Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Frank A. Guridy on the Transnational Black Diaspora

By Frank A. Guridy

On April 22, 1930, Lalita Zamora, an Afro-Cuban woman in Havana, wrote a letter to Langston Hughes, the famous “Blues Poet” of the Harlem Renaissance, to thank him for sending her copies of his poetry books. Zamora had met Hughes during his recent trip to Cuba. Her letter, which was written in English, expressed her admiration for the way his writing style effectively conveyed to “the reader the sensation and feelings of the desires, hopes, love and ambitions of our race.” Zamora’s usage of the words “sensation” and “feelings” is striking. Such words convey her belief that Hughes’s poems authentically represented the emotions and aspirations of those of her “race” and perhaps even herself.

Zamora’s letters are a few of the fascinating communications that Hughes received from Cuban fans of his work, a number of them coming from Afro-Cubans. This “fan mail,” along with a host of other materials that exist in the Langston Hughes Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, documents the poet’s relationships with Cuban artists, intellectuals, and readers. The relationships that Langston Hughes developed with Afro-Cubans exemplify the personal and artistic connections that helped shape the political strategies of both Afro-Cubans and black Americans as they attempted to overcome a shared history of oppression and enslavement. These encounters illustrate the significance of cross-national linkages to the ways black populations in both countries negotiated the entangled processes of U.S. imperialism and racial discrimination. As a result of these relationships, Afro-Cubans and African-Americans came to identify themselves as part of a transcultural African diaspora, an identification that did not contradict their ongoing struggle for national citizenship.

Hughes’s international stature in the 1930s enabled him to play a key role in establishing African-American relations with Cubans of African descent in this period. While his role in the Harlem Renaissance is well documented, his important work as a promoter and translator of Afro-Cuban poetry and art is less well known. His experience living in Mexico as a youth with his father gave him a unique transcultural background in Latin American and U.S. American cultures, allowing him to translate Afro-Cuban writings for African-American readership. During his trips to the island in 1930 and 1931, Hughes became acquainted with many of the leading members of the Cuban intelligentsia, including José Antonio Fernández de Castro, the noted writer and magazine editor, Gustavo Urrutia, the black journalist, and Nicolás Guillén, the Afro-Cuban poet. Guillén’s poetry, like Hughes’s verse, popularized the use of black vernacular languages in poetry and song, thereby illustrating the synergies between the Harlem Renaissance and the Afro-Cubanist movement. Guillén crafted poems inspired by the son, the African-derived musical genre that spread throughout the island during the 1920s.

Correspondence between Hughes and his fans in Cuba illustrate the perception among African-descendants in both Cuba and the United States of a commonality of experiences across national and cultural differences. This is clear in the ways Cuban readers viewed the relationship between Guillén’s and Hughes’s poetry. A 1930 letter to Hughes from Gustavo Urrutia, hailed the publication of “eight formidable negro poems written by our Guillén. They are real Cuban negro poetry written in the very popular slang. They are the exact equivalent of your ‘blues,’” exalted Urrutia.

Yet the Cuban reception to Hughes was not limited to correspondence that commented on his poetry. For example, letters from Afro-Cuban women illustrate the ways romantic feelings infused their desire to connect with the attractive man from another part of the African diaspora. A few weeks after Hughes’s 1930 visit, Caruca Alvarez, a woman living in Havana who described herself as a “romantic,” wrote Urrutia in an effort to obtain the Blues Poet’s address in the U.S. “As one of the first admirers of his race and as a Cuban woman, I would very much like to be Langston’s spiritual friend,” Alvarez wrote.

A more aggressive series of communications came from Fara Crespo, another one of the Blues Poet’s female “admirers” who hoped to be his “friend.” Soon after Hughes’ departure from Cuba, Crespo wrote to express her admiration for the “poet of the ‘spirituals,’” as she called him, and to make a request. “I, a young Cuban woman admirer of one who is brave enough to exclaim: I want to be truly black, would like to be able to call myself the friend of the poet Langston Hughes!” Like Alvarez, Crespo was drawn to Hughes’s explicit identification with blackness, citing a public interview Guillén conducted with Hughes, in which he stated, “I want to be truly black.” Yet, her attractions ran deeper. While acknowledging the boldness of her explicit request to ask for the “friendship of a man,” she felt confident that Hughes would not be turned off because he “belong[ed] to this modern era free of all forms of prejudice and marked by material, intellectual, and moral freedom.” Indeed, Crespo fashioned herself as a woman of the modern era. “When you arrived in Havana you attracted my attention,” Crespo wrote, “because you were what I had been looking for and for this reason I write you with the hope of having [you] as a true friend.”

The letters from Alvarez and Crespo convey the complex motivations at work among those who expressed their admiration for the Blues Poet, including the desire to know a celebrity, romantic attraction, and intellectual curiosity. They also reveal how Hughes’s Afro-Cuban admirers sought to navigate cultural differences by relying on expressions of desire infused by a romantic attraction. I read these letters as evidence of the yearnings embedded in Afro-diasporic interaction and indeed most motives for affiliation—desires that ranged from Hughes’s wish to be “truly black,” to Crespo’s yearnings to be “the friend of Langston Hughes.” Crespo and Alvarez’s inattention to Hughes’s poetry showed that, like many of his Cuban fans, they sought to connect with the famous Blues Poet because they were attracted to his physical and symbolic roles as a “colored” man of letters from the United States. Perhaps most importantly, Crespo’s and Alvarez’s letters illustrate how black Cuban women could use the epistolary form to engage with the writers of the Harlem and Havana movements as agents, rather than as mere objects, of desire. These letters need not be dismissed as mere “fandom,” but rather seen as evidence of the ways women of African descent, excluded by the male-dominated literary scene in Cuba, sought to engage with the writers they found appealing. Moreover, they also show how Afro-Cubans and African Americans used whatever means at their disposal—broken versions of English and Spanish, or communications of affect—to forge commonality across difference.

For more on the transnational diaspora forged by Afro-Cubans and African-Americans, see Frank A. Guridy’s Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV

by Amber Abbas

Professor Masood ul Hasan was born in Moradabad in 1928. He completed high school from Hewat Muslim High School. His father was an employee of the Municipal Board. He completed his F.A. (Intermediate) from Government Inter-College, Moradabad. He studied in the Aligarh Muslim University from 1943 to 1947 where he completed his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature. He completed his Ph.D. in Liverpool while he was appointed as a Reader in the Department of English at AMU. He retired from AMU in 1988 after serving as Professor of English, Chair of Department of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He also served as the Proctor of the University. He continues to live in Aligarh, in Sir Syed Nagar.

I met Professor Masood ul Hasan first in July 2008, and I interviewed him a total of three times in 2008 and 2009 while I was living in Aligarh to conduct my dissertation research on the role and experience of Aligarh students in the freedom movement and the movement for Pakistan. He was extremely supportive of my project, and frequently introduced me to other senior and retired professors who had been his friends and colleagues for generations. I always looked forward to a visit and a cup of tea at his home during my stay in Aligarh!

Professor Hasan was also one of only a few students of the 1940s who was willing to speak about his involvement with the Muslim League in the 1945-46 elections. He frequently made sure that I understood that he regretted his involvement with the League and chalked it up to youthful enthusiasm, a desire for adventure, and naivete. He chose not to leave for Pakistan despite his involvement with the League and remained his entire career at Aligarh University as a professor of English.

In this interview he describes his experience on the day of Gandhi’s assassination, a mere five months after the partition of the country. On that day, Masood ul Hasan was traveling from Aligarh to his home in Bhopal. He took a train from Aligarh to Agra and was to buy his onward ticket in the Agra Cantonment Station. When he sat in the train, he made a deliberate choice to avoid the “minority compartment,” a concession made by the railways to protect Muslims and other minorities in the wake of the partition violence when trains became sites of massacre. It was his “little assertion of self-confidence” to ride in the general compartment, clad in a sherwani – a typically Muslim coat that was a gesture of pride in his heritage but marked him as a minority. These choices would have been only slightly risky on any other day. On this day, however, as he stepped onto the train platform at Agra and found it deserted, Masood ul Hasan felt afraid. The news of Gandhi’s assassination created a difficult position for him. If a Muslim had killed Gandhi, all Muslims would be held responsible, and the violence of partition could be reignited. As he stood on the platform, terribly alone, in the city made famous by Shah Jahan’s majestic Taj Mahal, a monument to India’s Muslim heritage, he feared what might happen if he were unable to leave.

Luckily, the ticket collector took pity on him, arranged for a ticket and Hasan was able to depart for the safer environment of his home in Bhopal. He did not become a victim of violence on that day, but the fear he experienced speaks to the uncertainty that Muslims in India felt, especially when traveling through unfamiliar environments, in the early years after India’s independence. Whereas they were supposed to have the same rights and privileges as other Indian citizens, the trauma of 1947 was still fresh, and, especially when traveling, Muslims often feared for their safety.

Hasan’s narrative picks up on some familiar themes from other stories Muslims tell about this day. It is singular, it stands out in the memory; he, like others, is able to tap into his emotions and experience with remarkable clarity. Muslims almost without exception feared a Muslim assassin. After everything they had been through in 1947 and Gandhi’s selfless efforts to protect Muslims in places they were threatened, a Muslim assassin would unseat in one shot the tenuous but safe position of Muslims in early 1948. Everyone knew this, not just Muslims. And when it was revealed that the assassin was a fundamentalist Hindu, Muslims heaved a collective sigh of relief. No conservative Hindus were targeted or held responsible for the actions of Nathuram Godse. Muslims were spared, but one of their staunch allies was lost.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Masood ul Hasan

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Yann, Gandhi in Noakhali, 1946

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Unknown author, “Group photo of Hindu Mahasabha, the group accused of successfully staging Gandhi’s assassination. Standing: Shankar Kistaiya, Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa, Digambar Badge (Approver), Guruji M.S. Golwalkar. Seated: Narayan Apte, Vinayak D. Savarkar, Nathuram Godse, Vishnu Karkare.” via Wikimedia Commons

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Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Professor Masood ul Hasan

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

Sir Syed Nagar, Aligarh (May 1, 2009)

Transcript

Biographical Notes: Professor Masood ul Hasan was born in Moradabad in 1928. He completed high school from Hewat Muslim High School. His father was an employee of the Municipal Board. He completed his F.A. (Intermediate) from Government Inter-College, Moradabad. He studied in the Aligarh Muslim University from 1943 to 1947 where he completed his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature. He completed his Ph.D. in Liverpool while he was appointed as a Reader in the Department of English at AMU. He retired from AMU in 1988 after serving as Professor of English, Chair of Department of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He also served as the Proctor of the University. He continues to live in Aligarh, in Sir Syed Nagar. Professor Masood ul Hasan has two children, Seema and Naved Masood.

Context Notes: This was my third interview with Professor of English Masood ul Hasan. I finally arrived at his house without getting lost, riding my own bicycle. He welcomed me warmly and we sat down to tea and biscuits and a friendly conversation.

Professor Masoodul Hasan: (1:28:26.1) No, no. You see, when Gandhiji was assassinated, I had left this place, and in fact, on the day of his assassination I was on [a] train and found myself in quite an embarrassing and panicky position.

Amber Abbas: You were in Bhopal.

PMH: (1:28:50) I was in Bhopal, but I was traveling from Aligarh to Bhopal. I was on the GT Express. And they used to run a minority compartment in those days, especially for the minorities, under police protection.

AA: That was something that came up around partition time or that had always been there?

PMH: Minority compartments came in the wake of partition because of the great killings! Now of course, sometimes I use it, sometimes I don’t. But in those days I was religiously clad in a sherwani. And I avoided that minority compartment as my little assertion of self-confidence, in me. But I tell you, how the human mind changes—how the courage, how you pale. I entrained at Aligarh. It was a general compartment. Three or four constables with one hefty prisoner, who was an Afghan, they were sat there. We reached Tundla. Tundla is on the way. I had some nashta (breakfast) with me, and it was extra. I asked the constable “Bhai aapko agar koi (indistinguishable) ho tho mein oosko vo de doon? (If it’s okay with you, shall I give it to him?) Hanh. Of course it suited them because his meals they would get. And then they said, “Sahib, is ne tho hume Bareilley se yahan tak lane me kahan, or kaise…” (“Sir, this guy, just in the distance from Bareilly to here, we don’t know where or how—“) I don’t know these are the, those are the “do dafa hathkari tor chuka hein yeh” (“Twice he broke the handcuffs already”). Anyway. It was a passenger train up to Agra, it used to take very long. When we reached Agra Fort, I found a kind of uncanny silence all over there. Dark, it was January. I think yes, it was January. Dark and everything and pin-drop silence. No vendors. So I just didn’t know. And the entire compartment was vacated. I was left. I lost my nerve. Then I head some one say, “Gandhiji ko mar diya. (Gandhi has been killed).” Now the first thing that struck me, “Gandhiji ko kis musalman ne mara hoga. (Some Muslim must have killed Gandhi.)” And you know, very diplomatically and very wisely, Nehruji was the first to say bahut jaldi oon hone kaha “Oos ko ek Hindu fanatic ne mar diya.” (very quickly he told us “A Hindu fanatic has killed him”) I lost nerve, and I also shifted to the minority compartment, where, even those people had left, the policemen, because their destination had come. Now I didn’t have a direct ticket for Bhopal. I had a ticket for Agra and from Agra—because this was a passenger train—when I reached, the ticket was to be bought at Agra cantonment station. And the train touched there, the train missed this Agra Fort. When I reached there it was totally dark, it was forlorn and not a soul to be seen there. I went to the booking window and they said ke “Sir, Bhopal ke ticket aaj hi issue nehin hongey.” (“A ticket for Bhopal will not be issued today.”) I felt quite uncomfortable and panicky. “Nehin Sahib, aap aasey kijiyee ke accha, vo head ticket collector hein. (No, sir, you can do this- he is the Ticket Collector, there) You go to him.” And it was a dark—within the station. It was dark inside. I felt a little uncanny and I went there and I said, “I am employed there and I am due there tomorrow.” He thankfully issued a chit to me, I got the ticket and I went. And I reached home. So that was the day.

Posted on January 27, 2012

The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo by Lauren Derby (2009)

by Lauren Hammond

Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, remains a figure of mythic proportions in the popular Dominican imagination. A light-skinned mulatto with Haitian ancestry, Trujillo rose from obscurity as a sugar plantation guard to establish one of Latin America’s most enduring dictatorships. His appetite for women was legendary and common belief held that he never sweated. Trujillo’s minions, and even foreign governments, lavished him with praise and an array of titles from Generalissimo to Benefactor of the Fatherland to Restorer of Financial Independence. However, outside portrayals of Trujillo as a make-up wearing megalomaniac and revelations of his regime’s oppression, many questions remain about the mechanisms of state power and relations between the Dominican populace, Trujillo, and the state. In The Dictator’s Seduction, Lauren Derby uncovers the cultural economy “that bound Dominicans to the regime.” She reinterprets the regime’s theatricality – pageants, parades, and the practices of denunciation and public praise – as critical in obscuring the inner workings of the regime and argues that the Trujillato gained and maintained the support of the masses, albeit in attenuated form, by creating a new middle class and co-opting Dominican understandings about the embodiment of race, gender, sexuality, and the process of community formation.

Derby’s most salient observations of the populist dynamics of the Trujillo regime come through her examination of the ritualized practices of denunciation and praise and the tensions between the Dominican Party and an expanded state bureaucracy. Amongst ordinary citizens, state workers, and party officials, accusation reflected the Caribbean practice of gossip as a means of social control, while panegyric was used for personal gain. The conflict between the Dominican Party and an expanded state bureaucracy reflected this dynamic. Founded in 1930, the massive Dominican Party created a new, darker middle-class indebted to the regime for its new identity. State workers, on the other hand, continued to hail from lighter-skinned elite families. While this divide played on pre-existing socio-racial tensions, Derby demonstrates that Trujillo and his proxies also encouraged a culture of enmity between state and party officials. This left members of both groups vulnerable to charges of corruption, disloyalty, and moral failings, which could result in social death. In a culture sensitive to the loss of personal honor and respect, Dominicans lived in fear of social isolation. Moreover, state bureaucrats and Dominican Party workers used praise of Trujillo and their efforts on his behalf to improve their positions within the Trujillato and as a means of defense against condemnation.

The book’s most interesting claims emerge from Derby’s exploration of popular belief surrounding Trujillo’s invulnerability, which Dominicans attribute to his muchachito, or spiritual guide. After the assassination of Trujillo on the highway between Ciudad Trujillo and San Cristobal, the arranged coup failed to take place because conspirators inside the regime hesitated to believe that Trujillo, who had survived three previous assassination attempts, was dead. Derby shows that Dominicans attributed Trujillo’s invulnerability to his muchachito who purportedly visited Trujillo in his sleep. The muchachito found its roots in a popular mixture of Haitian voodun and Afro-Dominican vodú and was associated with black magic. It told Trujillo how to invest and about plots against him, providing a popular explanation of the apparatus of power. Popular Dominican religiosity viewed the duality of Trujillo and his spirit guide as extremely dangerous and unstable. Many believe that in the end Trujillo lost trust in his muchachito and challenged it. This loss of confianza led to Trujillo’s undoing. Derby also examines the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following Hurricane San Zenón, the coronations of his daughter at the Free World’s Fair of Peace and Confraternity in 1955 and his mistress at the Dominican Republic’s 1937 Carnival, clothing and tiguerage, and the growth of a grassroots religious movement called Olivorismo following Trujillo’s assassination.

Lauren Derby’s monograph makes a significant contribution to Dominican historiography and scholarship on populism, Latin American and Caribbean dictatorship, and gender and sexuality. However, while many of her conclusions are based on a series of oral histories, the voices of her subjects remain largely absent from the text. In addition, at times the work would have benefitted from a more in depth analysis of the complexity of race and national identity in the Dominican Republic. Overall, the text offers much needed assessment of popular culture in the Dominican Republic during and after the Trujillo regime.

Photo credits:

Harris & Ewing, “Former President [of] San Domingo arrives in Capital. Washington, D.C., July 6. A close-up of General Rafael L. Trujillo, former President of the Dominican Republic, made as he stood at attention while the national anthem was being played upon his arrival today,” 6 July, 1939.

via The Library of Congress

Unknown artist, “Insignia of the Dominican Party, the party founded by the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo on 16 August, 1931.”

via Wikipedia

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This interview, conducted in May 2011, with General Imbert, one of the men who assassinated Rafael Trujillo in 1961. (BBC News)

Adrian Masters’ review of The Doubtful Strait, Ernesto Cardenal’s poem chronicling the history of Nicaragua from colonial discovery to the Somoza dictatorship.

Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA

by Jonathan Hunt

The recent assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, an Iranian nuclear scientist and the deputy director of the enrichment site at Natanz, has underscored that a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program is underway. At the end of January 2012, Iranian officials will meet with representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As the international community scrambles to stop a nuclear-armed Iran from adding more fuel to the powder keg of Middle Eastern geopolitics, it is vital that contrasting understandings of the international nuclear nonproliferation regime among nations, particularly the purpose of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty administered by the IAEA, be acknowledged and resolved.

Mohamed El-Baradei, former director and Yukiya Amano, current director of the IAEA

“God Bless the IAEA,” read an editorial in Le Monde on November 9, 2011, the day after the IAEA issued a report expressing serious concerns that “Iran has carried out … activities that are relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” The response from Moscow had a different tone, with the Russian foreign ministry (echoing Russian Prime Minister and once-and-future president, Vladimir Putin) declaring the report “biased” and “purposely twisted,” by pressure from the U.S. and the EU. President Mahmoud Ahmaninejad of Iran was blunter, demanding to know why Yukiya Amano, the IAEA director general, had allowed U.S. “bullying” to shape the agency’s conclusions.

In the United States, international organizations are something of a four-letter word. The case of the United Nations is exemplary. It is frequently denigrated in U.S. media and politics as a haven for despots, a forum for anti-Americanism, and a graveyard for U.S. initiatives. The criticisms leveled at the IAEA were similar in 2003 when the U.S. argued that an Iraqi attempt to obtain weapons of mass destruction and medium-range missiles was a casus belli, and tried to assemble an international coalition to depose Saddam Hussein. When Secretary of Defense Colin Powell brandished U.S. intelligence before the UN General Assembly he described as the smoking gun of Iraqi nuclear ambitions, the IAEA warned that, in actuality, there was little to no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program with a military object. In hindsight, their verdict was as accurate as it was disregarded by an American society at the height of its power and hubris.

Today, U.S. and European officials present the IAEA as an irrefutable source. In part, this is because Yukiya Amano is widely seen as a more dependable ally of the West than Mohamed El Baradei, the Egyptian statesman who served as the agency’s director general from 1997 to 2009. The international community saw El Baradei as an honest broker. But recent revelations have indicated that Amano is more responsive to U.S. interests. A U.S. Department of State cable disclosed by WikiLeaks shows U.S. officials describing Amano as “director general of all states, but in agreement with us.” Republicans have cited the IAEA report as proof of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nefarious intentions. The GOP’s presidential frontrunner, Mitt Romney, has gone so far as to state that progress made by Iran’s nuclear program is President Obama’s “greatest failing … [in] foreign policy,” and, that if Obama were reelected, Iran would become the world’s ninth nuclear power.

In reality, however, the November 8, 2011 report overstepped the IAEA’s constitutional mandate and relies on stale evidence that fails to substantiate the agency’s concerns. As the leading U.S. authority on the legal history of the IAEA and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Daniel Joyner, has pointed out in the legal blog Jurist:

“The IAEA is given no authority to inquire into or to examine activities within Iran that are not directly related to fissile materials, even if they may possibly relate to the development of a nuclear explosive device. Again, the IAEA has a limited legal mandate that does not include being a general nuclear weapons watchdog.”

Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist who has followed the story for The New Yorker magazine, asked Robert Kelley, a former IAEA director and a nuclear engineer with decades of experience, about the report’s evidentiary basis. He observed that the information used by the IAEA to support its extra-legal “concerns” was chiefly taken from a single laptop of questionable origins. He also picked holes in the revelatory nature of the findings. The substance of the report, in his words, was “old news,” and he wondered “why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.”

This institutional overreach is damaging the agency’s reputation as an independent and impartial regulator. The IAEA was the brainchild of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who announced in 1953 the creation of an agency that would ensure that “fissionable material would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind.” Amid the push-button fear of the early Cold War, U.S. policymakers wanted Atoms for Peace (as the proposal was famously dubbed) to showcase the socioeconomic benefits of applying nuclear science and technology to energy production, agriculture, and medicine. The hidden agenda, however, was to justify the country’s mounting investment in its nuclear-weapon complex. In the Kennedy and Johnson years, the IAEA safeguard regime designed to keep fissile nuclear materials (uranium and plutonium) from being put to military use was folded into the international nuclear nonproliferation regime with the NPT and the IAEA at its heart.

This focus on fissile nuclear materials has meant that research and technical activities to develop the practical knowledge and equipment necessary to construct a nuclear warhead lie beyond the agency’s ambit. The history of the NPT and IAEA demonstrate that the agency was not designed to be a nuclear “watchdog” supervising any and all research work relevant to nuclear weapons, but instead a “regulator” certifying that the fissile byproducts of peaceful nuclear energy were not used in a military program.

The public debate about Iran and the IAEA is marked by the divergent readings of the history and purpose of the nonproliferation regime. The United States regards the IAEA as a linchpin of a peaceful and progressive world under U.S. guardianship; China and Russia as a way to reinforce their special status as nuclear powers; Britain and France as a bulwark of international law and Western influence; and the developing countries of the G-77 as a discriminatory system that perpetuates a hierarchy of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.” The controversial report has brought these clashing views into starker relief. As the U.S. and the EU rachet up economic sanctions and Iranian scientists continue to find themselves the targets of what appear to be covert assassinations, the IAEA will find it more and more difficult to act as a intermediary. The implications for peace in the Middle East, and the future of nuclear nonproliferation, could be grim.

Photos via Wikimedia Commons

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

by Kristie Flannery

Since Douglas Cope’s seminal study The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City 1660-1720 was published in 1994, historians have understood the caste system, or sistema de castas, that categorised New Spain’s multiracial population as an elite construct to impose order on a disordered plebe, rather than a discourse that reflected existing, clearly defined racial boundaries. Cope overturned the idea that racial identity in colonial Mexico was “fixed permanently at birth” and argued that race was a versatile identity that could be “reaffirmed, modified, manipulated, or perhaps even rejected.” The unfixed nature of identities assumed and performed by individuals and groups in colonial Latin America beyond Mexico City is the subject of the collection of essays edited by Andrew Fisher and Matthew O’Hara recently published as Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America.

Together the nine essays printed in this volume demonstrate that identities forged throughout Spain and Portugal’s empires in America were “fluid, malleable and constrained.” For example, Ann Twinam’s essay reveals that in the late eighteenth century mulattos and pardos from diverse parts of Spain’s Latin American empire petitioned the Council and Camará of the Indies to purchased whiteness. Mariana Dantas shows that in mid-eigtheenth-century Minas Gerais, the black brotherhood of Saint Joseph petitioned the King of Portugal for an exemption from a regulation that prohibited blacks and other people of “inferior condition” from carrying swords. Dantas emphasizes that this group of men justified their request on the grounds that they were loyal vassals, Christians, and skilled tradesmen; they evoked political, social and economic identities that they believed would override racial identity. Both Twinam and Dantas discuss the notion of ‘calidad’, which was a sense of the ‘quality,’ ‘state’ or ‘condition’ of a person that could be influenced by, but was not at all dependent upon, a person’s physical attributes including skin colour. ‘Calidad’ is a common thread that runs through many of the essays in Imperial Subjects that reinforces the impermanence of racial identity.

The expansive geographical and temporal scope of Imperial Subjects is a sure strength of this project; it persuades readers that the fluidity and malleability of racial identity was a defining feature of Latin American colonialism, rather than an anomaly. This collection has a strong footing in interdisciplinary analysis, borrowing theories from anthropology and cultural studies. The concept of ‘social identity’ attributed to the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth is deployed implicitly or explicitly within all of essays. Barth theorised that ethnicity was produced through processes of group interactions that defined boundaries, and therefore were inherently fluid.

Imperial Subjects may be faulted for giving the false impression that all historians have accepted the fluidity of identity in colonial Latin America. In a recent study Matthew Restall argued that the mobility of Africans and people of African decent in the colonial Yucatan was restricted to the ‘black middle.’ Although a porous line dividing enslaved and free blacks afforded blacks a degree of social mobility in this corner of New Spain, Restall insists that “men and women of African decent could never become full and indistinguishable members of the colony’s Spanish community.”

Can we accept both the fluidity of identity showcased in Imperial Subjects and Restall’s thesis of the ‘black middle’? The jury is out on this question. Yet Restall’s thesis is commensurable with Fisher and O’Hara’s view that the production of subaltern identities was fundamentally constrained in colonial Latin America. Fisher and O’Hara clearly state in their introduction to Imperial Subjects that this collection of essays rejects the “constructionist interpretation of personhood,” which they claim “places too much stock in the ability of individuals and groups to shape identities.” Imperial Subjects shows that power in colonial Latin America was fundamentally unequal, and draws our attention to the multiple ways in which the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies and transatlantic bureaucracies in Latin American imposed limits upon the range of identities that individuals and groups could assume or perform. Twinam and Dantes respectively demonstrate that the Council of the Indies and the Monarch had the power to determine the race and calidad of imperial subjects. Jeremy Mumford’s essay on indigenous nobles in sixteenth-century Peru highlights the power of local forces to render irrelevant identities approved by the Monarch. In pointing to the influence of the state upon the experiences of individuals and groups in colonial Latin America, this collection prompts us to ponder the present state of research into official colonial institutions. In contrast to race, gender and class, which have been the focus of countless studies in the past two decades, colonial institutions have received little attention from historians in recent years. If Fisher and O’Hara’s suggestion that we must understand colonial cultures and institutions in order to understand colonial identities, then historians should pay more attention to how these institutions operated and evolved.

Garcilaso de la Vega, a sixteenth century Peruvian writer born to a noble indigenous family.

The contributors to this collection draw on a variety of sources to understand colonial institutions and identities, including demographic data mined from parish and census records, as well as petitions, and other items of correspondence between imperial subjects and the colonial bureaucracy. The editors acknowledge the limitations of these sources; specifically that they generally not written by the subjects themselves. Imperial Subjects is an important collection reflecting nine influential scholars’ current thinking about race and identity in Latin America before independence. Undergraduate and graduate students alike would do well to read this work.

Photo credits:

Bruno Girin, “Carmo Church Overlooking Ouro Preto, Brazil,” 2005

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Portrait of Felipe Guaman Poma de Aya

via The National Library of Peru

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Jorge Canizares-Esquerra’s review of Sabine MacCormack’s book On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru.

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Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Professor Irfan Habib

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

Center for Advanced Study, Department of History, Aligarh (June 28, 2009)

Transcript:

Context Notes: Professor Irfan Habib is probably the best-known professor of History in Aligarh. He was a young student, in the Intermediate classes during the 1940s. His father, Mohammad Habib was the leader of the progressive factions at Aligarh. Irfan Habib is an Emeritus Professor of the Dept of History but he still appears daily in the department where he sits in the office of Professor Shireen Moosvi and interacts with all of the students, other professors, Communist party activists and others who move in and out of the office throughout the day. Irfan Habib always provides hospitality to these guest, endless cups of tea and biscuits. On many occasions I had the opportunity to sit in the office and transcribe stories he would share in English or in Urdu with the people who came and went. It was some time before I could convince him to sit down with me for a formal interview because he was very skeptical of the methodology of my research, being as he is, a historian of medieval India and deeply invested in the investigation of documentary sources. When I finally did meet him he asked me to meet him in his own office, down the hall, a small cupboard of a room, which he referred to as his “Hole Office.”

Amber Abbas: What changed at AMU around partition? Obviously a lot of people left, but what did that look like?

Professor Irfan Habib: Well, first of all, one of the strengths of institution we didn’t notice, that admissions were on time, classes were held, a teacher disappears was replaced immediately by another teacher. Classes were held.

Secondly, Gandhi’s fast and martyrdom had much to do with the recovery. When Gandhi died I would expect 20% of the people in the university were from Pakistan. They had remained here to complete their second year, that is Intermediate Final, their fourth year B.A. Final and their M.A. Final. Because they had already done one year and they wanted to complete it. They didn’t know that riots will close us, they came in July when it opened the riots broke out in August. So they were here. So they were here. They were very concerned, you can understand, all of us were concerned, about the slaughter, and so Gandhi became the one man between slaughter and protection. We were coming from Lucknow and we heard at Hattras station that Gandhiji had been assassinated. So the next day my father with four or five people, you know, nationalists were very few at that time, Muslim Nationalists. But we were about ten or twelve, then some others joined us. So we went; I was a first year student. We went and stood in the SS Hall Gate, from this side, Bab-ul-ilm (Gate of Knowledge) or something like that. And soon students began collecting. HUGE crowd! At that time there must have been around 2500 students [in the whole university], then the number declined. HUGE crowd! We were asked to wait for V.M. Hall people. We went to City. Actually, that was my first impression of a demonstration. There were communists also demanding execution of RSS leaders. Hindu Sabha, nehin, RSS or Hindu Sabha, Phansi Do! Phansi Do! I forget the title, the slogans.

AA: So you left for City after you knew who the assassin was?

IH: No, that was announced on the radio immediately! Totally. I mean, his name was announced repeatedly on the radio. That it’s Godse and he’s a Hindu Mahasabhite. Oh, it was announced. Only Hindustan Times in an edition said it was suspected to be a Muslim, but they apologized later on, Devdas Gandhi apologized and Nehru was very annoyed. So that was a remarkable demonstration. And all these Pakistanis were there. And then the refugees started coming at almost the same time. They were admitted. I still remember Punjabis from Pakistan mixing with Sikhs, you know, shanyartis. Collecting things for them. Even in this demonstration there were Sikh students and Punjabis from Pakistan. And Hindus, of course, Hindus are not marked out. So that was a second feature, was how sharnyartis fitted in. No—not a single incident took place in the university between Muslim students and sharnyartis.

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III

by Amber Abbas

Professor Irfan Habib is probably the best-known professor in Aligarh. Born in 1931, he was a young student in the Intermediate classes during the 1940s. His father, Mohammad Habib, a staunch nationalist was the leader of the progressive factions at Aligarh. Irfan Habib is an Emeritus Professor of the Department of History but he still appears daily in the department where he sits in the office of Professor Shireen Moosvi and interacts with all of the students, other professors, Communist party activists and others who move in and out of the office throughout the day. Irfan Habib always provides hospitality to these guests: endless cups of tea and biscuits. On many occasions I had the opportunity to sit in the office and transcribe stories he would share in English or in Urdu with the people who came and went. It was some time before I could convince him to sit down with me for a formal interview about his experiences during the 1930s and 1940s in Aligarh. He was very skeptical of the methodology of my research, being as he is, a historian of medieval India and deeply invested in the investigation of documentary sources. Interviews, he reminded me, would only catch a person’s “bias,” and not “The Truth.”

In this interview, he describes the atmosphere in AMU in the years following partition and his experiences around Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. He first emphasizes the fact that though partition caused terrible disruption at the university, with thousands of students and many faculty departing for Pakistan, the university worked to minimize its effect on students’ lives. He repeatedly told me that no class was ever cancelled, even if a professor left, another instructor stepped in to cover his responsibilities. Continuity is important as a way to show that there were Muslims at the university who worked to support independent India—contrary to the narrative that has plagued the university since the 1947 partition by suggesting that its students and professors were, without exception, traitors and fifth columnists. Habib wears his nationalism on his sleeve, even if, as a Leftist, he has not really represented its mainstream.

Habib’s family had a long history of nationalist allegiance and his mother’s family had been close to Gandhi since the early years of his leadership. Habib earlier told me that Gandhi “was an idol… in our home. My mother called him ‘Bapu’ because of the family relationship, but I never heard my father referring to Gandhi as anything except ‘Mahatmaji.’ He wouldn’t even say ‘Gandhiji.’” In describing the events of Gandhi’s death, Professor Habib, however, does not emphasize his family’s grief, but the efforts of students publicly to show their solidarity with the nation. Because of the immediate suspicions that a Muslim may have committed the murder, and the anxiety that threatened the Muslims more broadly in the wake of partition, AMU stood out as a particularly sensitive site. Professor Mohammad Habib led the students from the University to the city of Aligarh, which involved crossing the railway line, the traditional boundary between the University and the majority Hindu city adjoining it. Crossing this boundary is a symbolic act of solidarity, and the Muslim students demonstrated their Indian-ness by publicly engaging in the response to Gandhi’s death. Habib also points out that many “Pakistanis”—by which he means those students whose family homes were in territories that became Pakistan in 1947: Punjab, Northwest Frontier Province, Sindh, Balochistan and Bengal—also participated in the march. Thus, even though Gandhi had been a controversial figure at the University, all students: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and even Pakistanis came together to mourn for the man who had risked his life in 1947 to stop the murder of Muslims in Bengal.

In conclusion he notes that the refugees—sharnyartis—who arrived at the university in 1947 and 1948 were welcomed with open arms, students gathered clothes for them, and “no incident” ever took place between Muslim students and refugees. This is important at Aligarh in particular because of its much-vaunted history of religious tolerance. Aligarh University had always considered itself aloof from “communal” concerns, but partition was a test of this culture. During the 1940s, even as the Muslim League mobilized students to support a Muslim homeland, no communal violence took place there. Political and national groups with differing perspectives put them aside to join in solidarity to support the university and the state in 1947 and 1948—and this is a very different kind of story from that we hear in Punjab, in Delhi, in places where violence and not peace characterized this time.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo Credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Irfan Habib

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Yann, Gandhi During the Salt March, March 1930

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Syed Gibran, Aligarh Muslim University

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

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Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (2010)

by Reem Elghonimi

In the last decade, the history of Muslims in America has come into its own and A History of Islam in America provides one of the most comprehensive and even-handed treatments of the subject. Many previous studies breezily pit “Islam” against the “West.” Sidestepping the assumption that the two categories are essentially different, GhaneaBassiri studies the actual lived tradition of Muslims in America instead of second-guessing their compatibility.

America has been home to Muslims for a long time. Compelling stories come to the fore. Some Muslims arrived in the New World before slavery, like the adventurous sixteenth-century Moroccan cowboy and healer, Estevanico. Enslaved African Muslims sometimes resorted to private worship and remained active in their local communities. The story of Selim, an Algerian captive who petitioned for his freedom, is fascinating. Understanding his constraints, Selim converted to Christianity and, as a result, received economic and political benefits. He finally earned enough money to return to Algeria as a free man. Once there, he reverted to Islam.

Much past research about Islam in the West has focused on perceptions. For instance, Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism and Susan Nance’s How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream: 1790-1935 study only non-Muslim Americans’ representation of Islam. But images of Muslims in literature and political propaganda are not the only sources at our disposal. The historical records of Muslim individuals and institutions show that in the past four hundred years, Islam and America have interacted and the relationship between the two has defined each. Islamic America, like the rest of American society, is not one uniform set of communities, practices or symbols, but it has nonetheless existed in different forms continuously on this side of the Atlantic.

American political, legal, and civic institutions have provided many ethnic and religious groups, not only Muslims, with opportunities for participation mixed with doses of exclusion. GhaneaBassiri tells us of Muslims who collaborated and challenged these norms through organizations of their own. In the period between the two world wars, Islamic community building took root in mosques and benevolent societies like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. Islam allowed black Muslims new tools for rethinking race, religion, and progress in the aftermath of World War II when optimism about human accomplishment waned. Civil Rights legislation offered opportunities for immigrant Muslims by declaring loudly that discrimination based on race would not be tolerated. A positive, if accidental, symptom of immigration reform was the realization that the Muslim community also struggled for self-reliance.

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the popular American use of the term “Islamic terrorism” in place of “Arab terrorism,” Muslims in the United States continued to participate in activism. Optimistic that their adopted land gave them substantial socio-economic and political advantages, Muslims also realized that prejudice, like anything else, fades through interaction. Today, the juggernaut terms “Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism” are the focus of U.S. foreign policy rather than Cold War enemies. But at the same time, GhaneaBassiri believes that American Muslim objectives continue to show increased diversity. With a multiplicity of institutions, Muslim groups and organizations have ties to non-Muslim institutions and individuals. These relationships, bonds and experiences testify to a larger and more varied experience than merely cultural conflict. This book drives home the point that America’s historical encounter with Islam has not been a clash. But, as the author explains, we can only get our arms around it when we look at how Muslims actually lived on American soil.

Photo credits:

Marion S. Trikosko, “President Jimmy Carter greets Mohammad Ali at a White House dinner celebrating the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, Washington, D.C., 7 September, 1977”

Library of Congress

Kamal al-Din, People Marching before the Iranian Revolution

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

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The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K. Johnson (2006)

by Joseph Parrott

In 1958 Frank Kameny was out of a job. A Harvard trained astronomer and veteran of World War II, he had been working for the Army Map Service. In the wake of the Russian launch of Sputnik in October of 1957, the American government was rushing to catch up, and the young scientist seemed poised to play a role in the new emphasis on space exploration. Yet within just a few months, Kameny’s career was over because he was a homosexual. His story was not unique. He was one of many victims of the Lavender Scare – a manifestation of Cold War paranoia and social bigotry that led to the dismissal of hundreds and possibly thousands of gays and lesbians from government jobs.

Historian David K. Johnson sheds light on this forgotten episode in American history. The Lavender Scare grew from the McCarthy persecutions of the 1950s, but Johnson argues that its policies lasted far longer and became more institutionalized than the anti-communist hysteria. The government dismissed homosexuals on the grounds that emotional weakness and the likelihood of blackmail made them security risks. No evidence supported these accusations and medical experts challenged the idea that homosexuals were in any way different from the majority of employees, but to little avail. Executive departments hurried to dismiss employees suspected of homosexuality, lest ambitious congressmen – already suspicious of the expansion of bureaucratic policymaking – target them for public scrutiny. In the midst of the Cold War, fear, politics, and prejudice combined “to conflate homosexuals and communists.”

The Lavender Scare offers an arresting political narrative, but Johnson also makes sure to present the very human face of this drama. Johnson utilizes extensive interviews to demonstrate the way the purges changed the lives of victims and the social milieu of Washington D.C. itself. The rapid growth of the federal government during the Depression and its relatively egalitarian hiring practices attracted large numbers of young people seeking employment, including many homosexuals hoping to escape the limitations of small town life. By 1945, Washington was, in the words of one resident, “a very gay city,” where vibrant communities thrived and authorities tolerated homosexual activity. In an effortless combination of social and political history, the author shows how the rise of the national security state transformed gay Washington, forcing many to leave and others to endure years of joblessness.

Persecution also inspired a nascent movement in defense of gay lifestyles. Activists like Frank Kameny recast the discrimination against homosexuals as an issue of civil rights. The Mattachine Society of Washington organized picketing and supported challenges to government dismissals, consciously combining “political activism with service to and affirmation of the gay subculture.” Johnson explores how these vocal demands led the government to reevaluate its policies and the connection between the private and public lives of its employees. These early manifestations of homosexual activism not only helped end decades of vocational persecution, but they also informed the networks and tactics that would come to define a movement.

In light of Frank Kameny’s death last October at the age of 86, it is appropriate to look back at the origins of the LGBT activism. The recent repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy demonstrates that cause of homosexual equality has made great strides, specifically in regard to government service. But at the same time, the continuing debate over the necessity of this policy and calls to reinstate it remind the country that Kameny’s ultimate goals have not yet been achieved. David Johnson’s smart, well-written, and truly engaging book clearly lays out the history of anti-gay sentiment in the modern federal government. It also, perhaps, hints at ways activists can continue to challenge discrimination in the future.

Photo credits:

United Press, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, 1954

Library of Commons via Wikimedia Commons

Kay Tobin Lahusen, “Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and John Fryer in disguise as “Dr. H. Anonymous,”” 1972

New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division via Wikimedia Commons

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