The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Monsoon Islam: An interview with Sebastian Prange

By Anuj Kaushal

Here Sebastian R. Prange is interviewed about his 2018 book, Monsoon Islam: Trade & Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge 2018), by Anuj Kaushal, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Sebastian R. Prange is Associate Professor of South Asian history at the University of British Columbia. He obtained his doctorate from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 2008 and has since held academic appointments in Canada, the United States, and Germany. His first book Monsoon Islam: Trade & Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge 2018) has been awarded both the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History and the American Historical Association–Pacific Coast Branch Book Award. Its Malayalam translation is forthcoming with Other Books (Kozhikode). The following is a the transcript of an extended interview between Dr Prange and Anuj Kaushal.

Anuj Kaushal is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses upon Islamicate healing practices and traditional medical science in South Asia. His work seeks to study identity formation and gender relations in South Asia through medical print culture, private consumption habits, and pluralistic approach to sexology during the 19th-20th century.   

Q. Your book’s title, Monsoon Islam, is a key intervention in the study of Islamic “discursive traditions.” While Monsoon Islam challenges the new orientalist conception of Islam as a monolithic entity, it also provides the opportunity to learn more about diverse cultural influences over Islam. Could you briefly elaborate upon this essence of “Monsoon Islam” that allow readers to better understand Islamic pluralism or what Talal Asad calls the “discursive traditions” of Islam?

In the book, I use the term “Monsoon Islam” to describe what I see as a distinct trajectory of Islamic history that developed within the trading world of the medieval Indian Ocean. To be clear, it is not meant to denote a formal school of law or a distinct theology; rather, it encapsulates interrelated sets of legal interpretation and socio-religious practices that took shape among Muslim merchant communities in the trading ports of the Indian Ocean. The commercial context is crucial: merchants were key in the formation and transmission of this Monsoon Islam across maritime Asia. The role of trade in the so-called “spread of Islam” has long been acknowledged, but the literature has tended to regard traders as mere conveyances, rather than recognize them as creative agents in communicating and elaborating the faith within new settings. In the Indian Ocean world, Muslim merchants lived in close and sustained contact with non-Muslim societies; in these diaspora contexts, they were continually confronted with new situations for which the standard texts of Islamic law offered no clear course of appropriate action. So in many cases, such as on the Malabar Coast for example, these merchant communities produced new collections of legal interpretation and guidance that addressed the kind of issues that they faced there. As might be expected, most of these have to do with commercial law, but they also engage with questions of cohabitation, commensality, intermarriage, and many other social and political matters that reflected the concerns of Muslims living as part of a majority non-Muslim society. And these interpretations were then taken up by other Muslim communities in other parts of the Indian Ocean world, especially in Southeast Asia. My work reinforces a vision of Islamic history in which there wasn’t a linear transmission of a uniform religion to different places but rather a circulatory process by which the faith came to be translated and reframed in new settings and contexts. As you rightly say, anthropologists such as Asad have long pointed to processes of localization and vernacularization within Islam; my book seeks to offer an additional perspective on this, together with new empirical support, for the medieval period.

Q. Your work analyzes the dynamism of Islam through a “twin process” of meaning making in distinct regions across the Indian Ocean. What are these processes?

The book argues that “Monsoon Islam” was shaped by two intertwined processes. On the one hand, Islam was introduced into new regions by merchants (accompanied by scholars and sufis, who operated within this transoceanic commercial milieu) and influenced by their often quite pragmatic priorities and preferences. On the other hand, the reality of these Muslim merchants living as trading diasporas within majority non-Muslim societies also significantly shaped how Islam was conceived and conveyed in those places. “Monsoon Islam” was defined by the tension between these two forces: between the global and the local, between the competing impulses and imperatives of severalty and syncretism. The book explores this twin process from a dual perspective: it looks both outwards, from the Malabar Coast towards the movements of Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean in space and time, and inwards, to ask how these communities understood and responded to changes in their local, social, and political environments. It does so through the lens of four different spaces that defined the existence of Malabar’s Muslim trading communities:

  • the Port, which offers an economic history of the practical organization of long- distance trade in the medieval Indian Ocean);
  • the Mosque, which examines the internal stratification and social organization of these Muslim trading communities;
  • the Palace, which looks at their political relationships to South Indian states and elites;
  • and lastly the Sea, which traces the trans-oceanic networks of the pepper trade, religious and scholarly ties, as well as political patronage.

It is the entanglement of all these four realms—the commercial, the social, the political, and the trans-oceanic—that shaped the formation of Muslim communities, and of Islam, across the trading world of the medieval Indian Ocean.

The monsoon winds that blow across the expanse of the Indian Ocean facilitated the trade of spices and the expansion of Islam. Credit: National Museum of African Art/Smithsonian Institution.

Q. Your book emphasizes trans-oceanic exchanges through networks and actors operating at different levels and in different environments across the Indian Ocean. Could you elaborate upon your methodology through which you analyzed these actors and networks or the role of the brokers in developing this “trans-oceanic network”?

There is no question that network theory has become the dominant paradigm of Indian Ocean studies. The study of networks has underpinned the view of the premodern Indian Ocean as an integrated world system (even if that particular term has fallen out of favor), but it also throws up its own set of core-periphery questions. Within networks, cores are often defined in terms of origins, be it of a kinship group, religious tradition, or trade good. However, as the network expands and evolves over time, its center of gravity also shifts. The spread of Islam, a seminal process in Indian Ocean history, is a prime example of this, but we can also look to Buddhism, or Christianity, or any number of other instances. The actual connections that produced such trans-oceanic milieus of shared cultural ties between distant regions have come to be almost universally described in terms of networks. My book is no exception to this, but I’m also aware that we easily run the risk of reifying every form of contact as a network. Clearly, the network paradigm is as much a product of our present-day worldview as it is of the historical record: in the digital age, even premodern linkages have come to be conceived through the metaphors of circuits, hubs, and nodes.

Where it gets interesting, to my mind, is when we look at how different types of exchange intersect and overlap to create persistent ties. What my book focuses on primarily is the role of long-distance trade as the facilitator of other forms of communication and exchange. Commercial networks were tightly interwoven with kinship, religious, and scholarly networks: Buddhist temples were situated on trade routes; scholarly prestige was established through association with a teacher on the other side of the ocean; pilgrimage was inseparable from economic activity; religious specialists often had an eye for profitable business; and intermarriage created ever more layers of complexity. Networks rarely served a single purpose, in much the same way that traders were not exclusively economic actors but also social and political beings. The analytical focus on networks can serve as an organizing principle for the multiple levels of material and intellectual connections across the ocean, without having to necessarily subsume them into claims of a coherent, overarching system.

Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611) & Bernard Paludanus (1550-1633), Almadies [bark canoe] or boats of Fisherman of Goa and Cochin (Almadies ou bateaux de Pescheurs de Goa & Cochin), c. 1638, Intaglio technique of printing, David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, (Stanford University, California),

Q. Your discussion of agents is multilayered and quite dense. I am curious to understand your model of partnerships as discussed in your work along with the role of slaves. How diverse are the roles of these agents in your analysis, both as an external and internal influencer, in the development of the networks?

The role of agents, both as commercial conduits and cultural ‘go-betweens’, has attracted a lot of scholarly attention in the past years. Work by scholars such as Natalie Rothman, Francesca Trivellato, Roxani Margariti, or Sebouh Aslanian have vastly expanded not just our empirical understanding of their functions, but also the conceptual tools for framing their personal and structural entanglements. My book seeks to add to that growing body of scholarship by highlighting the complexity and fluidity of many of those arrangements. And as you say, I’m particularly interested in the role of slaves as business agents, which is something I’ve worked on ever since my Masters thesis. Looking at the Malabar Coast, it is striking that several Arabic epigraphs state that a mosque was endowed or renovated by someone who in the inscription is explicitly identified as a former slave; in other cases, there are less direct but nonetheless quite compelling clues for this. As we know, for example from the Geniza records, slaves served as business agents in the maritime trade between Arabia and India. The extreme disparity in power between master and slave prompts the question of how principal-agent problems were resolved. But even when the agent was free and of equal status to the principal, their relationship required complex institutions in the context of the vast distances involved in oceanic trade, the slow and unreliable communication, and the ever-present temptations of malfeasance. It was only really through networks that these relationships could be managed and constrained. Premodern trade was an inherently social activity, and many of the social conventions and practices that we come across in the sources also, or even primarily, served an economic purpose.

Q. You discussed du‘ā al-sultān being carried out in the Friday prayers (khutba), in Malabar region, with the name of Rasulid sultans purely as a ritual through which Malabar rulers could develop close affinity with rulers of Aden and extract trade benefits. However, ritual aspect aside, what impact did this act have in challenging native authority over time?

In recent years, a number of new sources for the medieval Indian Ocean have become accessible to scholars. One of the most significant of these is a thirteenth-century chronicle from Yemen that contains a list of annual payments made by the Rasulid sultans to Muslim communities in coastal India. These stipends were not ceremonial investments like robes of honor; they were direct and regular payments to the religious leaders of merchant communities all along the Indian coast, to be conveyed annually with the merchant fleets from Aden. Éric Vallet was first to interpret this practice as an expression of a Rasulid “oceanic policy,” designed to boost Aden’s commerce and promote the dynasty’s self-appointed role as champions of Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean. Notably, the places detailed in the ledger—in Gujarat and the Konkan, on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts—were all under Hindu rule at the time. To extend patronage to judges and preachers who reside in the territory of another Muslim ruler would have been an unmistakable claim to political suzerainty that no self-respecting sultan would have tolerated. In lands under Hindu rule, however, the Rasulids could act as the benefactors and patrons of the local Muslim communities without calling into question the sovereignty of the local king.

This investment was repaid by at least some of those Muslim communities in a symbolic currency. It took the form, as you mention, of the du‘ā al-sultān or “invocation of the ruler”, which formed part of the Friday prayer (khutbah). Its purpose was to openly declare the relationship between a city or territory and its ruler. The dedication of this congregational prayer was a highly symbolic act: when a new sovereign was installed, the altered khutbah is frequently noted in the annals as the most significant public affirmation of the new political reality. As is known from different sources, Muslim communities in coastal India oftentimes invoked distant Muslim rulers in their khutbah. To a degree, Muslim traders on the Malabar Coast were able to pursue their own foreign policy, which of course was directed towards cordial relationships with important trading partners, perhaps in the hope of gaining tax exemptions. From a merchant’s point of view, dedicating the Friday sermon to the ruler of Aden was a richly symbolic, yet entirely free, way of substantiating vital economic ties.

Guillaume de l’Isle [great French map cartographer] (1675-1726), The Coast of Malabar and Coromandel a Very Accurate Map (Orarum Malabariae, Coromandelae, &c. tabula accuratissima), c. 1742 , published by Coven & Mortier [largest cartographic publisher in 18th cty Netherland] (1721-1866), (Amsterdam, Netherland),

For Muslim merchants living in the Hindu states of the Malabar Coast, invoking a foreign ruler in their khutbah was not in itself seen as a challenge to local sovereignty. That said, there were clearly also limits to this. For example, we don’t have any inscriptions about a Malabar mosque being endowed by, or dedicated to, a Muslim ruler. The building of mosques was an exclusively private endeavor, financed by merchants; anything else would likely have been viewed as a competing claim over land or people. So we don’t see the material and ritual ties that were forged across the ocean by Muslim rulers and Muslim merchants evolving into joint political projects on the Malabar Coast.

Q. One of the most fascinating chapters in your book deals with the syncretic nature of Islamic architecture in South and Southeast Asia. While your analysis supplements Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner’s work, I’m curious how it speaks to more recent works such as that of Chanchal Dadlani, i.e. does your study of the sources and architecture reflect any notion of the “ars memoria” tradition in the diasporic Islamic communities’ religious structures?

Beyond the textual inscriptions that they hold, my book tries to “read” the historic mosques of the Malabar Coast themselves as primary sources. In this, I build on the work of Eaton and Wagoner, whom you mention, but also scholars such as Stephen Dale, Alka Patel, and especially Mehrdad Shokoohy. Analogous to the idea of a “Monsoon Islam,”” the book argues for a discrete style of the “monsoon mosque” that we find in South India but also, in its own distinct iterations, in other Indian Ocean trading regions such as insular Southeast Asia or on the Swahili Coast. Again, this is not about the monsoon weather pattern as such, but rather about the interconnected trading world it encapsulated and about the dynamic between the global and local that I’ve mentioned before.

The elaborate superstructure of the fifteenth century Mithqālpalli at Calicut (Image copyright by Sebastian R. Prange), in Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (New York: Cambridge university Press, 2018), p. 132, figure 2.6.

The monsoon mosque stands at this junction. On the one hand, it is a manifestation of a universalist faith that spanned across the ocean, as well as a key part of the commercial infrastructure that sustained those trans-oceanic linkages. On the other hand, its form is an expression of the syncretic processes by which Muslim communities became part of local societies and polities. The book looks at particular stylistic features, such as their multilayered tiled roofs, to explore the establishment, the meaning, but also the contestations of mosques within local landscapes of the sacred. In that sense, it touches on similar issues to those Dadlani so masterfully explores for the Mughals. In both cases, mosques serve as a cultural index, as a form of codified historical consciousness. For Muslim trade diasporas, mosques symbolized not just their presence but also a claim on a historical foundation in a place—and, of course, also an investment in their future there. It is this aspect of the book that I most look forward to expanding on once travel becomes possible again.

Early photograph of Ponnani’s Juma Masjid. Image courtesy of Basel Mission Archives (ref. no. C-30.84.138: “Moschee i. Ponnani, Mekka v. Malabar” by Gotthilf Dengler, 1938). Accessed in Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam, (New York: Cambridge university Press, 2018), p. 114, figure 2.2.

Q. You position your work as being inspired by the historiographical shift that sought to pluralize Islam through cultural interpretation that countered the orientalist perception of a “monolithic Islam,” while at the same time you discuss Arab ulema and Mappila ulema in your book. How do you negotiate the three-dimensional development of Islamic pluralism along with a hierarchical interpretation of Islam (i.e. native vs. foreign)?

This is a really important question: clearly the binary between “foreign” and “local” Muslims is as problematic—-not to mention as false and as dangerous—-as that between a supposedly “authentic Islam” and a hybrid or syncretic faith. At the same time, we can’t simply elide the categories we encounter in the sources. Obviously, we find those crude dichotomies in European sources, for example in the Portuguese distinction between the “Moors of Mecca” and “Moors of the land.” But as my book shows, these identities were also very much at play within the Muslim merchant communities. Malabar’s ulama self-consciously promoted an Arabian ethnic identity to underpin their claims to status. This became one of the most prominent discursive projects that we can discern in the early sources. Then, in the sixteenth century, in the face of Portuguese aggression and the exodus of many Arab merchants, we see a refiguring of the ulama to project a more local, Mappila identity. We can even trace this shift within individual families, such as that of the famed Malabari scholar Zayn al-Dīn Makhdūm.

In Engseng Ho’s memorable image, Malabar’s Muslims were a community facing in two directions: on the one hand bound in complex relations with non-Muslim states and societies, and on the other engaged in intensive exchange with the wider trading world of the Indian Ocean and the Islamic cosmopolis. This duality means that it is misleading to speak simply of the ‘indigenization’ of a Muslim diaspora on the Malabar Coast. This is not to say that this process was not essential. It finds expression in such diverse phenomena as mosque architecture, changing compositions of the ulama, the development of new legal traditions, saint worship, and many other institutional and cultural facets. But it was taking place in conjunction with another dimension of interaction that linked them into networks of commercial partnership, economic institutions, religious learning, legal communitas, mysticism, political allegiance, and warfare. Monsoon Islam is the history of the interplay between these two dimensions in the economic, social, and political lives of Muslim merchant communities—it is the process of embedding global forces in local contexts, and vice versa. So, you’re absolutely right, we’re not looking at a binary or hierarchy, but rather at a multilayered and multidimensional exchange, which yielded distinct processes and outcomes for different communities, in different places, and of course also changed over time, with the sixteenth century as a particularly significant watershed.

Q. Your work’s objective, as highlighted by you, is to challenge the ‘static taxonomies’ that have dominated the study of history. In continuation of your objective, I am curious about the Eurocentric imagination of “piracy”. You briefly reflected upon the diverse perceptions of Mappila sailors as traders by local rulers but their simultaneous portrayal as “pirates” by Portuguese. Given your prior publications and the current monograph, how do you, epistemologically challenge the Eurocentric imagination of pirates in the Indian Ocean?

The brief mention of pirates in Monsoon Islam hints at a wider project I’m pursuing now, which examines the political dimensions of piracy in Asian waters. It challenges the conventional wisdom that Asian waters were great voids in indigenous political imagination and that Asian polities never regulated maritime space before the arrival of European empires. But as soon as we look at instances of maritime violence more closely, we quickly recognize its political dimensions, whether at the communal level or as part of rivalries and competing claims over trade routes and maritime spaces.

This realization forces us to reconsider the conceptual categories we have used to study and to develop new models for interpreting the role of piracy in Indian Ocean history. Situating Asian pirate communities within their local social and political settings highlights the severe shortcomings of projecting notions of legitimacy and sovereignty that are based on the European model of the modern nation-state back onto the premodern past. It shows that what European sources and historians have dismissed as mere piracy was, more often than not, the manifestation of the political contestation of trade routes and sea space by Asian potentates. The central aim of my project is not just to recover the voices and deeds of Asian seafarers, but to examine piracy as a historical category in the context of Indian Ocean history.

Accusations of piracy tend to accompany situations in which claims to sovereignty over maritime space are imposed, subverted, or openly contested. In this light, the study of piracy opens up questions about power relations, hegemonic practices, and permeable jurisdictions—questions that are at the heart of scholarly thinking about the emergence of the modern world order. In Asia as in Europe, the early-modern period was marked by a shift from fluid to more rigid parameters of social and political identity, from semi-private to public forms of warfare, and from personal to increasingly codified legal regimes. Recognizing that maritime violence was a crucial vector in all of these developments reveals the much-maligned pirate as a key player in the making of the early-modern world.

Veloso Salgado, Vasco de Gama before the Samorim of Calicut c.1498 (Vasco da Gama Perante o Samorim de Calecute), (c. 1898), oil on canvas, Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa  (Lisbon, Portugal), accessed from – Wikimedia Commons

Q. You state in your acknowledgement that this work is the product of 10 years of labor, the foundation of which was laid during your doctoral studies at SOAS. Given this work is a product of your dissertation, could you highlight the alterations and changes the dissertation went through to reach the stage of a popular monograph?

Yes, it took me a very long time to turn the dissertation into a book. Other projects intervened, as did life in general, but the greatest challenge was to conceive of the empirical findings put forward by my doctoral research in terms of a broader argument. Inspired by my earlier studies at the LSE, my doctoral work was originally conceived as a quite narrow economic history of the pepper trade. But coming to terms with the ways that trade diasporas functioned forced me to grapple with social history—as I said earlier, premodern long-distance trade was inherently social. Partnership and agency agreements forced me to look at Islamic law, and in particular the interpretations of Shāfi‘ī law that were produced by Muslim merchant communities like those on the Malabar Coast. Before long, I was thinking not just about commodities and markets but about personal networks, scholarly affiliations, legal schools, and the nature of diaspora communities. The whole time, though, I was plagued (if that is a word we can still use) by the scarcity of sources. I had so many questions, and very limited means to address them. For that reason, the dissertation was really focused on establishing an empirical basis, while the writing of the book was much more about the interpretation.

All of which is to say, it was a really haphazard process, with no clear or predetermined end in sight. Now that I’m in the position of advising graduate students myself, I inevitably apply hindsight in trying to derive some kind of lesson from my experience that I can pass on. But what my experience exemplifies, above all, is the immense privilege I’ve enjoyed, which allowed me to pursue this quest, to trace the evidence and figure out the ideas that eventually coalesced into Monsoon Islam. It takes the resources of many institutions, the trust and support of numerous people, and countless other perquisites to research and write a book. This is what I want to acknowledge most about the entire process, from dissertation to monograph.

Q. Your work intersects multiple fields in terms of maritime history, Islamic pluralism, religious studies, economic history, political-military studies of littoral areas etc. What would be the 5 key works that either reshape the field of analysis or help us better understand the field when read together with your work?

Here are five recent books I would feel very honored for Monsoon Islam to be read alongside with:

  • Islam Translated by Ronit Ricci (2011)
  • What is Islam? by Shahab Ahmed (2016)
  • A Sea of Debt by Fahad Bishara (2017)
  • Abraham’s Luggage by Elizabeth Lambourn (2018)
  • Across Oceans of Law by Renisa Mawani (2018)

Anuj Kaushal is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses upon Islamicate healing practices and traditional medical science in South Asia. His work seeks to study identity formation and gender relations in South Asia through medical print culture, private consumption habits, and pluralistic approach to sexology during the 19th-20th century.    

This is a revised version of an interview that appeared in https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/xqs_xxii_-_a_conversation_with_sebastian_prange.html. With thanks to Chapati Mystery. Images reproduced with thanks from Sebastian Prange’s collection.

A New Historical Studies Journal at UT

Starting a Conversation: Recruiting For A New Historical Studies Journal at UT 

We are creating a new kind of historical studies journal based at the University of Texas at Austin. Innovative and forward looking, it has three goals.  First, to make the great research that students do accessible in different forms: both traditional published articles and via our online Public History platform, Not Even Past.  Second, to lift up diverse voices that do not always have access to traditional publishing.  Third, to write History that meets the current moment, that finds connections, that reveals something about society and our world today. We aim to recruit students that share this vision. If you are interested in being a founding member of the editorial board for this exciting publication (it’ll look great on your resume!), joining this journal is for you! We also have scope for designers, marketers, managers, and business officers. If you are interested in working with a dedicated group of individuals on creating something that will have a lasting impact at UT, please contact Ananya Dwivedi at ananyadwivedi@utexas.edu. 

Purpose and rationale

We created “Past in Process” because we wanted to address the lack of diverse voices and stories in historical studies, and to bend the idea of what historical research means. We hope that “Past in Process” will be a vehicle to create great student research that is compelling, engaging and worth publishing.

Journal Staff

Ananya Dwivedi, Founder and Editor-in-Chief (2020-2021) of Past in Process 

I am a senior studying History and Economics here at the University of Texas at Austin. I was born in Chandigarh, India, but have lived outside of India since I was forty days old, moving around the globe from India to Singapore to Taiwan to the US. My historical focus is on South Asian colonial history and understanding how the colonial past of this area affects the development and trade policy of South Asia today. I also have an interest in Ancient Roman history, particularly the Republic and Julio-Claudian trade policy and relations.  

Carson Coronado, Managing Editor (2020-2021) of Past in Process

I am a senior, earning degrees in Liberal Arts Honors History and Business at the University of Texas at Austin with minors in Spanish and Latin. I was born and grew up in Austin, Texas. In 2019, I was a Normandy Scholar and am currently the president of UT’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honorary. My historical focus is Late Antiquity, medieval Spain and colonial Latin America. I am especially interested in the history of cultural borderlands and the exchange of ideas, resources, languages, and laws. I believe that the study of these exchanges can help improve our understanding of modern globalization.

Grace Goodman, Lead Editor (2020-2021) of Past in Process

I am a junior studying Classics and Ancient History at the University of Texas at Austin. I was born, raised, and started college in Corpus Christi, Texas. I came to UT in 2018 to study Computer Science, but I quickly moved on to ancient history and classical literature. My historical focus is in Classical religion and politics, specifically how the two areas of ancient culture intermingled and evolved to their modern connection. I am also pursuing UTeach: Liberal Arts certification in Latin pedagogy and a Bridging Disciplines Program certificate in Digital Arts and Media. I believe that ancient history has a tremendous historical impact on modern civilization and that modern historians should study history with an ever-evolving magnifying glass.

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Digital Archive Review – Imágenes y relatos de un viaje por Colombia

By Alexander Chaparro-Silva

Review of: Imágenes y relatos de un viaje por Colombia [Images and Narratives of a Journey Through Colombia]. Biblioteca Virtual. Banco de la República de Colombia.  https://www.banrep.gov.co/impresiones-de-un-viaje/

What was it like for a European to travel and live in nineteenth-century Latin America? Imágenes y relatos de un viaje por Colombia [Images and Narratives of a Journey Through Colombia] offers an exceptional answer to this question.  This interactive website features the Colombian travelogue of the Spanish intellectual José María Gutiérrez de Alba, written between 1870 and 1884. A skillful writer passionate about Spanish American affairs, Gutiérrez landed in Colombia as Spain’s diplomatic agent. He was charged with reestablishing relations between the two countries after Colombia’s independence sixty years prior. Nevertheless, his plans were upended. Due to the collapse of monarchy of Amadeo I in Spain and the rise of the First Spanish Republic in 1873, Gutiérrez needed to lie low for a while, and, persuaded by his Colombian friends, he remained in the country. For nearly the next fourteen years, he lived and traveled in Colombia. 

Gutiérrez arrived in a country ruled by radical liberals committed to realizing the republican promise of democracy, the separation of church and state, and the erasure of the “colonial legacies.” (1). Astonishingly perceptive, Gutiérrez rapidly began documenting Colombian society. He chronicled how the country was refashioning itself by federalism, unrestricted male citizenship, and a vibrant popular republicanism. He also depicted how the multiple tensions between liberty and order, equality and hierarchy, and unity and diversity unfolded in the radical liberal political project. While living in Colombia, Gutiérrez published political newspapers, agricultural treatises, and literary works. However, his most enduring contribution to Colombia’s intellectual life was his impressive travelogue entitled Impresiones de un viaje a América [Impressions of a Journey to America].

Screenshot of Imágenes y relatos de un viaje por Colombia

Gutiérrez’s work vividly portrays the political life, popular cultures, and natural landscapes of mid-nineteenth-century Colombia. Through captivating prose, Gutiérrez weaves connections between Colombia’s distinctive regional identities, contrasting topographies, and fragmented economies. With ten hand-written volumes and over 4000 pages, the manuscript comprises the most extensive travelogue ever written about nineteenth-century Colombia. Additionally, its 466 watercolors, drawings, photographs, and lithographs primarily created by the author, constitute the largest graphic collection on the country during the same period.

Bogota’s Luis Ángel Arango Library, which holds these documents, spearheaded the process of cataloguing and digitizing Gutiérrez’s work. Biblioteca Virtual and Makina Editorial—previously named Manuvo Colombia SAS—designed and produced the site. An interdisciplinary team of scholars, led by Juan Pablo Siza, and composed of Efraín Sánchez Cabra, Diana Farley Rodríguez, and Catalina Holguín, researched and curated the collection. 

The high-quality digitization of these materials and the ability to quickly download them is a particular strength of the website. All the images are thoroughly identified, catalogued, and accompanied by Gutiérrez’s descriptions. Users can filter the images by thematic categories, authors, and artistic media. The images may also be displayed in the ways Gutiérrez originally organized them.

The experience of exploring the manuscript is enriched by an impressive array of visual accompaniments and multimedia resources such as maps, image galleries, infographics, animations, and audios. The overall visual style strikes a fine balance between nineteenth-century and contemporary graphic elements. Hyperlinks are used judiciously, and browsing the site is easy through effective search engines.

Users can approach Gutiérrez’s work through multiple paths: an in-depth historical submersion into the political and scientific contexts of nineteenth-century Colombia; the challenge of traveling through the rugged geography of the country by mule back and steamboat; and Gutiérrez’s political and intellectual adventures. This includes two sections highlighting Gutiérrez’s remarkable commentaries and drawings of the archeological site of San Agustín in southwest Colombia—the largest group of religious monuments and megalithic sculptures in South America—and his depictions of several indigenous peoples in the Amazon.

Gutiérrez de Alba, José María. Los Chinitos: Corpus Christi celebration. Mariquita, Tolima, Colombia (1874). Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango. Banco de la República.
http://babel.banrepcultural.org/cdm/ref/collection/p17054coll16/id/309

Readers can also recreate in detail eight journeys undertaken by Gutiérrez in various parts of Colombia, as well as his transatlantic crossing and diverse experiences in Puerto Rico, Curaçao, and Venezuela. These expeditions are dissected through georeferenced maps and images of the towns and natural sites visited by Gutiérrez. This section includes various statistics about the trips such as the distance covered, the topics of the illustrations, and Gutiérrez’s companions, both elites and plebeians.

For those who do not have time to dive into Gutiérrez’s travelogue, the site offers the possibility of navigating between 150 selected episodes on a wide range of subjects, for example, amusing anecdotes about hens filled with emeralds in the mining zone of Muzo (2), the fabrication of jipijapa hats (3), political commentaries on the relations between the republican government and the country’s indigenous peoples (4), and the patriotic celebrations of Independence (5). Users can also filter these lively narratives by thematic categories and keywords; even recordings accompany some of them.


Gutiérrez de Alba, José María. Jipijapa hat weavers and sellers. Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia (1875). Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango. Banco de la República.
http://babel.banrepcultural.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p17054coll16/id/420/rec/3

To make researching easier, the portal has an entire section that allows searches by different keywords and categories, including text mining tools to determine the frequency and location of the searched words within the manuscript. As a complement, the site offers a comprehensive lexicon of 1200 words created by Gutiérrez, which explain some of the regional idiomatic expressions, local political vocabulary, and scientific names used in the travelogue. Finally, as a way to engage with younger audiences, the project developed an app that creates and sends digital postcards using Gutiérrez’s original illustrations.


Gutiérrez de Alba, José María. Panning for gold in Barbacoas, Cauca, Colombia (1875). Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango. Banco de la República.
http://babel.banrepcultural.org/cdm/sin gleitem/collection/p17054coll16/id/425

The site won a 2017 Digital Humanities Award (6) in the category “Best Use of Digital Humanities for Public Engagement,” in recognition of both its outstanding contribution to the accessibility and usability of online historical materials and the innovative ways to engage with a wide range of audiences, from the relative novice to the more informed reader.

Imágenes y relatos de un viaje por Colombia is a superbly researched project, beautifully written and skillfully designed. It makes a significant contribution to the study of travelogues, popular visual culture, and the language of representation in nineteenth-century Latin America. The exhibit is an inspiring example of what public and digital history can achieve when accomplished with imagination and commitment to archival work. By making Gutiérrez’s travelogue and its stunning visual collection available electronically, this site responds to the ongoing need for quality online resources, both for researchers and the general public. It brings nineteenth-century Latin America history closer under a renewed gaze. It enhances history research and teaching by aiding course assignments and classroom exercises in historical interpretation.

The exhibit covers so many important angles of Gutiérrez’s travelogue that, inevitably, there will be quibbles. For me as a historian, there are two important aspects that deserve more attention. First, since the site is geared towards both the general public and specialists, it would benefit from  a “further reading” section with an updated and multilingual secondary bibliography to guide users interested in delving deeper into the historical problems conveyed by Gutiérrez’s travelogue.

Second, the exhibit surprisingly does not offer further information about the history of Gutiérrez’s manuscript itself. When exploring the site, users learn that the author intended to publish it with all the images as engravings under the title Album of Two Worlds, but we never learn why this enterprise never came to fruition. Users also discover that the travelogue was kept in a private collection until 2013, when the library acquired it after a rigorous assessment of its historic value. However, what happened to the collection after Gutiérrez finished his Colombian adventure and went back to Spain?

Information about how Gutiérrez created the manuscript is also missing. Readers never learn, for example, Gutiérrez’s process of record keeping, writing drafts, and drawing during his journeys. Although all the images are carefully catalogued, there is no accompanying data about the materiality of the manuscript—from paper, ink, and paint to annotations and marginalia. An exploration of Gutiérrez’s experiences in producing the travelogue not only would help us better understand its history as an object of material culture but also provide insight into the period’s intellectual culture and practices of knowledge. As this meticulous online exhibit continuously reminds us, archives have social lives and historical itineraries of their own.

(1) https://notevenpast.org/crafting-a-republic-for-the-world-in-19c-colombia/   

(2) https://www.banrep.gov.co/impresiones-de-un-viaje/index.php/episodios/view?id=58

(3) https://www.banrep.gov.co/impresiones-de-un-viaje/index.php/episodios/view?id=71&&

(4) https://www.banrep.gov.co/impresiones-de-un-viaje/index.php/episodios/view?id=103&&

(5) https://www.banrep.gov.co/impresiones-de-un-viaje/index.php/episodios/view?id=28

(6) http://dhawards.org/dhawards2017/results/

Technology in Paper: Interactive Design in Early Printed Books

By Aaron T. Pratt

Aaron T. Pratt is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center. This is the first in what we hope will become a regular feature introducing some lesser known objects and texts in the Ransom Center’s remarkable collections.

Long before computer mice and touchscreens made it possible to manipulate complex digital interfaces with ease, volvelles were cutting-edge information technology, transforming the otherwise static surface of the page into an interactive vehicle for learning and knowledge creation.

From Latin volvere, a verb meaning “to turn,” “volvelle” emerged in the Middle Ages as a noun that emphasizes the dynamic nature of new rotating or “turnable” devices that were being made of parchment and paper. First designed for inclusion within medieval manuscripts, volvelles and other interactive diagrams proliferated with the advent of print. They demonstrate both the ingenuity of medieval and early modern thinkers and the technical skill of the printers and bookbinders who helped bring their ideas to broader audiences.

The large volvelles created by Leonhard Thurneisser zum Thurn (ca. 1530–ca. 1596) are among the most elaborate ever printed.

Leonhard Thurneisser zum Thurn, Dess Saturni Circkel und Lauff (Berlin: Leonhard Thurneisser, ca. 1575). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, -f- BF 1724 T54 1575.

Thurneisser was a German polymath who earned a reputation as a miracle doctor. In 1571, he became the personal physician of Elector Johann Georg of Bradenburg after helping his wife through an illness. Johann Georg subsequently furnished him with space in Grey Abbey, a former monastery in Berlin. There, Thurneisser established his home, along with a library, laboratory, and printing operation.

Thurneisser designed and printed eight paper machines around 1575. Meant to accompany the second edition of his alchemical and astrological treatise, Archidoxa, they are tools to help readers determine the influence that the heavens would exert on their lives and the natural world. In essence, they are horoscope calculators.

In each, a woodcut frame surrounds the base of each device. At its foot, the frame depicts female alchemists with the tools and symbols of their craft, connecting alchemy to astrology as an associated art. The volvelles themselves are made from as many as seven distinct parts, and, with their curves and fine lines, they would have been a challenge to cut out and assemble.

The serpentine dragons that serve as pointers are particularly striking, but look closely and you can find detailed constellation charts among the lower layers.

Thurneisser’s volvelles remain an ambitious—and visually stunning—instance of early interface design. Some sets remain black and white, but the Ransom Center’s set has been colored by hand.

There are other examples of volvelles in the Ransom Center. Active during the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Ramon Llull (ca. 1232–ca. 1316) dedicated much of his prolific career as a writer to the goal of converting Muslims to Christianity, and in the process became one of the earliest—and most influential—volvelle-makers. A 1578 edition at the Center includes an instance of the volvelle he integrated into his Ars brevis. It combines the letters of a symbolic alphabet, which is designed to help readers contemplate important questions and arrive at Christian truths. For example, Llull writes that the combination “BCD” can help readers contemplate “whether any goodness is as infinitely great as eternity.” (Llull’s answer is “yes; otherwise all the greatness of eternity would not be good.”)

Ramon Llull, Ars brevis (Paris: Gilles Gourbin, 1578). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BV 5080 L85 1578.

Volvelles show up in other areas of learning, too. Take for example Gioseffo Zarlino’s (1517–1590) work on calendar reform. Best known today as a music theorist and composer, Zarlino published a book for the consideration of Pope Gregory, who was eager to institute a new calendar that would bring Easter back to the time of the year when it had been observed by early Christians. Zarlino’s proposed calendar would not end up being the one Gregory adopted in 1582, but the ingenious volvelle he designed remains an impressive piece of technology. By manipulating the discs, readers can reconcile the 28-year solar cycle of the Julian Calendar with the 203-year cycle that his book proposes. (Zarlino subdivides his solar cycle into seven 29-year periods, or “Great Years.” A solar cycle is the number of years before days of the week will recur on the same days of month.)

Gioseffo Zarlino, De vera anni forma (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1580). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, CE 10 Z298 Copy 1.

Such objects are not only beautiful. In its own way, each underscores the intimate relationship between new forms of knowledge and media design. Design communicates knowledge, yes, but it also creates it.

This article is revised and updated from a piece originally published in the online Ransom Center Magazine in January 2018.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions. 

The Sword and The Shield: A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part II)

In this conversation, Dr. Peniel Joseph discusses his new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders. This is part II of the conversation. Part I can be seen here. The Not Even Past Conversations Series was born out of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes the form of an interview held informally (usually at home) over Zoom with leading scholars and teachers at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. The following is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Adam Clulow and Peniel Joseph.

AC: You talk about the suffocating mythology that sometimes surrounds Dr King and Malcolm X. One of the parts of your book that’s so striking is your discussion of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Can you talk about this moment and that speech?

Is that the case immediately? The speech has a huge impact and it’s very widely publicized and reported but I get the sense that very quickly people are focusing in on those parts that we all know and the rest of the speech is elided.  Is that the case, that this understanding comes into being very quickly? Or is there a moment when the speech as a whole is considered?

PJ: I think the speech gets a Janus-faced treatment. The Black press treats it in a very holistic way. The white press is going to focus on ‘I Have a Dream’. John F. Kennedy says ‘I Have a Dream’ as soon as he meets King. It’s important to remember that the Black press, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier the New York Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Herald Dispatch, this is how most of the 16, 17, 18 million Black people got their news. You know, Black people were rarely written about in say The New York Times. King is an exception.  Most of the time Black people were written about in major newspapers was for having committed some kind of crime. So the Black press really gets what he’s trying to say. And even the march on Washington, the Black press gives it its full title. It’s the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. So that economic aspect is really there for the Black press.  But I would say that the mythologizing starts, yes, early and often when we think about the mainstream.

AC: So you talk about this kind of “children’s bedtime story” version of Civil Rights that is sometimes told. And it’s often told as a singularly American story. What really struck me in the book is the global dimensions of this story. You talk about Dr King and Malcolm X bestriding the global age of decolonization. They meet with Ben Bellah, the first President of Algeria and both travel across the world. Malcolm X travels repeatedly and is welcomed, you say, as America’s Black Prime Minister. So is Dr King. Can you say more about these figures as global icons in a much wider process of decolonization?

PJ: Yes, definitely. They’re both hugely impacted by this global age of decolonization. There’s been great work on Black internationalism done by Penny Von Eschen and Brenda Gayle Plummer and Thomas Borstelmann, Mary Dudziak, and Gerald Horne, whose whole career has focused on Black Internationalism with dozens of books. When we think about Malcolm and Martin, both of them are global figures. They converge at the intersection of anticolonialism and human rights, both of them.

Malcolm X, 1963 by Gordon Parks -Exhibition label: “Gordon Parks photographed Malcolm X on a New York City sidewalk as he sold a special issue of Muhammad Speaks, the official newspaper of the Black separatist group Nation of Islam.”(National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

Malcolm, I would argue, is even more interested in the global stage because in a lot of ways he’s able to get more global support than he is domestically. I think King is interested in the global stage but as his domestic reputation swells, he really utilizes global support to impact the domestic struggle. Whereas Malcolm is really trying to utilize the world stage to push for anti-racism and the defeat of white supremacy in, for example, the United Nations, and also to have coalitions in the Organization of African Unity that will censor the United States for its mistreatment of African-Americans. In a very specific, granular way they both in the 1950s take trips overseas. So King goes to Ghana in 1957 and is able to witness Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. When we think about Nkrumah he is such an important figure. He’s really the post-war avatar of Pan Africanism as a nation state building project on the continent of Africa. He makes mistakes. But symbolically, he is this unbelievably important figure. Malcolm X meets him in Harlem. Martin meets him in Ghana.  Malcolm later meets him in Ghana. 

So King gets to Africa first. In 1957. King spends a month in India in 1959. The India trip is crucial. King’s India trip and seeing all that poverty and the caste system in India makes King understand that he has been put on Earth not just to defeat racism and white supremacy, but actually to defeat poverty globally.  These are massive ambitions that most humans will never have, He really believes it.  That’s what’s so extraordinary and exciting about studying these figures. Malcolm visits the Middle East in 1959, spends five weeks there, visits Saudi Arabia, visits Khartoum, Egypt, all these different places. He meets up with Anwar El Sadat, the vice president of Egypt, the future president, Egypt.

Malcolm starts making critical alliances with Middle Eastern and African diplomats in the 1950s. Malcolm had such good alliances, that one of the little known facts I talk about in the book, is that Malcolm X has an office at the United Nations. He’s got it through the connections with African and Middle Eastern diplomats. So Malcolm goes in and out of the UN all the time with a briefcase. And he’s an extraordinary figure in this sense. 

So as the 60s progressed, you see Dr. King with Ben Bella.  King becomes this figure for anticolonial activists who especially are interested in human rights, but especially interested in also pressuring the United States to recognize their activism as something that’s good and virtuous, even as the United States has this ultimate contradiction of not just Jim Crow segregation, but really utilizing state violence against Black people.

In 1964, Malcolm goes overseas for about 25 weeks. He goes to the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca. He goes to Nigeria. He goes to Tanzania. He goes to Ghana. Malcolm is in Ethiopia. He’s in Cairo. He’s in London. And Birmingham. And Smethwick. And Oxford. He’s in Paris. So what Malcolm is trying to do is, one, he really becomes a statesman who is giving the global audience, the world audience, a firsthand account of his experiences as a Black man and as a Black person in America.

He’s telling Africans about the depth and breadth of racism and white supremacy. He’s repudiating the State Department’s notion that things are getting better. Malcolm is actually even harsher globally than King is.  By 1964 when King travels overseas, he travels to Scandinavia to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. So in a way, King is always giving, until he’s coming out against the Vietnam War, etc, he’s giving a more optimistic vision. 

Malcolm finds some optimism in the fact that anticolonialism has worked and he wants help.  Malcolm meet with Fidel Castro in Harlem September of 1960, and he’s telling Fidel that your struggle is our struggle and our struggle is your struggle. Malcolm is telling that to Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. What’s so interesting about Malcolm is that so many African revolutionaries respect Malcolm.  He is willing to speak truth to power.  So the global component is really important for both of them. I would say that Malcolm really tries to cultivate that global component even more than King. And I think it’s out of necessity. 

But it’s also because Malcolm is this revolutionary Pan Africanist and also a global Islamic figure.  You know, I make an argument that he’s always Muslim, both within the Nation of Islam and then when he becomes an Orthodox Muslim. So just because he’s in a different sect doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe he’s a Muslim.  

They are secular, but these are two faith leaders. They bring this real morality to what they’re doing. And it’s not a cheap morality that we have in our society today about who’s sleeping with whom. It’s the morality of: does human life matter?  Should we protect children? Should we protect communities? Should we not torture people? At any time? Any place? Should we be, and this is where King’s very important here, a society that is nonviolent but we are not morally equivocating about that nonviolence. 

“No Apartheid – Wall of Justice Revival” by Mario Torero. (UC Santa Barbara, Library, Department of Special Research Collections)

King believes in nonviolence.  Whether it’s white sheriffs who are attacking Black people or it is people in Vietnam who are considered the enemy. The United States is dropping napalm. And again, these are crimes. These are crimes against humanity that the United States is committing. No matter what we do, we can never take back these acts. Right. And so King is saying that, right. And that’s when King, I argue, April 4th, 1967 becomes a revolutionary because there’s no turning back after that. There’s no handshakes with President Johnson and President Johnson doesn’t come to his funeral.

AC: Malcolm X and Dr King exist in a global moment of decolonization. Do you see a parallel between that moment and what’s happening now with Black Lives Matter? Because one thing that’s been so striking is the way these protests have gone global in a way that could not have been predicted two years ago. Do you see parallels between the years you discuss in the book and the global Dimensions of Black Lives Matter which have has swept across the world in unprecedented and unpredictable ways and galvanized people in many different countries?

PJ: Absolutely. I think there’s parallels and I think we’re at another crossroads. I think the parallels are, again, also between the global north and the global south, because as we’ve seen, the underdevelopment of the global south and really the exploitation of the global south has continued with a different kind of colonization. And that colonization is a kind of economic colonization. Right. Because of these unfair distributions of wealth created by globalization. Globalization, that in and of itself is not a bad thing, just like gentrification.  But we have made sure that the distributions or the supply chains of power and privilege versus the supply chains of misery and greed are distributed along racial and economic lines, ethnicity lines, different lines based on identity and geography.

So in a way, even as indigenous groups got rights of political self-determination – probably our biggest global example after King and Malcolm’s time is going to be Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Yes, the ANC absolutely got political power in South Africa, but without connected economic justice and equality. The segregation, the economic impoverishment has actually increased even though now we have Black billionaires and African billionaires in South Africa, too. So the whole world is absolutely in the throes of a rebellion against this inequality that is organized around anti-black racism, but it’s organized around intersectional injustice based on your race, class, gender, sexuality, how you identify.

So we’re seeing this. And I think that King and Malcolm actually anticipated this crisis, and that’s why they were interested in thinking of human and civil rights as a Human Rights movement, this bigger movement that was going to guarantee redistribution of wealth and guarantee citizenship for, yes, Black people, but for all people.

AC: We’re going to return to Dr King in a second but you can say more about how Malcolm X changes and evolves? He’s often presented in a very limited way that does not encompass the complexity of the individual, but also just how much he changed across this period. Although you cover their whole lives, the book really focuses on a relatively compressed space of time and he travels a remarkable road in this period. 

So let’s talk about the last two chapters of the book, the Radical King and the Revolutionary King. And so we talked about the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Let’s talk about the Riverside speech, in 1967.  This is an extraordinary speech that is very different from popular understandings of Dr. King.  It’s stunning in its repudiation of US involvement in Vietnam.  You write in the last years of his life that Dr King was transformed “into a revolutionary dissident vilified in quarters that once feted him.” Do you think he anticipated the strength of this backlash?

PJ: I would say he didn’t anticipate how big the backlash would be because I think that he thought what would protect him was the mainstream accolades that he had gotten before. So he was a Nobel Prize winner, was somebody who had been a leader of a social movement, who was on par with Presidents of the United States. And people knew that King was a serious, sober person politically. He wasn’t prone to making wild eyed statements. And when you read the speech, the speech is very sober. I mean, it’s very critical. But it’s not even his most critical speech against the war. That’s going to start really at the end of that month, because he’s going to do a speech on April 4th, April 15th. He’s at the spring mobilization, which is the largest anti-war demonstration up until that time. 400,000.  Two years later is going to be marching with over a million. That’s in Central Park with Benjamin Spock. Harry Belafonte. 

But then April 30th is when he does the speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Stokely Carmichael is in the front row. He says he’s not going to study war no more. It’s a much more stinging indictment. And Stokely leads the standing ovation for that speech. So the Riverside speech, I mean, I think one of the things he talks about when he says America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is very, very important, because I think that speech is very similar to what Malcolm X is saying when he says the chickens have come home to roost.

And one of the things that King starts to channel, I argue in the book after Malcolm’s assassination, is really Malcolm’s framing of structural racism and white supremacy and imperialism and racial violence and this idea that the United States being a deployer of that kind of violence is always going to have some kind of karmic payback. For Malcolm, he was talking about the Kennedy assassination, for King the reason why he breaks with Lyndon Johnson. He’s saying, look: we’re immorally killing all these people in Vietnam, and the Great Society is failing now. In a television interview in 1966, he says, your money goes where your heart goes. And the president’s heart and the country’s heart is in Vietnam. And he was right. I mean, all that money, we know retrospectively, we should have poured that into urban cities and poured that into rural areas and anti-poverty and employment and guaranteed basic income. We could have given everybody health care and income and not murdered all those people. So, again, what’s interesting about King is he takes that weight on for himself. So he feels the weight of the US’s morally reprehensible actions in a way, I think that elected leaders should because that would prevent you from doing it. So King feels that enormous psychic weight. 

And he feels that about poverty. He feels that about violence. And so he becomes this very clarifying figure. But he starts to use nonviolence as a political sword in the way that Malcolm X had talked about. And King starts speaking truth to power, saying Congress, the halls of Congress are running wild with racism. In 1967 before the American Psychological Association, he’s saying the roots of urban rebellions are white supremacy, and white racism is producing chaos. And the media says that there would be peace if Black people stopped rebelling. And King says it’s the white people who are producing the chaos.

This is King. One of the most interesting symmetries between Malcolm and Martin is the fact that Malcolm X, who I argue is Black America’s prosecuting attorney, was always charging white America with a series of crimes. We have the videotape of King talking to poor Black people in Marks, Mississippi. There’s a point where Andy Young says King is in tears listening. This is terrible. Marks, Mississippi. King says the way you are living right here in America, it’s a crime. That’s what King says.  

Martin Luther King, Jr (1967) by Benedict J. Fernandez. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Eastman Kodak Professional Photography Division, the Engl Trust, and Benedict J. Fernandez

So we go from Malcolm saying this is a crime. He’s that revolutionary. King’s our good guy. Right? So he’s the bad guy. And King is saying this is a crime. And King is talking about white people getting access to land through the Homestead Act. And Black people not getting their reparations, their 40 acres and a mule. And yet people are telling Black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And so he says, we’re coming to Washington to get that check. Right. So this is extraordinary what happens in terms of the symmetry between both of these individuals. Both while they’re living but then certainly during the last three years of King’s life.

AC: So a final question. Before becoming a university professor, I taught high school history. And the question I have is, how should we teach about these two figures in a way that does more justice to their lives.

PJ: I think we should teach about them together. So this is really a dual biography. Whenever you tell students about one, you tell them about the other. It’s pretty simple to do because they live parallel lives. Malcolm’s born in 1925. King in 1929. Malcolm’s killed in 1965. King in 1968. So there’s not a lot of mental shuffling you have to do. And so I think you show students the way in which they interpret race and democracy differently based on the life experiences that they have. So you look at King: Morehouse College, had his father in his life. Malcolm: father was killed, trauma, foster home. While he’s in college, Malcolm is in prison. While King is in seminary, Malcolm’s in prison and they both come out and they’re activists, both men of faith. They become faith leaders. But then you look at how, how and why both of them imbibe this revolutionary moment in different ways. And then why do they start to converge? How and why they converge. 

AC: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on two remarkable lives and a remarkable book.  

Part I in this series is available here.

PENIEL JOSEPH holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. His newest book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., was published in March 2020 and is available now.

More from Dr. Joseph on Not Even Past:

Consider reading as well:

Featured Image Credit: MalcolmX and MLK, Jr., mural, E. W. alley view, N. of Manchester Ave. towards Cimarron, Los Angeles, California, 2010. (Vergara, Camilo J. Vergara Photograph Collection. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Designing Historical Video Games

by Adam Clulow with Ashley Gelato, Michael Rader, Izellah Wang and Alex Aragon.

In early 2020, we set about recruiting students for an experiment: Could four History majors design a fully functional, historically accurate video game across the course of a single semester. The experiment was driven, first, by an awareness of the dramatic growth of the video games industry in recent years and, second, by a sense that History departments including our own needed to engage more closely with what has become a key conduit for students in our classes.

At current estimates, video games are a $120 billion industry and one that is growing rapidly every year.  For university students in particular, video games are pervasive.  According to surveys, more than 70% of college students play video games, even more watch gaming content streamed on a range of services and the overwhelming majority report some exposure to video games across multiple platforms.  At the same time, video games have become an increasingly important gateway for majors.  Many students who enter our classrooms come to History via historically-based games which proliferate across multiple platforms.

Historians can engage with video games in two basic ways. First, we can deploy them much as a film or a novel to interrogate popular understandings of particular topics, moments or figures. Second,  we can use them as a learning tool by asking students to design their own games.  This was our approach.  After an open call for applications followed by interviews, Julie Hardwick and I recruited four students, Ashley Gelato, Michael Rader, Izellah Wang and Alex Aragon, for a semester long Digital Humanities internship focused on game design, story-telling, programming, and history. 

The Game Design Team: Ashley Gelato, Michael Rader, Izellah Wang and Alex Aragon

The task for the semester was to design a fully playable game that could be used in the classroom. The game was constrained by a set of guidelines.  First, it had to be built around a historical episode known variously as Chushingura, the 47 ronin or the Akō incident.  One of the most celebrated but also controversial episodes in Japanese history, the Akō incident took place between 1701 and 1703 and centered on an act of revenge carried out by a group of samurai against the perceived enemy of their dead master.  It laid bare the tensions between the myths and the realities of samurai life in this period, between legality and morality, and between the need for order and the desire for honor. 

Second, the Games Team had to develop a game with a clear educational payoff that could provide a window into the difficult life of a low-ranking samurai family in the eighteenth century.  To ensure stability, the Tokugawa regime that governed Japan worked to preserve and secure the samurai class while also stripping them of the right to use violence.  Placed on fixed stipends, many samurai and their families fell deeply into debt.   The game had to draw on and make connections to the most recent scholarship on the lived realities of the Tokugawa samurai, providing a series of teaching points that educators could use to design lesson plans around.  Third, the game had to be developed on zero budget, using only free, publicly available platforms and software without purchasing game assets. With these requirements in place, the Games Team was given total freedom to design the characters, the narrative and the game as a whole. As part of the internship, they worked closely with Ian Diaz, a UT graduate and experienced Games Designer.  

Promotional video for the Ako game

Video games take many forms.  Working within the confines of a single semester timeframe, the decision was made to develop a Visual Novel, a popular genre that is also highly flexible. Visual novels, which can broadly be characterized as Choose-Your-Own style adventure games, are typically presented in the first person with the player making a series of choices that govern subsequent actions.  They employ branching storylines that offer multiple paths through the narrative and for this reason players often replay them to experience the full range of different options. 

In designing a functional game, the Games Team faced four overlapping challenges: creating a believable central character, developing a branching storyline with consequential choices, writing compelling dialogue and producing realistic and historically grounded artwork. The most successful games push the player to invest emotionally in their character and the choices they make.  The first hurdle, therefore, was to create a believable character that could stand at the center of a first-person game.  The Akō game allows the player to view Tokugawa Japan through the eyes of young samurai, Kanpei Hashimoto. As Hashimoto, the player progresses through the major events of the Akō incident.  The game is divided into four chapters with each chapter designed to expose Hashimoto to new decisions and conflicts while exploring the realities of samurai life, the economic structures of early modern Japan, the role of women in society, the commercialization of religion, and the nature of samurai ideologies in an age of peace.

Second, the Games team worked to construct compelling narratives filled with choices that matter.  In total, the Akō game has five possible outcomes depending on the individual decisions players make.  These five outcomes represent unique branches of the story, but the player is also presented with numerous smaller decisions that open up additional pathways. 

Example of individual player decision

Third, the Games Team wrote thousands of words of dialog for use in the game.  Visual Novels contain some background information that is displayed at key junctures in the story, but the vast majority of interactions take place through dialog as the player engages with individual characters.   The scale of this dialog is magnified by the fact that it has to be written to accommodate multiple different pathways through the game.  For this project, the Games Team wrote over 30,000 words of dialog, a significant challenge that required extensive research in topics as diverse as agriculture, diet, currency, dress style, architecture and funeral ceremonies.

Comments from Ashley Gelato, a member of the Games Design Team

Finally, the Games Team made the decision to develop original artwork rather than using public domain images.  In its final form, the game has 4 chapters with 30 background images and 13 characters. Each of these 13 characters has multiple expressions, creating a total of around 50 individual “sprites” that display varying emotions and postures.  In order to ensure that the artwork was historically grounded, hundreds woodblock prints and other images were collected to serve as reference material.  Even the smallest of artistic decisions required extensive research. 

Over the semester, the Games team dedicated hundreds of hours to the task. The result was impressive: a deep learning experience and a fully functional game, Ako: A Test of Loyalty, that is linked to contemporary scholarship.  By the end of the semester in May 2020, the game was distributed to beta-testers who provided feedback.  In September 2020, it will be used for the first time in a university setting as an educational resource and then released on commercial platforms where it will be available for download at no charge. 

Screenshot of Ako: A Test of Loyalty

As an educator, it was remarkable to watch a group of students start from zero and build up an immersive historical experience over the course of a semester. Such experiments show how video games can be viewed as something more than just a distraction separated from the core study of history. Instead, used properly, video games can provide a highly effective vehicle for learning about the past. At UT, the experiment was so successful that it led directly to the creation of Epoch: History Games Initiative, which aims to develop a pipeline of historical games over the coming years.

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Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented – Conference Report

By Raymond Hyser

April 22-23, 2021
Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin

This conference brings together diverse scholars whose work grapples with the challenges that climate change presents to the discipline of history. Participants will address precedents for this “unprecedented” crisis by uncovering and analyzing the historical roots and analogues of contemporary climate change across a wide range of eras and areas around the world. Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?

Climate in Context Panel Summaries

Session I: Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

The first panel of the conference was a roundtable comprised of five graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin’s History Department. Although temporally and geographically diverse in their areas of focus, each panelist engages with environmental issues in their research. For each of their presentations, they were tasked with discussing how climate change intersects with their own work.

In his presentation, “An Upwelling of Stone: Climate Change and Infrastructure Agendas in Early Modern India,” Jonathan Seefeldt discussed Rajsamand, a large-scale precolonial dam in the present-day western Indian state of Rajasthan built between 1662 to 1676 AD. Using Rajsamand, Seefeldt problematizes the broadly-conceived notion that these massive infrastructure projects were projections of kingly power by highlighting that the dam’s construction was less a prestige project than a response to failed monsoons, unusual regional aridity, and mounting social strain.

Diana Heredia-López’s presentation, “Cultivating Parasitism: Early Modern Insect Crops and the Limits of Commodification,” discussed the need to investigate the different manifestations of parasitism throughout the Plantationocene and the non-linear trajectories of plantation agriculture by exploring the seventeenth-century project to scale-up the production of cochineal in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Jesse Ritner’s presentation, “Skiing in Variable Conditions: Climate Adoptation, Profitability, and Repercussions,” discussed how modern ski resorts used highly profitable snow-making technologies to adapt to variable climates that provide inconsistent or insufficient snowfall for ski resorts. In “Drafting Blueprints: Critiquing the Past to Fight Climate Injustice Today,”

Micaela Valadez’s presentation explored the history of Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, Texas to critique the historiography of the organization as being unbalanced and not contending with the organization’s decision to not use the rhetoric of race or class when agitating for change. In doing so, she argued that if historians are to help in the current climate justice movement, they need to divert their attention to understanding how communities of color fight against environmental and climate injustice.

Brooks Winfree’s presentation, “African Americans, Slavery, and the Long History of Environmental Degradation in the Cotton South,” advocates for historians to consider slavery and enslaved people’s interest in forging alternative understandings of the land by considering how the cotton-based plantation zone of the nineteenth-century Gulf South became a contested site of competing ideas of environmental use.

Session II: Historicizing Climate

In the second session of the conference, four scholars explore the historical ways of knowing climate in temporally and geographically different contexts. Dr. Clark L. Alejandrino’s presentation, “Beyond Numbers: Knowing Typhoons in Late Imperial China,” argued against the fetish for numbers that dominate the study of past storms and, to some extent, historical climatology. He argued that historians need to take seriously the diverse, non-numeric ways that people along the southern coast of China recognized, understood, and conceived typhoons in the past.

In Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s talk, “The Anthropocene and Epistemological Colonialism: The 18th-Century Spanish American Origins of Humboldt’s Global Histories of the Earth and Climate Change,” he critiqued the historiography of Alexander von Humboldt and his role in creating the intellectual genealogies of the Anthropocene. While Humboldt played an important role in spreading environmentalism throughout North America and Europe, in his work Humboldt largely erases both the physical and intellectual communities he interacted with in Latin America. In “Measuring by Proxy,”

Dr. Melissa Charenko explored how scientists’ use of climate proxies, preserved physical characteristics of past climates that stand in for direct meteorological measurements, constrained and compelled what they thought about climate’s past and future. She focused on predictions derived from tree rings in the 1920s and the predictive limitations of pollen analysis in the 1980s given the unprecedented future of global climate change.

Dr. Deborah Coen’s presentation, “Degrees of Vulnerability: Why We Need a Feminist History of Climate Science,” discussed the discourse surrounding the diverse concepts of human vulnerability that has developed since the 1970s and hypothesized that this evolving discourse reveals the influence of the global feminist movement in the 1980s and 1990s. She advocates that a history of the science of climate vulnerability should attend to the presence of this past, the living legacy of two centuries of efforts to separate the knowing human subject from the human object of geophysical influence.

Session III: Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

In the third session of the conference, four scholars explore the causes and consequences of the climate crisis with a focus on the intimate connections between fossil fuels, race, colonialism, and capitalism. Dr. Christopher Sellers’s talk, entitled “Gathering Clouds over Petropolis: A Prolegomena,” he focused on a single historical thread within the anthropogenesis of climate change: the oil industry. Centered on two locales, the eastern coast of Texas around Houston and the southern coast of Veracruz in Mexico, Sellers offered more local and human scales of historical action that explored how corporations, governments, and other institutions created and sustained the material conduits that have provided for the world’s growing petroleum needs over the last century.

In Dr. Andreas Malm’s presentation, he discusses the book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism that he co-authored with the Zetkin Collective. The book is the first study that critically engages with the far right’s role in the current climate crisis and how fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. The racist legacy of fossil fuels has led to the far-right’s defense of the fossil fuel industry and their anti-climate change policies.

In Dr. Andrew Curley’s talk, “The Cene Scene: Modernization Myths, Navajo Coal Development, and the Making of Arizona,” he discussed the “cene” narratives of writing history within larger geological frameworks and stressed the importance of indigenous understandings of temporality in relation to water resources in the American Southwest. When considering the “cenes,” we must ask what future is enabled for indigenous people and knowledge when we understand all of time through these broad geological lenses. He advocated that the metrics and theorizations of our current geological era must account for the struggles Black and Indigenous peoples, and there must be space for demands for decolonization and abolition in climate debates.

Victor Seow, in his presentation, “States of Second Nature,” discussed the interrelationship between the state and nature. The role of the state, while not ignored in studies of climate, is often pushed to the background. Seow argued that modern states play an active role in engendering environmental change and that we need to extend our inquiries beyond the capitalist systems that are often the points of focus. He ended with a discussion of turning toward a statist solution to the climate crisis, a crisis that modern states were complicit in.

Session IV: Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

In the fourth session of the conference, five scholars present their ideas on how the historical profession and academia in general can be more responsive to the climate crisis. Dr. Andrea Gaynor’s presentation, “We Use the Living Earth to Make Our Histories,” argued that historians often engage in disavowing the problems of climate change and our contribution to them in the course of our historical work. She advocated that historians have important roles to play in disrupting the disavowal of the climate and biodiversity crises through modifying how we conduct our professional work and acting to modify the institutional and wider social frameworks that we operate within.

Dr. J. T. Roane’s talk, “Rural Black Social Life in the Chesapeake After the 1933 Great Hurricane,” discussed the strong relationship between Black communities and waterscapes in the Tidewater region of Virginia. With the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century, Black people were increasingly excluded from the waterscapes that played such vital roles to Black communities.

In Dr. Justin Hosbey’s presentation, “Louisiana: Race, Justice, and the Ecological Legacies of the Plantation Economy,” he discussed how the humanitarian crisis triggered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposed the racial violence and class domination that structures New Orleans and the broader American South. He analyzed how the politics of space, place, and class in Black New Orleans has been transformed by post-Katrina redevelopment policies and that these reconstruction projects can be read as anti-Black spatial tactics.

Dr. Paul N. Edwards’ presentation, “Writing History into the Sixth IPCC Assessment Report,” discussed his work as one of the few social scientists working on the sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report and the challenges of integrating historical research into the IPCC Assessment Report.

Dr. Dolly Jørgensen’s presentation, “Isn’t all Environmental Humanities ‘Environmental Humanities in Practice’?,” discussed how after she and Dr. Franklin Ginn took over as co-editors of the Environmental Humanities journal in January 2020 they sought to make the journal more inclusive of environmental humanities practices. As part of this effort, they introduced a new category of journal article, “Environmental Humanities in Practice,” and discuss the tension in this decision to develop a separate category of scholarship geared toward outreach.

Session V: Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

In session five of the conference, five scholars discussed the public-facing aspects of their work and how work about climate history, climate change, and environmental humanities gets translated to the public. Dr. D. O. McCullough’s talk, “Specific Constraints for a Universal Challenge: Navigating Resources and Space to Create a History of Climate Science Exhibition,” explored the challenges and possibilities of using museum exhibits to communicate the history of climate science and offered several suggestions for so effectively. He advocated for curators of history of climate science exhibitions to draw their narratives from the objects available for display, to treat their own institutions as artifacts to model critical reflection about past practices in meteorology and climate, and to foreground museum space and audience in the design process.

Dr. Bethany Wiggin’s presentation, “When Will It Be Over? Water, Flood, Toxics, and the Duration of Colonial Legacies in Philadelphia,” explored climate impacts as ongoing colonial relations and explores the coloniality of climate change through a series of inter-related public humanities projects developed in Philadelphia amidst flash floods, refinery explosions, and school children’s hopes and dreams for Philadelphia in 2100.

In Dr. Prasannan Parthasarathi’s talk, “Indian Ocean Current,” he discussed the “Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives,” an exhibit at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art that he co-curated with Salim Currimjee. The exhibit integrated material on climate change, ocean science, and the crisis of fisheries with perspectives from six contemporary artists from around the western Indian Ocean World.

Dr. Tom Chandler and Dr. Adam Clulow’s presentation, “Modeling Virtual Angkor: An Evolutionary Approach to a Single Urban Space,” discussed how the Virtual Angkor Project aims recreates the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor, the largest settlement complex of the preindustrial world, at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence in Southeast Asia. They explore the long development of the project, the challenges involved in modelling the historical environment, and the question of climate variability and the decline of Angkor.

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