, conquest and rock hard resistance to a slimy female

communist menace,

a

For one, both

common?

books under the sign of paternal

start their

violence, maternal pain. For Theweleit

was a good man,

tally lavished as

first lessons I

too,

and a

pretty

it's

would one day come in

my own

mother

— were

setting out to write about the violent

his preface

tory that ject

is

as

from

as

his defeating family

world of

is

child,

his father.

romance to

comes with the completion of

152

be-

kind of vic-

a

But

his thesis.

his pro-

What

follows

as the Freikorps,

warriors

became top-ranking

who

War

I.

War

I

soldiers

fought to put

Two

of

them

down com-

(Hoss,

So while their legacy

Goeb-

Nazis; one, Ernst Jiinger, a respected

modernist writer; one of them even became an anti-Nazi ter.

He

the thesis he has completed, a thesis based on a

munist insurgents after World bels)

an abused

not in any obvious sense an autobiography.

the preface

the beat-

1

an autobiography, taking us in the few pages of

very specific topic: the group of post- World

known

good, were the

— she considered

the second.

Theweleit announces himself in his preface

book

fascist father:

to recognize as lessons in fascism.

my

ings necessary but tempered them

bad

a

good fascist. The blows he bru-

a matter of course, andjor

The instances of ambivalence

gins his

and

red flood. What, beyond their age, could

Theweleit and Spiegelman have in

He

in

is

resis-

mixed, even inconsistent, their writ-

THEWELEIT AND SPIEGELMAN

ings as a

whole sent an enabling message and

set

an emotional

tone for the rise of National Socialism. Theweleit works from a

broad corpus of novels, biographies, and journals written by Freikorps veterans. like

The books he quotes have

sensational titles

The Red Flood and Blood-Brass-Coal, and he organizes their

themes into

titles

and

The White Nurse; Exploding

subtitles:

Earth/Lava; Defense Against Slime, the Morass, Pulp.

He

does,

furthermore, what we're usually taught in graduate school not to

do

academic writing: mentions everything that comes into

in

head. Lets

it

flow. Theweleit's

document

is

powerful in

"Nuremberg

length; there's a kind of willful

his

its

trials effect"

where

the banality of the examples and their constant repetition force the reader into acknowledging the ubiquity of psychic horror.

Spiegelman's animal tale

toon form and of the dialogue

is

while telling

father's life

Maus

is

mony,

simplicity of the car-

you over the head with the

strength of allegory. Art Spiegelman

Queens and the narrator of

The

brief.

hits

is

an American from

his cartoon.

He

tells

both an autobiography, a biography, and

for

it is

the story of his

and showing how he gets the

Spiegelman's father Vladek

who

story:

a novel of testi-

supplies the nar-

ration, the survivor's tale, while

Spiegelman himself elaborates

the frame. Vladek Spiegelman

a survivor of Auschwitz. His

is

wife also survived, but she has committed suicide before the story begins

— or rather the memory of her suicide intrudes into

Spiegelman's attempt to get his father to strips

down

father to the

tell

their story.

Maus

the conversations between Art Spiegelman and his

minimum, and

yet the small

book speaks volumes

about the death camps, the postwar struggle for Jewish redefinition

and

survival,

Maus

is

about war, memory, and forgetting.

structured around a series of "simple conversa-

tions." Spiegelman's father doesn't fault, repressive,

the kind of guy

want to

who

tells his

he

is

stingy to a

grabs paper towels from

restrooms so he won't have to buy napkins. ing the story he

talk;

He

keeps interrupt-

son about the camps while he takes his

153

"

Alice

Yaeger Kaplan

up old telephone wire, throws

picks

pills,

garbage and gives him his old one. he's inculcated the mistrust in his

But

his son's coat in the

doesn't trust anyone and

son from a very young age.

some of

the story takes over. Art Spiegelman shows

finally

his first

He

drawings for Maus to his father, who's really happy

—

thinks Art will be successful and famous like Walt Disney. But

while the father

may be

comic, he

more ambivalent when

far

is

The

of the war.

enthusiastic about the creation of a

story of Vladek's

it

comes

proceeds

life

memory

to the

at regular inter-

toward the gates of Auschwitz, but the narrative frame of

vals

Maus

builds

ther against

up

to a single act of violence

memory: he has destroyed

committed by the

his wife's diary

fa-

from the

camp. Father: After Anja died I

These papers had too

had

to

Son: You burned them? Christ!

you

.

.

Father:

you

I

.

.

.

burned them.

save tons of worthless shit,

and

.

Yes, it's

even looked

Son:

make an order with everything

many memories. So

a shame! For years they were laying there and nobody

in.

Did you

ever read

any of them?

.

.

.

Can you remember what

she

wrote? Father: No. I looked said,

Son:

"1 wish

God

my

in,

son,

but

I don't

remember

when he grows

.

.

.

only I

know

that she

up, he will be interested by this.

DAMN you! You—you MURDERER! How

the hell could

you do such a thing!! Father: Ach.

2

The Maus published by Pantheon eventual two-part book. ent, at

It

the gates of Auschwitz saying he flash

is

double

the

first

part of an

register: the pres-

knew he would be

forward to Queens and to

confession about the diaries. little

1986 a

our present, and the flashback to 1944. Spiegelman's father

then an abrupt

154

in

ends on

The

last

gassed and

his survival, his

frame of Maus

is

a

narrow

frame of Art Spiegelman, mouse-cartoonist, walking out of

house with portfolio in hand and

his father's

coming out of reads

".

.

his

head

as

he thinks about

Murderer." The reader

.

is

left

a single balloon

his father.

The balloon

with the impossible

double register: the certainty of Vladek's extermination and the

misery his survival has inflicted upon his family.

One

man

of

many

extraordinary features of Maus

is

gets the voices right, he gets the order of the

that Spiegel-

words

right,

he manages to capture the intonations of Eastern Europe spoken

by Queens.

He

puts us in the cultural space of those impossible

father-son dialogues without ever being obvious about

why

very hard to describe

Maus works

so well.

It

it.

It's

the anthropomorphic universe of

begins

on

a

white page with a single

quotation from Adolf Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race,

but they are not human."

As

if

From then

presenting Jews as Hitler saw

on, we're in a nightmare.

them

— as animals — were

Spiegelman's way of forcing us to experience

word did become law

resistance to Hitler's law

having

made

animals,

all

the Jews

is

then

all

in the

that Hitler's

anthropomorphism,

— and the Germans and the

Poles

in

— human

too human, each of them dressed with minute atten-

tion to cultural detail, ercycle in

anew

— that "what he said, went." Spiegelman's

from the naugahyde windbreaker and ex-

Rego Park to the

hats of Sosnowiec.

The

suit jackets

and spectacles and the

possibilities of black ink

on white,

scratched shading, solids, dots to convey documentary

memory,

everydayness, and danger are a stunning surprise: there

is

much

of the beauty of nineteenth-century children's engravings here.

Spiegelman and Theweleit are genealogical opposites.

One

155

is

the child of Nazi ideology, one the child of an Auschwitz sur-

vivor.

The parents of one attended

the rallies at Nuremberg, the

other's parents escaped the ovens at Auschwitz. as distant as

Why,

oppressor and oppressed.

overwhelming

sense, reading

one book

They ought

then,

do

I

to be

have the

after the other, that

Klaus Theweleit and Art Spiegelman are brothers? There

is,

of

course, the shared anger at their fathers. Theweleit at his for doling out the politics of the fascist state to his children in the

of domestic violence. Spiegelman of the camps and projecting is

it

at his for internalizing

onto

his

form

the hell

wife and his son. There

the loss of history, and the loss of parents: Spiegelman's

mother,

who

survived Auschwitz but committed suicide in 1968;

who "succumbed

Theweleit's father,

to alcohol

and German

his-

tory" and died "a disappointed public servant." Klaus Theweleit

tells us, in

passing,

face to his study of the Freikorps,

dren was,

in the

The older

siblings

how

the act of

naming

were named with operatic

never came." 3

The author and

pride, Reinhold,

coming Reich

his sister

that

some-

were the

"latecomers" inasmuch as they came after the defeat

156

chil-

Theweleit family, politically overdetermined.

Siegfried, Brunhilde, Giinter: "for the

how

once again in the pre-

at Sta-

THEWELEIT AND SPIEGELMAN

They were given names

lingrad.

cultural associations,

names

that lacked specific historic or

by their very ordinariness,

that,

hence their blamelessness, came into vogue for postwar children: Klaus and Helga. This preface, of course,

is

only a small auto-

biographical aside in comparison with the rest of Male Fantasies,

but

enables what

it

Theweleit's

and

life

is

to come.

his

work;

It

makes

takes as

it

a

connection between step an auto-

its first

biographical risk.

The parents children to

of both Theweleit and Spiegelman bring their

name them,

life,

defeat. All children

on them by anecdotes. their at

must

after their

their parents: a first

What happens when

name and

place?

I

own

name,

history cuts people off

am reminded

from

mon amour. 4 The two and broken with

War

through separate tragedies of Second World

They

"Your name

series of

of that haunting exchange

characters, lovers, have respectively lost

their families history.

name, a

a place

the end of Duras and Resnais's Hiroshima

main

survival, after their

with the historical signs imposed

live

give themselves place

is

names

Hiroshima." "Your name

is

after those tragedies.

Nevers. Nevers in

France." Hiroshima mon amour I

try to

is

memory and

the German-occupied

soldier.

He

dies

shaved for her

from

about a French

remember, and

man, to

a

German

her town square as part of the

her hair

she

It

as a

end of the war. She

is

decently long, she

"Hiroshiman" with

whom

a

when

Fantasies.

woman who,

tells

is

sent

Paris. Years later,

an actress, she goes to Hiroshima to make

peace. She meets a

think of

town of Nevers, loved

a sniper's bullet at the

When

I

Maus and Male

by her family to forget and be forgotten in

now to

in fact the film that

sins, tondue in

Liberation festivities. off

is

the connection between

a story about

girl in

is

make

a film

whom

about she

is

her war story. As she

able tells

of her love for the German soldier for the very first time, the man from Hiroshima becomes, in her mind and in his, the Ger-

man

soldier.

The two

events

— love in France, love in 157

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

Hiroshima

— collapse, and with a remorse that drives her nearly

to the point of madness, the for telling her story

mon amour

is

woman

realizes that the condition

become

that she's

able to forget. Hiroshima

one of the most famous enactments of an impossi-

is

ble truth that

Male

Fantasies

and Maus renew: the necessity of

pressing in order to survive, the necessity of

remembering

condition of the survivor's dignity, the inevitability that is

forgotten, or perhaps even if

And

when

the sense that

it

it is

does,

it

remembered,

it

re-

as a

history

if

will repeat.

does so in the least expected

ways.

But there

an important difference in the texts of

is

Theweleit and Spiegelman,

who

are not the historic agents, but

rather the sons of Hiroshima and Nevers. This generation was

named by World War postwar schools. tory, ties

own

its

It's

survivors, learned to read

II

old enough

signs: television,

now

to have

its

and write

own

commodity and drug

in

family his-

cultures, six-

militancy and rejection of middle-class parents, therapy, and

more. There

is

a

whole new generational perspective

available to

bring to bear on the world events portrayed in Hiroshima mon amour, a

new

perspective and radically

Theweleit's project tion: he's

read

all

is

new

descriptive forms.

essentially archival, a Ph.D. disserta-

the diaries, the papers of the Freikorps,

all

the

secondary psychoanalytic and theoretical materials on fascism.

But he gives himself permission to take on the project by writing in the autobiographical genre.

of Nazism

is

selfhood, of what

ory of Nazism style of his

is

own

we

its

begins by saying, the story

own

man, characters

within. Spiegelman's project

generation, in comix. its

language. at a

marked by trauma

German

have inherited from our parents.

to listen to the story of

story in

He

also a story of families, of marriages, of

parents but

A

is

construed in the

generation ready

who

insists

on

Young Theweleit and young

generation's

in a different

The mem-

at last

telling that

Spiegel-

remove from war trauma,

way than the

lovers in

Hiroshima. But even in their generational remove from the

158

are

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

events, there

no emotional

is still

safety. Hitler has carried his

one generation beyond. Your name

effects

name

burg, Kiel, your

A new

Queens.

What happens

is

generation

marked,

is

memory

to the

Hinden-

Stalingrad,

is

Czestochowa, Sosnowiec, Auschwitz, it is

of history

making

when

it

its

mark.

ceases to be

testimony?

One

Germany

generation removed, Nazi

experience that can be narrated directly; the children

who

heard about

Hence the prominence

in

it

it

is

no longer an

has been absorbed by

and grew up with

worn.

it; it is

both Spiegelman and Theweleit's pro-

ject of the narrative frame.

Theweleit's intuition of "Nazism within" gives to his writing an anger, and an impatience with academic method, the-

with

oretical language,

all

the intellectual tools for under-

standing Nazism that he has also inherited along with the Nazi

He

past.

tries to

come

at history

already absorbed by the body,

expressive only in lived experience. for the fascist

make

one

Anyone who

this point.

length with actual

Once

again

am

female: "I

is

is

The

authority he substitutes

not about to use literature to

interested can discuss

it

at

women." 5

we

can look to the preface for an auto-

biographical clue. Theweleit

is

indebted to his wife, the analyst,

to her clinical experience with schizophrenics, so-called de-

whom

viants,

women

with

fascism

is

Theweleit

whom

calls

"the true non-fascists." Unlike the

Theweleit would have us discuss whether

indeed the

norm

for males

who

under

live

capitalist

patriarchy, schizophrenics can't be effective sources of informa-

tion about fascism

Theweleit claims a

— they lack conceptual authority. Yet lot for

them, in passing.

freedom from categories and

He

a language that

is

claims for

them

neither distant

nor repressed. He wants something of the same freedom in

own

identification

know

160

his

writing process, though he acknowledges that the risk of is

boundaryless disfunctionality.

that the radical

And

his readers

forms of therapy proposed for schizo-

a

"

THEWELEIT AND SPIEGELMAN

phrenics by Laing and others twenty years ago have given way to

drug therapies: Theweleit's empathy

is

a nostalgic one, his claim

order to

but a

fragile claim for position. In

tions

between body, writing, and thought

fascist struggle,

make

the connec-

a part of the anti-

Theweleit posits schizophrenia

as fascism's polar

opposite.

His personal and bodily engagement with his archival maself-knowledge, allow Klaus Theweleit to do what

terial, his

tempted to

call (still in

work" with

He

to do.

I

am

the parlance of therapy) "emotional

not likely

his material that traditional historians are

gets close to the material, he establishes an emotional

intimacy with his readers in a style I've rarely seen outside feminist criticism.

Sometimes you

a reader.

in

His closeness can produce elation or discomfort in feel as

though he

an impossible therapy group. Theweleit

— and you, too — are

he has gathered together from outside time ists,

group

is

a

few

and

leader,

fascist terror-

uptight left-wing intellectuals, and boundaryless psychotics:

Pankow has outlined one

Gisela

chotic" patients who, unlike the

possible

avenue of treatment for "psy-

men under

scrutiny here, are not

equipped with any totality ego and have no awareness whatever of their

body boundaries. For

.

her, the

.

.

goal of therapy

riences a single part

that the patient,

of the body only as the

whole body as dismembered boundaries.

is

who

whole — and

often expe-

perceives the

— develops a recognition of her or

"Every new area of the body perceived

is

his

body

a firm piece of

ground extracted from the process of psychosis. For the soldier male, by contrast, locked as he

is

in his totality-

armor, analysis might perhaps involve guiding him towards an acknowl-

edgement of his bodily openings and of the interior of his body, der to protect

himjrom immediate inundation by

in or-

the jear of dissolution

6 if his bodily periphery becomes pleasurably invested.

When

I

first

was writing

read volume one of Male Fantasies in manuscript, a

book of

my own

on French

fascism,

and

I

came

I

to

161

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

who

think of Klaus Theweleit as a friend

allowed

me

to write

—

I

got incredible writing energy from the book, analytic energy,

my

permission to use

intuitions. 7

was swimming and writing

I

and reading Theweleit; the book was having both an invigorating and

a

hypnotic

effect. Effects

such as these take Male Fantasies

way outside the boundaries of conventional terms of reception and

Theweleit

social theory, in

terms of consequences. How, and why?

in

not afraid of being "vulgar."

is

of the ordinariness of the language he

Nor

about literature but about language that

is

"bad." There

would be

is

no temptation,

as there

is

quoting. His

is

he afraid

book

is

not

repetitive, "obvious,"

in reading a

canonized novel, to lose one's grip on sadistic dynamics because the form itself

is

such a bribe

Jiinger, the "real writer" his

.

.

except perhaps with Ernst

.

among

commonplaces are mixed

in

the warriors, but his words and

by Theweleit with those of

all

the rest of the warriors.

Some Theweleit's

of the American critics have complained in reviewing

book

that he wasn't

much good

as

an historian. The

of the historian, they argue, would be to show why some men became Freikorps sadists, others left-wing intellectuals. What in their background, their socialization, what in their spe-

work

cific historic

moment made them

specificity important,

so?

wonder? Or

I

torical project: the pinpointing of trickier, less disciplined

present?

I

in

is

is

and Sartre

totally uninterested in

didn't, but the question

an important way, beside the point of the book;

to insist

come

on shared

fascists,

themes,

how

but it is

is

interested in making.

terrain.

how

the true his-

attempt to make links between past and

a fascist

move Theweleit himself

Not why

comparison: enough female

much

occupy

makes

murk

it is

is,

not the

He wants

rather

Sartre and Brecht didn't be-

that they share so

it is

that they

universe. Sartreian language

162

which

an empirical cause, or the

don't think that Theweleit

why Hoss became

preoccupation with

Is this

rather,

many

misogynist

the same psychosexual

for an especially tempting

inhabits his writings to

com-

French postcard, from Klaus Theweleit, Male

Fantasies,

permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

1987.

Reproduced by

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

pete with the slimiest texts in Theweleit's corpus of slime. 8

Theweleit would celebrate such a comparison, for he attempting to

from the

slide

is

always

arguing espe-

fascist to nonfascist,

— his — shares with the fascists he's examining in the way of

about what the respectable, left-wing intellectual

cially

reader

rhetorical rigidity, primitive fear,

and hatred of the female body.

His most characteristic moves are juxtaposition and boundary crashing. In image alone,

on

we

and Brecht,

see Lenin

a

Frenchman

a horse, an English comic strip, a panel of nine male psycho-

analysts in 1977, mingling

with

intellectual heroes, in

how

Theweleit's

pecially

propaganda posters. Look

fascist

for fascist structures in your daily

life,

Theweleit

your schoolbooks.

book worked, how

And

this

precisely

told by their parents

and teachers to remember the Holocaust but

.

.

to forget about

.

looking not for the truth about the

is

not for the specificity of their socialization, he to uncover new,

is

unknown

He

fascists.

your

inflamed in Germany, es-

it

among young people who had been

fascism. Theweleit

says, in

is

fascists,

not even trying

is

interested in their

emo-

tional legacy.

Male it's

Fantasies

is

constantly metamorphosing.

about the 1920s; then

becomes

a

book about

one page

intellectual

about now:

style,

To this day, level

it

On

it is

required that the level of reflection be a high one, the

of theory higher

cretizations

is

still;

the drop to lower levels offeeling

considered precipitous. But

is

and con-

there any such thing as the

"height of theory," except as an element in masculine mystique? 9

You

can't help thinking that

ergy of the

sixties

something has been

when what used

lost of the en-

to be called "getting

down"

gets articulated as "concretization" ("concretization" was, in fact, a

key word in

well).

But Theweleit

neither

left activists

leftist

isn't

student circles

it

doesn't translate

nor male feminists on the

recurring theme of his analyses

164

—

nostalgic for the student

is

the attack

left;

he spares

style question.

on

A

a national style

"Tommy's dream," British World War

I

poster,

from Klaus Theweleit, Male

Fantasies,

1987. Reproduced

by permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

165

Alice Yoeger Kaplan

common body

to both right and left that betrays

in a

from the

its flight

penchant for abstraction:

If a male author chooses to write eulogies to the feminist movement,

then he should at least accept that the language of penetration which

he has, perhaps, used in the past

no longer be used

to seduce long-suffering virgins,

to take possession

can

of virgin-white paper.

The language of the Left excludes the mysteries of the body

.

.

.

Over and over again, the Left blunders into engagements with the lan-

guage of dominant groups without realizing Such language cannot be "refuted" on the ing":

its

primary territory of effectivity

"Primary territory of effectivity" language dominates not because it

gets to us, because

it

feels

it

has mistaken

terrain.

its

of "political mean-

elsewhere. 10

a difficult

means X,

way of

saying that

Y, or Z, but because

good, body and

some

includes intellectuals, not

is

is

it

level

soul.

And

the "us"

abstractly nondiscriminating

"people" susceptible to manipulation. The mind/body problem isn't

new, but Theweleit brings the body to

rial in

an acutely

political

manner

that

his intellectual

mate-

may be new. What's

missing for Theweleit in the Theory he looks to in understanding fascist violence

is

any sustained sensitivity to the power and

mystery of our body's relationship to our minds. The theorists Theweleit start "at

is

finally

most interested

in are the ones

who

home," with the body, rather than with the

especially indebted to

and most of

all

Wilhelm Reich,

to Deleuze

try to

idea. He's

and Guattari,

to the entire field of radical psychotherapists, be-

ginning in the preface with Monika Kubale and Margret Berger, for

whom

bodily functions are the starting point of

analytic work. Theweleit lic)

is

promoting neither

all

psycho-

a "distant" (phal-

nor simply identificatory type of criticism. His method

perhaps best described

as a

new way

is

of "knowing" politics

through the body.

How plores,

166

if

can

we hope

to understand fascist defenses, he im-

our intellectual methods for understanding are rigid

THEWELEIT AND SPIEGELMAN

and defensive, too? Here's the crux of Theweleit's argument and here

is

where

me

defensive:

ing

between

officers

I

begin to lose him, or, perhaps, where he makes

mak-

don't want to believe that the analogy he's

I

his original object of study

— the

Freikorps

— and the various political and psychoanalytic theories

he dismisses

so complete, nor even so useful.

is

erarchies, or

maybe

I

want some

more boundaries. Between

just

rorists, phallic psychoanalysts,

hi-

fascist ter-

between 1870 and 1977.

want

I

context.

So

me

let

attribute the author's

and

aries to his context. This slipping

to rigid intellectual

methods has

German

the postwar

sliding

from

bound-

rigid fascists

several important functions in

It

was

working out of desires

a

sion, for mastery, for control that

The

rejection of

context. Theweleit believes that the Holo-

caust was not an accident.

daily basis.

own

all

for fu-

people experience on a

project of analyzing the Nazi past

is

itself

imbued

with, informed by the same psychic needs for mastery, distance,

What

control.

is

the message then?

Not

what "they" and "we"

not

just, as

that "they"

I

surmised

about

and respon-

guilt,

were perverts, and we are innocent, but

sibility.

look

at

It's

earlier,

The

share.

length of the book

is

an insistence on the psychic hor-

rors of the Nazi past, but a smashing of boundaries

time and reading time that Theweleit wants to

visit

between

upon

real

his

reader as a part of the anti-fascist cure. It's

German that

important in understanding Theweleit's work in the context to

project

the message of Fassbinder's films:

Germany

ents." 11

social

where reconstruction and forgetting were intertwined.

Theweleit's context in

remember

postwar German society was caught up in a massive

My

is,

as

he

states

it,

"the injunction prevailing

against learning about fascism

friend Margret, a

member

and

its

anteced-

of Theweleit's generation,

learned about the camps not from her parents but from her

grandmother, on the

man

sly.

When

she

secondary school, she devoted

became

much

a teacher in a

Ger-

of her energy to that

167

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

could learn about recent

Her

self-hating way. I

learn as

an atmosphere where students

task: fostering

near impossible

I

German

was published by Pantheon it

German

was Roter

German

States. 12

I

it

learn

German

a luxury? In

volume

an interview with Spiegelman and a history of the Roter Stern

strip.

gressive, anti-fascist.

a left-wing publisher, pro-

is

The segments from Maus

context of 1980.

Is

raise questions in

demystifying the

camp

survivors

an intellectual climate where so-called revisionists

write literal-minded texts to persuade people that

we've learned about the camps

is

mean

whose

for people to read Maus,

like cousins of is

And

public, in a brochure packaged with the

American comic

or

who

version, even before

United

in the

it

Fantasies,

was Klaus Theweleit who introduced Spiegelman's work

that contains

the

not unusual.

is

finish writing this article that

published segments of Maus in a

to the

me,

same publisher who published Male

Stern, the

that

history in a critical but not

story, she tells

a

Mickey and Minnie?

Disney

Is

tale,

much

of what

what does

it

allegorical characters look this aesthetic insensitivity

— the rendering of a — incomprehensible in a so-

Spiegelman's brilliant formal invention

high tragic story in comic strip form ciety so troubled

by

its

Related, perhaps,

racist past?

is

the trouble at the University of Min-

nesota Press over the advertisements used to publicize the

American

translation of Male Fantasies.

number of complaints

The

that the illustrations

editor received a

from Male

Fantasies

published in the Minnesota Press catalogue were violently antifeminist: a face,

woman bound and

came from

that

unholy

a

gun aimed

alliance: the conservative right

anti-pornography feminists. people

me

gagged with

at

her

an ink drawing of multiple female nudes. The complaints

who

don't

A

cover, a catalogue,

read a book, not for those

that Theweleit, reader of

symptoms and

who

is

and the

meant

do.

It

for

occurs to

distant effects,

would probably be pleased and amused by these

critics

something of what he did without the benefit of

his

who saw

words.

THEWELEIT AND SPIEGELMAN

For us in the U.S., the necessity of learning about Nazism does not exist in the same form as equations that Theweleit insists

it

does in Germany. The

upon between

meth-

intellectual

ods and political crime do seem excessive; the connections are too numerous, too messy. Not that

What

away from Theweleit? seminal

officer, the

book

to read the

we would, we'd American

fascist

in

we

What can

tional repressive structures.

don't have our

an American context the way he might hope

have to start asking a lot of questions about an

easy

it is

to forget our

own

nationalist genocides,

— Indians,

Vietnam seemed almost to have ruptured the pattern, sionism came

memory

We now

way.

its

to write about

My

Lai

The

name

tivized in the

We

serious debate. for our

want to

ries,

from

is

met with

outcries

and

do not bear a personal burden of guilt or crimes, and scarcely the

though

their effect

on

I

his father tells

his person: "I

but such private things,

mouse hand

Germany

disdain. In

an issue inseparable from na-

I

can

We

memory.

our history bleed. But Spiegelman

"Okay, okay, his

until revi-

suggestion that the Holocaust should be rela-

father bleeds history,"

events

is

our

Filipinos.

a Theweleit, a Spiegelman,

of national pride

own war let

need

and Rambo without

of the Holocaust

tional identity.

don't

we were

fantasies? If

fascism.

How

shame

na-

our equivalent of the Freikorps

is

male with male

manifest destiny that wiped out those others

the

own

the American reader take

him

insists:

"My

to separate the

tell

you

other sto-

don't want you should mention." 13

promise," Art Spiegelman answers, raising

in a defensive gesture that looks

oddly

like a

"sieg heil."

Someone who or

two

month

the

man

knew

it

picks

up

will not automatically

American as a

literary

this essay

know

when

that

it

it

appears in a year

was written the

world learned that Paul de Man,

a

teacher and literary theorist until his death in

1984, wrote articles for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper at the age of twenty-one and twenty-two.

It's

the year, too, of the

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Heidegger revelations in France.

hope

We

that revelations like these will

new

search, with desire for a ever, have

shown not

intellectual debt,

We

live in

so

look.

much

are busy with surprise. fill

The

initial reactions,

We

about history, instead of thinking about

how

Theweleit

who

thought they knew what fascism was:

The "symbol seekers" are fundamentally misguided to be easily

who

instead of thinking

we, too, bleed his-

angry and polemical on the subject of those

tory.

"anti-fascists"

ties.

denounce, clean

and simple, the past of one or two individuals

language

open

to interpretation

—

in

assuming fascist

as misguided as are the

characterize fascist language as "stupid" or "politi-

cally senseless. " Since neither

group takes account of the structure from

which fascist language emanates, they inevitably underestimate plosive political power, ignore its

in

what

it

says,

how-

a curiosity as a defense against

an estrangement, a cutting of

an era of denouncement.

is

I

us with energy for re-

not in

their questions in terms

how

it

functions.

of "what

its

ex-

dynamic force; they are interested only

it

And

once they have framed

says," they are able to pose fascist

language in opposition to signifers of their own preferred meanings, which they immediately claim

170

to be "superior.

" "Fascism can never

tri-

THEWELEIT AND SPIEGELMAN

umph

since

we are more clever"

—

this

was the dictum on which almost

all

14 "assessments" by the I920's Left were founded.

To

find an analogy

against in our

my

and

context,

I

would need

to produce in myself

readers that uncomfortable, compromised feeling of re-

cognition:

"my God, we

believe Theweleit in Theweleit,

me

with the kind of error Theweleit warns

own

on

haven't learned a thing."

The

this score.

wandering, tedious, irresponsible.

again to Spiegelman and to Maus.

way Spiegelman shows

to us,

it

is

The

Which

the fascism visited

come

to

We

"My

tells us.

don't like to think about

much

it

brings

this

father

way:

upon

we

his fa-

embody and

"My

project even as he has triumphed in his survival.

derer."

don't want to

fascism within, the

ther in the camps, a fascism his father has

bleeds history," Art Spiegelman

I

belief seems, like so

is

father

mur-

a

like

our vic-

tims pure, and our intellectual heroes untouched by history. In Male Fantasies

and Maus,

there's a horrible echo, a haunt-

ing of personal history by the political. Theweleit seems to to greet the echoes with anger

and resignation, despite

liance with the therapeutic option; Spiegelman greets

overwhelming sadness, survived, he their

a

determination that just

must survive

his father. If

becomes

a

it

is

stand history.

And

the

is still

was undoubtedly

share with them. Therapy

dominant method and metaphor

cause therapy

Theweleit,

I

for Theweleit be-

way our generation has learned

to resist

it,

around to be

at

with an

as his father

were tempted to put

books together before knowing why,

out of the sense of generation that

form

I

it

me

his al-

to under-

the bodily level. Fascism, for

resisted. In Spiegelman, the

— the radical comic strip — brings into the cultural main-

stream of the eighties a

sixties militancy,

with

its

hallucinogenic

imperative to transform our parents' dusty reality. By using that radical

with

form to

his

own

tell his father's story,

vision

and

voice.

Both

Spiegelman consecrates

men

it

have claimed their

parentage in the fullest sense in order to free themselves from its

bonds.

171

Alice Yaeger Kaplan

Notes

1.

Klaus Theweleit, Male

Fantasies, Vol.

1:

Women,

Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Ste-

phen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

A

(New

Press, 1987), p. xx.

York: Pantheon Books, 1986),

2.

Art Spiegelman, Maus:

p.

159.

3.

Theweleit, Male

4.

See Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, scenario for a film by Alain

Resnais

(New

Survivor's Tale

Fantasies, vol. 1, p. xx.

York: Grove Press, 1987).

5.

Theweleit, Male

6.

Klaus Theweleit, manuscript of volume 2 of Male Fantasies (forthcoming);

Fantasies, vol.

1,

p.

444, note

1.

manuscript pp. 328-329. 7.

Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French In-

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

tellectual Life 8.

Margery

L. Collins

and Christine Pierce, "Holes and Slime: Sexism

Sartre's Psychoanalysis," Philosophical

Forum

5, no. 1-2

in

(Fall-Winter 1973-1974);

reprinted in Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, ed. Carol C.

Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: G.

Putnam's Sons, 1976), pp.

P.

112-127. 9.

Theweleit, Male

Fantasies, vol. 2,

manuscript

manuscript

p. 67.

p. 132.

10.

Ibid.,

11.

Theweleit, Male

12.

Art Spiegelman, Breakdowns. Gesammelte Comic

Fantasies, vol. 1, p. 57. Strips,

with an interview by

Martin Langbrin and Klaus Theweleit; adapted by Dieter Karl; Heinz (Frankfurt: Roter Stern Verlag, 1980). This

work,

much

able in any ful to

Miriam Hansen

Spiegelman, Maus,

14.

Theweleit, Male

library or inter-library system that

The book I

know

for the reference. p. 23.

Fantasies, vol. 2,

manuscript

trans.

Emigholz

a collection of Spiegelman's

of which was to be incorporated into Maus.

American

13.

172

is

p. 328.

x

not

is

of.

I

am

avail-

grate-

John Wayne

in The Green Berets, 1968.

Courtesy Photofest.

J.

Hoberman

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

While movie-going has long

since ceased to be a national habit

for just about everyone but teenagers, the

main

a privileged instrument in the

American

— indeed, international — mass culture.

aside, they sibilities,

movies themselves re-

symphony orchestra of Entertainment

function as social metaphor, showcase Utopian pos-

present

new

personality types, provide socially cohe-

While

sive cocktail party conversation.

television

is

a

continuum, a transmission, a guilty pleasure, a consumer appliance;

and pop music

by the age of

a

thirty-five,

way of each

life

that generally exhausts itself

new movie

is

an aspiring Event

conflagration, a potlatch, a public burning of celluloid

money, whose success

is

tasy that this

ple's lives

life.

— to take the central event of many peo-

— was something

else. It

Gabriel Kolko, an epic event.

It

was, to paraphrase historian

was both the longest

and the most sustained revolutionary tury, as well as the

history

single

war

effort of the twentieth cen-

most challenging military experience

in U.S.

— "a synthesis of politics, technology, the residues of past

wars, convoluted logic, and symbolism," greatest in

fas-

mass need-to-know, the secret fan-

might change your

The Vietnam War

and

dependent on inspiring the public's

cination, instigating a kind of

—a

1

delivered with the

volume of firepower the world has ever seen. The cost

human

suffering

was monumental and

difficult to calculate. In

South Vietnam, the war produced seven million displaced persons

— one-third of the population, over half the peasantry;

precipitated a forced urbanization, the

most "brutal and

it

disori-

enting that a large Third World nation has ever experienced." 2

Here

in the

United

States,

we experienced another

sort of

disorientation. 175

J.

Hoberman

American Bicenten-

In a brilliant essay occasioned by the nial,

Hannah Arendt wrote

clusively

Vietnam War "was ex-

that the

guided by the needs of a superpower to create for

an image which would convince the world that the mightiest

power on

earth." Such "image-making as global

policy," Arendt observed, was "something nal of

human

follies

itself

was, indeed,

it

recorded in history

.

.

new .

in the

permitted to proliferate throughout the ranks of

mental services, military and civilian

huge

arse-

[Image-making] was all

govern-

— the phony body-counts of

the search and destroy missions, the doctored after-damage re-

ports of the air force, the constant progress reports to

Washington." 3 So the Vietnam

Waged

in the

War was

name of

spectacular

"credibility,"

it

— in the

literal sense.

was intended to project

a

superpower's image as the mightiest on earth. But image-making has

its

own

less rational

and imperatives. The war was

logic

and more

also

delirious, harder to control

something

and easier to

get high on, than just a ten-year public relations campaign. Viet-

nam was

also a movie.

Our movie. Our

greatest hit.

Our

biggest

bomb. As orchestrated by two administrations,

this

movie became

the greatest episode in American show business — the longest, costliest,

Or

most ambitious, best-attended catastrophe ever

staged.

rather filmed, videotaped, and televised. Cleopatra and

Heaven's Gate have nothing cast of millions,

some

sixty

the death of forty times as

ninety times as don't have to

many

tell

if

on

this debacle

— a cost of billions, a

thousand American casualties (plus

many

foreign "extras," eighty or

you include the Cambodian sideshow).

you what the

ratings

were

like

of mouth. Indeed, we've never stopped talking about It's

it.

not simply that Vietnam was perceived as a living-room

war by those of us who used vision.

to watch the instant replay

The experience of those who

bound up with our

national fantasy

on

tele-

participated was intimately

life.

Out

in the field, dan-

gerous areas were called "Indian country," Vietnamese scouts 176

I

— or the word

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

were known

as

good Indian

is

"Kit Carsons," the infamous one-liner "The only a

only good gook

dead Indian" was updated is

When chael Herr I'll

It's

Wayne was

base to which John

named Dodge

dead one."

a

as the slogan

"The

not a coincidence that the

assigned in The Green Berets

is

City.

an American captain invites war correspondant Mi-

on

Cowboys and

take you out to play

patches.) Later,

he

a search-and-destroy mission,

says,

"Come

Indians." (This

on,

in Dis-

is

Herr muses over the combat performance given

by nineteen-year-old kids when they realized a television crew

was

"They were

in the vicinity:

actually

their heads, doing little guts-and-glory

under

were

fire,

making war movies

They

getting their pimples shot off for the networks.

insane, but the

war hadn't done

election of Ronald Reagan, the

in

Leatherneck tap dances

that to them." 4 Like the

war was the

fulfillment of

something. In his analysis of the role

American

cultural attitudes

played in our Vietnamese involvement, Loren Baritz observes that "It

is

astonishing

how

often

American GIs

in

provingly referred to John Wayne, not as a movie

model and

a standard

up on World War jungle,

knew

armed

II

.

.

.

Vietnam apstar,

but as a

Nineteen-year-old Americans, brought

movies and westerns, walking through the

to the teeth, searching for an invisible

enemy who

the wilderness better than they did, could hardly miss

these connections.

One

thing like 'Hey, this

is

after another said, at

just like a

some

point,

some-

movie.'" You probably remem-

ber the famous scene in Dispatches where a

wounded marine

turns to Herr and says, "I hate this movie!" 5

The men

that served in

Vietnam used to

call

America "the

— short for the Real World. Vietnam by inference, was somewhere else — somewhere imaginary. But this exactly what I'm going to talk about — was never in Vietnam, only World"

isn't

I

know

it

second-hand, so for

under which these

and

me

I

it's

doubly imaginary. The rubric

talks are being given

— as literal-minded as

I

am — this

is

is

"Remaking History,"

"Vietnam: The Remake." 177

— J.

Hoberman

Now,

for

much

fertile

Hollywood

Among

confusion.

had been characterized by lars that

1960s was a period of

as elsewhere, the

other things, the previous decade

Roman

a cycle of Biblical or

spectacu-

not only demonstrated Hollywood's wealth and power

but were also suggestive of an imperial Pax Americana. With the

twin disasters of Cleopatra (1963) and Vietnam (1964-75),

came

cycle

— or rather,

end

to an

The movie industry was it

groped

this

apotheosis.

midst of an identity

in the

crisis

—

formulae. By 1969, around the time that the war

was wisely conceived to be unwinnable, in the red.

its

dark for the huge youth market, attempting to

in the

new

develop

reached

it

At

its

encouraged consid-

and directorial nonconformity. The old

erable genre criticism verites

had crumbled, anything was

sixties

mode

is

major studios were

five

best, this disorganized state

Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Wild in the Breckinridge, Night of the Living Dead.

ticular significance, having

The

possible.

the apocalyptic genre film

Streets,

(The

quintessential

The Wild Bunch,

2001 Myra ,

latter

is

a film of par-

been made outside Hollywood, using

the techniques of underground movies to offer the most literal possible image of

remained quite

Of

America devouring

course, the whole idea of a

particularly if

itself.)

The war

film alone

traditional.

you suspect,

as

I

war

film

is

bizarre

do, that entertainment

— is

by

its

nature somewhat Utopian and compensatory, concerned with pleasure and wish fulfillment. Samuel Fuller,

twice in World

War

II

and made

movies, maintained that really

is

a

number of powerful combat

was impossible to "show war

on the screen," adding

"fire real shots alties in

it

who was wounded

that

it

as

it

might be preferable to

over the audience's head" and "have actual casu-

the theater."

The analogy between dreams and movies

has been endlessly rehearsed and so

it's

suggestive that, after

studying the dreams of traumatized World

War

I

veterans, Freud

considered their nocturnal flashbacks as a distinct category of

dream

m

that arose less

from wish

fulfillment or anxiety than a

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

compulsion to repeat the traumatic experience.

The megabuck World War

II

epic was

still

a viable

form of

entertainment during the period of U.S. escalation. Each year,

from 1965 through 1970, brought

at least

of Big Two: Battle of the Bulge (1965),

Is

one large-scale replay

Paris

Burning? (1966),

Beach Red (1967), Anzio (1968), The Battle of Britain (1969), Toral Toral Toral (1970). Yet,

with the exception of The Green

(which, although produced in 1968, took

War

II

combat

films), the

American movie

diers, but the

"Don't

Sit

a

was

few songs dealing with unhappy

War

sol-

Green Berets notwithstanding,

— that

is,

forces

War became

American

widely perceived as

—

all

war vanished from the movie

Hollywood released nine war

since the big-budget

1958), the genre

history in

once Nixon and Kissinger began to with-

draw American ground screen. Although

odd

has always had an

Indeed, once the Vietnam

unwinnable

set

mu-

Under the Apple Tree."

the Vietnam

most

virtually true of popular

Vietnam War produced no "Over There" or

Now, John Wayne and The

films.

cues from World

its

current war was entirely absent from

screens. This

There were

sic as well.

Berets

World War

II

epic

films in

1970 (the

was launched

in

was abruptly terminated once Richard Nixon

about withdrawing American combat troops. Only two war

were released

films

in 1971,

and none

at all for

the next four

years (which, significantly, coincides with the heyday of disaster films).

Not

until the

Too Far (1977), first

wave of Vietnam combat So, right

war

war was over did Midway (1976),

in

from the

start,

Hollywood seemed to want the

Vietnam over and done with

set

Bridge

films.

regime of wish fulfillment. The

were

A

and MacArthur (1977) appear— along with the

mainly on the

home

— thus operating within the

initial cycle

front,

of Vietnam movies

where the

battle

was being

fought for the hearts and minds of the American viewing public.

These movies were considerably

less

interested in

combat he-

roics than in the often nightmarish situation of the returning

179

J.

Hoberman

vets

or

— alternately shown as a guilty society's violent redeemers victimized scapegoats and often an ambiguous combination

its

of the two.

The 1967 Born half-Indian,

Losers

not only introduced the messianic

ex-Green Beret,

wing precursor

to

Rambo

Billy Jack (a

now-forgotten

left-

in his agonized vigilantism), but

spawned an entire subgenre

which alienated Viet

in

vets either

joined up with or battled marauding motorcycle gangs (the most

malevolent manifestation of the youth culture). With the

rise of

ex-Green Berets played by

blaxploitation, the turf shifted so that

Jim Brown or Paul Winfield came back to war against ghetto

dope dealers and exploitive gangsters. While only flicks

— the

Deathdream literal

1971 Fiend with the Electronic Brain, Bob Clark's 1972

monsters, movies like Welcome

mention scores of

prone Viet vet

TV

shows,

mass culture

a

But the purpose of war, injure

— "to alter (to burn, to

and

Home

Soldier Boys (1972),

Rolling Thunder (1977), not

made

the psychotic, violence-

cliche. as Elaine Scarry

the objects that

And

human

so,

more

reminds

blast, to shell, to cut)

tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape,

selves." 6

few horror

— were crude enough to use returning Viet vets as

Tracks (1976), Taxi Driver (1976),

to

a

to

beings recognize as extensions of them-

visibly or invisibly scarred

amok were

those

Some Kind of Hero (1982)

who came

who back

— the wounded vets of Coming Home

(1978), Who'll Stop the Rain? (1978), Cutter's

Way

(1981), and

— who appeared to suffer some partic-

ular sexual malaise, if not an out-and-out mutilation. is

is

and deep entirety of

disturbing perhaps than those vets

returned to the World to run

of theirs

us,

human

missing. Vietnam,

it

would seem,

hit

Something

America below

the belt.

The

first

recuperation of the sixties can be found in the cycle of

disaster films inaugurated in

1

970 by Airport

— and peaking four

years later with Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, The Hindenburg,

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

Juggernaut, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the resignation of

Richard Nixon, and Airport 1975. These featured the guise of ordinary, middle-class people

who

all-star casts in

have to cope with

the total breakdown of institutions thought to be safe. Such in-

microcosms of America but, although the

stitutions are clearly

disaster

is

worsened by mendacious, greedy, corrupt, and incom-

petent leaders,

it

does not reflect a fundamental flaw in the sys-

tem. Actually, the system works. Disaster films demonstrate the

fundamental decency of ordinary people, their allegiance to ditional

moral virtues.

tra-

All the middle-class values reign vic-

torious at the end.

By asserting

that America's

enemies remained nature and/

or technology, disaster films denied that Americans had become

decadent or that consensus had shattered. Indeed, they suggested that the sixties never

happened

— traditional virtues are intact

and, unlike in Night of the Living Dead, enable people to help

each other survive the

crisis.

So disaster films were fundamen-

reassuring and they also reassured the alienated audience

tally

with the old-time entertainment religion of conspicuous consumption, happy endings, and filled

all-star casts.

They were

with familiar faces from the forties and

fifties

typically

— had he not

decided on another career, Ronald Reagan would have

fit

right

in as a secondary character in The Towering Inferno. In recuperating the apocalyptic disaster films

were the

be others. With the public was

left

first

fall

breakdowns of the

sixties,

wave of reillusionment. There would

of Saigon in June 1975, the American

to contemplate the futility of

its

great disaster

film

— the wasted lives and squandered wealth. This was depress-

ing.

Small wonder that, from 1976 on, Americans indulged in an

orgy of born-again genres and exercises in feel-good regression, a

prolonged fascination with the fabulous

like Freud's

notion of the fetish

tration anxiety fixating

on

— that

is,

fifties

that functioned

a defense against cas-

a substitute phallus, often the last

thing experienced before a traumatic discovery or

loss.

For the

181

J.

Hoberman

we

past fifteen years, the era

the

call

fifties (really

the 1955-62

period between the Korean and Vietnam wars) has been a kind of lost paradise within American popular culture. George Lucas's

1973 American because

it

but because

was the harbinger of

Graffiti

was the

first

this

deliberately used the disaster of

it

trend

— not just

film to periodicize the 1955-62 period,

Vietnam

as a

structuring absence. Since then and up until very recently,

TV, and

politics have

American movies,

continued to privilege the

fifties,

even to

the point of superimposing that happy era over the eighties.

Only

in Blue Velvet (1986) does this contradiction begin to

"1955"

is

more seamless Back

the

ifest itself; in

a place for the

to the

hero to play

man-

Future (1985),

— a theme park or Disney-

land (which, perhaps not coincidentally, opened that very year).

Back

to the

Future

is

a kind of historical

Moebius

strip that

negates the idea of history, by suggesting that the troublesome past can be rescripted to improve the present.

war movies,

In terms of after the in the

war

is

over.

Hollywood began

mid- twenties and World War

War movies were years after the

war

the

this usually

as a

II

to

occurs several years

ponder World War

after 1949, while

a staple of the late fifties.

fall

Not

I

Korean

until several

of Saigon did Hollywood attempt to reenact

period spectacle.

A

cluster of films released in 1978

and 1979 established and/or epitomized the basic thematics in various combinations, have

that,

gone in and out of favor through

to the present day: the returning vet

melodrama (Hal Ashby's

Coming Home, 1978), the grunt ensemble film (Sidney Furie's The Boys in Company

C,

1978),

and the macho back-to-Nam fantasy

(Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, 1978).

These were preceded by the publication of Michael Herr's Dispatches, a vivid

work of gonzo journalism

tain basic koans about its

triply elusive antagonist, the

was

his,

above

it

that established cer-

Vietnam and the American relationship

was ours

.

.

.

Vietcong

We

— "Under the ground

to

had the days and [Charlie] had

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

the nights." 7 Dispatches further paved the spectacle of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse

way

Now

for the psychedelic

(1979) that, in

its

brazen megalomania and dazzling concern for the power of spe-

may be

cial effects,

War

truer to the sense of the original Vietnam

than any remake yet produced

climactic ending, not to

— up to

its

confused, anti-

mention the destructive

effect

it

had on

Coppola's subsequent career (which most recently included a hack, maudlin tribute to Viet era heroism).

For as a

all this,

however, the war remained

murder witnessed by

in the villages, the lar culture

TV

it

crews couldn't film

got really interesting

at night."

hadn't evolved language to describe

grandiose failure of Apocalypse Now's

final

dark and primal

For Herr, "Night was

a two-year-old.

medium; night was when

the war's truest

as

8

Our popu-

beyond the

it,

movement. As mad

Dennis Hopper said of crazy Marlon Brando when he met

dogged Martin Sheen

at

the heart of darkness: "I wish

I

a

had

words." Despite the success of The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, their unresolved ambiguities proved far

less attractive

than

the clearcut fantasies generated by something like Good Guys

Wear Black (1979), an early Chuck Norris vehicle ex-karate

Valor,

champ

him and

trayed

two

in

which the

searches for the Washington politicos

his

commando

unit, or First Blood

early eighties sleepers both directed

who

be-

and Uncommon

by Ted Kotcheff.

Released almost simultaneously with the dedication of the

Vietnam Veteran's Monument the surprise hit of late

commercial

hit outside the

decade on Warner's

in

Washington,

1982 — as well as

Rocky

shelf, First

cycle.

First

Blood proved

Sylvester Stallone's

A

first

property that spent a

Blood turned the assumptions of

the returning vet films inside out. This incendiary plea for tolerance, designed to appeal to both

John Rambo — a

hawks and doves, introduced

taciturn, hippified

acts of insane violence

ex-Green Beret driven to

by the relentless persecution of

a

redneck

sheriff.

In effect,

Rambo brought

the

war home and

cast himself as

Sylvester Stallone as

Rambo

in First Blood, Part

II,

1985. Courtesy Photofest.

a victimized, victorious guerrilla fighter. In the novel

which the ster.

He

film

kills

is

mixture of

anticipates

left-

who

and

is

finally

trained him.

is

into the

terminated by

in his

ambiguous

more

like a reverse lives.

never succeeds in wrestling the Phallus from he's

mon-

hills,

The movie

property rather than

hauled off to prison,

it's

Although

the possesclearly for

sins.

Rambo's equally haunted masculine equivalent was

184

him up

Bruce Springsteen

when

from

clearly a Frankenstein

and right-wing symbols,

sion of the sheriff,

our

is

Street,

officer

bomb — destroying

neutron

Rambo

down Main

Green Beret

Rambo, who

Rambo

the entire posse that chases

returns to burn the very

adapted,

if less

neurotic and

Tom Magnum,

more

securely

the hero of CBS's long-

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

running Magnum,

P.I.

The show

continually manifest in

its

Hawaii but Vietnam

set in

is

characters and situations, not to

tion the hero's frequent flashbacks to his

ences

commando

is

men-

experi-

— often accompanied by soulful sixties pop songs or

moody

riffs

for electric guitar. (Clearly,

Magnum was

man who

a

An

had once smoked pot and brooded over Eric Clapton.) tion of orange and green, the

war

is

mad

represented as a

cession of meaningless missions or chaotic combat. But for

incomprehensibility,

it is

stituted

Magnum Man

Vietnam

for

all its

male testing ground. Son and

clearly a

grandson of American war heroes chon), the

erupsuc-

was

(his father

killed at In-

exudes a tough melancholy that sub-

some

unhappy

prehistoric

private-eye mystique. (Simon and Simon

is

love affair in his

another hit detective

show, born during the 1982-83 season, that proposed to bind America's wounds by splitting are a brother team,

one

Rambo

in two.

The

protagonists

a Viet vet, the other a college-educated

peacenik.)

By the

who

early eighties, the idea that

fought in Vietnam

Rambo — if

— had been betrayed

upon" when they returned, became an

at

not

those

home, then "spat

article of faith.

gratitude lent piquance to the fantasy of an

all

This in-

American victory

in

Vietnam and an aspect of implied revenge to the imaginative appropriation of the Vietcong's guerrilla tactics. In 1983, this scenario was canonized with the unexpected success of Valor,

co-produced by John Milius,

trains guerrillas to spring his son a Laotian prison

Uncommon Losers (1970), in

in

which

and other

Uncommon

a retired officer

MI As

held captive in

camp. Valor basically appropriated the

which

a

premise of The

group of bikers returned to

Nam

their motorcycles to rescue a captured presidential adviser a

on

from

Chinese prison camp. (Anticipating the self-pity endemic to

early eighties

Nam

films, the surviving

gang members have to

hear themselves denounced as "trash" for their troubles.) But,

with

its

emphasis on patriarchal authority, mutilated genealogy,

185

J.

Hoberman

and male

rites

of passage, Uncommon Valor took the lead in visu-

alizing Indochina as the site of America's symbolic castration.

Unlike Apocalypse

Now

Niro's possession of the Phallus seems tentative it

offered itself as a clear-cut exorcism of the

honor of American

and depressed),

shame and

a guilt-free version of

Blood that managed to refight the war in Colorado

identifying his youthful protagonists with the ting America's vaders. In the

dis-

defeat.

1984 Red Dawn provided

Milius's First

De

or even The Deer Hunter (in which

wartime

activities

wake of Uncommon

VC

—

while projec-

onto the Soviet and Cuban inValor (and the

euphoria

produced by Grenada, surely the most successful American war

movie since Bridge on

the River Kwai),

subsequent Vietnam exor-

cisms grew increasingly fantastic and compensatory. Films like Missing in Action (1984),

Rambo

(1985), and the futuristic Top

Gun (1986) changed the emphasis from teamwork

to the

glorification of a supermasculine principle.

In recuperating the war, these movies finally (after twenty years) recapitulated

something of

can policy makers of the early issue of

its initial

sixties

The Ameri-

American military potency. The nuclear stalemate be-

tween the United their frustration

States

and the Soviet Union only

— you can see this again in

like a celebration of ejaculatio retardata.

in the bold, Kennedy-inflected sixties,

manliness

Now,

appeal.

were obsessed with the

.

.

intensified

Top Gun,

Once upon war was an

which

is

a time, back

invitation to

.

given the shame inherent in missing a war and thus fore-

going the opportunity to demonstrate one's manhood,

it

seems

appropriate that the movies most expressive of America's humiliation

would have been produced by John Milius and

Stallone,

both of

whom

(Top Gun's co-producer,

Sylvester

avoided service during the Vietnam War.

Don

Simpson, actually bragged to one

interviewer that he deliberately wrecked his motorcycle to beat

186

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

the draft.)

No

than the war

less

and Rambo reflected

Rumor

what Philip Caputo,

of War, yearns for as "that savage, heroic time

America became

a land of salesmen

scarcely

it's

essay, "Injury

uncommon

for an

envisioned as a single gigantic individual, often

commanding rear that

.

A

before

.

and the

army

named

to be

for the

with an Achilles heel or an underbelly or a

officer,

may be

.

in

and shopping centers." 9

As Elaine Scarry has noted in her Structure of War,"

Dawn

the fantasies of Red

itself,

a nostalgia for

penetrated. For the American ground forces in

Vietnam, that individual only appeared some years after the war

was

over. This colossus

is

Rambo — a

thing built to absorb

punishment, whose illusion of mastery complements Ronald Reagan's mastery of illusion.

Rambo keep

is

superb icon:

a

in the

he-man (he manages

to

long hair even in prison), a patriotic loner.

his talismanic

Once

a hippie

Nam, he

strips

down

to his

trademark tank top and

sweatband — he's a high-tech primitive incinerating battalions of gooks with

TNT-tipped arrows. You might reasonably

his special

assume that

Rambo

is

the

American descendant of

a nineteenth-

century French poet, back for another Season in Hell. As

it

turns out, he's of "Indian-German" descent, a sort of Apache

Ubermensch or a Prussian noble savage, the ultimate Karl

But mainly,

fantasy.

Rambo

is

a torso: absurdly muscular, per-

petually taut, a sort of Nautilus-built hard-on. that "Stallone is

is

so

May

pumped up

One

critic

his veins have erections."

wrote

Rambo

so phallic, he really should be called Dildo. If

you've seen the movie, you

killed in

Rambo's arms seconds

know

after

that the love object

he clasps her to

thus the

VC

as Klaus

Theweleit wrote of the Freikorps,

him from even

saves

a

moment's is

is

his pecs,

relaxation.

Rambo,

one of those "men

[who] look for ecstasy not in embraces, but in explosions," 10 the great balls of about.

fire

that the guys in Top

Rambo can

never be

presents himself as the

satisfied,

Gun

are always singing

he can never detumesce, he

embodiment of unrequited

patriotic love:

187

J.

Hoberman

with him, that unwinnable war had

at last

(and

at least)

been

successfully repackaged.

Magnum and Rambo (we deemed the American

With

call

him Cro Magnum)

man, thus making the world

fighting

for their lesser buddies.

might

re-

safe

Platoon (1986), Gardens of Stone

(1987), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Hamburger Hill (1987), Good

Morning Vietnam (1987), the documentary Dear America (1987),

and the television

series Tour of

Duty

(shot, like

Magnum,

P. I.,

in

Hawaii), the Vietnam exorcism has taken a turn for the "naturalistic,"

Not

focusing on the actual experience of ordinary combatants.

surprisingly, a

Viet vets

who

number of

their experience of the

war on the

The emphasis having elite

POWs,

mainly

ploits of their

these movies are statements by

have been trying, in some cases for years, to get

air force

bomber

pilots,

and the fantasy ex-

supermasculine rescuers, to the

suffering of the teenage recruits

combat, the

screen.

from the humiliation of the

shifted

new Vietnam

less

who were most

glamorous

often sent into

films are less virulently right-wing

than their immediate predecessors and more attuned to the specific

gle

nature of the war. (As Herr observed, "Flying over the jun-

was almost pure pleasure, doing

pain.")

Now

on the American

side,

on foot was nearly

Vietnam was

mainly by working-class teenagers panic. Their average age in

it

all

11

World War

II).

a

war fought

— half of them black or His-

was nineteen

(as

opposed to twenty-six

These kids knew that most of

their peers

were

beating the draft, that the better educated enlistees were enjoying American-style amenities. In short, they understood that

they were suckers, and they were resentful. Consequently, they

developed their

own

anti-authoritarian subculture:

more than

any previous American army, they were prone to go native, take scalps,

wear earrings, shoot drugs, scrawl weird slogans on

their

helmets.

The grunt ensemble

films

acknowledge that the war's hu-

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

man

was born

cost

largely

by the disadvantaged.

Still,

they do so

only obliquely: poor blacks are prominent, but the protagonists of these movies are middle-class whites. There has been as yet

no Vietnam

film

made from

a black point of

view although,

overrepresented as they were in the worst assignments, black grunts were far

more

politically radical

were whites. Hamburger

and disaffected than

Hill allows a taste of black rage, albeit

focusing on micro-incidents of racial tension rather than addressing the essential racist Instead,

war

is

shown

component of the war. as terrifyingly existential: a sense of

abandonment amid meaningless ensemble

films as

it is

to the

conflict

MIA

is

as central to the

rescue films, but here

grunt

it is

less

tragic than pathetic or, in the case of Full Metal Jacket, ironic.

Gardens of Stone

is

the lone current example to even bother with

traditional forms of patriotic sentiment. Like,

who

it

wasn't

started "that crazy Asian war." Bereft of even the

them most

minimal ideological support, the teenage warriors nevertheless

perform Duty I

is

their "patriotic chore."

the most didactic

saw had

when

a peacenik learn to

As it

kill,

befits a

comes a

TV

show, Tour of

to this: the last episode

Puerto Rican win the re-

spect of his black comrades, a middle-class lieutenant appreciate his tough sergeant. But the pointless heroism

is

Hamburger

Hill,

acme of

where the

come

to

excruciatingly central battle for

control of a slope in the Ashau valley has no intrinsic meaning, strategic or otherwise.

With

the collapse of the greater values,

the minor ones are drafted into service. bleakest sort of absurdism only by

cannon fodder

— a tragic and noble when

Platoon

its

film escapes the

seem

a virtue to

be

Rambo and Ronbo, one

swept the 1987 Oscars,

after the Iran-contragate revelations, the

receding from

it

fate.

Given the close identification between suspected that

The

making

six

months

Reagan revolution was

high water mark. But even as Platoon provided

a gutsy correlative to the fantasies of bellicose

noncombatants

189

J.

Hoberman

another round of mythologizing.

Milius and Stallone,

it

Drenched

rock and a perverse Viet nostalgia (one's

youth

in sixties

is still

initiated

one's youth,

whether spent

in

Kansas or Khe Sanh),

grunt ensemble films shy away from any sense of the war's moral basis or its political significance. In this, they

conflict of

may

reflect the

Vietnam veterans who want to forget the horrors of

war but recognize

that the experience

was the high point of

their lives.

Historical context

period

secondary to the re-creation of the

is

— and, by extension, American innocence.

Hence the

stunning popularity of Good Morning, Vietnam in which Robin

Williams appears

as

an irreverent Saigon-based disc jockey.

Aside from playing the

Vietnam

man who

brought rock

major accomplishment

is

his attitude.

items or rags on LBJ's family on the

and teaches Vietnamese students to hipness distances Platoon

'n' roll

to

— thus making possible Vietnam movies — Williams's

and

Full

him from

He

reads classified news

air, insults

uptight officers

talk street jive. Williams's

the war. Like the protagonists of

Metal Jacket, his cynicism

is

a

form of

militant

naivete, if not denial. Moreover, despite his insolence, he's pro-

tected by a friendly general

who

recognizes his value for morale.

Thus, Good Morning, Vietnam doesn't as celebrate the illusion

satirize the

war so much

— and the impotence — of "telling

it

like

it is."

The

home and

first

Vietnam

movement back and The more

films

forth in

naturalistic

vet's

return

is still

engorged:

some

fruitless search for closure.

grunt ensembles plunge headlong into the

ward

war's center, an attempt to

chine

had two themes: the

the vet's return to Vietnam, embodying a restless

it's

off inevitable defeat.

Good Morning, Vietnam

The ma-

rather than

Good Night World. This

is

why

virtually

all

Vietnam combat

ing the present tense of Johnson's

war

— that

films are set dur-

is,

at

the peak of

American involvement, before Nixon's troop withdrawals de-

190

IN VIETNAM

THE WIND DOESN'T BLOW IT

SUCKS

Stanley Kubrick's

FULL

METAL JACKET Poster for Full Metal Jacket, 1987. Courtesy Photofest.

J.

Hoberman

stroyed what was

My

army morale, the exposure of the

of

left

Lai massacre eroded America's moral position, before the inva-

sion of

Cambodia made

widen the war, before

movement and The

mockery of Nixon's promise not

a

new

to

had experienced the antiwar

recruits

the counterculture, black power, and urban riots.

were

post- 1969 recruits

less docile

and, as the troop with-

drawals signaled the retreat from military victory, the

army was

plagued by escalating disorders that raised questions as to the ability of the U.S.

armed

forces to continue to function at

The grunt ensemble

all.

dreams

films strongly suggest the

that

Freud attributed to traumatic neuroses, "repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident." (In fact, there

was an

article in

This repetition, according to Freud,

overpowered by the

initial

as children

might

peats

it,

a repetition terial as a it

as

compulsion

is

an attempt

Defusing blame is

is

a

"obliged to repeat the repressed ma-

this

.

.

remembering

new Vietnam

for a foreign country, It

.

13

key aspect of the

named

be shown as an American struggle.

waging

mastery:

as play. But, a neurotic in the grip of

is

contemporary experience instead of

Although the war

at

experience, the subject actively re-

something belonging to the past."

that in

as therapy.) 12

Newsday about the value of Platoon

it

film.

must always

can never be acknowledged

war, the U.S. orchestrated the most massive

display of firepower in

human

history.

As

in the original movie,

the stars of every Vietnam film are entirely American. Hamburger Hill

and Good Morning, Vietnam might be considered mildly

sionist for the

cameos they award

to-hand combat and aside, the indigenous

a

few

the locals but, a bit of

flashes of

population

thus designed for subjugation.

is

North Vietnamese

revi-

hand-

artillery

almost entirely female and

The enemy

is

the VC: Platoon refights the American Civil

only perfunctorily

War with

blacks and

northern white dopers pitted against Southern juiceheads; in Metal Jacket, media.

192

women

are the

enemy;

in

Hamburger

Hill, it's

the

Full

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

Bill is

Coutrie's Dear America, produced for

Home Box

the documentary corollary to Platoon and Hamburger

timental and horrific,

Office,

Sen-

Hill.

juxtaposes actual GI letters to parents,

it

wives, and girlfriends read by a small galaxy of Hollywood stars

with candid footage,

as well as the obligatory sixties

to create a sort of transpersonal

home movie. These

rock track, letters are

often expressions of pure terror and disorientation. But this

powerful raw material makes the result doubly disturbing. The

paradox

is

that Coutrie's

documentary

mythologizing grunt ensemble film

is

yet.

the most heavily

Not only

are the musical

juxtapositions stupefyingly literal-minded ("I'm 18" for boot

camp,

Gonna

"Gimme

Shelter" during an air assault,

Fall" used to

accompany

conveniently forget that war tell

Mom

is

a

"A Hard

Rain's

A

monsoon), but the filmmakers

war and one doesn't

necessarily

all.

Although

nam without

insistent

on

its

authenticity, Dear America

is

Viet-

racism, drugs, fraggings, atrocities, sex weirdness,

or any of the perks of an occupying army. Historical context dissolves in subjectivity, the

whose victims are

war emerging

as a no-fault collision

entirely American. The Deer Hunter has

been

replaced by Dear Hunter.

In their retreat

Vietnam

from the realm of the

sociohistorical, recent

films stress the subjective experience of the individual

combatant

— thus, the importance of voice-over letters in Platoon,

Gardens of Stone, and Dear America, the frenzied flashbacks of

Magnum,

comes

P. I.,

the immersion in sixties

pop music. The war be-

a personal affair or a generational

coming of

ensemble films honor the Viet vet by extolling loyalty to his buddies.

Although

age.

Grunt

his situational

in this, they are true to the ex-

perience of a war where the continual rotation of ground troops discouraged cohesion and a soldier's overriding concern was to survive his twelve-month tour of duty and get out, these movies

can never address the ideological conditioning that suckered

193

Hoberman

J.

Americans into Vietnam to begin with. Imperial America

TV

run. As the

not too

The World War

Why We

located the

war

Fight?

in

It

II

to be an

it's

a perpetual re"It's

film

who

had addressed the our adversaries were,

our national history, and directed us towards It

provided instruction in what

American while reassuring us

provocations of the

enemy and horrors

who

guys and square-shooters films could

combat

explained

our individual responsibilities.

meant

in syndication:

do something about Vietnam. See Platoon and un-

late to

derstand."

question

now

is

ads for the video release of Platoon told us:

do none of

this.

that,

of war,

it

whatever the

we were

nice

still

played by the rules. 14 Vietnam

Nor can

they. The Green Berets aside,

there were no such movies produced during the course of the

Vietnam War. I

Won

the

cynical

Instead, The Dirty Dozen (from the right)

War (from the

war

stories that

mocracy, or

fair play. If

left),

both 1967, initiated

and How

a cycle of

had nothing to do with patriotism, deanything, these issues were displaced

onto the dying form of the western. The Wild Bunch (1969), dier Blue (1970), Little Big

(1973) had

more

Man

to do with

(1970),

and High

Sol-

Plains Drifter

Vietnam than any war

film.

This quintessential American genre was typically the way that,

however honestly or meretriciously, America used to ex-

plain itself to

American

itself.

Who

soldiers played

makes the law? What "cowboys"

is

in Vietnam,

the order? As it is

significant

that the antiwar counterculture identified itself

with the Indians,

adopting beads and headbands, tribal

peyote, eco-

politics, a

made

return to the land. This

the western obsolete.

The

lifestyles,

split in historical

genre, which enjoyed

Age during the quarter-century Pax Americana

World War

II,

grew

consensus its

Golden

that followed

increasingly apocalyptic throughout the

Vietnam War, with the ultimate desecration of Blazing

Saddles

(1974) capping the assorted anti-, post, spaghetti, revisionist, psychedelic, and burlesque westerns of the early seventies.

The

m

decline and eclipse of the western effectively redefined

VIETNAM: THE REMAKE

the screen image of the masculine hero. finally

made

When

Dustin Hoffman

a western, he played an Indian; the seventies saw a

whole generation of

stars

who

never donned stetsons (Robert

Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss).

thology had been discredited.

No wonder

was emblazoned with a quote to the

Top Gun's press

or President of the United States."

constructing a winner out of a loser

is

The

He

difficulty inherent in

Vietnam

really should have spent less

Vietnam offered no great casualties included

Its

first

vet-

time

Martin Peretz and more time watching Magnum,

listening to

enemy.

star, jet fighter pi-

at least a partial factor in

the abject failure of Senator Albert Gore, the

eran to run for president.

book

effect that "there are only

four occupations worthy of a man: actor, rock lot

De

The my-

battles

and no

P.I.

clearly defined

our longstanding sense of national

innocence and masculine identity, not to mention the broad national consensus that

World War

II.

had defined American foreign policy since

This has

made

the

war

particularly difficult to

represent: inherently polarizing and depressing, with a built-in

unhappy ending, fare last

and the

it

both broke the conventions of civilized war-

basic rules of

Hollywood entertainment.

It

was the

picture show.

The

impossible longing for a satisfactory conclusion tempts

each Viet film to

sell itself as definitive. It is

precisely that

bum-

— more the film just running out of the projector, than the roof caving in — that has us with a compulsion to

mer of a

finale

left

remake,

if

not history, then

at least

the movie.

Notes

1

.

Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United

torical Experience

(New

States,

and

the

Modern His-

York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 176.

201.

2.

Ibid., p.

3.

Hannah Arendt, "Home

to Roost:

A

Bicentennial Address,"

New

York Review

of Books, June 26, 1975, p. 4.

195

J.

Hoberman

4.

Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), pp. 61 and 209. pp. 188-189.

5.

Ibid.,

6.

Elaine Scarry, "Injury and the Structure of War," Representations, no. 10

(Spring 1985): 1-51. 7.

Herr, Dispatches, p. 14.

8.

Ibid., p. 41.

9.

Philip Caputo,

1977), p. 10.

A Rumor

of

War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,

5.

Klaus Theweleit, Male

Fantasies, Vol.

1:

Women,

Floods, Bodies, History, trans.

Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 11.

Herr, Dispatches,

12.

New

13.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond

York Newsday,

p. 41.

p. 10.

May

10, 1988. the Pleasure Principle

(New

York:

W. W. Norton,

1961), p. 12. 14.

See Jeanine Basinger's comprehensive The World War

of a Genre

m

(New

11

Combat

York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 79.

Film:

Anatomy

Carol Squiers

AT THEIR MERCY:

READING OF PICTURES

A

FROM 1988

An

instantly

tory dia.

consumable and hyperbolically

Writ

in mass-culture platitudes,

and bureaucratic jargon, journalists

which

complex and

is

power without ever and

tions,

inflated type of his-

produced each and every day by the American news me-

is

strive to

make simple

that

to provide a behind-the-scenes look at

revealing the true underpinnings, supposi-

beneficiaries of the system that they labor to explain

and maintain: who wins and who never going to win;

who

a kind of love;

many

loses

controls what;

system are and what that means;

will in

shorthand redundancies,

and why the

who

how money

losers are

the owners of the

can indeed buy you

and how honest labor and the sweat of your brow

cases earn

you

a progressively

lower standard of

and an uncertain future for whatever children you are op-

living

timistic

enough to bring into

a

democracy

in

which most people

are created unequal.

An image.

important part of the newsmaking process

is

takes a variety of ever-more pervasive forms,

It

the visual

from the

video footage of the world's killing fields unreeled nightly on the national

news

to the

still

images reproduced in newspapers and

magazines to Hollywood's factoid-based dramas, which are predicated

on

and uses

"real life" events. in the greater

Each

visual

mode

has

its

own

rules

scheme of the maintenance of American

democratic capitalism and the concurrent achievement of max-

imum

corporate profit, with a middling consideration given to

199

Carol Squiers

actually providing information or insight to the general public.

Within

this system, the

news photograph has an almost

wholly symbolic function. Most often a single picture will be

used to "tell" an entire story, both illustrating and supplementing a journalist's words. Take a situation in itary

blows up

a Palestinian's

for an alleged act of violence.

house explodes that

which the

It is

moment

a picture of the

printed in the newspaper

is

mil-

Israeli

house on the West Bank in revenge the

— not the mo-

ment

the soldiers arrive at the house and begin laying the explo-

sives,

or the look on a woman's face

when

minutes or one hour to clear out of her

she

home

is

given twenty

before

it is

totally

destroyed. Such a profound injustice will almost always be inadequately portrayed in a single photograph. stead

is

What

is

recorded

the instant of greatest action and high drama.

instant collapses any notion of injustice, brute force,

And

in-

that

and human

violation into an image that replays repeatedly the idea that the

Middle East

is

somehow

mysteriously and willfully violent, that

nothing can be done about the violence, that the Palestinians bring

it

on themselves.

In addition to the political complexities

and human tragedy that are effaced

is

the fact that violence

is

constituted as so essentially exciting: the violence makes a better picture

than any other visual aspect of the situation.

Whether they

are shooting politicians in

poverty in Bangladesh, their wire service or

job

is

all

Washington or

good news photographers know what

news magazine or newspaper wants. Their

to deliver "fresh" images of subjects within a range of ac-

ceptable stereotypes. Anything less than this

uninformed and even

unintelligent.

is

to risk seeming

Anything more

is

to be la-

beled too "political" and therefore unobjective.

The following

commentaries

news and

strive to untangle the ideology of

representations, showing

how news imagery

tural suppositions that construct the news.

its

illustrates the cul-

MERCY

AT THEIR

During the second half of 1988, the American public was subjected to a thoroughly dreadful and

some might even

say heinous

presidential campaign. Rather than trying to forget that

it

happened, however,

we

tem of party

— and political representation — that

brought us

One

politics

should take time to meditate on the sys-

this miserable travesty.

sible in this

is

how

the spectrum of the politically permis-

country runs the gamut only from

disheartening

fact,

there

Democratic and Republican analysis of large

is

A

to B. Despite

indeed a difference between the

parties, as evidenced

by pictorial

groups of people from both parties attending

their respective national conventions. Thus, even all

mind about

of the most obvious points that springs to

said party system

this

ever

acknowledging

the prevarication, hypocrisy, evasiveness, quibbling, fibbing,

faking, dissembling,

we might

still

and perversion we have been subjected

be able to discern

why we

volve ourselves in a process presided over by a less,

to,

should continue to in-

bunch of humor-

immoral numbskulls. Consider the following photographs,

taken while the author was documenting the way the news media covered the presidential campaign. Although they are simulations of political photography (the author journalist), they

tographed

at

is

not a photo-

do cover the general range of typical

conventions

sights

pho-

— and in the process, point up visible

philosophical differences between Democrats and Republicans. People

in

Funny Hats.

A

staple of political conventions

and the

photographer's best friend, few people in funny hats can escape looking like born fools. Some, however, such as this Jesse Jack-

son delegate, can convey a message of progress and optimism

with their decorative headgear. Having experienced our government

at

work, however,

this delegate also

a lifetime of

wears an

expression indicating an underlying skepticism that this political

201

process

is

ever going to do jack zip for her.

Other

hats,

such as the one worn by

this Pat

Robertson

supporter, remind you that Diane Arbus didn't invent the people she photographed. She simply waited for off their

Styrofoam campaign

hats,

over them, grab an American

flag,

them

to tear the rims

smash an old army helmet

and goosestep

in her

direction. Young People.

What

does

it

take to get a young Republican to

turn himself into a one-person billboard for death and destruction?

Not much, judging from the spooky

pily exhibited

by

this youthful enthusiast.

self-desecration hap-

Notice too the conflict

AT THEIR

he shows about his appearance.

him

to be recognized that inspires

with

"SDI"

his

modesty and the

to

wear

his

desire not

Ray Bans, along

stickers, at eleven o'clock at night?

In contrast, witness the

feed-'n'-seed cap

buttons

Is it

MERCY

young man wearing the Dukakis

and festooned with traditional

— none of them on his face.

political

Clean-cut, well-behaved,

psychologically stable, and probably working for nothing at the

Democratic convention, cans pretend

Politicians

cratic

is

he's the

type of youngster the Republi-

just like one of their children.

Who

Are Not Running for the Presidency.

governor Mario

Cuomo

New

York's

Demo-

has lots of negatives, including not

who

being the kind of leader that the people

voted for him

wanted, and not running for the presidency in 1988. Nevertheless,

he

obvious

still

has plenty of admirable attributes.

some of the most Here he officials

The most

— a cuddly, pliable face capable of squeezing is

doing his turn on the perennial disbelief

seem

On

itself into

ironic expressions ever sported by a politician. all

elected

to feel about the things people say to them.

the Republican side, however,

senator Orrin Hatch, the

we

man who went

have the likes of Utah

high profile during the

Iran-contra hearings by congratulating Oliver North for his criminal behavior, and of homosexuals."

The

who

has called the Democrats "the party

strange deathmask-like illusionism in this

203

— Carol Squiers

picture,

from

his

which makes body,

it

look as

if

the senator's face

detached

is

actually a quite realistic depiction of a

is

whose usual demeanor suggests

man

that he probably gets his skin

screwed on. CBS's Lesley Stahl looked none

Signs Bearing Political Sentiments.

too happy about being photographed holding the sign that her

objectivity

cameraman used

you could readily

predicament lay

(Silence = Death

many

it

at

No

test,

Contra Aid

the

of

shows the kind of

visible),

them problems

both parties are

vitally

myth of

many stuff

the Democratic conven-

out concern for issues such

buttons were highly

rights,

in

aside,

your hands on

tion: signs that spelled

Americans

some kind of

being the general masquerade amongst

still

journalists. Stahl's

and equal

for

as

AIDS

the environment,

that a majority of

concerned about, even

though their government has ignored or otherwise purposefully defeated

them

for

many

long years.

At the Republican convention, signs were either of the happy-faced Hallmark variety Bush!

Welcome Dan! and Ohio Loves

— or the deeply disturbed. At the river's edge rally where

George Bush sprang Dan Quayle on an expectant world, nutso conservatism manifested

itself in

anticommie sentiments and the

—

—

—

pummeling of AIDS

Of course,

protestors.

magic markers and

armed with

a decided lack of design ability, thousands of

hand-lettered signs were turned out for use

There was

entirely too

much

tions. Invocations, benedictions, Billy

the convention,

at

giving the entire corporate fiesta that homey, Prayer.

home-

the signs were

spun. Utilizing squadrons of young Republicans

hand-made

praying

Graham

at

look.

both conven-

— heads bent in

prayer during events that are essentially television commercials are a revolting sight to witness.

Once

again, though, there

was

an essential difference between the two parties. Democrats

as-

sumed

to

from unctuous devotion

a variety of pious attitudes,

barely faking

it.

Republicans, however (although they probably

span the same spectrum in terms of real attitude), treated prayer

form of revenge. Our

as a

art in

of you

heaven

name

liberals.

Sam Donaldson

father

dirty,

we'll get every last

card-carrying

Luckily, despite the

one

— who

— hallowed be thy

impediment of prayer, ABC's

always stayed on top of his job, although

when

the Republican supplication was over he inadvertently brushed past the devout

who

it

young blonde

woman

at right.

When

she saw

was, she bared her teeth, glared, and heatedly wiped off

her arm, belying the dog-eared platitude about prayer being a

balm to the Balloons.

spirit.

Like funny hats, balloons are a beloved and indispen-

sable part of

our political process. The release of red, white, and

blue inflated orbs over a nales

is

deemed

crowd during emotional convention

the festive

way

fi-

to celebrate the candidate, the

acceptance speech, and the end of four days of living

hell.

On

the night Dukakis delivered his acceptance speech in Atlanta, the

were

tricolors

a nice finishing

touch to an emotional evening

had been capped by the spectacle of every Democrat of any

that

stature taking to the

podium along with

The

down

balloons wafted

bonus to

the beaming candidate.

gently over the excited crowd, a

heartwarming event.

a

In contrast, by the final night of the Republican conven-

crowd worked

tion, the

interest

masquerading

pledge to the

flag!

more

self-

Prayer in the schools!

as morality.

Eight

frenzy of hysterical

itself into a

The

years of escalating profits! Sud-

denly huge caches of killer balloons were released from the heights of the

Superdome and somewhere

in the range of

two

hundred thousand of them dumped on the crowd. These orbs didn't waft: they ing.

came down with

vengeance, pelting and bash-

a

Giddy, the Republicans cast off their Sunday school de-

meanor and jumped and stomped on escape unbroken, they turned their

down

American

flags

upside

and, using the gold points at the ends, stabbed until

balloons

pher

their attackers. Lest any

little

were destroyed.

said,

Haiti,

all

the

one veteran campaign photogra-

standing back in disbelief.

It's

like Haiti

during the

elections.

II

These are the outlines and accessories of transgression: an

empty

chair, a

paper cup, and a used condom discarded surrep-

A A jogging hanky furtively swiped across the shriveled member. suit with easy frontal access. And a woman who was badly paid to perform a series of naughty poses and meager costumings. A titiously in

2m

shame and disgust on the carpet next

to the chair.

AT THEIR

woman detail,

with a

memory

the verbal

that

commands

had recorded,

seemingly exacting

in

given and obediently obeyed, per-

haps because they were so simple and pathetic. other televangelist,

Jimmy Swaggart

dollar gilded goose slaughtered

turbation, dirty words,

Oh

sure,

it's

MERCY

Down

goes an-

this time, a multimillion-

on the

voyeurism, mas-

altar of

and short-term motel

rentals.

easy to say in hindsight that

it all

makes

sense.

These taunting, prancing preachers, these wailing maws of

money

lust

—

it

stands to reason that they are hypocrites, scam-

Penthouse, July 1988, p. 109.

Carol Squiers

mongers, and opportunists through and through.

And

longings of Swaggart, however sad and puny, were

make

the news.

The news

that first "breaks" the story,

network newscasts,

to

in this case takes a particularly inter-

esting route through varied venues.

tional

so the

bound

it

From

the local media outlet

then progresses through the na-

daily newspapers,

and national news

magazines, and into the secondary purveyors such as newsoriented talk shows, late-night talk shows, lifestyle magazines,

and sex

rags.

Round and round

the news of Swaggart's misde-

meanors goes, swelling with conjecture and lishment.

Once hidden from

all

ridicule

and embel-

but a single observer's eyes, the

small and shameful ejaculations in hastily arranged encounters are magnified into major events that audiences across the land

could almost

see.

Events that they would lust to see, would pay

to see. Events that they, predictably, can see, for the cost of the July 1988 issue of Penthouse: The International Magazine for Men.

In

more ways than

lication.

Suspecting that

one, Penthouse its

readers'

is

a public-service

minds might be

pub-

than

less

razor sharp, Penthouse (like Playboy) helpfully characterizes each listing

on

contents page.

its

Some

pieces are called

"Comment,"

while others are "Article" or "Service." Most popular, probably, are those sections called "Pictorial."

Does Swaggart"

is,

but what

portage," a term that usually

it

was

A

pictorial

called

means "the

is

what "Debbie

by Penthouse was "React or process of re-

porting the news."

Jimmy Swaggart televangelist's

getting "done" was certainly news.

son snapped pictures of Swaggart outside

with a prostitute, evidence that placed him in position. Unfortunately,

no

original

a

a

A

rival

motel

compromising

photographs that we

know

of were taken of the encounters between Swaggart and Debra

Murphree,

a self-admitted

worker

in the sex industry

— not a

church secretary claiming wanton violation or an aspiring model/ actress

208

who

likes to

party with the powerful and randy, but a

MERCY

AT THEIR

woman who makes

men

her living servicing the unmet needs of

you wouldn't usually hear about. But

in this richly fictionalized era, just as

proof of presidential

lies is totally

documentary

ignored, so can documentary

proof of just about anything be materialized from thin

A

air.

re-

portage can be created in both words and pictures. So Debra

Murphree re-posed and

two

re-cited for

and

Penthouse writers

a

photographer the things that Swaggart had her do that brought

him down. Presented

as a

two-part package, an article included

a detailed narrative of Swaggart's "secret sex life" as described

by Debra Murphree, while

a series of black

and white photo-

graphs, isolated in a sealed section of the magazine that had to

be cut open after purchase, provided the reenactment of the sordid scenes.

— as either "reportage"

But what kind of pictures are these

or pornography? Shot in square format, they are printed

full-

frame with black borders in the self-conscious art photo

style

that

was popular

in the 1970s.

credit given, leading

Oddly, there

one to suspect

miliar with both this artful style

has taken these snaps. ing, like

1

Odder

that

and

is

no photographer's

someone

this

intimately fa-

kind of cheeky trespass

they are ironic and untitillat-

still,

medical photos or pictures from a women's

self-

examination manual. Murphree faces the camera and panto-

mimes her she

dirty deeds with a knowing,

back and demonstrates, with

lies

moves and positions

bemused expression. Or

clinical precision, the

wanted

that Swaggart

to see. Rather than

being exploited by the anonymous shooter, Murphree

is

in

cahoots with him, giving a deadpan, tongue-in-cheek perfor-

mance

that

is

cool and unseductive.

Penthouse's reasons for

producing

plexing but hardly indecipherable.

this

parodic piece are per-

The magazine's

editors

must

have realized that Murphree doing Penthouse was not going to be

convincing in the cheesecake marketplace.

A

plain

woman,

she

209

Carol Squiers

lacked both the trashy stylization and pendulous physical endow-

ments of limited

Hahn or Donna Rice and would

a Jessica

charm

for a jack-off clientele.

Still,

thus have

because she was an

upfront sex worker and not a supposed innocent trying to recover her self-respect through extortion, Murphree would feel freer to enact for the didn't

camera what had transpired

need to be portrayed,

toplessly

as

Hahn

— in healing waters and open

claimers, although she clearly judges as sick, thus separating his twisted

in private. She

was, musing soulfully fields.

— and

She issues no dis-

most of Swaggart's

needs from her

desires

own more

pragmatic motives. Unlike the typical pictorials, where Penthouse supplies brief, suggestive captions, the editors here could flesh

out the entire sordid scenario: Murphree's words printed beneath became the dirty images that defined the otherwise schematic visuals.

What portage"?

We

gart.

could Penthouse's readers gain from seeing this "re-

We

are positioned as viewers, as surrogates for Swag-

look across a car seat

at this

woman, with her

unbuttoned and her shorts pulled down rub herself.

We

take his position

him and we peer up her

skirt.

on

We

in order to display

bed

a

watch her

pull her panties

a

woman who

tells

us that this

chill, anti-

is

the

has contempt for her spectator's

And

incapacity to join in the performance. us question Swaggart's sexuality even

mock

up

these pictures, coupled with Murphree's al-

all

most condescending "memoirs," performance of

and

as she stands over

her "crack" and kneel, "doggie-like," on a bed. The erotic staging of

blouse

more

this

message makes

strongly than

we

his hypocrisy.

This might just be the rationale behind the pictures. For consider this man's television performance before his Striding back

was in

like

and forth and back and forth across

an animal

cheap-looking

in heat. Strutting

suits that

210

his stage,

he

and shouting, he appeared

weren't necessarily cheap

had money but he had to appeal to

fall.

his

(this

man

mainly lower-middle-class

AT THEIR MERCY

constituents), with their fabric often

and

his crotch.

the stage.

and

A pimp

shouts and

It

and god and

lust

A

for Jesus.

and throbs and thrusts

that walks

open and snapping

drawn

cock of the walk.

itself,

moans and

taut across his thighs

yells its incantations

and

again. But

tion, this

ramming plunging power. More than the motion

is

of sin

words are second-

What mesmerizes and what

this

cock

moving, brutal mouth pulled wide

hell, its

shut, again

ary here.

words,

A

again and again, across

convincing

really counts

is

this

mo-

logic of the

— so powerful, so demanding,

so essential.

A man man

of

of insatiable desires could have been imagined, a

many

lusts.

Yet the "truth" as

it's

staged and framed in

Penthouse presents us with a lust so diminished, so stunted, so repulsive.

More than bringing Swaggart down

preacher, these pictures bring "I don't sity

think evangelists

him down

mean

performer.

to be sex symbols," says Univer-

of Alabama historian David E. Harrell,

azine,

as a holy roller of a

as a sexual

Jr., in

Newsweek mag-

"but they are frequently handsome and highly masculine

in behavior.

swooning."

The audience response

Among

those

is

not unlike bobby-soxers

who most demanded and

elicited that

sublimated swooning was the unfortunate Mr. Swaggart. But the

boys

at Penthouse

figured

high-stepping cock.

The

stakes are higher,

found,

how

Mere

to stop the

swoon and chasten

scandal in the pulpit

is

and the market demands

more permanent psychic

a

now

that

old hat.

more pro-

disgrace.

Ill

From

all

of the newspaper images of the months-long Palestinian

uprising in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and stands out. This small photograph, printed

West Bank, one

on page

8 of the

New

captioned "A house in the Palestinian

York Times for April 9,

is

village of Beita, in the

occupied West Bank, being blown up by

Israeli

troops."

It is

a simple

and somewhat abstract picture, be-

cause the photographer's view

is

so close to the exploding

m

Beita,

West Bank, April

8,

1988. Photo: Reuters/Bettmann News.

— either physically close or brought close by the use of a powerful lens — that besides the explosion, the smoke, and house

little

the blasted clouds of debris the picture and caption

Was

Killed by

is

is

visible in the image.

a headline:

"Army

Her Guard." And under

single sentence stands alone:

Underneath

Says Israeli Girl

that, in

boldfaced type, a

"The guard had shot

at

Arabs

before."

This refers, of course, to a much-publicized incident in

which

a teenage Israeli girl

was reported, with great hysteria and

horror, to have been "stoned to death" by Palestinian villagers.

Immediately after the

first

reports of the rock-throwing melee

that led to her death, Israel's justice minister called for the olition of

dem-

numerous Arab homes and the expulsion of hundreds

of Palestinians.

Two

days after the incident, and before

punishments could transpire, the that the girl

212

had

in fact

been

Israeli

killed not

army

some of the issued a statement

by Palestinians but by

AT THEIR

her

guard. Yet the

Israeli

army subsequently dynamited

MERCY

eight

houses belonging to families of Palestinians accused of taking part in the rock-throwing, despite

picture, then,

is its

nameless accused

who

its

own

What

did not directly cause her death.

report that the rocks

so distressing about the

is

evidence of retribution against a family of a

at least partially

vindicated by Israeli officials

nevertheless continued to carry out a punishment decreed

in the heat of hatred

Yet

it is

and

just a small

rage.

photograph that

offers this evidence, in

conjunction with the news story that accompanies

ways the picture seems even insignificant for example, than the images of

weeping

women

that have also

—

it.

In

some

far less dramatic,

it is

dead children, angry

soldiers, or

been printed. But the situation of

these people, with their grievous problems and appalling solutions,

is

essentially alien to us,

even while

them or damn them, and even while

What

emotions.

is

not alien to us

arrest, charges brought,

And what we cesses into

is

we sympathize with

pictures of

them evoke our

the idea of due process

— of

judgment passed, punishment decided.

see in the picture

is

the collapse of

all

those pro-

one immediate, and apparently acceptable, spasm of

revenge.

Under what circumstances would acceptable

on American

soil?

What

a violent street confrontation

rive at his

to ar-

— parents, wife,

his family

— and blast the house to ruins?

antinuclear demonstrators, after crawling through a fence

and damaging

a nuclear

warhead, would expect, in addition to

arrest, the destruction of their

in

punishment be

would expect the U.S. Army

home, evacuate him and

children, whatever kin lived there

What

a similar

black activist arrested during

1985 there was an

officially

homes?

It

seems unthinkable, yet

sanctioned bombing of an Ameri-

can dwelling. The Philadelphia house of a group of black Americans

who

belonged to an organization called

by the city police department, in

MOVE

a disastrous

was bombed

maneuver

sulted in the destruction of sixty other homes.

MOVE,

that re-

a radical

213

— Carol Squiers

e organization,

was unacceptably troublesome to

bors and local authorities, and officials

its

neigh-

intractability gave Philadelphia

its

an excuse to use extraordinary force against

it.

Usually, such force can only be gotten away with

when

applied to people considered too far outside the realm of society to be rendered even the

happened with the

most

their disruptive, violent,

and

had thus

far

them entree

raeli

to the

convinced the world

human

The opposition

society

commu-

from which they

their prior abstraction

much

and categorize than the PLO's bombs and

their

that

of their teenagers' stones to

guns and armored cars has proved

provoked

has

is

essentially nonlethal behavior (at

been excluded because of

into "terrorists."

human

What

Palestinians in the current insurgency

least in the events in question) has

nity to allow

basic of rights.

it is

assassinations,

a kind of sympathetic identification.

Is-

harder to label

and has

The images

of

dead children, angry women, and ruined homes have con-

veyed a tragic message that had never before reached the majority

of the American population with such force.

Out of

all

the terrible images pouring out of the occupied

territories, that picture of the

that the excuse for

sums up the frightening force Palestinian demands.

exploding house, and the news

destruction was no longer even valid,

its

It

been mobilized against

that has

also asks each

viewer to consider where

the use of unbridled force against an entire people will lead.

As the 1980s draws to

media

is still

a close, the

image of

taking a beating. In part, this

women

is

in the

orchestrated right-wing campaign against independent

Spearheaded by the attack on abortion

mass

the result of a wel.

rights,

most

women.

so-called

feminist issues have been steadily torpedoed during the Reagan era. Overall,

women made no economic gains, except for that women — mainly Anglo-Saxon Protestant

minority of genteel

who were 214

enlisted

by Wall Street during

its

"bull" market,

Jean Harris

at

1981. Photo:

Westchester County

Hedda Nussbaum

Jail,

AP/Wide World.

which only widened economic

testifying at Joel Steinberg

1988. Photo:

trial,

disparities.

But

AP/Wide World.

it

will not be

image of the successful, economically upwardly mobile

who

will stand for the eighties. Rather,

beaten, genteel

it

will be the

woman — Hedda Nussbaum — who

an

woman

image of

a

apparently will

represent the feminine status quo.

This

is

only

fitting.

The

eighties

began with the image of

another abused (emotionally rather than physically) genteel

woman — Jean Harris, who did away with randy diet doctor Herman Tarnower. In concert with the decade-long campaign against women, New York governor Mario Cuomo has decided that Harris, despite

good arguments

to the contrary,

must con-

tinue her penal servitude.

Cuomo's denial of clemency

for Harris occurred during the

Christmas holiday season for 1988, a time that seemed to breed a great

old

spasm of antiwoman

woman

fered

two heart

gerous

activity. Releasing a sixty-six-year-

with advanced heart disease,

signal.

attacks in prison,

who

has already suf-

would apparently send

Any other homicidal female might

and slaughter an unfaithful or abusive husband or

a

dan-

take up arms lover.

215

Carol Squiers

This trend,

it

seems, would interfere with a system that

firmly entrenched. In to

maul or

it,

husbands and lovers

and

their wives

kill

girlfriends.

is

feel relatively free

During

that last ex-

New Yorkers were also confronted images of two women gunned down by their estranged with husbands. At the time of their deaths, both women were under traordinary

week of

1988,

"court protection" orders because of threats and physical abuse

by their husbands. Yet the

men were

their violation of those orders.

still

on the

According to

streets despite

local police,

"hun-

dreds" of violations of court orders occur and each violation can't be considered a "top priority."

So the representation of bloodied able cultural

men

is

And

utterly taboo.

ation can be altered: the Jersey,

women remains a tolerwomen bloodying

norm, even though the image of even though proof

murder

dropped 44 percent

rate in

exists that this situ-

Bergen County,

in 1987, "five years after a

New

compre-

hensive state law took effect requiring the police to arrest violators of protective orders" (emphasis added). Reluctantly,

round up sure of

their fellow

power over

men, and

their

own

in so doing give

domestic situations.

In line with the presumption that the bloodlust of socially tolerable, the

supposed bloodlust of

nowhere more ferociously than

And

the

New

women

is

Day

on the sex

story

testing of fetuses.

"In a major change in medical attitudes and practice,

want to abort

a fetus

on the

"Even doctors who

selves will often tell

story, as

it

is

in the abortion rights struggle.

tors are providing prenatal diagnoses to pregnant

Telling

men

played out

York Times gave abortion foes a juicy present in a

front-page, Christmas

Kolata.

men

up some mea-

laid

out a sordid

who

wrote Gina

will not provide this service

women where

women where

ing trend of women

basis of sex alone,"

many doc-

women who

to go tale

them-

to go to get it."

seemed

to be the point of the

purporting to expose the grow-

decide to abort fetuses based on sexual

preference. Patiently, Kolata built up evidence against the lying,

216

MERCY

AT THEIR

who

calculating females

tions for this reason.

them abor-

tricked doctors into giving

"We've been burned," one doctor

bitterly

intoned.

Unspoken

"women from means

in the Times piece, except

India

and Asia,"

related to

it

that sexual preference usually

is

male sex and

a preference for the

where

a devaluation of the fe-

male. But neither the cultural forces that compel a

worry over the sex of her child or the

woman

to

father's role in sexual

preference were even mentioned. Clearly, the American family

women, painted

being destroyed by the country's

manipulators

who con

procedures for their

as

is

demented

innocent doctors into performing medical

own

diabolical end.

Women,

if

the Times

is

to be believed, will stop at nothing in order to control the hu-

man

race.

Control, submission, credibility, and victimization are

is-

sues played out repeatedly in the media, mainly to the detriment

of

women. Among

mur-

the most recent have been the "preppy"

der victim Jennifer Levin and the brutalized Tawana Brawley, along with Hedda Nussbaum.

And

out, poses a certain repetitious

the reportage, day in and day

and insidious

set of questions

about each of them: whether she was asking for allowed

whether she

it,

violation or beating

is

was

telling the truth,

it,

whether she

whether her death or

some sense deserved. By the way

in

the

questions are framed, the frequency with which they are asked,

and the sheer reiteration of words and images, the answer seems to be affirmative:

women

In 1980, Jean Harris

anomaly.

It

are getting what they deserve.

was represented

seemed certain

that

no

woman

as

an outcast and an

could

make common

cause with her, driven as she was by frightening self-delusion

and reprehensible versely,

is

class

philosophy. But

Hedda Nussbaum, con-

being touted as everywoman, as the victim potentially

lurking within each

woman

alive,

waiting to be abused. As

we

enter the Bush years and look toward the 1990s, the antiwoman rhetoric

— and the ghastly actions and images that result —

is

be-

217

Corol Squiers

ing played out with macabre

With every new

new

twists

day, that violation

and unabated

comes

to

ferocity.

seem more

familiar,

more common, more expected, more normal. Conditioned by the steady stream of sordid images, the injured and deformed face of a

Hedda Nussbaum begins

to look

pathetic than any smiling, self-confident

more

woman

essentially

sym-

could ever be.

Notes

1.

In his "Real Life

Greil

2i!

S

Rock Top 10" column of June

Marcus mentioned

that

21, 1988, in the Village

David Kennedy was the photographer.

Voice,

Victoria

de Grazia

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE:

HOW AMERICAN PUBLICITY SUBVERTED THE EUROPEAN POSTER, 1920-1940

On

a

summer Sunday

in 1931, a Fiat Spider

donkey path one thousand meters to Alps of Emilia. the drivers,

was the

It

two debonair youths, hopped out and

Midas Motor expert

up

reported on

it.

perplexed the

In a

town

so

chines; If

in

The only

oil.

need of lubrication thereabouts were sewing ma-

and gasoline and

nothing

Italian adver-

poor and out-of-

the-way, there was simply no market for engine

machines

to the per-

a symbolist poster advertising

Oil. This event equally

who

a

Apennine

car ever seen there. Just arrived,

first

plexity of the villagers pasted

tising

509 scrambled up

a village in the

else,

olive oil aplenty

were

available for that.

our sophisticated urbaner concluded,

documented once more the

futility

of postering.

this

episode

1

For students of mass culture, the advertiser's dilemma

—

namely, whether or not the campaign paid off by boosting markets for car oil

—

is

of slight interest.

other reasons. Not least of

all, it

The episode

is

telling for

presents in neat paradox

capitalist

market relations separate exchange from use

Here, no

less,

The

the machine had

story acquires yet

ical context.

more

come

to

significance

announce

when

social

needs!

put in histor-

in

complex

cultural

meanings; commodities come loaded with ways of

thinking about individual

it is

values.

own

Students of market cultures have emphasized that

exchange and consumption are embedded

and

its

how

and

human

relations;

and

acts of purchase foster

collective identities. 2 Accordingly,

we might

new ask

221

de Grazia

Victoria

whether

profit alone motivated this enterprise

and whether the

young men were not conscious of their own role as interpreters of culture; we might query how the villagers regarded it and what significance should be given to the motor

at

the time, as

if,

came

plains, they

modern ways commotion

that disrupted

thereafter,

others,

centers to find

as

a

leader that the donkey path

The roadbed was upgraded soon

and before long,

emptied out

from causing

Sunday mass, their deed impressed

community

transitable.

in the

bringing urbanity and

as civilizing knights,

to a rough rural backwater. Aside

made

American

from the centers of consumer culture

the local priest and

could be

oil's

young men's bravado did not go unremarked

origin. Indeed, the

this little Italian village, like

emigrants made their way

work and partake

down

in the amenities of

many

to urban

modern

consumer mores. This micro-event, interpreted both as a market ploy and for

its

social-cultural implications,

complex able

story.

The

is

a fragment of an even

variations thereon are practically

and can be conjured up with any of the myriad images

which American

cultural

and consumer

more

innumerin

artifacts set jarringly

amidst the semi-rural environs of other societies, sometimes to

be interpreted

as

representing modernity, sometimes as degener-

acy and corruption.

The Coke

plummets from

bottle that

a pass-

ing airplane onto the Khoisan, Xi, in The Gods Must Be Crazy;

the comic-pathetic scene of bleach-blond

with

a

Coke

Hamoua shimmying

bottle in Youssef Chahine's 1957 film Central Station;

the Coca-Cola-induced high of desperate 1950s teenagers in the

Hungarian Peter Gothar's Time Stands emblematic of a world-changing

Still

— these images are

set of events in this century

all

:

namely, the transposition of American models of marketing and

consumer culture beyond U.S. borders

in the last seventy or

eighty years as the United States acquired world economic

preeminence. In this essay,

222

I

want to explore some aspects of

this global

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

process of "Americanization" by focusing on

how

in a particular

region of the world, continental Europe, and in a particular

— namely, the interwar years — conceptions of market,

period

merchandising techniques, and advertising design of American

provenance forced the development of new patterns of consumer culture

and thus came to define what

By consumer

culture,

I

mean

it

meant

modern. 3

broadly a society-wide structure of

meaning and

feeling organized primarily

chase. In the

forms we know today,

States. Since the

to be

around

acts of pur-

originated in the United

it

turn of the century, as the main circuitry of

mass commerce was established, techniques devised to promote national markets for the branded, standardized products of largescale

manufacturers were honed in

a

huge industry specialized in

preparing, placing, and disseminating advertising messages. Increasingly, the contractual relations of

market shaped notions of

community, pressures

and the modalities of po-

for entitlement,

consensus. This change was accompanied by the construc-

litical

tion of

new

social subjects,

such

as the

consumer, and of new

social mediators including the salesman, the advertising expert,

also gave rise to

new

organizations such

Rotary businessmen's clubs. Not

least

of

and the press agent. as the

a

new

It

all, it

gave rise to

language of goods. Both in the U.S. and abroad, this com-

plex system of representation cast capitalist relations in a light:

the dynamic principal was not so

tribution and consumption; the a subject

empowered by

lectivities increasingly

his or

much production

consumer was,

if

new as dis-

not sovereign,

her spending capacity; social col-

appeared to be based on choice in the

marketplace rather than the vagaries of geography or the bonds of craft or class; finally, social conflicts

seemed subject

to resolu-

tion by widening access to commodities rather than by revolutionizing capitalist society root

and branch. 4

The responses of European special

inasmuch

as

societies

were

in

some

sense

American consumer culture appeared

abruptly and in less brutal forms than in Third

World

less

areas:

223

Victoria

de Grazia

there was no colonial heritage and no physical conquest was involved.

From

the start,

American models competed with

well-

defined market cultures, which themselves had contributed

much

over the previous century to developments in the U.S.,

and that continued to produce the

finely

wrought

theless,

American consumer culture presented

local notions of market, craft,

goods

craft

held up as models of taste and quality by American

elites.

None-

a real challenge to

and modernity. Reconstructing

which certain American values and techniques

the process by

were assimilated

into

European commercial culture demonstrates

not just the power exercised by the U.S. economy, but also the process by which certain local economic patterns and cultural

were

alternatives

altered,

abandoned, or suppressed.

American business methods, with

on creating productive

which markets were

societies in

their powerful emphasis

World War

capacity, took hold after still

regarded

economic Malthusianism: markets, limited, the best policy

one's tried

and true

around old

city centers 5

in

tastes.

being naturally stick to

Commercial culture was organized

and catered to bourgeois rather than

Generally, politicians could not conceive of changes

consumption or cultural

them

a residual

was to cleave to traditions and

clientele.

mass

like resources,

in

Most

as finite.

European business firms continued to be guided by

I

habits such as

to alter their appeals. Indeed,

bound up with

class cleavages,

it

would have caused

consumer

identities being so

was hard, even

for social re-

formers, to imagine that workers would develop "needs" that

were not

strictly

class position.

economic

Any

necessities or consonant with their

ulterior desires reflected "false conscious-

ness" or "embourgeoisement." 6 In the 1920s,

American consumer culture

started to chal-

lenge these assumptions. This was especially manifest in what the specific focus of

my

essay,

namely the grande

European advertisers and commercial sent goods in the marketplace. In

224

its

artists

querelle

over

how

is

among

to repre-

most elementary form,

this

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

debate centered on whether to pursue the editorializing copy style

used in the American mass-circulation press or to prefer

the design aesthetic associated with European postermaking traditions.

Should European promoters stake their future on

tual style that

promised

profits

a tex-

and new professional dignity? Or

should they stay loyal to pictorial representation in the hope of preserving artistic autonomy and defending local traditions?

Un-

Thus

derlying these positions, broader issues were in dispute.

the debate reflected conflicting assumptions about the operations

of the market, the extent of "communities of consumption," the logics motivating

constructing

consumer behaviors, and even the means of

human

desire.

The contending

positions also re-

flected diverse notions within the advertising sector and,

more

generally, within bourgeois culture about the relationship be-

tween

and commerce. In

art

aesthetics of representation realistically to highlight

particular, they differed about the

itself;

should goods be represented

what they did for the consumer,

as the

American practice indicated? Or should they be animated by strong symbolic and pictorial design traditions in order to acti-

European practitioners held out?

vate latent desire, as

Both the

allure

and

fear of

ing this contest reflected a

the elites in post- World

ment

that,

more

War

I

American commercialism pervasive ambivalence

Europe about

a

fuel-

among

model of develop-

while promising prodigious growth, also threatened

uncontrollable cultural and social changes. There was a kind of

unanimity

and

in favor of

economic modernity: from conservatives

liberals to the far left, the

response to Taylorism and Ford-

ism was generally positive. 7 But the implications of Americanizing trends for culture and values were judged unpredictable if

not outright pernicious. American society might well have

tol-

erated the continuous turnover in custom generated by mass

consumption. After garded

as

all, its

constitutional structures

were

re-

being sufficiently sturdy to withstand the fads and

wild fluctuations of opinion that European observers had associ-

225

Victoria de Grazia

ated with the "civilization" of the

New World

Tocqueville's travels to America. Moreover,

peared powerful enough to

sumer

American

American

capital ap-

unleashed by con-

satisfy the desires

culture. In any event,

ever since

society,

it

was argued,

— views differed as to — that the risk that novel mores would disrupt status hier-

was already so homogenized or so hybrid

which

archies, declassing the bourgeoisie

seemed minor.

ders,

and disquieting the lower or-

In Europe, by contrast, cultural tradi-

tionalism and highly stratified consumer habits appeared to stand as a

bulwark against

servatives

who most

social upheaval.

anguished about the conquest of European

American material

culture by

Thus, for the cultural con-

civilization, the

"democratization

of consumption," as conservative commentator Andre Siegfried

wrote, could "only be obtained

at a tragic price

workmen becoming automatons,

leisure ruled

.

.

.":

namely,

by standardized

products, and spiritual values forsaken for mechanistic conduct. 8

At the same time, American commercial culture seemed to offer

much

and

to professionals in quest of social

cultural legit-

imacy: this was true not just for advertising experts, but also for engineers, architects, journalists, and movie producers, indeed for

all

of the professions associated with constructing and

com-

municating in mass society. For advertising agents, in particular,

American technologies of distribution and publicity offered three opportunities:

were being made their

own

in

first,

to

America

make

big profits,

much

when

interest-group or-

ganization was firming up everywhere; and third, to

what might be described

Great

they saw

in the 1920s; second, to bolster

professional status at a time

geois order, consequent

as

manage

as a crisis of representation of the

on the

War and compounded by

bour-

social upheavals following the

the double challenge of Ameri-

canism and Bolshevism in their wake. 9 Thus modern publicity

might help overcome the zero-sum

logic of

economic national-

ism by deepening and broadening markets across national

m

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

boundaries.

It

would eliminate

irrational

consumer choices by

applying behavioral studies and psychological testing to motivation. Above

mass appeal, and of

new

elites

and

advertising's

all,

stripped-down language,

display of business

its

human its

tempos bespoke the vigor

their endeavor to publicize the virtues of tech-

were being

nological civilization. These virtues, they argued,

contested, not least of

all

because

modern

industrial society's ac-

complishments had been furtively concealed by retrograde businessmen. Flashing the name of the French Henry Ford, Citroen,

from the

Eiffel

Tower with two hundred thousand

luminating the Milan

Duomo

bulbs, or

il-

Square with thousands of mega-

watts of publicity, or faking advertising copy to suggest

— as Le Corin the mid- 1920s — these feats

industrial patronage for innovating architecture

busier did in his journal L'Esprit

signaled the compatibility of cultural iconoclasm, technology,

and

reformed community of workers and

a

tising,

modernists saw

a

new

adver-

capitalists. In

language, the idiom of youth

em-

battled against the rhetorical conventions of the old, the sacrosanct,

and the academic. Advertising promised to become

the Esperanto of a dynamic capitalism, "the key to world welfare," to use the slogan of the

1929 Berlin World Advertising

Conference, and, as such, the guarantor of a

new

international

order. 10

Their zeal was

all

the stronger because the structure of Eu-

ropean economies and the nature of consumer habits seemed so unpropitious to promoting American-style techniques. U.S. advertisers

had the advantage of serving oligopolistic firms and

working with brand-products devised and

affluent markets.

for broad,

homogeneous,

However, in the 1920s, most European

business firms served local markets, at best regional ones. Mar-

keting consumer commodities across national boundaries was practically

unheard

of.

Domestic markets were generally

low, even in the most affluent nation, namely late

many; the European working

classes

were

still

shal-

Weimar Ger-

not regarded as

227

Victoria

de Grazia

consumers

potential

among to

in these pre-Keynesian economies.

those producers of consumer durables

in

Even

who had gone

American production systems, there seemed

between innovations

11

over

to be a real gap

production techniques and distribution

methods. Meanwhile, the most

were not the

visible advertisers

producers of consumer durables, but an ill-reputed lot of vendors of patent medicines and entertainment.

Above

all,

the organization of space and publics seemed

tle suited to the marketing practices developed to

ized brands in a relatively

sell

lit-

standard-

homogeneous and incomparably more

wealthy market, using the press and other media to reach out to increasingly suburbanized publics. Traditionally,

were dominated by major

kets

parisien,

we know,

department store vilion,

capitals of

set the dress style of all etalage, the

European mar-

consumption; the gout

Western

The

open-air market, the exposition pa-

and the grand boulevard were the typical

market culture organized around licized their

society.

institutions of a

city centers. Retailers

pub-

merchandise by elaborate displays and customers

were primarily bourgeois. Local markets might appear luxury

at

the core. But outside of the great metropolitan centers and a few

wealthy provincial towns, they were status differences,

cumstances, the poster, along with plays,

offered the major

still

need

straitened by poverty,

window and

for detail

and

cir-

shopfloor dis-

mediums of communication:

placarded kiosks, handbills, postcards cial

still

and regional fragmentation. Under the

all

signaled,

little class specificity,

imity of centers of consumption.

The mass

with no spe-

the physical prox-

press absorbed

increasing amounts of advertising revenues by the early 1920s.

Even

so,

the political character and class specificity of most lead-

ing national

news organs, the regional dispersion, and the great

jumble of rates and formats made the print medium gainly

and

still

an un-

costly undertaking for advertisers. 12

Although beleaguered advertisers banked on U.S. precedents, they

228

were not indifferent to the dangers of American-

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

modernity. Some features of U.S. marketing technologies

style

were not readily advertising:

it

digestible.

the exploitativeness of U.S.

was with awe and trepidation

marked on American licized:

One was

from deodorants

to the afterlife.

that advertisers re-

ruthlessness. Everything could be pub-

to furs, babies to burials, the intimate

Not even

religion

was sacred,

marketing

as the

director of a French pharmaceutical concern observed in Venire, a leading

French trade journal. He

illustrated his point

with ad

copy showing a soldier offering to quaff Christ on the Cross' thirst

with

gall

and apologizing

that

it

wasn't Vinegar X. 13

intense competitiveness caused uneasiness as well.

thing to urge Taylorized

work

It

The

was one

rules for sales personnel or to up-

grade the profession by purging the

unfit;

it

was quite another to

introduce humbling competition into the ranks of the profession itself.

Above

all,

there was the giant problem of "taste." U.S. ad-

vertisers abroad

contended that there was "one best way"

vertising. Carefully studied in

qualities, their advertising pitches

pealing.

tified still

were deemed universally ap-

Hence they would need only minor tuning

local conditions.

in ad-

terms of markets and product

However, in Europe, bourgeois

to adjust to

status

was iden-

with conserving cultural traditions, and advertising was

close

enough to being considered

thetic standards alongside

art to

want

to

uphold aes-

commercial ones. Each nation

— and

in the case of Germany, each major region as well — had identifiable style of publicity. in the interest of building

clients really

up

its

own

Should these customs be jettisoned sales?

Were

advertisers

and

their

ready to foresake the old cultural alliances underly-

ing their class position to pander to the tastes of volatile mass publics?

tom

It

might be possible to argue that publicity was

just business,

opening the way to

all stylistic

at

conventions,

regardless of national provenance. Yet questions remained.

American advertising

styles

vert national traditions?

promote

Was

alien values?

bot-

Did

Did they sub-

there indeed a national "taste,"

229

Victoria

de Grazia

not just

among

advertisers but

among consumers

as well, that

should be protected and perhaps even promoted against U.S.

commercialism?

These

what

issues

were most sharply formulated

in trade journals

of the poster." In

its

in discussing

was commonly referred to

as the "crisis

heyday in the Belle Epoque urban centers

of prewar Europe, the poster was lamented to have "decayed"

and "declined"

complaint was espe-

in the years thereafter. This

strong in Italy and in France. In Germany, with

cially

tionally strong

advertising

commercial design

and commercial

art corporations,

fretted about their future

new American

excep-

and much stronger

domestic and international markets, the poster held least until the early 1930s. 14

its

traditions, well-organized

own,

its

But there, too, commercial

at

artists

and advertisers weighed the merits of

systems against the familiar

German

styles of

representation.

Was that

it

the poster really "in crisis"? Crisis

was used suggested

that the poster

is

a strong

word:

had become the focus

of a whole set of anxieties. These were perhaps spurred by fears of American competition. But they also reflected

little

under-

stood and ill-tolerated changes going on in European societies of the period. For sure, the poster had occupied pride of place in

prewar advertising. The great expansion of merchandising the turn of the century had put a

market the special

premium on

and

inventiveness.

To

article for the bourgeois trade, the stock

posters that lithographic companies kept in advertising

after

that could be

hand

for all-purpose

adopted indiscriminately for pro-

moting soap, chocolate, sewing machines, or whatever were judged ineffective. Enterprising merchants in search of specialized designs

Nouveau or

were thus hospitable

to the aesthetics of Art

Jugendstil, as well as to Arts

styles. Intensely local

and Crafts movement

schools evolved within national boundaries

or in reference to regional markets: the leading artists were re-

nowned

230

locally, like the British

Hardy, Pryde and Nicolson, or

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

Andre Cheret,

the French postermasters the

Raffet,

Germans Hohlwein and Lucian Bernhard;

piello,

who moved between

recognition.

past:

War

Italy,

Cap-

acquired broader

15

For urban residents Great

France and

and Gavarni, or

a few, like

who

idealized the halcyon days of pre-

Europe, the poster was a soothing reminder of the

amidst social turmoil,

it

recalled the comfortable

human

dimensions of the Belle Epoque. "The cry of the posters from the concrete walls/ Proclaims a fairyland that

we

have lost,"

wrote the Dadaist poet Richard Huelsenbeck. In the bleak, chaotic cities of

cars/

And

Weimar, "Man might stand naked among tramway-

not

know

a

word of human speech/ The colored

poster-world would break secret

down

the bars/

And

own

his

heart the

meaning teach." 16

The tendency

to identify the poster with a

order heightened perceptions of

tempo of postwar commercial

how

life.

uneasily

The

politicized, having

street politics

become

with the

poster's crisis

perceived as having a threefold dimension.

become

more humane

it fit

First,

identified

was thus

the poster had

with left-wing

and mass mobilizations after the war. Second,

businessmen were increasingly uncertain about what aesthetic or style artist

was more suited to was

selling goods. Third, the

commercial

in increasingly precarious circumstances, beset

by

competition and unemployment. All of these combined to jeopardize the poster's value as commercial

art.

Thus, since the

war, and especially in the wake of the "red years," the poster

had become

a

much-debated form of mass culture (hence

Huelsenbeck's evocation of the poster's symbolic and social value). In

Germany, the revolution of 1918 and the subsequent

polarization of national political

life

had produced an outpouring

of wall manifestos. Experimental in form, often inspired by Expressionist motifs, they rally public

were designed

as

propaganda, that

is,

to

opinion rather than to market goods. Second, older

conventions very successful in the prewar years, such as Lucian

23!

Victoria de Grazia

Bernhard's emphasis on the "thing-ness" of objects (Sachplakat),

were worn to death by

imitators.

Although the exhaustion of old

formulae led to a greater variety of figurative and pictorial motifs, the conventions about

Commercial culture a scale to

what best sold goods broke down.

in the big cities

was conducted on too

permit regular contact between businessmen and the

Forced to take up their portfolios to make the rounds

arts.

large

search of clients, artists tended to pitch their sketches

in

more

loudly and cast their personal idiosyncrasies in crasser form; and

when

executed, the designs presented stronger traits of conven-

tionalization than the goal of advertising usually warranted. Finally,

young

artists

plagiarism, not to

commercial

everywhere were discouraged by the ease of

mention the

artists as

difficulty of plying their trade as

commissions declined. This insecurity fed

the fear, polemically evoked by Grosz and Herzefelde in Die

Kunst

in

Gefahr (1925), of the "dismantling of the artist in his

present form." In their radical vision, the artist

two

choices, namely, "he could

merge

or advertising man, or else he might

now had

but

in industry as a designer

become

a propagandist for

the revolution." 17

At the same time, there were growing doubts about

whether postering

itself

was an

effective

medium

of advertising.

Marketing was becoming a more complicated process, with new

new

products, vertising

and new uses of urban

publics,

consumer

space. Firms ad-

and house-

durables, including automobiles

hold appliances, as well as personal products such as soap, cosmetics, and cleansers, realized that these for explanation. city centers.

They

also sought

At bottom

postering reflected

its

products called outside of the

their concerns about the effectiveness of

high costs. Paper and color printing were

expensive, and postering was

More and

new

new consumers

encumbered by heavy

taxation.

more, local governments treated street advertising as a

luxury or a nuisance: strapped for revenues in the 1920s, town councils assessed taxes of

232

all

kinds,

and

practically

no revenues

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

went to maintain the emplacements.

In Italy, local taxes

product, and the kind of posting (whether

it

on

size,

was on board,

metal, or concrete) added 50 percent to the price of production.

Even then,

was not uncommon

it

for

new

rulings to cause entire

print runs to be warehoused. Moreover, regulations verse that they discouraged any but the

most

local

were so

di-

marketing

endeavors. 18

But the real issue was cost-effectiveness. In most big urban centers, city

life

was changing:

in the 1920s, renewal projects

designed to ease the flow of motor

traffic

and clean out the

sign-

cluttered confusion of the old central districts cleared away

poster emplacements and speeded up the pace of urban

Among tricts ter.

the major cities, except perhaps for Paris, residential dis-

were more and more separate from the commercial cen-

New

systems of public transportation speeded up daily

In any case, the poster

was unable to target did

life.

was simply too generic

in

its

life.

appeal.

It

Nor

specific publics for particular products.

readily lend itself to provincial distribution networks

it

where prosperous small-town or found.

The bourgeois

centers had

moved

rural customers

might be

clientele formerly concentrated in city

to the suburbs. True, advertisers might study

the subway routes, as they were invited to do in Berlin, so as to

determine which led to proletarian quarters and which led to bourgeois suburbs. They might then specify the goods to be advertised sive it

on each

route.

However, the costs of

this

more exten-

coverage were high. There was also a problem of turnover:

was alleged

that the quicker pace of

more

tion spans, and

more frequent

life,

shorter atten-

postering. As a mid- 1920s Berlin advertisers'

adage, loosely translated, put

it

in

Warholian terms: "Every

ef-

— for twenty-four hours" ("Ein Plakat an der Saule macht unsterblich — fur 24

fective poster

effektvolles

urban

rapid turnover of products called for a

is

a celebrity

Stunden"). 19 Finally, the use of public space

was becoming more com-

233

Victoria de Grazia

petitive

and

The

conflictual.

garish outsize cinema posters, dis-

American

tributed by the promoters of

on giant presses cal

in the U.S.,

production. In

films

and often produced

crowded out smaller placards of

there were complaints that vandals

Italy,

ripped up the hoardings for

fuel.

New

products and leisure pas-

times vied for position. During the great

German

1923, the commercial poster was literally buried

The

ings.

situation

was

lo-

bleak.

inflation of

on the hoard-

According to the account of Pro-

fessor H. E. Frenzel, director of Berlin's refined

commercial

art

magazine Gebrauchsgraphik, "The principal space [had been] occupied by the movie poster with

high-sounding

titles,

pernicious excrescences and

its

calculated to appeal to cooks

maids. Next in importance

and kitchen-

came the numerous announcements

of offices for the buying and selling of gold and jewels, advertise-

ments of pleasure

resorts, 'beauty dances,'

go-go

girls,

etc."

These were interspersed with "red placards topped with fabu-

sums

lous

tween

in millions of

these, "small

being suffocated, [were] benefit of people as part of the

marks

for this or that criminal." Be-

and modest

who,

official state

in reality

economic

like the

life

agonized sighs of a

announcements

were no longer

spaces of

town

centers.

for the

to be regarded

of the nation." 20 In sum, consump-

tion was no longer comfortably contained within the cial

man

commer-

Those spaces were increasingly being

subverted by urban renewal and shifting networks of distribution,

by the poor from below, and by Americanism from abroad.

Ultimately the poster's apparent inability to represent the

new

world of consumer goods was brought home by the growing use of a potentially

more commercially

effective alternative. This

the newspaper or periodical insert. Throughout Europe, true, the print

medium was

already increasingly widely used for

publicity purposes by the early 1920s. But press advertising still

was

generally treated as a shabby enterprise: crowded, competing

for space, smudgily copied,

234

was

it is

with heavy black lined designs, they

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

were often but mere announcements. used,

and nostrums of various

sorts.

For their

sale

stood or

the results of advertising. Nationwide campaigns for

newspaper

ucts treated the

black

was

namely patent medicines, quack remedies, fortune

services, ing,

Insofar as long copy

was devoted to the most heavily advertised goods and

it

as if

on white, emphatic with

name of the

it

were

a single

tell-

on

fell

new prod-

a poster: using heavy

word, displaying the

article advertised in as large a typeface as possible,

without any decoration or

illustration, publicity inserts

seemed

intended, according to the characterization of a contemporary observer, to give "a blow between the eyes, as hard as ble to deliver

The

through the

it,

medium

of printer's ink."

was an entirely new

real alternative then

advertising, identified with the

American consumer

it is

possi-

21

style of print

industry.

This was the carefully argued, meticulously designed, sometimes multicolor insert in especially conspicuous display in the masscirculation magazines of the interwar years, in particular, the Ladies

Home Journal,

Saturday Evening

Post,

Employed by American companies such Walter

Thompson

the late 1920s,

was

it

American national

European

in their also

style

and Good Housekeeping.

as

Erwin Wasey and

J.

advertising campaigns in

much-cited in European sources

as the

of advertising. In design, print ads were

densely packed, sometimes three columns of several paragraphs, illustrated

with

titles

so-called "reason

and decoration.

why"

Yet, at its best, as in the

studies of Helen Resor,

it

was unclut-

and readable;

it

combined much information

and persuasive reasoning, and

it

was backed up with ostensibly

tered to look

at

scientific data or testimonials

print," as

it

was sometimes

the attributes of goods and

Thus,

it

by social leaders. "Salesmanship in

called, the text insert

how

emphasized

the consumer could use them.

"sold the benefit instead of the product: illumination in-

stead of lighting fixtures, prestige instead of automobiles, sex ap-

peal instead of

mere soap." 22 Often the advertisement imitated

the look and layout of the

medium

in

which

it

was printed,

as if

235

Victoria de Grazia

to play

on the

indistinctiveness in a highly

between "real" reading matter and

commodified culture

editorializing for

consumer

products.

This

style,

sometimes called "stupid realism," or perhaps

with more analytical

rigor, "capitalist realism," 23

worked

through different psychological mechanisms from those in the poster

and print copy derived from

temporaries frequently pointed out publicity that

they contrasted the

worked through seduction with

worked by

evocation, or

nism, with

its

when

which

that

they contrasted American purita-

purported emphasis on interpreting the

European paganism, with like

when

European poster

its

at play

So European con-

it.

worship of the

advertising, in

idol.

with

text,

24 Indeed,

un-

which symbolic goods were

common

represented with symbolic forms, as was increasingly

in

the 1920s, the American style relied, in Michael Schudson's

words, on the

"common

understanding of

audience." 25

its

American advertising layout played on emotions and it

One

insecurities;

reassured the consumer that the sponsor was likewise a patron

of shared ideals, and the product being endorsed concretely and actively contributed to their perpetuation.

claim to represent their social

common

may not

veys that firms like

through the marketplace. American

have depended on the scientific market sur-

J.

Walter

Thompson swore

any real respect for public opinion. But if

it

temporary dose of empathy for popular

enough

its

manipulated

meanings by implying that they were individual ac-

quisitions, available solely

advertising

Democratic by

social values, this style

familiarity

did

by,

much

command

susceptibilities

less

on

a strong

and

with the qualities of the product to be able to

write persuasive copy. Just as the poster represented turn-of-the-century Euro-

pean urban commercial culture,

this advertising

form

the state of development of early twentieth-century

marketing. Text advertisements carried, as

it

reflected

American

were, heavy freight

over long distances, reaching out to diverse, nonhomogeneous

236

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

publics at a time

when markets were

impersonal. They had a strong power of projection

medium,

to recall

and

increasingly distant

when

the

McLuhan's familiar phrase, was not yet the

message and the presentation of new brands

More

considerable explanation.

still

called for

generally, the adoption of cap-

realism seems to have responded to what Pierre Bourdieu

italist

described as the "popular aesthetic," that of people who, domi-

nated by ordinary interests and urgencies, expect the conventions of representation "to allow

things just

represented." They

from

lack of familiarity but

participation,

them

to believe 'naively' in the

reluctantly accept abstraction, "not

from

a

which formal experiment

deep-rooted demand for systematically disap-

points ..." In this sense, they behave differently from "aesthetic elites"

who

"believe in the representation

.

.

.

more than

in the

things represented" because they experience the world "freed

from urgency and through the practice of end

activities

which are an

in themselves." 26

By the 1920s, U.S.

had come around, not with-

advertisers

out conflict, to sharing the aesthetic of capitalist realism with their audience; indeed they

leadership. For

promoted

no aesthetic seemed

complex modernity of market the one hand, advertising

it

to legitimate their social

to represent so well the

was twofold.

relations. This

On

promoted an impersonal marketplace

of vast scale, stimulating the conviction that "what was desirable," indispensable to a

modern world

other hand, advertising denied

its

outlook.

new was

On

the

economic nature

essentially

as

the mass communications system of the marketplace by striving after a subjective, personal appeal.

publicity

Thus,

promoted economic modernity,

it

the uncontrollability of market operations. public to

new conveniences while

stressful competitiveness

it

the same time as

at

protected against

It

accommodated the

comforted them against the

and the cultural

strictures that

went

along with them. 27 Naturally, this conception of

how modern goods

should be

Victoria de Grazia

sold was not uncontested in the

One

European advertising milieu.

among

typical response, shared not just

bound, but even by individuals working

and trade journals was bad

taste.

cism, the

The

American copy

mix of

stylistic

that

style

was simply

methods was

to the

American

inadvisable. style,

Not

as the

premium

complex sen-

least of

low quality of repro-

space, emulation of such

all,

there was the fear that

produced by giant bureaucratic juggernauts,

would snuff out the expressivity of the advertising the

in

of the old world. Europeans would not tolerate such long

duction and the high costs of

the

tradition-

conventions were perhaps suited for a

mix would not appeal

and for technical reasons, such

texts;

more

the

Americanizing firms

grossly literal sensibility, the pretentious didacti-

"young people"; sibility

that

in

name

initiative,

of efficiency, profits, mass markets, personality

— in sum

all

it

staff itself; in

denied "fantasy,

that gives pleasure to the exis-

tence of our publicity experts [techniciens]." 28 Indeed, one reaction to this formidable rival was to defend

European poster

traditions. This defense used

ferent strategies.

One might be

associated with the

rope.

The other

it

ing a

more

egies

presumed

quite dif-

weaker commercial markets of Southern Eu-

strategy might be called reformist: this

sociated with the powerful position of

markets, and

two

described as resistance; this was

Germany

in

was

as-

European

sought to commercialize the poster by develop-

varied idiom and wider marketing appeal. Both strat-

visual signing

that

and

commodities needed only

that their uses

were

familiar

relatively simple

enough not

to re-

quire any complex system of textual signification.

The by the

strategy of resistance

Italian

was most militantly put forward

Giuseppe Magagnoli, founder and director of the

poster workshop Maga.

A

former salesman with the leading

French poster concern, Vercasson, Magagnoli had established

own

atelier just after the

his

Great War. This firm was exclusively

devoted to commercial postermaking. With showrooms centrally located in Milan and Paris and business connections as far away

238

Ball bearings

Poster advertising ball bearings produced by

and such are the "material

substructure of our civilization." Print advertising

Fiat's subsidiary Riv,

from

mid- 1920s.

Fortune, late 1920s.

as

Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires,

it

was

Maga workshop,

largely responsible

for the reputation of Italian poster art for individuality

and bold

expression. Magagnoli's contemporaries, bothered by his factiousness as they sought to professionalize their metier, charged

the firm with being "old school" and overly specialized. ter charge firm's

was true

in a way,

The

lat-

and perhaps contributed to the

bankruptcy in 1932. Magagnoli himself died the next year

of heart failure. ?9 In

its

prime, however,

Maga employed

the talents of lead-

ing French and Italian artists, including Cappiello, the Italians Nizzoli, Sinopico,

and Pozzati (Sepo), the French-born,

ianized Lucien-Achille Mauzan, and other lesser

often

unnamed

figures

working

in the

house

style. In his

organ published through the 1920s under the chio,

or Pans dans

l'Oeil

(Punch

against "all the old, rancid

and

in the eye),

Ital-

known and

title

house

Pugno nell'Oc-

Magagnoli ranted

idiotic systems

used up to now,"

239

Victoria de Grazia

and especially against the purported

and academi-

scientificity

cism of U.S. advertising. 30 Typically, Maga's posters were "materialized ideas": they

performed

as large

trademarks for goods,

though they were always unmistakably Maga products. The color

was forced by giving them

effect

a colored, black, or blue back-

ground, and the lettering, brief and the design. Indeed, the text, far design,

legible,

did not form part of

from being integrated

into the

was generally added on afterwards, once the customer

had selected the sketch for

his

product from a roster of

proposals.

The work of Lucien-Achille Mauzan was reputation.

He was not

Drawing posters according to

ventive lithographer.

of his own, directly the

method

that

crucial to Maga's

only a virtuoso designer, but also an in-

upon the stone or

zinc,

a technique

he had so mastered

he could turn out daily two press-ready posters

140 by 140 centimeters worked in four colors. Indeed, his out-

put was prodigious.

From 1906 when he

Mauzan was estimated

Maga

artists,

to have

produced 3,200 items. Like other

Mauzan played on quick

"la trovata" (the

visual wit, the

it

had to grab your attention;

it

name

of the

first Italian

British publicity expert

sound of your voice

The poster was

Clamor,

fittingly,

roadsign company). In

commented, "you have

— to be heard."

a bar-

was the voice of the object

calling out, clamoring for attention (and

the

cunning of

gimmick), the odd juxtaposition, and the

ostensibly animate qualities of the object. ker;

started through 1929,

31

In

was

Italy, as a

to increase the

common, Maga and

its

entourage eschewed any reference to the social attributes of objects or the potential

needs they might serve.

It

was through

their rendering of the object that they preserved a strong sense

of

human

was

agency; the machine, domesticated and individualized,

vivified

through representation.

The entry gued, ing

240

is

into a society of

new

distinctions,

it

has been ar-

fraught with the "anxiety of exposure" and aestheticiz-

becomes

a distancing

mechanism

to preserve social

THE ARTS OF PURCHASE

position. 32 In Magagnoli's case, but not only his, aestheticizing

means

offered a cess.

to establish control over the modernizing pro-

This claim to leadership rested on his capacity to caricature

goods rather than to communicate to new consumers about their utility.

His Americanizing compatriots contested his position as

backward, and

factious,

inefficient. Yet

Magagnoli was only being

true to what he was — a skilled craftsman plying a trade geared to older

market

circuits: to

have done otherwise would have

called for a different professional identity, a different relation-

ship with commodities,

and

a different rapport

with the mass

consumer.

By

contrast, the leading

German commercial

art schools,

being better connected both to national marketing networks and to international markets,

embarked on what might be

called a

program of reform. This was sparked by the recognition

that as

American commercial competition overran specialized markets, it

threatened to destroy the specialized design traditions associ-

ated with them.

The endeavor

to keep

German commercial

art

abreast of rapidly changing commercial and aesthetic conventions

was led primarily by Professor Frenzel, who founded

Gebrauchsgraphik in 1924. as a journal "to

promote

The Berlin-based monthly, artistic publicity"

kunstlerische reklame"), in 1928 changed

from

U.S.,

it

to

all

its

subheading to jour-

Covering design innova-

nal of "international advertising art."

tions

starting out

("zum forderung

over the world, but especially focusing on the

was an awesomely cosmopolitan

modernize German commercial

art

affair, its

mission being

by measuring

it

against

the international competition.

The

task of relating local styles to Americanizing trends

especially interesting in

options were available.

Germany, because two very

One was

is

different

the "object-ness" of the Berlin

school of Lucian Bernhard, which, in the postwar years, easily fed into the modernist experimentation of the International school. Basically, Bernhard,

and

like

him, Fritz Rosen and Wal-

241

EDISON MAZDA LAMPS GENERAL ||| ELECTRIC

What

electric lighting can

do

for the

consumer:

U.S. print advertising, Fortune, late 1920s.

Updated German poster advertising

for

Osram.

Walther Nehmer, 1927.

Face to face: the bourgeois family reacts to Lucien-Achille Mauzan's poster for

Updated poster advertising Achille

Mauzan, circa 1928.

for

Osram. Lucien-

Osram

caricature by Mauzan, displayed at a

work,

late 1920s.

in a

show of

his

"Sachplakat," for

Nehmer,

ther after

to

was

c.

name but two

Bernhard moved to

that there ing,

Osram. Lucian Bernhard,

New

1908.

of the figures

more

in evidence

York in 1925, held to the notion

rationality in the functional form;

good

advertis-

— early morning, the a bird — might construct,

by mustering symbolic representations

crowing cock; speed, an arrow;

flight,

with astonishing economy of form, an international language. Progressive, internationalist, experimental, artistically rigorous, it

seemed

in every

way an

alternative to America's capitalist

realism. 33

The other

style

was

identified first

and foremost with the

Bavarian artist Ludwig Hohlwein. Influenced by local traditions of genre painting and growing out of a vigorous local art industry, his

"amiable and soliciting" pictorial style found favor

elsewhere in Germany;

markably close in

its

spirit to

deed, prior to and

expressive sentimentality was re-

American commercial

much more

realism. In-

than Bernhard, Hohlwein found

favor in U.S. advertising circles,

though

it

was argued that

his

character types were too local and his artistic personality per-

243

Victoria

de Grazia

—

haps too strong to work on competitive accounts

not

at least

without firm guidance from an agency art director. 34

What more urge be done?

concretely did Gebrauchsgraphik's promoters

First,

they advocated a willingness to experiment;

then, a turnover in styles; finally, a greater responsiveness to

commercial pressures. To these ends, the German commercial artists

mounted extraordinary

regional and national shows, the

culminating event being held at Leipzig in 1927, on the occasion of the huge annual commercial

endeavors did not save the

moting

a critical

fair.

35

Over the long run, these

German commercial

By pro-

poster.

awareness of the aesthetic conventions under-

lying local schools, they

may even

have helped

call

these

conventions into question. Nevertheless, they did draw attention

from abroad, and they

related local traditions to the syncretic

commercial mill of American

German

artists

publicity.

were welcomed

One outcome was

that

though they did not

in the U.S.;

fundamentally alter the nature of the appeal of American publicity in

the 1930s, they significantly embellished American de-

sign traditions

with modernist motifs.

Even while the canons of commercial

art

were under

re-

view, the American-style advertising campaign was going native.

At

first

much

discussed, by the mid- 1930s,

were no longer always labeled

as such.

ments had become so familiar

as to

its

American

origins

Apparently some ele-

be taken for granted; they

had become the "natural" way of promoting goods. However,

American business was

also

becoming

As American

less visible.

firms pulled out of Europe altogether in the

Depression or cut back on their European

wake

of the Great

former em-

staffs,

ployees sought positions elsewhere, sometimes in firms of their

own, sometimes

in

branch subsidiaries of U.S.

was to be gained from identifying techniques

firms. as

As

Depression having destroyed the myth of America's

2U

American

— the

infallible

economic might — the citing of U.S. models diminished. advertising might henceforth be in the

now

less

American

style.

Local

But

it

now

passed as local production. Finally, the Great Depression,

by aggravating worry over

sales,

counseled paying close attention

to any technique or ploy that promised to build

up markets. Not

everywhere, not usually systematically, the American model was

most

closely followed for the

promotion of goods such

as auto-

mobiles, foodstuffs, and cosmetics that potentially had a mass

market, might benefit by national advertising, and were similar to

commodities already marketed successfully by American

firms. Just as in the U.S.,

tors like General

and

as a result of

American competi-

Motors and Ford on European markets, the

European automobile industry, together with car products, such as

motor

oil

and

vertisers. If for

not the rule,

tires,

many

still

were the biggest and most innovative ad-

other goods, full-fledged campaigns were

Americanisms had begun to crop up every-

where: in the heavier reliance on text, the structure of argumentation, the use of

photography, the look of capitalist realism, and

the styles of typography.

Unquestionably, trends outside of the advertising world reinforced stylistic changes. tributed

all

American movies, so widely

dis-

over the continent through the mid-1950s, and so

very influential in the popular imagination, established

new con-

245

Victoria de Grazia

ventions for female beauty; the Hollywood ing of the "thing-ness" of

such as the telephone, boudoir

sets,

pliances appear quintessentially aesthetic alternative,

its

made

renderobjects

home

ap-

modern. Meanwhile, the major

German modernist

experimentation, was sufficient here to recall

It is

ban on non-Gothic typefaces destroyed the international

German typographic

leadership of

more romanticized and This

is

it

eclectic

arts, to

American

the benefit of the styles. 36

not to argue that the poster disappeared from the

European scene art," as

with

life,

automobiles, and

destroyed by the triumph of Nazism. that the

set,

American everyday

in the 1930s. Far

from

might then have come to be

it:

commercial "high

called,

was

beautifully

represented in the modernist verve of 1930s postermaking. Yet its

a

meaning had changed

mere ploy

in the

sometimes

significantly:

gamut of means

available to

it

had become

commerce;

jus-

it

tified itself

on aesthetic grounds, concealing the hurly-burly of

commerce;

it

was used

as a

intervention in the market. vate

propaganda device, legitimating Its

state

major sponsor was no longer

commerce, but the interventionist

state of the

pri-

Great De-

pression and interest groups sponsoring collective advertising

campaigns. In this capacity, the poster advertised social messages; rather

for sacrifice

market

than

and

relations.

selling, strictly speaking,

social

the poster appealed

involvement in an effort to transcend

Thus, national governments stepped up their

promotional and welfare

activities to

compensate for the mal-

functioning of the marketplace. Thus, by appealing to citizens as

consumers of national goods and

services, they in effect rejected

the claim of American market society that individual desires and collective well-being could be satisfied tion. Like

through mass consump-

Magagnoli in the 1920s, theorists of the poster contin-

ued to emphasize the importance of focusing on the object rather than the consumer, aestheticizing

design tradition rather than socializing able" qualities. So the

it

new commodities

it

with a

still

powerful

by publicizing

its

"us-

of a society of abun-

Gbrte And,

rauAe

i

suwt und g&vtt-dundt

9Cd4tde weide*.

KALO D Ell MA- G E LE E "Mommy, Aunt

Use's

hands are

as

rough

as

i'.V^f.r,'

sandpaper

.

."

.

!,Ym,:

Americanized press

advertising from Die Woche, late 1930s.

grope 6

Die ID 00

hann johnffcin

htimtucHtfeti et tote rofdi et jooifctien

iff,

{icti

fttson

ohnen

unb 3um pusfoil

IDclctie

Beruhigung,

fity!

imm

jahnflcifcti. bis et

iochett

bringt!

bo(j es in Soiiboi

boo bet jahnfmngcfahi

batubet tiinaus

oilr

\\)t\

-

bit ojenigftcr

ousbrtitpt, wit ct

]ohn unb

mittci gibt,

fdiobfn"

Donugr

c

einet do

Soliboc entfetnt bcim 3ohnfpu*U r

lichen 3ohnftcin, ofjne

ben

3at]nf