Natalie Cincotta, Author at Not Even Past

Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico by Daniel Nemser (2017)

By focusing on the relationship between race and physical space, Nemser analyzes colonial concepts of race through an unexpected and innovative lens. His investigation of concrete structures and their effect on the creation of Mexico’s caste society spans the Spanish colonial period, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Examining the dynamic among the indigenous, Spanish, and mestizo populations in Mexico City, Nemser claims that the conceptualization of race in colonial Mexico developed not only through interpersonal relationships but also grew out of the physical separation of peoples into distinct spaces.

Nemser focuses on four key spaces: religious congregations, mestizo schools, urban neighborhoods, and the city’s royal gardens. Ultimately, he finds that the physical separation of cultural groups implicitly created the subordinate status of non-Spanish populations. These racialized spaces, then, cultivated and institutionalized the inequality still found in Mexico today.

Nemser begins his discussion with the first Spanish efforts to separate indigenous populations into religious settlements known as congregations. He builds upon this foundational Spanish-indigenous dichotomy by then investigating the paradoxical existence of the mestizo and the segregation of Mexico City’s neighborhoods. Initially, biracial mestizos appeared to be the perfect mediators to bring the Spanish Catholic faith to indigenous populations. However, by the end of the sixteenth century, mestizos’ role in society had declined from missionary to vagabond. The subsequent separation of mestizos into different schools and neighborhoods further cultivated their reputation as dangerous and untrustworthy. Finally, Nemser experiments with a much more conceptual argument. Focusing on early modern Spanish understandings of botany, he asserts that the organization of the city’s botanical gardens throughout the nineteenth century acted as the predecessor to the scientific racism characteristic of the twentieth century. As imperial botanists in Mexico City separated plants into distinct spaces and micro-climates based on their biological characteristics, new concepts of biopolitics developed to address New Spain’s growing multiracial population.

A painting showing the casta system in eighteenth-century Mexico (via Wikipedia)

Nemser structures his book in a way that capitalizes on accessibility to the reader. Each of the four core chapters discusses an increasingly more complex separation of space. The reader thus moves from concrete religious congregations to more abstract botanical divisions. This allows Nemser to delve into the complexity of racial separation in the colonial era without confusing readers. Finally, he utilizes the introduction and conclusion to tie these colonial concepts back to the modern era.

Infrastructures of Race relies on public resources such as administrative reports, academic debates, and urban surveys that allow Nemser to demonstrate how Spanish officials restructured urban spaces into racialized areas. Due to the nature of the sources, it is difficult to gauge the indigenous perspective. As such, Nemser’s analysis emphasizes the role of elite administrators in codifying race but cannot provide the indigenous response to such separation.

Infrastructures of Race provides a compelling discussion of the role of physical spaces in creating and solidifying definitions of race in society. Weaving a narrative between established theory and new research, Nemser has created an investigation that is both innovative and accessible to the reader. Taking care to consistently maintain the relevancy of the colonial caste system to modern Mexico, Nemser sheds light on both historical racial organization and contemporary institutional racism. Both academic and non-academic audiences will find Nemser’s work thought provoking.

Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional

You may also like:

Casta Paintings, by Susan Deans-Smith
Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia by Nancy Applebaum, reviewed by Madeleine Olson
Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew Fisher and Matthew O’Hara, reviewed by Kristie Flannery

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

By Christopher Rose

Editor’s Note: To accompany this year’s Institute for Historical Studies theme and the theme of our film series Faces of Migration, Not Even Past will be showcasing a series of posts featuring graduate students working on topics related to migration, exile or displacement.

Nearly every historian can attest to the fact that working in the archives can lead you down unexpected paths that provide tantalizing, and often frustratingly abbreviated, glimpses into areas outside of their usual research. I had such an experience with a file that had the innocuous name “Near East Refugee Aid” one afternoon at the United Nations Archive in Geneva.

Near East Refugee Aid (NERA) was the name of a tiny League of Nations program that operated in the early- to mid-1920s. It consisted of only three agents—a director and secretary in Constantinople, and a female case worker based in Aleppo (now in Syria)—and operated on a tiny budget (none of its employees were paid). As I read through the documents in the file, I realized that NERA’s mission was far more specific than its name suggested: to seek out child survivors of the Armenian genocide.

The genocide began with the purge of prominent Armenian intellectuals and political activists by the Ottoman government in the spring of 1915. In the months that followed, the majority of Armenians residing in Asia Minor were rounded up and sent on forced marches toward the city of Deir ez-Zor, located in the Syrian desert along the Euphrates River. The vast majority of deportees never arrived, having been shot or hanged, or starved or frozen to death. Those few who managed to survive the trek found that almost no arrangements had been made to provide housing or other supplies for them once they arrived in Syria.

Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by Ottoman soldiers, 1915 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Estimates of the number of victims vary wildly. The Armenians claim over 1.5 million dead. While most historians—including a number of Turkish academics—recognize the events of 1915 as genocidal, the Turkish government does not and offers a revised death toll of around 700,000 (not coincidentally equal in number to the estimated Turkish civilian casualties during the war).

The documents in the NERA file complicated the usual polarized narrative of Turkish barbarism and Armenian suffering, and made the already tragic story even more heartbreaking.

NERA’s agents were looking for the children of Armenians who had been taken in by Turkish families. In some cases, Armenian parents left infants and toddlers with Turkish neighbors, coworkers, and friends who offered to take them in as deportation orders were issued. Other children were given away en route—sometimes, tragically, even sold—as their starving parents foresaw their own fates and desperately sought any chance for their children to live.

NERA’s mission was to find these children and, in the language of the Christian missionaries who staffed the organization, “to rescue them from Islam.” NERA’s reports laid out a narrative of victimhood: the children had been stripped of their identities, given new names, raised as Turkish speaking Muslims, forced to suppress their Armenian identities.

Armenian child refugees in cramped classrooms in Aleppo, 1915 (via Wikimedia Commons)

When NERA agents arrived in a town or village, some of the Turkish families came forward in hopes that their foster children might be reunited with their families, but others were quite reluctant to do so. It was unclear from the file what other methods NERA’s agents used to identify children suspected of being Armenian (neighborhood gossip appeared to be one source of information). Children would be summoned for an interview with a caseworker and an Armenian speaking volunteer. Since many of the children had been infants at the time and did not remember the Armenian language, more elaborate methods might be used. Children who could recognize traditional Armenian lullabies, for example, were assumed to be of Armenian origin. Once “recovered,” the children would be taken to a group home in Constantinople or Aleppo, until arrangements could be made to send them to relatives in Greece, France, or the United States.

While in some cases—usually those of children who were abandoned during the death marches—they had been treated as servants and never really considered part of the family, the opposite seemed to be true for those taken in by friends and coworkers in the child’s home town. However, NERA’s agents appeared to completely reject the idea the children might have formed a bond with the only family they had ever known. Some did not know they were not the natural born children of their Turkish parents. Tears and protestations of the Turkish parents at having the children taken away were usually dismissed as parlor tricks. In several cases police intervention was necessary to remove the children from their homes.

Armenian children in an orphanage in Merzifon, Turkey, 1918 (via Wikimedia Commons)

It was clear from the documents that the situation, which was represented by NERA as morally black and white, of rescuing Armenian children from “duplicitous” Turks, was far more complex in many cases. The traumatic effects on these children were clear from the file, although unrecognized at the time by the case workers on site. Some became violent and had to be restrained or sedated. A handful fled from the group homes and were eventually declared “lost.”

Frustratingly, the children’s stories contained in these files ended once they left Turkey. The file contained no information about what happened once they were reunited with relatives. Whether they fared well; if they kept in contact with their Turkish foster parents; or if any had eventually come back to Turkey to visit or live remains a mystery.

NERA’s work was short-lived, and came to an end toward the end of the 1920s, having successfully reclaimed just over one hundred children with relatives and, biases aside, provide a fascinating glimpse into the aftermath of the genocide. Several scholars (see note below) have begun working on the issue of Islamized Armenians living in Turkey after the genocide, and are contributing to a more nuanced analysis of what has become one of the most polarizing historical debates of the 20^th century.

You may also like:

Kelly Douma reviews Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (2016) by Stephan Ihrig
Andrew Straw on the Tatars of Crimea: Ethnic Cleansing and Why History Matters

Check out the schedule for our film series “Faces of Migration: Classic and Contemporary Films”
More on this year’s Institute for Historical Studies theme “Migration, Exile, and Displacement”

The National Museum of Anthropology in San Salvador

Picture of a mural at the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), San Salvador — Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), San Salvador (via Brittany Erwin)

By Brittany Erwin

With its multiple universities, extensive commercial sector, and fast-growing population, the city of San Salvador has become an important axis of cultural production for the Salvadoran nation. As the country’s capital city, it houses many notable institutions, including the National Archive, The Museum of Art, and the National Theater, in addition to several historic churches. Included in these important institutions is MUNA, the Museo Nacional de Antropología.

Founded in 1883, MUNA was a product of cooperation between Salvadoran president Rafael Zaldívar and David J. Guzmán, a politician and scholar. Today the full name of the museum is the David J. Guzman National Museum of Anthropology in honor of his contributions to natural and archaeological knowledge in the country.

Located in the heart of downtown San Salvador, this museum offers the nation’s most comprehensive exhibition of Salvadoran history. With five exhibit halls, space for temporary displays and artists’ showcases, MUNA serves as a pillar of El Salvador’s effort towards cultural preservation.

The current temporary exhibit explores the legacy of the last significant eruption of the San Salvador Volcano a hundred years ago, in 1917. Seismic activity and its effects on all aspects of daily life is an important reoccurring theme in the historical narrative that this museum presents.

As visitors enter, they encounter a large, striking mural on the interior courtyard wall. Its vibrant colors and graphic scenery illustrate the significant historical impression that this small country has made. Painted by Antonio Barilla and completed in 2011, the work illustrates the story of the nation. Over centuries, struggles for power among different social, cultural, and ethnic groups have manifested in cycles of conquest, internal conflict, and war. In this sense, Barilla’s mural represents the history of this country as a story about people who have turned a legacy of suffering into one of perseverance and triumph. In that same sense, the mural also provides a thematic map to enhance the museum visitor’s examination of the artifacts that make up that history.

The quantity of exhibits in this museum is impressive, ranging from early-Mayan ceramics to modern-day markers of Catholic culture. Three of its more prominent specialties are the agricultural foundations of El Salvador’s early civilizations, the ongoing role of ritual worship in community life, and the consequences of living in a highly volcanic region.

For the student, this institution offers a wide range of historical, biological, and anthropological information about the interesting dynamics between the past, present, and future in this Central American country. In addition to the artifact displays, MUNA is home to a specialized library. Its collections comprise a variety of primary and secondary works pertaining to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the nation. These resources are available to local and international researchers.

For the tourist, the historian, or the curious visitor, MUNA allows for a Salvadoran excursion to the past, starting from the earliest days of inhabitance and ending in the contemporary reality of twenty-first century life.

For more information about this museum and its collections, visit: http://www.cultura.gob.sv/museo-nacional-de-antropologia-dr-david-j-guzman/

Also by Brittany Erwin on Not Even Past:

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador

You may also like:

Too much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellín, Colombia, by Jimena Perry
History Museums: Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico, by Robert Wilks
History Museums: the Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful by Joan Neuberger

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.

Che Guevara’s Last Interview

by Jonathan C. Brown

October 9th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Among the documental gems housed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library is Guevara’s last interview. It occurred on the very morning of his execution. A Cuban-American agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, Félix Rodríguez, conducted the interview. Rodríguez composed a memorandum of his talk with the revolutionary and sent it from Bolivia to CIA headquarters at Langley, which forwarded it to the White House.

The CIA agent even convinced Guevara to pose for his last live photograph.

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency had been tracking the activities of the Argentinean-born revolutionary who served as Fidel Castro’s guerrilla lieutenant, economic czar, and international agent provocateur. In the spring of 1964, CIA lost the scent. They speculated that Che Guevara was dead. The White House did not learn that he might still be alive until April 1967, when Bolivia’s president, René Barrientos, wrote directly to President Johnson requesting urgent military assistance. Barrientos was facing a guerrilla uprising by both Cubans and Bolivians led by the legendary El Che.

Why Bolivia? Guevara had grown weary of his leadership role in socializing Cuba’s economy and having to explain why production had declined drastically. At the same time, his diplomatic role involved justifying Cuba’s deviation from the doctrines of its chief benefactors in Moscow. Fidel and Che aided revolutionary insurgencies abroad at a time that Soviet leaders carried on policies of “peaceful coexistence” with the West.

Guerrillero Heroico, 1960 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Ideologically, Guevara had more in common with Chairman Mao Zedong than Leonid Brezhnev. Yet on his final trip to Beijing, Mao refused to meet with Che. Other Chinese officials accused him of “revisionism” for accepting aid from the Soviets. Guevara decided to retire from politics and economics and devote himself to what he knew best – guerrilla warfare.

Che Guevara had always fancied himself as Latin America’s chief guerrilla strategist. He suggested that the lessons of the Cuban Revolution could be replayed elsewhere in Latin America. Guerrilla movements were still active in Central American and in Colombia and Venezuela. His idea was to spread thin the forces of imperialism, to “create two, three Vietnams,” as Guevara wrote in his famous message to the Tricontinental Conference. Che, then 38 years old, wanted to ignite the revolution in Southern South America while he still had the stamina he had under Fidel’s orders nine years earlier.

In the eastern foothills of Bolivia, Che assembled a fighting force of about fifty men, divided between thirty Bolivians and the rest Cubans and other foreigners. Remarkably, neither the CIA nor Latin American customs officials had picked up any indication of the movement of men and arms into the heart of South America. Guevara had planned that Paraguayans, Peruvians, and Brazilians would join his group and gain sufficient skills to begin guerrilla uprisings in their own countries. Eventually, Che wanted to return to his native Argentina with a band of his own paisanos. It was not to be.

The White House responded to President Barrientos by dispatching two Cuban-American CIA agents and seventeen Green Berets from the Panama Canal Zone. The Green Berets were to train a battalion of Bolivian guerrilla-hunting rangers. The intelligence agents offered to supervise Bolivian units in the field. Agent Félix Rodríguez was assigned to the Bolivian Army at the rank of a captain.

Che in Bolivia, 1967 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Months of isolation and firefights with Bolivian forces had reduced Che’s group from fifty to some twenty men by the end of September 1967. At that moment, the first units of the ranger battalion trained by the US Special Forces arrived on the front lines. In its first battle with the guerrillas on October 8, a company of rangers captured the leader. “Don’t shoot,” he yelled. “I’m El Che and I’m worth more to you alive than dead.”

Guevara’s surrender allowed several of his men to retreat, though the rangers caught up and killed many of them. On the morning of the next day, Agent Félix Rodríguez flew to the small hamlet in eastern Bolivia where the wounded Che was held prisoner. The CIA agent pleaded with the commanders to permit him to take Guevara to the Panama Canal Zone for interrogation, but they informed him that President Barrientos had already announced that Che had died in battle the day before.

Rodríguez went to talk to Che Guevara. “Nobody interrogates me!” said Che, although he did consent to have a conversation with the CIA officer. Rodríguez untied the captive and invited him outside into the bright sunlight for a photo. The agent and the prisoner returned inside for a chat.

Che refused to denounce Fidel. He told Rodríguez that Castro was not a communist until after he came to power. Moreover, Guevara wanted Fidel to know that the revolution in Latin America would ultimately succeed. Che advised his wife back home in Cuba to marry again. He knew he was going to die, reported Rodríguez, but “Che never lost his composure.”

Within a few minutes, a Bolivian sergeant came to shoot the world famous revolutionary. “Let me stand up,” El Che said to him. “Know that you are killing a man! Now shoot, dammit!”

172. Memorandum From Director of Central Intelligence Helms

Washington, October 13, 1967.

MEMORANDUM FOR
The Secretary of State
The Secretary of Defense
Mr. Walt W. Rostow
Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs

SUBJECT
Statements by Ernesto “Che” Guevara Prior to His Execution in Bolivia

Further details have now been obtained from [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] who was on the scene in the small village of Higueras where Ernesto “Che” Guevara was taken after his capture on 8 October 1967 by the Bolivian Army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion.
[less than 1 line of source text not declassified] attempted to interrogate Guevara on 9 October 1967 as soon as he got access to him at around 7 a.m. At that time “Che” Guevara was sitting on the floor in the corner of a small, dark schoolroom in Higueras [sic]. He had his hands over his face. His wrists and feet were tied. In front of him on the floor lay the corpses of two Cuban guerrillas. Guevara had a flesh wound in his leg, which was bandaged.
Guevara refused to be interrogated but permitted himself to be drawn into a conversation with [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] during which he made the following comments:
Cuban economic situation: Hunger in Cuba is the result of pressure by United States imperialism. Now Cuba has become self-sufficient in meat production and has almost reached the point where it will begin to export meat. Cuba is the only economically self-sufficient country in the Socialist world.
Camilo Cienfuegos: For many years the story has circulated that Fidel Castro Ruz had Cienfuegos, one of his foremost deputies, killed because his personal popularity presented a danger to Castro. Actually the death of Cienfuegos was an accident. Cienfuegos has been in Oriente Province when he received a call to attend a general staff meeting in Havana. He left by plane and the theory was that the plane became lost in low-ceiling flying conditions, consumed all of its fuel, and crashed in the ocean, and no trace of him was ever found. Castro had loved Cienfuegos more than any of his lieutenants.
Fidel Castro Ruz: Castro had not been a Communist prior to the success of the Cuban Revolution. Castro’s own statements on the subject are correct.
The Congo: American imperialism had not been the reason for his failure there but, rather, the Belgian mercenaries. He denied ever having several thousand troops in the Congo, as sometimes reported, but admitted having had “quite a few”.
Treatment of Guerrilla Prisoners in Cuba: During the course of the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath, there had been only about 1,500 individuals killed, exclusive of armed encounters such as the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban Government, of course, executed all guerrilla leaders who invaded its territory. . . . (He stopped then with a quizzical look on his face and smiled as he recognized his own position on Bolivian soil.)
Future of the Guerrilla Movement in Bolivia: With his capture, the guerrilla movement had suffered an overwhelming setback in Bolivia, but he predicted a resurgence in the future. He insisted that his ideals would win in the end even though he was disappointed at the lack of response from the Bolivian campesinos. The guerrilla movement had failed partially because of Bolivian Government propaganda which claimed that the guerrillas represented a foreign invasion of Bolivian soil. In spite of the lack of popular response from the Bolivian campesinos, he had not planned an exfiltration route from Bolivia in case of failure. He had definitely decided to either fall or win in this effort.
According to [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] when Guevara, Simon Cuba, and Aniceto Reynaga Gordillo were captured on 8 October, the Bolivian Armed Forces Headquarters ordered that they be kept alive for a time. A telegraphic code was arranged between La Paz and Higueras with the numbers 500 representing Guevara, 600 meaning the phrase “keep alive” and 700 representing “execute”. During the course of the discussion with Guevara, Simon Cuba and Aniceto Reynaga were detained in the next room of the school house. At one stage, a burst of shots was heard and [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] learned later that Simon Cuba had been executed. A little later a single shot was heard and it was learned afterward that Aniceto Reynaga had been killed. When the order came at 11:50 a.m. from La Paz to kill Guevara, the execution was delayed as long as possible. However, when the local commander was advised that a helicopter would arrive to recover the bodies at approximately 1:30 p.m., Guevara was executed with a burst of shots at 1:15 p.m. Guevara’s last words were, “Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will again rise in the Americas.” To his executioner he said, “Remember, you are killing a man.”
At no time during the period he was under [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] observation did Guevara lose his composure.

Dick

[Richard Helms, Director of the CIA]

Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Bolivia, Vol. IV, Memoranda, January 1966-December 1968. Secret. Copies of this memorandum in CIA files indicate that it was drafted by Broe and [name not declassified] in the Western Hemisphere Division and approved by Karamessines. (Central Intelligence Agency, DDO/IMS, Operational Group, Job 78-06423A, U.S. Government-President).

For more on Che in Bolivia see Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (2017)

Also by Jonathan C. Brown on Not Even Past:

On the Future of Cuba-Texas Relations
How Washington Helped Fidel Castro Rise to Power
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba
On the Phone with LBJ and Panamanian President Roberto F. Chiari

Yoav Di-Capua on the story behind an image of Che in Gaza
Edward Shore reviews Che: A Revolutionary Life by Lee Anderson
Franz D. Hensel Riveros reviews Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey

Victoria & Abdul: Simulacra & Simulation

by Gajendra Singh
University of Exeter

Posted in partnership with the History Department at the University of Exeter and The Imperial and Global Forum.

One of the earliest films to be shot and then screened throughout India were scenes from the Delhi Durbar between December 29, 1902 and January 10, 1903 The Imperial Durbar, created to celebrate the accession of Edward VII as Emperor of India following the death of Victoria, was the most expensive and elaborate act of British Imperial pageantry that had ever been attempted. Nathaniel Curzon, as Viceroy of India, oversaw the construction of a tent city housing 150,000 guests north of Delhi proper and what occurred in Delhi was to be replicated (on a smaller scale) in towns and cities across India.

The purpose of the Durbar was to contrast British modernity with Indian tradition. Europeans at the Durbar were instructed to dress in contemporary styles even when celebrating an older British Imperial past (as with veterans of the ‘Mutiny’). Indians, however, were to wear Oriental (perceptibly Oriental) costumes as motifs of their Otherness. This construction of an exaggerated sense of Imperial difference, and through it Imperial order and Imperial continuity, was significant. It was a statement of the permanence of Empire, of Britain’s Empire being at the vanguard of modernity even as the Empire itself was increasingly anxious about nascent nationalist movements and rocked by perpetual Imperial crises.

It’s unlikely that Stephen Frears watched these films from 1902 or 1903 upon finalising the screenplay and then shooting Victoria & Abdul. They have only recently been digitized and archived by the British Film Institute. But his recent movie, filmed when most visions of the past are obscured by the myopia of the present, is an unconscious reproduction of films produced and shown when Empire was an idée fixe in the British mind. Abdul Karim, one of several Indians at Victoria’s court during her long reign (the other two, that I know of, were Dalip Singh, the last Maharaja of Punjab, and Victoria Gouramma, the daughter of the last Raja of Kodagu), is a cypher throughout the film. He shows no emotion or sentiment or stirring rhetoric except when genuflecting before his Empress – kissing her feet upon their first meeting, stoically holding her hand upon her death, sitting as a sentinel by her statue in Agra into his dotage.

Such a one-dimensional portrayal is partly a reflection of the populist histories used as source material for the film. Sushila Anand’s Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul is a titillating account of the possible sexual encounter between the matronly white Empress and her much younger lowborn Indian servant and Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant is a more sober tale of the scandal that the relationship caused among Victoria’s staff. But even in these accounts Karim has voice and agency. Anand and Basu are, in part, relying upon Karim’s own accounts of what transpired when he and Victoria were alone.

Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim, 1893 (via Wikimedia Commons)

That agency is consciously stripped by Frears. His instruction to Ali Fazal upon taking up the role was to play him as Peter Sellar’s Chance in Being There, a character who is a simple-minded, sheltered gardener suddenly catapulted into political power.[1] It is Judi Dench’s Victoria and, to a lesser extent, Eddie Izzard’s wonderfully corpulent Bertie/Edward VII who are the actual protagonists of the piece. The official synopsis makes this clear:

The film tells the extraordinary true story of an unexpected friendship in the later years of Queen Victoria’s remarkable rule. When Abdul Karim, a young clerk, travels from India to participate in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, he is surprised to find favor [sic.] with the Queen herself. As the Queen questions the constrictions of her long-held position, the two forge an unlikely and devoted alliance with a loyalty to one another that her household and inner circle all attempt to destroy. As the friendship deepens, the Queen begins to see a changing world through new eyes and joyfully reclaims her humanity.

Her rule, her favour, her humanity. It is a story told to redeem Victoria. It is through her eyes that the narrative is conveyed and any change or evolution in a character occurs in her attitudes towards India and her subject people – learning some terribly mis-pronounced Hindustani/Urdu and that Indians too can act as competent servants (huzzah!). Victoria is cast as the flagbearer of Imperial progress against her “racialist” son who despises Karim and is representative of a “bad” form of Imperialism. “If only the latter had not won out,” we are expected to cry, “then India would not have been lost!” Only in the uncovering of the fact that Karim had gonorrhoea by Victoria’s outraged staff do we get a glimpse of the many lives lived by Karim. One can only assume that he had at least some fun in England.

The film is an Orientalist fable that is not meant to reveal any social life of the Indian portrayed. But that is not what makes it remarkable. Stephen Frears made his career with My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, a film which presented the transgressive relationship between Gordon Warnecke’s Omar, a British-Pakistani from Battersea, and Daniel Day Lewis’ Johnny, a neo-Nazi. It seems that the complex filmic relationships that were once Frears’ stock-in-trade are no longer filmable or seen as commercially viable. Instead in Abdul we have a character who is childlike in his stupor at British munificence, completely asexual despite the revelation that he has a sexually transmitted disease, and is always ready with a word of wisdom that only a true Oriental can provide (lines that are, of course, from Rumi – always Rumi). It is an unconscious reproduction of the first films ever produced of and in India. But at least in those films the desire to cast Indians into caricatures was born from Imperial anxiety; this is merely the product of an absence of thought.

Sources and Related Reading:

Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (2015).

Kim Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’; Past and Present, 218: 1 (2013): 159-197.

Sushila Anand, Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul, (1996).

Shrabani Basu, Victoria and Karim: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant, (2010).

Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, (1997).

UK readers can find early films of India on BFI Player here, and a full list of films from this era (with commentary by the author) here. US and international readers can see a similar film, Delhi Durbar (1912) on Youtube here.

[1] According to Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, BBC Radio Five Live, 15^th September 2017. Hello to Jason Isaacs.

You may also like:

Sundar Vadlamudi reviews Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India by Gauri Viswanathan
Indrani Chatterjee on monasteries and memory in Northeast India
Isabel Huacuja reviews The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayley and Tim Harper

IHS Talk: Beyond “Crisis” and Headlines: The History of Humanity as a History of Migration

On Monday, September 18, 2017, José C. Moya of Barnard College delivered a talk considering migration not as a current concern or “crisis” but as an intrinsic element of the human condition. Moya discusses migration as the very origin of our species, of its “racial” and cultural diversity, its global dispersion, and an engine of opportunity, innovation, and socioeconomic growth but also a source of disparities, inequalities, and conflict at global and local scales.

José C. Moya is professor of history at Director of the Forum on Migration at Barnard College, Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, and Professor Emeritus at UCLA, where he taught for seventeen years and directed an equal number of doctoral dissertations. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Paris, San Andres (Argentina), and Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and invited speaker or research fellow at the universities of Berlin, Vienna, Krakow, Oxford, Leiden, Louvain, Fudan in Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Sao Paulo, the London School of Economics, and the Colegio de Mexico, among others.

Professor Moya has authored more than fifty publications, including Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930, a book that received five awards, World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century, co-authored with Adam McKeown, and The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, an edited volume on Latin American historiography. He is currently working on a book about anarchism in Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World during the belle époque and editing a book titled “Atlantic Crossroads: Webs of Migration, Culture and Politics between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, 1800-2010.”

The talk was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies, LLILAS Benson, and International Relations and Global Studies.

Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader (2016) by Matthew Qvortrup

by Augusta Dell’Omo

With a sly smile, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, lets his black Labrador Koni off the leash and it immediately begins to approach German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Merkel, who was bitten by a dog in 1995, attempts to hide her visible discomfort, lips pursed and legs tightly crossed. Putin, well aware of the effect he created in the German Chancellor, appears smug and amused. The first Putin-Merkel visit in 2006 got off to a rough start. As one of many revealing anecdotes in Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader, political scientist and professor Matthew Qvortrup seeks to introduce an American audience to the woman fondly known in Germany as “Mutti.” Qvortrup’s work remains one of the few English language biographies of “the new leader of the free world.” Serving as the Chancellor of Germany since 2005, Merkel represents the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the major center-left party in Germany. On September 24, 2017, Merkel won a remarkable fourth term in office, heading off a nationalist surge to maintain control of the German Bundestag, the legislative body at the federal level in Germany. Merkel’s success begs the question: how did a woman, born in relative obscurity in East Germany to a Lutheran pastor rise to become the protégée of Helmut Kohl and arguably the most powerful woman in Europe? Qvortrup, relying on original sources and archives never made available in English, in combination with his powerful storytelling abilities, creates a compelling narrative of Merkel’s rise.
The first half of Angela Merkel details both the solidification of Merkel’s power in the CDU, but also the solidification of Merkel’s “brand.” As she herself would admit, Merkel relies far more on substance and consistency than flashy speeches and charm. Political pundits in Germany and abroad often criticize Merkel as “boring.” She prefers to exude calm, rationality, prudence, and unflappability. For much of her early life, says Qvortrup, Merkel “was not consumed by a passion for dissent,” instead nurturing a deep love of the sciences, eventually achieving a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Qvortrup attributes Merkel’s political awakening to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the process of German reunification. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Merkel became involved in the new democracy movement through the Demokratischer Aufbruch (DA), which would eventually merge with the East German CDU. Merkel rapidly rose through the ranks, eventually receiving an appointment by Kohl himself as federal Minister for Women and Young People. Merkel’s early years coming up in the ranks of the CDU solidified in her mind the important of grassroots organization, effective team members, and loyalty to the party hierarchy. While Merkel discovered her commitment and passion on issues of capitalist oriented economic development and reunification, Merkel also revealed a political pragmatism many of her colleagues did not initially suspect. According to Qvortrup, Merkel proved perfectly willing to let other members of the party fail if it advanced her own progress. Early on in her career in November 1991, Merkel declined requests to speak out in favor of the Prime Minister of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), Lothar de Maizière, after calculating that his fall opened the door for her career advancement.

Angela Merkel at a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) campaign event in 2013 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The second half of Qvortrup’s work really picks up speed as Merkel, after consolidating power in the CDU, gains control of the chancellorship. Here, Qvortrup launches into the crux of his argument: Merkel’s success, he believes, rests in her unique ability to recognize others’ perceptions of her, and then either reinforce or upend them as needed. This, in combination with her pragmatism, willingness to compromise on the international stage, and promotion of modernization and globalization at home, made Merkel not only popular, but effective. Her sole guiding principle, it seems, is the preservation of European unity with Germany’s preeminent position in it. In Qvortrup’s calculations, Merkel’s handling of almost every major political crisis, from the Eurozone crisis to Russian aggression in Ukraine, reflected her ability to calmly and rationally assess the situation. Her interactions with Putin are perhaps the most famous and powerful example of her rationality. According to Qvortrup, Merkel manipulated Putin’s expectations of her as a matronly, unassuming woman in order to drive concessions out of him, and put herself in his situation. As an East German, Merkel possessed a unique ability to recognize the Russian geopolitical uncertainty. Furthermore, Qvortrup hints at the clear gender politics of much of Merkel’s reign: she not only remains above the fray in the masculine political games of Europe’s male leaders, but she also manipulates their expectations of her.

Merkel arrives at the Supporting Syria and the Region conference, London, 2016 (via Flickr)

Qvortrup ends with his most interesting discovery of all: Merkel’s support for refugees represents a stark departure from her usual approach to politics. Merkel, traditionally governed almost entirely by pragmatism and a commitment to a united Europe, finally “discovered an issue that was more important than her own career.” Here, Qvortrup comes full circle to the young girl who grew up in a divided nation, finally finding an issue on which she is willing to expend her political capital and stake her own reputation. Angela Merkel offers an insightful, enjoyable read to those seeking to understand the woman Qvortrup describes as part Mother Courage, part Machiavelli.

Also by Augusta Dell’Omo on Not Even Past:

History Calling: LBJ and Thurgood Marshall on the Telephone
Review of Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

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Joseph Parrott reviews Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins
Jeremi Suri on his new book The Impossible Presidency
Great Books in Women’s History: Europe

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Originally published as “Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed” in the Fall 2017 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

Editors Note: The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War premiered on PBS last Sunday, September 17. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, reflects on what we are learning from historians’ renewed interest in the subject, especially with new scholarship based on Vietnamese sources.

These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. One reason is resurgent public interest in a topic that had lost some of its salience in American life during the 1990s. At that time, the end of the Cold War and surging confidence about U.S. power seemed to diminish the relevance of long ago controversies and the need to draw lessons from America’s lost war. But then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: grueling conflicts that, in key respects, resembled the war in Southeast Asia three decades earlier. Critics complained that George W. Bush had mired the nation in “another Vietnam,” and military strategists focused anew on the earlier war for clues about fighting insurgents in distant, inhospitable places. For their part, historians seized the opportunity to reinterpret Vietnam for a younger generation and especially to compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with America’s new embroilments.

More recently, intense public interest in the war has been sustained by fiftieth anniversaries of the war’s most harrowing years for the United States. Publishers have used these occasions to release high-profile histories, including Mark Bowden’s widely reviewed Hue 1968, a sprawling account of the largest battle between U.S. and Communist forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The media are taking part as well. During 2017 and early 2018, the New York Times is publishing an online series of approximately 130 op-eds focused on the events of 1967. The biggest moment of all is due in late September: the premiere of the much anticipated 18-hour documentary on the war from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, an event certain to inspire new waves of commentary about Vietnam and to rekindle debate in living rooms across the nation.

Footage of Vietnam being broadcast in an American living room, February 1968 (via Wikipedia). The first episode of the highly anticipated The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premiered on Sunday, September 17, once again bringing a divisive and contested history into American living rooms.

But there is another, less noticed reason for renewed attention to the Vietnam War: Spectacular new source material has transformed the possibilities for writing about the subject. Some of this new documentation has emerged from U.S. archives as a result of declassification in the last decade or so. Records from the Nixon and Ford presidencies (1969–1977), especially, are making it possible for historians to write with more confidence and in greater detail about the final stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, long a relatively neglected era of the war.

Indeed, the last phase of U.S. military operations has recently spawned an especially contentious debate on one of the most fundamental controversies about Vietnam: Could the United States and its South Vietnamese allies have won the war if the American public had not turned against it? Provocative new works by Lewis Sorley and Gregory Daddis lead the way in arguing for and against, respectively, the notion that the U.S. military could have secured overall victory, if not for crumbling political support within the United States.

Meanwhile, writing about every phase of American decision-making has been enhanced by the release of audio recordings that U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon made of important meetings, telephone conversations, or both. Because these often convey the mood and emotions of senior policymakers, they are invaluable in helping historians gain a richer understanding of the motives that underlay decision-making about the war. It is now possible, for example, to hear Lyndon Johnson’s anguish about escalating the U.S. role in 1964 and 1965. LBJ’s doubts, along with his obvious awareness of the problems that would beset U.S. forces if he escalated the war in Vietnam, have led many historians to scrap the once dominant idea that leaders in Washington, ignorant of Vietnamese politics and blinded by Cold War assumptions about the dangers of communism, walked step-by-step into a “quagmire” that no one had anticipated. The old question—How could Americans have been so ignorant?—has been replaced by a new one: Why did U.S. leaders commit the nation to war despite abundant doubts and accurate knowledge of the obstacles they would confront?

President Lyndon B. Johnson at a National Security meeting on Vietnam, July 1965 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The most impressive new source material, however, has emerged from countries other than the United States. As recently as 30 years ago, historians were limited to U.S. and West European sources, making it impossible to write with authority about Vietnam itself or decision-making by North Vietnam’s allies, China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European nations. Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. East European nations went furthest in opening their archives to researchers. For its part, the Russian government opened some Soviet-era records, most notably the records of the Communist party. China and Vietnam, where the end of the Cold War did not produce dramatic political change, lagged behind, yet even those governments gradually permitted access to some records from the Cold War years. Most strikingly, the Vietnamese government opened troves of material amassed by the defunct regime in Saigon that ruled below the seventeenth parallel during the heyday of U.S. involvement.

The result has been a large and growing body of new work by ambitious and linguistically skilled scholars eager to explore fresh dimensions of the war. Historians Mark Philip Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, William J. Duiker, Christopher Goscha, David S. Marr, and Sophie Quinn-Judge led the way in examining Vietnam’s experience, drawing on newly available Vietnamese sources to produce pathbreaking studies around the turn of the century. A younger generation of scholars, most of whom wrote dissertations rooted in extensive research in Vietnam, has built on those accomplishments and even, for the first time, begun delving into decision-making by the Communist government in Hanoi. Meanwhile, historians of Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, most notably Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai, have used new documentation to examine the complex relationships between the Vietnamese Communists and their superpower patrons.

Unquestionably, archival openings in Russia and China, just as in Vietnam, remain partial and selective, leaving studies rooted in newly accessible material—stunning as it may be—highly susceptible to debate and revision as more documentation becomes available. Yet, measured against the near impossibility of doing this kind of work just three decades ago, historians have made remarkable progress toward rethinking the Vietnam War as an episode not just in U.S. history but also in Vietnamese and world history. Historians, in short, increasingly appreciate the war for what it was at the time: a multisided conflict involving numerous Vietnamese and international actors and driven by extraordinarily complicated and shifting motives.

What precisely has this new research in non-U.S. sources revealed thus far? Three examples point to the variety and significance of the new discoveries. First, studies of Chinese foreign policy have revealed details of North Vietnam’s dependence on its mighty neighbor to the north in the years before the Cultural Revolution, which greatly diminished China’s ambitions abroad. Despite historical tensions between Vietnam and China, newly available sources show definitively that Chinese military helped train and advise Vietnamese Communist forces from as early as 1950 and played an especially pivotal role in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese victory that ended French colonialism and dealt a major blow to the West in the Cold War.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1954 (via Wikimedia Commons)

More strikingly, new documents clarify the vast amounts of equipment and even manpower that China provided to North Vietnam during the later fighting that involved U.S. combat forces. According to historian Qiang Zhai, China sent everything from military gear and weapons to table tennis balls, playing cards, sewing needles, and vegetable seed under a series of agreements with North Vietnam. At the same time, Qiang Zhai asserts, a total of 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking at 170,000 during 1967. To be sure, Chinese forces were not assigned combat roles. But Zhai observes that they enabled North Vietnam to send more of its own forces to southern battlefields by performing valuable functions such as repairing bridges and rail lines, building and relocating factories, and manning antiaircraft guns. Such tasks could, of course, be hazardous, not least because of U.S. bombing of some parts of North Vietnam. According to Zhai’s sources, 1,100 Chinese soldiers died in North Vietnam and another 4,200 were wounded.

Second, new sources from Vietnam are exposing the complexity of decision-making among Communist leaders in Hanoi. For many years, historians assumed that North Vietnamese leaders marched in lockstep and permitted no dissent. This view was sustained in part by the belief that the regime in Hanoi was totalitarian to its core and utterly subservient to its most powerful leaders, above all Ho Chi Minh. Recent discoveries have, however, called all of this into question. For one thing, historians Lien-Hang Nguyen and Pierre Asselin have revealed that Ho Chi Minh—long assumed to have been the preeminent North Vietnamese leader all the way to his death in 1969—in fact, lost a great deal of influence around 1960.

The pivotal figure thereafter was Le Duan, a Southern-born revolutionary who remained relatively obscure to Western historians until recent years. Thanks to recent publications, though, it’s clear that Le Duan, a firebrand eager to throw enormous blood and resources into the effort to reunify his country under Communist leadership, dominated decision-making in Hanoi during the peak years of American involvement. Understanding the importance of Le Duan and the hawks who surrounded him helps enormously to appreciate the escalatory pressures that operated on the Vietnamese side, even as Lyndon Johnson and his aides stepped up the American commitment in the mid 1960s. We can now see that leaders on both sides rejected diplomacy and banked on military victory, a tragic convergence of hawkishness that fueled escalation.

The dominance of the hawks in Hanoi does not mean, though, that there were no contrary voices once they were in the driver’s seat. Scholars working with Vietnamese sources have discovered evidence of substantial factionalism within the Hanoi regime throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Broadly speaking, some high-ranking North Vietnamese leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, prioritized consolidation of Communist rule above the seventeenth parallel and were wary of major expenditures of lives and treasure to bring about reunification. Others, including Le Duan, strongly favored reunification—even at the cost of a major war likely to draw in the United States—over all other North Vietnamese priorities. New studies of the war show that North Vietnamese policy flowed from the interplay of these two points of view. During the late 1950s, the moderate faction held sway, and the result was a period of relative peace in Vietnam. With the triumph of the hawks, however, Hanoi embraced a new war and transformed North Vietnam into a full-fledged police state in order to keep the skeptics at bay.

Third, the new scholarship has shed valuable new light on the nature of the South Vietnamese state that endured from its beginning in 1954 to its collapse in 1975. Was South Vietnam merely a puppet of the United States, an artificial creation doomed to fall apart whenever Washington withdrew its economic and military assistance? Or was it a viable nation with a legitimate government that, absent the onslaught by northern Communists, could have endured as a stable, pro-Western entity into the indefinite future? For many years, the debate was more a matter of polemics than historical inquiry. Opponents of the war argued that the United States hitched itself to a hopeless Potemkin experiment led by venal, authoritarian leaders, while supporters saw South Vietnam as a beleaguered young nation that, for all its faults, was doing its best to resist Communist aggression.

Leonid Brezhnev during talks with Le Duan, October 1975 (via Flickr)

Unsurprisingly, much of the new scholarship rooted in Vietnamese sources has argued for a gray area between these two extremes. Historians such as Edward Miller and Jessica Chapman focus especially on the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem possessed a degree of legitimacy and popular support unrecognized by Diem’s critics at the time or since. To be sure, they also point out the government’s inability to expand its base further among the South Vietnamese population. But they show that the South Vietnamese state possessed a remarkable amount of agency that its leaders might have exercised differently. All in all, these historians have helped restore the Vietnamese to the center of their own history.

What do all these revelations mean for how we should understand the Vietnam War in its totality? Clearly, the new work in non-American sources holds implications for primordial questions about the U.S. role in Vietnam. Was the U.S. commitment to Vietnam justified by any genuine security interests in the region? Why did the United States fail to achieve its objectives despite monumental effort? Might different decisions by American leaders have led to a different outcome? Knowing more about the international and Vietnamese contexts makes it far more possible than ever before to form authoritative opinions about questions that cannot logically be answered fully on the basis of U.S. sources alone. But the new work also underscores the possibility of addressing questions that transcend the American experience and viewing the Vietnam War within the context of, for example, decolonization, the international Communist movement, and the Sino-Soviet split. The good news is that, given the range of new and still-to-be-released source material and robust interest in the war four decades after it ended, historians are sure to move forward energetically on both tracks. The boom times may stick around for a while.

Also by Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past:

Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam
Changing Course in Vietnam – or not
LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

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Aden Knaap reviews Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Janet Davis on cultural memory and the Vietnam War
Clay Katsky reviews Kissinger’s Shadow

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

by Christopher Rose

Can the microbe speak?

It’s 5:30 pm, and I’ve been staring at my computer screen for over eight hours. There’s a crick in my neck, my breathing is shallow, my blood pressure has elevated, and the entire Giza governorate has just disappeared off of the map the instant that I finished tracing its borders—for the third time. I take a deep breath, utter a few choice unpleasant words under my breath, make sure to save my work, and turn off the computer. Today, the dragon has won.

I am two weeks into what I had originally, and naively, thought would be a one-week project to map the outbreak of epidemic and epizootic diseases in Egypt during the First World War, which comprises a subsection of my dissertation project. It’s not a great time to be working on Egypt, as it’s become nearly impossible to get research clearance from the Egyptian government. Funding has also become a near impossibility: my optimism at being named a finalist for a Fulbright in early 2016 was short lived; the program was suspended due to security concerns before awards were announced.

While online resources are scarce, I did find that the Egyptian government’s official gazetteer has an online index of its entire run since the 1870s. Over the course of several days, I discovered that the gazetteer was a virtual treasure trove of exactly the sort of data I’ve been looking for: reports of disease outbreaks in detailed locations up and down the Nile Valley. Over a week, I compiled a spreadsheet of almost 800 records for the period between late 1914 and mid-1919.

The question, of course, was what to do with this data. I was certain the diseases would tell me something, if I could just figure out how to get them to speak.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)

It was Julia Gossard, a UT alumna now teaching at Utah State University, who pointed me in the direction of the Programming Historian, a website dedicated to helping historians use digital tools to process data through modeling, mapping, and other methods. I didn’t have time to learn a programming language, but mapping was an idea I liked. The site has several columns about creating maps, using open source mapping software. While I’m a big fan of open source, especially when it replaces costly technical software, I was a bit uneasy about the lack of support for the platform – in short, I foresaw the ability to get myself into trouble, but not out of it.

A little digging around led me to the unexpected find that UT has an institutional subscription to ARCGIS, which is the (otherwise very expensive) industry standard mapping platform. Using UT’s institutional subscription to Lynda.com, I started training myself to use ARCGIS.

Had I known what I was getting myself into, I probably wouldn’t have dived right in.

Mapping the data required me to tag each record with the latitude and longitude of the reported location. This led me to one of the key stumbling blocks for all scholars of the Middle East who’ve dabbled in the digital humanities—so much data is out there on the web, but much of it is transliterated from the original language. There is no universally recognized Arabic-to-Latin transliteration method, and the potential inconsistencies are well on display in the web’s largest open-source geographic database, Geonames.org. While some of its Egyptian entries contained the original names in Arabic script, most did not, leaving me to guess—frequently incorrectly—how they might have been rendered. Since Geonames is open-source, I added the names both in Arabic and one of the more commonly recognized transliteration systems to Geonames’s database as I went, which will hopefully make someone else’s life a little easier.

People fleeing a cholera outbreak at the port of Boulaq (near Cairo) in 1883 (via Wellcome Collection)

Finally, it was time to start mapping, and herein lay another challenge. ARCGIS has an expansive built in library of open source data, which included, as I had hoped, administrative maps of Egypt. I very quickly realized, however, that the administrative borders of the early 21c did not correlate directly to those of the early 20c. At least one governorate has since been split into three and there were a lot of unfamiliar names on the maps. I discovered that the UT Libraries has a copy of the 1917 Egyptian census, which has a big fold out map of the country. I scanned it, brought it home and compared it to the current maps … and realized that it was probably going to be easier to draw the 1917 map in ARCGIS rather than try to adapt the contemporary maps.

The process took nearly two weeks, employing long forgotten Photoshop skills (yay for bezel curves!), tracing a century old map and rendering it onto a satellite image of contemporary Egypt. The resultant map is, as they say, “good enough.” It’s probably got a distortion of around 2 miles, but it’ll never appear in print at that level of detail. Maybe when my monograph becomes a best-seller, I’ll hire someone to re-draw it.

I learned that ARCGIS has some quirks. It has a tendency to freeze up every 60-90 seconds. I quickly learned to save my work every time I did anything, a lesson that came in handy when, for some reason, the entire Giza governorate vanished inexplicably … three times … after I drew it. (The following morning, I discovered that the governorate hadn’t vanished, it was just invisible. I still don’t actually know why).

Finally, the big day came. After the blood, sweat, tears, swearing, and yelling at the cat, the map was finished. I overlay my disease data, and sat back to look at the results.

Children playing in a poor neighborhood of Alexandria under quarantine during an outbreak of typhus, sometime around WWI (via Wellcome Collection)

Have the microbes told me a story? They have. As I set forth on the next phase of my project, I have clusters of locations and specific dates to look for. But the maps have also given me more questions—Is there a correlation between a two-year outbreak of cattle plague and the rampant inflation in the cost of food during the war? Does the death of 139,000 Egyptians due to influenza at war’s end have anything to do with the eruption of a populist uprising just six weeks later? And why is this most deadly epidemic absent from the press and the pages of the official gazetteer?

I also realized the importance of presenting my data in this visual form. No one is going to go through all 800 records on my spreadsheet, but the map provides a clear snapshot of my subject and the questions it raises, and it makes a visual case for the argument I’m laying out in my dissertation. In this form, it will make my modest contribution to this field of study more convincing and accessible.

The New Archive series highlights various uses of digital tools in humanities research. More from the series:

Charlie S. Binkow explores Honest Abe’s Archive
Joseph Parrott highlights the digitalized political posters collected by archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing
Maria José Afanador-Llach discusses her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

You may also like:

Hanan Hammad on gender in a small town in Egypt
Martin Thomas and Richard Toye discuss the Dreyfus Affair and the Fashoda Crisis of 1898
Cali Slair on the eradication of smallpox

More than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History

by Jimena Perry

In July 2017, as part of my dissertation research, I had the opportunity to participate in an assembly of the Association of Victims of Granada (Asociación de Víctimas de Granada, ASOVIDA), in Colombia. This organization is composed of the survivors of the violence inflicted by guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the National Army during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. ASOVIDA was legally created in 2007 after three years of victims organizing, learning about their rights, and finding ways to prevent brutalities from happening again. Since the early 2000s, amidst the ongoing armed conflict in Colombia, the people of Granada began a process of awareness, prevention, and production of memories of the atrocities they experienced. To this day, the members of ASOVIDA gather on the first Saturday of each month to talk about their concerns as victims, to participate in community decisions, and to continue with their grieving and reparation process.

Gloria Ramírez, President of ASOVIDA introduces Jimena Perry to the crowd (Jimena Perry, 2017)

My dissertation is about the production of historical memories about the armed conflict in Colombia, including institutions like ASOVIDA and The Hall of Never Again, a space for remembering and honoring the victims of massacres, disappearances, targeted killings, bombings, and other forms of violence in Granada. Therefore, ASOVIDA´s president asked me to present my project before the assembly. She wanted me to tell the community why I am interested in ASOVIDA and the Hall, what I am going to do with the information gathered, and what benefits my work could bring to them. ASOVIDA´s president requested my presence at the assembly because some of my primary sources are the contents of so-called bitácoras, notebooks designed to make the victim´s grieving process easier. In these texts, one can read mothers talking to their children, husbands to their wives, brothers to sisters, children to their parents, and other family members remembering their departed loved ones. The bitácoras become both objects to be exhibited and historical sources for studying the violence endured by a particular person or family and how they survived. Bitácoras also provide an account of the story and character of the dead person, why he or she was important and help the public and visitors of the Hall to learn about local history and to link the survivors to community reconstruction processes. They are intimate accounts of the survivor’s feelings along with very personal stories, consequently, using them requires an ethical commitment and a deep respect towards their authors.

When requested to present my project before the assembly, my first reaction was surprise. Why should I do this? If the bitácoras are part of the Hall of Never Again´s exhibit they are already public records; they are meant to be read, but when I thought carefully about the request, I realized that the authors had reasonable suspicions. I am an outsider, a researcher who comes and goes; I have not suffered violence in the same way, and there I am using their cherished stories for an academic endeavor.

Assembly victims discussing about what forgiveness means to them (Jimena Perry, 2017)

It made even more sense when I saw the inhabitants of Granada at the assembly´s meeting. Regular people working to achieve peace in their town looked at me with curiosity. They wanted to know who was I and what was I doing there. Seeing all those people, interested in finding peace for themselves, their families, and town, I understood that academic research becomes secondary to dealing with people´s lives and feelings. I was willing to leave out of my dissertation the contents of the bitácoras if the community did not grant me permission to use them. The main purpose of my presence at the assembly was letting people know that I intend to use their stories in an academic endeavor, as an example of memory production ASOVIDA´s president introduced me and stated why I was there giving me the floor. I started by telling them about my own story. I mentioned my background, where I came from, and why I was so interested in the bitácoras. They listened carefully. I emphasized the academic purpose of my research and assured them that I would not use their names, that I was not going to sell their stories, and that when my research is over I would go back and show it to them. So far, I have traveled to Granada three times.

After my presentation, ASOVIDA´s president told the members of the assembly to think about my request to use their testimony. She asked them to consider why would they let me use their stories and to take their time. When the time for voting came, I was surprised and delighted with the results. The victims’ assembly approved my project and my use of the bitácoras by a vast majority. Then there were some questions and even suggestions. Granada´s victims want visibility, their voices heard, the world to know all the brutalities committed against them and their struggles for survival. Granada´s inhabitants believe that letting the world know what happened in their town can help prevent violent acts to happen again. With this in mind, they told me they granted their authorization to use their testimonies. I thanked them feeling grateful for their trust and an immense commitment to use my work to serve the people of Granada.

During this assembly the victims were asked to work in groups to think about what peace and reconciliation can be achieved in Granada (Jimena Perry, 2017)

This experience with Granada´s victims of violence changed my priorities regarding my work. I realized the enormous ethical commitment I had made in dealing with memories about a recent violent past that is still fresh, remembrances that still give people nightmares and fears. I also understood that more than the bitácoras, victims themselves are the ones who really matter. I knew this before, but seeing the people, talking to them, answering their questions raised different questions about academic research. How can one deal with intimate stories of pain without being disrespectful? How far must researcher go to achieve her or his goals? How to avoid being the kind of person that goes to a community, takes what is needed from the people, and never returns? How not to be another source of stress for the victims?

After speaking to the assembly and talking to the real protagonists of the Colombian armed conflict, I believe that analyzing the community coming to terms with its pain can encourage other social groups to do the same. In addition, I want to think that my work will inspire more victims to tell their stories and start a grieving process. I want to honor the trust Granada´s people gave me. I want my work to help them heal and I want to make the testimonies of the bitácoras known to as many audiences as possible. After attending the assembly, I feel that one of the priorities of my work should be writing a story in which the community of Granada can recognize itself. I want my dissertation to become a text in which the Granada inhabitants find their own voices. Memory production is an ongoing process that hopefully would continue until the victims feel their healing is complete, but meanwhile, their efforts for achieving peace in their town should be encouraged and acknowledged.

More by Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:

Too much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellín, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory in Colombia, 2000-2014
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

You may also like:

Madeleine Olson reviews Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra on Colombian history in the Netflix hit-series Narcos
Vasken Markarian traces complaint reports in the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive

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