ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

Lessons from London: what happens when universities place PhD students in museums?

By Kevin Guyan

Stress: Approaches to the First World War is currently running at University College London and explores the effects of the First World War on the mind, the body and the environment. The exhibition is part of the Student Engager project, which began at UCL in February 2012 to explore the question, ‘What happens when PhD students from different disciplines explore links between their research and museum collections then share their discoveries with non-university audiences?’

Opening Night of Stress: Approaches to the First World War Exhibition

I am one of nine PhD students who works for UCL’s Public and Cultural Engagement Department on ‘as and when’ contracts and wish to share what we can learn when PhD researchers are placed in museums and left to engage with the public. I am in the final year of my PhD in History at UCL and got involved in the project as I was aware that historians often find themselves presenting research only to those working in the same field. Through the Student Engager project, I have experienced first-hand how PhD students can use museums as locations to fine-tune their thesis through two-way discussions with visitors, as well as other curators, and avoid the dangers of intellectually narrow research.

Members of the Student Engagement Team.

The meat and bones of the Student Engager project is the presence of PhD researchers in UCL’s museums (the Petrie Museum of Egyptology, the Grant Museum of Zoology, and the Art Museum), working three hour shifts every one or two weeks. Similarly, during the run of Stress, an engager is always present in the exhibition space ready for conversation – making all visits a unique experience that presents a personal interpretation of the materials on display from whoever is working that afternoon.

Approaches to engaging vary but researchers generally follow the pattern of approaching interested visitors, introducing themselves, explaining the project and asking about their museum experience. This either provokes a confused look, a polite acknowledgement of the project or sparks the start of a conversation, which can last anything from five minutes to three hours. The project discourages engagers from reciting prepared monologues and instead encourages people to draw connections between their theses and the collections, and enjoy the thrill of seeing where visitor conversations lead. After every engagement, researchers input details into an online platform that enables us to gather quantitative and qualitative information on the types of people encountered in the museums and the conversations taking place.

Members of the Student Engagement Team discuss the exhibition with visitors.

Project responses are overwhelmingly positive. Between October 2012 and January 2015, engagers had 1,516 conversations and described 93 per cent of interactions favourably. Online responses also noted that UCL Museums and Collections was the most common talking point (38 per cent of engagements), followed by the researcher’s own work (33 per cent of engagements).

The Student Engager project has helped encourage curators to reimagine museum sites as interactive locations for conversation. It has also given me a space to test innovative and experimental ways to share my research. For example, I brought images from my research into the museums then observed the responses they provoked from visitors. I shared photographs of ideal English homes in the 1940s and 1950s, this presented an entry-point for visitors to start conversations as they drew links between the images and their own lives. Visual cues helped visitors think about their own homes, both past and present, in a new way, while also educating me on their experiences and opinions towards my research.

The project is not without its problems. It risks looking for intellectual connections between themes and across disciplines where none may in fact exist. Projects like this also come at a cost, requiring the funding for a full roster of museum staff alongside researchers who are paid for their time. Universities cannot expect PhD students to undertake public engagement work without recompense.

Above all, placing PhD students in university museums does not require a ‘dumbing-down’ of the intellectual rigour of research. It instead opens up new skills, crucial for historians entering competitive job markets. The benefits also reach far further than dissemination alone – they allow researchers to enter into dialogues with people from different backgrounds and identify new and unexpected connections. The process of sharing ideas with people unfamiliar with our own field forces us to change the way we present information, which ultimately results in a deeper understanding for everyone involved.

For further information on the UCL Student Engager Project and Stress: Approaches to the First World War visit http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums

Kevin Guyan is in the final year of a PhD in History at University College London and is a Visiting Research Associate with the University of Texas at Austin during Fall 2015. His research explores how planning experts, including architects and sociologists, used the design of domestic space to produce new performances of masculinity in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. He is from the North East of Scotland and works as the Student Engagement Coordinator for UCL’s Public and Cultural Engagement Department, a project that provides a platform for PhD students to share their research with non-academic audiences.

All images courtesy of the author.

Vietnam between the United States and Yugoslavia

By Deirdre Smith

A specter is haunting Europe (also the United States and, really, much of the globe)—the specter of a new Cold War. In recent years columnists have been invoking the memory of the global ideological conflict that governed much of the violence and geopolitics of the twentieth-century.[i] The reason for the comparisons is the eerie familiarity of the escalating conflict between Putin’s Russia and the United States and European Union. Tensions surrounding the annexation of Crimea, protests and military conflict in Ukraine, increases in sanctions against Russia, and divided support in the Syrian Civil War and refugee crisis have many people claiming redux.

On the cultural front, movies like Bridge of Spies and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. reflect a related desire to look back to the past for lessons about the present. As a student of the history of art in former Yugoslavia, I went to the archives held at the LBJ Presidential Library on the University of Texas at Austin campus following a similar impulse. I was looking for clues about the relationship between the United States and Yugoslavia during the critical years of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration and how they reflected the larger divides between nations that are so frequently conjured today in the news.

Smoke in Novi Sad, Serbia after NATO bombardment in 1999, via Wikipedia.

When many Americans think about the history of United States relations with Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Wars and the bombings in Belgrade in the 1990s likely come to mind. However, the two countries had long been ambivalent allies. As Yugoslavia’s President, Josip Broz Tito, had cut ties with the Soviet Union in 1948, he and his country were identified as useful in U.S. strategies to create divisions between communist nations.[ii] The United States provided military aid to Tito throughout the administrations of Truman and Eisenhower, hoping to keep the Yugoslav leader oriented toward positive relations with the West.

A Tomahawk cruise missile launches from the aft missile deck of the USS Gonzalez (DDG 66) headed for a target in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on March 31, 1999. Via Wikipedia.

The LBJ archives at UT hold numerous documents that give a first-hand impression of the nature and texture of relations between the United States and Yugoslavia as it proceeded through the 1960s. Ambassadors Eric Kocher and C. Burke Elbrick were stationed in Belgrade and both sent frequent telegrams to the Department of State that have been declassified only within the past fifteen years.

John F. Kennedy and Josip Broz Tito at the White House in 1963. Via the Boston Globe.

One of the most fascinating things I found in reading through these materials were traces of the growing divide between the United States and Yugoslavia following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, often in the smallest details. A cable from December 1963 summarizes a meeting held with President Tito in which Eric Kocher assured the Yugoslav leader that friendship would continue between the two countries after Kennedy’s death. Tito, who had met personally with Kennedy not long prior, apparently voiced some foreboding skepticism on the subject of Johnson. He also pressured the U.S. to be more attentive to the needs of South Americans, and inquired about the motivations and identity of the Kennedy assassin.[iii] The document suggests the intimacy between Tito and the United States at that point in time. Tito felt moved to express condolences and show interest in the case of Kennedy. He also took the same opportunity to discuss things that he wanted from the United States. Kocher mentions that all of these heady topics were covered in a span of only forty-five minutes.

Josip Broz Tito greeting former American first lady Eleanor Roosevelt during her July 1953 visit to the Brijuni islands, PR Croatia, FPR Yugoslavia. Via Wikipedia.

In May 1964, President Johnson announced intentions to improve relations with Eastern European countries in terms of trade, travel and aid. Interest and activity around the United States embassies in Eastern European countries increased at this time. The Johnson administration attempted a détente with Moscow by becoming friendlier with Eastern Bloc countries at the same time that it amped up its commitments in Vietnam, creating a conflict that undermined the success of the former operation.[iv] Documents in the LBJ archives clearly convey a mounting tension in relations with Yugoslavia, which often manifested in events of daily life and personal interaction. Johnson’s more sweeping efforts at détente meant a diminished status for Yugoslavia as a key communist ally. In turn, Yugoslavia grew more open in its critiques of U.S. foreign policy.

On May 31, 1965, a telegrammed report from Eric Kocher alerted the State Department to signs of dissatisfaction with the United States appearing in the Yugoslav press, “Within the last year we have been under constant attack for our ‘misdeeds’ in the Congo, the UN, and especially in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.”[v] Kocher’s scare quotes around the word misdeeds speak volumes about United States diplomatic attitudes. When reading in archives, being attentive to something as minute as a choice in punctuation and tone can offer tremendous insight. In this case, the special marking of misdeeds seems to reflect the same imperialistic attitude that the United States was being accused of by Yugoslav journalists. In June 1965, another cable summarized a meeting with Tito in which he made his loathing for the war in Vietnam clear. Tito told former ambassador George Kennan that U.S.-Yugoslavian relations would continue to suffer over their disagreements about the war. The document reads, “Tito said if U.S. took more relaxed posture toward world events things would work out to benefit of U.S. in long run.”[vi] If only it could be so simple.

US-Yugoslav summit, 1978. Via Wikipedia.

These and other telegrams offer insight into the increasingly turbulent relationship between the United States and Yugoslavia in the 1960s under Johnson. Although files related to Yugoslavia make up a relatively small portion of what can be read at the LBJ Library, they reveal the constant and delicate activity of balancing contradictory initiatives and maintaining diplomatic relationships on the ground.

You may also like our monthly feature article on the War in Vietnam Revisited.

[i] See Dmitri Trenin, “Welcome to Cold War II: This is what it will look like,” Foreign Policy 3 March 2014.

[ii] For more on the relationship between the U.S. and Yugoslavia during these administrations see Lorraine M. Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat: The United States, Yugoslavia, and the Cold War (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

[iii] NATIONAL SECURITY FILE: Cable, Belgrade 3996, 12/6/63, Box 2, Country File, Yugoslavia, National Security File, LBJ Library.

[iv] See Jonathan Colman, The Foreign Policy of Lyndon B. Johnson: The United States and the World, 1963-1969 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2010), 116-118.

[v] NATIONAL SECURITY FILE: Cable, Belgrade, 5/31/65 #12, Box 1, Country File, Yugoslavia, National Security File, LBJ Library.

[vi] NATIONAL SECURITY FILE: Cable, Belgrade, 6/3/65 #11, Box 1, Country File, Yugoslavia, National Security File, LBJ Library.

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)

By Jing Zhai

Seventy-two ordinary women, living in four different villages in central and southern Shaanxi Province, mostly born during the 1920s or 1930s, witnessed the rise of the new Communist regime in 1949 and experienced dramatic life transformations as a result. During the 1950s and 1960s, a few of them were national or regional labor models. Some were local activists, village-level officials, or midwives. And the others were just ordinary village women who did not involve themselves in local politics. Although the national or regional labor models might get the precious chance of going to Beijing and even meeting Chairman Mao, these women’s life experiences were mostly confined to their villages. Few of them had the habit of keeping a diary or recording their observations. And in official documents, their personal life stories were rarely discussed. If not for the interviews conducted by Gail Hershatter and Gao Xiaoxian from 1996 through 2006, aging and death would have surely silenced these women’s memory.

This book focuses on the memories of rural women who lived through the momentous events of the 1950s. It attempts to recount their life stories not only as historical witnesses, but mostly importantly as women. By tracing the social roles that rural women assumed across their lifetimes, the book reveals changes taking place in women’s field work, domestic labor, childbearing, and marriage. Hershatter successfully brings out the beauty, vibrancy and pain in these women’s rich life experiences. The author asks, “If we placed a doubly marginalized group — rural women — at the center of an inquiry about the 1950s, what might we learn about the effects of Party-state policy and its permutations and appropriations at the local level?”

Usually, memoirs, diaries and interviews that contain people’s memory are used as important clues for historical facts. However, Hershatter’s book is striking for its study of memory itself, based on the large number of interviews she and her collaborator were able to carry out. The distance between memory and the “true” story seems to not be an obstacle for the author and she is fully aware of today’s influences on recollecting the past. Instead, she analyzes the context in which individual memory is generated, especially the subjects’ special experiences as rural women and girls. The stories we hear from women reflect a more distant relationship from politics than that of men. Taking timekeeping as an example, compared with rural men who were familiar with using official time to organize their daily life, women relied on domestic events to remember things. The zodiac, the date of their marriage, and the birthdates of their children formed the system of timekeeping that they used to frame their memories. Memory here is gendered memory.

This book challenges the conventional narrative on the 1950s that is usually focused on changing political campaigns. Many events that people experienced are outside the narrative frame punctuated by campaigns such as land reforms, collectivization, and the Great Leap Forward. By following the life stories of women in farming communities far from the center of state control, these women’s conception of time produced a much more continuous narrative compared with official histories.

Chinese workers in front of the open hearth furnace, September 1958. Via Wikimedia Commons

Memories of Chinese rural women also questioned the unified narrative in the academic study of gender. For example Chaofeng had been a tongyangxi, a “child raised to be a daughter-in-law.” But she experienced painful uncertainties when she decided to divorce her husband during the New Marriage Law Campaign due to her close relations with her mother-in-law. Her experience argues against the traditional analysis of gender reform, regardless of the guilt of tongyangxi or the absolute legitimacy of marriage freedom. This book questions the limitations of a lot feminist scholars’ opinion and brings out the question about recording the perspective and the experience of ordinary women. Is gender such a coherent and unified genre that feminists can easily represent the experience of women from a lower society stratum?

As a work about China’s collective past, Hershatter’s book sheds light on the cultural and social history of the 1950s China. But even if you are just simply searching for some enchanting stories, Hershatter’s book is a great place to start.

Gail Hershatter The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Press (University of California Press, 2011)

Rabin’s Assassination Twenty Years Later

By Itay Eisinger

And I wish to add one more thing, if I can.
The Prime Minister died a happy man.
Farewell to the dust of my Prime Minister,
husband and father, and what’s rarely said:
son of Rosa the Red.”

Dalia Ravikovitch, translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

On November 4 of 1995, the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin– “the beautiful son of the Zionist utopia” — was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a 25 year old law student and Jewish zealot. The assassin wished to thwart the peace process, led by Rabin, between Israel and the Palestinians. Twenty years after the assassination, the word “peace” seems to have evaporated from Israeli discourse as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises his people will “forever live by the sword.” It is now crucial to reexamine the murder and its effect on the course of history, on the Arab-Israeli conflict and particularly on Israeli society. What role, if any, did the murder have on “the triumph of Israel’s Radical Right,” as the title of UT’s Professor Ami Pedahzur’s last book suggests?

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, shaking hands with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, with U.S. President Bill Clinton in the center at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, Sept. 13, 1993. (Vince Musi / The White House)

Rabin became Prime Minister in 1992 with a promise to achieve peace between Israel and the Arabs. But for most of his life he was not a man of peace. In his teens, he joined a pre-state Jewish militia and later played a significant role in the Independence War of 1948. In his memoir, he writes frankly about the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the newly established Israel and his role in it. Rabin served another 21 years in the Israeli Army, becoming its Chief of Staff in 1964. He thus has a crucial role in Israel’s most famous military victory—the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel occupied territories three times its original size.

Yitzhak Rabin, commander of the Harel Brigade, c. 1948. Via Wikipedia

Hence, for most of his life, Rabin was the ultimate embodiment of the Zionist ethos, a real Sabra—native born, socialist-secular educated, from Ashkenazi origins; he was a dedicated settler and a brilliant combatant. Later he would serve as ambassador to the United States, a member of the Israeli Parliament, Prime Minister, and Defense Minister. Beside the political ramifications of his assassination, the event also carries great symbolism. No leader represents the values of the old Zionist elite more than Rabin. His murder, in retrospect, symbolized the decline of liberal Zionism and the rise of a new radical elite.

The Israeli delegation to the 1949 Armistice Agreements talks. Left to right- Commanders Yehoshafat Harkabi, Aryeh Simon, Yigael Yadin, and Yitzhak Rabin (1949). Via Wikipedia.

Although a small coterie was responsible for the murder, it came after a long campaign inciting violence against the Prime Minister, run by the political right and directed at Rabin, Shimon Peres, and the peace process. The writing was literally on the wall and I remember seeing it daily, with slogans like “Rabin is a traitor,” or “Death to Rabin.” Thousands of right wing demonstrators set fire to photomontages of Rabin wearing an “Arab” Kafyyia or dressed as an SS officer. The abuse of Holocaust discourse was especially common and obviously loaded. Historian Idith Zertal notes that “central Israeli political figures and parties, including two individuals who were later, as a direct or indirect consequence of the assassination, to become Prime Ministers [Netanyahu and Sharon], and past and present cabinet ministers, played an active role in these demonstrations.” Yet, to this day, the Right has managed to disassociate itself from the assassination.

At the funeral, Rabin’s widow refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand and told the press: “Mr. Netanyahu [the head of the Opposition] incited against my husband and led the savage demonstrations against him.” It is here where the story revealed itself as a biblical, or Shakespearean, tragedy. Seven months after the murder, Netanyahu came to power and systematically destroyed the already-broken peace process. In the aftermath, many Leftists (such as Rabin’s widow) invoked the biblical story of prophet Elijah telling King Ahab: “Thus saith God, Hast thou committed murder, then also hast thou inherited?”

A poster of Rabin proclaiming him a traitor to Israel.

Zeev Sternhell, a world expert on fascism, wrote: “Israel was the first democratic state—and from the end of the second World War, the only one—in which a political murder achieved its goal.” Amir did not murder Rabin out of personal hatred. In Amir’s own words, “It wasn’t a matter of revenge, or punishment, or anger, Heaven forbid, but what would stop the Oslo [Peace] Process.” Yet politicians from the Right have managed to de-politicize the murder. They now depict the assassin, along with his colleagues and their mentors — the very rabbis who “sentenced” Rabin to death—simply as “bad apples.”

Since any peace agreement would necessitate at least some withdrawal from the occupied territories, both the secular and religious Right fiercely oppose such plans. The moderate right-wing, led by Netanyahu, argues that such a withdrawal endangers Israel’s security; the religious also perceive any territorial concession to Arabs as a betrayal of God’s Divine Plan. Beyond Israeli objections, the Oslo Peace Process was rightly criticized by many Palestinians for promising them only autonomy, not statehood. An agreement that fell short of satisfying the needs of the Palestinians also far exceeded what the Jewish Right-wing could tolerate.

Under the Oslo Agreement, Israel has (partly and slowly) withdrawn from some parts of the biblical, Greater Eretz Israel. For many religious and messianic Jews, this meant a secular attack on God’s plans. Rabin’s murder, writes philosopher Avishay Margalit, “was not confined to a direct assassin or assassins. The murder of Rabin… was a statistical question – who will actually commit the deed.” And yet, the forces that abhorred any partition of the Holy Land have gained a historic victory.

Binyamin Netanyahu speaks at the infamous “Rabin the Traitor” rally in Jerusalem, October 1995 — Netanyahu observing one of the most violent demonstrations against Rabin. He has since said that he did not hear the shouts of the demonstrators nor did he see their slogans.

There is no guarantee that Rabin could have achieved a just peace. Waves of Palestinian terror attacks eroded public support of the peace process already prior to Rabin’s death. There is also no guarantee that Palestinians would be satisfied with the very limited gains the Oslo Agreement guaranteed them. What we do know is that under Netanyahu’s first premiership (1996-1999) and under his successors, the peace process was utterly sabotaged. A new cycle of violence, the Second Intifada, began following the final collapse of peace talks in 2000. For many Israelis, the Second Intifada vindicated the right wing. The so-called “Peace Camp” — supporters of the two state solution — virtually disappeared.

Twenty years after Rabin’s assassination, Israel is run by the most right-wing government in its history. The victory of the right-wing Likud party in 1996, the evaporation of the Zionist-Left since 2000, and the ongoing de-politicization of Rabin’s death have empowered those against peace with Arabs. The assassin’s brother told the media last week that he is very pleased with the results of their deed. The ongoing attack by the Likud government on what is left of the Left might turn the Israeli ethnocracy, which privileges Jews, into a theocracy, which will represent the values and politics of the extreme right.

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.

Dominance without Hegemony by Ranajit Guha (1997)

By Katherine Maddox

The theory that dominance in society is based on a hegemonic culture was initially posited by Antonio Gramsci based on a Marxist analysis of economic and social class. Gramsci proposed that prevailing cultural norms should not be perceived as natural and inevitable but in fact represent artificial social constructs imposed by the ruling class and that the roots of these constructs reveal the instruments of social-class domination. In the framework of the nation, this translated to the state maintaining its position through a mix of sheer force (or coercion in political society) as well as the active participation of the subordinate groups (or consent through hegemony in civil society). Gramsci’s work on domination and consent founded in hegemony inspired many scholars that followed, and particularly those studying societies emerging from European imperial rule in the decades after World War II.

One of the most significant works in the field of post-colonial studies to draw on Gramsci’s concept was Ranajot Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony. Published only in 1998, the groundwork for the book had been laid almost fifteen years earlier with the establishment of the Subaltern Studies journal in 1982, which was founded by an initial group of eight South Asian scholars. The term “subaltern” is also an allusion to Gramsci, who called for the emergence of “subaltern intellectuals” to challenge the cultural hegemony of the ruling bourgeois class. In this context, subaltern refers to any person or group of inferior rank and position to those who dominated society. While the works of prominent post-colonial scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said had previously challenged the extent of hegemonic dominance in societies under direct or indirect colonial rule, the Subaltern Studies Group in its journals and in the overall approach of the individual scholars beyond this sought more directly to apply Gramsci’s theoretical relation of dominance to hegemony to the context of India and to highlight the issues with it.

Ranajit Guha.

The Subaltern Studies Group’s take on dominance without hegemony in India, as outlined by Guha in his book, begins with the experience of the British Raj and the inherent difference between the colonial history and that of the metropolitan bourgeois state narrative in Europe (as well as America). In colonial India, political coercion outweighed persuasive cultural hegemony in civil society and this carried over to the post-independence period as well. The post-colonial elite (both newly minted bourgeois capitalists and more well-established land owners) had distinctly different interests than the subaltern groups in the new nation. Consequently, Guha argues, this split in the politics of the state meant that the Indian bourgeoisie, unlike the European bourgeoisie, failed to establish Gramscian cultural hegemony over Indian subalterns. The inability of the colonial state and then the independent nation to assimilate civil society into political society, as had been accomplished in the West, led the state to exercise dominance without hegemonic consent.

In the decades since the subalternists began their influential work, the theory of dominance without hegemony has not been without its critics. Most recently, Vivek Chibber challenged the conclusions reached by Guha and his colleagues Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty. In particular, Chibber takes issue with the assumption by these scholars that the narrative of hegemony could be founded in the agency of the bourgeoisie, and that they in turn could speak for the nation in the West or the East. The Subaltern Studies Group, Chibber argues, romanticized the bourgeois democratic mission and capitalist power relations. Among other things, the Subalternists misdiagnosed cultural differences as the failure of the dominant classes to secure consent through hegemony – a process that Chibber asserts is more grounded in political economy than the absolute social hegemony the Subaltern Studies Group refutes. Chibber ultimately calls for a more nuanced understanding of the nature of dominance and hegemony in Europe, which he asserts the subalternists mistakenly use as a counter-factual.

Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Harvard University Press, 1998)

Sources:

Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013).

Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs and Eric Hobsbawm (2000).

Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1998).

You may also like these articles in our Social Theory series:

Ben Weiss explain’s Slavoj Žižek’s theory of Violence

Jing Zhai on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Charles Stewart talks about Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

Magical Realism on Drugs: Colombian History in Netflix’s Narcos

Seen through the eyes of Steven Murphy, the DEA agent whose voice-over narrates the new Netflix series Narcos, Colombia appears to viewers all over the world as a land of sicarios (hired young assassins), putas (whores), and malparidos (the fucked-up). In short, Colombia becomes the quintessential Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez. The Colombian Nobel prize winner is renowned for introducing magical realism as narrative technique: the journalistic description of reality, in which the supernatural and the strange are woven together into matter-of-fact accounts. Narcos introduces the viewer to one of Macondo’s sons: Pablo Escobar, a savvy entrepreneur who was to become one of the most powerful drug lords in the history of the world, the leader of the Medellin cartel. In the early 70s, Escobar went from smuggling cigarettes and TV-sets to exporting cocaine into Miami. By the early 80s, Escobar was transporting one ton of cocaine per day.

Narcos describes the transformation of both Colombia and Murphy. Before Escobar, Colombia was corrupt but poor. But with the arrival of Escobar’s billions, Colombia became a bustling, cosmopolitan hellhole. The narrative arc of Murphy’s metamorphosis is also cast in very simple terms. He was originally a naïve agent chasing after potheads in Miami. Once in Colombia, however, Murphy goes native. In the last episode, Murphy resolves the dispute over a mild car accident by shooting at the other driver, while his gringa wife and Colombian baby girl (who had been left orphaned in a murderous rampage by Escobar’s minions and who Murphy casually picked up to raise) witness in horror Murphy’s new penchant for blood and lawlessness. It is in the wake of this shooting that Murphy’s wife begs Murphy to take the baby and go back home (to the US). A nonchalant Murphy replies that home is now Colombia.

Viewers do not get to witness the effects of Colombia in the transformation of two other secondary characters working at the US Embassy in Bogota: the CIA chief agent and the marine representative of US Southern Army Command. These two gringos have already been “seasoned” and therefore understand that Colombians are moved only through the barrel of a gun. Narcos therefore explicitly suggests that there is a fundamental difference between an uncivilized Latino south and a peaceful Anglo north that is bridged when Anglos get to live for a long time among the savages. Narcos has the three representatives of the US government embracing every aspect of Colombian violence while proving incapable of learning a single word in Spanish over the course of ten episodes.

There is something, however, that Narcos gets right. The series shows the use of torture, terror, and electronic surveillance in the making of the modern US Empire. For three episodes, Escobar operates freely in the USA. Murphy documents the murder of some 3,000 black and Latino narcos in the streets of Miami in the late 70s and early 80s. This blood bath of expendables did not budge any US politicians into action. It was, however, a photo of Escobar moving crates on an airfield of Sandinista Nicaragua that persuaded Reagan to up the ante. It is only then that Murphy moves to Colombia as DEA agent and the CIA and the marines begin torturing Colombians as well pursuing the electronic surveillance of Escobar’s phone communications. The show documents with great accuracy how before Iraq, there was Colombia.

Colombian police and miltary forces storm the rooftop where Pablo Escobar was shot. Courtesy of AFP/Getty Images.

Narcos has Escobar’s minions pitted against a tiny elite of incorruptible bilinguals (politicos and army officers) in a violent struggle over control of the Colombian state. Every event in Colombian politics in the 80s and early 90s is made to revolve around the implementation (or lack thereof) of extradition of narcos to the USA: the assassinations of the Chief Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, the election of Cesar Gaviria as President of Colombia, the M19 attack on the Palace of Justice of 1985, and the constitution of 1991. The picture is so skewed as to become absurd.

On November 6, 1985, M19 stormed Bogota's Palace of Justice. — On November 6, 1985, M19 stormed Bogota’s Palace of Justice.

The M19, a social democratic guerilla movement that led the attack on the Palace of Justice and whose negotiated incorporation into the political process led to the Constitutional Assembly of 1991, is turned in a clownish club of dilettantes. In one episode, Narcos has a strangely taciturn, sad, and inept M19 leader (clearly not the historical leader of M19, Jaime Bateman, who was an exuberant Afro-Colombian who loved both life and politics) break into a museum with his voluptuous lover to steal Bolivar’s sword, a symbol of unfulfilled liberation, only to have the leader hand in the sword to Escobar in the next episode. The M19 was by far the most popular political movement of the 1980s, equipped with a regular army 2,000 strong engaged in a war of positions with the Colombian army in the Valley of Cauca. But in Narcos it is portrayed as a tiny urban cell doing all of Escobar’s dirty business. According to Narcos, the M19 attack on the Palace of Justice was financed by Escobar to have a cache of his papers, captured in a raid, burnt. This is nonsense. M19 seized the Palace to call attention to the systematic aerial bombardment of guerilla forces in the wake of a negotiated peace agreement with President Belisario Betancourt. The burning of the palace was the doing of the army, not the M19.

Photograph of the real-life Jaime Bateman Cayón (April 23, 1940 – April 28, 1983)

The great conflict of the 80s in Colombia was for sure messy. It did involve narcos, the state, urban guerrillas, and the USA. Yet the great protagonist of the 80s was the grass roots movement to transform the oligarchic Colombian regime into a viable constitutional social democracy. The movement partially culminated in the passage of the Constitution of 1991. Narcos completely distorts this process and by so doing overlooks the impulse behind the constitutional banning of extradition. The debate was not just over the threat of narco money corrupting politicos. It was far more ethically substantive: whose blood should be spilled in the global war on drugs and whose bodies incarcerated. This war is now being fought in Mexico and US ghettoes. The dead bodies of the war on drugs continue to be largely brown and the incarcerated ones black, while consumers in Palo Alto and Manhattan get to enjoy Netflix’s Narcos.

History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia

By Jimena Perry

September 23, 2015, marked a historic day in Colombian history. President Juan Manuel Santos and Timoléon Jiménez, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People´s Army (FARC-EP), agreed to sign a peace treaty. Concluding negotiations that started in 2012, the two leaders will sign the treaty on March 23, 2016, ending sixty years of armed conflict. Questions will now be raised about the need to offer reparations to the victims of the violence and how the country can move forward after a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

President Raúl Castro of Cuba, center, with President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, left, and Rodrigo Londoño, of FARC. Courtesy of Desmond Boylan/Associated Press

This healing process has already started in some parts of Colombia in the form of several grassroots movements and state-led initiatives. Since the early 2000s, different communities across the nation located in both urban and rural environments began to create spaces where they could grieve and mourn the loss of their loved ones. These memory sites allow different communities a space to represent their specific experiences of the violence and make sense of their collective trauma. They also offer the country as a whole a series of strategies to help heal, now that peace is on the horizon.

One example is The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation (Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación), founded in 2012. It was created as the result of discussions of Human Rights NGOs and peace organizations that started in 2008. The Center is an inclusive and participatory space, where survivors of violence can participate in constructing their public historical memories. The main structure of the Center is the Memorial for Life, which is a wall built for remembering casualties of the armed conflict. The architects promoted a participatory process where the survivors of atrocities could bring, as a symbolic gesture, a handful of soil dedicated to the victims. The soil symbolized the source of the armed conflict in struggles over landowning but also represented something that belongs to everybody. They wanted people to feel part of the initiative for peace that the Center promotes. Therefore, the wall represents the dead, memory, and the future.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Colombia.

The Center´s intention is to promote commemoration that is meaningful to the local population, rather than to perpetuate an official state narrative. For example, the coordinators of the Center have organized exhibits related to the extermination of the political party, The Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica). The UP was the target of political violence from drug lords, paramilitaries, and agents of the security forces during the mid-1980s, leading to its disappearance. The Center also organized an important exhibit called “Exhibition of the Mothers of Soacha,” in which a group of mothers claimed justice for the assassination of their sons. In 2008, some members of the National Army killed civilians, claiming they were guerrilla fighters. During the last months of that year, approximately 19 corpses of young men appeared in Norte de Santander, a region bordering Venezuela in the north, but officials from Soacha, a city on the southern edge of Bogotá, were able to establish they had been recruited as workers and then appeared dead far away from their home. Since then, the so-called Mothers of Soacha have been threatened, harassed, and kept under surveillance due to their efforts to commemorate their sons.

Now, as Colombia seeks to achieve a lasting peace, these efforts of commemoration and memory in local communities, NGOs, cultural organizations, and the state need to come together to begin a project of national reflection that includes every individual effected by the violence.

Plaque describing the memorial. Courtesy of the author.

Plaque describing the memorial, which reads “This Memorial for Life is inhabited by handfuls of soil that citizens brought during three years. They are kept in 2012 glass tubes embedded in the walls of the building. They symbolize more than 40,000 records of victims of murders and disappearances and thousands of stories of violence. We recover voices, we make visible what has been hidden or silenced because memory resists death. We create the past so dreams can return.” Courtesy of the author.

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)

By Christopher Babits

In the series finale of Mad Men, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) finds himself at a California retreat center overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of several days, Draper attends seminars where participants talk about what’s bothering them. At first, he’s skeptical of the place, reluctantly engaging with other people to support the niece who wanted to attend the retreat. When she leaves him, with no car and no escape, Draper is forced to find peace with himself. In the final scene, he participates in a morning meditation session. He sits with his legs crossed and his eyes closed. Upon uttering an “om,” a bell rings, as Draper has yet another advertising epiphany, and the show ends with the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. Draper finally accepted that he was an ad man, albeit one who was responding to — and incorporating elements of — changing social and cultural norms .

Don Draper in the final scene of Mad Men. Via Hollywood Reporter

In Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, Jessica Grogan examines the rise, demise, and lasting impact of humanistic psychology, a mental health movement that sometimes incorporated meditation, always emphasized self-acceptance, and that Grogan implies changed the corporate world for the better. Grogan offers detailed and illuminating portraits of the individuals most responsible for shaping humanistic psychology — Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May — while putting their movement in historical context. As Grogan demonstrates, humanistic psychology emerged in the 1950s and grew in the 1960s because Maslow, Rogers, May, and others thought psychology had lost its way. In the early Cold War, professional psychologists focused on individuals’ pathologies and academic psychologists emphasized empirical studies at the expense of theory and philosophy. Humanistic psychology, with its emphasis on personal growth and the practice of nondirective therapy, challenged the status quo. By the 1970s, Grogan believes, humanistic psychology infiltrated various segments of American intellectual, cultural, and social life, laying the foundations for today’s therapy culture.

Grogan’s well-constructed and easy-to-follow narrative highlights the discontent that existed in the 1950s and 1960s and the ways that humanistic psychologists offered Americans a new kind of therapy. The threat of nuclear war, not to mention excessive conformity, were key factors for a despondent national mood. Grogan shows that humanistic psychologists had the same critiques of American culture put forth in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956). And she traces the solution humanistic psychologists pursued: create, develop, refine, and advertise a subfield of psychology that emphasized personal growth and individualism.

Abraham Maslow. Via Wikipedia

Humanistic psychologists had a formidable challenge ahead of them. For nearly fifty years, Freudian psychoanalysts and empirical behaviorists dominated the practice of psychotherapy. Grogan describes how Maslow, Rogers, May, and others aimed to transform psychology and American culture in spite of this longstanding dominance. Maslow, a professor of psychology at Brandeis, then a fledgling and financially struggling university, wrote theoretical and philosophical texts, mixed with some small-scale empirical studies, that emphasized the healthy parts of human development and personal growth. Rogers and May pushed humanistic psychology in other directions. Rogers, who taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and left to join the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, California, in 1963, established person-centered therapy. According to Grogan, person-centered therapy allowed for a relationship to develop between psychologist and patient, thus questioning old models where a stifled psychoanalyst listened to her patient and then asked probing questions. May, on the other hand, pushed for group therapy, challenging the predominant belief that therapy had to be a one-on-one relationship between psychoanalyst and patient.

Carl Rogers. Via Wikipedia

By the end of the 1960s, humanistic psychology had gained repute in disparate areas of American intellectual, cultural, and social life. Grogan demonstrates that Maslow, Rogers, and May were able to carve out a space within the psychological discipline for humanistic psychology, organizing their own journals and conferences. Rogers’ ideas about person-centered therapy also dramatically changed the fields of social work and education, putting increasing emphasis on the lived (and subjective) experiences of clients and students. And at least initially, humanistic psychologists supported Timothy Leary’s ideas about the therapeutic uses of LSD. In addition, Grogan examines California’s Esalen Institute, the place that many commentators believe Don Draper found himself in the last episode of Mad Men. Esalen practiced encounter-group therapy and meditation and spiritual practices as paths to self-actualization. By covering such an array of people and places, Grogan underscores that humanistic psychology found a diverse group of followers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Esalen Institute, California. Via Wikipedia.

Encountering America is a fascinating work of cultural and intellectual history. It would have been easy for any historian to get bogged down in the details about the many people, ideas, and events related to humanistic psychology, but Grogan’s narrative style keeps the reader interested. Grogan’s least developed point, however, deals with humanistic psychology’s connections to corporate America. It is clear that humanistic psychology had some impact on the business world (for example, companies now offer employee retreats and sensitivity training), but at what cost? Was this a dramatic victory for humanistic psychology? Or was it selling out? Grogan implies that the changes were for the best, but she also hints that humanistic psychology could only do so much to change businesses’ adherence to the profit-motive. Importantly, Grogan has written a work that could help future historians probe these questions. Anyone interested in Sixties culture and/or the history of psychology should find themselves immersed in this work.

Jessica Grogan, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (Harper Perennial, 2012)

Slavoj Žižek and Violence

By Ben Weiss

In Violence, popular political theorist, Slavoj Žižek, develops several notions for thinking about the contemporary world. While complex philosophical discussions often appear esoteric to the general reader, Žižek’s work renders new insights into numerous global issues, from politics and trade to social movements and cross-cultural exchanges. Entire books could be written on any one of the plethora of themes Žižek introduces. However, his reflections on the nature of violence and tolerance are particularly thought provoking.

Žižek’s book is fundamentally about understanding violence and the way it is represented in global society, especially in relation to economic interests. He draws a distinction between what he calls subjective violence and objective violence. Subjective violence refers to violence that is inflicted by a clearly identifiable agent of action, as in the case of criminal activity or terrorism. Objective violence, on the other hand, has no clear perpetrator and is often overlooked in the background of subjective violence outbreaks. For example, the objective violence of global poverty cannot be blamed on any one entity and, even if financial elites were to be identified as culpable, they could still be exonerated by their subjugation to a system of capitalist finance that makes the rise of an elite financial class inevitable. While Žižek further subdivides objective violence, the core difference illustrated here reflects Žižek’s interest in establishing the way certain forms of violence are represented and perceived in the general social consciousness.

The lack of a clearly identifiable perpetrator in cases of objective violence pushes them to the background while outbreaks of subjectively violent criminal activity, terrorist attacks, etc. easily draw popular attention. Because poverty is a constant, systematic form of violence, sudden violent incidents will attract more notice. Ultimately, Žižek claims that subjective forms of violence actually detract from public notice of objective forms of violence that are often caused by systemic issues that pervade the global financial sector. Žižek’s analysis helps reveal the ways in which world governments may act in the interests of trade networks and capital gains despite the objectively violent consequences that may implicate various populations around the world.

Further, Žižek also establishes that subjective violence, for example criminal activity, may result from the very objectively violent economic system that, in turn, may disenfranchise a group of people and cause them to violently resist their condition. In this way, Violence explains how popular attention to outbursts of violence by specific groups of people not only detracts from public attention to deeper issues but are also born from those deeper issues themselves.

Poster advertising Zizek's movie 'The Pervert's Guide to Ideology' — Poster advertising Zizek’s movie ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology’

Žižek’s exploration of the interplay between subjective and objective violence in the context of state violence, cultural affiliation, political deliberation, and language itself, leads him to make interesting applications to the practice of tolerance. Tolerance exists today as a hallmark of Western liberal thought and, though controversial as it may be to question the potential negatives of such a practice, Žižek pushes readers to think about the ideologies many in the world take for granted. Žižek contends that tolerance necessitates some degree of objectively violent alienation between parties that tolerate one other. In effect, to tolerate other people is to crystalize their differences as a point of contention that must be respected, but not necessarily accepted. For Žižek, “the language of respect is the language of liberal tolerance: respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.” What Žižek sees as dangerous about this dynamic, however, is that the enforcement of difference can become a point of oppression when one party crosses a line that cannot be tolerated by the other party. In this way, the crossing of a line may be articulated by governments as subjectively violent, even though the very rhetoric of tolerance frames the boundary that facilitated the outbreak of violence.

Slavoj Zizek in Liverpool, 2008. Via Wikipedia.

This dynamic points to the importance of Violence. Historically, Žižek has pushed the limits of scholarship to question even the most basic assumptions about the contemporary world. This work reveals the value of doing so. Outside of his specific applications, the definitional analysis he renders for types of violence proves incredibly useful for understanding the way politics intersect with public perception, and it causes us to raise essential and new questions about the world in which we live.

You may also like these articles in our Social Theory series:

Jing Zhai on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Charles Stewart talks about Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast, by Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. (2014)

By Diego A. Godoy

Walter Salles’ 2001 film Behind the Sun (Abril Despedaçado) chronicles the blood feud that envelops two families in the Bahian sertão (outback) in 1910. The rival Ferreira Breves clans are engaged in an unending war over land and honor. Portraits of the deceased hang on each family’s walls and their blood-drenched shirts are hung outside to signal mercy; the next killing cycle cannot commence until the blood has turned yellow. It is a depressing picture of misery, violence, and backwardness. Nevertheless, the arrival of a traveling circus and the ensuing friendships between the Breves sons and two of the performers infuse this somber story with a whimsical romanticism. Ultimately, the youngest Breves boy attempts to liberate himself and his brother from their wretched situation. The struggle, as one might expect, ends badly, but not without a note of measured optimism.

Screenshot from the film Abril Despedaçado.

Depictions like the one in this film, with all its attendant ideas and images, are what preoccupy Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. in The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast. Albuquerque, who is Professor of Brazilian History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, is considered one of Brazil’s preeminent scholars. In this now classic study of Brazilian regionalism, the reader is presented with the story of how the Northeastern region of Brazil was “nordestinizado,” or transformed into an imagined space of misery, violence, folklore, fanaticism, and rebellion. This idea of the Northeast was “invented” by a rich archive of texts and images that achieved prominence in the 1920s and continues to influence our conception of the area and its inhabitants. Albuquerque examines a thick assortment of discourses advanced through literature, cinema, music, art, and academic production to see how they “construct and institute the realities” of the Northeast.

The very idea of the Northeast as a distinct region came into existence as Brazil’s central South, particularly the city and state of São Paulo, became a type of foil to the Northeast as a result of rapid and sustained industrialization, urbanization, and European immigration. Soon, travelers and journalists from the South began to disseminate accounts detailing the strange and backward customs of Northeasterners—a discourse that would continue to gain prominence with time. The onset of seasonal droughts proved a “point of unity for diverse Northern interests to raise their various complaints to the national level, at the cost of converging around a shared vocabulary of weather-based misery and suffering.” Banditry and messianic movements quickly joined the drought discourse as additional points of argument for “investing in the modernization of the North.”

Gilberto Freyre, circa 1975

In terms of culture, members of the new regional elite began to produce works that crystallized all the stereotypical perceptions of the region as fanatical, folkloric, underdeveloped and drought-stricken. The first generation of cultural elites, spearheaded by the renowned Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, rooted their work in notions of tradition and nostalgia for the past. Albuquerque explains the preponderance of folklorizations and romanticizations in artistic and academic works as a reaction to greater nationalist strategies that heralded a radically different and “modern” idea of Brasilidade (Brazilianess) emanating from the center South. The author is highly critical of the discursive paradigm fashioned by these individuals because of its essentialization of nordestinos and their history, one that “imposed a ready-made history that naturalized the present injustice, discrimination, and misery.” A more leftist, less traditionalist group of observers painted the Northeast as a place that was naturally inclined toward revolt against exploitation and bourgeois domination from outside the region. Inadvertently, perhaps, this cemented the marginalized identity of the Northeast as a land of perpetual misery and injustice.

Underpinning Albuquerque’s analysis are the Foucaldian concepts of dispositif and gaze. Dispositif refers to the various institutional, physical, and administrative bodies and knowledge structures that are responsible for maintaining the exercise of power. Gaze, on the other hand, refers to the idea that it is not just the object of knowledge in a power relationship that is constructed, but also the knower, the person “gazing.” This underscores the extreme importance of the South, particularly Sao Paulo, in the invention of the Northeast. Throughout the study, the South acts a counterpoint to the Northeast—in fact, it is just as critical as the latter. The “modern,” eugenically superior white, Italian South essentially shapes the primitively backward African, racially-mixed Northeast. Indeed, Barbara Weinstein’s excellent new book, The Color of Modernity: Sao Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil, illuminates exactly how the intellectuals and politicians who formulated Paulista identity during the first half of the twentieth century ardently advanced the idea that their region and its people were the vanguard of Brazilian civilization. Not only was Sao Paulo culturally and economically superior to the rest of the nation, but its citizens had a unique aptitude for social progress and modernity. Not surprisingly, this discourse of exceptionalism came neatly wrapped in explanations that emphasized the European origins of the majority of its inhabitants.

Although Albuquerque does not explicitly use the term “internal colonialism,” his narrative is engaged with the concept. The Northeast’s alterity thrust it into a cultural relationship with the South that is reminiscent of that between colonizer and colonized. And while internal colonialism seems like a fitting label, perhaps one should take a cue from postcolonial theorist Edward Said (as Weinstein does) and consider the concept of “internal Orientalism” as well. Orientalism is particularly enlightening because it focuses on the colonizing power and actually tells us more about the desires and identities of the “occidental architects” than it does about the “Orient.”

The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast is a fascinating exploration into an idea that endures to the present day, as films like Behind the Sun demonstrate. It is an enthralling book that will give the reader a clearer understanding of Brazilian culture.

The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast, by Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., translated by Jerry Dennis Metz (Duke University Press, 2014)

Recent Posts