Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Undergraduate Essay Contest Honorable Mention: The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad (2007)

by Carson Stones

The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad is a fascinating account of superpower interventions in the Third World during the latter half of the twentieth century.Covering a wide sweep of history, Westad argues that the United States and the Soviet Union were driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics.

Westad opens his book with an examination of the ideologies of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the post-colonial leaders before the Second World War. Emerging victorious from the war, Westad argues that the two countries believed it was their destiny to combat the competing ideas of modernity in the post-war era of decolonization. With the world divided between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, any country declaring independence outside the blocs was a potential battleground for the competing ideologies. In a conflict that lasted over forty years and affected billions of people worldwide, Westad highlights the events chronologically from the Korean Peninsula to Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and finally the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Seamlessly tying together seemingly unrelated incidents, The Global Cold War manages to take a bird’s eye view of history while still providing incredible details of the specific events, which turned the tide of the Cold War. Westad explains that each pivotal turn represented a new ideological shift for Moscow and Washington in the continuing struggle to win the hearts and minds of newly emerging countries. A few notable incidents from the book include the CIA operations in Guatemala, containment in Vietnam, and détente in Ethiopia. As this book proves, these superpower interventions only exacerbated the conflicts of diverse nationalities who were struggling to emerge from under the heels of Imperialism. The unfortunate result of these interventions was incredible bloodshed, environmental devastation, and millions displaced as refugees. The turning point of the book is the 1979 Iranian Revolution, preaching a new ideology, Islamism, which rejected both liberal capitalism and Marxist-Leninist socialism. The best chapters in the book follow the emergence of Islamism and the repercussions of its rapid spread in a two-bloc world.

This book provided a refreshing perspective on the Cold War as it related to the political and social developments in the Third World. Echoing Clausewitz, Westad calls the Cold War “a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means.” Anyone who reads this book will appreciate Westad’s tragically ironic statement that while both Moscow and Washington were formally opposed to colonialism, the “methods they used in imposing their vision of modernity on Third World countries were very similar to those of the European Empires who had gone before them.” This book will force readers to question the motives of American foreign policies which authorized assassinations, toppled democratically elected regimes, and supported dictatorships all in the name of protecting freedom and democracy from the evils of socialism around the globe.The conclusion of The Global Cold War is especially poignant when considering the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the return of American troops this Christmas. Twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union but the specter of the Cold War still haunts American foreign policy today. With the breakdown of the bipolar world, this book should encourage citizens around the world to question the motives of any country, which imposes an ideology upon their neighbors as humankind progresses into the twenty-first century.

Photo credits

Unknown photographer, Soldiers ride aboard a Soviet BMD airborne combat vehicle, Kabul, 25 March, 1986

DOD Media via Wikipedia

Check out the other winning and honorable mentions submissions for our First Annual Undergraduate Writing Contest:

William Wilson’s review of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia

Lynn Romero’s review of Open Veins of Latin America

Katherine Maddox’s review of Beirut City Center Recovery

J. Edgar (2011)

By Dolph Briscoe IV

Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood presents a biopic of one of the most powerful and controversial figures of twentieth-century America in the film J. Edgar. Acclaimed actor Leonardo DiCaprio brilliantly portrays John Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Eastwood and DiCaprio depict Hoover as a complicated individual, dedicated to modernizing crime investigation in the United States yet consumed with a desire for power, respect, and adoration. Hoover’s insecurities lead him to legal and ethical abuses of his authority, which cause great problems in both his personal life and professional legacy.

J. Edgar begins in the early 1960s, as an aging Hoover reflects upon his life to young agents writing a history of the FBI. Hoover grew up in Washington, D.C., the favored son of a domineering mother who continuously predicts that he will bring greatness to the family name. Such familial pressures cause Hoover to perpetually seek his mother’s approval throughout his life. While working in the Department of Justice following World War I, he catches the attention of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and plays a key role in the notorious Red Scare, hunting down and deporting individuals suspected of Bolshevist sympathies. Hoover’s experience with the Palmer Raids converts him into a strident anticommunist.

Following his successes during the Red Scare, Hoover becomes director of the Bureau of Investigation (which would become the FBI in the 1930s). Hoover immediately sets out to professionalize his agency. He only hires individuals of excellent physical stature who commit to complete loyalty to the Bureau above any other persons or goals in their lives. His organization practices the most advanced crime-fighting techniques, as Hoover rigorously studies the new sciences of fingerprinting and forensics. During these years, two critical people enter Hoover’s life, Helen Gandy and Clyde Tolson. Miss Gandy, as Hoover calls her, chooses to forego romantic relationships in order to dedicate herself totally to her work. Impressed by such conviction, Hoover hires her as his personal secretary. He also feels an instant connection with Clyde Tolson, a young law school graduate, whom he names as his right-hand man.

Hoover perceives leading the FBI as the vehicle to achieve glory for both himself and his family name. He also truly believes his agency serves as the watchdog for his beloved country’s safety. The film recalls many famous historical events. Hoover’s FBI investigates the kidnapping and murder of renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby, contentiously finding only one suspect in the crime. Agents battle organized crime, and bank robbers, like John Dillinger. Hoover himself markets the organization, supporting efforts to lionize his “G-Men” in both comic books and movies, often exaggerating his own personal role in suspenseful accounts of arrests.

Yet Hoover’s obsession with empowering his beloved FBI causes him serious problems and raises ethical questions. His fear of losing the directorship and anxiety about domestic subversives leads him, with the help of Miss Gandy, to create a secret file with salacious information about some of the most powerful people in America. In a reoccurring scene, the FBI leader meets with new presidents entering the White House and asserts his authority though barely veiled blackmail. In a flashback, a young Hoover visits President Franklin D. Roosevelt, inquiring about how to handle information he has obtained detailing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s intimacy with another woman. Understanding Hoover’s purpose, FDR gives the Bureau even more autonomy.

Thirty years later, Robert F. Kennedy and Hoover engage in a tense meeting, where the new attorney general attempts to reassert the Department of Justice’s authority over the FBI. Hoover makes clear that he possesses files detailing President John F. Kennedy’s extramarital affairs, and is not afraid to make this information public. A disgusted Robert Kennedy acquiesces to Hoover’s demands, fearful of a scandal that could embarrass his brother. In another infamous episode, the FBI director bugs Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hotel room, collects evidence of the civil rights leader’s marital infidelities, and unsuccessfully attempts to blackmail him to prevent King from accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hoover’s weaknesses also cause conflict in his own personal life. Though doted upon by his mother, he seems incapable of ever fulfilling her high expectations. When the body of the abducted Lindbergh infant is found, Hoover’s mother chastises him for failing to save the child and condemns him as possessing blood on his hands. The FBI director struggles with romantic relationships. The film presents him as awkward around women, but illustrates the deep bond he develops with Clyde Tolson, long rumored to be Hoover’s lover. However, even with Tolson, Hoover often demonstrates cruelty and chooses solitude. Because of his mother’s harsh warning to avoid homosexual relationships, Hoover withholds affection from the ever loyal Tolson, whom he clearly loves. Likewise, when Tolson and Miss Gandy express concern regarding Hoover’s obsession with destroying Dr. King, the FBI director ruthlessly berates them for questioning his judgment.

At the film’s conclusion, Hoover remains concerned with the future of the FBI and his own legacy. Following a meeting with Richard Nixon, the FBI leader expresses alarm to Miss Gandy and Tolson about the new president’s lust for power. Eastwood presents Nixon as even more sinister and paranoid than Hoover. At his request, Miss Gandy promises Hoover that she will always protect his secret files, and thus the integrity of both the FBI and himself. Sure enough, when Hoover passes away a few years later, President Nixon, while publicly praising Hoover, vulgarly orders his aides to confiscate the secret FBI files. When Nixon’s men search through Hoover’s office, however, they only find empty file cabinets. The film then ends showing Miss Gandy privately shredding a mountain of documents. The credits note that only a few misfiled papers from Hoover’s collection were ever found. Even in death, J. Edgar Hoover once again asserts his power over a sitting American president.

J. Edgar omits several critical historical episodes. Eastwood does not address Hoover and the FBI’s role during World War II. Surprisingly, the film barely mentions the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism, surely a seminal period in the time of Hoover’s FBI directorship. Also, we see scant attention to the larger civil rights movement beyond Dr. King. What about the FBI’s surveillance of organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers? Furthermore, how about FBI monitoring of antiwar groups during the Vietnam era? Certainly, a director can only cover so many stories in a movie, but these are important events, too.

Despite this minor criticism, Eastwood tells us much about the past that certainly is applicable today. The film’s central theme is power, and how its abuse can be very dangerous. Hoover’s lust for power causes him to breach legal and ethical boundaries, raising issues that continue to remain divisive among Americans. We live in a time when leaders, often in the name of national security, much like Hoover, utilize their powers with questionable methods. Much controversy surrounds the Patriot Act and electronic surveillance, supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Civil liberties in the age of terrorism, as in the Cold War era, again seem at risk. Hoover’s paranoia about subversives appears eerily similar to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s obsession with capturing suspected Islamic militants. What does it mean if, in our dedication to protect the United States, we violate the moral codes our country holds most dear?

J. Edgar is an excellent presentation of an individual and an organization which had profound, and controversial, influences upon American life in the twentieth century. Recalling many historical episodes with dazzling acting and fascinating storylines, viewers will find J. Edgar both intellectually stimulating and movingly entertaining.

Photo Credits
Uncredited photographer for Los Angeles Daily News, J. Edgar Hoover and his assistant Clyde Tolson, c 1939.
Abbie Rowe, John F. Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy, Oval Office, 1961
Yoichi. R. Okamoto, J. Edgar Hoover in the Oval Office, 1967

Two documentaries on Guatemala’s violent civil war

By Virginia Garrard-Burnett

Discovering Dominga (2003), directed by Patricia Flynn

Denese Joy Becker, a cosmotologist living in Iowa, was adopted as a child from Guatemala. Although she remembers nearly nothing about her past, a cousin from her American family realizes that Denese’s age corresponds with the period of la violencia in Guatemala. Denese and her adopted family travel to Guatemala, where she discovers she is Dominga Sic Ruiz, a survivor from a 1982 Guatemalan massacre in which both her parents were murdered by the Guatemalan military. The documentary recounts how Denese rediscovers her own identity as Dominga—an Achí Maya woman, and the horrendous political context that led to her being put up for adoption in the United States.

When the Mountains Tremble (1983), directed by Pamela Yates

This is a documentary about the armed conflict between the Guatemalan military and one of that nation’s most important armed guerrilla groups, the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP), who in the context of this film are primarily indigenous people, the Maya. This documentary was made during the nadir of Guatemala’s 36-year long civil war, and includes remarkable footage from both sides of the conflict. It also includes narration by a very young Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the Ki’che’ Mayan activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Virginia Garrard-Burnett recommends related books here in READ.

Rethinking Borders: Salman Rushdie & Sebastião Salgado on the US-Mexico Border

by Anne M. Martinez

The U.S.-Mexico border, with all its power, danger, intrigue and excitement is even more complex than most acknowledge. As Gloria Anzaldúa suggested in her seminal work, Borderlands/La Frontera:

The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture… A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A border is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.

Anzaldúa focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border, while Salman Rushdie emphasizes figurative, more than literal, borders in Step Across This Line, “there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind.” Rushdie, an international figure who spent nearly a decade in his own “borderlands” existence, provides a unique perspective on the role of frontiers, as he calls them. Step Across This Line, his 2002 Yale University Tanner Lecture on Human Values, travels the globe and the centuries to try to make sense of lines, frontiers, and borders and the peoples who traverse them in the early twenty-first century. Consider Rushdie’s analysis of this photograph:

There is a photograph by Sebastião Salgado that shows the wall between the United States and Mexico snaking over the crests of hills, running away into the distance, as far as the eye can see, part Great Wall of China, part gulag. There is a kind of brutal beauty here, the beauty of starkness.

Give the photo a second or third or fourth glance before continuing. Which side is the United States? How do you know? What kind of activity do you see? What kind of lives do you imagine are lived on either side of the wall? Rushdie continues,

At intervals along the wall there are watchtowers, and these so-called sky-towers are manned by armed men. In the photograph we can see the tiny, silhouetted figure of a running man, an illegal immigrant, being chased by other men in cars. The strange thing about the picture is that, although the running man is clearly on the American side, he is running toward the wall, not away from it. He has been spotted, and is more afraid of the men bearing down on him in cars than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind. He is trying to get back, to unmake his bid for freedom.

Rushdie’s turn of phrase is striking. The idea of “unmaking” one’s “bid for freedom” counters our traditional casting of the United States as the land of the free.

So freedom is now to be defined against those too poor to deserve its benefits by the edifices and procedures of totalitarianism. What kind of freedom is it, then, that we enjoy in the countries of the West – those exclusive, increasingly well-guarded enclaves of ours? That is the question the photograph asks, and before September 11, 2001, many of us – many more, I suspect, than today – would have been on the running man’s side.

This prescient vision, a decade ago, came to be: the border in the post-9/11 world has been directly tied to terrorism, despite our knowledge that none of those who struck on 9/11 entered through Mexico. In fact, the alliance between the United States and Mexico that was being strengthened by Presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox in the days immediately prior to 9/11, disintegrated. The spirit of opportunity and cooperation between these neighbors evaporated in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States.

You may also enjoy this author’s blog post: Borderlands Business

In the meantime, you may enjoy these resources:

The Borderlands Encyclopedia
Educational resource on contemporary US-Mexico border issues.

Borderlands Information Center (BIC)
Central clearinghouse and referral center for information about the Texas-Mexico border region.

Migrations.
A photo essay on world migration by Sebastião Salgado (1997)

Corruption at the Gates
Two-part series from NPR’s All Things Considered, which examines the culture of drug money and corruption along the US-Mexico border.

The Forgotten Americans
PBS documentary about the people who live in Las Colonias, shanty towns and rural communities within 150 miles of the US – Mexico Border.

Latin American Network Information Center
“LANIC’s mission is to facilitate access to Internet-based information to, from, or on Latin America. While many of our resources are designed to facilitate research and academic endeavors, our site has also become an important gateway to Latin America for primary and secondary school teachers and students, private and public sector professionals, and just about anyone looking for important information about this public region.”

Photo credit:
Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, born 1944)
U.S. – Mexico Border, desert of San Ysidro, California
negative 1997; print 2009. Gelatin silver print
34.4 x 51.4 cm (13 9/16 x 20 1/4 in.)
© Sebastião Salgado
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

“Lightly Fictionalized” Books about the Italian Renaissance

by Alison Frazier

I generally go out of my way to avoid historical novels, unless they were written in the nineteenth century. But I’m happy to recommend a slightly different sort of book, one that could be described as lightly fictionalized history. This approach has its roots in magisterial works of history such as Carlo Ginzberg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, and has become a trend in popular history-writing. Practitioners are usually professional historians working from legal evidence. Typically, they take the reader into the archives for a ‘real-life’ sense of the research experience, but then write up their archival evidence with a light, “commonsensical” fictionalization. For example, they invent thoughtful walks in the piazza, or speculate about probable conversations between would-be assassins.

In my area of specialization, the Italian Renaissance, recent examples of lightly fictionalized history include Lauro Martines’ Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence (also published as April Blood) at the top of the list, followed by Anthony D’Elia’s A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome and Marcello Simonetta’s The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded.

The newest example is Craig Monson’s Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Early Modern Italy, which opens true to form by describing what it’s like to work in the Vatican Secret Archive before moving on to five short chapters about strong-minded nuns in Bologna, Pavia, and Naples.

For a recent graduate seminar, the book raised wonderful questions about the line between history and fiction, about the historians’ double responsibility to the archives and to audience. Everyone, no matter their position on these questions, agreed that Monson is a great story-teller: the book is engrossing and provocative. One grad student, celebrating the historian’s decision to serve the widest audience possible, made plans to buy it for her father for Christmas.

Photo credits:

Unknown artist, painting depicting the hanging and burning of Girolamo Savonarola in Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1498

Museo di San Marco, Florence, via Wikipedia

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (2003)

by Mathew J. Butler

Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), the story of a fugitive “whisky priest” in 1930s Mexico, is a short, pathos-laden novel about religious persecution after the Mexican Revolution. The Catholic Church at that time was under attack for its considerable wealth and social control. The unnamed priest at the center of the novel is a complicated man, by no means a conventional hero, but his refusal to abandon the priesthood eventually endows him with a magnetic aura of spirituality, despite his many vices.

Not all professional historians admire the novel, however. Some find it overly polemical, others even anachronistic, given that the story of a persecuted priest, written after Greene’s visit in March-April 1938, coincided with President Cárdenas’s decision to end the long revolutionary campaign against the Church. It is also rather curious that the most celebrated novel about Mexican Catholicism during the Revolution was written by an English neophyte who was new to Mexico. Greene’s English prejudices give rise to the novel’s flaws. Greene’s mestizo “Judas,” the man who betrays the priest while the Indian faithful shelter him––reprises a colonial view of racial miscegenation as constitutionally debilitating. The frequent interventions of British and German characters, as out of place in their plantation houses and dilapidated dental surgeries as Greene must have felt in tropical Tabasco, are also irritating, if not occidentalizing.

For all that, the novel has strong redeeming features and in some respects is insightful and true to life. Greene’s tone of moral uncertainty and self-doubt, for example, muddles profoundly the simplistic dualism of most portraits of Mexico’s religious conflict––supposedly a clash between two triumphalist world views and institutions, those of Church and Revolution. Greene is critical of sheer ideology. He is as dismissive of a mawkish contemporary Catholicism as he is of anticlerical bile: “I don’t believe a word of it … Nobody could be such a fool,” a Mexican boy, reared on endless stories of preternatural piety, yells at his mother after hearing for the umpteenth time stories of impeccable Catholic martyrdom at the hands of revolutionary Neros. At the same time,Greene captures perfectly the introspective origins of so much revolutionary irreligion in the lieutenant who pursues the whisky priest with fanatical zeal. The same ambiguity lurks inside the schismatical, fornicating Padre José, whose hands still trembled with emotion at every consecration. Inside-out religion masquerading as state atheism, a Catholicism as anticlerical as it is pervasive: these are the more human paradoxes that fascinate Greene as he sends the whisky priest scurrying across the countryside and into the towns of prohibitionist Tabasco, there to buy alcohol for his personal and ritual libations from corrupt revolutionary politicos.

The Power and the Glory does more than nuance Mexicans’ religious and secular thinking in a political context in which the state was trying to disentangle categories of citizenship and faith. In the end, the whisky priest ends up in the jails of tropical socialist Tomás Garrido Canabal, the revolutionary boss of Mexico’s southeast, first on latrine duty and then, at the book’s close, to face the inevitable firing squad. As such humiliation attests, however, it is the reduction and redemption of man and office rather than the mere mention of worldly vices––the whisky priest’s boozing, for example, that constitute the book’s claim to be radical, for its time, in a religious sense. Greene may have imagined that he was writing a universal Christian parable set in Mexico. Yet he also understood (or imagined) how the Mexican Church had resisted revolutionary persecution by itself undergoing something of a revolution in spirit. By clinging to spiritual basics, the whisky priest rediscovers God and is liberated, such that “everything but the simplest outline of the mystery” was stripped away. The Church’s conversion into a more integrated body of faithful is dramatized by the whisky priest’s abandonment of his breviary and altar stone and by his walking barefoot in worn-out shoe uppers to celebrate Mass in a villager’s shack. That it is María, an Indian villager, who gives the whisky priest brandy to consecrate, and that “for a matter of seconds” the priest could sermonize about suffering without hypocrisy, is perhaps Greene’s ultimate point. What makes The Power and the Glory so suggestive for historians is that these fictional experiences are so often borne out in the recorded lives of ordinary people. Rather than just a Mexico-based allegory for a new Church, The Power and the Glory can read for glimpses of the real religious meanings that Mexican people themselves actually created during the upheavals of the Revolution.

Picture credits:

Unknown photographer, General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, 1937

Archivo General de la Nación via Wikimedia Commons

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (1993)

by Robert A. Olwell

Sacred Hunger, a novel by Barry Unsworth (which was awarded the 1992 Booker Prize) is the story of a single ship and a single voyage. The novel begins in 1752, in Liverpool, England. The Royal African Company, a chartered corporation created in the mid-17th-century with a monopoly on trade with the African coast, has just lost the last of its privileges, making the slave trade, for the first time, a “free trade” (all irony intended). Inspired by the promise of lucrative profits, a Liverpool merchant, William Kemp, commissions the construction of a ship to engage in the newly opened trade. Before the ship sets sail, Kemp engages his nephew, Matthew Paris, a disgraced apothecary, to serve as the ship’s surgeon.

In the scales of Kemp’s complacent morality, his good deed in “saving” Paris, will be amply repaid in the healthier and more valuable slaves that his ship will be able to sell once it reaches America. This fictional view closely mirrors that of Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote that masters who spared pregnant slave women from field labor were wise as well as kind, for “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” To Jefferson, this happy equation revealed the hand of an enlightened creator in making “our interest and our duties coincide perfectly.”

In the chapters that follow the ship’s arrival on the African coast, Unsworth vividly and accurately describes the painstaking and painful process by which a slave ship “made” a cargo in the mid-18th-century. The climax of Sacred Hunger occurs during the “middle passage” when slaves, sailors, and Paris combine to mutiny and seize the ship in mid-Atlantic. (That slaves might take control of a slave ship at sea draws upon several historical precedents.) The mutineers do not attempt to sail back to Africa, but rather steer the course later taken by the men who mutinied against Captain Bligh on the HMS Bounty in 1789. They try to escape recapture by sailing “off the map,” and build a new society in an uncharted region, deep in the Florida Everglades.

Once in Florida, Jimmy, the African “linguister,” brought on board the slave ship to communicate with the enslaved, puts his story-telling skills to work to weave the fledging camp of ex-slaves and ex-slavers into an “imagined community” with a shared identity and purpose. Paris, while acknowledging the importance of this task, also recognizes it as a process of myth-making. Jimmy’s oft-told history of the mutiny, the community’s founding legend, “ran like a clear stream” with a straight-forward causality, and clear moral purpose. In keeping with his role as the community’s “moralist” (and historian), Jimmy “omitted” or “even falsified” “certain aspects” of the past. This historical “morality play” starkly contrasts with the more ambiguous, “viscous substance of truth,” that Paris peers into when he tries to recall the actual event. When questioned by his young son (born in Florida to an African wife) about the contrast between “what really happened” in the past and how it has been remembered (or retold) Paris answers simply: “Nobody sabee de whole story.”

Sacred Hunger similarly weaves together the real and the fictive. For instance, the incident that sparked the mutiny follows closely upon the actual (and infamous) case of the slave ship Zong in 1781, in which sickly slaves were deliberately cast overboard so as to collect upon their insurance value as cargo “lost at sea.” However, in other places, Unsworth subtly alters or inverts the historic record, drawing a fictional curtain across the facts, perhaps to deliberately cast doubt upon the veracity of historical “truths.” Nicolas Owen, an Irishman who kept a journal of his life as a slave-dealer on the Sherbro River in West Africa in the late 18th-century, becomes in the novel, Timothy Owen, an Englishman. However, the factual Owen’s callous disregard for the human cost of the trade is echoed by his fictitious doppelganger. Similarly, Timothy’s foreboding sense of death in the novel mimics the actual death of Nicolas in Africa in 1781.

A nineteen century painting captures the brutality of the 1781 Zong slave ship massacre

In the novel, the mutineers’ Everglades community, “‘where white and black live together and no one is chief,’” reaches a crisis during a “palaver,” or public trial. Watching the trial, Paris realizes that regardless of the outcome, the accused, a man named Iboti, will be sentenced to some form of servitude, either permanently enslaved to his accuser if convicted, or if acquitted, temporarily bound to labor for his “attorney” in payment for his services.

Given the community’s origin, Paris expresses dismay at its members’ willingness to countenance the reemergence of human bondage. In response, Iboti’s accuser, an ex-slave named Kireku, calls Paris a fool. “I no ask come here. Now I here, I fight for place,” Kireku declares. Kireku proffers a version of Adam Smith’s (not yet written) Wealth of Nations in pidgin creole (that also echoes and mocks the opening chapter of the novel, when Liverpudlians eagerly anticipated the profits they would make from a free trade in slaves): “Strong man make everybody rich. Everybody dis place happy an’ rich come from trade. Some man not free, nevermind, buggerit, trade free.”

Unsworth presents Paris’s own quest for knowledge as intellectual hubris or worse. It was his arrogant “insistence on [promulgating his own] opinion, concealed under the appearance of a desire for truth” which led him to publish the “blasphemous” ideas about the age of the earth that brought about his disgrace and the death of his wife and child. Despite this abject lesson, Paris continues to try to impose his ideas upon others. Kireku dismisses Paris’s egalitarian ideals as mere intellectual colonialism. Nadri, a man with whom Paris shares a wife, accuses him of wanting everyone to “serve some idea in your head” and of “all the time wanting to make some kind of laws for people.” When Paris protests that arguing “from particular truths to general ones” is a basic rule of reason, Nadri counters, “Partikklar to gen’ral is [the] story of [the] slave trade.”

Since morality and other kinds of “law” cannot be separated from self-interest, the novel ultimately rejects the moralizing and truth-making project itself. While Paris belatedly realizes that his attempt to engage in a “moral argument” with Kireku was a mistake, Unsworth presents Nadri’s “constitutional unwillingness to generalize about human behavior” as form of wisdom.

Like the post-modern theorist Michel Foucault (whose influence in the Anglo-phone world was peaking at the time of the novel’s publication), Unsworth portrays the pursuit of knowledge as intrinsically intertwined with the creation and exercise of power. In his own work, Foucault argued that since the mid-18th-century Enlightenment, western society’s inquisitiveness has worked in tandem with its boundless acquisitiveness and desire to dominate. In the character of Matthew Paris, Unsworth offers us an anachronism: an early-modern protagonist who acquires the post-modern insight that truth-making is itself a form of control and who becomes aware of his complicity in an oppressive system without having any intellectual, metaphysical, or religious beliefs upon which to build any alternative. In the final pages of the novel, as he lies dying, Paris dimly recognizes that “doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and . . . [this was] all the blessing he had.”

Picture credits:

Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on”

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston via Wikimedia Commons

In The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and the American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson (2011)

by Penne Restad

Erik Larson is a peculiar type of writer. He writes history as narrative drama, and does it well. Larson locates an important moment in history, then meticulously mines historical archives to construct an entirely non-fiction account of events into what reads like a good novel.

His most recent book, In the Garden of Beasts, focuses on the U.S. embassy in Berlin in 1933, drawing particularly on the letters and diaries of Ambassador William Dodd and his daughter Martha, who kept company (and sometimes more) with, among many others, the head of the Gestapo and a Soviet spy, Larson has also written non-fiction, including Devil in the White City, which has fascinating information about late nineteenth-century architects, the first Ferris Wheel, Little Egypt, and a serial killer–all in Chicago in 1893 for the Columbia Exposition. Another of his books, Isaac’s Storm tracks the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, in part from the perspective of the new U.S. Weather Bureau.

You may also like:

This piece featured on NPR’s Fresh Air on the historical background of Erik Larsen’s novel.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)

By H.W. Brands

The best historical novel I’ve ever read is Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. It helps that Dickens is one of my favorite writers, and that the French revolution afforded a wonderfully dramatic context for him to display his story-telling skills.

It also helped Dickens that he had at hand Thomas Carlyle’s non-fictional The French Revolution, which is one of the most stirring works of history ever written. Add Dickens’s unique skills of characterization and a satisfyingly intricate plot and the result is that rare nineteenth century work that even the jaded modern reader can’t put down. ‘Tis a far, far better thing’ than almost any other work of its genre (readers will appreciate that oft-quoted line by the end of the book).

Photo Credits

artist unknown, bust of Charles Dickens, 1867

J. Gurney & Son, Library of Congress

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (1979)

by Joseph Parrott

Much like its eponymous waterway, V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River meanders steadily through the dark reality of postcolonial Africa, alternately depicting minimalist beauty and frightening tension. Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, subtle prose reveals the timelessness of the continent’s remote corners alongside human corruptibility. Yet, Naipaul moves his narrative closer in time to contemporary Africa, demonstrating that the horrifying legacies of colonialism did not end with Europe’s retreat. In A Bend in the River, the struggle to establish national identities in the wake of Western imperialism takes center stage, with “black men assuming the lies of white men” in order to govern.

The work follows Salim, an ethnically Indian trader who moves to the newly independent hinterland of an anonymous Francophone state modeled on the former Belgian Congo. The rise and fall of African modernity occurs slowly under the disembodied image of the dictatorial “Big Man” – a depiction eerily similar to Mobutu Sese Seko – who introduces relative security through the constant threat of violence. While building his mercantile business and conducting an affair with a married woman, Salim witnesses the nation devolve into a state of xenophobia, corruption, and general malaise. The character’s growing feelings of alienation and the struggle to maintain his livelihood provide the novel with narrative momentum. They also demonstrate the divisions that often emerged during the creation of postcolonial national identities and the problems common to the despotic state. Thus, Naipaul’s insular setting serves as a symbol of the transitory nature and uncertain future of the continent as a whole: “This piece of earth – how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this.”

More than just a piece of fiction, Naipaul’s work offers an introspective reflection on the practices of western modernity and the meaning of life in a period of upheaval. Essentially likeable, Salim becomes the vehicle for trenchant observations on morality, passion, and progress. A cast of supporting characters represents the failures of contemporary society: Metty, the naive servant clinging to abandoned social conventions; Mahesh, the superficial franchiser of the first western fast food chain in the bush town; Ferdinand, a malleable and ultimately disenchanted youth who becomes an African nationalist; and Raymond, the satirical former colonial who desperately seeks to portray the mercurial Big Man as the savior of Africa. Relatively uneventful and filled with intentionally unresolved subplots, the novel moves from one life experience to another as the protagonists seek only to survive under trying circumstances. Yet, the author’s eye for detail and crisp writing adeptly create a sense of tension and drama that pervades even the quietest corners of the book, culminating in an ambiguous ending reminiscent of Marlowe’s journey on an older river. Meditative, challenging, yet wholly engrossing, Naipaul’s novel deserves its fame as a monument of postcolonial literature.

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