Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Commemorating 9/11 in 2017

For too many of us, the events of September 11, 2001 have been embalmed in political rhetoric so thick, that we have lost sight of what happened that day and what it meant. Our greatest city was attacked. Our capital was attacked. 2996 people died.

In addition to our regular programming I want to commemorate that day by re-posting one of the articles from our tenth anniversary series in 2011.

Let’s end our week of commentary on September 11, 2001 with some images. Visualizing and re-visualizing shape our memories differently than describing and talking. Poetry, photography, and song open up different dimensions to understanding the past. Images keep the past present in different ways as well.

It’s probably fair to say that everyone alive in 2001 can see pictures from that day. And that looking at them again makes everything we’ve read take on new meanings. My then-second-grader still pictures a drawing he made in school of smoke coming from the two “Thin Towers.” The image that first made me aware, viscerally aware, of the magnitude of the attack is a photograph by Marty Lederhandler of three New Yorkers, absolutely horrified by what they were seeing, but they’re standing in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral, all the way up on 51st St, miles away. Here is The New York Times’ collection of photographs from September 11 and the days that followed. (And here is a collection of Times’ articles.)

Frank Guridy shared with us a poem he reads in his classes every year on September 11. “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” by Martín Espada is dedicated to the restaurant workers at Windows on the World. It is a wonderful elegy both for its affection for the international, early-morning world of a restaurant kitchen and for the music — “the kitchen radio/ dial clicked even before the dial on the oven” — that bridged gaps of language and class; and distance.

And finally, Paul Simon. Watch and listen to this perfect rendition of a perfect song, perfectly attuned to the moment, sent to us by Richard (Kip) Pells. “The Sound of Silence” on 9/11 at Ground Zero.

Chan is Missing (1982)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first historical film review we posted on Not Even Past. As the author says, Chan is Missing is: “an early classic of Asian American cinema, it holds up well to multiple viewings.”

By Madeline Hsu

In this affectionate insider’s portrait of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1970s, director Wayne Wang riffs on the well-known adventures of Charlie Chan, the stereotyped Chinese-American 1930s film detective, by following the meandering investigation of two cab drivers. Joe and his nephew Steve are searching for another Chan, their friend Chan Hung, who seems to have disappeared with $4,000 of their cash. Along the way, they encounter a gallery of Chinatown personalities and settings, revealing aspects of the district that are rarely visible to visiting tourists. They venture past the bustling restaurants and the pagoda roofs and dragon-embellished streetlights of Grant Avenue into the tight quarters of greasy commercial kitchens; the packed fish markets and grocery stores of Stockton Street; narrow, laundry-festooned residential alleyways; a local senior citizens center; and the Neighborhood Language Center offering English classes for new arrivals.

Along the way, the search for the elusive Chan uncovers a rich pastiche of the possibilities of being Chinese in America. Chan could be a victim of police misunderstandings; a possible murderer and political extremist; an aeronautical engineer who developed the first Chinese word processor; a genius who could find no other job than working in a restaurant kitchen; a sentimental music lover; a disappointing husband who refused to adapt and get US citizenship but was a good father. Joe and Steve find themselves increasingly befuddled as the movie unfolds.

The 1970s witnessed a reinvigorated Chinatown, with the civil rights movement and new waves of American-born advocates and new immigrants adding to the agitation of community rights groups. Through a cacophony of dialects, accents, and background noises, Wang skillfully shows that the earlier film hero Charlie Chan does not represent Chinese America in the 1970s. Wang obscures his subjects by shooting at angles and through windows even as he offers glimpses into a richly textured community framed by competing divides of generations and genders: American-born and immigrants; leftists and rightists; business successes, community activists, and the striving working-classes. Joe and Steve’s banter captures not just their strategizing about how and where to find Chan, but also whether and how Chinese can claim a place in America. If a man of Chan’s abilities and character seems to have fled the United States, what of those with less promise?

“Chan is Missing” was Wayne Wang’s first feature film and still his most enduring. Along with “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart” (1985) it is the most intimate of his movies before he launched into commercially successful hits such as “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and “Maid in Manhattan” (2002) as well as collaborating on independent films with writers like Paul Auster and Yiyun Li. An early classic of Asian American cinema, it holds up well to multiple viewings.

photos by Nancy Wong

Fathers & Sons

by J Neuberger

My father fought in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War. He didn’t like much of anything about being a soldier but he was proud to have helped to defeat Hitler.

This photograph hung in our house and a painting of it hung in my grandmother’s apartment in New York City. It is the picture of my father that I carry around in my head.

To my eye he looks old enough here to be my father, but yesterday, when I was scanning the photo and trying to figure out what year it was taken and how old he must have been, I realized that in this picture he is almost exactly the same age as my older son is now.

Henry Leopold Neuberger, Jr. July 11, 1921-January 23, 2004.

Jacqueline Jones on the Myth of Race in America

Like countless other cultures and countries throughout the world, the United States has its own creation myth—its own unique, dramatic story intended to explain where we came from and who we are today. In the case of the United States, this story holds that the nation was conceived in “racial” differences, and that over the last four centuries these self-evident differences have suffused our national character and shaped our national destiny. The American creation story begins with a violent, self-inflicted wound, and features subsequent incremental episodes of healing, culminating in a redemption of sorts. It is, ultimately, a triumphant narrative, one that testifies to the innate strength and moral rectitude of the American system, however imperfect its origins.

According to this myth, the first Europeans who laid eyes on Africans were struck foremost by their physical appearance—the color of their skin and the texture of their hair—and concluded that these beings constituted a lower order of humans, an inferior race destined for enslavement. During the American Revolution, Patriots spoke eloquently of liberty and equality, and though their lofty rhetoric went unfulfilled, they inadvertently challenged basic forms of racial categorization. And so white Northerners, deriving inspiration from the Revolution, emancipated their own slaves and ushered in a society free of the moral stain of race-based bondage.

The Civil War destroyed the system of slavery nationwide, but new theories of scientific racism gave rise to new forms of racial oppression in the North and South. Not until the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 did the federal government dismantle state-sponsored race-based segregation and thus pave the way for better race relations. Though hardly an unmitigated triumph, the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 signaled the dawn of a post-racial society, and offered a measure of the distance the country had travelled since slavery prevailed in British North America.

revwar soldiers — American Revolutionary War soldiers. On the far left is an African American in a Rhode Island regiment

Yet America’s creation myth is just that—a myth, one that itself rests entirely on a spurious concept: For “race” itself is a fiction, one that has no basis in biology or any longstanding, consistent usage in human culture. As employed in the popular rendition of America’s national origins, the word and its various iterations mask complex historical processes that have little or nothing to do with the physical make-up of the people who controlled or suffered from those processes.

jones_family — Virginia family of African, Native and European heritage, c 1900

Like its worldwide counterparts, the American creation myth is the product of collective imagination, not historical fact, and it exists outside the realm of rational thought. Americans who would scoff at the notion that meaningful social or temperamental differences distinguish brown-eyed people from blue-eyed people nevertheless utter the term “race” with a casual thoughtlessness; consequently the word itself helps to sustain not only the creation myth but also all the human misery that the myth has wrought over the centuries. In effect, the word race perpetuates—and legitimizes—the notion that some kind of inexorable primal prejudice has driven history, and that, to some degree at least, the United States has always been held hostage to “racial” differences.

Certainly the bitter legacies of historic injustices endure in concrete, blatant form. Today certain groups of people are impoverished, exploited in the workplace, or incarcerated in large numbers in prison. This is the case not because of their “race,” however, but rather because at a particular point in U. S. history certain other groups began to invoke the myth of race in a bid for political and economic power. This myth has served as a tool that one group can use to ratchet itself into a position of greater advantage in society, and a justification for the economic inequality and the imbalance in rights and privileges that result.

My book is about the way that the idea of race has been used and abused in American history. It focuses on the contradictory and inconsistent fictions of “race” that various groups of people contrived for specific political purposes throughout American history. As deployed by the powerful, race serves as a rationale for brutality, and its history is ultimately a local one, best understood through the lives of individual men, women, and children. The stories I examine in the book range over time and space to consider particular, shifting processes of racial myth-making in American history: in mid-seventeenth-century Maryland; Revolutionary-era South Carolina; early-nineteenth-century Providence, Rhode Island; post-Civil War Savannah, Georgia; segregationist Mississippi; and industrial and post-industrial Detroit.

This book is about physical force flowing from the law, the barrel of a gun, or the fury of a mob; but it is also about the struggle for justice and personal dignity waged by people of African descent in America. Their fight for human rights in turn intensified policies and prejudices based on so-called “racial” difference. In fact, in the region that would become the United States, race initially developed as an afterthought or a reaction—an afterthought, because for several generations the exploitation of people of African heritage required no explanation, no justification beyond the raw power wielded by the captors; and a reaction, because a concerted project based on the myth of race eventually arose in response to individuals and groups such as abolitionists and civil-rights activists who challenged forms of state-sanctioned violence and legal subordination that afflicted enslaved people and their descendants.

For the first century and a half or so of the British North American colonies, the fiction of race played little part in the origins and development of slavery; instead, that institution was the product of the unique vulnerability of Africans within a roiling Atlantic world of empire-building and profit-seeking. Not until the American Revolution did self-identified “white” elites perceive the need to concoct ideas of racial difference; these elites understood that the exclusion of a whole group of native-born men from the body politic demanded an explanation, a rationalization. Even then, many southern slaveholders, lording over forced-labor camps, believed they needed to justify their actions to no one; only over time did they begin to refer to their bound workforces in racial terms. Meanwhile, in the early nineteenth-century North, race emerged as a partisan political weapon, its rhetorical contours strikingly contradictory but its legal dimensions nevertheless explicit. Discriminatory laws and mob actions promoted and enforced the insidious notion that people could be assigned to a particular racial group and thereby considered “inferior” to whites and unworthy of basic human rights. Black immiseration was part and parcel with white privilege, all in the name of—the myth of—“race.”

By the late twentieth century, transformations in the American political economy had solidified the historic liabilities of black men and women, now in the form of segregated neighborhoods and a particular social division of labor within a so-called “color-blind” nation. The election of the nation’s first black president in 2008 produced an out-pouring of self-congratulation among Americans who heralded the dawn of a “post-racial” society. In fact, the recession that began that year showed that, although explicit ideas of black inferiority had receded (though not entirely disappeared) from American public discourse, African Americans continued to suffer the disastrous consequences spawned by those ideas, as evidenced by high rates of poverty, unemployment, and home foreclosures.

This book takes its title from a recurring phrase used by David Walker in his brilliant, militant polemic, Walker’s Appeal, first published in 1829. Walker, a native of North Carolina, had been born to a free mother and an enslaved father. By the 1820s he was living in Boston and playing a leading role in the fight against slavery. His Appeal draws from history, political theory, and Christian theology to expose the falsity of race. Walker argued that Europeans had devised a uniquely harsh system of New World slavery for the sole purpose of forcing blacks to “dig their mines and work their farms; and thus go on enriching them, from one generation to another with our blood and our tears!!!!” Gradually white people, he wrote, concocted lies by which they “dreadfully deceived” themselves, ruses to keep blacks in ignorance and subjection—the idea that blacks “are an inferior and distinctive race of beings.” Prescient, he warned of a coming conflagration that would destroy the system of slavery; but, like other abolitionists of the time, he failed to anticipate that, although slavery would die, “race” would survive and mutate into new and hideous shapes.

In the early twenty-first century, the words “race,” “racism,” and “race relations” are widely used as shorthand for specific historical legacies that have nothing to do with biological determinism and everything to do with power relations. Racial mythologies are best understood as a pretext for political and economic opportunism both wide-ranging and specific to a particular time and place. If this explication of the American creation myth leads to one overriding conclusion, it is the power of the word “race” to distort our understanding of the past and the present—and our hopes for a more just future—in equal measure.

Jacqueline Jones, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America

Seth Garfield on the Brazilian Amazon

At 2,700,000 square miles, the Amazon Basin is three-quarters the size of the continental United States, and a million square miles larger than all of Europe exclusive of Russia. Covering two-fifths of South America and three-fifths of Brazil, the Amazon Basin contains one-fifth of available fresh water in the world, one-third of evergreen broad-leaved forest resources, and one-tenth of the world’s living species. The Amazon river, the longest in the world (at 4,255 miles), has some 1,100 tributaries, seven of which are over 1,000 miles long.

And the Amazon’s forests, along with the adjacent Orinoco and Guyanas, represent over half the world’s surviving tropical rain forests. While contemporary accounts of the Amazon often begin by rattling off such statistics to provide readers with seemingly definitive answers, I raise them to make a fundamental point about the region. The Amazon is often imagined as a pristine, and increasingly endangered, realm of nature, but it should be seen as a region that has been constructed by public policies, social mediators, and cultural representations that operate at multiple scales: local, national, and global.

During World War II, the governments of Brazil and the United States made an unprecedented level of joint investment in the economy and infrastructure of the Amazon region. The dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45) trumpeted the colonization and development of the Amazon (christened the “March to the West”) as a nationalist imperative to defend a sparsely settled frontier covering some sixty percent of Brazilian territory. The Vargas regime subsidized labor migration and agricultural colonization, modernized river transportation, and rationalized rubber production in The Amazon. These fledgling efforts were given an unexpected boost when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and subsequently invaded the Malayan peninsula and Dutch East Indies, which deprived the United States of more than 92 percent of its rubber supply.

Unlike other types of tropical flora, rubber was indispensable for modern warfare, ensuring the mobility, speed, and efficiency critical for military defense. The United States, which consumed more rubber than the rest of the world combined in 1940, was dependent on Southeast Asian rubber sources, having failed to develop a synthetic rubber industry, or diversify its sources of natural rubber, or stockpile in preparation for emergencies. In 1942, Brazil agreed to sell its surplus rubber to the United States for a fixed rate for five years. The United States, in turn, invested millions of dollars in health and sanitation programs, public finance, and the relocation of tens of thousands of migrant workers from Northeastern Brazil to tap rubber in the Amazon.

In the context of binational wartime mobilization, a host of new (or renewed) claimants on Amazonian resources and populations emerged. Agronomists, sanitarians, physicians, botanists, engineers, technicians, army officials, intellectuals, consumers, migrant workers, and the media all became involved in Amazonian development. As Earl Parker Hanson noted in 1944: “It is probable that the past two years have seen more actual exploration of the basin, more knowledge gained about its physical nature than have all the four centuries since that early conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, was the first white commander to traverse it.”

Despite wartime pronouncements exhorting the peoples of Brazil and the United States to join in battle against the Axis and the forest, the Amazon’s vast territory, varied natural resources, and charged ideological significance precluded any uniform ideas or policies. National interests and cultural biases often divided people despite shared professional backgrounds or technocratic mindsets that might have united select Brazilian and U.S. policy makers in their efforts to develop the Amazon. Headiness marked an economic boom, but rubber tappers and their bosses jousted over revenues and resources, while migrants pursued varied livelihoods in the region.

Today the landscape of the Amazon reflects the legacy of such wartime tensions and transformations. The creation of Brazilian banking and public health institutions, alongside the expansion of airfields and transportation infrastructure, heralded the postwar advance of capital markets and state consolidation in the region. Mass wartime migration from Northeastern Brazil contributed to the region’s rapid demographic growth and urban expansion. Forest populations’ maintenance of traditional patterns of extraction, slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, and fishing preserved tropical ecosystems and systems of local knowledge. And the U.S. development of a domestic synthetic rubber industry by 1944-45 redirected postwar foreign investment in the Amazon from the wild rubber trade to mineral extraction. The history of wartime Amazonia also illustrates the shifting appropriation of the region’s resources. The Amazon’s reincarnation as ecological sanctuary resulted not only from postwar deforestation, but the rise of a global environmental movement, the emergence of new fields of scientific inquiry, and the grass roots mobilization of forest dwellers.

By melding the concerns and approaches of environmental, diplomatic, labor, economic, and social history, we can see Amazonian landscapes and lifestyles as the products of ecological, material, and political forces that a competing set of social mediators brought to bear on the meanings and uses of nature. This little known chapter of World War II history illuminates the ways outsiders’ very understandings and representations of the nature of the Amazon have evolved over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Seth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region.

Selling ourselves short? PhDs Inside the Academy and Outside of the Professoriate

By Lauren Apter Bairnsfather

In 2009, as I planned to return to the University of Texas at Austin in a staff position, I wrote: “It is hard not to feel that I have sold myself short by deciding not to be an academic. And even worse that I have to face this fact every day working in the administration of the university that most shaped me.”

It is remarkable how my perspective has changed over four years and how my satisfaction in my work exceeds anything I might have hoped for. In a recently published article in Perspectives, I was one of four History PhDs working in academic administration who shared our professional experiences and thoughts about working on the “alt-ac” track. Three of the four of us are very happy in our career choice.

The subject of PhDs working outside of traditional faculty jobs, “and not feeling bad about it,” has gotten attention recently in the New York Times. Why? One reason is Twitter. Twitter drives the news and alt-ac, post-ac, and non-ac jobs are everywhere on Twitter. Indeed, it is the most fertile place for connecting with thought leaders in the alt-academy; the conversation can be followed by searching for hashtag #altac.

The term “alt-ac” encompasses alternative academic employment, as opposed to traditional academic employment or the catch-all “non-academic” employment. To over-simplify, alt-ac jobs are staff positions inside colleges and universities.

The alt-ac conversation has been on the program at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (@MLAnews) for several years, as academic jobs in the disciplines represented by the MLA have dried up.

The American Historical Association (@AHAhistorians) joined the conversation with the publication of two articles by Anthony Grafton and James Grossman: “No More Plan B,” and “Time to Craft a Plan C.” In the latter article, they wrote:

Our persistence in supporting certain standards of learning—which is not mere Luddism—is as it should be. Standards matter. But there’s no sense pretending that the new world isn’t out there. Some of the students seeking doctorates in history will join the professoriate, changing the academy, as has each preceding generation.But many other Ph.D.’s will have to blaze new trails, finding ways to remain committed to history, and to practice it, in venues that are not now listed by most departments in their placement claims.

AHA 2013 in New Orleans featured a mini-conference on the Malleable Ph.D., a series of panels about alternative careers for History PhDs. More panels on the subject are slated for AHA 2014, in Washington, DC, with the addition of a career fair, where historians in various lines of work will meet with conference attendees. I will be there – stop by to say hello!

I find my job to be intellectually and personally satisfying, and, I admit it is fun to be part of a movement of troublemakers – challenging the presumed limitations of a specialized advanced degree in the Humanities. But there are practical steps involved in getting from graduate school to here. If you want to expand your career prospects, start thinking about it at the beginning of your graduate program.

Some things to consider:

What is non-negotiable to you?

To me it was firm footing. An academic career, which might eventually have involved tenure and (presumably) job security, at the outset meant potentially uprooting and moving every year, or possibly never laying down roots at all. I left the university for a year and returned to the security of a full-time staff position in a city I have called home off and on for more than twenty years. It’s hard to top that.

What work style suits you?

I am an extrovert and a team player. The isolation of academic work doesn’t suit my personality. At two museum jobs, pre-PhD, I worked in large rooms with five to ten people, and I thrived. A secluded private office at the library, on the other hand, was torture. What work environment suits you? Are you a lone wolf? A team player? Something in between? If you can’t answer this question easily, take advantage of campus resources. You don’t have to invent this process for yourself.

Resources at the University of Texas at Austin:

Liberal Arts Careers Services is expanding career coaching for graduate students, which will include identifying strengths and making a plan to develop skills to complement career goals.

The College of Liberal Arts will debut a menu of summer courses in 2014, including classes about the pedagogy of online education, public scholarship, and writing courses targeted to early stage PhD students and another to ABD dissertators.

Do you have the network?

If you are considering a career in academic administration, the best thing to do right now is to meet people around campus. Get involved with student government – long the province of undergraduates and professional programs, student government offers opportunities for the small number of Humanities PhD students who get involved. Not only do student leaders advocate for the needs of graduate students, but also they meet with all levels of university administration. There is no substitute for this kind of face time.

There are also opportunities to network online. VersatilePhD.com is an online community that has sprouted meet-up groups in the United States and Canada and lists job opportunities and samples of actual cover letters and resumes that led to alt-ac jobs. The web resources listed below are suitable for current grad students and academics considering a career change.

As this conversation engages the mainstream media along with university administrators, faculty, and potential employers, alt-ac work for Humanities PhDs is coming to be recognized by universities as a successful outcome.

It certainly feels like success to me. Turns out I did not sell myself short back in 2009; I sold the job short.

Lauren Apter Bairnsfather earned a Ph.D. in 2008 and has worked for the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin since 2009. She tweets @DrLaurenA.

For more on the development of “alt-ac,” see Brenda Bethman and C. Shaun Longstreet, “the Alt-Ac Track,” http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2013/01/14/essay-preparing-academic-or-alt-ac-careers (January 14, 2013)

Web resources on alt-ac and other careers beyond the professoriate:

fromPhDtolife.com
howtoleaveacademia.com
chroniclevitae.com
VersatilePhD.com (The Graduate School at UT has an institutional subscription)
Specifically for historians: beyondacademe.com

What to follow on Twitter, for starters:

#altac
@FromPhDtolife
@chronicle
@insidehighered
@pankisseskafka
@vitae

Published on Monday, November 18, 2013

Great Books on Rethinking the College Classroom

by Karl Hagstrom Miller and Penne Restad

A few of the most important and engaging books about teaching college students.

Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (2001).

When it comes to the lament that students don’t know anything about history, Sam Wineburg has heard it all. He documents the problem in Texas schools at least as far back as the early 20th century. He sees things differently. His path breaking work explores reasons for why and how students learn what they do and helps us understand that there’s more to knowing history than passing a multiple choice test.

Cathy Davidson, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention will Transform the Way we Live, Work, and Learn (2011).

In this highly engaging, readable study, Davidson shows how teachers (and others) can apply scientific advances and new digital technologies in the real world of the classroom.

Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More (2006).

Bok, a former president of Harvard, reviews what we know about undergraduate learning and the obstacles to improvement in this study of what he believes undergraduate education should provide.

James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2007).

What if students were as engaged in their education as they can be when playing video games? Gee argues that video games employ 36 effective strategies that apply to improving teaching and learning in schools. For example, games provide multiple opportunities to meet increasingly difficult challenges, which can enhance not only knowledge and skill, but also motivation to continue the game.

Exploring the Silk Route

By Christopher Rose

It’s the afternoon of a hot summer’s day, and I am standing at the bottom of a staircase—with no handrails—that’s not so much set in to the side of a mountain as built on top of it. The stairs look solid from way back, but now that I’m standing in front of them … they’re kind of crumbly. And did I mention the part with no handrail?

Way up there, at the top of four hundred fifty five stairs, there’s a shrine whose gleaming silver dome is barely visible in the afternoon sun. That’s our destination.

Am I really going to do this? I ask myself, gauging the heat and looking at my nearly empty water bottle, but knowing that the answer is yes. Otherwise, why would I be here?

I’m in the Sentyab valley, somewhere on the border between Samarkand and Navoiy viloyets, in the Central Asia republic of Uzbekistan. I’m here with a small tour group of educators exploring the midsection of the Silk Route.

Sentyab is the site of Uzbekistan’s first, and as far as I can tell only, community-based tourism venture. There are four guesthouses in Sentyab, each owned by a family (ours was owned by two brothers) that welcomes visitors into their homes and offers a glimpse of life in an idyllic village setting.

The village is spread out along a green valley on the north side of the Pemir mountains, a relatively low-lying mountain range that separates the more fertile part of the country where the main trunk of the ancient Silk Route runs from the drier steppes of Central Asia that expand north from where I’m standing to … well, they go a really long way.

On our arrival, we had been fed a typical “light” Uzbek lunch featuring the national dish, plov: a pilaf of meat, rice, carrots and currants. Also on the table was fresh bread—it’s always called non, cooked similarly to Indian naan in a tandoor-like clay oven—but the style differs from town to town with each region claiming its own as the country’s best. Apricots, apples, and mulberries were in season and served in abundance along with sweet melons, watermelon, salads of cucumber, tomato, and mint; fresh yogurt; and, just in case anyone was still hungry, toasted apricot seeds and dried fruits.

It’s little wonder that afterwards, most of us took a siesta on the veranda where we’d eaten, along the creek under giant mulberry trees, and then decided to take a walk through the village to wake ourselves back up. After all, dinner was coming in a few hours, and no one was even remotely hungry. What better to build up an appetite than walking up the side of a mountain?

As the others passed me, I slung my camera to one side and took the first few steps up the mountain. Once we got above the trees, there was a nice breeze! I quickly stopped counting the steps because the numbers weren’t approaching 455 as fast as I wanted. As we went up, the mountainside retreated, and the rail-less flight of stairs rose out of the side of the mountain a couple of meters. I focused on the dome above, trying to suppress my teenage vertigo. Just a few more steps …

Finally, we were there, atop the stairs—which was not actually on top of the mountain but on a ridge on the side. The structure was smaller than I’d expected—from the other side of the valley it looked massive!
And here I discovered one of the things that makes Uzbekistan unique. I’ve traveled in a lot of the Islamic world and it varies a lot from place to place. But here was something I’d never seen before.

“Is this a Buddhist shrine?” I asked our guide, slightly confused.
“No,” he said, pointing to the crescent on top of the dome.
“But … these are prayer flags.”

And, indeed, what I saw is almost identical to Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags in form and function.

The shrine is built over a spring whose waters are now diverted further down the mountainside. According to local legend, a local goat herder had been shown the location in a vision of Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s son in law. (This is a common story at many mountainside shrines; a much larger and more famous one is a pilgrimage site in the town of Nurota, where we stopped the next day on the way to Bukhara). Even though the spring has been in use since pre-Islamic days, locals still insist that Imam Ali was involved with its discovery.

Pilgrims come to this shrine and, as tradition has it, they tear off part of their garments, make a wish, and tie the strip of cloth to the metal railing. Eventually the cloth disintegrates and the wish is blown up to God with the intercession of the saints who guard the shrine.

It’s a tradition from the steppe, one of the many signs that you can find in Uzbekistan that the country sits aside the road between east and west: a Persian style dome sits atop an Islamic shrine, decorated with what I mistook to be Buddhist prayer flags, at a site that’s been revered since Zoroastrianism predominated here over a thousand years ago.

As the sun began to set over the valley and the smoke from several dozen cooking ovens began to rise above the trees, we started down the stairs to the path that would take us past the fields with the cows and goats, and the rooftops laden with fresh apricots and mulberries drying in the sun, to enjoy another home cooked meal in the veranda under the mulberry trees along the creek. We were the only visitors in the town that night, and every person on their way home from the fields greeted us warmly as we passed.

Uzbekistan, with its friendly people, natural beauty, and shimmering blue domed mosques and tiled minarets could very well be the next “hot” destination. I’m glad I got the chance to see it first.

Photo Credits: Christopher Rose

Stairs leading up to the Islamic Shrine at Sentyab

Sentyab Village

A “light” Uzbek lunch

View from the shrine

“Prayer flags” at the mountaintop shrine

The group with its Uzbek host family

Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation by Donald Raleigh (2013)

by Andrew Straw

Recalling his formative years as an American baby boomer and the influence the Cold War and the Soviet Union had on his worldview, Donald Raleigh asks what life was like for people his age in the Soviet Union? What were their concerns about the future? How did they spend their time and what did Cold War ideological battles mean for their daily lives? As historians exhaust the biographies and psychological studies of leaders to gain insight into authoritarian societies, scholars such as Raleigh are increasingly turning to evidence from everyday life to complete our understanding of non-democratic states. These new efforts are important because there is no denying that authoritarian governments were common in the twentieth century, lasted for several generations, and some, like the authoritarian government of North Korea, continue to affect global affairs in the new millennium. It is also increasingly evident that popular participation, and not just dictators’ decrees, helped build and dismantle authoritarian regimes.

In Soviet Baby Boomers, Raleigh borrows the US term referring to children born after World War II to examine the Soviet Union. This Soviet cohort was born leading up to Stalin’s death in 1953 and during the transfer of power to a more reform-minded leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Unlike their parents and grandparents who experienced the horrors of revolution, two world wars, Stalin’s terror and disastrous modernization policies, this new Soviet generation grew up in the “normalized” Soviet Union. The secret police, one-party dictatorship, and communism remained, but surviving the Soviet system now meant finishing university dissertations, pursuing various personal goals, and using the black market economy to improve personal fortunes. In fact, Raleigh makes the important argument that “the Soviet System’s very success at effecting social change” caused the post-Stalin generation to become cynical about the system. The Soviet welfare state provided the foundation for an educated and urbanized professional class who supported reforms in the 1980s. By that time, the enthusiasm for a normal Soviet life had withered away as Soviet citizens were increasingly able to compare their standard of living to more robust Western economies, thus highlighting the absurdities of Soviet communism. And yet, most people were not active in the dissident movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s despite widespread sympathy for it. It was not until Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the policies of “glasnost” (openness) and perestroika (economic liberalization) that the baby boomers expressed their revolutionary ideas in public, elected officials that took reforms farther than Gorbachev imagined, and prepared as best they good for the positive and negative consequences of the market economy and democracy.

Raleigh’s research centers on students who graduated in 1967 from two magnet secondary schools that specialized in English in Moscow and Saratov. Through interviews, the author examines how these students experienced events in post-Stalin Russia such as Khrushchev’s liberalization after 1956, the Cold War, the Brezhnev “stagnation,” the Soviet-Afghan War, and Gorbachev’s reforms. Many of Raleigh’s discoveries might surprise American readers. For example the interviews reveal an almost total lack of “true communist believers.” Many respondents simply claimed that by the 1970’s any sensible person could see the economic absurdities in the communist system. Simultaneously, Western popular culture, from the Beatles to consumer goods, strongly influenced Soviet knowledge of the outside world and conflicted with negative portrayals of the West. Yes, students still had classes on Marxism, but the attempt to “brainwash” Soviet baby boomers failed. Official decrees and the aging Politburo were the target of popular humor that exposed Soviet absurdities; Westerners were not the only ones to poke fun at Brezhnev. The Communist Party continued to play a role, but several interviewees claimed that they joined the Party only because of career opportunities and the residual fear of the state police and prison camps. At the same time, many admitted that they probably could have had successful careers if the hadn’t joined the Party.

Street life in the Soviet Union, 1955 (Image courtesy of flickr/Malmo Museer)

Many of the interviewees are nostalgic about the past. A majority fondly remembers the good aspects of the Soviet welfare state (free education, medicine, housing, summer camps), especially when compared with the economic and social disasters of the 1990’s. Raleigh does an excellent job displaying how nostalgia is tied to the reasonable expectations of any modern welfare state and does not indicate that baby boomers would like to return to the Soviet-style governing. However, when asked about Vladimir Putin’s presidency, most interviewees spoke positively about the ex-KGB officer’s stabilizing effect on Russia since 2000. Raleigh also examines some of the darker memories of this period, such as the prevalence of Soviet anti-Semitism in society. For example, Soviet Jews were often overrepresented in the top primary schools when compared to other ethnic groups, but then experienced discrimination when applying for university or searching for a job.

The limit of Raleigh’s study is clear from the beginning: the group of students he selected to interview comes from the well-educated Soviet elite in two central cities. This limits Raleigh’s ability to draw larger conclusions about Soviet society and the reader is left wondering how commonplace such experiences and sentiments were for other Soviet citizens. The late 1940s, 50s and 60s were years of massive migration to the urban centers, but the book focuses on well-established urban families and does not offer any contrasting experiences of first generation urbanites. At other points, Raleigh highlights interesting facts, such as the underrepresentation of Tatars in Saratov schools, but then provides no explanation.

Muscovites street dancing in 1991 (Image courtesy of Abbeville Press)

In his defense, Raleigh readily admits the limitations of his sample of interviewees, and does an excellent job showing the differences between life in Moscow (the Soviet capital) and Saratov (a large, provincial city that was purposely closed to the outside world). Furthermore, the author argues that this elite cohort of students had a privileged place in Soviet society that made their actions key to giving Gorbachev’s reforms momentum. Another issue that oral histories inevitably invoke is the fact that interviewees’ memories of events change over time and people often lie. Raleigh responds to this point by asserting that he is not only interested in the facts of Soviet life, but in what the Soviet Union represents in the baby boomers’ memories today. He carefully interrogates suspicious responses to draw out misrepresentations of certain events or topics.

In sum, for Soviet historians the author provides a vital starting point for further research and comparison on Soviet life after Stalin. For the casual reader, Raleigh demonstrates how people lived their lives under an authoritarian state by maneuvering within the bureaucracy, sustaining their families, enjoying the comforts not available to earlier Soviet generations, and placing themselves in the position to help dismantle their authoritarian state.

I am Cuba, for Sale (1964)

By Blake Scott

Our eyes travel from the sea’s surface to a palm-tree shore. A female voice can be heard. “I am Cuba,” she tells us. “Once Christopher Columbus landed here. He wrote in his diary: ‘This is the most beautiful land ever seen by human eyes.’ Thank you, Señor Columbus.”

An extravagant party on the rooftop of a Havana hotel. It’s the late 1950s; hedonistic tourism is booming in the City. A band plays loud. Drinks. Laughter. Our line of vision moves from the hotel’s rooftop to a crowd of tourists below, where we see a woman and follow her into the pool. Underwater.

Three male tourists from the U.S. sit at a table in one of Havana’s decadent clubs. They order drinks:
“Another daiquiri.”
“Give me a scotch, make it a double.”
“Vodka dragon.”
The waiter asks, “something on the side maybe?”
One of the men lowers his dark sunglasses. “I’ll take that tasty morsel.” And his friend, “And I’ll take that dish.” The men embrace as two beautiful yet sad-faced women walk over from the bar to their table. “Nothing is indecent in Cuba if you’ve got enough dough,” he tells his friend.

These deeply metaphorical scenes open the first of four episodes that make up the 1964 film, Soy Cuba (I am Cuba). Hailed today a classic for its inventive cinematography, I am Cuba was virtually forgotten for three decades. After a week in theaters in Cuba and the Soviet Union, the film went into the archives: one copy in Moscow and another in Havana. This essay reviews I am Cuba’s production and revival.

The Art of Cold War

The exchange of weapons, sugar, and communist dogma has traditionally dominated U.S. understandings of the Soviet-Cuban alliance. I am Cuba represents another aspect to this relationship. During the Cold War, Cuba was much more than a strategic island 90 miles from the U.S. border. For idealists in the Soviet Union, the Cuban Revolution offered hope for progressive socialism. The young bearded revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra Mountains reenergized intellectuals who were tired of the old guard politics in their own country. Soviet poet and co-writer of I am Cuba, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, says he was “childishly happy” when the Cuban Revolution triumphed. He remembers, fondly, Russian parents naming their sons “Fidel.”

During this early moment of optimism, the Soviet Union sent a film commission to meet representatives from the newly formed Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). The rebels founded ICAIC just three months after entering Havana. Film and art were to become key components in Cuba’s effort to create a new revolutionary culture. The Institute’s first director, Alfredo Guevara, explains that during the Soviet commission’s visit, “They proposed to make a movie… about its solidarity and friendship with Cuba, expressing how they sympathized with the Cuban Revolution.” ICAIC and the Soviet Union’s Mosfilm Studios agreed to collaborate on a film about the island’s dramatic transition from corrupt republic to revolutionary state.

The Soviet commission recommended Mikhail Kalatozov to direct the project. At the time, Kalatozov was one of the most famous filmmakers in the Soviet Union. His film, The Cranes are Flying, won the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. He was one of the few Soviet directors whose work had been widely viewed by audiences in the West. For the Cuban project, Kalatozov invited Sergey Urusevsky, his cinematographer from The Cranes are Flying and also The Letter Never Sent (1959), to be Director of Photography. Young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Cuban author Enrique Pineda Barnet were selected to write the script. I am Cuba was the first film produced by this Soviet-Cuban partnership. During production on the island the film crew received the full support of the Cuban revolutionary government. When Kalatozov needed 5,000 extras for a battle scene – to offer just one example – 5,000 Cuban soldiers were mobilized to play the part.

The Cuban Revolution had sparked hope, but also tension with the U.S. In 1961, the CIA sponsored an invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The following year, President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade after U-2 surveillance planes discovered nuclear missile sites. It was the closest the U.S. and the Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war. Cuba was right in the middle of it and so was the film crew of I am Cuba. The production team had become part of the Cold War. Kalatozov announced to the press: “I’ll make a movie in Cuba that will be my answer, and that of the whole Soviet people, against the naval blockade, this cruel aggression of American imperialism!”

The resulting film is an epic poem; a surreal critique of realities suffered before and confronted during the revolution. Kalatozov and his team sought to capture events as they unfolded, from social injustice to glorious revolt. Produced over a fourteen-month period, from 1962 to 1964, the film embodies the creativity, the militant optimism, and also the naiveté of the era. It is both Cold War history and revolutionary art.

Storyline and Reception

After the opening vignette of Havana’s immoral tourist scene, the film transitions to the story of a poor farmer. He works his entire life in the fields. He is old and tired, but the rich Cuban soil provides. He is happy enough, until a greedy landowner arrives with two armed guards and informs him that the land has been sold to United Fruit. “Now you’ll be able to rest,” the owner tells him. The landowner is a vendepatria elite (someone who sells out his country to foreign interests). The farmer is dispossessed and heartbroken. At the end of the episode, the female narrator asks, “Who will answer for this blood?”

The third and fourth parts of I am Cuba move away from the forms of capitalist exploitation (hedonist tourist parties and land-grabbing) to revolutionary mobilization.
Students and young people organize against the dictatorship and U.S. imperialism. When U.S. sailors chase a frightened woman, Gloria, a young student stands up against their belligerence. Other acts of defiance follow. The once passive student becomes a martyr, and more students take to the streets.

In the final part of the film, the nonviolent hands of a peasant turn to revolutionary action. He is left with no choice but to join Fidel and the revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra. They charge heroically into battle. “To die for your motherland is to live.”

Kalatozov and Urusevsky thought they had made a classic, but the audience didn’t agree. The film premiered simultaneously in Moscow and Santiago de Cuba, and then disappeared. Brazilian filmmaker Vicente Ferraz offers some possible answers for this short theatrical run in his 2005 documentary I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth. Ferraz interviewed crewmembers about their experiences making the film. They explained, in short, that the Cuban audience “felt insulted.” The characters seemed to react mechanically to structural circumstances, like pawns in a revolutionary chess game.

Sergio Corrieri, who played a student-revolutionary in the film, recalled people saying, “This really isn’t our reality. This character doesn’t exist, it isn’t Cuban . . . it was the Cuban reality seen through a Slavic prism.”

The film’s poetic tone and surreal mood, conveyed by highly mobile camera movement, connected poorly with Cubans who faced dangerous realities. In the middle of food shortages, and with U.S. military planes flying overhead, the Russians presented them with an unrealistic film. Enrique Pineda Barnet, Cuban co-writer, remembered the premiere with regret. “It was terrible. The first thing that bothered me was that voice, that text: ‘I am Cuba.’” The true story of the revolution, in the minds of many Cubans, had been subordinated to the cinematographic ambitions of the Soviet filmmakers.

The film was also unfavorably received in the Soviet Union, but for different reasons. The U.S. presence in Cuba was considered too glamorous for Soviet sensibilities. Pre-revolutionary Cuba looked like too much fun. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the film was never allowed to reach an audience because of its communist ties. I am Cuba was boxed-in by the polemics of the Cold War.

Revival

Only with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, some thirty years later, did I am Cuba reemerge. It was U.S. filmmakers, ironically, who first came to love and promote the Soviet-Cuban production, which so bitingly critiqued U.S. culture. The film’s path from obscurity to classic is not entirely clear. But, in brief, social status and money pushed the film into public light. Directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola saw I am Cuba and became the film’s biggest supporters. Distribution rights were acquired from Mosfilm Studios, and in 1995 the film was formally released in the U.S.

Scorsese and Coppola, along with other filmmakers, admired I am Cuba for the very reason it was initially discarded: the radical form and cinematic style, which seemed to overshadow its revolutionary content. Contemporary film critics have praised I am Cuba as a masterpiece in cinematography. In several key scenes, the camera travels vertically from ground level, or from a rooftop, to another space of events (below or above), and then moves horizontally through windows and interior rooms, all in a single take. “There is a shot near the beginning of I Am Cuba,” explains Roger Ebert, “that is one of the most astonishing I have ever seen.” Every image is like a piece of art inside a larger work.

With this post-Cold War revival, the film’s original “flaws” are still acknowledged, but the value system is inverted. The script is still considered weak – “propaganda” – but that is now seen as acceptable because the cinematography is so beautiful. But is the quality of I am Cuba’s story really so secondary to its style? Does the film not capture aspects of truth despite, or even because of, its surreal presentation? Sometimes the “imaginary,” as writer André Breton once put it, can be the most “real.” While it’s true that the film offers subjective and often exoticized representations of reality, there is still something real in them. I am Cuba’s content cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda. The film is a window, among other things, into Cuba’s revolt, Cold War militancy, and also Soviet views of the American tropics.

For those of us interested in the relationship between history and cinema, I am Cuba’s plot and its story of production merit further analysis. How might the film change, for example, our understandings of the tenuous relationship between Cuba, the Soviet Union and the U.S.? Why was the film rejected so abruptly in the mid-1960s, and beloved so quickly in the 1990s? Narrow visions of acceptable revolutionary art? Capitalist society’s infatuation with the cultural ruins of communism? I am Cuba has as much to say about history as it does about film technique.

In the current moment of state-promoted luxury tourism, I am Cuba may also help us understand the complicated relationship between the Cuban Revolution’s past and present. Most Cubans living on the island have never seen I am Cuba. The film’s depiction of pre-revolutionary tourism, however, looks a lot like the bar and club scene of Havana today.

To learn more about the film I am Cuba, and the historical context in which it was produced:

• I am Cuba, The Siberian Mammoth. A documentary by Vicente Ferraz about the making of I am Cuba. Ferraz returns to Havana after the film’s revival to interview cast and crew about their experiences on set. The interviews are fascinating. A must see. Here’s the trailer.

• Week-end in Havana. An exotic, carefree view of pre-revolutionary Cuba by U.S. filmmaker Walter Lang. To watch this film alongside I am Cuba is to see Havana from two dramatically different viewpoints. Here’s the trailer.

• History Will Absolve Me. Fidel Castro’s powerful speech against the Batista dictatorship in 1953. The speech outlines the justifications for the July 26th Movement. It marks the beginning of a long drawn-out rebellion.

• On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture. Professor Louis A. Pérez Jr.’s book highlights the historical relationship between Cuba and United States. He meticulously explains the cross-cultural context that directly led up to the Cuban Revolution.

• The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy. Professor Marifeli Pérez-Stable’s book provides an in depth analysis of the socio-economic causes and effects of the Cuban Revolution.

More films about life in Cuba’s revolution:

• Memories of Underdevelopment. The story of Sergio, a bourgeois writer who decides to stay in revolutionary Havana, even though his wife and friends flee to Miami.

• Lucía. The film traces the lives of three Cuban women, each named Lucía from three different historical periods: the Cuban war of independence (with Spain), the 1930’s, and the 1960’s.

• Strawberry and Chocolate. The story of a complicated friendship between a young communist student and a gay artist in 1979 Havana. The film offers a powerful critique of authoritarianism and homophobia in the revolution.

• Suite Havana. In this documentary, we follow the lives of ten Cubans as they go about their daily routine. The film has no dialogue, using only sound and image.

Photo Credits:

Scenes from the film I am Cuba

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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