Alina Scott, Author at Not Even Past

To Chicago and Back by Aleko Konstantinov (1894)

In 1893 Aleko Konstantinov, one of Bulgaria’s most well known literary figures, traveled to the Chicago World’s Fair. Once in Chicago, Aleko—as he is remembered by Bulgarians—observed this now-famous spectacle along with the peculiarities of the “New World” itself. The Chicago fair was a formidable vision of prosperity and progress, by far the largest of all nineteenth-century fairs, with 27 million visitors and display space three times the 1889 fair in Paris. Aleko was mesmerized by the stately neo-classical pavilions that made up the fair’s so-called “White City” but was also drawn to the Midway Plaisance. The Midway was more about entertainment than trade and industry. It featured the world’s first ferris wheel, but also a whole world of exotic or “savage” sites, sounds, and flavors. In his recently translated travelogue entitled To Chicago and Back (Do Chikago i Nazad, first published 1894) Aleko details his complex impressions of the world, including his home country Bulgaria, on display. But it was the New World itself, on and off the fairgrounds, that most dazzled and disturbed Aleko.

Bird’s eye view of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (via Library of Congress)

Historians have spilled plenty of ink on the world’s fair phenomenon—namely how nations and empires projected and encoded power at these elaborate exhibitions. But the reading of fairs, especially by “non-Western” visitors has been much harder to unearth, with few such records left behind. Aleko’s reading of the fair’s sights, sounds, and smells then is a rare artifact. He was, after all, a Bulgarian from the outermost edge of Europe, a region that had been under direct Ottoman rule for five centuries and had only become autonomous in 1878. By all accounts, the fair’s extravagant displays of American wealth and might stunned Aleko, who was also impressed by the range of other, as well as Japanese, exhibits. Bulgaria’s tiny pavilion, in contrast, was a clear embarrassment. As Aleko noted with his characteristic irony, the Bulgarian pavilion tucked away in a “dark alley” next to the Ottoman pavilion was pathetic by all measures, except possibly in comparison with the Greek pavilion with its mere “sack of olives.” As Aleko snidely quipped of Bulgaria’s southern neighbor, “Why couldn’t they keep quiet, and mind their own poverty?” Aleko was even more annoyed by Bulgaria’s paltry kiosk labeled “Bulgarian Curiosities” on the Midway. As he ruminated with deadpan irony (and Eurocentric denigration), Americans will surely mistake Bulgarians for a “South American tribe” given the handicrafts on display, in spite of the Turkish-Moorish style of the kiosk.

Aleko Konstantinov (via Wikimedia)

Aleko’s concerns about appearing poor, “Oriental” or “savage” was also tempered by a growing sense of unease in the face of American “progress.” His long trip was punctuated by bouts of disillusionment as he wearied of the pace of American life, “the mad motion, of the railways, ships, and trams…and those worried faces…those silent lips, already unable to smile. So cold!…But when will we live?” But the climax of his disenchantment comes when he visits the Chicago slaughterhouses—a popular tourist destination for fairgoers at the time. The stench of pig death is so putrid and overpowering that Aleko almost throws up several times and nearly loses consciousness on his slaughterhouse tour. He chokes on the “murderous stench” until he finally yells “I’m dying!” His revulsion is physical as well as moral and he ruminates, “What has brought us to this place?” Turn of the century Chicago was the epicenter of modern meat production, with its massive stockyards, slaughterhouses, and meatpacking industry. But Chicago’s most important offsite display of “progress” then did not always have the desired effect; that is to impress the world with American might. On the contrary, it was the sight and smell of industrialized meat production and the mass slaughter of animals that sent Aleko reeling, questioning modern progress.

Chicago World’s Fair 1893 (via DPLA)

He was not the only one, of course, to look askance on the costs of progress and on the ills of the slaughterhouse in particular. A global vegetarian movement was on the rise in this period, in part fueled by ethical considerations raised by modern slaughterhouses such as those on display in Chicago. Interestingly the first Vegetarian Federal Union had an exhibit at the Chicago fair, and the 3rd International Vegetarian Congress was held in Chicago that year. Aleko was not a vegetarian and his visit to the Chicago slaughterhouse did not make him into one. He indulged with pleasure in a kebab at the restaurant in the “Turkish Village” on the Midway, served up by Americans in fezzes. But the experience did create a long shadow over his impressions of the glories of the fair and the New World. His readers can continue to walk in his steps, and imagine this lone Bulgarian’s journey to the future.

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Maurice Cowling and AJP Taylor: What Would They Think of Brexit?

Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920-1924 (1971)
A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945 (1965)

After three years of riotous gyrations and mayhem, Brexit has finally happened. The United Kingdom officially left the European Union last week, an official agreement being signed between the two entities that formally severs ties in a (hopefully) orderly manner. Britain will remain in the single market and customs union (though not sit on or in any decision-making bodies) throughout 2020 during which trade, migration and special considerations around the border between Northern and Southern Ireland will be hashed out. There has been no formal agreement regarding Harry and Meghan, though it would appear many who voted to leave the E.U. are astounded that anyone would want to leave the U.K.

Anti-Brexit, People’s Vote march, London, October 19, 2019 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Politically, it all feels very 1924. Multiple parties and political actors mill about on stage, the Union looks fragile, and the traditional grains that govern policy and partisanship have warped. Who today is the party of the Union; of Brexit; of Remain; of the NHS; of the environment? The whole parliamentary system seems to be on the penultimate lap of a messy realignment in which conservative political forces have triumphed at the expense of liberal ones. At least, that’s what Maurice Cowling might have thought . . . if he were around today.

In his seminal work, The Impact of Labour, 1920-1924, written in 1971, Cowling focused on “high politics” in order to track “the politicians who mattered.” In doing so, he narrowed in on partisan strategy, parliamentary maneuver, and political rhetoric while treating other factors—such as parliamentary backbenchers, Ireland, India, the British working class—as “off-stage [forces] with unknown natures and unpredictable wills.” What emerges is a story of the Conservative Party’s survival, the Liberal Party’s demise and the emergence of the Labour Party. Cowling details the ascendancy of grey eminences like Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain at the expense of chivalrous, old-school firebrands like David Lloyd George. He also shows how a new two-party system emerged at Westminster which replaced the one founded nine decades earlier (in 1832). The system would remain mostly intact for the next nine decades . . . that is, until Brexit.

Cowling’s approach was unashamedly elitist. He believed the decisions and actions of “the politicians who mattered” (who, by his count, numbered a mere fifty or sixty) could not “be understood as derivative offshoots of pre-existing social conditions.” The historian’s job was therefore to “impute motive, intention and disingenuousness to the [political] actors whose personalities we have created out of the letters and speeches which survive.” At the same time, he shunned hagiography because he believed a biographical approach abstracted politicos from the political system in which they operated. “The system,” lectured Cowling, “was a circular relationship; shift in one element changed the position of all others in relation to the rest.” Because of their “ignorance and eccentricity,” politicians reacted more readily to each other than to outside factors. In many ways pre-empting the linguistic turn of the 1980s, Cowling treated the public utterances of politicians as portable forms of power-broking rather than vessels containing anything of real ideological substance.

Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Teresa May, and David Cameron.

One way to assess Cowling’s value today is to ask, what would historians gain if he were here to write a book about modern British politics? Let’s tentatively title it The Impact of Brexit. What would he focus on as he explained why Britain left the European Union? First, I believe he would view David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Teresa May, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage as a political class in the tradition of 1920-24: reacting to one another as much as to what they thought constitutes public opinion. Second, he would find no riddle in the fact that Britain has drifted perilously close to a hard Brexit—one with no trade deals or border agreements in place to lessen the impact of leaving— despite a no-deal Brexit being desired by only a minority of Britons. Indeed, Cowling would point out how, historically, partisan considerations and vocal minorities often trump both the public good and electoral sense. (A hard Brexit remains in the cards depending on how negotiations with the E.U. proceed throughout the year.) Third, Cowling’s belief in the collective gravity of the political constellation, over that of its individual stars, made him the opposite of a conspiracy theorist. He would demonstrate (with panache) how no one appears to know what they are doing—because they don’t.

Boris Johnson’s first PMQs, September 2019 (via UK Parliament, Flickr)

And yet, Cowling’s Impact of Brexit would be incomplete. By dogmatically depicting the political as always prior to the social and cultural, he often missed the wider story. During the period between the first and second world wars, British society witnessed a series of powerful trans-political transformations. Conversely, the governments that Cowling’s scholarship hones in on all tend to look the same. In many ways, it was Parliament that provided the scenery for the age rather than life in the counties. Westminster ambled along while class politics, the depression, radio, the motor car, and foreign policy developments pace back and forth with menace. Cowling often struggled to pick out the melodies and timbres of the past. Indeed, Robbin Marris once called his work a “history of noise” and for all his narrow, reductive focus, his books tend to sprawl and congeal.

What Cowling would miss are the things A.J.P. Taylor would find—namely the general sense of malaise that permeates not just contemporary British politics, but British society caught between the twin realities of anxious precarity and plastic wealth at the advent of the social media age. Indeed, while Cowling’s Impact of Brexit would be welcome, an updated version of Taylor’s English History 1914-1945 would be an even greater boon. In English History, Taylor crafts a masterful work of historical impressionism—a blurry birds-eye-view of an age that evokes the emotion and ambience of interwar Britain. Taylor locates historical significance in a miscellany of seemingly minor things. Did British cities change for the better? Yes, replies Taylor: tea replaced beer as the drink of the work day —“convictions for drunkenness were more than halved, and it was unusual to see a drunk man in the streets.” Did veterans impact British culture? Yes: for example, the word “fuck,” used liberally among soldiers during the First World War became common in literature, albeit remaining off limits in polite conversation. Were Britons happy? Well, Taylor points out, the use of condoms remained secondary to coitus interruptus in family planning —“the historian [of interwar England] should bear in mind that . . . he has on his hands a frustrated people.”

Lloyd George ca. 1915- 1920 (via Library of Congress)

In another key passage, Taylor described how, television and radio irrevocably changed the character of public oratory: “Broadcasting demanded a gentler, more intimate style. The old-timers, trained on audiences [who heard rather than saw them] could not manage this. Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald, once great magicians, were both ineffective on the air. Baldwin came into his own.” With that, the reader instantly grasps the transition from one political aesthetic to another during the interwar period. One wonders what he would have made of Twitter. Certainly, he would see Brexit as the symptom not the cause. He would view Messrs. Johnson, May, Corbyn and Farage as political bumblers treading out of their depth—hostages of fate rather than its architects; expressions rather than drivers of Britain’s winter of discontent.

Today, it is common to see historians publish editorials in the press on contemporary issues, such as cultural customs, a social injustice, or a foreign policy development– usually by shedding light on its historical roots. The value of Taylor and Cowling’s scholarship, like Foucault’s, is that their approaches to history lend themselves to thinking about the nature of human societies in general. As such, they enable historians to reflect on the present in terms of the past, not simply as an emanation of it. But neither of their approaches is complete. By downplaying the ability of leaders to effect real change in society, Taylor’s approach often denies politicians their very real knack for screwing things up. Cowling’s insistence on change always springing from the political leadership while the masses muddle along behind, downplays the amount of social, cultural, and technological change that goes on in a society regardless of who’s in charge. In seeking to understand modern or interwar Britain, we need to borrow from both. Cowling would likely roll his eyes at such an olive branch. Taylor would probably smile wryly. “Of all the historians of his generation, Cowling had the greatest mind, after my own,” Taylor is reputed to have said once.

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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.

Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.-Mexico Divide by C.J. Alvarez (2019)

By Alejandra C. Garza

The U.S.-Mexico border is a constant subject in today’s news. Debates over immigration and the building of a wall along the border keep the spotlight fixed on the land and water that stretches from California to Texas on the U.S. side and Baja California to Tamaulipas in Mexico. As a native South Texan, the route from Laredo to Brownsville was my stomping ground. Laredo was a short 50 mile drive west from my hometown of Hebbronville. It was not uncommon for us to cross the international border into Nuevo Laredo. When my family stopped crossing into Nuevo Laredo, I attributed it to the rise in violence. Historian C.J. Alvarez shows that the debate about the built environment along the border began before the Trump administration and control of the border region includes more infrastructure than the infamous wall.

Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide uses the built environment and major construction projects to tell the history of the U.S.-Mexico border region. In a refreshing step away from the term “borderland,” Alvarez uses “border region,” in order to emphasize that the border is not a single place as it is often portrayed. He uses the term “border region,” to alert readers to construction projects across the border, not just along it.

Alvarez’s main contribution is to “advance the notion of the border as a literal construction site.” Border Land, Border Water is a story of the most complex, expensive, and largest construction in the border region. As such, it is a great companion to Andrew Needham’s Powerlines, which explores the relationship between electrical power industry and reservations in Arizona. Like Needham, Alvarez shows how the built environment affected the communities where construction took place, reconfiguring waterways, transforming agriculture, and, more recently, building fences.

U.S. Mexico border crossing at Tijuana ca. 1923 (via Library of Congress)

Alvarez bridges borderlands and environmental histories in order to examine how the built world on the border “functions and for whom.” He achieves this by looking at the border region as multiple spaces that different actors (military, private companies, governments) utilized for their own political motives. For example, law enforcement officials advocate for border infrastructure in the name of national security. Additionally, he traces the evolution of U.S. and Mexican interests from partnership to dominance over the space. Many projects that began as joint ventures in marking the border have evolved into U.S. construction of a harsh demarcation of the region via a border fence.

A major theme throughout the book is that both federal and private entities had a hand in developing the built environment in the border region. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Alvarez explains, this included survey markers (which were often incorrect or missing when later surveyors searched for them), railroad crossings, and entry points. In the first half of the twentieth century, surveillance of the border region evolved from military presence to infrastructure, which was situated mostly on the U.S. side of the border. Lastly, the waterway projects of the 1960s and 70s, shifted to the aforementioned fence and barrier construction with the Secure Fence Act of 2006. All of this construction was intended to impede movement, whether by people, vehicles, or animals.

US-Mexico Border Fence, 2014 (via Sheila Ahmadi, Flickr)

Dominance was tied to construction. Yet, what sets this region apart from others around the world is the transnational collaboration between Mexican and U.S. governments. While government and private industries had a hand in the building, the main actor was the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC). The IBWC was a joint government entity created by the U.S. and Mexican governments in 1889, then called the International Boundary Commission (IBC). The Mexican counterpart was called the Comisión Internacional de Límites y Aguas (CILA), previously the Comisíon Internacional de Límites (CIL). The renaming of these government agencies in 1944 suggests that they sought control of the waterways, not just the land. Additionally, the renaming occurred eight years before the construction of the Falcon Dam, one of the agency’s major projects.

Manuel Ramirez and members of his family in front of their home in Texas will be relocated as a result of the joint U.S.-Mexico Falcon Dam construction project on the Rio Grande River (International Boundary and Water Commission, United States Information Agency photograph, via Library of Congress)

My family history also stretches across the border. In the early twentieth century, my maternal grandmother’s parents immigrated from Guerrero, Tamaulipas and settled in central South Texas. As a young girl, I often heard of the “flood” that wiped away my ancestors’ home. It wasn’t until I read Alvarez’s research that I realized the “flood” was the result of Falcon Dam. I have family friends who worked at the dam alongside Mexican workers and know plenty of people who fished in the Rio Grande in the dam’s shadow. As Alvarez writes, this history is personal to the people who have lived in the border region and we don’t often think about the reasons why. Border Land, Border Water not only examines the ways the built environment changed the border region, it also urges people question the history of the land where they grew up.

Falcon Dam and Reservoir (cropped image via NASA, Flickr)

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Review of The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (2017), by Cyrus Schayegh

Cyrus Schayegh addresses the spatial formation of the modern world in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World. He uses the history of Bilad al-Sham from 1830 to 1945 as his case study. Bilad al-Sham, also known as the Levant or Greater Syria, is roughly bordered by the Mediterranean to the west, Anatolia to the north, the Euphrates to the east, and the Arabian Peninsula to the south. It is comprised of the modern states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. Schayegh describes Bilad al-Sham as a “meso-region,” a relatively uniform area that is larger than a single nation but smaller than a continent. Although the meso-region of Bilad al-Sham is not homogenous, with ill-defined and fluctuating borders, it is comprised of interlinked cities and rural areas with a shared history.

Schayegh sees the meso-region of Bilad al-Sham as an ideal candidate for his central concept, “transpatialization,” which he defines as the “socio-spatial intertwinements” of cities, nation-states, regions, and global networks. He prescribes transpatialization as a remedy to histories that overemphasize a single scale of history, whether global, regional, national, or municipal. Transpatialization is a way to consider multiple scales of history simultaneously, providing a more complete picture of modern developments. Schayegh implements it to study the individuals, cities, and nation-states of Bilad al-Sham and connect the entire region to global trends. He argues that applying this concept to meso-regions, like Bilad al-Sham, is the most effective means of understanding developments in modern history.

Map of Bilad al-Sham (via Wikimedia Commons)

Applying transpatialization to the making of the modern Bilad al-Sham, Schayegh argues that there were two stages in its modern history. During the first stage, from the 1830s to 1910s, there were three primary socio-spatial intertwinements: Bilad al-Sham and the Eurocentric world economy, Shami cities and their inter-urban ties, and interregional transformation. Schayegh’s first stage is conceptually cogent, effectively explaining the economic and cultural development of the region. Although Schayegh notes the role of individuals living in Bilad al-Sham, cities are the primary characters and Beirut is arguably the most important character. Schyageh’s application of transpatialization is most apparent with Beirut. The city came to prominence during the nineteenth century for its role as a port city, connecting the interior cities of Damascus and Aleppo to the Eurocentric maritime economy. Likewise, the city benefited from its interregional relationship with Anatolia and the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, leading to its assignment as the capital of its own providence in 1888. Schayegh also notes individuals living in Beirut during this period such as Butrus al-Bustani (1819-1883) who was instrumental in the Arab Nahda, a cultural and linguistic renewal founded in the publication houses of Beirut. Bustani, like the city he inhabited, developed his ideas at the confluence of different scales of history. Schayegh points to the city of Beirut, its residents, its inter-urban ties, and its economic development to describe the first stage of modern Shami history as one of rapid transformation.

The second stage of modern Shami history is the primary focus of the book, where Schayegh applies transpatialization to the transitional period of the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s and the development of nation-states during the 1930s and 1940s. He argues for the development of a “national umbrella” out of what was previously described as a “patchwork region.” Instead of attributing the rise of nation-states to globalization, the decisions of powerful individuals, or any other singular narrative, Schayegh ties together all relevant factors—the Great Depression, Jewish migration, European geopolitical strategy, Arab nationalism, and more. During the second stage, Schayegh records the accentuated build-up of nation-states in the region, which were influenced by innumerable factors. One particularly influential factor was the development of economic competition between the port cities of Haifa and Beirut. Schayegh notes the individuals, communities, cities, and nations that influenced this competition. He argues that this contest, primarily between Syrian and Yishuv communities, played a significant role in the development of competing national identities in the region. Schayegh’s concept of transpatialization convincingly entwines global, regional, national, and municipal histories to provide a nuanced account of nation-state development in Bilad al-Sham.

View of Beirut, 1934 (via Library of Congress)

Schayegh’s concept of transpatialization weaves together Bilad al-Sham like a tapestry. The intertwinement of local, urban, regional, and global fields presents views of the modern Middle East that are otherwise unapparent. For example, transpatialization brings new meaning to consequential topics like the development of Arab nationalism. It captures the fluctuating values of qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationalism) and Wataniyya (individual state nationalism) as individuals, cities, nation-states, and regions appropriated them. This leads to novel formulations like Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli’s: “I am a son of Damascus including all its neighborhoods, its different quarters and houses, I am a son of Syria, and I am a son of the Arabs.”

Schayegh uses transpatialization to effectively trace some historical developments like Arab nationalism, but his attempt to offer a definitive history of Bilad al-Sham’s spatial formation is incomplete. For instance, he misses opportunities to address global networks. He mentions diasporic communities and individuals, like the Homsis in Sao Paolo and Khalil Sakakini in New York, yet fails to significantly develop these global connections into his argument. Most of his analysis remains within the bounds of Bilad al-Sham despite his global ambitions.

Schayegh pulls together a magisterial account of the modern formation of Bilad al-Sham and sets a precedent for the use of transpatialization in global history. While the argument of the book is often specific to Bilad al-Sham, it is a useful work for a broad audience seeking conceptual tools to make sense of the modern world. The concept of transpatialization is viable and should be employed in future studies of Bilad al-Sham, the modern Middle East, and the modern world.

Carter Barnett studies the history of medical institutions in the 19^th/20^th-century Middle East. He received his BA in History and Arabic from Baylor University and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His MA thesis examined the ambivalent interaction between missionary medicine and Palestinian society, politics and law. In 2022, he joined Johns Hopkins History of Medicine doctoral program. His present research takes interest in the history of (post)colonial medical institutions in the Middle East, focusing on the intersections between religion, international health organizations and changing medical practices.

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Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation

By Candice D. Lyons

In the spring of 1852, Benjamin Roper, overseer to Galveston area plantations Evergreen and Headquarters, wrote a short letter to his employer to inform him that “on the night of [April] 30 I cut Lewis [an enslaved man] with a knife . . . . He is now and has been since his misfortune at Dr. Whiting’s and will remain there until he is able to bear punishment when I shall bring him home and give him a very severe whiping [sic].” Roper postponed describing the events leading up to this act of brutality, however, he insisted that “if any negro (whether I have the controll [sic] of him or not) should ever give me the like provocation, I will deliberately take his life. I am now armed and it is my intention never to go into your field without, and to use them if necessary.”

Photograph of part of a letter sent by Benjamin Roper, a plantation overseer, in 1852 to his employer — *Letter from May 3, 1852 (by author)*

The recipient of this missive was Ashbel Smith, noted Texas statesman often hailed as both “the father of Texas medicine” and “the father of the University of Texas.” Known for his pioneering work in the treatment of yellow fever as well as his diplomatic endeavors, Smith spent the latter part of his life acting as a vocal proponent for women’s and African American education, serving as one of three commissioners tasked with establishing an “Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, for the benefit of the Colored Youths”—the institution that would eventually become Prairie View A&M University. This avowed investment is difficult to reconcile, however, with Smith’s years-long, active participation in the institution of chattel slavery, including his seeming complicity in his steward’s violent attempts at plantation management.

Shortly after the April 30 incident, Smith returned to his Texas holdings for a brief visit, after which Roper penned a follow-up message noting, “Lewis is here for a week or two until we get more out of the grass. Perhaps it may be some satisfaction for you to know that he as well as all the other negroes have behaved very well indeed since you left.” This bit of self-congratulation would prove premature, however, as between the writing of this letter and one dated June 23, 1852, those enslaved by Ashbel Smith mounted a sustained resistance (undoubtedly, at least in part, to Lewis’ stabbing) that would compel Roper to draft yet another letter to his employer noting that “Your negroes have for a long time enjoyed the reputation of being hard to manage yet I believed until now that I could control them. I am now satisfied that I cannot and being so satisfied I wish to resign.” It is clear from this communication that, as they had done in years past, the individuals enslaved by Ashbel Smith were challenging the conditions of their enslavement. This is evident in Roper’s comment a week later that “whilst I have been at one place [that is, one of Smith’s plantations] the work has been neglected at the other. Your negroes all need continual watching or rather continual flogging to make them do their work.”

Printed map of Galveston County for 1879 — *Map of Galveston County, 1879 via Library of Congress*

Demoralized, Roper divulges that “there is not a single person [enslaved at Evergreen or Headquarters] in whom I can depend unless it be Abram, and I have not full confidence in him. Bob and Old Sam deceived me for a long time but I have found them out and in my opinion there are not two greater scoundrels on the place.” Roper’s plaintive airing of grievances highlights how those enslaved by Smith shifted the balance of power after a heinous act of violence, contesting the circumstances under which they were expected to labor in ways marking them, in Roper’s view, as “scoundrels.”

Black and white image of Ashbel Smith — Ashbel Smith via Wikimedia Commons

This situation was thrown into crisis once again in 1857, as Ashbel Smith began to receive extensive correspondence from Roper concerning the practices of his replacement, the newly hired overseer, Mr. Page. Roper still lived in the area and spoke regularly with Smith. In February 1857, he wrote to note that Page was rarely if ever seen in the fields and that, rather, “the negroes are called up and receive orders at the house and then they go off and do as they please.” While this lack of oversight may have been to the benefit of the enslaved on one hand, it signaled a type of neglect that would leave them especially vulnerable to medical calamity, on the other. On March 4, 1857, Roper writes, “Ann gave birth to a [daughter] since you left which died a few days after. I knew not of its birth or sickness until after its death, if I had I should have gone to have seen it.” He adds, “I have since told Albert and Abram that if anyone was sick hereafter before your return to let me know it”—a request that seems to imply that Roper attributes the death of Ann’s child to some failure to attend to the needs of those enslaved on Evergreen Plantation on Mr. Page’s part.

Such was the fate of these individuals: despite Smith’s reputation as an upstanding and altruistic Texas luminary, the people he enslaved spent their lives subject to the whims of a perpetually absent “master” and were routinely made to contend with insufficient resources, violent overseers, and inadequate health care.

Image of a statue of Ashbel Smith in Baytown, Texas — Ashbel Smith is memorialized in a statue in Baytown, Texas (via Wikimedia Commons)

Read the full letters from the Ashbel Smith Papers, 1823-1926 here:

Sources:
Ashbel Smith Papers, 1823-1926, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
“Evergreen Plantation.” Handbook of Texas Online.
Elizabeth Silverthrone. “Smith, Ashbel.” Handbook of Texas Online.

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Five Sisters: Women Against The Tsar

This year, Not Even Past asked UT History faculty to tell us about a book that they love to teach. What makes it a great book for teaching history? What interesting and revealing questions does it raise? How do students respond to it? This is the first article in what we hope will be a series on books we love to teach.

Why would anyone give up a life of the utmost leisure and privilege to become a revolutionary, isolated from society and hunted by the police? How does an individual choose to become a terrorist – to kill for an idea or an ideology? What country comes to mind when you think about these questions? It is probably not nineteenth-century Russia and you are probably not imagining women in these roles. Yet arguably, modern terrorism was born in the aristocratic manor houses of the Russian empire. This collection of translated memoirs takes us deep into the everyday lives of the girls who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

I have taught this book almost every year since I began teaching in 1985, every time I teach my survey of Russian history from 1613 to 1917. These fascinating and accessible memoirs give us a highly detailed and deeply personal view of the decisions five revolutionary women made on the journeys they took to the revolutionary underground. Vera Figner (1852-1942) is especially thoughtful and reflective about her path from childhood innocence to growing awareness of social and economic inequality on her parents’ estate, to her desire to help the impoverished in her province, to her frustration with her own abilities and government obstacles for personal improvement and social-economic justice. In 1872, at age nineteen, Figner went to Zurich to study to be a doctor so that she could come back and have a greater impact at home serving the poor. But in Switzerland, she met radical thinkers and activists who cast doubt on her ideas about individual service and reform. When she and her friends returned to Russia, they decided that the only way to effect change was through revolution, and the only way to bring about a revolution –to spark a peasant uprising — was to assassinate the tsar. Figner was one of the chief agents of that plot, but instead of igniting revolution, the assassination ushered in a period of reaction and repression. Figner was eventually arrested but not executed, which gave her decades in prison to think about her life and write her revealing – and unapologetic — memoirs.

Vera Figner (sitting second to the right) and her family, 1915.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The moral ambiguities of the women’s ideas and actions fascinate my students year after year. Were these young women nothing more than spoiled rich kids with no sense of political realities, or were they dedicated realists, taking the only steps possible to transform people’s lives in a country where the government was indifferent to the suffering of ninety percent of the population? How did they understand the moral stakes of their choices? What did they hope to accomplish? How did their lives as revolutionary women compare to those of revolutionary men? And are they comparable to terrorists in the twentieth century and today? The students’ discussion of these questions changes, often dramatically, from year to year, reflecting current events and their current political concerns, which provides its own set of historical lessons, and has the added benefit of giving me a sense of the issues that matter to the succeeding generations of students in my classes.

Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar
Edited and translated by Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford Rosenthal
Original publication: New York: Knopf/Random House 1975

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Policing Art in Early Soviet Russia
Great Books on Women’s History: Asia
Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible” in Stalin’s Russia

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Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development under the Commune by Joshua Eisenman (2018)

by Horus Tan

The People’s Commune was both a collective farm and a local institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. It was introduced in China in 1958 and abolished in 1983. Many scholars suggest that the People’s Commune was unproductive because its remuneration system was too egalitarian. According to James Kai-sing Kung , it offered only “a tenuous link between effort and reward. This weakness of incentives led to extensive free-riding behavior, which was cured only by the eventual replacement of the collectives by family farms.”[1] The Chinese Communist Party today shares this perspective. In its official narrative, the People’s Commune was too unproductive to maintain the subsistence of the peasants, and the abolition of the commune was set into motion by a couple of destitute peasants in 1978 who were attempting to improve their living standard. Joshua Eisenman offers a quite different perspective. In Red China’s Green Revolution, he argues that, instead of being an economic failure, the People’s Commune was successful in modernizing agriculture and promoting agricultural productivity during the 1970s. Some top officials of the Chinese Communist Party, not some poor peasants, abolished the People’s Commune in 1983 for their own political gain instead of its economic performance.

Poster of People’s Commune ca. 1958 (via Flickr)

Eisenman’s foremost conclusion is that the People’s Commune of the 1970s can be considered productive because of its ability to generate investment. Eisenman found that the People’s Commune was not a rigid institution. When it was introduced in 1958, it was indeed a disastrous failure and led to the famine of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). However, it experienced a dramatic transformation in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the People’s Commune, which Eisenman called the “Green Revolution Commune,” was successful in raising the agricultural productivity in China. One of the biggest problems agriculture in China faced before the introduction of the People’s Commune was the lack of capital. In a country with scarce capital and an unlimited labor force living just above subsistence level, it was hard to cut consumption and increase saving rates, in order to make productive investments to take advantage of high returns to capital. The People’s Commune of the 1970s extracted agricultural surplus before produce was distributed among the peasants. In other words, the peasants were taxed before they got their income. This system enabled the commune to “reduce consumption and ensure the high savings rates necessary to finance agricultural modernization.” Unlike the People’s Commune of 1958, which invested household savings in poor quality capital and caused the most catastrophic famine in human history, the People’s Commune of the 1970s turned savings into productive investments like agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizer. It kickstarted a continuous development process that produced rapid growth in food production. At the same time, the People’s Commune of the 1970s tolerated the existence of private sideline plots, cottage enterprises, and rural markets. This tolerance helped the peasants maintain their lives above the subsistence level and avoid the over-extraction which took place in the People’s Commune of 1958.

Mao Zedong shakes hands with Peoples commune workers ca. 1958 (via. Wikimedia)

Many scholars suggest that the remuneration system of the People’s Commune allowed the less productive members to be free riders, and made more productive members work less hard for the commune and seek better compensation outside it. In contrast, Eisenman argues that the free rider problem was largely alleviated by Maoist collectivist indoctrination. He argues that the People’s Commune was a kind of religious community, a church of Mao. Through ceremonial behaviors, like the public recitation of Mao’s teachings, the performance of Maoist opera and dance, and the display of Mao’s profile, the People’s Commune created a self-disciplined labor force who prioritized the fulfillment of Maoist collectivist ideology over material wealth. These activities also created a strict political atmosphere in which a nonconformists felt that criticized by the entire commune. Maoist indoctrination was backed up by the People’s Militia—the semiautonomous local military institution nested within the commune. The People’s Militia was controlled by the leaders of the commune to enforce both the commune’s collectivist ideology and its external security. Eisenman points out one additional characteristic that forced peasants to accept the high savings rates. The People’s Commune was not only a collective farm but also an autarkic institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. This autarky made it almost impossible for the peasants to flee the commune and seek a better life in the world outside.

People’s Commune Canteen ca. 1958 (via Wikimedia)

Eisenman’s second major conclusion is that the abolition of the People’s Commune was carried out by top officials of the Chinese Communist Party. According to the official narrative, the People’s Commune was too unproductive to maintain the subsistence of its members, so eighteen starving peasants in a commune of East China decollectivized their own commune, risking the death penalty on December 24, 1978. The improvement of these peasants’ economic conditions after decollectivization supposedly encouraged the authorities to abolish the People’s Commune. However, Eisenman argues that the fate of the Commune was decided not by its economic performance or by grassroots demands, but rather by the winner of the factional struggle within the Communist Party—Deng Xiaoping. The abolition of the Commune was a deliberate decision taken by these top Party officials to overthrow their pro-commune rivals who were still loyal to Mao’s ideology after Mao’s death. He also shows that there were many local and commune officials who opposed the abolition of the commune and refused to return to household-based agriculture. They did not dismember their commune until they were asked to do so by provincial officials. Some provincial officials admitted that they had to issue orders to stop the local officials from hindering the decollectivization movement.

People’s Commune ca. 1981 (via Wikimedia)

One of the merits of Eisenman’s study is that it offers a very useful approach to help scholars understand the transformation of agriculture in China during the 1960s and 1970s. Famine is one of the most common topics in Chinese history, and agriculture in China still underperformed until the 1960s. But during the 1970s, the situation definitely changed. Between 1962 and 1978, although China was almost completely closed to foreign trade, added almost 300 million people without suffering any massive famine. We can’t understand how Chinese agriculture accomplished this if we do not recognize the contribution of the People’s Commune to agricultural productivity. Eisenman’s study also helps researchers to dispense with their idealization of private property rights. Researchers of collective agriculture in the Soviet Union and Communist China usually are occupied with the underperformance of collective agriculture and the tragedies peasants suffered in the collective farms in these countries. These tragedies sometimes make researchers assume that private property is therefore superior. Eisenman’s study shows that the foremost obstacle faced by agriculture in many developing and underdeveloped countries is the lack of capital rather than the lack of private property rights. Small peasants cannot overcome the lack of capital by just building a closer connection between effort and reward.

[1] James Kai-sing Kung, “Transaction Costs and Peasants’ Choice of Institutions: Did the Right to Exit Really Solve the Free Rider Problem in Chinese Collective Agriculture?” Journal of Comparative Economics 17, no. 2 (June 1993): 486.

You might also like:
Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China
China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)
Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA

Presenting Prague Spring to the West: Czechoslovak Life and Socialism with a Human Face

by Cullan Bendig

In January 1968, Alexander Dubček became the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, replacing the unpopular communist hardliner Antonín Novotný. The following months of 1968, known as the Prague Spring, brought Czechoslovakia to the attention of the international community. Dubček’s goal was to create “socialism with a human face” through a series of liberalizing reforms, including loosening restrictions on freedom of expression. The Soviet Union attempted to use negotiations to reign in the program which had begun to expand beyond Dubček´s control as 1968 continued, but those efforts were unsuccessful. Under Soviet leadership, the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21, ending the period of reform and its increased freedom of speech. In the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion, the reform programs were gradually repealed and Dubček was removed as First Secretary in April 1969. The media faced a reimposed regime of Moscow-approved censorship, which would be extended to full censorship in March and April, 1969. The only reform that would survive the rollbacks was the federalization of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic.

Cover of the March, 1969 edition of Czechoslovak Life. Source: glossycommunism

The magazine Czechoslovak Life was published in Prague throughout this time, and it was distributed in English to an international audience. There is a sharp contrast between the Czechoslovak Life of pre-Prague Spring and the one that emerged in the wake of the crushed uprising. The magazine pre-Spring was much less polished, structured, and organized. Much of the content was dedicated to Czech identity and cultural achievements. In contrast, the magazine of the 1970s featured more highly polished images and articles that discussed the economic progress and welfare of the Czechoslovak state. The strict censorship imposed in 1969 is especially visible in a sudden shift in the language used to describe the Spring. Articles from the immediate wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion but before censorship stress that although the movement was crushed, the liberalizing goals of the Prague Spring were noble attempts to reform the organization of the state in line with the socialist project. After censorship was imposed, the official party narrative of the Prague Spring as a failed right-wing, bourgeoise coup replaced the previous narrative extended to Western audiences in Czechoslovak Life about what the reforms had meant.

The pre-Spring editions of Czechoslovak Life also included an editorial section alongside the table of contents that always starts with “Dear Readers….” The “Dear Readers” column was signed “Editorial Board,” and frequently commented on major international events or the state of the magazine itself. The editorial team on the magazine was largely comprised of the same group of people throughout the period when “Dear Readers” appeared. These people were replaced when “Dear Readers” stopped appearing in the magazine in 1970, therefore it can be assumed that the column was a project of this group of editors. Frantisek Lebenhart and Lenka Reinerová in particular, both Czech-born Holocaust survivors, appear in the list of editors in various positions from 1964 to 1969. The most common political statements made in the “Dear Reader” section were criticisms of then-ongoing imperialist projects by Western powers. In the November 1967 edition, for example, the editors condemned Israel as the aggressor in the Six-Day War and declared that “the editors of this magazine stand alongside the Arab states” in their resistance to colonialism. Throughout the 1960s, the editorial board was also highly critical of American military action in Vietnam.

During Prague Spring, the magazine continued to comment on global imperialism, but also shifted to address the international interest in developments within Czechoslovakia. One article alongside the “Dear Reader” column addresseed a question sent in from a Finnish reader who asks how liberal reforms can happen within a communist system. The editorial board replied that there is nothing inherently problematic with liberalizing reforms in order to advance a more democratic socialist project. The editors of Czechoslovak Life explicitly promoted Dubček´s reforms through the “Dear Reader” column and continued to do so even after the Spring began to be reversed in late 1968 and early 1969. The cover of the January 1969 edition features a photograph of a healthy, adorable child waving a Czechoslovak flag, and the first article on the next page is a telling “Dear Reader” section. This edition asks the reader to carefully verify everything they hear about Czechoslovakia in the coming months, and to remember what their elected leader Alexander Dubček had said. In retrospect, this can be seen as a forewarning of the oncoming censorship that lasted for the next two decades.

1969 was the last gasp of the “Dear Reader” section of Czechoslovak Life. In 1970, the entire editorial board was replaced by names not found anywhere in the editions from the 1960s. Frantisek Lebenhart was the first to go during 1969, and Lenka Reinerová became Editor in Chief before being removed herself between 1969 and 1970. Reinerová would not be allowed to publish at all in Czechoslovakia until the fall of communism. The content of Czechoslovak Life in the 1970s reflects the increased censorship imposed in 1969, with articles about Czech industry, the health of good socialist citizens, and denunciations of the Spring as a failed right-wing coup that Czechs and Slovaks had recognized and rejected. No mention is made of the Warsaw Pact tanks. The censorship regime imposed after the Prague Spring marks the end not only of Dubček’s reforms, but also of Czechoslovak Life presenting “socialism with a human face” to a Western audience.

Further Reading:
Glossy Communism

You might also like:
The Refugees of ’68: The U.S. Response to Czechoslovak Refugees during Prague Spring
The Public Archive: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions
50 Years Since Prague Spring: Czechoslovak Dreams and Cold War Realities

The Drama of Celebrity by Sharon Marcus (2019)

by Kameron Dunn

Sharon Marcus’s The Drama of Celebrity argues that a celebrity is not merely a creation of the media, but is rather a result of the competing interactions between the media, publics, and the celebrities themselves. Marcus makes the provocative argument that celebrities, as we conceive of them today, are not newly minted Hollywood constructions. Rather, they have permeated our social consciousness since at least the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of global theatre and its proliferating media. This is where Marcus situates her history, honing in on the world-famous French actress, Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), whose celebrity exemplifies Marcus’s triangulation. Bernhardt’s fans—like all fans—were not merely passive consumers, nor were they obsessive in their adoration as is the popular conception of fandom. Instead, they existed at once in an active and passive state. Marcus does not merely give fans and celebrities pure agency in this process, however. Rather, she illustrates the complex and unpredictable nature of the interplay between these three players in a celebrity’s rise to stardom.

Sarah Bernhardt, 1844-1923, in 3 theatrical poses (via Library of Congress)

To construct her argument, Marcus examines the material culture produced around popular theatre during Bernhardt’s time, especially fan-created scrapbooks. These scrapbooks illustrate Marcus’s central argument about the combined obsessive and passive nature of fandom. Creating scrapbooks was not an entirely passive activity: a fan had to purchase the empty book, collect pictures and paste them in, and arrange the images in a way that suited them. This is clearly not the all-consuming obsession often pinned to a crazed fandom. Most of Bernhardt’s fans operated in this state, as do most fans now.

Marcus shows how celebrities function as “social exceptions,” people who engage in behavior antithetical to social mores but nevertheless secure societal benefits. Publics are drawn to celebrities who defy social convention, who play by their own rules, and who thus satisfy a fan’s internal desire to live uninhibited by the social order. Fans also want to give into celebrities on a more sensuous level. Fandom is created, in part, by a desire to lose yourself in the craft of the celebrity you adore, and to form an identity around the collective experience of celebrity-driven transcendence. Marcus writes: “people want to be moved, even overcome, and paradoxically use their agency in order to lose it.” Bernhardt, for instance, inspired awe on stage in her mastery of the form. Though she performed in French to all her audiences, including American audiences who by and large would not understand her, she played up her physicality in a way that kept audiences rapt. This speaks both to Bernhardt’s skill and to the desires of her fans, who would sit through hours of a play in a language they did not understand just to see her perform.

Sarah Bernhardt by N. Sarony c1880 (via Library of Congress)

For Bernhardt and others, Marcus emphasizes that the media alone do not determine who gets to be a celebrity or which fans will admire them. She shows both the media’s ridicule of celebrities as well as their fans. She situates a particular type of racial and politically-infused ridicule thrown at Bernhardt, primarily through cartoons, that depict Bernhardt as catering to lower-classes of people, such as people of color. Of course, this did not diminish her fans’ adoration, and Marcus makes the point that “[t]he most successful celebrities connect with fans in ways that bypass the media.” This facet of fandom is especially important in considering political figures and the popularity: Trump’s connection with his voter base (insert for “fandom”) remained strong despite media ridicule.

Marcus also shows some of the ways that fans seek intimacy with celebrities. When they take photos, images, or other ephemera and place them in new locations (such as scrapbooks) without significantly changing or altering the media, fans establish their own context and their own personal bonds. Fans of theatre in the late nineteenth century would paste images of actors they liked in a book without any significant additions. Creating the palpable presence of a celebrity in this way is crucial part of fandom. The chapter delves deeper into the ramifications of this desire for intimacy, going further into the eroticizing of stars and attempts for fans to make some sort of in-real-life sexual connection. No matter the degree of affection, the spectrum extends across a fan’s central desire to be recognized by a celebrity they admire.

A star’s ability to make multiples of themselves for their audiences is crucial to their celebrity status, as well. Celebrities cement themselves in the minds of their public by exposing their audiences to their appearance repeatedly and through a variety of media: drawings, photographs, films, etc. It makes sense that with the rise of photography and global communication in the late nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt capitalized on her reproduced images to boost her stardom. By “multiplying” themselves, Bernhardt and other celebrities became more recognizable in more guises to more people. This also allows fans to imitate celebrities and their images, mainly through buying products a celebrity advertises or through imitating their fashion. Though ridicule of Bernhardt’s fans was typically restricted to white female imitators, Marcus also takes time to show how the media made this kind of imitation a racial privilege, as demonstrated by cartoons and minstrel performance. In these depictions, Marcus says, “The attempt to imitate celebrities may be universal, but only those at the top of the racial hierarchy are allowed to be seen as successfully copying the stars.”

Edwin Booth as Hamlet c1870 (via Library of Congress)

Celebrities and fans are prone to criticism, not just from the media, but from one another as well, and fans critiquing the celebrities they admire is also crucial to creating the intimacy of fandom. Marcus uses the example of fans sending letters to Edwin Booth, the most famous Shakespearean actor of his age, that criticized elements of his acting. Some theatre scrapbooks would also include ranking plays the fan had seen. Marcus also shows that late nineteenth-century audiences would see the same play over and over with different actors and compare their performances in their scrapbooks. Bernhardt played into this tendency. When she played Hamlet, she provocatively claimed that she would outdo the previous male performers of the role. Marcus goes on to discuss the globalizing effect of publics’ ranking of actors across geographic locales. People from all around the world were witnessing the same celebrities and assessing them, putting these disparate communities into a kind of conversation. Marcus shows that fans have a critical role in a celebrity’s rise and in creating a community through that shared experience: a fandom.

For Marcus, celebrity is not created solely by the media. Instead the media, publics, and celebrities themselves all work together to create stardom. However, Marcus is not arguing simply for the agency of fans or celebrities in this process. Rather, she is highlighting the interplay between all three groups in a star-making process that is not as simple—and definitely not as predictable—as one may expect. The most pertinent example here would be the rise of Trump. If we consider Trump’s voter base more like a fandom, we can see how he maintained his popularity despite being panned by the media. Trump mastered his multiples much like Bernhardt and crafted an image of himself that was unmistakably him. His words and actions created an affective response for a voting base disillusioned by the media in general. By Marcus’s calculation, Trump was the perfect candidate for stardom; only this time, his stardom put him in office.

Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet c 1885-1900 (via Library of Congress)

This book makes a compelling case for seeing Sarah Bernhardt as a model for the history of celebrity and fandom. Marcus’ tripartite theory of celebrity should prove useful for all readers wanting to understand stardom in the past and today, whether celebrities in entertainment, politics, or the often distressingly blurred lines between the two. Readers might wonder how online social media exacerbates the effects of this process. Does it amplify fans, the media, celebrities, or all of them at once? Or does it dampen one of the three? Altogether, Marcus makes a compelling argument that is well-researched, highly readable, and eminently useful.

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History Between Memory and Reconstruction
Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade, By Linda B. Hall (2013)
Popular Culture in the Classroom

Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran by Negar Mottahedeh (2019)

by Denise Gomez

On March 7, 1979, just one day before International Women’s Day, the highly influential American feminist scholar, Kate Millet, appeared in Tehran, in the Iranian Revolution’s afterglow. Invited alongside other prominent feminist scholars and activists to speak at a demonstration organized by Iranian woman activists, Millet was accompanied by her partner and $1,200 worth of recording equipment, but without any working knowledge of Persian. Millett spent her days wandering around with tape recorder in hand, documenting her observations and capturing the voices of protesting Iranian women. After returning to the United States, Millet used her memories and the tapes’ contents to write her 1981 book, Going to Iran. As a result of Millet’s excursion and the subsequent publication of her book, the United States’ media wrongly embraced her as an authoritative figure regarding the Iranian revolution despite her understandable shortcomings as an ally and friend of Iranian women. Mottahedheh’s study of Millet’s visit in Whisper Tapes provides its readers with profound insight into Millet’s travels as an activist, as well as into the liberationist messages of the Iranian revolution.

Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (1982)

Whisper Tapes challenges established ideas about the relationship between Iranian women and their Revolution. Carefully separating the rise of the Islamic Republic and the popular revolutionary movement, Negar Mottahedeh works against the major assumptions of western scholarship, where the arrival of the Iranian Revolution and the arrival of the Islamic Republic happen simultaneously and are seen to be one and the same thing. In this western version, the Iranian Revolution is an inherently Islamic revolution, which insisted on an instant curtailment of women’s rights. Mottahedeh works against this assumption by demonstrating how Iranian women saw their demonstrations and protests as a continuation of the Iranian Revolution itself, as well as a continuation of the Revolution’s principles of freedom and resistance to oppression in all forms. Mottahedeh pushes back on portrayals of the revolution as happening overnight, of opposition to Mohammad Reza Phalavi as monolithic, and of an inherently patriarchal protesting populace who betrayed their feminine revolutionary counterparts.

To situate her book and its actors, Mottahedeh places the Iranian Revolution within the context of, and in solidarity with, the Third World, a geo-political concept that dominated the western intellectual thinking at the time of the revolution. Under this principle, revolutionary cultures and thought flourished, and various marginalized groups positioned themselves to defend each other against all forms of exploitation. Western intellectuals’ left-leaning politics naturally aligned them against Iran’s Shah, and similarly influenced the politics of the western feminist circles. Millet and her French contemporaries, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig, who initially declared their solidarity with the Iranian Revolution, were unsettled by the ensuing proclamations of compulsory veiling. As Iranian women took to the streets in protest against these proclamations, their calls to action were widely ignored by the men who stood by their side during the Anti-Shah demonstrations. As equal participants of the 1979 revolution, women were in a sense betrayed by their fellow revolutionaries. Millet and the French identified with the Iranian women in protest, and understood their revolts against Khomeini’s proclamations as a continuation of a larger struggle against the patriarchy.

Kate Millett, 1977 (via Schlesinger Library)

Mottahedeh revitalizes this story by accessing what Millet could not due to her socially constructed state of “unknowledge” about Iran and its culture. As a result of her lack of knowledge, Millet cannot and does not fully see the movement materializing before her very eyes — but this does not make her experience a counterfeit one. Mottahedeh does not accuse Millet of playing the role of the arrogant westerner here, instead she is treated as a limited observer whose observations were skewed and incomplete. In so many ways, Mottahedeh, a researcher who focuses on various aspects of Iranian resistance and protest, has the expertise and knowledge for understanding the women’s protests that Kate Millet lacked. Mottahedeh’s Whisper Tapes is as much an expansion of her own research as it is an expansion of Millet’s Going to Iran. Mottahedeh’s work does not reject the material of the whisper tapes, it instead contextualizes and broadens Millet’s experience, observations, and recordings. To complete her project, Mottahedeh pulls from many theoretical works, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mladen Dolar but she extracts the majority of her citations from the tapes themselves or Millet’s book about her experiences on the ground. Through this very narrow focus, Mottahedeh is able to remain within the context of the tapes’ spaces and interact with the content of Miller’s tapes more deeply.

When listening to Millet’s recordings Mottahedeh noticed a second, background narrative in the political chanting and hushed conversations in Persian, behind the obvious, intended narrative of Millet’s tapes. Describing these surrounding acoustics as an unconscious layer to Millet’s recordings –whisper tapes — Mottahedeh uses these background voices to frame and inform her analysis of Millet’s visit to Iran. These voices both contradict and clarify Millet’s observations and revive the protestors’ aspirations in a way that complicates mainstream ideas of feminist consciousness in post-revolutionary Iran. Instead of tracing Iranian feminist consciousness to individual (anti-)religious sentiments or as reactions to western influence, Mottahedeh suggests the women’s protests emerged as a continuation of the 1979 revolution that called for planetary freedom and justice.

Women and the Iranian Revolution (via BBC)

Whisper Tapes is organized according to the Farsi alphabet, with each “chapter” named after a theme or symbol of the revolution, such as Chapter V, “Servat,” (Wealth) or Chapter XIII “Zan,” (Woman). Although disorienting and disjointed at times, Mottahedeh’s chapters are informed by the tapes’ evidence, which was captured haphazardly and at the mercy of 1979’s technological limitations. However, for Mottahedeh the fragmentary nature of the tapes’ narrative evokes the feeling experienced by listening to the recordings’ “whispered background.” Furthermore, Mottahedeh inaugurates this account with a section entitled “A Revolutionary Timeline,” where she lays out the revolution’s key dates for a reader’s reference. The introduction and conclusion, titled “Overture” and “Coda,” flank her alphabetically-organized segments, and provide readers with the theoretical, historical, and personal background necessary for digesting the bulk of her content.

Few books resemble Whisper Tapes in its organization, and few studies of the Iranian Revolution so thoroughly and fairly challenge misconceptions born from well-intentioned actions of politically progressive circles. Mottahedeh’s method of listening to the accidental voices of Millet’s background is inventive and produces refreshing scholarship that can be enjoyed, understood, and appreciated by academics and non-specialists together. By revisiting Kate Millet, Mottahedeh accomplishes the elevation and centering of oft-ignored voices.

You might also like:
The Strength of Women in the Iranian Revolution
The Public Archive: Qahvehkhaneh, Reading Iranian Newspapers
A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)
Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes

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Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920-1924 (1971)
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