gre287, Author at Not Even Past

This is Democracy – Black Resistance to Slavery in Early America and its Legacies

Guest: Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and Chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Fellow of the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and the George W. Littlefield Professorship in American History, and the former Associate Dean of The Graduate School. Professor Berry is a scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery as well as Black women’s history in the United States. Professor Berry’s books include: Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia; The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation; and A Black Women’s History of the United States, with co-author Kali Nicole Gross.

Jeremi and Zachary turn to expert Dr. Daina Ramey Berry to discuss the history and legacy of slave revolts and maroon societies in the United States, and lack of education on these subjects today.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “One You Have Not Heard”.

About This is Democracy

The future of democracy is uncertain, but we are committed to its urgent renewal today. This podcast will draw on historical knowledge to inspire a contemporary democratic renaissance. The past offers hope for the present and the future, if only we can escape the negativity of our current moment — and each show will offer a serious way to do that! This podcast will bring together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. Our goal is to advance democratic change, one show at a time. Dr. Jeremi Suri, a renowned scholar of democracy, will host the podcast and moderate discussions.

IHS Panel: The Environmental Protection Agency at the Half Century Mark, 1970-2020

Institute for Historical Studies, Monday March 29, 2021

On the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, panelists will present on the agency’s tenure from a number of perspectives including a personal reflection on what it was like to work at the EPA, how the agency’s policy initiatives have changed, and how the legal framework around the agency has shifted over time.

Featured Speakers:

Sheila Olmstead
Professor of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin
https://lbj.utexas.edu/olmstead-sheila

Marianne Sullivan
Professor of Public Health, and Director, Global Public Health Honors Track
William Paterson University of New Jersey
https://wpconnect.wpunj.edu/directories/faculty/default.cfm?user=sullivanm19

Jeremi Suri
Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs, and Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/js33338

Samuel Truett
Associate Professor of History
Director, Center for the Southwest
University of New Mexico
https://history.unm.edu/people/faculty/profile/samuel-truett.html

This talk is part of the Institute’s theme in 2020-2021 on “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented.”

Sponsored by: Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History, and Planet Texas 2050

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.

Alberto Torres Fuster, Artist, 1872-1922

From the editors: We are delighted to republish this moving profile of Alberto Torres Fuster (1872-1922) by Emilio Zamora. Dr Zamora was recently awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award from the Organization of American Historians. See our profile of Dr Zamora’s remarkable career here.

We remember the departed for many reasons, but we mostly wish to revisit the memory of persons who left deep impressions among us. We may also want to commemorate the achievements and values of public figures that have given much to our communities. The Museums and Cultural Programs Division (MCP) of the Austin Parks and Recreation Department reminded us recently that we also invoke such memories as researchers seeking to better understand and appreciate the past.

I was fortunate that Ms. Laura Esparza, manager of the MCP, asked me to participate in such a memorialization on October 9 and 10, 2020 entitled, “All Together Here: A Community Symposium for Discovery and Remembrance.” The online forum convened 40 scholars, community activists and city staff to bring attention to recent archeological work at Oakwood Cemetery and to pay our respects to the many who have come before us. I participated in Panel 7, “Many Histories, One Burial Ground,” moderated by Gregg Farrar, with my colleagues Dr. Daina Berry from the University of Texas and Dr. Theodore Francis II of Huston-Tillotson University as fellow presenters.

Since I wanted to bring attention to the Mexican community, I searched the Spanish-language newspapers for burials at Oakwood during the turn of the century. I had no special purpose in mind other than to find a significant case that would help me contemplate funerary practices among Mexicans in Austin at the time. I found one in the San Antonio daily of La Prensa on the passing of a 50-year-old Mexican National named Alberto Torres Fuster (1872-1922). He was not from Austin but died in an Austin hospital while on his way from New York to Mexico.

Fuster was born in Tlacotalpán, Veracruz. By the age of sixteen, he had completed studies in painting at Mexico City’s prestigious Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and obtained a government stipend to study art in France and Italy. Fuster distinguished himself as an artist of the modernist school and secured special recognition at the 1900 Paris Exposition. While in Italy, he also served as a Mexican consulate official for fourteen years. Fuster returned to teach and paint in Mexico City during the early 1900s. He received government support to study and paint in New York beginning around 1919.

Portrait of Alberto Fuster — Alberto Fuster, pintor, retrato, circa 1914. Source: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia de México

Despite his major achievements, Fuster was not well. Although there are no clear records on the cause of his illness, an official explanation was that he had lost trust in the goodness of humanity and became distraught over his haunting anxieties. Sadly, while on his way to Mexico, Fuster attempted suicide at the Austin train station. Someone rushed him to a local hospital and, although the staff kept a constant watch over him, Fuster hanged himself on January 31, 1922. Within days, Mexican government officials made funeral arrangements through the General Consulate Office from San Antonio. At least 250 Austinites, including Mexican government officials, socially prominent Mexicans representing organizations from throughout Texas, and local residents who wished to pay their respects laid Fuster to rest at the Oakwood Cemetery Annex.

We can only imagine what members of the largely working-class Mexican community must have thought as they contemplated why such an accomplished and respected person would decide to end his life. Then as now, understanding such a personal act of finality may be impossible. Fuster’s passing, however, may have especially bedeviled the poorer Mexican observers. They lived with pains associated with the denials and indignities of racial segregation and other forms of discrimination. Their trauma must have seemed just as unbearable, but many of them persevered somehow.

This is not to minimize mental illness, but rather to ask instead why the largely poor Mexicans, as well as African Americans, did not succumb in greater numbers to self-destructive impulses. Their sense of responsibility to family and community may have allowed their demons to pass through them; much like soldiers in combat who have transcended the horror of war by imagining their return to the love and safety of home. It is sad to consider that no such psychological relief helped Fuster, evidenced in the deep sense of anguish and suffering that led to his death in a faraway place from his home in Mexico.

News of Alberto Fuster’s death on the front page of La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper from San Antonio. Source: Texas Digital Newspaper Program

To continue with our use of the sociological imagination that C. Wright Mills suggested long ago, the outpouring of condolences offer other cultural scripts, or views, of the Mexican community of Austin in the early 1900s.

An unnamed Baptist Church held religious services prior to the burial, indicating that Mexicans also embraced the promise of salvation through faith as Protestants in a small community of mostly Catholics. The participation of Mexican government officials and organizations of mostly Mexicans Nationals as well as the overwhelming use of Spanish underscored cultural diversity and an attachment to Mexico and things Mexican. This does not mean that the Austin Mexican community was mostly Mexico-born. Most, if not all Mexican communities in Texas were U.S.-born at this time. Personal choice and the isolation that came with segregation, on the other hand, explains their pan-Mexican identity.

After the burial, the congregation gathered at the hall of a benevolent organization, La Sociedad Union y Beneficencia Mexicana, located at 707 Colorado Street, in an area west of the Freeway that they no longer inhabit because the city council ordered their segregation (along with African Americans) to the east side of the city in 1928.

Representatives of La Cruz Azul Mexicana, a statewide organization akin to the Red Cross, and the Comisión Honorífica Mexicana, another statewide organization affiliated with the Mexican consulate offices, also participated in the ceremonies. Lauro Izaguirre, the head of the Mexican consulate in San Antonio, gave the eulogy at the cemetery and led a vigil at the hall. He spoke about Fuster’s “imposing” personality and his “exquisite” art exhibited in Europe, Mexico, and the United States.

Apoteosis de la paz by Alberto Fuster, 1903; oil on canvas — Apoteosis de la paz by Alberto Fuster, 1903

María Hernández, a major Mexican leader representing La Cruz Azul and the Comisiónes Honoríficas from Texas, introduced Izaguirre. She was followed by officers and members of other organizations, including Pedro E. Gonzalez, the president of the of the Sociedad, and Aureliano García, J. G. Perales, T. G. Ortiz, Sritas Adela y Olivia Garcia Refugio de la Cruz and Sras Juana de Galván and Bartola García. Years later, the Mexican community from Austin gave Fuster another send-off when the Mexican government exhumed his remains and reburied them at El Panteón Tepeyac in Mexico City.

Fuster’s return fulfilled the longing for home expressed in México Lindo y Querido, the sentimental song that became the unofficial anthem of Mexico coincidentally composed by Jesús Monge Ramirez in 1921.

México Lindo y Querido
Si muero lejos de ti
Que digan que estoy dormido
Y que me traigan aquí

Que digan que estoy dormido
Y que me traigan aquí
México Lindo y Querido
Si muero lejos de ti

Mexico, beloved and beautiful
if I die far from you
tell them I am asleep
and bring me back to you.

Tell them I am asleep
and bring me back to you.
Mexico, beloved and beautiful
if I die far from thee.

Fuster is now a memory, recovered from a largely dismissed and forgotten Mexican past. His passing also provides us a small window through which we may remember a life whose status and accomplishments accentuate the reduced standing of a growing working-class community of approximately 4,000 Mexicans that similarly lived and died in the 1920s. Despite these differences, the great equalizer that death is, brought him to rest at Oakwood, reminding us all of life’s vicissitudes.

Alberto Fuster, QPD.

This profile was first published here.

IHS Roundtable: Teaching Climate Change: Perspectives from History and the Humanities

Institute for Historical Studies, Thursday March 11, 2021

Featured Speakers:

“Climate Change Has No Discipline”
DR. STEPHANIE LEMENAGER
Barbara and Carlisle Moore Endowed Professor
Department of English, and Department of Environmental Studies
University of Oregon
https://www.stephanielemenager.com/
https://english.uoregon.edu/profile/slemen

Professor LeMenager will discuss the process or assembling her co-edited book, Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, with Drs. Stephen Siperstein and Shane Hall. In particular, the talk will focus on the editors’ decision not to make the book about the Environmental Humanities, but rather to conceive of ways to integrate the science and experiences of climate crisis into diverse Humanities fields and classrooms.

“Cambio Climático: Covering Climate Change as a Topic in a Latin American Studies Program”
DR. CARLOS E. RAMOS SCHARRÓN
Associate Professor, Department of Geography and the Environment
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/geography/faculty/cer577

Through this brief presentation Professor Ramos-Scharrón will provide examples of some of the interdisciplinary content covered in two of his Latin American Studies courses: Water Resources Issues and Vulnerability to Natural Hazards. Although climate change is not the central theme of these courses, inserting climate change as vital in understanding environmental challenges affecting Latin American and Caribbean countries becomes even more evident and pressing every time he finds himself refreshing course materials. Examples to be discussed will include the diversity of physical and social responses associated to deglaciation in the Andes, climate change as a convenient excuse of government officials to avoid responsibility when climate strikes in the form of severe rainstorms and drought in Colombia, and climate change as an agent of social disturbance through forced migration using Hurricane Mitch, Eta and Iota in Honduras and Hurricane María in Puerto Rico.

“Why Teaching Climate History is a Spiritual and Moral Imperative”
DR. EMILY WAKILD
Professor of History, and Director of Environmental Studies
Boise State University
https://emilywakild.weebly.com/
https://www.boisestate.edu/history/faculty-staff/emily-wakild/

This presentation reviews some of the reasons why teachers of history choose not to teach about climate change. Professor Wakild suggests ways climate change can be an integral part of a history course and offer examples of energy, cultural identities, and wildland fire as places to weave climate into traditional history classes. Teaching climate change does not have to be only about scientific data or geophysical facts; the moral, emotional, and cultural impacts of climate change have a natural fit in history classrooms, environmental and otherwise.

Discussants:

Erika M. Bsumek
Associate Professor, Department of History
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/bsumeke
Megan Raby
Associate Professor, Department of History
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/mr46636

If you use any resources (online or printed) for teaching climate change and history in the humanities, please take a moment to let us know of any recommendations at this link. This talk is part of the Institute’s theme in 2020-2021 on “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented.”
—
Sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies in the History Department; Planet Texas 2050; Environmental Humanities UT (courtesy of the English Dept.); Humanities Institute through the Sterling Clark Holloway Centennial Lectureship; and Jackson School of Geosciences.

The Death of Yukio Mishima, 50 Years On

By Kirsten Cather

This article first appeared in The Conversation. The original can be accessed here.

Japanese writer Yukio Mishima has long been a favorite of the international press. In a 1966 edition of Life magazine, he was called “Japan’s Dynamo of Letters” and “the Japanese Hemingway.” Appearing on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in August 1970, he was dubbed “Japan’s Renaissance Man.”

The prolific writer was also an occasional film actor and director, singer, bodybuilder and avid martial arts practitioner, and The New York Times cover depicted him dressed in a white kendo jacket and hakama, wielding a katana sword.

Mishima in Life Magazine (September 1966)

Less than four months later, he was dead.

He had committed ritual seppuku, what’s more familiarly known as hara-kiri in the West: self-disembowelment by a short sword followed by decapitation with a long sword at the hands of a trusted acquaintance.

A half-century later, Yukio Mishima’s dramatic final act continues to puzzle and haunt. No less puzzling or haunting is a newly published photo collection, which has appeared in English as “Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man” and in Japanese as “Otoko No Shi.”

Made by Kishin Shinoyama, one of Japan’s leading photographers since the 1960s, and choreographed by Mishima in the months leading up to his death, the photos depict the now long-dead Mishima dying over and over again.

The cover of ‘The Death of a Man’ features the photograph ‘Death Mask.’ © ‘Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man.’ Texts by Yukio Mishima and Tadanori Yokoo, Rizzoli New York, 2020. Photography © Kishin Shinoyama.

I’m currently at work on a book titled “Scripting Suicide in Modern Japan” that explores dozens of Japanese writers who, like Mishima, scripted their suicides into their work – from a 16-year-old university prep student who etched a final philosophical poem, “Thoughts at the Precipice,” into a tree at the head of a waterfall before leaping to his death in 1903, to the cult manga artist Yamada Hanako, who eerily prefigured her own leap from the roof of a Tokyo high-rise apartment in 1992 in a comic panel.

Their acts raise the question of how people can fashion and curate their own self-image – in life and in death. They’re a reminder that the traces of the dead linger on unexpectedly, sometimes even by the design of those who have left us behind.

Yet none has confounded more than Mishima.

Right-wing renaissance man

Mishima came early to fame as a literary writer, publishing his first stories as a precocious teenager in 1941 and catapulting to fame with the 1949 semi-autobiographical novel “Confessions of a Mask.” Considered the main contender to become the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was beaten out in 1968 by his mentor, Yasunari Kawabata. Never content to confine himself to any single box, Mishima also wrote poetry, modern Noh theater and Kabuki plays, sci-fi, pulp noir and volumes of cultural criticism.

Nor was he content to confine himself to the literary field. Over the course of the 1960s, he became an increasingly vocal right-wing advocate for restoring political power to the emperor and to the Japanese military. After the country’s defeat in World War II, both institutions, he lamented, had been rendered impotent by a U.S.-imposed postwar constitution that reduced the emperor to a symbolic figurehead and renounced Japan’s right to wage war.

On Nov. 25, 1970, after months of meticulous planning, Mishima and four members of his self-styled militia, the Shield Society, attempted a coup by taking a hostage at Japan’s military headquarters. Mishima delivered a rousing speech to the young cadets but was unable to gain their respect or support. Seemingly anticipating the plot’s ultimate failure, he then committed seppuku. His alleged male lover, Shield Society member Masakatsu Morita, followed suit.

Yukio Mishima delivers a speech on the balcony of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) building in Tokyo, before committing Harakiri suicide with a short sword. Source: The National Archives of the Netherlands. (CC license)

Ever fearful of aging and living on past his prime, he had taken his life at age 45, when he was at his peak physically and creatively. Afterward, Mishima again appeared in Life magazine.

This time, it was a photo of his severed head propped up beside Morita’s.

Trying to explain the inexplicable

Mishima’s decision to commit suicide in this way has fueled speculation over his motives. Like a Rorschach test, the incident offers limitless interpretations that can suit almost any agenda. On and on goes the search for a reason that might explain this inexplicable act.

Seppuku had long been an exclusive right of the samurai warrior caste, but both the samurai and their exclusive mode of dying were abolished as part of a push by Japan’s leaders to modernize the country in the late 19th century.

Some interpreted his suicide in cultural and political terms. By committing to an anachronistic method of dying long outlawed by the authorities, he sought to revive the nation’s samurai spirit. It was a call to throw off the shackles of U.S. imperialism and return to a traditional Japan.

*‘The Death of a Duelist.’ © ‘Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man.’ Texts by Yukio Mishima and Tadanori Yokoo, Rizzoli New York, 2020. Photography © Kishin Shinoyama.*

Others have claimed that his dying in this excruciatingly painful manner – alongside his young male lover – marked the climax of an erotic fixation on death. Some view this in highbrow, philosophical terms, quoting Mishima’s reviews and essays on French philosopher Georges Bataille on the union of Eros and death. Alternatively, lurid tell-all memoirs by his former male lovers reveal his erotic investment in enacting suicide in highly choreographed role play.

Death that deadens in its repetition

What gets buried in these many theories is the profusion of art that Mishima produced as the date of his suicide approached, knowing full well that these works would be consumed in its aftermath.

In “The Savage God,” Al Alvarez’s canonical work about the relationship between suicide and the arts in Western society, he points out how the logic of suicide is, to outsiders, inaccessible, a “closed world.” And in his classic work “On Suicide,” essayist Jean Améry, who survived Auschwitz and one suicide attempt but not his second, suggests it is equally incomprehensible to the person taking his own life, likening it to the feeling of being “surrounded by a thoroughly impenetrable darkness.”

However, with Mishima, this world is far from closed. Instead, it is perhaps all too available, blasted out into the world in multimedia and showing no signs of slowing down even 50 years later.

“The Death of a Man,” published by Rizzoli Press in an English version in September of last year, contains a collection of photos taken by Shinoyama in the weeks before the suicide.

In these images, Mishima appears dead over and over again. In one, he’s dressed as a sailor who’s been whipped to death on board a ship; in another, he’s a garage mechanic in an unbuttoned jumpsuit stabbed by a screwdriver in the abdomen. He’s a duelist in all white pierced by his opponent’s sword; a gymnast shot in the chest hanging suspended from gymnastic rings; a loincloth-clad fishmonger committing seppuku on the shop floor with fish guts scattered about; and a soldier in helmet and loincloth entwined in barbed wire.

Deadening in its repetition of death, the collection exhausts. With its generic and repetitive titles – “The Death of a Sailor,” “The Death of a Mechanic,” “The Death of Gymnast,” “Drowned Man,” “Hanged Man” and so forth – the “dead” body of Mishima is the only element that unites the variety of occupations and methods of dying. It embodies all too literally what the French literary critic Roland Barthes observed as “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”

A careful orchestration

This collection of photos didn’t constitute Mishima’s first death in art.

As lead actor in the self-directed 1966 short film adaptation of his story “Yūkoku,” he performs a grueling seppuku. In Yasuzō Masumura’s 1960 feature film “Afraid to Die,” he plays a punk yakuza gangster who’s shot in the back, and he performs another seppuku as a samurai in Hideo Gosha’s 1969 film “Hitokiri.” In a 1967 photo shoot with bodybuilder-turned-photographer Tamotsu Yatō, he’s photographed dead in a snowy landscape, wearing nothing but a loincloth and clasping a katana.

A still from the Mishima short film, *The Rite of Love and Death*

But in this final collection, from conception to execution, Mishima was in total control. Unlike his earlier work as a photography model where he had given himself over to, as he put it, the “spell of the camera lens,” here he orchestrated everything. The vast majority of the images were shot on his command from early September through Nov. 17, 1970. He finalized the selections in a meeting on Nov. 20, 1970, just five days before his death.

Shinoyama would later complain that the project “wasn’t the slightest bit interesting” to him, and he bristled at Mishima’s micromanagement “down to the exact shade of red” for the fake blood.

The original plan was for this collection to be released in the immediate aftermath of Mishima’s suicide. Or at least this was Mishima’s plan. Instead, Shinoyama refused to publish the collection for decades and, in September 2019, angrily complained about being unknowingly made complicit with Mishima’s plan.

“Only Mishima knew. Even though it was a documentary headed for death, as the photographer, I was just an idiot.”

Our longing for preservation

Clearly, Mishima was obsessed with exploring death in art, in politics and in the bedroom. But his impulse – though extreme – represents something universal.

When facing death, whether it is our own or another’s, we confront the question of how – or if – the dead will be remembered. In our own case, we cannot help but imagine and perhaps even try to control the ways we will live on in the memories, objects and lives of our loved ones.

There is a longing for preservation, even immortality.

In Mishima’s case, this project of self-preservation was one he engaged with preemptively – before the fact. He recognized that although art may endure and offer one avenue for preservation, it was not without its own complications. In an October 1967 essay provocatively titled “How to live eternally?” Mishima mused at the difficulties faced by artists who inscribe themselves into their art – whether as an author of autobiographical fiction or as an actor in a film or play – in the interest of achieving what he called “a tricky, nasty immortality.”

Preservation is at the heart of this photography enterprise too. Death is not just represented but also suspended here, often quite literally, as in shots of Mishima propped in midair pierced by a dueling opponent’s sword or dangling from gymnast rings or ropes.

In a country branded as “the suicide nation” for its high contemporary suicide rates and historical associations with the act, Mishima remains, 50 years on, the most infamous example.

It is high time to put Mishima to rest. And this exhausting collection of images may just offer a means to do so.

The photo collection ends with a chapter called “The Death of a Samurai,” with Mishima in ritual whites and topknot committing seppuku in a series of six shots that culminate in his lightly blood-spattered figure prostrate in a contextless white vacuum.

But it is an earlier photo in the volume, the one that graces the cover, that offers some respite. It is simply a close-up shot of his face, unmarred and unbloodied. The background is shadowed while Mishima’s heavily powdered face turns upward toward the light. The title – “Death Mask” – offers the only context.

Relief in death and death in relief, at last.

IHS Panel: Rodney King and the LA Riots: 30 Years Later

Institute for Historical Studies, Tuesday March 30, 2021

Thirty years ago, in March 1991, Rodney King, a Black man, was stopped after a police chase, ordered out of his car, and beaten savagely by Los Angeles police officers. An amateur videographer filmed the beating and sent the footage to a local news station. As the film was broadcast across the U.S., the incident came to symbolize the wider issue of disproportionate police brutality against minorities. In the wake of recent events, including the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Institute for Historical Studies has organized this panel to discuss an issue that is no less pressing today than it was in 1991. To address the wider scope of the phenomenon, it will also include an examination of the long history of police violence targeting multiple racial and ethnic minorities in Texas.

Featured Panelists:

“The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Evolution of Black Power”
DR. PENIEL E. JOSEPH
Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, Professor of History, and Founding Director, Center for the Study of Race and Democracy
The University of Texas at Austin
https://csrd.lbj.utexas.edu
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/pej335
https://lbj.utexas.edu/directory/faculty/peniel-joseph

“Under Cloak of Legal Authority: Police Violence and Racial Terror in Texas”
DR. MONICA MUÑOZ MARTINEZ
Associate Professor, Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/mmm497
https://monicamunozmartinez.com/

“From Cleveland to Compton: The Moore Family and the Second Great Migration”
DR. LEONARD N. MOORE
Executive Director, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and George W. Littlefield Professorship in American History
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/lm25645

DR. MIRIAM BODIAN, Moderator
Professor, Department of History, and Director, Institute for Historical Studies
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/mb35382

IHS Climate in Context Panel: Oil, Water, and Climate: Environmental Histories of Texas

April 12, 2021 at 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM

Featured Panelists:

“Arroyo Flood Control in the Chihuahuan Desert”

C. J. Alvarez
Assistant Professor, Department of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Department of History and Center for Mexican American Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract: Deserts are, by definition, dry places. They are implicated in global climate change just as much as coastal regions, but instead of sea level rise and tropical storms, deserts are afflicted by widespread droughts well beyond the threshold of their natural aridness. In this talk, however, I will introduce you to an extremely local way of understanding water in the Chihuahuan desert, the largest desert in North America. Focusing on arroyo flood control projects, I aim to illuminate an important feature of desert people’s lives that is almost always overlooked or taken for granted. This localized focus argues for a broader approach to the environmental history of deserts that focuses on desert dwellers instead of outsiders’ reactions or impressions of drylands.

“Texas Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future”

Jay L. Banner
F. M. Bullard Professor of Geological Sciences, the Jackson School of Geosciences, and
Director, Environmental Science Institute.
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract: Texas’ climatological and geopolitical location has the potential to put extreme stress on its water and other resources. Paleoclimate records indicate that the region experienced periods of significant drought over the last thousand years. These droughts were longer than the 1950s ‘drought of record’ that is commonly used in planning and occurred independently of human-induced climate change. Model simulations for the 21st century project that Texas will experience droughts that are unprecedented in terms of length and intensity. A projected doubling of the state’s population by mid-century will drive increased demand for water, which will create synergistic challenges to the state’s resilience.

“Deep Roots Make Strong Trees: Climate Adaptation Rooted in Community History”

Alison M. Meadow
Associate Research Professor, Arizona Institutes for Resilience
University of Arizona

Abstract: Communities throughout the Southwest are facing an uncertain future as climate change places our health, infrastructure, and natural environments at risk. This talk will focus on using community-based research approaches in order to ground climate change adaptation planning in the history and culture of communities so that long-term plans build on community strengths and priorities, even as we recognize the need for change to meet the challenge of our new climate reality.

“The Petropolis: Where Oil and Water Meet”

Christopher Sellers
Professor of History, Stony Brook University, and
Research Fellow, Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract: If oil and water have a sturdy reputation for not mixing, Texas has long been a place where they unavoidably meet, especially in cities that arose on the back of the state’s oil industry, Petropolises. Taking the Houston metro area as an example, my talk will sketch out three eras from the late nineteenth century to the present in its historical relationship between water and oil. In the first two, while it also weathered occasional storms and floods, this like other cities associated with the petroleum and petrochemical industries increasingly took toxic pollution as its main waterborne challenge. More recently, the prevailing threat has come from hurricanes and floods, intensifying thanks to the global effects of its favored industry and placing the entire region in a new kind of jeopardy.

Zoom Webinar registration link forthcoming. Please email cmeador@austin.utexas.edu to receive a notification when registration goes live.

This talk is part of the Institute’s theme in 2020-2021 on “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented.”

Sponsored by: Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History, and Planet Texas 2050

The Trial of the Juntas: Reckoning with State Violence in Argentina

From the editors: In 2021, Not Even Past launched a new collaboration with LLILAS Benson. Journey into the Archive: History from the Benson Latin American Collection celebrates the Benson’s centennial and highlights the center’s world-class holdings.

In April 1985, the historic trial of the military juntas that had ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1982 began in Buenos Aires. Nine members of three previous military juntas faced charges ranging from the falsification of public documents to homicide. Over the following eight months, the trial of the juntas captured national attention. Although not televised or aired by radio, the trial was open to the public and received detailed coverage in El Diario del Juicio, a weekly publication that documented the proceedings and included witness transcripts. The accessibility and publication of the facts surrounding the prosecution helped convert the trial into a national event, which served not only to punish the guilty but also to help create a shared understanding of the past.

At the Benson Latin American Collection, case transcripts of testimonies given by 828 witnesses at the 1985 trial occupy 10 boxes and more than 7,000 pages. The Actas Mecanografiadas document gross human rights violations and present damning evidence against senior military commanders, including former heads-of-state. Some feared that political or social changes would place the trial transcripts in jeopardy. As a safeguard against destruction and to ensure long-term preservation of these records, Argentine officials made efforts to deliver copies of trial transcripts and recordings to foreign archives.

Witnesses recounted dramatic details of torture and abuse, and their testimony served as Federal Prosecutor Julio Strassera’s most powerful tool during the trial of the juntas. Hundreds of similar accounts helped the prosecution establish a pattern of repressive state-sponsored violence. After leaving power in 1983, the armed forces had maintained that any unjust or innocent deaths were the result of errors or excesses committed by individual officers. Strassera’s case selection sought to disprove this defense by demonstrating that a sustained pattern of abduction, torture, and murder occurred countrywide. Documenting similarities across numerous military commands, Strassera argued that former leaders had established an apparatus of state terror and could not attribute the violence to a few renegade officers.

The military commanders in the courtroom. One general looks at the camera. — The military commanders on trial were Rafael Videla, Emilio Massera, Orlando Agosti, Roberto Viola, Omar Graffigna, Armando Lambruschini, Leopoldo Galtieri, Basilio Lami Dozo and Jorge Anaya. Source: Agencia EFE

Witness testimony helped establish the facts of the 709 cases and detailed a systematic pattern of repressive practices, but the prosecution needed to prove a legal basis for punishment of the ex-leaders. Members of the three juntas did not directly engage in or supervise the described atrocities. However, they had issued the instructions calling for the annihilation of subversion. In the context of state-sanctioned violence, Strassera reasoned that the ex-leaders were indirect authors of the crimes committed because they exercised complete control of the repressive apparatus and over their direct agents or subordinates who engaged in the actual violence.[1]

The prosecution sought to demonstrate that the generals held responsibility for the actions of their subordinates due to the structure and culture of the armed forces. Within the military, the top brass could remove and replace anyone for noncompliance. Thus, the individual was interchangeable, and the crime would likely occur with or without that person’s participation. Furthermore, the armed forces encouraged total confidence in one’s superiors. Retired Navy Officer Adolfo Scilingo, who would gain fame in the 1990s as the first man to break the military’s pact of silence, explained, “In the navy, there’s no such thing as orders that aren’t legal.”[2] Scilingo’s account detailed a military institution that expected blind obedience and discouraged individual assessment of an order’s legitimacy.

The testimony of military officers during the trial helped the prosecution establish the unique context in which human rights violations occurred. First Lieutenant Ernesto Facundo Urien detailed how the hierarchical structure of the armed forces encouraged compliance because those who expressed differing opinions risked their career.[3] During his testimony, Urien recalled various incidents that led him to doubt the military’s methods in the so-called “war on subversion.” Superiors had ordered Urien to dress as a civilian, with his military arms, and patrol public spaces. He also provided security during transfers of personnel and prisoners to La Perla military installation, which served as a clandestine detention center during the dictatorship. At La Perla, Urien witnessed a detainee, “hooded, hands and feet bound.”[4] Urien questioned these tactics, but superiors defended their actions within the context of a civil war. Ultimately, Urien was forced into retirement in 1980 for “not sharing the philosophies that the institution upheld.”[5]

Ernesto Facundo Urien on the cover of el diario del juicio just days after his testimony. — *Ernesto Facundo Urien on the cover of el diario del juicio just days after his testimony*.

Fear of repercussions for speaking out extended beyond professional concerns. “The climate that existed was don’t risk frank opinions,” testified Captain Félix Roberto Bussico, “There inside, life had no value . . . regardless of the life involved.”[6] An officer could refuse to comply with orders, but the repressive apparatus bred fear of retaliation and limited subordinates’ decision-making capacity. Bussico’s testimony and those of other military officers demonstrated that a minority of lower-ranking officers did not devise the violent tactics of the preceding years. Instead, orders for torture and disappearance derived from the highest ranks and bred a culture of indiscriminate violence.

As evidence mounted against the military leaders on trial, the defense sought to justify the armed forces’ violent methods in the context of a brutal civil war. The accused believed that the trial punished them for acts of service to the nation. “He who saves the nation does not break any law,” asserted the defense counsel for Lami Dozo, air force general and member of the third junta.[7] The defendants understood their actions within the context of an ideological war, so they believed defeating subversion justified their methods and absolved them of criminal responsibility. Following this reasoning, the defense frequently resorted to attacks on the witness’s or alleged victim’s character. This strategy often backfired. After an aggressive line of questioning, Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, a journalist and member of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, replied with her own question. “Is it lawful,” she asked, “to torture, kill, and make people disappear?”[8] Guiñazú’s retort highlighted the criminality of the defendants’ actions regardless of the victims’ alleged political affiliations or actions.

*The cover of el diario del juicio features Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú and notes that her testimony lasted more than two and a half hours.*

Issuing its final verdict in December 1985, the Federal Court of Appeals rejected the defense’s arguments. The chamber responded that the defendants’ actions were abusive. “There was no intensification of originally adequate means but rather illicit instruments,” explained the judges.[9] They held that “combat should never escape the framework of the law.”[10] The sentencing further clarified that the military juntas had access to legal measures to combat so-called subversives. According to the members of the Federal Court of Appeals, the dictatorship could have declared emergency zones, dictated public warnings, made summary judgements, and even applied death sentences.[11] The former leaders had not employed these methods.

In its entirety, the judgement filled 868 pages. The judges sentenced General Jorge Videla and Admiral Eduardo Massera to life in prison; General Roberto Viola to seventeen years in prison; Admiral Armando Lambrushini to eight years in prison; and Brigadier General Osvaldo Agosti to four and one-half years in prison. The sentencing also stripped them of their military status. Those acquitted were the second junta’s Brigadier General Omar Graffigna, and the three leaders of the third junta, General Leopoldo Galtieri, Admiral Jorge Anaya, and Brigadier General Lami Dozo.[12] Members of the second and third juntas generally received lower sentences because more than eighty percent of the kidnappings occurred during the first two years of the dictatorship.[13]

*“Massera declares himself responsible for everything, guilty of nothing.”*

The verdict generated conflicting reactions from the public. Particularly for those who had suffered personally, the sentencing seemed far too lenient. Emilio Mignone, who became a prominent human rights activist after his daughter disappeared in 1976, maintained that “the sentencing [did] not satisfy the expectations of a democratic society.”[14] Others claimed the trial was nothing more than a political show. However, the trial had respected legal codes and due process. Strict adherence to the law during the trial of the military generals showed the power of democratic processes to condemn illegal acts, even when done by former leaders. This was an important act in a country prone to military intervention and the first step in establishing greater civilian control over the armed forces.

The trial and resulting records document gross violations of human rights. Official estimates place the number of disappeared between 10,000 and 30,000, among them more than 500 babies and children. Witness testimony and evidence helped prove that these disappearances occurred as part of an apparatus of state-sanctioned terror. More importantly, the testimony also demonstrated that the military commanders had orchestrated the violence and deserved punishment. This was clear even to those sectors of Argentine society that had supported the dictatorship. The trial, which occurred within the framework of democratic laws and institutions, publicly and officially condemned the military dictatorship.

Today, the transcripts housed in the Benson Latin American Collection serve as an archive of Argentina’s early efforts to reckon with its legacy of state-sponsored violence. More than thirty years later, such efforts continue in the form of new and ongoing trials for human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship. The trials, and the crimes they describe, are shocking. But, as disturbing as the details are, we are fortunate to have access to such a collection. The Actas Mecanografiadas bear witness to a difficult history and reveal Argentine society’s judgment of its recent past.

Héctor Pedro Vergez, Luciano Menéndez, and Jorge González Navarro during the 2016 "mega trial" for crimes against humanity — Héctor Pedro Vergez, Luciano Menéndez, and Jorge González Navarro during the 2016 “mega trial”, where 43 military officials faced trial for crimes against humanity committed at the clandestine detention center known as La Perla. Source: Espacio Memoria

[1] Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 85.

[2] Horacio Verbitsky, Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior: A Firsthand Account of Atrocity, (New York: The New Press, 2005), 27.

[3] Ernesto Facundo Urien, Box 6, Actas Mecanografiadas, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “No creí que en la Armada pasara eso,” El Diario del Juicio, July 23, 1985.

[7] Nino, Radical Evil on Trial, 86.

[8] Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, Box 4, Folder 53, Actas Mecanografiadas, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

[9] “Introducción al dispositivo,” El diario del Juicio, January 28, 1986.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Secretaria de Derechos Humanos de Argentina. Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, Nunca más: informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2009), 302.

[14] “Habla Emilio Fermin Mignone, Titular del CELS,” El Diario del Juicio, January 14, 1986.

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NEP Faculty Feature – Dr. Ashley Farmer

From the editors: NEP Faculty Features are a new series at Not Even Past designed to celebrate the achievements of faculty and to showcase their wide-ranging work. They are a companion to NEP Author Spotlights which focus on graduate students. In this, the first in the series, we feature the work of Dr Ashley Farmer, who was recently awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. This article highlights Dr Farmer’s groundbreaking scholarship while also showcasing her work on Not Even Past.

Dr. Ashley D. Farmer, is a historian of Black women’s history, intellectual history, and radical politics. She was recently awarded tenure as an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (UNC Press, 2017), is the first comprehensive study of black women’s intellectual production and activism in the Black Power era. She is also the co-editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (NUP Press, 2018), an anthology that examines four central themes within the black intellectual tradition: black internationalism, religion and spirituality, racial politics and struggles for social justice, and black radicalism.

Dr. Farmer’s scholarship has appeared in numerous venues including The Black Scholar and The Journal of African American History. Her research has also been featured in several popular outlets including Vibe, NPR, and The Chronicle Review, and The Washington Post.

Dr. Farmer has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Research on Women and Politics at Iowa State University, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) have also supported her research. She has also been a leader of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and a regular blogger for Black Perspectives.

Dr. Farmer earned her BA from Spelman College, an MA in History and a PhD in African American Studies from Harvard University. She is also the Co-Editor and Curator of the Black Power Series with Ibram X. Kendi, published with NYU Press.

Books

Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era

In this comprehensive history, Dr. Farmer examines black women’s political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations.

Complicating the assumption that race and gender constraints relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Dr. Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This compelling book shows how the new tropes of womanhood that they created–the “Militant Black Domestic,” the “Revolutionary Black Woman,” and the “Third World Woman,” for instance–spurred debate among activists over the centrality of gender to Black Power ideologies, ultimately causing many of the era’s organizations and collectives to adopt a more radical critique of patriarchy.

Making use of a vast and untapped array of black women’s artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, Dr. Farmer reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.

Reviews and Praise for the Book

Farmer challenges the basic assumptions of this period that the main role of women was marginal or custodial within Black Power formations, or that black women simply left Black Power organizations to form their own groups in reaction to intransigent sexism during the era. Instead, Farmer describes black women as engaged in intense ideological struggles to shape the political interventions and priorities of the organizations in which they were involved.
American Historical Review

Remaking Black Power is an indispensable triumph. Painstakingly researched, artfully organized, crisply argued, utterly insightful, Ashley Farmer has remade Black Power scholarship like the black women she chronicles. This book unveils and dissects what has been hidden from the Black Power–era for far too long: the black woman as theorist.
Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author, Stamped from the Beginning

“Farmer offers students of twentieth-century U.S. history a marvelous gift: an intellectual genealogy of radical black women’s black power activism, grounded in their political theorizing and cultural production and spanning the post–World War II years through the 1970s.”
The Journal of American History

New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition

From well-known intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and Nella Larsen to often-obscured thinkers such as Amina Baraka and Bernardo Ruiz Suárez, black theorists across the globe have engaged in sustained efforts to create insurgent and resilient forms of thought. New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition is a collection of twelve essays that explores these and other theorists and their contributions to diverse strains of political, social, and cultural thought.

The book examines four central themes within the black intellectual tradition: black internationalism, religion and spirituality, racial politics and struggles for social justice, and black radicalism. The essays identify the emergence of black thought within multiple communities internationally, analyze how black thinkers shaped and were shaped by the historical moment in which they lived, interrogate the ways in which activists and intellectuals connected their theoretical frameworks across time and space, and assess how these strains of thought bolstered black consciousness and resistance worldwide.

Reviews and Praise for the Book

. . . New Perspectives makes an important contribution to the field of intellectual history. Adding African Americans into the larger narrative, using non-traditional sources, and expanding focus beyond well-known black men pushes readers to expand their ideas about the definition of intellectual history and the place of the black intellectual tradition within it . . . It could be used in either upper-level undergraduate or graduate classes about African American history or intellectual history.
The Journal of African American History

This is a marvelously insightful collection featuring contributions by a diverse array of rising stars in our field. In these pages you will learn not only where Africana Studies is headed, but about Intellectual History more generally.
Gerald Horne, author of The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

Publications on Not Even Past

One has to only look at a few headlines to see that many view black women organizers as important figures in combating today’s most pressing problems. Articles urging mainstream America to “support black women” or “trust black women” such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement are popular. Publications, such as Time, laud black women’s political leadership—particularly when they mount a challenge to the status quo such as Stacey Abrams’ victory in the Georgia Democratic Governor primary. At the core of these sentiments is the recognition that black women have developed and sustained a liberal democratic politics that is conscious of and responsive to the interconnected effects of racism, capitalism, and sexism and that their approach can offer insight into current socio-political issues. The media often frames these and other women’s efforts as a manifestation of the current political moment divorced from the longer tradition of black women agitators and organizers to which they belong. Many of the black women making headlines today for their work in advancing civil rights and social justice ideals draw from these earlier traditions, including from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Read the full article here.

Q: This is a large lecture class but you don’t start each class by lecturing. Instead you write that you cede “the floor for the first five minutes of class to a student who wants to raise an issue about campus, Austin, or the national climate.” Can you tell us more about this?

A: I like to always get to the classroom a little bit before class starts. I set everything up and then we just kind of talk informally as a class. I ask what’s going on campus? Or if they saw a certain topic in the news? To give an example around Halloween time, we talked about costumes. I know students are aware of conversations about racism, sexism, and cultural appropriation around costumes, so I will say something along the lines of: did you see this costume I saw online? Does anybody know what’s happening with costumes on UT’s campus? And usually that will allow for someone to speak up about something that they have been thinking about.

I start that way at the beginning of the semester and I find it by mid semester students come in with something they want to talk about. One day, I arrived a bit late, so I didn’t get to do this. And I had one student stop me and say: “What are we talking about today? Because we always talk about stuff before we get started. So what’s our topic today?” They wanted me to go back and do our informal discussion first before we got started with our lesson plan for the day. It made me laugh, but also showed me that they value these conversations that we have together. I think beginning class this way is important for a couple of reasons. Typically, students bring up things that are happening in the world that are related to class. We learned about something, say, the prison industrial complex in class. Students will then bring up an article they have seen about prisons in Texas. Or, we talk about the historical context of policing and then students will want to talk about the school’s relationship to policing or something like that. So these conversations help students connect what’s happening in the classroom to the real world. Also, in the spirit of consciousness raising, it also shows students that I believe that I’m not the only person in the room that can offer valuable information or perspectives or who has something to teach or raise awareness about. We all can contribute to helping each other understand what’s happening on our campus, in the world, around us. And truth be told, because the students live and work and learn on the campus in a way that faculty members don’t, this is honestly where I get a lot of my news about what is happening on campus. So it’s mutually beneficial

Read the full interview here.

IHS Talk: Environmental Justice in Indian Country and Moving Toward a Transformational Land Ethic

Institute for Historical Studies, Friday February 26, 2021

Drawing on the book’s theorizing of an Indigenized environmental justice, this talk covers some of the central themes examined in Professor Gilio-Whitaker’s recent publication As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock (Beacon Press, 2019). It then leans into the author’s current work from her forthcoming book to understand what a transformational land ethic looks like.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is an independent writer and researcher in Indigenous studies, having earned a bachelor’s degree in Native American Studies and a master’s degree in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and also holds the position of research associate and associate scholar at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. Her work focuses on issues related to Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, and environmental justice. She is the author of As Long As Grass Grows (see above) and co-author (with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) of “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (Beacon Press, 2016). An award-winning journalist, she is a frequent contributor to Indian Country Today Media Network and Native Peoples Magazine. Dr. Gilio-Whitaker is currently a Lecturer in American Indian Studies at California State University, San Marcos. Read more about her work on her website, and follow her research and publications on academia.edu.

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