Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Remembering Dutch Decolonization through Historical Fiction

By Paul Doolan
Zurich International School and the University of Konstanz

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (June 14, 2017).

On May 8, 2017, the jury of the Libris Literature Prize announced in Amsterdam and live on television that they had unanimously chosen Alfred Birney as winner of the best Dutch language novel of 2016, for his novel De Tolk van Java [The Interpreter from Java]. According to the jury, Birney has “cast a new light upon a poisonous period of our history“. The book is a relentlessly violent postmemory novel and a searing indictment of not only Dutch colonial brutality, but also the willingness of a society to forget or unremember the uncomfortable parts of the nation’s past. Birney’s work forms a corrective to many historical myths regarding the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies.

In recent years we have seen Dutch courts finding the Dutch state guilty of massacring hundreds of civilians in Indonesia during the Indonesian War of Liberation (1945-1949). In 2016 Remy Limpach’s historical thesis, that the Dutch political and military leadership at the time had been responsible for the use of structural violence that amounted to war crimes, was well received in both the popular press as well as among academics. Last month’s decision of the jury of the Libris Literature Prize marks another milestone in the Dutch coming to terms with their past by working through the trauma of decolonization.

In an interview broadcast on television in May 2016, Birney admitted that the novel was autobiographical and that “everything really happened.” The book tells the story of Alan Noland (clearly based on Alfred Birney himself) and his relationship with his father, Arto or Arend.

Arto, the interpreter from Java of the book’s title, was the illegitimate son of an Indo(Eurasian) lawyer and his Chinese housekeeper. During the Indonesian Revolution (1945-1949), Arto, like Birney’s own father, had chosen to fight on the side of the Dutch against the Indonesian republican nationalists. Arto had become a translator or interpreter for the Dutch Royal Marines. In an interview on television in 2016 Birney admitted that the title “Interpreter” was a euphemism. In reality his father interrogated prisoners of the Dutch and was given “100% a blank cheque” allowing him to abuse and torture the prisoners.

The attempt to understand the violence of his own father and the monsters that haunted his father forever more is what led Birney to penning this historical novel. But Birney’s personal quest becomes simultaneously an interrogation of Dutch colonial history and its consequences for the postcolonial generation, who found themselves bearing the brunt of the scars that history had inflicted upon their parents.

Dutch literary practice has long suffered from what Rudy Kousbroek infamously called “East Indies Camp Syndrome”. Put another way, looking back at their experience in the Dutch East Indies, Dutch novelists, historians, and memorialists have seen themselves as the misunderstood and unacknowledged innocent victims. After all, they had spent World War Two imprisoned in Japanese “concentration camps”.

Kousbroek, who himself had spent the war in such a camp, would have none of it. For one thing, such a view ignores the fact that many Dutch spent the Japanese occupation of Indonesia outside the camps. But these Dutch were slightly darker skinned, because, like Birney’s father, they were of mixed Asian-European heritage. The story of these Indos outside the camps has been eclipsed, white-washed out of history, by the hundreds of volumes of memoirs that describe life within the camps. As Birney put it in a newspaper interview with the NRC Handelsblad, a type of apartheid exists in the Dutch literary world, whereby the experience of the white Dutch has been privileged. His book, which includes the terror and violence suffered by the Indos outside the camps, provides a magnificent corrective to this blindness.

Like much of so-called trauma literature, Birney avoids telling us a traditional narrative. His novel is fragmentary, with a variety of voices and includes multiple genres. It includes interviews, email exchanges, official documents, memoirs as well as more straight forward narration. A large part of the book is supposed to be a memoir written by Arto and discovered by the chief narrator, his son Alan. Arto’s memoir tells of his youth under a racist colonial regime, his experience of being tortured by the Japanese and the commencement of his career as a killer, the bloody outbreak of the Indonesian Revolution in 1945 with its barbaric killings of Japanese soldiers and Dutch civilians.

We then receive a blow by blow account of Arto’s experience in the Dutch army. Reading this section I had a feeling that I was reading a manga graphic novel or watching a Rambo style movie. I lost count of the number of Indonesians who fell victim to Arto’s macho warrior prowess. He spears them to death, cuts their throats with a dagger, shoots them out of trees, murders them in the still of the night, mows them down in battle, tortures them, then disposes of them.

In the television interview quoted above, Birney informs us that during his early childhood, instead of hearing fairy tales, he was force-fed his father’s “Rambo-like stories” of cruelty. Are we supposed to believe this account of mammoth cruelties? Birney leaves us multiple hints that Arto is an unreliable narrator and near the end of the novel Alan is attempting to weigh up the truth value of Arto’s ramblings. But whatever the veracity of these tall tales, Birney leaves us in no doubt that some Dutch military forces in Indonesia behaved badly.

Being persona non-grata among the leadership of the new Republic of Indonesia, Arto, like Birney’s own father, joins the hundreds of thousands who are “repatriated” to the Netherlands. Like Birney’s father, he soon marries a white Dutch woman and they start a family. Arto feels estranged in his new homeland (the dilemma of the cultural hybrid is expressed in his surname, “Noland”!). The mother seems almost ashamed in public of her dark-skinned children, and is uninterested in their Asian heritage and her husband’s past. She represents the readiness of the people of the Netherlands who, for decades, proved more than willing to unremember their own colonial past, especially their colonial war.

Haunted by the ghosts of his violent past, enraged by the indifference of a complacent Dutch society, the father again turns to violence. He beats his Dutch wife when she is pregnant with Alan and his twin brother Phil. Thus, they enter the world already suffering the consequences of the scars that were inflicted upon their father by the brutality of his past.

Marianne Hirsch of Columbia University introduced the concept of “postmemory” into academic discourse in the 1990s. She uses the term to analyse “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up.” The post-memory generation suffers the scars of their elders who have experienced traumatic violence.

Birney describes the post-memory predicament of Alan and his siblings who must now endure scars that emanate from the trauma of the historical wound their father had experienced during decolonization. Years of violent abuse from their father (and emotional abuse from their mother) follow. Wife and children are slapped, punched and kicked, they are beaten with rulers, belts, straps and even steel cables. Like Birney and his siblings, the children are eventually removed from their parents and will reach adulthood still living in state-run institutions.

Yet Alan, just like Birney himself, becomes obsessed with unravelling the past of his father. In a conversation with his mother, Alan sums up the dilemma of the post-memory generation: “I’m afraid that I will look deeper into that rotten war of yours than you do yourselves. That is the destiny of someone from the post-war generation who thinks that his future is determined by the past of his ancestors.” (p. 72). Thus, the brutality of decolonization continues to live among those who have never experienced it.

A well-known literary trope in the post-memory literature that has developed among the Indisch community in the Netherlands since the early 1980s is that of the silent Indo father. He has been scarred by his violent experiences during decolonization and he passes on to his Dutch-born children the burden of his awful silence. Birney’s work is an attempt to destroy this clichéd myth.

Some fathers, like Birney’s own and like the fictional Arto, could hardly shut up, spewing their stories like venomous verbal profusions, over their own children’s future, poisoning the post-memory generation. Yet, as Alan tells us, “no researcher, journalist or writer” will find this sort of story in any textbook on colonialism (p. 19). Arto writes in his memoir that the Dutch have a fondness for reading about the good old colonial days, but this history “is a lie”. (p. 85) Similarly, Alan’s brother, Phil, in an email to his twin, agrees: “The official historiography is a lie.” (p. 516) Birney himself would seem to agree, too. In the NRC Handelsblad interview he claims colonial historiography is written from a white perspective and that the most important reason that he wrote this book is “to show that the Netherlands closed its colonial history in an abominable way.”

Birney’s novel is like a stick of dynamite. Reading it is like hearing the slow sound of an explosion rolling from within the crypt that is repressed collective memory. The smoke clears, one peers into the crypt, and what appears is an exposed seam, a raw wound entombed in the nation’s past: a past that, as Birney himself proves, is not dead and is not even past.

Episode 96: Louis XIV’s Absolutism and the “Affair of the Poisons”

Satanic masses. Child sacrifice. Renegade priests who deal in love potions and black magics. And a secret tribunal set up to weed out the unholy members of nobility who use them, all desperate to get close to an absolute monarch who keeps the entire nation under his thumb. It’s not the subject of Dan Brown’s latest book, it’s something that really happened in 17th century France at the court of Louis XIV, “The Sun King.” Julia Gossard, an alumna of UT’s History Program, now an Assistant Professor of French History at Utah State University, has read through the archives of the secret court and walks us through the connections between Louis XIV’s absolutist rule and a fantastic series of events that’s become known as “The Affair of the Poisons.”

A Deportation Story: Russia 1914

On the same day the President of the United States announced that he was ending DACA (the program that provides some immigrants who were brought to the US as minors protection from deportation and eligibility for a work permit), this moving essay appeared on the Russian History Blog, which we re-post with their permission. In the context of our IHS annual theme and our film series on the FACES OF MIGRATION, this story offers a cautionary tale on bureaucracy and vulnerability. ~Joan Neuberger

The Failures of Arbitrary Mercy

Toward the end of a very long archival file, toward the end of a long research trip, I came across a letter that made me gasp and then tear up as I sat in the reading room. It was sent from the Minister of the Interior to the Minister of the Imperial Court on December 12, 1914, and then forwarded on to the Gatchina town authorities:

On October 26, Iuliia and Luiza Ruprekht, the first 71, and the second 67 years old, German subjects who lived in Gatchina and were subject to deportation due to the war, gave the Gatchina police chief a petition in which they asked to be allowed to remain in their place of residence in Russia, where they were born and had lived all their lives, and referring to their elderly years, illness, and material dependence on their sister, a Russian subject living in Petrograd. [The police chief] presented this petition to the Petrograd governor only after thirteen days, that is on November 8, with а favorable conclusion, due to which [the governor] placed a decision favorable to the petitioners on the report. But not waiting for notice of [the resolution of their petition], the aforementioned foreigners on November 9 ended their lives with suicide, having hanged themselves in their apartment; the reason for their suicide, according to the same police chief, was that they were dejected under the influence of the threat of the possibility of being sent, as German subjects, out of Russia. The police chief’s explanation of why there was such a delay in presenting the late Ruprekhts’ petition to the Petrograd governor does not hold up.

Where to begin? Well, there’s a horrible irony here, because the other actors were hardly themselves all Russians, even if they were all Russian subjects. The police chief’s name was Kavtaradze; the Minister of the Imperial Court’s name was Frederiks, the Petrograd governor’s name Adlerberg. The officials of imperial Russia were of its empire, not all of Russia. I could go on about the unfairness of former non-Russians turning on current non-Russians, particularly current non-Russians who had lived their whole lives in Russia, except that I think that’s not really the story here.

Let’s start instead with the specifics of the file itself. This letter comes at the end of a long file “with confidential correspondence on various questions,” the same file that had the many lists of foreigners that I mentioned in my last post. The reason for this letter being there was due not to the fact that it involved “foreigners” but instead to the fact that it involved criticizing the police. The Minister of the Interior, who had oversight over the governor, was writing to the Minister of the Imperial Court, who had oversight over the Gatchina authorities, because he was casting blame for this suicide on the Gatchina police chief. A number of the other issues that show up in this file also involve cases in which police officials are found guilty of some bad act—wrongdoing by the police had to be kept secret. So that means that this outcome was seen as a very bad thing, and that there was real worry that the police chief had failed to carry out his important duty of dealing with petitions.

The royal palace at Gatchina. Lithograph by K.K.Schultz from the drawing by I.I.Charlemagne, mid-19c. (Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia)

The Gatchina authorities investigated the incident, and believed that the police chief was innocent of any wrongdoing—if anything, they blamed the Petrograd governor’s office. According to their investigation, the two sisters had received notice that they were to be kicked out of Russia, much to their shock (after all, that’s where they’d been born), and decided to travel straight to Petrograd to petition the governor directly. Once they got there, however, they were told they had to follow the normal chain of command, which meant turning first to the Gatchina authorities. Only those authorities could then forward their petition to Petrograd. When the sisters returned to Gatchina, still upset, they went to see the police chief to make their petition. He was surprised that they had been sent notice of their deportation, because he had thought the lists of foreigners were in the process of being corrected and that their names oughtn’t to have appeared on it anyway (he apparently considered them non-foreigners even if they’d never formally taken on Russian subjecthood). He also advised them to get a letter from a doctor to bolster their claim of ill health. Once they got such a letter, he forwarded the petition, but before any response could come, the women were so overcome by the set of events that their fear took over.

Perhaps in part because I am a woman living and working in a country where I do not have citizenship, I find this story almost unbearable. Had Iuliia and Luiza’s father taken Russian subjecthood, they wouldn’t have had a problem. Had they married Russian subjects, they wouldn’t have had a problem. Instead, most likely, no one had ever really noticed that these two maiden ladies weren’t Russian subjects. They don’t show up on the lists of foreigners, probably because they were women, and the lists almost always only include men. They just lived their lives until suddenly their citizenship became meaningful in a most awful way. What must that have felt like? Well, we have the answer. It felt hopeless.

Even sadder is that clearly no one expected it to turn out this way. No one even expected them to be deported. The governor was going to grant their petition; the police chief supported them in their efforts, and gave them suggestions for how to make their case stronger. That goes back to the idea that the real concern for this case, the reason it ended up in the confidential file, was that it involved the system of petitions breaking down. The autocracy could make laws that were as harsh as it wanted to—like, say, deporting people based on the sheer fact of their citizenship, not because of anything to do with who they were as individuals—in part because it had the system of petitions in place to allow it to say, “oh, but we didn’t really mean you, you can stay.” Petitions allowed the autocracy to be merciful. So it could make laws that it knew were going to be bad for some people it didn’t actually want to hurt, because it knew that petitions could create those exceptions. Except of course that mercy was just as arbitrary as the autocracy’s punishment could be. It could not be relied upon, it could not be trusted, because the law was also the law.

(Letter from RGIA f. 491, op. 3, d. 279, ll. 480-80ob; Barbara Engel has written about the ways that petitions allowed the autocracy to be merciful in “In the Name of the Tsar: Competing Legalities and Marital Conflict in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 1 (2005): 70-96.)

Alison Smith is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author, most recently, of For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Originally posted on Russian History Blog (September 5, 2017).

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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.

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador

By Brittany T. Erwin

In the tiny nation of El Salvador, the West dominates. As a result of commercial and political relationships that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been significant influence in this Central American country from the United States and Western Europe. However, within the Salvadoran context, the predominance of western history and culture refers to the marked differences between the eastern and western regions of the country, and the east often gets the short end of the stick. One institution born in 1994 pushed back against this enduring stigma by celebrating the difference of the east.

In the west of this mountainous and volcano-ridden country lies the capital city of San Salvador. Founded in 1524, this sprawling metropolis is home to busy streets and extensive networks of both interregional and international exchange. Far away from that hustle and bustle, and at the foot of the frequently active Chaparrastique Volcano, lies San Miguel. This city, the third-largest in the nation is the proprietor of the first museum built in the eastern half of the country.

Museo Regional de Oriente (Brittany Erwin, 2017)

Housed in a former textile factory and one-time military complex, the Regional Museum of the East (Museo Regional de Oriente) tells the story of the east through the multidisciplinary lenses of archaeology, ethnography, and history. Under the direction of Saúl Cerritos, this institution promotes a celebration of the distinct history and heritage of the East. Even without capital-city resources, it tells the important stories of indigenous life in the pre-hispanic era, the complexities of sociocultural interactions during centuries of conquest and immigration, and the resulting diffusion of cultural practices that continues today.

The collections begin with a display of ceramic artifacts whose particular motifs and production techniques place them firmly outside the Mayan influence that permeates western El Salvador. Extensive historical context in Spanish and English accompanies these carefully preserved pieces, dating from the Paleo-Indian period through the post-Classical period, which ends around the time of Spanish contact.

The exhibitions then shift to reflect the living culture of the zona oriental. Displays of artisanal products and pottery with both a modern presence and historical roots reveal the enduring influence of indigenous culture. The final permanent exhibition hall showcases the dozens of local festivals that guide public life in the city and throughout the east. From the elaborate costumes they inspire to the coordinated offerings and ritualized dances that they require, these fiestas reveal an important aspect of local identity. On that note of energetic cultural pride, the tour concludes.

Inside the Museo Regional de Oriente (Brittany Erwin, 2017)

The museum also houses two temporary exhibits, which change several times a year to reflect contemporary issues of historical interest and investigation. Currently on display are a photographic history of the railroads that connected the people and markets of the East until the early 2000s and an exhibit reflecting on the nation’s anniversary of peace after the civil wars of 1980-1992.

This modest museum, constructed in the shadows of its influential western rival leaves a strong impression. Through a careful selection of local artifacts and the presentation of a region-centered dialogue, it encapsulates both the history and culture of the proudly idiosyncratic eastern region of El Salvador.

The Impossible Presidency

By Jeremi Suri

The U.S. presidency is the most powerful office in the world, but it is set up to fail. And the power is the problem. Beginning as a small and uncertain position within a large and sprawling democracy, the presidency has grown over two centuries into a towering central command for global decisions about war, economy, and justice. The president can bomb more places, spend more money, and influence more people than any other figure in history. His reach is almost boundless.

Reach does not promote desired results. Each major president has changed the world, but none has changed it as he liked. Often just the opposite. Rising power elicits demands on that power, at home and abroad, that exceed the capabilities of leaders. Rising power also inspires resistance, from jealous friends as much as determined adversaries. Dominance motivates mounting commitments, exaggerated promises, and widening distractions – “mission creep,” in its many infectious forms.

Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan in the general’s tent at Antietam, Maryland, October 3, 1862 (Wikimedia)

Despite their dominance, modern presidents have rarely achieved what they wanted because they have consistently overcommitted, over-promised, and overreached. They have run in too many directions at once. They have tried to achieve success too fast. They have departed from their priorities. And they have become too preoccupied with managing crises, rather than leading the country in desired directions. This was the case for presidents as diverse as Lyndon Johnson, burdened by a war in Vietnam he did not want to fight, and Ronald Reagan, distracted during his second term by the Iran-Contra Scandal.

Extraordinary power has pushed even the most ambitious presidents to become largely reactive – racing to put out the latest fire, rather than focusing on the most important goals. The crises caused by small and distant actors have frequently defined the presidents. The time and resources spent on crises have diminished the attention to matters with much greater significance for the nation as a whole. Presidents frequently lose control of their agendas because they are too busy deploying their power flagrantly, rather than targeting it selectively. This happened with Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom spent much of their presidencies fighting wars abroad that did not make the country safer.

Theodore Roosevelt with a globe (Wikimedia)

Unmatched capabilities and ambitions encourage undisciplined decision-making, followed by stubborn efforts to make good on poor choices. These are the “sunk costs” that hang over the heads of powerful leaders determined to make sure nothing sinks, except their own presidencies. As much as they try, presidents cannot redeem the past nor control the present. Their most effective use of power is investing in future changes defined around a limited set of national economic, social, and military priorities. Priorities matter most for successful leaders, but presidents forget them in the ever-denser fog of White House decision-making.

Thomas Jefferson anticipated these circumstances two centuries ago. Although he valued virtue and strength in leaders, Jefferson recognized that these qualities were potential sources of despotism as much as democracy. The virtuous and the strong often try to do too much and they adopt tyrannical practices in pursuit of worthy, now corrupted, purposes. Machiavelli’s prince, who promotes the public good through ruthless policies, was a warning for eighteenth century American readers against centralized power run amok.

Like other founders steeped in the history of empires, Jefferson wanted to insure that the United States remained a republic with restrained, modest, and cautious leaders. He envisioned a president who embodied wisdom above all – a philosopher president more than a warrior president or a businessman president. For Jefferson, the essential qualities of leadership came from the intellect of the man who occupied the office.

Franklin D. Roosevelt giving the State of the Union speech that came to be called the Four Freedoms Speech, January 6, 1941 (The Four Freedoms).

The checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution divided power to prevent presidential tyranny, but they did not guarantee the election of presidents with intellect, prudence, or personal restraint. Fragmented authority could be just as flagrant and misguided as centralized authority and it could franchise its despotism in multiplying offices and agencies with similar effects to the dictatorial prince. According to Jefferson, powerful democracy ultimately required wisdom and self-denial in its leaders, more than constitutional barriers. Democratic leaders had to remain introspective and ascetic as their country grew more dynamic and prosperous.

Writing on the eve of the country’s first burst of expansion, Jefferson warned that the nation’s leaders may one day “shake a rod over the heads of all, which may make the stoutest of them tremble.” Restrained use of power and disciplined focus on the national interest were the only antidotes to excess, despotism, and decline. “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power,” Jefferson wrote, “and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”[1]

John Turnbull, The Declaration of Independence (Wikimedia, 1819).

Jefferson’s heirs did not heed his words. By the mid-twentieth century the rapid growth of American power made frequent misuse unavoidable and effective leadership nearly unattainable. The United States strayed from its democratic values more than any elected president could correct, despite repeated public hopes for a savior. Leaders pursued goals – for wealth, influence, and security – that undermined the democracy they aimed to preserve. Too often they sacrificed democratic procedures – supporting dictators abroad and increasing secrecy at home – for these other goals.

The widening gap between power and values produced President Donald Trump, elected to promote raw power above all. He is the final fall of the founders’ presidency – the absolute antithesis of what they expected for the office. President Trump was not inevitable, but the rise and fall of America’s highest office had a historical logic that explains the current moment, and how we might move forward.

For more on the presidency and its challenges see Jeremi Suri’s new book:

The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office (2017)

Or watch him talk about it on C-SPAN.

Or listen to our interview with Prof Suri on our podcast, 15 Minute History

Episode 95: The Impossible Presidency

Over the past two and a half centuries, the expectations placed upon the office of the President have changed and evolved with each individual charged with holding the position. From George Washington to Barack Obama, each occupant has left his mark on the office. However, since WWII, the occupant of America’s highest office has aspired to do more and more, but seems to have accomplished less and less. Have the expectations placed upon the office actually made the position less effective? In his new book “The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office,” returning guest Jeremi Suri (UT-Austin) takes a long historical look at what has made presidents successful in the role of chief executive, and asks whether the office has evolved to take on too much responsibility to govern effectively.

Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes

When Sandy Chang was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to give a talk about her research on women migrants in Asia, she was invited to make a podcast on the subject of her research. Chang was interviewed at the studio of the independent radio station, Business Station (BFM 89.9), that focuses on business news and current affairs. BFM also broadcasts the podcast, “Night School,” which deals topics on a range of social issues. Most of their audience would be English-speaking Malaysians. The show is catered towards a general audience with interest in the humanities and social sciences.

[You can listen to the podcast online here. Or you can click on the link below.]

Photograph of Sandy Chang at the independent radio station, Business Station (BFM 89.9) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

We asked Sandy if she enjoyed talking about her research and making it accessible to the public. She said:

“This was my first radio experience! I’m so glad it wasn’t live – it was pre-recorded in the studio two days in advance, but nonetheless, I was still very nervous. However, it was a great experience to practice speaking about my work to non-specialists in a short and concise way – but also in a way that would be appealing and exciting to listeners. Speaking about my work in this way was actually really refreshing. It rekindled a lot of the joy I sometimes feel doing archival research, but which can be easily forgotten when I’ve been away from home for months doing mostly solitary work. In that sense, I enjoyed sharing the frustrations and delights of the archival process, and also interesting anecdotes about female migrants from my findings.”

We also asked her if doing public history of this kind has had an impact on her own professional work:

“I am not sure if there are any long-term impacts on my professional work. But, I did feel like it was both important and necessary to share some of my research with local listeners outside the university setting. I feel indebted to many of the participants in Malaysia who generously shared their family stories and private collections with me. This kind of public history offers a kind of exchange, so I can share what I’ve learned from them with them, and also a broader public audience.”

And in the end she added:

“Recording a podcast is fun, and engaging with a broader public audience should also be an important part of our training as historians!”

Here at Not Even Past, we wholeheartedly agree!

See also:
Sandy Chang, “A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore“

Arguing about Empire: The Dreyfus Affair and the Fashoda Crisis, 1898

We are very happy to announce a new online collaboration with our colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Exeter in the UK. Not Even Past and Exeter’s Imperial & Global Forum, edited by Marc Palen (UT PhD 2011) will be cross-posting articles, sharing podcasts, and sponsoring discussions of historical publications and events. We are launching our joint initiative this month with a blog based on a new book by two Exeter historians, Arguing About Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France.

By Martin Thomas and Richard Toye

“At the present moment it is impossible to open a newspaper without finding an account of war, disturbance, the fear of war, diplomatic changes achieved or in prospect, in every quarter of the world,” noted an advertisement in The Times on May 20, 1898. “Under these circumstances it is absolutely essential for anyone who desires to follow the course of events to possess a thoroughly good atlas.” One of the selling points of the atlas in question – that published by The Times itself – was that it would allow its owner to follow “most minute details of the campaign on the Atbara, Fashoda, Uganda, the Italian-Abyssinian conflict &c.” The name Atbara would already have been quite familiar to readers, as the British had recently had a battle triumph there as part of the ongoing reconquest of the Sudan.

Fashoda, underlined in red, lay on the eastern margins of the Sudanese province of Bahr el-Ghazal. As this 1897 map indicates, the French Foreign Ministry, too, needed help in identifying Marchand’s location. (Source: MAE, 123CPCOM15: Commandant Marchand, 1895-98.)

Fashoda, much further up the Nile, remained, for the time, more obscure. Newspaper readers might have been dimly aware that an expedition led by the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Marchand was attempting to reach the place via the Congo, but his fate remained a mystery. Within a few months, however, Captain Marchand and his successful effort to establish himself at Fashoda would be the hottest political topic, the subject of multitudes of speeches and articles on both sides of the English Channel as the British and French Empires collided, or at least scraped each other’s hulls. It never did come to “war,” but there was certainly sufficient “disturbance, fear of war and diplomatic changes achieved or in prospect” to justify a Times reader purchasing an atlas, perhaps even the half-morocco version, “very handsome, gilt edges,” that retailed at 26 shillings.

The clash at Fashoda was both a seminal moment in Anglo-French relations and a revealing one with respect to imperial language. In addition to rhetoric’s role in stoking up tensions, there are further angles to be considered. Falling at the height of the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish Army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, endured a protracted retrial after being wrongly convicted of spying for Germany, British official readings of the Fashoda crisis were also conditioned by the growing conviction that the worst aspects of French political culture – an overweening state, an irresponsible military leadership, and an intrusive Catholic Church – were too apparent for comfort.

Viewed from the British perspective, dignity, above all, was at stake. The French were obsessed with the prospect of their own impending humiliation; whereas the British, from a position of strength, showed verbal concern for French amour propre, even while their own actions seemed guaranteed to dent it severely.

French Poodle to British Bulldog: “Well if I can’t have the bone I’ll be satisified if you’ll give me one of the scraps.” J. M. Staniforth, Evening Express (Wales).

What the rhetoricians of both countries had in common was their willingness to discuss the fate of the disputed area exclusively as a problem in their own relations, without the slightest reference to the possible wishes of the indigenous population. This is unsurprising, but there was more to the diplomatic grandstanding than appeared at first sight. It was the Dreyfus case that best illustrated how embittered French politics had become.

Dreyfus’s cause divided French society along several fault lines: institutional, ideological, religious, and juridical. By 1898 the issue was less about the officer’s innocence and more about the discredit (or humiliation) that would befall the Army and, to a lesser degree, the Catholic Church (notably imperialist institutions), were the original conspiracy against him revealed. So much so that the writer Emile Zola was twice convicted of libel over the course of the year after his fiery open letters in the new print voice of Radical-Socialism, L’Aurore in early 1898 compelled the Dreyfus case to be reopened,

Twelve months before Dreyfus was shipped back from Devil’s Island to be retried a safe distance from Paris at Rennes, Zola’s convictions confirmed that justice ran a poor second to elite self-interest.

High Command cover-ups, the ingrained anti-Semitism of the Catholic bishopric, and the grisly prison suicide on August 31 of Colonel Hubert Joseph Henry, the real traitor behind the original spying offense, brought French political culture to a new low. From the ashes would spring a new human rights lobby, the League of the Rights of Man (Ligue des droits de l’homme). Meanwhile, the Dreyfusard press, led since 1897 by the indomitable, if obsessive, L’Aurore, wrote feverishly of alleged coup plots to which Marchand, once he returned from Africa, might or might not be enlisted.

Charles Léandre, Caricature of Henri Brisson, Le Rire, November 5, 1898. Here caricatured as a Freemason.

At the start of November, Henri Brisson’s fledgling government finally decided to back down. A furious Marchand, who had arrived in Paris to report in person, was ordered to return and evacuate the mission. The right-wing press, fixated over the previous week on the likely composition of the new government and its consequent approach to the Dreyfus case, resumed its veneration of Marchand. La Croix went furthest, offering a pen portrait of Marchand’s entire family as an exemplar of nationalist rectitude. The inspiring, if sugary, narrative was, of course, a none-too-oblique way of criticizing the alleged patriotic deficiencies of the republican establishment and siding with the army as the institutional embodiment of an eternal (and by no means republican) France.

Something of a contrived crisis – or, at least, an avoidable one – Fashoda was also a Franco-British battle of words in which competing claims of imperial destiny, legal rights, ethical superiority, and gentility preserved in the face of provocation belied the local reality of yet more African territory seized by force. If the Sudanese were the forgotten victims in all this, the Fashoda crisis was patently unequal in Franco-British aspects as well.

“Come Professor. You’ve had a nice little scientific trip! I’ve smashed the dervishes — luckily for you — and now I recommend you to pack up your flags and go home!” John Tenniel, Punch, Oct. 8, 1898.

On the imperial periphery, Marchand’s Mission was outnumbered and over-extended next to Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian expeditionary force. In London a self-confident Conservative government was able to exploit the internal fissures within French coalition administrations wrestling with the unending scandal of the Dreyfus case. Hence the imperative need for Ministers to be seen to be standing up in Marchand’s defense. In terms of political rhetoric, then, the French side of the Fashoda crisis was conditioned by official efforts to narrow the country’s deep internal divisions in the same way that the Republic’s opponents in politics, in the press, and on the streets sought to widen them.

Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France

Read more about European Empires in the nineteenth century:

Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Empire (2012). A vivid and captivating study, which locates fin de siècle constructions of heroism, sacrifice, and patriotic duty within the context of imperialist chauvinism.

William Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (2006). The go-to resource for insights into the concerns – and the colonial blind-spots – of France’s primary human rights lobby from the late nineteenth century onward.

Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (2009). A landmark book that dissects the presumptive distinctions, and actual connections, between liberal thinking and support for imperial conquests in the long nineteenth century.

Michael Rosen, The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case (2017). A beautifully written account of Emile Zola’s brief “exile” in Britain at the height of the Dreyfus Case; as much a story of the cultural misperceptions between Britain and France at the dawn of the twentieth century as an account of France’s leading Dreyfusard intellectual.

Bertrand Taithe, The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa (2009). A deeply disturbing but essential account of the so-called Voulet-Chanoine mission, an appallingly cruel Frenchh imperial venture into West-Central Africa that, in all its butchery and madness formed the dystopian counterpart to Fashoda’s Sudan incursion.

Podcast: In Our Time: The Dreyfus Affair: Host Melvyn Bragg speaks with historians Robert Gildea, Ruth Harris, and Robert Tombs.

Top Image: Louis Dalrymple, Puck, October 26, 1898.

All images in public domain unless otherwise indicated.

Digital Teaching: The Stalinist Purges on Video

This short documentary film was produced by a team of 5 students in Introduction to Russian, East, European and Eurasian Studies (REE310) — Ben Randall, David Elliott, Jennifer Hairston, David Spector, and Ben Rettig. In this interdisciplinary course, co-taught by Mary Neuburger and Christian Hilchey, student teams spent the semester working together in stages that culminated in the presentation of their films during the finals period. We found inspiration and models in similar projects assigned by Erika Bsumek, Robert Olwell, and others in the UT History Department.

In our course, students were encouraged to define a sufficiently narrow topic so that they were able to compile primary and secondary audio and visual material–film clips, photos, interviews, music, voice-over narration, etc–and construct a coherent and meaningful narrative in 5 minutes. Not all projects were history projects though all were related to Russia or Eastern Europe.

As instructors, we worked with them closely on the various stages of the project including a preliminary proposal, a storyboard, and preliminary script, and a trailer. We generally encouraged narrowing and focus of topic, and directed students towards possible sources, including interviews of relevant UT faculty for on camera expertise. This group’s project on one aspect of the Great Purge of the 1930s used amazing historical footage to tell the story of one of its victims, the great theater director, Vsevolod Meyerhold. One of the highlights of the film is the interview with Dr. Charters Wynn in his office in Garrison Hall.

The Media Matters: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of Hunger in the U.S.

by Laurie Green

April 11, 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of a historical moment that is far more relevant today than we might wish: the discovery of hunger in the U.S. or, perhaps better put, the point in the late 1960s when severe poverty and life-threatening malnutrition in the world’s wealthiest nation suddenly soared into public view on the national political stage. This anniversary matters today not only because proposals to restructure federal food programs threaten their very viability, but also because of the role played by the media, then and now.

The very meaning of “discovery,” when it came to the politics of hunger in the late 1960s, rested in part on the production and reception of news, documentaries, visual images, and editorials that, at times, provoked explicit confrontations over who had the right and expertise to say whether starvation existed in America. The one media production that scholars have written about, CBS’s renowned Hunger in America, first broadcast in May 1968 and vividly recalled by many who watched it, is notable as much for the reactions it provoked as its content. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman denounced the program’s critique of federal food programs as “biased, one-sided, [and] dishonest.” San Antonio’s county commissioner, A. J. Ploch, reported threats on his life for his statement that Mexican American kids didn’t need to do well in school, for which they needed better nutrition, because they would always be “Indians,” not “chiefs.” Later it came out that the Mississippi congressman who headed the House agricultural appropriations subcommittee borrowed agents from the FBI to track down and survey the cupboards of every interviewee in order to prove the show had been a pack of lies. Drama over who controls truth in the media is not a new phenomenon.

Fannie Lou Hamer speaking at a hearing of Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 10, 1967. Rev. J. C. Killingsworth is seated beside her. (Photograph: Jim Peppler)

On April 11, 1967, Senators Joseph Clark (D-Pennsylvania) and—famously—Robert Kennedy (D-New York) conducted a daylong tour of the Mississippi Delta that brought them face to face with residents, especially young children, who bore signs of malnutrition so severe that they could only compare them with what they had observed in Latin America and Africa. Their shock at what they witnessed triggered an ultimately victorious decade-long campaign to expand, alter, and establish the federal food programs that are in jeopardy today. Within months, investigations in locales as disparate as Kentucky, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. precipitated a cascade of further discoveries confirming that hunger was not solely a Mississippi problem.

Senators George Murphy, Jacob Javits, Joseph Clark, and Robert F. Kennedy of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, listening to testimony during a hearing in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 10, 1967 (Photograph: Jim Peppler)

Kennedy and Clark had flown to the Delta from Jackson, where the day before they had heard Mississippi activists testify at a senate hearing on the War on Poverty that starvation had become a genuine threat in their counties. Fannie Lou Hamer, Marian Wright (Edelman)—then an NAACP attorney in Jackson—and others ascribed this devastating situation not only to joblessness caused by cotton mechanization but voting rights repression. County officials, they argued, used government regulations to prevent them from receiving food stamps. Back in Washington two weeks later, Clark, Kennedy, and other members of their committee released a letter they had sent to Lyndon Johnson describing their shock at witnessing malnutrition and hunger among the families they had met and urging him to send emergency food to the area. Johnson denied the request, the press reported, blaming the problem on congressional cuts to the poverty program. Hunger was not new in the U.S., nor had activists previously held their tongues, but now it arrived on the national political stage wrapped in drama and political conflict.

Daniel Schorr’s typescript for CBS News, April 11, 1967. (The Daniel Schorr Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division)

By evening on April 11, 1967, reporters and photographers had filed stories and images of the senators’ Delta tour. Daniel Schorr’s CBS Evening News report and Joseph Loftus’s New York Times article helped frame what would be cast as ground zero for the politics of hunger. Both portrayed Kennedy surrounded by enthusiastic crowds, but whereas their coverage of the previous day’s hearing had centered on the Mississippi politicians’ assault on Johnson’s War on Poverty, these stories concerned Kennedy and Clark’s critiques of Johnson from the left. Loftus reported that Clark had declined to label what he witnessed as starvation, but asserted that the deplorable conditions indicated the poverty program’s weakness. Schorr mused that RFK might have found a platform other than Vietnam, from which to challenge Johnson.

Schorr began his next report by stating: “Congress talks of poverty and how it should be dealt with, but rarely does it go to look at it.” Clark and Kennedy, however, had gone themselves “to see if the reports of starvation were true.” He described their shock at seeing “children with distended bellies” and speaking with “poor Negroes earning $6 a day for cotton chopping, and many earning nothing.” Many, Clark learned, “could not even scrape together the $2 a month to buy $12 worth of food stamps.” The senators had not spoken of “starvation,” but Schorr had. That term spurred irate Mississippi politicians to launch their own investigations to disprove its existence. Journalist didn’t invent this language—African American activists in Mississippi did that; however, they helped create the context for national controversy.

Simeon Booker

Simeon Booker covered similar ground in his article for Jet, aimed at black readers, but he made Kennedy and Clark’s Delta tour inseparable from what occurred at the hearing the previous day. This strategy allowed him to present a trenchant critique of racism in the antipoverty program from the vantage point of activists at the hearing. At a time when some journalists had begun to separate hunger from other problems the hearings had addressed, Booker took a different tack, beginning and ending with Kennedy’s responses to witnessing hunger and malnutrition but diving into economic, medical, and political challenges in between.

Others pursued feature stories that combined “behind-the-scenes” investigation, vivid language, and political insight. Robert Sherrill’s June 4 New York Times essay, “It Isn’t True That Nobody Starves In America,” took readers to Alabama and Mississippi, while slamming the beltway politicians who had structured federal food programs such that they could produce starvation as easily as nutrition. Mississippi could pride itself on having food stamp programs in more counties than elsewhere in the South, he declared, but purchase requirements meant that the poorer one was, the more unlikely one was to access benefits. Sherrill minced no words, criticizing even Kennedy for using euphemisms like “extreme hunger.”

Sherrill’s article preceded national hearings on hunger and malnutrition that Clark’s Senate poverty committee held in Washington in July 1967. People watched the hearings on television or read reports of such moments as when Senator John Stennis lit into North Carolina pediatrician and civil rights activist Raymond Wheeler. Wheeler was one of six doctors sent by the Field Foundation to investigate starvation in Mississippi and had accused white elites of trying to starve blacks out of the state. Stennis, who had his own radio program and was well aware that cameras were rolling and reporters were scribbling, accused him of “gross libel and slander.”

William Hedgepeth and Al Clayton, “The Hungry World of Teresa Pilgrim,” LOOK, December 26, 1967.

Questions of proof inspired one of the most intimate and widely-read features to appear in a mass-circulation glossy magazine, Al Clayton and William Hedgepeth’s “The Hungry World of Teresa Pilgrim,” which ran in LOOK’s Christmas 1967 issue. Struck by Clayton’s photographs, which Kennedy displayed at the hearings as proof of starvation, Hedgepeth teamed up with the photographer for a story about a family surviving conditions the senators described. Both white southerners — Clayton from southeast Tennessee, Hedgepeth from Atlanta — they spent days with the Pilgrims, especially with six-year-old, bright-eyed Teresa, whose photograph opens the story. Public response was off the charts for LOOK, as readers asked where to send Christmas gifts and money.

CBS’s phones began ringing off the hook five months later, even before the broadcast of Hunger in America had concluded. Viewers not only sent food and financial support to those who appeared in it, but sent letters to their representatives demanding the overhaul of food programs that the documentary prescribed. While the Federal Communications Commission weighed charges that CBS had overstepped the ethical bounds of journalism, social commentators referred to the documentary as the turning point in bringing public awareness to the crisis of hunger.

The matter of truth, including who had the right to define it, was an incendiary one in April 1967 and for months thereafter. “Starvation,” unlike either hunger or malnutrition, implied that someone or something was responsible, raising the stakes in a conflict that drew in large swaths of the public via the media. Two years later, antipoverty activists in every region were fed up with hearings and investigations; they wanted change.

Also by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:

Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity.
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

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