Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)*

The title of Carey’s best-seller is misleading. The True History of the Kelly Gang is not a “true history” at all, but rather an imagined autobiography of Australia’s greatest folk-hero, the bushranger Ned Kelly and his band of Irish-Australian outlaws. The novel is written as though it were an authentic autobiography, written by the bushranger on paper printed with the “National Bank of Australia” letterhead, dated 1878. It has an intentionally old feel as though it had been discovered by a historian in the archive. To write this novel Carey climbed into the bushranger’s worn-out boots, mounted his stolen horse, and bounded gallantly into the land of historical fiction bravely going where many have gone before.

Certainly Carey’s not-so-True History is based on historical evidence. The Kelly Gang’s criminal exploits left a sizable paper trail for historians to read and interpret, including criminal records, newspaper reports and wanted posters offering prizes for Gang members dead or alive. The real Ned Kelly also left the long “Jerilderie letter,” a sort of manifesto that he dictated during a bank robbery to justify his life of crime. Based on such documents, Carey makes Ned’s own voice clearly heard. Historians can also ponder the Kelly Gang’s famous suits of iron armour, and Ned’s eerie death mask, both of which are on display in public museums in Victoria.

The primary sources can tell us a lot about Ned Kelly and his Gang. Ned was born in 1854 in the colony of Victoria to impoverished Irish convicts. He became a petty thief while still a lad, appearing before a judge more than once for stealing livestock before his sixteenth birthday, and serving three years in prison before turning twenty. Upon his release from gaol, Kelly and his Gang gained notoriety for murdering three policemen and then robbing a series of coaches and banks. For a long time the elusive Kelly Gang avoided the police in a drawn-out game of catch me if you can. Kelly was finally shot by police after an epic shoot-out in the town of Glenrowan, where his Gang had kept the entire town population hostage in a pub. Soon afterwards, in 1880, Ned Kelly was hanged until dead in the Melbourne Gaol.

The documentary life history of Ned Kelly is a great one and it is complete in the sense that it has a beginning, a middle and an end. But there are still plenty of gaps that story-tellers like Carey want to fill and this is the beauty of historical fiction. It’s an art form that allows us to speculate on aspects of history that are otherwise are unknowable. What kind of man was Kelly? Who did he love? Who did he hate? Why did he pursue a life of crime? As Carey did not have primary sources that could answer these questions, he invented them.

In many ways Carey’s historical fiction sticks to the script of the Ned Kelly legend. Carey’s Ned is kind and brave, coerced into violence by the violence of the cruel colonial system he had the misfortune of being born into. It’s this version of Ned that has made it to the big screen many times, including in The Story of the Kelly Gang produced in 1906 and thought to be the world’s first feature-length narrative movie. Later films had clear political agendas. The heartthrob rocker Mick Jagger started as a radical Ned Kelly in Tony Richardson’s 1970 film (really!) who called for the establishment of an Irish Republic downunder, and in 2003 the late Heath Ledger played the bushranger in Gregor Jordan’s Hollywood production. This most recent Hollywood interpretation of Ned Kelly controversially suggested that Ned’s brother Dad Kelly and Joe Byrne were in love. Born from Carey’s fertile mind is a wife and baby for Ned. These wholly fictional characters allow us to also get to know the bushranger-hero as a husband and father.

Like any other good reads, historical fiction serves to entertain us. The True History of the Kelly Gang is a beautifully written story, and it won Carey the Man Booker Prize in 2001. But Carey’s novel also had a political program. The Ned Kelly that Carey imagines seeks to redeem a nation founded as a penal colony. For a long time Australians with convict heritage were ashamed of the fact. It was the myth of the honest bushranger that allowed Irish-Australians to embrace their ancestors who were transported to Australia against their will. Carey’s True History breathes new life into this legend. One can also read Carey’s portrayal of police stupidity and brutality sponsored by the Crown in the colonial period as an attempt to renew Australia’s Republican movement. In 1999, shortly before Carey wrote this novel, Australians voted no in a referendum to break political ties with Great Britain.

Today the Queen of England remains Australia’s Head of State and retains the authority to dissolve a democratically elected Government. Only a writer opposed to Australia’s membership in the Commonwealth would write the novel that Carey did.

It suggests that historical fiction also provides us with an opportunity to come to know a version of history that is more intriguing or more convenient than the actual past.

*Note from the editors of Not Even Past: we are aware that Australia is its own continent. However, because we do not currently have a section dedicated exclusively to books written on Australia, we decided, however inadequately, to categorize The True History of the Kelly Gang as “transnational.”

Photo credits:

The National Museum of Australia, “Armour worn by Ned Kelly, 1879, State Library of Victoria; armour worn by Joseph Byrne 1879, private collection; armour worn by Dan Kelly 1879, Victoria Police Museum; armor worn by Steve Hard 1879, Victoria Police Museum”

http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/irish_in_australia/exhibition_overview/

You may also like:

Information on the exhibit at the National Museum of Australia entitled “Not Just Ned,” which covers the history of the Irish presence in Australia.

Telling Stories, Writing History: Novel Week at NEP

by Joan Neuberger

Not Even Past has always reviewed and commented on historical films. This week we take a look at some of our favorite historical novels. Historians often criticize novels set in the past, partly because they see fiction writers as falsifying and distorting the record, but also because they seem to simplify the past by narrating historical events through the lives of fictional individuals.

But historical fiction has had an enduring appeal, both the novels that use historical settings purely as colorful background for formulaic melodramas and those that attempt to explore the past in ways just out of the reach of historians. The bedrock of the historian’s work is, of course, our commitment to documentary evidence. Sure, we speculate, we ask “what if,” and we tell stories, but our first responsibility is to the evidence and that limits us when it comes to understanding the complexities of historical experience. Historical novels allow us to imagine what it felt like to be an Empress, what motivated an act of heroism in the face of mortal danger, what a soldier, torn between exhilaration and fear, sees and smells and feels on a chaotic battlefield. In a recent discussion, best-selling historical novelist Philippa Gregory said that historical fiction can get to a “truth beyond historical truth.”

All the novels we review this week show us aspects of historical experience that we value both as general readers and professional historians. They all have strong, complex characters, whose decisions, actions, thoughts, and feelings show us significant facets of history, even if they don’t adhere to the historical record–or perhaps especially when they don’t adhere to the historical record. Good historical novels don’t detract from the work we do as historians, they complement it.

Last year I was on a panel at the AHA (The American Historical Association annual convention) on historical fiction. The other panelists included the novelists Geraldine Brooks and Peter Ho Davies and two historians who have experimented with writing historical fiction, Donald Ostrowski and Jane Kamensky. The discussion was lively and raised a number of interesting issues about historical fiction. You can see a video of the whole two-hour session here.

Three topics raised then are worth mentioning today. First, Geraldine Brooks said that while she does an enormous amount of research, she needs holes in the research in order to find her own way into the lives of her characters; in order to find both her own voice and a way of conveying her characters’ voices.

Second, after discussing the ways that historical fiction can make the past real by bringing it close to us, by making peoples’ lives in the past seem similar to our own, Sarah Maza (in the audience) noted that it is equally important to show the distance between the present and the past. The effectiveness of any work of history, whether documentary or fictional, can often be found in the particular balancing of proximity and distance. In that sense, novels and non-fiction historical writing share with each other the characteristic element often noted about photographs–that they function most powerfully in their ability to convey our fundamental, unconscious sense of living in the past and present simultaneously.

Third, the best historical fiction also carefully balances the demands of accuracy and invention. Jane Kamensky defended the value of “deception” in fiction not as a trick or as melodrama (as in Hollywood films that insist on inventing love stories because audiences like them), but because novels are at their heart a deception in the service of a kind of knowledge. The whole point of writing a historical novel for some historians is to escape the binding of documentary evidence. But other writers start out enjoying the freedom from footnotes and then find themselves inching their way back towards maximum accuracy. This is not necessarily a contradiction: accuracy of details about clothes and food, or the rituals of life at a royal court, or among peasants haying or workers striking can literally set the stage for creatively exploring interior lives. But as historian Lisa Hilton got deeper into her research for a novel about an isolated French village during World War II, she found herself wanting it to be as “real” as possible. When she was finally able to get her laconic neighbors to talk about the war and the Nazi occupation, she found that “the war consisted of a series of sharply-weighted individual decisions, often insignificant in themselves, but collectively forming a history too delicate for written sources to convey.”

Some historians have begun to cross the line in the other direction, writing what they sometimes call “creative history.” Thomas Keneally did it first or at least most spectacularly, in 1994 in Schindler’s List. Numerous historians have recently followed that path in writing what Alison Frazier calls “lightly fictionalized history” (watch for Frazier’s contribution to NEP Novel Week later this week). The historian of science, Rebekah Higgitt devotes a post on her blog “teleskopos” (and cross-posted to the excellent History of Science blog, Whewell’s Ghost) to the problems of lightly fictionalizing in novels about science. She ends by confessing that for her there sometimes can be too much history in historical fiction. I have certainly felt that way when reading some acclaimed historical novels: enough already! get on with the story, get back to the drama!

I think the best historians have found ways to talk about the complexities of history as it is lived, and that we have learned to combine carefully nuanced analysis of texts with more vivid story-telling, but as readers, we still sometimes want more than our commitment to documents allows us. We want to free ourselves to imagine our subjects taking up their own lives and, as Dickens put it, to be the heroes of their own lives. The best historical fiction does that.

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924)

by Isabel Huacuja

Set during the nascent years of the Indian nationalist movement in the fictitious North Indian town of Chandrapore, E.M. Foster’s novel, A Passage to India, follows Adela Quested, a young English woman visiting India for the first time. During a trip to the nearby Marabar caves, Adela accuses Dr. Aziz, an educated and well-reputed Muslim, of attempting to rape her. The contentious trial, which follows Adela’s accusation, brings to the surface the racial and sexual tensions of the British Raj.

British officials condemn Dr. Aziz before the hearing begins, and the judge comments at the onset of the trial that “the darker races are physically attracted to the fairer races but not vice versa.” Foster implies, but never explicitly states, that Dr. Aziz never molested Adela and that she imagined the entire incident. Therefore, the British abuse of power, or more explicitly British colonialism, and not the attempted rape, represent the real crime in the novel. Forster unashamedly condemns British colonialism, which he believes victimizes not only Indians, but also British women. Even though Adela causes Dr. Aziz great distress, Foster portrays her as a victim of patriarchy. As the literary critic Jenny Sharpe explains, colonial officials, “treat Adela as a mere cipher for a battle between men.”

Furthermore, Foster’s perceptive eye captures the political forces at work. Published in 1924, A Passage to India anticipates the nationalist movement’s eruption and India’s and Britain’s final rupture. “India should be a Nation!” yells Dr. Aziz in a spurt of passion. “India a Nation? What an apotheosis!” replies Mr. Fielding. At the end of the novel, Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding accept their differences and reconcile, but the two shall never be close friends again. “Why can’t we be friends now?” says Mr. Fielding to Dr. Aziz. “It is what I want. It is what you want,” replies Dr. Aziz. But the friends “swerved apart” because “the earth did not want it,” because “the sky said ‘No.”

Yet, to focus only on the political implications of the novel, and not mention its artistic accomplishments, would do a great disservice to Foster’s genius. He tells the story as an outsider and describes an India that is foreign, exotic, and incomprehensible to him – an India, that he lusts to understand, but humbly acknowledges he could never master. Forster recognizes his shortcomings as an outsider and perhaps that is why instead of attempting to present a whole and coherent picture of India, he sets out to capture special details: a festival, the monsoon sun, a man’s love of poetry. In his characteristic colorful style, Foster writes: “As it rose from the earth on the shoulders of its bearers, the friendly sun of the monsoons shone forth and flooded the world with color,” Simple, yet evocative passages such as this one, lend a magic touch to this extraordinary story and bear responsibility for the novel’s enduring popularity.

You may also like:

Voices of India’s Partition – Part 1

Sundar Vadlamudi’s review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandi and his Struggle with India

Amber Abbas’s reviews of Krishna Kumar’s Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan and Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India

UT professor of history Gail Minault’s review of The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Photo credits:

Photographer unknown, Hindus and Muslims displaying the flags of both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League as a part of Mohandas Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922

via Wikipedia

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1931)

by Peter Hamilton

On November 11, 1938, Pearl Buck awoke to learn that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.Her first reaction—in Chinese—was “Wo bu xiangxin (我不相信)” or “I don’t believe it.” She added in English: “That’s ridiculous. It should have gone to [Theodore] Dreiser.” Despite tremendous popular support, the literary establishment shared Buck’s disbelief. Critic Norman Holmes Pearson labeled the choice “hammish,” while William Faulkner derided Pearl as “Mrs. Chinahand Buck.” To this day, scholars often dismiss Buck’s writings as didactic or trite.

Pearl Buck was the first American woman—and only the third American after Sinclair Lewis (1930) and Eugene O’Neill (1936)—to win the Nobel Prize. Many of her contemporary critics burned with obvious misogyny, a racist disinterest in her Chinese subjects, and just plain jealousy at her titanic commercial success. Indeed, although writers win the Nobel for their body of work, it was Buck’s smash-hit novel The Good Earth (1931) that had most seized the world’s attention.

Despite scholarly reserve, The Good Earth is a remarkable novel. Many critics have chosen to see simplistic melodrama and even offensive stereotypes in its pages; however, for millions more worldwide readers, the novel is distinguished by its deeply moving sincerity. Set in the grinding poverty of rural Anhui, the novel opens as the humble farmer Wang Lung wakes on his wedding day. Rejoicing, he boils water for his ailing father and sprinkles in a few tealeaves, a luxury his father complains is “like eating silver.” But Wang Lung is too excited to care and even wastes precious water on washing himself for the first time in months. He hurries to the great House of Hwang, where his intended bride O-lan is a slave. Decadent opium addicts, the powerful Hwang family often sells off minor slaves as wives for poor men. Plain but loyal and uncomplaining, O-lan becomes Wang Lung’s companion, the mother of his much-desired sons, and at several crucial junctures, his salvation.

We follow the ambitious Wang Lung and dutiful O-lan from their wedding day through to their deathbeds. Although beautifully written, their journey is rarely pretty. The young couple is hardworking and scrimps and saves to buy small tracts of land from the debauched House of Hwang. Buck’s descriptions of O-lan’s pregnancies and deliveries are stark and painful even now. In a devastating famine, Wang Lung’s pernicious aunt and uncle commit cannibalism, while O-lan must secretly kill her hungry newborn girl. They abandon their home, beg by the roadside, and only a windfall saves their lives. But as Wang Lung regains his fortune, he also accretes a hubris and dissipation that once consumed the House of Hwang. Throughout the novel, Buck’s genuine investment in the emotional lives of her characters shines through against even the most determined critiques.

The Good Earth holds a special appeal for students of history. It was the best-selling American novel of 1931 and 1932, the darkest days of the Great Depression. Its sequel novel Sons (1932) and silver screen adaptation (1937) were also runaway successes. Moreover, the novel is a testament to the American expatriate world that thrived in prewar China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, Pearl Buck (née Sydenstricker) grew up in China, spoke Chinese as her first language, and only at the age of forty-two came to live permanently in the United States. As her biographer Peter Conn emphasizes, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Buck exerted “more influence over Western opinions about Asia than any other American”—with the possible exception of another American expatriate born in China, Time founder Henry Luce.

Finally, The Good Earth calls us to revisit a great American writer who fought for her beliefs in the face of dark international horizons and withering criticism—in both China and America. Indeed, most contemporary Chinese critics were privileged elites who found it offensive that international readers might define China by its unsophisticated farmers rather than the refined arts and literati culture of imperial China. A woman in a man’s profession, Buck boldly wrote from the viewpoint of Chinese peasants and underscored their resolution and dignity. True to this novel’s title, her work also champions respect for nature and its finite resources. She condemned Japanese imperialism and evangelical Christianity alike. In 1938, she urged the U.S. government to open immigration to European Jews and personally sponsored as many as the law permitted. Her critiques of Chiang Kai-shek and acknowledgement of Chinese Communist accomplishments drew a firestorm from hysterical Cold Warriors. She was an outspoken advocate for birth control, international adoption, and the rights of children with special needs (her daughter Carol suffered from Phenylketonuria, or PKU). And while The Good Earth racked up enormous sales, a Pulitzer Prize, and even eventually Buck’s Nobel, this engrossing novel is most profoundly a testament to the worth of underestimated human beings, whatever their creed, color, shape or size.

Photo Credits:

Between the Covers, Rare Book Inc., First Edition Cover of “The Good Earth,” released in 1938

www.betweenthecovers.org via Wikipedia

On Veterans’ Day: War Photos

by Joan Neuberger

Photographs of war, more than photographs of any other subject, make war seem both very distant and impossibly close.

The earliest war to be extensively caught on film was the Crimean War, waged by allies France and Britain against Russia in 1853-55. Roger Fenton’s photographs of that war have been digitalized and made available in a number of sites, including the Library of Congress. Sepia tinting, lines of pristine white tents, soldiers on horseback make that war seem very distant, almost illegible.

One of Fenton’s photographs was the subject of a New York Times blog series (and now a book) by the film maker and photographer Errol Morris, who, together with Philip Gourevitch, wrote the best book on the soldiers who photographed their abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure.

During the Crimean War and the US Civil War, the size of camera equipment and slow speed of the film made action shots impossible. Civil War photographer Mathew Brady and his team of field photographers, like Fenton before them, would often rearrange corpses for dramatic effect.

Two hundred of Civil War era photographs can be seen here on the National Archives website.

In honor of Veterans’ Day, the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film has posted 576 photographs of soldiers and war scenes, primarily from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And the New York Times has posted a series of photos from readers, “Lives During Wartime,” with background descriptions by those shown in the photos.

More recent wars can be seen in such unforgettable detail that war and its impact can seem very close — and still very difficult to fully comprehend.

This series of photographs by Kate Brooks on the Foreign Policy website, “This is What War Looks Like,” makes one wonder how any responsible government can justify the human costs of war.

But then photographs of “Afghanistan, October 2011,” posted this week on the excellent Boston Globe photojournalism site, “The Big Picture,” makes palpable how hard it is sometimes to weigh the varied results of war.

Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession by Haggai Ram (2009)

by Lior Sternfeld

Two weeks ago the British Guardian revealed that the Israeli Air-Force has been conducting secret training exercises in preparation for an imminent attack on Iran. As the war drums beats get stronger, one should ask why Iran preoccupies such a large part of Israel’s inner discourse? If Iran imposes such an existential threat to Israel, why do threats sound louder coming from Jerusalem? I am no expert on nuclear issues, therefore the goal of this essay is not to assess the level of threat Iran poses to Israel, but rather to question the pathology of the Israeli obsession with an Iranian threat.

There could be no better time to read Haggai Ram’s Iranophobia: the Logic of an Israeli Obsession (full disclosure: Haggai Ram was my MA Thesis advisor and is a friend). Haggai Ram, a prominent Israeli scholar, offers a new reading of the long history of the relationship between Israel and Iran, and persuasively analyzes the problematic Israeli “reading” of Iran.

Prior to the 1979 revolution, Iran and Israel forged a close and very beneficial relationship, stemming from Israel’s strategy of “the Alliance of Periphery.” This alliance was aimed at bringing the three non-Arab countries of the Middle East — Israel, Turkey, and Iran, — and the Christian state of east Africa— Ethiopia—into a strategic collaboration vis-à-vis the Arab states. What brought these countries together was the fear of Nasser’s pan-Arabism, which appeared to be on the borders of each. Israel and Iran, apart from the strategic collaboration, also became trade partners. Iran supplied Israel most of its oil needs and Israeli companies worked throughout Iran in supplying military technology (ironically, even nuclear), agricultural assistance, and construction. The relationship thrived as both countries imagined themselves as non-Middle Eastern by nature. Israel’s self perception envisaged a Judeo-Christian civilization, and in Iran the Shah tried to instill the “Aryan Hypothesis” arguing that Iranians are of ancient indo-European tribes descent.

The 1979 revolution, however, took Iran to a different place in the Israeli imagination. Not only did Iran cease to be “modern,” but it also represented everything that seemed wrong and backward in the Middle East. The Israeli nightmare became a reality in the former close ally. Ram juxtaposes this development with the changing political reality in Israel, as the long time Ashkenazi ruling hegemony was voted out, and the ‘Likud’ party—overwhelmingly supported by religious Mizrahi Jews—came to power. At that point, Israelis saw Iran as a reflection of Israel’s own dark future if the Mizrahi forces in Israel should gain more political power. This sentiment grew stronger during the 1980s and the early 1990s. Ram brings a telling example of Iran’s function in the Israeli inner discourse in a slogan penned by Zionist leftist Meretz party in its 1992 campaign: “This is not Iran” (Kan lo iran). Ram explains: “in this slogan Meretz obviously rejected Iran, but at the same time it also suggested that Israel was becoming an Iran-like state, treading a dangerous path that might culminate in the establishment of a Jewish theocracy.”

In another important contribution of this work, Ram traces the place Iran had in the Israeli scholarship of the Middle East, especially on the Iranian Jews. Ram eloquently shows that the history of Iranian Jewry was written mainly by Iranian or Israeli Jews, and was deeply embedded in the Zionist paradigm, which denigrated Jewish existence anywhere but in Israel, and especially in a Muslim country. Therefore, the history of integrated communities in the Middle East was reduced to a history of persecution and cultural achievement.

Iranophobia is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in Israeli society. It helps explain Israeli anxieties about the Iranian nuclear threat and incidentally also helps explain Israeli anxieties in response to the Arab spring.

Casta Paintings

by Susan Deans-Smith

In 1746 Dr. Andrés Arce y Miranda, a creole attorney from Puebla, Mexico, criticized a series of paintings known as the cuadros de castas or casta paintings. Offended by their depictions of racial mixtures of the inhabitants of Spain’s American colonies, Arce y Miranda feared the paintings would send back to Spain the damaging message that creoles, the Mexican-born children of Spanish parents, were of mixed blood. For Arce y Miranda, the paintings would only confirm European assumptions of creole inferiority.

Casta paintings first appeared during the reign of the first Bourbon monarch of Spain, Phillip V (1700-46), and grew in popularity throughout the eighteenth century. They remained in demand until the majority of Spain’s American colonies became independent in 1821. To date over one hundred full or partial series of casta paintings have been documented and more continue to surface at art auctions. Their popularity in the eighteenth century suggests that many of Arce y Miranda’s contemporaries did not share his negative opinions of the paintings.

The casta series represent different racial mixtures that derived from the offspring of unions between Spaniards and Indians–mestizos, Spaniards and Blacks–mulattos, and Blacks and Indians–zambos. Subsequent intermixtures produced a mesmerizing racial taxonomy that included labels such as “no te entiendo,” (“I don’t understand who you are”), an offspring of so many racial mixtures that made ancestry difficult to determine, or “salta atrás” (“a jump backward”) which could denote African ancestry. The overwhelming majority of extant casta series were produced and painted in Mexico. While most of the artists remain anonymous, those who have been identified include some of the most prominent painters in eighteenth-century Mexico including Miguel Cabrera, Juan Rodríguez Juárez, José de Ibarra, José Joaquín Magón, and Francisco Vallejo.

Casta paintings were presented most commonly in a series of sixteen individual canvases or a single canvas divided into sixteen compartments. The series usually depict a man, woman, and child, arranged according to a hierarchies of race and status, the latter increasingly represented by occupation as well as dress by the mid-eighteenth century. The paintings are usually numbered and the racial mixtures identified in inscriptions. Spanish men are often portrayed as men of leisure or professionals, blacks and mulattos as coachmen, Indians as food vendors, and mestizos as tailors, shoemakers, and tobacconists. Mulattas and mestizas are often represented as cooks, spinners, and seamstresses. Despite clear duplications, significant variations occur in casta sets produced throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whereas some series restrict themselves to representation and specification of racial mixtures, dress styles, and material culture, others are more detailed in their representation of flora and fauna peculiar to the New World (avocadoes, prickly pear, parrots, armadillos, and different types of indigenous peoples). While the majority appear to be in urban settings, several series depict rural landscapes.

What do these exquisitely beguiling images tell us about colonial society and Spanish imperial rule? As with textual evidence, we cannot take them as unmediated and transparent sources. Spanish elites’ anxiety about the breakdown of a clear socio-racial hierarchy in colonial society–the sistema de castas or caste system–that privileged a white, Spanish elite partially accounts for the development of this genre. Countering those anxieties, casta paintings depict colonial social life and mixed-race people in idealized terms. Instead of the beggars, vagrants, and drunks that populated travelers’ accounts and Spanish bureaucratic reports about its colonial populations, viewers gaze upon scenes of prosperity and domesticity, of subjects engaged in productive labor, consumption, and commerce. Familiar tropes of the idle and drunken castas are only occasionally depicted in scenes of domestic conflict. In addition, European desires for exotica and the growing popularity of natural history contributed to the demand for casta paintings. The only extant casta series from Peru was commissioned as a gift specifically for the natural history collection of the Prince of Asturias (the future Charles IV of Spain). And despite Dr. Arce y Miranda’s fears, many contemporaries believed the casta series offered positive images of Mexico and America as well as of Spanish imperial rule. In this regard, the casta paintings tell us as much about Mexico’s and Spain’s aspirations and resources as they do about racial mixing. Many owners of casta paintings were high-ranking colonial bureaucrats, military officials, and clergy, who took their casta paintings back to Spain with them when they completed their service in America. But there is also evidence of patrons from the middling ranks of the colonial bureaucracy. Very fragmentary data on the price of casta paintings suggests that their purchase would not have been restricted to only the very wealthy.

The casta paintings were displayed in official public spaces, such as museums, universities, high ranking officials’ residences and palaces, as well as in unofficial spaces when some private collections would be opened up to limited public viewing. The main public space where casta paintings could have been viewed by a wide audience was the Natural History Museum in Madrid.

Regardless of what patrons and artists may have intended casta paintings to convey, viewers responded to them according to their own points of reference and contexts. While much remains to be learned about who saw sets of casta paintings and where they saw them, fragmentary evidence suggests varied audience responses. The English traveler Richard Phillips, visiting the Natural History Museum in Madrid in 1803, enthusiastically encouraged his readers to go and see the casta paintings as exemplary exotica along with Japanese drums and Canopus pots from Egypt. Another English traveler, Richard Twiss, expressed skepticism about the inscriptions that described the racial mixtures depicted in a casta series he viewed in a private house in Malaga. And, to return to Arce y Miranda in Mexico, the casta paintings for him signified a slur on the reputation of creoles in Mexico.

Although we have a good general understanding of the development of this provocative genre much remains to be understood about the circulation, patronage, and reception of the casta paintings. We know, for example, that some casta series found their way to England. One tantalizing piece of evidence comes from the British landscape painter Thomas Jones (1742-1803) who made a diary entry in 1774 about a set of casta paintings he viewed at a friend’s house in Chesham. How these paintings were acquired by their English owners, as purchases, gifts, or through more nefarious means, remains an open question. We also need to know much more about patrons of the casta paintings and the painters in order to deepen our understanding about innovations and new interpretations that appear in this genre.

This is an electronic version of an article published in the Colonial Latin American Review © 2005 Copyright Taylor & Francis; Colonial Latin American Review is available online at www.tandfonline.com http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10609160500314980

For more on casta paintings:

Magali M. Carrera, Imagining identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (2003)

María Concepción García Saiz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano (1989)

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2004)

You may also like: Naming and Picturing New World Nature, by Maria Jose Afanador LLach (here on NEP)

Credits:
1. De Español y Mestizo, Castizo de Miguel Cabrera. Nº. Inv. 00006
2. De Chino Cambujo y India, Loba de Miguel Cabrera. Nº. Inv. 00011
3. Castas de Luis de Mena. Nª.Inv. 00026
Posted by permission of El Museo de América, Madrid

The Strangest Dream – Reykjavik 1986

by Jonathan Hunt

College freshmen have no personal knowledge of the Cold War. Born after the Berlin Wall’s fall and the Soviet Union’s collapse, the threat of nuclear Armageddon seems far removed from their experiences, a relic of a bygone age. Yet, today, more countries than ever hold weapons whose scale of destruction can dwarf that of every bomb used in World War II. As the Cold War nuclear arms race recedes from collective memory, it is important to remember why the world remains beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

This October 11th and 12th, the world observed the 25th anniversary of the summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, where the leaders of the world’s superpowers contemplated the abolition of nuclear weapons. The talks remain the closest humanity has come to stopping the accumulation and proliferation of nuclear arms. Twenty-five years later, historians still debate the summit’s legacy. Even if the nuclear colossi had adopted Gorbachev’s plan to disarm in three stages by 2000, only their fine example would have persuaded Great Britain, France, China, India, and Israel to join them. Reading the minutes of the four meetings at Reykjavik, it is also unclear if gravity bombs like the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been eliminated. Nevertheless, during those two autumn days, Reagan and Gorbachev neared the brink of a nuclear-free world, only to turn back in defeat.

It seems, ironically, that Reagan’s abhorrence of nuclear weapons scuttled the talks. As president, Reagan made research and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an anti-missile shield derisively known as “Star Wars,” a centerpiece of his strategic policy. Nuclear abolitionists condemned the project as a multi-billion dollar boondoggle and a slippery slope toward normalizing the military use of nuclear weapons. Strategists weaned on the Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction warned that its construction could prompt the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive first strike. For Reagan, SDI represented a means by which to make nuclear weapons obsolete and an insurance policy if a “madman” ever got his hands on them. Gorbachev disagreed, and saw limits on SDI as indispensible if the USSR was to trust its rival to disarm.

At Reykjavik, Soviet and American negotiators smoothed over rough spot after rough spot, agreeing to limits and sub-limits on an array of nuclear delivery systems—bombs, cruise missiles, sub-launched, medium-range, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. More progress was made in 36 hours than the previous 15 years combined. Paul Nitze, the president’s special adviser on arms control and a fixture in U.S. foreign policymaking throughout the Cold War, remarked Soviet concessions were “the best we have received in 25 years.” When Reagan and Gorbachev began their fourth and final meeting, they knew the stakes: an historic agreement for deep arms cuts and eventual disarmament. They also knew the final and toughest challenge; how to finesse Reagan’s steely support for SDI and Gorbachev’s stand that the U.S. confine R&D to the labs.

Initial expectations for Reykjavik had been modest. Recurrent crises had beset U.S.-Soviet relations since Reagan took office. The White House’s more confrontational tone, the shooting down of a wayward Korean airliner over Soviet territory, the deployment of quick-strike missiles in Europe, and an alarming NATO nuclear exercise codenamed Able Archer, compounded an already fraught relationship. However, conditions eventually improved. Reagan assumed a more conciliatory line so as to facilitate arms control initiatives and lessen the chances of an accidental nuclear exchange. It was Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, however, that transformed the tenor of the Cold War by infusing new life into a listless Soviet system. Following a series of three elderly statesmen whose best days were behind them, he was confronted by an economic system with chronic shortages and, in April 1986, a catastrophic meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Gorbachev insisted that “new thinking” be applied to the USSR’s manifold problems, and espoused the policies of perestroika, restructuring the Soviet economy, and glasnost, making the government more open and responsive. A major element of perestroika was redirecting the river of resources flowing into the state’s military-industrial complex, especially the secret agencies managing the USSR’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, to more productive ends. Unable and unwilling to keep pace with U.S. military spending, Gorbachev instead offered a three-step plan to liquidate the superpowers’ nuclear weapons.

It was a bold initiative, but Gorbachev’s labors were close to bearing fruit when he and Reagan sat down for their last tête-à-tête. Reagan promised to share advances in missile defense with the Soviets. Gorbachev fired back that the U.S. had thus far been unwilling to share even industrial and agricultural technology with his country. Just when the statesmen seemed to have exhausted their cases, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, urged them to cross the finish line, declaring they had “come very close to accomplishing this historic task … [a]nd when future generations read the record … they will not forgive us if we let this opportunity slip by.” Despite Shevardnadze’s appeal, however, Reagan and Gorbachev failed to agree on the wording of the final text. The two negotiating parties left Reykjavik without an agreement.

Sadly, subsequent generations have more often forgotten than condemned the talks. The calamity of climate change is more familiar to our undergraduates than the firestorm of nuclear war and the long night of the ensuing nuclear winter. In the 1980s, scientists theorized that only 200 thermonuclear explosions would kick up a planetary shroud of radioactive dust, lowering temperatures enough to recreate the climactic conditions in which the dinosaurs died off. Five countries—the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, France, and China—have more than 200 warheads. The U.S. and Russia are currently reducing their arsenals to 1,550 deliverable warheads. A conflict between India and Pakistan, who fought four wars since 1947, where nuclear weapons were used would jeopardize the continuation of life, as we know it.

Current global affairs hardly resemble the global situation in 1986 when two nuclear-armed superpowers testily eyed one another. Yet some themes have reoccurred. Just as the Soviet Union fiscal emergency forced Gorbachev to offer a plan to nuclear disarmament, today’s financial crisis could pave the way for deep multilateral arms cuts. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan augurs lessons similar to those of Chernobyl regarding the uncontrollable nature of nuclear power. It remains for the leaders of today to take advantage of their window of opportunity.

For two days on a remote archipelago in the North Atlantic, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed the entwined destinies of the Cold War and nuclear arms. As educators, we must remind our students of such moments, when history conspires to grant individuals the occasion to re-route its course. Reykjavik’s great tragedy is not its failure; after all, the negotiations paved the way for two momentous treaties—the 1987 Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile Treaty and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Its tragedy resides in its potential disappearance from our collective memory. For our students’ generation will have to address this dangerous legacy of the Cold War—even if they don’t remember it.

You may also like:

Reuters, Mikhail Gorbachev, “A Farewell to Nuclear Arms,” October 11, 2011

“The Reykjavik File: Previously Secret Documents from U.S. and Soviet Archives on the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev Summit, from the collections of The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington DC.

Jonathan Hunt and Paul Walker, “The Legacy of Reykjavik and the Future of Nuclear Disarmament,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec 2011.

Photo Credits:
Federal Government via Wikimedia Commons

Film Review – Amigo (2011)

By Sarah Steinbock-Pratt

As an historian of American empire at the turn of the last century, I am constantly surprised by the number of people who have never heard that the United States annexed the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1899. When I tell people about my research, they often have no idea this nation was in fact a formal empire from 1899 until 1946, when the Philippines achieved independence. This ignorance, perhaps, should not be shocking. Most textbooks and classes at the primary and secondary levels gloss over this crucial period of American history. Our popular culture has also all but ignored the Philippines as an American colonial possession. Empire does not fit into the narrative of the United States as a land of freedom and representative democracy; thus, it is left out. This is a disturbing omission precisely because most Americans, for better or worse, get much of their knowledge about the past from popular culture. Throughout the twentieth century, films like Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, Saving Private Ryan, The Patriot, and even Forrest Gump have shaped the way that we remember and understand our past.

Into this void steps John Sayles’ Amigo, a beautiful film about the experience of one town during the Philippine-American War. The film opens in 1900 in San Isidro, on the island of Luzon. The Philippines have been annexed by the United States, and the Philippine Revolutionary Army has taken up arms again to fight its new colonial master. Rafael Dacanay (Joel Torre), the mayor of San Isidro, tries desperately to protect his town after American troops establish a garrison under the head of Lieutenant Compton (Garret Dillahunt). With his brother, Simón (Ronnie Lazaro), fighting with the Philippine Army, Rafael must walk an increasingly impossible line between his loyalties to the nationalist cause and the need to keep the Americans happy in order to shield himself and those he loves.

In depicting an events that have been generally ignored in popular culture, Sayles takes on a herculean task. Knowing that his audience likely lacks the historical knowledge to put this film in context, Sayles keeps Amigo moving along at a brisk pace, fitting an impressive amount of information into his story. And Sayles has clearly done his homework – there are many moments in the film that feel authentic, including the playing of “A Hot Time in the Old Town,” which, anecdotal references attest, was played so often by American troops that some Filipinos believed it to be the national anthem.

Sayles also stresses the link between the Philippine-American War and America’s previous imperial struggle – the conquest of Native American tribes on the frontier. The last major battle of the Indian Wars was the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, only a decade before the United States turned its eyes toward a Pacific empire. Sayles highlights the fact that many of the soldiers and officers fought against Native Americans in the West were later sent to fight in the Philippines. This experience fighting on the frontier provided a lens through which the military understood their role in the islands, as shown by an early scene in the film, in which a soldier complains to Colonel Hardacre, “It’s awful hard to tell the Indians from the Amigos.”

Sayles doesn’t demonize the American soldiers, however; indeed, his portrayal is perhaps a little too sympathetic. If the movie has a villain, it could be the Dickensian-named, hard-boiled Colonel Hardacre, who informs Lieutenant Compton that he is there “to make war on these people.” But for the most part, one is left with the impression that the soldiers and townspeople could have come together to rebuild San Isidro if they’d just been left alone by the military higher ups. Mention is made of burning down houses, which did happen early on as a counterinsurgent technique and then later as part of a sanitation campaign against cholera, but we never see this act of violence being carried out.

The Occupation of San Isidro in Amigo

Equally absent is the violence that was directed at Filipino women during the occupation. The sweet, awkward romance between Gil and Azalea, ignores the violence involved in many such encounters, either directly, through the raping of Filipino women, or through the coercive power of money and food on families that were desperate and starving. This toned-down portrayal of the soldiers may have been necessary for them to be accepted as sympathetic figures – it is hard to see the humanity of a man who kills or rapes an innocent civilian. But it ignores the abuses of power that occurred at the local level, on the initiative of individual soldiers and officers — a very real part of the true horror of war.

Also missing from the film is a sense of the varied cast of characters that would have been present during this period. We see white American soldiers, Tagalog-speaking Filipinos, Chinese workers, and several Spaniards. There is some mention of intermarriage between Filipinos and Chinese, and Macabebe Scouts are present in the film. But a full sense of the utter complexity encompassed by the marker “Filipino,” is not really depicted. Despite the real tensions between all three groups, Filipinos, Spaniards, and the Chinese had been intermarrying for generations. And that’s not even taking into account the hundreds of different ethnic and language groups spread throughout the islands.

The movie also leaves out the fact that four regular regiments of African American soldiers were sent to the Philippines: the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments, and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments, as well as several other volunteer regiments. These soldiers faced a difficult situation, charged with waging war on a colonized population while racial violence was on the rise at home. The link between the oppression of African Americans and Filipinos was clear in the tendency of white soldiers to use the epithet “nigger” to refer to Filipinos as well as their black compatriots. The 24th Infantry, moreover, participated in the capture of San Isidro in 1899, and was stationed in Nueva Ecija. Indeed, the famed David Fagen, an African American who defected to the Philippine Army, was a member of the 24th Infantry, and operated as a leader of Filipino guerilla forces in that province until his supposed death in 1901.

Sayles is most deeply interested in the impossible situations in which the characters find themselves: the residents of San Isidro, who must negotiate between both the revolutionaries and the American military, and the soldiers themselves, who come under increased pressure to pacify the town and end the armed resistance. This is highlighted in a scene which cuts back and forth between Lieutenant Compton reading General Order 100 and a general in the Philippine Army reading out an order from Emilio Aguinaldo, both of which threaten death as retribution for civilians caught aiding the other, aptly capturing the ultimate, bloody tragedy of war: there are no innocent bystanders, and civilians caught between two armies often suffer the greatest losses.

Despite its flaws, Amigo is a remarkable film, especially because of its focus on a Filipino character, its strong Filipino cast and the use of Tagalog for at least half of the dialogue of the film. There have been only three other American films made to date about the Philippine-American War: The Real Glory (1939), Cavalry Command (1963), and This Bloody Blundering Business (1971), none of which used Filipino actors.

Amigo will be no blockbuster, but it ought to be required viewing for all Americans. Not only does the film do a better job than most historical dramas in accurately depicting the past, its relevance to the present is clear. As an historian, I sincerely hope that I am wrong, and that Amigo will garner the attention and accolades it deserves. If it does, perhaps the next time that I explain my dissertation to a new friend, they’ll nod and say, “Oh, sure. I know about that.”

Official Website of Amigo

Photo Credits:

All photos from the official Amigo website

Sankofa (1993)

By Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux

In this 1993 film by Ethiopian-born filmmaker Haile Gerima, a modern-day, fashion model is transported to the past to experience the traumas of American chattel slavery. It is only through her return to the past that she can move forward, hence the name of the film, Sankofa, an Akan word meaning “go back and take” or “go back to move forward.” The film opens with a photo shoot on the coast of Ghana on the grounds of a fortification (read castle/dungeon) used to house African captives prior to being forcibly transported to new world plantations. Zola, the main character, is forced back in time to an isolated sugar plantation. There she learns the power of family, community, and even rebellion as she and other members of the enslaved community seek their freedom through solidarity and decisive action. This is the closest film rendition of slavery since the 1977 television mini-series Roots. Gerima, a Howard University professor, did much to ensure that his portrayal of the institution of slavery and the presentation of African cultural traditions were as close to reality as possible.

Teza, another film directed by Haile Gerima

The bookstore, gallery and cafe, Sankofa, established by Gerima

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