Economies of Representation, 1790-2000

ECONOMIES OF REPRESENTATION, 1790–2000 Although postcolonialism has emerged as one of the most significant theoretical...

Author: Leigh Dale and Helen Gilbert

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ECONOMIES OF REPRESENTATION, 1790–2000

Although postcolonialism has emerged as one of the most significant theoretical movements in literary and cultural studies, it has paid scant attention to the importance of trade and trade relations to debates about culture. Focusing on the past two centuries, this volume investigates the links among trade, colonialism, and forms of representation, posing the question, ‘What is the historical or modern relationship between economic inequality and imperial patterns of representation and reading?’ Rather than dealing exclusively with a particular industry or type of industry, the contributors take up the issue of how various economies have been represented in Aboriginal art; in literature by North American, Caribbean, Portuguese, South African, First Nations, Australian, British, and Aboriginal authors; and in a diverse range of writings that includes travel diaries, missionary texts, the findings of the Leprosy Investigation Commission, early medical accounts and media representations of HIV/AIDS. Examining trade in commodities as various as illicit drugs, liquor, bananas, tourism, adventure fiction, and modern Aboriginal art, as well as cultural exchanges in politics, medicine, and literature, the essays reflect the widespread origins of the contributors themselves, who are based throughout the English-speaking world. Taken as a whole, this book contests the commonplace view promoted by some modern economists – that trade in and of itself has a leveling effect, equalising cultures, places, and peoples – demonstrating instead the ways in which commerce has created and exacerbated differences in power.

Economies of Representation, 1790–2000 Colonialism and Commerce

Edited by LEIGH DALE University of Queensland, Australia and HELEN GILBERT University of London, UK

© Leigh Dale and Helen Gilbert 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Leigh Dale and Helen Gilbert have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Economies of representation, 1790–2000: colonialism and commerce 1. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism 2. English literature – 20th century – History and criticism 3. Colonies in literature 4. Commerce in literature 5. Capitalism in literature I. Dale, Leigh II. Gilbert, Helen 820.9’3553 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Economies of representation, 1790–2000: colonialism and commerce/edited by Leigh Dale and Helen Gilbert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6257-0 (alk. paper) 1. Colonies—History. 2. Colonies—Commerce—History. 3. Commerce—Social aspects. I. Dale, Leigh. II. Gilbert, Helen, 1956– JV105.E26 2007 382.09171—dc22 2007012682

ISBN 978-0-7546-6257-0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

For our former colleagues at the University of Queensland Press made redundant in December 2004

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Contents Notes on Contributors Introduction Leigh Dale and Helen Gilbert Part I

ix xiii

Colonialism and Commerce

1

Meditation on Yellow: Trade and Indigeneity in the Caribbean Peter Hulme

2

Sites of Purchase: Slavery, Missions and Tourism on Two Tanzanian Sites Gareth Griffiths

3

17

3

The Bible Trade: Commerce and Christianity in the Pacific Anna Johnston

31

4

In Search of M. Leprae: Medicine, Public Debate, Politics and the Leprosy Commission to India Jo Robertson

41

5

Coincidences and Likely Stories: Perverse Desire and Viral Exchange in the ‘Origin’ of AIDS Susan Knabe

59

6

Junk International: The Symbolic Drug Trade Brian Musgrove

73

7

Redefining the Shebeen: The Illicit Liquor Trade in South Africa, c.1950–1983 Anne Mager

83

8

The Textuality of Tourism and the Ontology of Resource: An Amazing Thai Case Study Guy Redden

93

Part II 9

Reading Exchange

Text as Trading Place: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother Ross Chambers

107

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Economies of Representation, 1790–2000

10

Raw Deals: Kngwarreye and Contemporary Art Criticism Catherine Howell

123

11

Sweet Beauty: West Indian Travel Narratives Claudia Brandenstein

135

12

Women’s Trading in Fanny Stevenson’s The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ Roslyn Jolly

143

13

Fair Trade: Marketing ‘The Mohawk Princess’ Anne Collett

157

14

How Queer Native Narratives Interrogate Colonialist Discourses Wendy Pearson

169

15

New Life Stories in the New South Africa Judith Lütge Coullie

183

16

Postcolonial Pedagogy and International Economics Leigh Dale

193

Bibliography

209

Index

229

Notes on Contributors Claudia Brandenstein completed her MA, ‘“To the stranger’s eye my world is a paradise”: Jamaica Kincaid’s Americas’ at the University of Queensland in 1997. She is the author of essays on Caribbean writing, including one published in the collection In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire, edited by Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston. She is currently working on a Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Imperial positions in nineteenth-century West Indian travel writing’. Ross Chambers is former Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, and now Emeritus Professor. He is the author of a set of highly influential studies of literature and rhetoric in French and in English. The best-known and most recent volumes in English include Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (2004); Loiterature (1999); Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author (1998); The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism (1993); and Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (1991). Anne Collett teaches in the English Literatures program at the University of Wollongong. She has published widely on postcolonial women’s writing, most recently on poet Kate Llewellyn in Australian Literary Studies and Jamaica Kincaid in Wasafiri. Articles on Caribbean poet Olive Senior and another piece on Jamaica Kincaid are forthcoming in Ariel and New Literatures Review respectively. She is currently working on a comparative study of Australian poet, Judith Wright and Canadian painter, Emily Carr. Anne is editor of Kunapipi, a journal of postcolonial writing and culture (www.kunapipi.com). Judith Lütge Coullie is Professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Recent publications include Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African auto/biography (University of Hawai’i Press); The Closest of Strangers: South African Women’s Life Writing (Wits University Press); a.k.a. Breyten Breytenbach: Critical Approaches to his Writings and Paintings (Rodopi); and a CD-Rom on the life and writing of Roy Campbell: Campbell in Context (University of KwaZuluNatal, Killie Campbell Africana Library Series). Leigh Dale teaches Australian and postcolonial literatures at the University of Queensland, and is the author of The English Men: Professing Literature in Australian Universities. She is the editor of the journal Australian Literary Studies and, with Chris Tiffin, author of the essay on Australia for the Year’s Work in English Studies. Her current research examines the advertising, reviewing and discussion of literature in regional and metropolitan newspapers in Australia between the wars; she is also writing a book on responses to self-harm in European and North American medical cultures.

x


Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway College, University of London and Co-convenor of the College’s interdisciplinary Postcolonial Research Group. Her books include Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (co-authored with Jacqueline Lo, 2007) and Sightlines: Race, Gender and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre (1998). She has also published essays in postcolonial literatures and cultural studies, and is currently completing a project on race, orangutans and the species boundary. Gareth Griffiths is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He teaches and researches primarily in post-colonial literatures with a special emphasis on African and Australian writing. His books include A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing Between Two Cultures (1978) and African Literatures in English – East and West (2000). He has co-written and co-edited The Empire Writes Back (1989; 2002), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995; 2006), and Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (1998). Recent co-edited publications include Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies (2003) and Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions (2005). He is currently funded by the Australian Research Council to pursue a project on Africans educated by missions in the US in the late nineteenth century. Catherine Howell is based at the University of Cambridge, where she is Research Associate at the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET). Current research interests include: modernist art and architecture, travel writing, activity theory, ICT in education, and the digital humanities. Catherine holds an MA in English from the University of Queensland (1999) and a PhD in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Cambridge (2005). She is currently making a digital short film about modernist architecture in Cambridge. Peter Hulme is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex, and author of Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797. Recent publications include (ed. with Tim Youngs) Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and (ed. with William H. Sherman) William Shakespeare: The Tempest (W.W. Norton & Co., 2003). He is currently working on the literary geography of the Caribbean. Anna Johnston is Queen Elizabeth II Fellow at the University of Tasmania, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath. Her previous publications include Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 and In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire (co-edited with Helen Gilbert). She is currently working on separate projects on Tasmanian short stories (with Ralph Crane), and missionary textuality and early nineteenth-century Australian colonial culture. Roslyn Jolly, author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (1993), teaches in the School of English at the University of New South Wales. She recently completed Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific (forthcoming from Ashgate), and is the editor of Fanny Stevenson’s The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ among the South Sea Islands.

Notes on Contributors

xi

Her research interests include theories of fiction and narrative, travel literature, and literature and Empire. She is currently working on the idea of the South in nineteenthcentury English literature. Susan Knabe teaches courses in feminist theory and practice, gender and popular culture, and gender and the culture of medicine in the Centre for Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include the construction of gender and sexuality in discourses of health and disease and in the formation of public policy, as well as the intersections of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in popular culture. Anne Mager, author of Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, teaches in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. Most recently, she has been working on commercial beer, men and masculinities in South Africa. Running With the Big Dogs, a book on this subject, is due to be published soon. Brian Musgrove is a senior lecturer in literature and cultural theory and a member of the Public Memory Research Centre at the University of Southern Queensland. He is a contributor to the volume Travel Writing and Empire, and has published articles on a variety of topics, including the drug-inspired ‘narco-travelogue’ (in Studies in Travel Writing). His current research is on public language and political rhetoric, and his article ‘David Williamson in the Dock: Paranoia, Propaganda and “The People”’ was nominated for the 2006 Alfred Deakin Essay Prize for promoting public debate. Wendy Pearson is Assistant Professor in English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She has published articles on discourses of sexuality, race, citizenship and belonging in contemporary Canadian cultural production, with a focus on gay and lesbian as well as indigenous issues. Some forthcoming essays include ‘Not in the Hardware Aisle, Please: Same-Sex Marriage, Anti-Gay Activism and My Fabulous Gay Wedding’ (Ethnologies); ‘“Whatever That Is”: Hiromo Goto’s Body Politic/s’ (Essays on Canadian Writing), and ‘Post-colonialism/s, Gender/s, Sexuality/s and the Legacy of The Left Hand of Darkness: Gwyneth Jones’ Aleutians Talk Back’ (Yearbook of English Studies). Guy Redden teaches media and cultural studies at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom. His research revolves around the moral dimensions of consumer culture. He has recently published work on the commodification of personal guidance (self-help and alternative spirituality), expressive gift economies on the Internet (activism and blogging), and makeover television. His essays have appeared in Cultural Studies Review, Social Movement Studies, Journal of Contemporary Religion, and Media International Australia. He is a former editor of M/C, an online journal focusing on media and culture.

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Jo Robertson has coordinated and carried out research on the International Leprosy Association’s Global Project on the History of Leprosy. It is funded by the Nippon Foundation, and based at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at Oxford University. This project is developing a database of locations at , where leprosy archives can be found in order to facilitate historical research into the disease. Jo’s research interests are leprosy and its representation in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial contexts, specifically the ‘untainted’ children of people affected by leprosy, the League of Nations Leprosy Commission, and the emergence of international leprosy organizations. The editors would like to thank the contributors for their patience during the preparation of this manuscript and Amanda Lynch, Lorrie McLay and Paul Newman for their help at various stages.

Introduction Leigh Dale and Helen Gilbert Whatever we might wish, or regard as enlightenment, the severalty of cultures abides and proliferates, even amidst, indeed in response to, the powerfully connecting forces of modern manufacture, finance, travel, and trade.1

To consider the relationship between colonialism and commerce is almost necessarily to invoke the work of Immanuel Wallerstein on ‘world-systems theory’, an approach to history that gives particular emphasis to the global economy. Since the 1960s, Wallerstein has made a set of arguments foundational to debates about the relationship of colony to metropole, and the gaps between rich and poor. Wallerstein’s analysis foregrounds ‘the unceasing ascension of the ideology of national economic development’; indeed, he contends that national economic development has been ‘the primordial collective task’.2 At first glance, this contention might seem at odds with post-colonial scholars’ customary focus on identificatory categories such as race, ethnicity, religion and gender, for culture and economics have often been approached as essentially separate domains in studies of colonialism and its aftermath, with the result that debates about each have proceeded in parallel rather than in dialogue. The chapters in this book argue for the interrelatedness of cultural and economic systems in specific colonial and post-colonial contexts.3 The project of historicizing connections between capitalism and colonialism seems particularly urgent in an age when globalization is widely seen as a new and omnipotent force shaping contemporary cultures and political economies. The demand for specificity in attention to local histories and geographies, local cultures and cultural values, and the articulation of this analysis to the global forces and exchanges that typify imperialism, has increased over the past decade. So, too, has interdisciplinarity, and indeed Robert Young describes postcolonial studies as ‘a certain kind of interdisciplinary political, theoretical and historical academic work that sets out to serve as a transnational forum for studies grounded in the historical context of colonialism, as well as in the political context of contemporary problems of globalization’.4 One of the things which makes this task difficult is that there is little consensus about the nature of what is – or was – globalization. Those who interpret it as primarily 1 Clifford Geertz, qtd in Michael S. Billing, Barons, Brokers and Buyers: The Institutions and Cultures of Philippine Sugar (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), p. 252. 2 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s (San Diego: Academic Press/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 4. 3 We use the term ‘post-colonial’ much as Terry Eagleton does ‘post-Romantic’: to convey the ‘sense of being … product[s] of that epoch rather than confidently posterior to it.’ See Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 18. 4 Robert Young, ‘Ideologies of the Postcolonial’, Interventions, 1:1 (1998–99), p. 4.

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an economic phenomenon tend to highlight flows of capital, labor and commodities, and to understand those flows in terms of market and political forces; culturalist models, on the other hand, focus on flows of information, values, technology, images, artifacts and people (seen as social beings rather than merely part of a mobile workforce). Though their emphasis is different, both strands of theorizing acknowledge the penetration of culture by capital, and tend to represent this dynamic as largely benign, if profound, in its effects. Thus, globalization has been variously regarded as the end-stage in an inevitable trajectory of (post)national economic development; embraced as an engine of progress and increased prosperity; celebrated as a manifestation of postmodern modes of subjectivity and (dis)identification; and even vaunted as a mechanism for social and political democratization.5 What is muted in or by such theorizing is a critique of ‘globalization’ as an explanatory model that normalizes the asymmetries which characterize international relations. One of the ways to begin such a critique is to suggest that the coalition of government and industry in the proliferation of capital provokes comparisons with the modus operandi of colonialism – and, certainly, globalization seems to have deepened precisely those channels between rich and poor cut by European imperialism. Thus, in Wallerstein’s view, the beginnings of the ‘global system’ must be located not in the technologies of the late twentieth century, but in those of the sixteenth century, and it must be seen that the spread of European imperialism was energized – financed and motivated – by nascent capitalism. In this respect, the transformation of the world market from agrarian to industrial economies (which is said to characterize modernity) can be seen as instantiating the uneven patterns of global connectivity still legible in contemporary commodity cultures. But perhaps the more prevalent view is that contemporary modes of economic and cultural interconnectedness are unprecedented in their extent and force: thus, for Paul Gilroy, what marks the difference between earlier and current modes of globalization is not so much the processes but the patterns in distribution of injurious effects.6 Other critics focus on the institutional control of capital and commodity flows, remarking that the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – and its successor, the World Trade Organization – along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have taken over the role of colonial chartered companies and state apparatuses, to become the ‘instruments for management of the ruined world’.7 In the context of this book, perhaps the most important distinction between early and late global systems is in the realm of ideology: whereas imperialism projected

5 This cursory summary extrapolates from ideas usefully surveyed in Revathi Krishnaswamy’s ‘The Claims of Globalization Theory: Some Contexts and Contestations’, South Asian Review, 24:1 (2003), pp. 18–32; see also Crystal Bartolovich, ‘Global Capital and Transnationalism’, in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 126–61, and Arif Dirlik, ‘The Global in the Local’, in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds Wimal Dissanayake and Rob Wilson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 22–45. 6 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 7 Misao Miyoshi, ‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-state’, in Global/Local, eds Dissanayake and Wilson, p. 82.

Introduction

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‘a self-conscious cultural project of universality’ (manifest in its ‘civilizing mission’), globalization tends to occult its politics in the logic of ‘mere ubiquity’.8 Michael Pusey diagnoses the dangers of such ubiquity in his robust attack on neo-liberal economists, whose values Pusey, among many others, sees as having a disproportionate and destructive influence on culture and society, specifically through an antagonism to beliefs about the significance of history and community. He contends that ‘One of the grand ideas of economic rationalism and globalisation is that the market can, will and should, for the sake of ever greater efficiency, neutralize social memory … about what the economy ought to deliver to the society and to its citizens.’9 Writing of Australia, he claims that Policy can only be made by people with the trained incapacity to reason in a way that puts the general interests of the society and its citizens first … [E]ven those remaining institutions that have survived reform without collapse (the courts, the universities, the churches, the unions, the quality media, and others) are left with only a ‘weak capacity to detect latent problems’ and with even less strength to mobilise awareness in what remains of the public sphere.10

Pusey’s key point, about social memory, community, and the power of history, is made in a similar fashion by Richard Sennett. In his recent Castle lectures in ethics, politics and economics, Sennett asserts that a small but disproportionately influential group of economic elites have been able to reify and normalize the notion of personal freedom, experienced as untrammeled consumption – what Sennett, quoting Zygmunt Bauman, calls ‘“liquid modernity”’.11 Sennett is distinctive in pointing out that the cultural changes seen as being ‘inflicted’ by large corporations are also experienced within them: whereas challenges to management once came ‘from oddly dressed elderly ladies and vegetarian activists’, in the past few decades ‘Enormous pressure was put on companies to look beautiful in the eyes of the passing voyeur’; crucially, for senior management, ‘the willingness to destabilize one’s own organization sent a positive signal.’12 Following Sennett, and shifting to a more prophetic mode, it might be posited that the newer forms of imperialism effect a struggle over narrative and cultural value, but the object of that struggle has shifted from place to temporality, in the specific sense that the very idea of significance seems to demand relationship and to imply some degree of longevity. It is hardly new to observe that it is those exiled from the present, often in the name of the future, who bear the economic and cultural brunt of a surging modernity: ‘you are not part of our plans for the future’. 8 Krishnaswamy, ‘The Claims of Globalization Theory’, p. 29. 9 Michael Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 44. 10 Ibid., p. 174. Pusey quotes here from Jürgen Habermas, Between Fact and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 358. 11 Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 13. 12 Ibid., pp. 39, 40, 41.

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In such circumstances, the severing of ‘cultural’ from ‘economic’ values becomes normative, but this does not prevent individuals and groups who trade on that severance representing themselves as embodying a static and meaningful culture – indeed, meaningful because static – such that ‘there is a naturalization or essentialization of “the culture” that views it as coterminous with the individuals who “possess” it.’13 Thus, at the very time that the nation as a political and economic entity is declining in significance, its cultural centrality is invoked increasingly by political and economic elites who maneuver to naturalize the view that ‘the national interest’ is coterminous with their own. This terrible collusion uses a rhetoric that purports to value stasis and simplicity, while deriving its emotional force from the instabilities created by the even more powerful drive for forward motion, intrinsic to capitalism, which aims to leave the past behind. Precisely because globalization continues ‘to admit different cultures into the realm of capital only to break them down and to remake them in accordance with the requirements of production and consumption’,14 the roots of the current system, its historical connections with earlier kinds of imperialism, demand analysis and critique. Again, Wallerstein’s work is instructive. In 1975, he contended that scholars would be misguided if they looked for what was new in the system rather than longterm, continuing features.15 In 2004, evidently frustrated by what he saw as superficial responses to problems of globalization and terrorism created by inattention to the history of capitalism, Wallerstein reiterated his view that the global system ‘is a social creation, with a history, whose origins need to be explained, whose ongoing mechanisms need to be delineated, and whose inevitable terminal crisis needs to be discerned’.16 Crucially, he added this ‘credo’: ‘the emergence of this mode of analysis is a reflection of, an expression of, the real protest about the deep inequalities of the world-system that are so politically central to our current times.’17 This kind of statement is an important counter to those economic histories that seek to foreground colonialism’s ‘success stories’, such as ‘the settler societies of North America and Australasia’, or that centralize debates about the ‘benefit’ of imperialism, asking whether specific regions ‘benefited’ from colonization.18 In Wallerstein’s terms, this hypothetical question is meaningless because it ‘sets aside’ – often in the name of disciplinary purity – the destruction of indigenous peoples and their cultures. Considerations of the relationship between commodity and culture are often particularly effective in terms of enabling scholars to interrogate the alibi of benevolence – ‘civilizing and Christianizing’ the heathen – integral to the moral 13 Billing, pp. 253, 254. 14 Dirlik, p. 32. 15 The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays by Immanuel Wallerstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1979), p. 120. 16 Immanuel Wallerstein, World-systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. ix, x. 17 Ibid., World-systems Analysis, p. xi. 18 This claim and question are in D.K. Fieldhouse’s The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence and Development (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), p. 351. The question is not merely hypothetical but, when framed within a discipline that presumes the normativity of capitalism, tautological.

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justification of imperialism. Michael Taussig’s influential Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, for example, highlights the extreme atrocity that can characterize colonialist plunder, a point also foregrounded in the numerous studies of slavery and of its later form, indentured labor.19 In terms of the continuing influence of key works in postcolonial studies which emphasize the connectedness of subjectivity – Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes is paradigmatic here – it is essential to note that a key element of slavery and forced labor was (is) not just trade, but promotion of the view that the mass reorientation of non-monetary or poor economies to the consumer demands of the rich was (is) entirely legitimate. In that sense, one of the more pernicious but prevalent effects of various modes of imperial and colonial discourses is to erase this connection, and to naturalize possession and consumption as prerogatives of the rich. To date, most works in postcolonial studies that have brought together the imperial and the industrial have tended to focus on single commodities or industries, particularly colonial products such as salt, cotton and (especially) sugar, and to consider the ways in which colonization plays out in debates about the adoption or rejection of specific commodities and practices of commodification.20 Keith Sandiford’s The Cultural Politics of Sugar is one of the more densely argued and subtle of these; the book analyzes ‘the representation of sugar as matter and metaphysic, a substance potent enough to transform not only consumptive patterns but also to alter perceptions

19 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Studies of modern industries like tourism, and ‘niche’ commodities (as well as the old colonial staples), draw attention to the same flows of capital remarked as characterizing imperialism. See, for example, Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown, Capital and Entrepreneurship in South-East Asia (Houndmills, Hants: Macmillan Press; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994); Richard Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006); and Susanne Freidberg, French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). On slavery, see for example the work of James Walvin, including his Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire, 2nd edn (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001) and The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and James Walvin (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). On indentured labor, see for example Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labour Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); David Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834–1920, ed. Kay Saunders (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 20 See, for example, Sadananda Choudhury, Economic History of Colonialism: A Study of British Salt Policy in Orissa (Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1979); Richard L. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and the Regional Economy in the French Soudan, 1800–1946 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); William K. Storey, Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997); Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, & Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), p. 185. Burke’s study of hygiene, which focuses on changing understandings of the body and cleanliness, is wry and carefully politicized.

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and invent new aesthetic and imaginative space’.21 Through her evocative notion of ‘commodity racism’, Anne McClintock has explored the ways in which ‘domestic commodities were mass marketed through their appeal to imperial jingoism’ through Victorian advertising campaigns.22 McClintock concludes by arguing that ‘In the imperial contest zone, [commodity] fetishes embodied conflicts in the realm of value’, and that these collisions of value ‘were from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter’.23 Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake have also emphasized the interconnectedness of the cultural and the colonial, remarking that imperialism ‘has thrived since the days of … Adam Smith maximizing the “wealth of nations” upon circulating spectacles and discourses of social difference and cultural heterogeneity’.24 In this vein, the chapters in this volume implicitly take up Crystal Bartolovich’s call for more particularized approaches to the development of capitalism: ‘When “globalization” is examined in a truly “global” context … it implies a politics of history as well as geography: its “newness” depends to a large extent not only on how it is conceptualized but where you look for it’.25 This kind of insistence on geography would have seemed passé ten years ago, when the author of an introduction to ‘globalization’ could argue that the new millennium would bring ‘the end of geography’ (and with it, presumably, the environment): ‘Importantly territoriality will disappear as an organizing principle for social and cultural life; it will be a society without borders and spatial boundaries. In a globalized world we will be unable to predict social practices and preferences on the basis of geographical location’.26 As Saskia Sassen contends, such remarks are evidence of an academic rhetoric and policy context in which ‘place is seen as [being] neutralized by global communications and the hypermobility of capital’.27 One shared characteristic of many of the essays gathered here is that they interrogate and complicate homogenizing representations of place, arguing instead for the need to complicate the well-worn vectors of difference such as class, race and gender. The chapters in the first section, ‘Colonialism and Commerce’, frequently reflect the dictum that while people do (attempt to) make their own history, they do not always do so in conditions of their own choosing. This paraphrasing of Marx’s remark, taken from the first page of his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, slightly understates the case that Marx makes in relation to history. In one (translated) account, he does begin by observing that ‘Men make their own history, but they 21 Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 16. Sandiford remarks that he reaches conclusions similar to those drawn by Edward Brathwaite in The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), not by Brathwaite’s ‘historical method’ but by ‘literary critical and theoretical practices’ (p. 21). 22 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 209. 23 Ibid., p. 231. 24 Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, ‘Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local’, in Global/Local, eds Dissanayake and Wilson, p. 7. 25 Bartolovich, p. 136. 26 Malcolm Waters, Globalization, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 5. 27 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), p. xxi.

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do not make it just as they please’; crucially, though, he follows this statement by drawing attention to the fact that the circumstances in which people are trapped are ‘directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’28 Having argued that political struggle is therefore a struggle over perceptions of the past, Marx draws attention to what he seems to see as a paradox created by the desire for change: … just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonoured disguise and this borrowed language.29

The crux of Marx’s observation, at least for our purposes, is that the struggle for transformation of the present is also a struggle about the meanings of the past; commensurately, it is through historical analysis that we can call into question the values and processes of supposedly ahistorical and implacable economic forces. Such claims are made in deliberate opposition to institutional thinking that manifests a pervasive aggression towards the notion of history itself, a violent stripping away of context, in favor of that ‘radical economic present’ which Wallerstein identifies and likewise contests. Thus, he laughs at the results of a survey which showed that most economists had no use for data that was more than ten years old, and advocates going on the front foot to respond: ‘Of course the emperor has no clothes! What of significance can we possibly know with data about only the last ten years of human existence? Precious little! Instead of defending ourselves against academic divestment by the economists, economic historians should lay to claim to replacing economists completely. Away with economics!’30 This struggle over history is at the heart of the various discussions of the relationship between colonialism and commerce in this book. The first chapter that follows begins, fittingly, with an analysis of an iconic narrative of ‘first encounter’ by Christopher Columbus. Peter Hulme’s discussion of the banana trade – or what one textbook of international economics calls the banana war31 – briefly considers Columbus’s concern with trade and commerce (noting his ‘years working in Genoese trade’), before going on to examine the ways in which the banana industry and its collapse have placed increasing pressure on the inhabitants of Dominica to embrace cultural tourism. Hulme counterpoints his study of industry with the resonant lines of Olive Senior’s ‘Meditation on Yellow’, using the poem as echo and commentary on exploitation, while also flagging concern about the way in which indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean have been positioned in terms of their skin color.

28 K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, c.1948), p. 15. 29 Ibid. 30 Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 258. 31 Robert M. Dunn, Jr., and John H. Mutti, International Economics: Sixth Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 195.

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The same conjunctions of historical practice and modern industry, ‘the desire for profit without exploitation’ (which can serve to obscure vested interests),32 are the subject of the next chapter, which moves to the east coast of Africa. Gareth Griffiths, considering former slave trading forts in modern Tanzania, notes that these sites are now being featured in campaigns to increase tourism to the region. His careful discussion of a range of specific sites – individual buildings, streets and towns – demonstrates not only the grim past of these places, but the ambiguities raised by their use or neglect in the present. In shuttling between historical materials (archival and architectural) and modern tourism, Griffiths offers a model for synthesizing analyses of historical data and contemporary social practices based on theatre: sites are ‘read’ in terms of overlapping performances, to which the scholar plays dramaturge. The missionary archives that are (part of) the source material for Griffiths’s arguments are also central to the analysis of Pacific history in Anna Johnston’s discussion of the work of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in Polynesia. The missionaries participated energetically in trade – a role taken up in part because the missions were required to become self-supporting financially – but were often criticized for their financial successes. Johnston notes that in some respects the missionaries’ dilemmas about the level of their involvement in commerce mirrored their problems in dealing with sexuality: in both arenas, missionaries condemned what they saw as immoral and exploitative relations, but many succumbed to the temptations of profit and sexual intimacy in their interactions with local populations. Like Johnston’s, Jo Robertson’s chapter offers an account of an imperial mission dispatched with fanfare to colonial parts. Robertson’s extraordinarily detailed research on the workings of a ‘Leprosy Commission’ sent from London to India in 1890 reveals imperialism’s investment in controlling the parameters of scientific/ medical knowledge. This chapter also offers insights into ways in which public/ professional debates about disease generated and spread metaphors that reflected anxieties in Britain about the dangers of colonial trade. This intersection between the scientific, the medical and the popular is also at the heart of Susan Knabe’s analysis of a story published in a popular American magazine about the ‘origin’ of AIDS in chimpanzee populations in West Africa. Knabe argues that purported genealogies of the disease create and reinforce historical asymmetries in the trade between rich and poor nations. And like Griffiths, she concludes that a modern, popular narrative unconsciously reiterates the narratives of African slavery. Brian Musgrove’s chapter on the drug trade works from a Marxist and anticolonial perspective in taking up the case, put by Paul B. Stares (and before him, William S. Burroughs), that traders in illicit commodities are ‘“not the Other but the Brother” of legitimate capital’. After establishing this framework, Musgrove turns to the relationship between British and American formulations of model society, arguing that many British writers of the 1950s saw the sale of illegal drugs and, by implication, an American lifestyle, as ‘the very model of a colonizing capitalism at its most efficient pitch’. Anne Mager’s study of illicit drugs, in this case alcohol, uses an historical framework grounded in concern with racial difference to 32 Dean MacCannell, ‘Cannibalism Today’, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 28.

Introduction

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demonstrate the specificities of local economies. In her analysis of the shebeen, a place in which Africans purchased and consumed alcohol, Mager argues that colonialism and commerce are intertwined in particularly complicated ways in the illicit liquor trade – one of South Africa’s largest industries. Her chapter traces the development of shebeens from backyard businesses to major landmarks in the economic and social landscape, asking what links can be traced between liquor, commerce and politics in South Africa since the 1890s. The final chapter in this section, by Guy Redden, is concerned with analyzing the (Orientalist) traditions of representation, the formations of cultural capital, and the economic exigencies that produce representations of Thailand appropriate to late capitalist modes of consumption, and neo-liberal economic imperialism. The marketing of Thailand as a ‘fascinating’ place of timeless autochthony quite unlike the tourists’ own culture appeals to two colonial values: the appropriation of a ‘distant place’, and the appropriateness of first-hand authentication as a way for a knowledge-seeker to validate truths. But Redden argues that the vaunted singularity of Thailand is a consumer fetish, demonstrated by its (paradoxical) appropriation in terms of the consumer’s normal ways of knowing, from chain-store shopping to credit-card purchasing. With its posters of ‘exotic dancers’, the marketing campaign is also a brilliant means of simultaneously exploiting and masking the more common association of Thailand with sexual tourism. Literary texts are often sites through which powerful resistance to the demand to erase suffering and erode difference can be expressed. Texts are both objects and sites at which identities are rehearsed, interrogated and exchanged by writers and readers; they are also means by which narratives of self and community are developed and circulated, as well as problematized. The chapters in the second part of this book, ‘Reading Exchange’, are responsive to the principle that representation cannot be bracketed off our more general understanding of capitalism – colonial and contemporary. Texts, particularly literary ones, have the capacity to proffer more complex modes of representation, or ways of seeing that contest taken-forgranted tropes and ways of thinking, while their circulation as objects can also tell us something about the penetration of everyday life by the exigencies of capital. In particular, the chapters shed new light on the relationships which can be posited between identity and subjectivity, and the flow and consumption of commodities, under the conditions created by colonialism. As Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have observed, ‘the market has always made capital out of human difference and difference out of capital, cultivating exploitable categories of workers and consumers’.33 Whereas the chapters in the first part of this collection focus on the nexus of industry and empire – frequently demonstrating (as Dean MacCannell so pithily puts it in relation to the touristic ideal) that otherness is ‘a magical resource that can be used without actually diminishing or possessing it’34 – the chapters in the second section are more explicitly concentrated on individuals and specific texts, drawing on the techniques of literary and cultural studies. 33 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, Public Culture, 12:2 (2000), p. 306. 34 MacCannell, ‘Cannibalism Today’, p. 28.

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All contributors find both slippage and friction in patterns of representation and interpretation structured by colonial relations, and implicitly seek an ethical reading praxis for (anti-)colonial texts. The section begins with Ross Chambers’s complex and detailed interpretation of Jamaica Kincaid’s treatment of AIDS in My Brother, which effectively proposes a new ethics of post-colonial reading and pedagogy. Conceiving the text itself as a ‘trading place’ for the negotiation of subjectivity, Chambers argues that reading offers a means by which those who do not have a ‘direct voice’ may be given one; in this sense, reading becomes a form of ‘agencing’. Chambers asserts that one of the scandals of AIDS is the West’s indifference to the epidemic as it is being experienced by the ‘rest’, an indifference grounded in an ideology of separation, exclusion and containment. In this context, he reads Kincaid’s novel as an example of ‘dual autobiography’, in which a survivor tells both the story of another’s dying and that of the survivor’s survivorhood, in such a way that both the difference of the stories, and their connectedness, are acknowledged. Kincaid’s device for presenting difference/connectedness is by moving back and forth – sometimes several times in a paragraph – between two contexts: that of Antigua, where her brother dies, and that of Vermont, where she, a successful writer, lives and works. This shuttling technique allegorizes contemporary West–rest relations and, as a form of rhetorical digression, involves the Western reader in another context that is not separate from, but permeable with, that reader’s own. Catherine Howell’s chapter on the work of a world-renowned Aboriginal artist who passed away some years ago is likewise concerned with the relationship between past and present, ethics and interpretation, and the ways in which women trade in representation. She asks how we are to approach the products of indigenous artists, what consideration might be given to the very different material cultures in which their work is created and consumed, and what is the role of aesthetics – and the legacy of anthropology – in shaping our understanding of their achievements. Like Chambers, Howell is working to develop something like an ethics of perception, a way of responding to culturally different art that neither ignores nor fetishizes that cultural difference. Claudia Brandenstein’s chapter on travel-writing about the English-speaking Caribbean shows that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers were eager to promote British commercial interests. These travelers’ texts demonstrate the specific ways in which imperial writers sought to shift their gaze from the material realities of the sugar industry – notably slavery and land degradation – to an idealized world in which slaves were the beneficiaries of imperial benevolence. Brandenstein charts changes in modes of representing the landscape that occurred after the decline of the sugar industry, noting the ways in which trade (rather than the plantation) is foregrounded in later texts. Whereas Brandenstein’s travelers remark on slaves in the workplace, Roslyn Jolly’s chapter includes detailed descriptions of places and peoples traumatized by the violence of those seeking to trade in human beings. Writing of her journeys in the late nineteenth century, Fanny Stevenson describes her attempts to trade with the women of the Pacific Islands to which her trading ship travels. Jolly draws attention to the minutiae of commercial, colonial and representational practices, highlighting the ways in which local fears about the labor trade could frame responses to white traders, and the ways in which Stevenson’s way of responding to and representing these fears altered over the course of her extensive voyage.

Introduction

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The complex and compromised place of white women which Jolly analyzes is taken up and complicated further in Anne Collett’s analysis of representations of nineteenth-century author, Canadian poet E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake. Johnson-Tekahionwake traveled across Canada and elsewhere billed as ‘The Mohawk Princess’, reaching the height of her fame in the late 1890s. Collett examines the ways in which this much textualized figure traded on – and traded off – her ‘native’ identity in building a career for herself as a raconteur, author and ‘native exhibit’, performing her own double act as ‘wild savage’ and ‘genteel lady’. The chapter considers the business and the ethics of ‘fair trade’ in the poignant case of an individual navigating the turbulent sites at which her authenticity and ethnicity were sold and bought, and like Hulme’s essay, counterpoints modern poetry in elucidating the meanings of the historical trade. Wendy Pearson explores the concept of difference by focusing on representations of cultural conflict in queer native writing, including that of Mohawk writer Beth Brant and Cree playwright and novelist Tomson Highway, arguing that their work reminds us not only of imperialism’s material consequences for native communities, but, more specifically, of its impact on existing sex/gender systems and conceptions of sexuality. She shows the ways in which Brant’s story, ‘This Place’ (like Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake), contests the notion that Indian culture can be relocated to a distant past, just as it contests the view that homosexual people simply should not ‘be’. Pearson’s reading of Kiss of the Fur Queen illuminates Highway’s use of the trickster figure, and the ways in which desire – for commodities, for identities – is complicated by colonization. In the even more volatile context of post-apartheid South Africa, writing the self takes on an additional charge. Judith Lütge Coullie surveys autobiographical output in English by South Africans (and non-South Africans documenting experiences in South Africa) in the post-apartheid period, before examining the implications for life-writing of the demise of apartheid. Her particular concern is the ways in which the democratic, ostensibly non-racial present of the ‘New South Africa’ has informed the ways in which life stories are told, and the ways that new kinds of selves have to be negotiated within the radically changed marketplace of cultural value in South Africa. Conceptions of Africa are also the concern of the final chapter in the collection, by Leigh Dale, which analyzes representations of the continent, its countries and peoples, in economics textbooks written and published for the north American undergraduate market. This chapter addresses, in more general terms, the relationship between colonialism and commerce in the contemporary period, particularly as it pertains to the function of the IMF and the World Bank, and the promotion of neo-liberal economic theory. Collectively, the task of these chapters is to illuminate the ways in which local communities – the histories and cultures of which need careful delineation – operate as central but often overlooked sites at which the vast ensemble of ideological and material practices that constitute capitalism operate. The aim, and the difficulty, is to analyze the interpenetration of the subjective and the imperial. In that sense, the volume as a whole can be positioned as a continuation and development of those studies of specific commodities and industries characteristic of colonialism, while also representing a response to the increased urgency of calls for historical specificity, and attention to the starkly differentiated impact of what is called

xxiv


‘the global economy’ on rich and poor. As Dirlik insists, cultural criticism needs to ‘reconnect with the actual movements of resistance to capital’, that resistance having been ‘coeval with the history of capitalism’.35 This loops back to the more purely theoretical works that characterized and energized post-colonial studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which focused in particular on those ways and moments in which resistance to imperialism was either effected or attempted. In a small way, we hope that this book offers ways to consider some moments or means, some narrative modes, by which the interpenetration of capital and culture is thwarted, diverted, or at least challenged by the colonized.

35 Dirlik, p. 36.

Part I Colonialism and Commerce


Chapter 1

Meditation on Yellow: Trade and Indigeneity in the Caribbean

1

Peter Hulme At three in the afternoon you landed here at El Dorado (for heat engenders gold and fires the brain) Had I known I would have brewed you up some yellow fever-grass and arsenic but we were peaceful then child-like in the yellow dawn of our innocence so in exchange for a string of islands and two continents you gave us a string of beads and some hawk’s bells which was fine by me personally for I have never wanted to possess things I prefer copper anyway the smell pleases our lord Yucahuna our mother Attabeira It’s just that copper and gold hammered into guanin worn in the solar pendants favoured by our holy men fooled you into thinking we possessed the real thing (you were not the last to be fooled by our patina)

1 This chapter was first given as a paper at a conference held at the University of Queensland in July 1999. Thanks are due to Helen Tiffin for the invitation, and to the Department of English at the University of Queensland for the award of the S.W. Brooks Fellowship. The paper has been recast from the perspective of April 2006.

4


As for silver I find that metal a bit cold The contents of our mines I would have let you take for one small mirror to catch and hold the sun I like to feel alive to the possibilities of yellow lightning striking perhaps as you sip tea at three in the afternoon a bit incontinent despite your vast holdings (though I was gratified to note that despite the difference in our skins our piss was exactly the same shade of yellow) I wished for you a sudden enlightenment that we were not the Indies nor Cathay No Yellow Peril here though after you came plenty of bananas oranges sugar cane You gave us these for our maize pineapples guavas – in that respect there was fair exchange But it was gold on your mind gold the light in your eyes gold the crown of the Queen of Spain (who had a daughter) gold the prize of your life the crowning glory the gateway to heaven


5

the golden altar (which I saw in Seville five hundred years after) Though I couldn’t help noticing (this filled me with dread): silver was your armour silver the cross of your Lord silver the steel in your countenance silver the glint of your sword silver the bullet I bite Golden the macca the weeds which mark our passing the only survivors on yellow-streaked soil We were The Good Indians The Red Indians The Dead Indians We were not golden We were a shade too brown.2 This is the first half of a poem called ‘Meditation on Yellow’ by the Jamaican writer Olive Senior. The poem is itself the first of a set called ‘Travellers’ Tales’ in her collection, Gardening in the Tropics, published in 1994. ‘Meditation on Yellow’ looks out from the perspective of an indigenous inhabitant of the Caribbean islands, a perspective I want to adopt here in the sense of trying to approach the topic of colonialism and trade from an indigenous Caribbean position, or set of positions, looking outwards from the islands towards the global forces beyond. Two moments predominate in this account – the first encounter and the present day – but two sketches of moments in between will provide an inkling of some historical perspective on the five hundred intervening years. ‘Meditation on Yellow’ provides a touchstone.3 One of the few things that archaeologists can tell us with assurance about the indigenous Caribbean is that there were extensive trade networks in existence before 1492. Those networks certainly extended into the Amazon basin, possibly to Central

2 Olive Senior, ‘Meditation on Yellow’, in Gardening in the Tropics (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1997. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2005), pp. 11–18. 3 See also Anne Collett, ‘Gardening in the Tropics: A Horticultural Guide to Caribbean Politics and Poetics, with Special Reference to the Poetry of Olive Senior’, SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, 46 (1998), pp. 87–103, and Helen Tiffin, ‘“Flowers of Evil”, Flowers of Empire: Roses and Daffodils in the Work of Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior, and Lorna Goodison’, SPAN, 46 (1998), pp. 58–71.

6


America, and perhaps as far as the Andes.4 This is important for two reasons. It shows just one level of the sophistication of cultures which have been routinely described by Western historians as either savage and cannibalistic, or docile and ignorant – ‘child-like in the yellow dawn of our innocence’, as the poem sarcastically puts it – with part of that sophistication coming from a level of intersocietal contact which makes it impossible to assume the existence of culturally closed units in the Caribbean, units which can then be the objects of anthropological reification. And then, second, the existence of indigenous pre-Columbian trade networks makes the point that trade was not the product of colonialism. There seems no a priori reason to think that pre-Columbian trade was different in essence from post-Columbian trade, inasmuch as it was undertaken within a set of existing social and political relationships, which, like most such relationships, were rarely free and equal – although it is difficult to see from an indigenous perspective how those relationships could not have been rather more free and equal than what replaced them. However, those relationships certainly changed in dramatic fashion after 1492, as the invading European forces destroyed existing social and political structures and in the process closed down existing trade routes at the same time as they imposed their own, thereby turning indigenous communities into defensive enclosures – where those communities survived at all, which they often did not. I … in exchange for a string of islands and two continents you gave us a string of beads and some hawk’s bells Just what kind of exchange did the first Europeans have in mind? This is from Columbus’s account of the very first encounter, at Guanahani in the Bahamas, on the beach, that liminal area which Greg Dening has made us understand so much better:5 I, he says, in order that they would be friendly to us – because I recognized that they were people who would be better freed [from error] and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force – to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel.6

4 See, for example, Jalil Sued-Badillo, ‘The Indigenous Societies at the Time of Conquest’, in General History of the Caribbean, Vol. I: Autochthonous Societies, ed. Jalil Sued-Badillo (Paris and London: UNESCO Publishing and Macmillan Caribbean, 2003), pp. 259–91. 5 Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2004). 6 Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493/Abstracted by Bartolome De Las Casas, trans. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), p. 65.


7

When he wrote those words Columbus had only spent a few hours in the Caribbean, but already a complex web of action, reaction and assumption is embedded in his language. Columbus’s first announced action is to give red caps and glass beads. The introductory, but subsidiary, clause explains that this was ‘in order that they would be friendly to us’. What is at issue, however, is not merely the ‘friendliness’ appropriate to meetings on liminal spaces between residents and visitors from across the sea. Implicit within Columbus’s reported action (in words not accessible to the island recipients, but spelled out in his journal entry for the eyes of his king and queen) is the ulterior motive of conversion ‘to our Holy Faith’, better achieved, in this case, by love than by force. The key word in this sentence turns out to be ‘recognized’, because this prior ‘recognition’ has governed the choice of ‘love’ over ‘force’ and thereby has set the agenda for the subsequent actions of Columbus and his party.7 The native behavior that has brought about that ‘recognition’ can only be inferred. The island had been first sighted at two o’clock in the morning. At first light they had seen ‘naked people’ on the shore. The Admiral had landed ‘in the armed launch’ and had called on his companions to witness ‘that, in the presence of all, he would take, as in fact he did take, possession of the said island for the king and for the queen his lords … Soon many people of the island gathered there’.8 So the people were not hostile. The Spaniards’ launch was armed, the initial encounter presumably wary, but the tone quickly established as friendly. In some sense, of course, a friendly encounter is the precondition for trading, and when visitors arrive from overseas, one would expect them to trade: they would be likely to need fresh water and food, and would be likely to have brought trade goods with them for that purpose. Trading would no doubt be preceded by some ritual giving of gifts, to demonstrate friendliness, to fulfill the rules of hospitality, and to provide a taste of what could later be traded. It scarcely needs to be pointed out that one does not usually begin trading by taking possession of the territory where one has just arrived. Indeed, informing one’s hosts that they were now the subjects of a monarch from across the seas would undoubtedly do little for the prevailing atmosphere, which is probably why Columbus refrained from mentioning his ‘taking of possession’ to the natives whose land he had just claimed in the name of his king and queen. Absence of hostility governs the distribution of caps and beads ‘and many other things of small value’, as a result of which the islanders become ‘so much our friends that it was a marvel’. There is an element of calculation in even this very first sentence of American ethnography. The degree of friendliness that results from the gifts is a ‘marvel’; and that ‘so much’ in ‘so much our friends’ is related to the ‘small’ in ‘of small value’. In other words, it comes as a pleasant surprise to Columbus that the warmth of the welcome is in excess of the value of the items distributed. The element of calculation suggested by Columbus’s words hints at a cultural economics. 7 For a fuller account of this moment, see Peter Hulme, ‘Tales of Distinction: European Ethnography and the Caribbean’, in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart Schwartz, Studies in Comparative Early Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 157–97. 8 Columbus, p. 65.

8


Implicit – if tightly embedded – in that couplet (so much / small) is the language of investment and accounting with which Columbus was familiar through his early years working in Genoese trade, and through his continuing connection with his Genoese financial backers. Accountancy is lodged at the very beginning of the European colonial venture; intimately entwined with that accountancy is the question of power. The friendliness with which Columbus begins his statement augurs well for business as well as for peaceful conversion, but the unexpected success of the caps and beads is ultimately to be gauged by the sort of relationship established. ‘Friendship’ is a relationship of mutuality, in which trade and other forms of exchange can develop: it is entered into by equals. But by the end of Columbus’s sentence, the relationship has altered: in the original Spanish, ‘tanto’ (so much) governs not ‘our friends’ but simply ‘ours’ – ‘tantos nuestros’ is the Spanish phrase – thus so much ours, the possessive adjective signaling a relationship in which trade is not going to be necessary because everything and everyone will rapidly become ‘ours’; ours to exploit as we will. ‘It was gold on your mind’. But we should hesitate before moving too quickly to Columbus’s own implicit conclusion that the islanders’ failure to cut the cloth of their friendship according to the value of the hand-outs indicated any lack of understanding on their part of the principles of value or exchange, a point later to be made much of because of supposed native ‘liberality’ with items of ‘valuable’ gold. After all, value is relative, and the new glass beads may well have quickly been assimilated into a sophisticated economy about which we still know very little. Columbus’s opening statement moves on to quite detailed descriptions of the bodies of the natives with some general remarks on aspects of their culture, these sentences being prefaced by the remark that ‘it seemed to me that they were a people very poor in everything’, where ‘poor’ registers in the discourses of both economics and anthropology: Some of them paint themselves with black, and they are the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white, and some of them with red, and some of them with whatever they find … They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves. They have no iron.9

Underwater archaeological investigations of contact period Spanish vessels suggest that they carried an extraordinary amount of arms: wrought iron cannons, swivel guns, harquebuses, rifles, crossbows, lances, swords, hand grenades. You will trade freely, otherwise we will shoot you. ‘Silver the glint of your sword / silver the bullet I bite’. The question of color is pursued by Columbus, although actual skin-tones are of secondary importance to the cultural markers laid across the spectrum: ‘they are the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white’. Three categories are made available: ‘white’, by which Columbus means ‘us’, the Spaniards and Italians; ‘black’, the Africans, usually slaves, common enough in both Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds in the late fifteenth century; and ‘Canarians’, intermediate in color, appropriate because of their ‘nakedness’, cultural ‘poverty’, and intermediate geographical location – between white Europe and black Africa – since Columbus had, according 9

Ibid.


9

to his calculations, sailed almost due west from the Canary Islands and similar skincolor could, it was thought, be found on similar latitudes. We were not golden We were a shade too brown. Or indeed yellow. Just like canaries. II Trade is never ‘free’, but there are moments when it is carried out more or less between equals; that is to say, with little room for coercion on either side, or at least with equal degrees of coercion. One such moment might be identified in the theatre of Caribbean cultural contact. Once the regular transatlantic routes had been established, Spanish captains began making use of Prince Rupert Bay, on the leeward shore of Dominica, as their first refreshment stop after the crossing – it had three fresh water rivers, hot mineral springs, forests for wood and shade.10 From 1535, convoys would gather there after the crossing, before dividing for their second leg to Mexico (via Hispaniola) and to Cartagena and Porto Bello. Carib canoes would come alongside, with tobacco, fruit and cassava bread, which they would trade for nails, hatchets and knives. The Spaniards were not interested in settling on Dominica and so never stopped long, but the trade was so successful that the Caribs probably started planting tobacco especially for trade, rather than simply trading their surplus. Both sides benefited, neither had control over the trade. ‘In that respect there was fair exchange’. By the end of the sixteenth century, this balance had changed. If anything, the change initially favored the Caribs, when French and English ships ended up on the Dominica coast. Apart from increased trade, wrecked ships were plundered – and anything useless to the Caribs themselves could be traded to the other Europeans; and that included European sailors of different nationalities. Once European settlement began on the smaller Caribbean islands, equality of trade ceased because the Europeans quickly learned how to grow the local crops. The Caribs fished better, and they made good canoes and remarkable baskets, but they could no longer offer the essentials. Apart, of course, from land, but though the French would occasionally ‘buy’ land for the sake of maintaining good relations, by the mid-seventeenth century the European powers were militarily strong enough to take whatever land they wanted, even though the struggle for indigenous land lasted until the end of the eighteenth century.

10 This section draws extensively on pioneering work of Lennox Honychurch in ‘Crossroads in the Caribbean: A Site of Encounter and Exchange on Dominica’, World Archaeology, 28:3 (1997), pp. 291–304, and ‘Carib to Creole: Contact and Culture Exchange in Dominica’, D. Phil. dissertation (Oxford: Oxford University, 1997).

10


III After their marginalization in areas remote from colonial activity, the few remaining Caribs were largely left to their own devices, with regular but small-scale trade and infrequent patronage the main sources of contact with the non-Carib majorities on Dominica and St Vincent. By 1930, the small Carib community on Dominica had retreated to the northeast corner of the island, the point furthest from the colonial capital and from the large plantations. Roads were few, so white and black Dominicans rarely saw Caribs. The Carib community was virtually self-sustaining, with some trade with Marie Galante and Martinique, the islands north and south of Dominica. There were various logics to this. On the mountainous islands of the southern Caribbean, it was always easier to travel from one island to another than it was from one side of an island to the other. Trade and familial links would sustain each other across the channels. Coastal communities were usually fishing communities, and the Caribs were still pre-eminent in making canoes, which could cross these dangerous waters with ease. And, crucially, in the neighboring French islands duty on liquor was considerably lower. In 1930, the British Administrator on Dominica decided to get tough with the smuggling, which was reducing colonial revenue. Police officers raided the Carib Reserve early one morning, got into a dispute with some Caribs over goods which might have been smuggled, and ended up opening fire and killing two young Carib men. This incident was reported in the London Times as an attack by Caribs on the capital, involving looting and rioting, which the police had had to confront. It is an incident that is still referred to as ‘The Carib War’, and among its reverberations is a barbed exchange between a black policeman and the narrator of Jean Rhys’s story, ‘Temps Perdi’. But I refer to it here as a paradigmatic moment for the intervention of the colonial state in island trade, marking the beginning of the end of any semiautonomous trade system which might have sustained the Carib community in the interstices of the modern world economy.11 IV For the Carib community in Dominica, the ‘present moment’ begins effectively in the early 1970s with the final establishment of a road system connecting the eastern and western sides of Dominica and bringing the Caribs, along with other previously isolated communities, into more meaningful contact both with the capital, Roseau, and with each other. This is essentially a postcolonial phenomenon inasmuch as Dominica became an Associated State in 1967 and fully independent in 1978, so that the unity putatively established by the road system is that of the new nation state of Dominica rather than the island of Dominica as one very small part of the British

11 On the 1930 Carib War, see Hulme, ‘Narrating the Carib War: Douglas Taylor and the Struggle over History (1930–1940)’, in Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 155–203. Rhys’s story ‘Temps Perdi’ is from The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 256–74.


11

empire.12 For Dominicans, roads have meant two things – bananas and tourism. In that, the Caribs differ from other Dominicans in only one small respect, which relates to their position vis-à-vis tourism. Dominica’s current economic dependence on bananas is in one sense just another depressing example of a monoculture imposed by a colonial regime, providing short-term economic salvation and longterm economic failure. Bananas – originally introduced into the Caribbean from the Canary Islands in 1516 – had been grown for local consumption for many years. They became the largest export crop from Dominica, overtaking citrus fruit, only in the mid-1950s. Citrus had itself superseded sugar, which had superseded coffee. After independence, successive governments chose to rely on developing the one currently successful income source, encouraging the growth of bananas for export and leading to the relative neglect of other food production. After all, the banana’s scientific name is Musa paradisiaca, given by Linnaeus on the understanding that the banana was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden: just too tempting to resist.13 Since the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995, the European Union has been under pressure from the American-owned fruit companies such as Chiquita, which grow their bananas on an industrial scale in Central and South America, to stop giving preferential terms to Caribbean banana producers from European excolonies such as Dominica. The United States government has given massive support to these companies, unilaterally threatening to impose huge sanctions on European goods in response to supposedly ‘illegal’ European trade preferences. This banana war may seem recent, but it actually started a century ago, when the United Fruit Company (as Chiquita used to be called) announced its intention to grow bananas in Cuba rather than importing them from Jamaica. To sustain Jamaican production, Joseph Chamberlain subsidized a shipping firm to start a banana trade between the Caribbean and the UK. That system is still in place, even if it is now under real threat. Although the World Trade Organization found in favor of the United States’ complaint against the European Union, there are a number of relevant ironies involved. The WTO itself is ample proof that the ideology of free trade goes hand in hand with powerful states imposing the freedom of their markets to go wherever they want, the path usually having been prepared by ‘structural adjustment’ imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The ideology of free trade has other associations too. Chiquita was revealed as a company which bribes Honduran politicians and judges, causes devastating pollution, goes out of its way to avoid paying workers’ benefits, and uses armed goon squads to control the local peasantry. Over the last few years, Chiquita has given $39 million to both US political parties. Its chairman gave half a million dollars to the Democratic Party within twenty-four hours of the United States’ administration filing its complaint to the WTO on behalf of Chiquita.14 12 On the modern history of Dominica, see Lennox Honychurch, The Dominica Story: A History of the Island, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995). 13 See Marina Warner, No Go The Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 348–73. 14 On these events, see the web pages ‘The Citizens’ Guide to Trade, Environment and Sustainability’, Friends of the Earth International, at , 3 January 2005; ‘Campaign Finance Corruption Erodes Citizen’s Human

12


Ironically, too, given all the rhetoric of free trade, banana-growers in Dominica have never actually been able to sell their bananas in the free market: they deliver them to an agency which unilaterally sets the price paid; sometimes they do not even know how much they are being paid until the bananas are on the high seas. That agency – now partly owned by local governments – delivers the bananas to Geest Holding Limited, the British-based multinational, which as sole customer fully determines the conditions under which the bananas are produced. Precise quantities of chemicals, herbicides and pesticides are demanded to ensure the production of the perfect fruit supposedly required by the world market: spotlessly yellow. Although they look at first sight like peasant proprietors, Dominican banana-growers, including Caribs, are really proletarians being paid for their labor power in a global marketplace. Banana farming has enmeshed the Caribs in the world economy by involving them in an industry which at every stage of cultivation is controlled by a distant metropolitan center. If the United States and the World Trade Organization have their way, this industry will collapse, with devastating consequences for at least three Caribbean economies, including Dominica’s.15 V The presence of roads and the relative availability of land on the Carib Reserve has drawn the Caribs into banana production over the last thirty-five years. One of the island’s biggest packing plants is on the Reserve, and the Caribs, as bananaproducers, are – as it were – Dominican first and Carib second. The Carib relationship with tourism is, however, slightly different from that of other Dominicans.16 Until the 1980s, tourists to Dominica, let alone to the Carib Reserve, were few and far between. Even during the 1960s and 1970s, when cheaper air travel opened up the Caribbean islands to mass tourism, Dominica was almost completely ignored. It offers no white beaches, its airports can take only very small planes, and there are still no large hotels – although there are huge cruise ships which now make regular stops. However, for all the reasons negative to mass tourism, Dominica has become a key site for various forms of ‘alternative tourism’: ‘ecotourism’, ‘cultural tourism’

Right to Freedom of Expression and Undermines the Public Interest: Four Case Studies’, Global Exchange, 20 April 2005, at , 3 January 2006; Jan Bauman, ‘Chiquita Banana’, Third World Traveler, September 1998, at , 3 January 2006. 15 On bananas and the modern Caribbean, see Robert Thomson et al., Green Gold: Bananas and Dependency in the Eastern Caribbean (London: Latin America Bureau, 1987); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Lawrence S. Grossman, The Political Ecology of Bananas: Contract Farming, Peasants, and Agrarian Change in the Eastern Caribbean (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas, eds Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Gordon Myers, Banana Wars: The Price of Free Trade, A Caribbean Perspective (London: Zed Books, 2004). 16 For the larger context, see Hulme, Remnants of Conquest, pp. 244–308.


13

and ‘ethnic tourism’. It has marketed itself as the ‘Nature Island’, and the presence of a surviving indigenous population has been a key factor in that promotion.17 In some respects, the Caribs are not well placed to benefit from ‘ethnic tourism’. There has been very little archaeological work on Dominica, and so there are no ruins and few artifacts of the kind displayed on many other Caribbean islands. The development of the banana monoculture has meant that Carib agricultural practices are now practically indistinguishable from those of their Afro-Dominican neighbors. ‘In short’, to quote one analyst from the 1970s, ‘the visitor … sees nothing that is unusual or distinctive which warrants his time and expense in going to the trouble of visiting the Carib community … This can be a point of disgruntlement and disappointment, because the tourist obviously is expecting to see something with a unique difference’.18 However, what tourists actually come to see is the Caribs themselves. One of the very first guide-books to the island, published at the beginning of the twentieth century, gave instructions for ‘those desirous of visiting the Caribs’;19 in 1970, another could announce that ‘The three hundred Caribs on the reservation in Dominica are considered a sight that tourists should not miss’.20 This is very much a tourism of the gaze. More precisely, the tourists come to see how different the Caribs are, or, more precisely yet, they come to see that the Carib skin is yellow and not black. Throughout sixty years of travel-writing about the Caribs, their particular physical characteristics have been emphasized over and over again: ‘We were now able to see that they were either ivory-colored in complexion or a deep bronze, with features that were almost Mongolian or Esquimaux’.21 ‘Those making day trips to Dominica from other Caribbean islands will want to see the Carib Indian Reservation in the northeast … Their look is Mongolian …’.22 ‘I had not expected to find pure types … But here I saw slanting eyes, high cheek bones, straight hair, and parchment-yellow skin. To me, it was a scene from the Far East. She might have been Korean or Vietnamese’.23 ‘One minute I was driving along a road where everyone was black, and then after an invisible barrier … many of the people look completely different. Although some were very clearly of mixed race, many showed not the slightest sign of African descent. They had straight hair, pale skins and looked as if they could have come

17 See Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (London: Cassell, 1996), and Dominica: Nature Island of the Caribbean (London: Hansib Publishing, 1989). 18 Arthur Einhorn, Proposal for Development of a Carib ‘Indian Village’ and the Economic Development of the Carib Indian Reserve on the Island of Dominica, British West Indies (Public Library, Roseau, Dominica n.d.), p. 2. 19 Algernon E. Aspinall, The Pocket Guide to the West Indies (London: Edward Stanford, 1907), p. 245. 20 Wesley Edson, Terry’s Guide to the Caribbean, ed. Dorothy Wheelock (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 362. 21 Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 108. 22 Darwin Porter, assisted by Danforth Price, Frommer’s Comprehensive Travel Guide: Caribbean ’94 (New York: Prentice Hall Travel, 1994), p. 520. 23 Carleton Mitchell, Isles of the Caribbees (Washington: National Geographic Society, 1971), p. 96.

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from some remote Indonesian island’.24 It is as if that ‘enlightenment that we were not the Indies nor Cathay’ had never come to many modern visitors, just as it never sank in with Columbus. To put this somewhat crudely, if your appearance is what attracts tourists, then you have not generated any useful source of income since tourists can look, from the bus, without stopping, and beyond a few roadside stalls there are no stopping places anyway. You have been commodified, but you are not benefiting from any exchange. One Carib response to this dilemma has been to raise funds to create a model village which would recreate the kind of indigenous community that visitors want to see: a version of pre-Columbian life, with traditional agricultural practices, far removed from the intensive banana production that characterizes Carib life now. Developing an idea first mooted in the early 1970s by the then chief, Faustulus Frederick, and a visiting US anthropologist, Arthur Einhorn, the Freedom Party government gained Caribbean Development Bank funding in 1994 in the region of EC$2.5 million.25 The village aims to depict the lifestyle of the Caribs 500 years ago and create significant employment through the showcasing of traditional crafts. It also houses an administration and interpretation Centre, a karbet (the traditional Carib meetinghouse), and a snackette – probably not selling ‘yellow fever-grass and arsenic’. Just what kind of exchange is involved here?26 Cultural villages are now common on the American continent, often under the control of Native American communities, which alters the politics of the construction and of the exchange without removing some of the issues of representation which are associated with the idea. However, what ethnic tourism promotes – the restoration, preservation and fictional re-creation of ethnic attributes – is very similar to what ethnic separatist movements themselves want to stress: their own difference, which is usually being eroded by the forces of modernity; which is why the cultural village idea has gained Carib support. In the postcolonial period, a Carib cultural revival, with oral history and documentation projects underway, and contacts in place with other indigenous groups, has established the platform for such a village as a serious ethnographic construct. Of course, the irony of the cultural village as a postcolonial artifact is that whereas it allows for – and indeed encourages – the kind of cultural invention (or re-invention) that theorists such as James Clifford have applauded in similar contexts, the expectations that such a village would have to meet are those that belong to the world of ‘alternative tourism’: expectations of ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’ and ‘survival’, expectations that are associated with earlier and more obviously imperial models of cultural identity. The Caribs would be acting out for visitors a version of themselves and their own history which would need to recognize and respond to, even if it tried ultimately to contradict, the expectations that tourists

24 John Hatt, ‘Dominica Done’, Harpers & Queen (April 1993), p. 166. 25 Einhorn, Proposal; Faustulus Frederick, Elizabeth Shepherd and Mas Clem Frederick, In Our Carib Indian Village (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1971). 26 For an excellent study, see Kelvin Smith, ‘Placing the Carib Model Village: The Carib Territory and Dominican Tourism’, in Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival, ed. Maximilian C. Forte (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 71–88.


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would bring with them: and these would continue to be, for the foreseeable future, expectations of visible indigenous difference. On a social level, such a village is probably difficult to defend. It offers what Dean MacCannell, in his Empty Meeting Grounds, presents as a final freezing of the ethnic imaginary,27 with the implication that any social dialogue comes to an end once commodification has fetishized the cultural representation. He sees this kind of project as simply fueling the postmodern fantasy of ‘authentic alterity’ which is ideologically necessary to the promotion and development of global monoculture, and therefore as embodying a kind of alienation, with – extrapolating to this case – the Caribs having to perform their ethnicity, turn it into a commodity, and act out a version of themselves in a living theatre, which MacCannell clearly sees as involving a loss of soul. On this reading, nothing is less authentic than the performance of authenticity. Under its new name, the Kalinago Barana Auté (Carib Cultural Village by the Sea), the cultural village was opened at the end of February 2006. The press release from the Office of the Prime Minister did little to allay the suspicion that the Dominican state sees the Carib community largely as a decorative element of its tourist strategy: ‘The official opening of the Kalinago Barana Auté next week is another manifestation of this Government’s strategy of economic diversification, through the development of the tourism sector. The development of the Kalinago people of Dominica is an essential component of that strategy.’28 As a large-scale project, with no Carib input into the building and ultimate authority lying with the Minister for Tourism, it is unclear whether the village will be embraced and put to use by the community or remain a white elephant. However, if ethnic identities are indeed negotiated and constructed through the interplay of self-knowledge and communal understandings, it is important to recognize that that process does not – to coin a phrase – occur under historical circumstances of the participants’ own choosing, and those circumstances include the extreme economic and social pressures facing most indigenous communities in the Americas. On the one hand, this village might provide the space in which the Caribs could tell their own version of their history. On the other hand, created in the context of tourism needing to be embraced as economic salvation, the village would have to provide a ‘text’ still legible to yet another set of visitors. When this paper was delivered in 1999, it seemed as if the oldest element of that text – that Caribs were savage man-eaters – had more or less disappeared. The charge might resurface in a few popular histories, but no scholars of the Caribbean took it seriously and the Caribs themselves had a clear view of their own past. However, in 2005, the old question raised its head again when Disney decided to film two follow-ups to the popular Pirates of the Caribbean on Dominica, and decided that one episode of 27 Dean MacCannell, Empty Tourist Grounds: The Tourist Papers (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 19, though this characterization of his argument belongs to Nobukiyo Eguchi, ‘Ethnic Tourism and Reconstruction of the Caribs’ Ethnic Identity, in Ethnicity, Race and Nationality in the Caribbean, ed. Juan Manuel Carrión (San Juan: Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, 1997), p. 365. 28 From the Office of the Prime Minister: ‘Great Anticipation as Carib Cultural Village Set for Opening’ (18 February 2006), at , 13 April 2006.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) would feature the hero, played by Johnny Depp, being captured by those savage cannibals, the Caribs, who would attempt to roast him on a spit. The Carib community was divided. The relatively new chief, Charles Williams, elected in 2004, took a strong anti-Disney line, inveighing against the resurrection of this discredited cannibal stereotype.29 But some members of the Carib council took the view that the economic benefits that would accrue from the filming, including Caribs playing their ancestors, outweighed any ideological disadvantages. In the end Disney were not allowed to film on the Carib Territory itself, but Caribs did travel to other parts of the island to act in the film.30 This dispute was certainly a factor in the increasingly poor relationship between Williams and his council. In June 2005, the council put the chief on six months’ probation, threatening new elections if he continued to take decisions without consulting with the council. Williams told the local press that the council’s action was illegal and that he would continue to serve as chief, although he was ready to go back to the Carib people to seek vindication.31 In April 2006, the Dominican government suspended the chief, announced new elections, and then declared that no new elections would take place.32 These events occurred against a background of increasing state intervention on the Carib Territory, marked by the establishment in 2000 of a Department of Carib Affairs, further eroding the already minimal powers exercised by the Carib chief and his council. VI These exact dilemmas are particular to the Caribs in Dominica, but they probably have analogues in many of what used to be called the remnant tribes, the detriti of the imperial process now left largely to their own devices to make their own ways in a world totally not of their own making, and with little to trade in a world ruled by trade. From one perspective, culturally and racially the Caribs are irremediably mixed: in that, they are no different from the rest of us, products of the colonial processes that have shaped the modern world. But not every community is faced with the possibility of trading on aspects of their identity in order to seek economic survival. As the Caribs enter the new millennium, the possibilities seem stark: the yellow of bananas is a national choice, the black choice if you like; the only other trading route is to sell the yellowness of their skins to international tourism. But what have they got to complain about?: they are absolutely free to choose. 29 See the BBC News report, ‘Film Row over Pirates “Cannibals”’ (14 February 2005), at , 13 April 2006. 30 In 1948, mountainous Dominica doubled as a flat Bahamian island and Caribs played Arawaks in the Fredric March vehicle, Christopher Columbus, directed by David MacDonald, ([1949]; Hallmark Studios, 1997). 31 ‘Carib Chief Put on Probation by Carib Council’ (21 June 2005), at , 12 April 2006. 32 ‘Dominica Government Overthrows Carib Chief’ (10 April 2006), at , 13 April 2006; and ‘Dominica: More on the Dissolution of the Carib Council’, at , 13 April 2006.

Chapter 2

Sites of Purchase: Slavery, Missions and Tourism on Two Tanzanian Sites Gareth Griffiths Zanzibar and Bagamoya on the coast of East Africa, in what is now Tanzania, were great sites of trade in pre-colonial and colonial times; now, it would seem that they are on the cusp of entering a new wave of trade, as East Africa refocuses its economy onto tourism. The questions I want to address are these: how are significant historical events memorialized on such sites? And how do the traces of the past impinge on and help to structure the social and economic usage of these sites? Following from this, I want to ask, in what ways does the site remain a stage for ‘performative events’ in which past and present events interact? For if the site is a colonial one, it is especially likely to have seen many different and overlapping ‘performances’: events, practices and custom which interact on a single space, reconstituting it within a variety of distinctive cultural geographies. Both Stone Town, the capital on Zanzibar Island, and Bagamoya, further south on the East African mainland (and later the first capital of German East Africa), were important pre-colonial sites for the Arab trade in black African slaves. Slaves from the mainland were taken to Zanzibar to work the spice plantations of the Omani Al Busaid Sultanate, which moved its capital there in 1832 to exploit the island’s natural resources. From the markets there and at Bagamoya, slaves were also exported to other parts of the Arab world and to the Indian Ocean region.1 These two ports were also the places from which the European exploration of the East and Central African interior began; they were the equipping points for the expeditions of Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, of David Livingstone and of Henry Morton Stanley. No doubt the porters and overseers whom these expeditions were able to recruit there had gained experience on slaving and ivory trading ventures, and for this reason the passionately anti-slavery Livingstone makes much in his journals of the fact that his expeditions were not dependent on the larger parties which had accompanied Burton and Speke, nor the even greater number who later accompanied Stanley on his more frankly secular and commercial expeditions.2

1 See Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1987). 2 David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London: John Murray, 1857).

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Bagamoya and Stone Town were also the sites of the earliest Christian missions in the East African region, missions the declared aim of which was the suppression of the Arab slave trade, and the rescue and conversion of slaves. It is worth noting that these first East African missions were established on the coastal fringe, where slaves were traded, not in the interior, where the communities of free Africans lived and where they were captured by the Arab slavers. The Catholic mission at Bagamoya was established in 1868 by a French Catholic order, the Pères du SaintEsprit (or Spiritans), at the end of the great slave trail from Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. The Spiritans had arrived on the island of Zanzibar in 1863 to consolidate the work of Bishop Maupoint, Bishop of the Diocese of St Denis, Réunion, who had sent the first mission there in 1860. From the beginning, their goal was the conversion of Africans in the interior to Christianity: ‘Bagamoya was never seen as an end in itself. It was understood to be the second stepping stone, after Zanzibar. The missionaries kept their eyes focused on the interior of East Africa’.3 The Anglican Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) was also established on Zanzibar, in 1863, although its participants too had their eyes on the interior, specifically the Nyasaland region where a major slaving enterprise existed.4 In fact, they had chosen Zanzibar as a starting point only after a disastrous earlier attempt to establish an inland mission on the Zambezi’s upper tributaries. Despite this emphasis on penetrating the interior and taking the Word to the heathen of Central Africa, the East African missions had scant success in converting free Africans in any great number, a problem also encountered by earlier missions in Southern Africa. In fact, African missions on the mainland had little or no real success in conversion until they had recruited African catechists and missionaries to spread the Word to their own people.5 But where could such recruits be found? The answer was among those Africans whose links to their native places and cultures had already been disrupted by the activities of slavers, especially in cases where this disruption had occurred in their early youth. Zanzibar and Bagamoya were places at which British anti-slavery patrols landed the recaptured cargoes of the slaving dhows they had intersected and boarded, especially in the second half of the century. Slaves were also sold in the markets, before being transported to their new owners. Bagamoya and Stone Town, then, were literally ‘sites of purchase’ for the slave trade, and they were chosen by the missions because they hoped to make them ‘sites of purchase’ in a different sense of that word, sites from which they could exert the 3 Fr. Joh. Henschel, C.S. sp., Missionaries of Bagamoya, undated pamphlet (n.p., [pencil dated] 1993), on sale at the Mission Museum. Henschel, a Dutch missionary, has also co-authored with Samahani M. Kejeri a history of the town called Bagamoya, Beauty at the Beach (Tabora, TZ: TMP Book Department, [pencil dated] 1993). These dates are suspect, but the pamphlets are a useful introduction to the history of the mission and the town. 4 ‘Nyasaland’ is the name for the inland region surrounding both sides of Lake Nyasa and extending south to the Zambezi. By the end of the century, as well as the Zanzibar diocese (which included the adjoining coastal region) the Anglicans had five dioceses in the interior, stretching from Lake Victoria in the north to the Limpopo River in the south. 5 This is now a generally held view in mission studies, and it is reflected in several of the chapters in the recent Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series volume Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Slavery, Missions and Tourism on Two Tanzanian Sites

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leverage which would simultaneously crack open the horrors of the slave trade, and open up the interior to their work. But these were sometimes literal sites of purchase for the missionaries too. Although the UMCA mission at Stone Town (and its associated training establishments at Kiungani and Mbweni in its southern environs) obtained most of their slaves from the British naval anti-slaving patrols in the Indian Ocean, the records in their archives show that from time to time they purchased slaves. It is significant, though, that most of the published Anglican accounts of the released slaves in their journal Central Africa and in their more popular, youth-oriented journal African Tidings do not dwell on this practice.6 The slaves whose narratives are recorded there are described as having been rescued, often quite dramatically, from dhows. We might speculate that this was because the mission did not want to draw overt attention to the relatively long struggle which the British authorities on Zanzibar had with the descendants of the great Sultan Sayyid Said before they managed a full closure of slavery – and the persistence of illegal slaving even after this occurred. Or, it may have been a practice that the Anglicans did not want to highlight in their published accounts to the British public on whom they depended for their funds. Dramatic sea-rescues by intrepid naval officers make much better stories than simple commercial transactions. In the same way, the erection of the Anglican Cathedral on the actual site of the old slave markets, at the rear of Stone Town’s winding alleyways and conveniently near the creek (since filled in) which flowed in there from the dhow harbor, presented a dramatic image of success which the mission publications made full use of in illustrations.7 The Catholic missionaries at Bagamoya were far less coy about the practice of buying slaves in order to free them and convert them to Catholicism, perhaps because they were forced to obtain far more of their converts by this commercial means.8 They not only recorded the transactions in their personal diaries and in letters,9 but also included accounts in journals such as Les Missions Catholiques, the official 6 For a fuller account of some of these narratives, see Gareth Griffiths ‘“Trained to Tell the Truth”: Missionaries, Converts, and Narration’, in Missions and Empire, ed. Etherington, pp. 153–72. 7 For example, the cover of the official monthly journal Central Africa for 1 July 1885 (vol. 31) shows a rather idealized picture of the cathedral, and the adjoining buildings. The view shows the cathedral, reached by a jungly path with palms along which African women and children, bearing pots, are walking. Since the cathedral was located on the eastern edge of densely populated Stone Town, which even in 1885 extended very close to the plots of land granted by the Sultan to the Christians when the slave markets were closed, such an idyllic rural scene reflects a vivid imagination. 8 As is suggested below, this was in part because the British authorities on Zanzibar favored the Protestant British missions in the distribution of slaves so rescued. 9 For example, in the archives of the order at Chevilly-LaRue, Paris, the handwritten Bagamoya Daily Journal has an entry for Friday 15 July 1887, p. 52, which reads: ‘Rachat d’un petit garçon de cinq ans d’âge environ’. In October 1888, the Journal records that on 1 October the priests purchased a child from a local leader, Kingo: ‘Kingo nous vend [sic] un enfant pour 14 piastres-L’enfant portera le nom de Charl. (?) en souvenir de P. Gommenginged, fondateur de la mission’. All translations from the French are the author’s.

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journal of the Vatican Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Numerous accounts of such purchases occur also in the journal of the Bagamoya missionaries, the Annales Apostoliques de la Congregation du St. Esprit et du St. Coeur de Marie. These accounts make it clear that for the Catholic missions, purchase was the usual means of obtaining slaves to convert; indeed, that there was a growing pressure from the rivalries of the French and English in the region to force them to this practice. By 1886, a report in the Annales Apostoliques reflects openly on the desirability of purchasing slaves, and seeks to justify the procedure: In the old times one found it was an easy matter to feed them [the slaves]. The only thing one had to do was to go to the Zanzibar market with a few piastres in one’s pocket. At the sight of the missionaries a great number of little arms stretched out to them and the poor children dragged from the barbarous tribes of the interior, thin, in poor health, fearful of the Arabs and hoping that their future would be better with the Europeans, kept saying insistently, ‘Buy me!’10

It is recorded in the Annales Apostoliques for the same year that, although some slaves freed by the British Navy ended up at the Catholic mission at Bagamoya, raising money in Europe for the explicit purpose of purchasing slaves had become the easiest means of obtaining converts. The Catholic missionaries felt that the (uneven) distribution of freed slaves to the Protestant and the Catholic missions partly reflected the growing rivalry between the French and the British in the Indian Ocean region, as well as the longstanding British prejudice against Catholic orders: The Consuls took upon themselves to spread the blacks rescued from the smugglers between the catholic and the protestant missions, and so we received between 50 and 60 children at one go. The Consul General, Sir. John Kirck [sic], recently knighted, feared that in giving the children to the Catholic missions he would at the same time give a more powerful influence to the French, and undoubtedly believed in his own conscience that he should put the interests of the Queen and his own interests above and beyond the interests of humanity, that is the reason why, as from now, the only thing he gives the mission is sweet smiles – what an excellent diplomat. Fortunately, numerous well-wishers have sent us from Europe sufficient funds to purchase these enslaved children. And since at Bagamoya we have always under our gaze young victims of the greed and tyranny of the musselmen, stolen in the interior, captured in wars, or sold by their masters, or sometimes by their parents, we have been able to execute the wishes of our charitable correspondents and to save from misery and from exclusion from the faith these poor children who, without us, would be sold to the Arabs, and would never recover their lost liberty.11 10 ‘Autrefois, on trouvait aisémont moyen de les alimenter: il n’y avait simplemente qu’a se rendre avec quelques piastres en poche sur le marché Zanzibar. A la vue du missionaire, quantité de petite bras se tendaient vers lui et de pauvres enfants arrachés aux barbares tribes de l’intèrieur, maigres, souffrantes, craignant des Arabes et espérant de l’Européen un sort meilleur, lui répetaient avec instances: “Achète-moi!”’ Annales Apostoliques de la Congrégation du St. Esprit et du St. Coeur de Marie, 2 (April 1886), p. 44. 11 ‘Plus tard, ce marché public ayant été supprimé, les Consuls se firent un devoir de répartir entre les missions catholiques et protestante les enfants pris sure les négriers de contrebande, et souvent ainsi nous avons été dotés de plus de 50 et 60 enfants d’un seul coup … le Consul général Sir. John Kirck [sic], récembrent ennobli, craignant, en donnant des enfants


21

The practice of purchasing slaves increased, but it had always been a feature of the mission. This is demonstrated in the letters in the correspondence files of the order’s archives at Chevilly-LaRue, in the many thanks they contain to benefactors who supplied cash for such purchases. For example, only a year after the mission was begun, we find a letter written in Innsbruck by a Jesuit colleague, Joseph Malsatti(?), SJ, to a benefactor, who is identified only as Mon Révérend Père. It reports that Rev. Père Horner, the Superior-General of the Mission of Zanzibar, had purchased slaves with the money he had sent: … il est dit, que dans cette Mission-la en rachéte les petits négres au prix 25 francs et les petites nègresses á celui de 40 francs, pour être élevés dans la réligion catholique. [He tells us that at the mission there they have purchased little negroes for 25 francs and little negresses for 40 francs, so that they might be raised as Catholics.]12

In a letter sent the following month, the same writer reports a further purchase made with a gift of 310 francs: ‘cet argent soit employé pour racheter 6 garçons et 4 filles’ [‘this money has been used to buy 6 boys and 4 girls’]. The same letter goes on to record that these children all received good saints’ names such as Joseph, Bernard, Francis of Assisi [sic], Maria and Catharine.13 Despite the assertion that missions, unlike ordinary slave-buyers, only purchased slaves to set them at ‘liberty’, slaves obtained by missions were rarely if ever returned to their natal societies. Relocating slaves could not occur until inland missions were well established, and even then slaves were sent to those missions, never to their original communities. The final purpose of the mission enterprise was not to return slaves to freedom, but to convert them to Christianity. This is consistent, of course, with the stated intention of the missionaries not only to rescue the slaves from the ‘négrieres de contrabande’, but also (perhaps equally?) to rescue them from their own origins, from the religion and customs of ‘[the] barbarous inland tribes’ (‘[les] barbares tribes de l’intèrieur’) and from the horrors of ‘exclusion from the faith’ (‘l’infidelité’). From the point of view of the missions, this was to give them a à la mission catholique, de donner du même coupe des forces á l’influence française, a cru sans doute en sa conscience que, au-dessus de l’intérêt de l’humanité, il devait mettre celui de la Reine, avec le sien, et il ne livre plus à la mission que de gracieux sourires: c’est un excellent diplomate. Heureusement, des bienfaiteurs encore nombreux nous envoient d’Europe des dons suffisants pour racheter des enfants d’esclavage. Et comme, á Bagamoya nous avons perpétuellement sous les yeux de ces jeunes victimes de la cupidité et de la tyrannie musulmanes, volées dans l’intérieur, capturées dans les guerres, ou vendues par leurs maîtres et quelquefois par les parents, nous nous faisons un devoir d’exécuter les intentions de nos charitables correspondants et de retirer de la misère et de l’infidélité ces pauvres enfants qui, sans nous, seraient vendus aux Arabes et ne retrouveraient jamais leur liberté perdus’. Annales Apostoliques, 2 (April 1886), pp. 44–5. 12 Letter, 23 February 1866, 1866 Correspondence file, Spiritans Archive, ChevillyLaRue. In this period, the name Zanzibar was also used to refer to the coastal region controlled by the Sultanate, and in French archives at the time the Bagamoya mission was often, confusingly, refered to as the mission at Zanzibar. 13 Letter, 21 March 1866, 1866 Correspondence file, Spiritans Archive, ChevillyLaRue.

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greater freedom than they had known before. The later published narratives of these released slaves, written down by the missionaries, emphasize that they were ‘dead’ to their old lives once baptized as Christians.14 From these sources, one might begin to draw some tentative ideas, or rather, to formulate some worrying questions. If we isolate the asserted intentions of the missionaries (to rescue and save the souls of suffering slaves) from the processes employed (purchase from slavers, or slave-owners), do not the trading practices appear disturbingly congruent? Bagamoya and Stone Town were the great marketplaces for the on-sale of slaves arriving from the trails to the interior, where slavers sold their wares; both slave-owners and missionaries were potential buyers. The missionary narratives of rescue depend upon the assertion that slaves purchased by them were freed, whereas those purchased by slave-owners were enslaved. Leaving aside for the moment evidence which might problematize such an easy division of the various purchasers into good and bad camps,15 it is clear that missionaries and slave-owners both traded for slaves, and so both could, in a sense, be seen to be the buyers who perpetuated the demand at the end of the slave trails from inland centers such as Ujiji. By 1896, this issue was being openly discussed in the pages of journals such as Annales Apostoliques, and the missionary practice of purchasing slaves to convert them is being carefully discriminated from the practices of Arab slave-buyers. It is debatable whether this discrimination could have been as carefully observed in practice as the entry in the journal suggests: … should we buy and buy slaves, as many as possible? France’s resources would never be sufficient to free a tenth of them, and the act of buying slaves will never cure the wound. We, missionaries, buy those who are exposed to destruction, those who belong to a master and who ask for freedom, but we never buy those who are on the market, sold by slave merchants because it would be to increase their terrible bargains. The safest and most humane way to fight against slavery, and certainly the means of a people who worship an apostle of freedom, is to convert the masters so that in their turn they treat their slaves not as servants but as their own children.16

14 I have discussed this in more detail in ‘Appropriation, Patronage and Control, the Case of the Missionary Text’, in Colonies, Missions, Cultures in the English-Speaking World: General and Comparative Studies, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000), pp. 13–23. 15 The inadequate representation in these accounts of the actual complexities of the various forms of slavery practiced in East Africa might well be explored further, as not all forms of slavery were quite as abusive as the simple mission narratives suggest. See, for example, Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar, and modern fictional accounts such as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994). 16 ‘… faut il racheter et racheter toujours le plus possible de ces malheureux? Jamais les resources de la France ne sufferaient à en delivvrer la dixième partie, et jamais les rachats, quels que nombreux qu’ils feussent, ne guerriraient la plaie. Nous rachetons, nous missionaires, ceux qui sont exposés à être immolés, ceux qui se trouvent sous la dépendance d’un maître, nous demandent leur liberté, mais jamais ceux qui sont vendus par des marchants d’esclaves, car se serait favoriser la traite. Le moyen le plus sûr le plus humain de combattre l’esclavage, et le plus digne aussi d’un peuple apôtre de la liberté, c’est de couvertir les maîtres et d’obtenir


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Despite their scruples, and the rather defensive assertion of the refusal to buy slaves directly from merchants, once purchased, the slaves acquired by the missionaries entered a world of ‘ownership’ at least as comprehensive and lasting (if usually more well-intentioned and kindly) as they would have endured as slaves. However humanely they were treated, there is no doubt that Christian converts were as effectively and permanently estranged from their natal communities as slaves. In part, as already noted, this was because of the young ages of the majority of slaves bought by the missionaries. Missionaries themselves have left no account of the factors which led them to select one person over another when they purchased slaves, although it seems that when they purchased slaves, they favored the young. They had no such option in the slaves obtained by release from the dhows, though the majority of these were also young, since the Arab slavers likewise valued youth: it was seen as implying the adaptability and docility of their charges.17 Perhaps the missionaries likewise believed that younger slaves might be more tractable, able to be more fully and thoroughly converted. They certainly knew that the younger the slaves the more chance of their becoming catechized, and acting as effective evangelists to their own people. The demography of the mission settlements would seem to support this contention. While there was a settlement for adults at Mbweni, where they were encouraged to become self-sufficient in agriculture and small-scale manufacture, Mbweni was also the site of a girls’ training institute, for which a number of substantial buildings were constructed. Miss Caroline Thackeray, niece of the Victorian novelist, was Superintendent there for more than thirty years. Penney records that in 1881, there were 100 married couples with 30 children at the adult settlement, as well as 30 unmarried adult slaves, whose ages are not given. Of these, he notes that 50 adults were baptized, and another 54 were undergoing catechization. He also notes that, since 1878, 70 released slaves had been baptized. At the same time there were 56 girls at the training institute, while at the equivalent boys’ training institute, closer to Stone Town at Kiungani, there were 60 to 70 boys in residence. Counting the children of the released adults, children almost equaled adults in the settlements.18 Nearly all the many accounts of these youngsters, which appear in the UMCA youth magazine African Tidings, end in baptism, preparation for which event was a significantly large part of the curriculum taught at both Mbweni and Kiungani. Significantly, perhaps, many of the adults were eventually resettled at Masasi, 130 miles inland, with an African deacon, John Swedi, as their pastor. Swedi was the first African to be admitted to Holy Orders by Bishop Tozer.19 It is noted that this was so that the freed slaves should be ‘restored to their own land’, but

d’eux qu’ils traitait désormais leurs esclaves non pas seulement comme des domestiques, mais comme des enfants’. Annales Apostoliques, 43 (July 1896), pp. 41–59. 17 Box D4 in the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) Archives (1828–1982), Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, Oxford, contains a number of photographs of individual slaves and groups of slaves. Most of these are in their early teens. 18 W.H. Penney, Pamphlet, UMCA Archives, TC E41-F7 (Appeals and Leaflets). 19 John Swedi is also buried in the churchyard at St John’s, Mbweni.

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the land on which they were settled was unlikely to have been anywhere near their native areas. Their survival in the hostile territory of the interior depended absolutely on their retaining their links with the mission, and with the community into which it had shaped them.20 I want now to turn from this account of conscious and unconscious historical collusion of the missions in the slaving enterprise to look at the ways in which this history is memorialized on these two sites, and to examine the ways in which this memorializing engages with the new economy of tourism. Is there an ongoing interaction between past events and present practice, and if so how does this manifest itself? On the island of Zanzibar, tourism is already well-established. The East Coast has a series of beach resorts which cater for the scuba divers and windsurfers who arrive by airplane, ferry and hovercraft services from Dar. Similar development is underway on the islands off the West Coast, including an eco-tourist resort on an island in a marine reserve area. Stone Town itself, with its appealing winding alleyways and many traditional buildings, has developed a thriving tourist industry based on stays in hotels converted from refurbished houses. These hotels have traditional features such as the famous, highly decorated Zanzibari doorways, and are decorated with antique furnishings. A number of the buildings associated with figures like Burton and Speke survive on both sites, alongside buildings of significance from the British and German colonial period. The dominant attractions in the Tanzanian tourist brochures for these sites are the ‘exotic’ atmosphere of Stone Town and the dive opportunities provided by the offshore islands. But the historical buildings are increasingly being exploited as tourist attractions. Ironically, perhaps, the house given to Livingstone by the Sultan before his last ill-fated expedition is now the offices of the Zanzibar Tourist Commission. Known locally as Sonabagh, the house is now advertised on Zanzibar tourist websites, and some reference is made to Livingstone’s body resting at the old British Consulate building (Mambo Msiige). This building sports a small plaque indicating its use by Livingstone, Burton, Speke, and others. The old British Club, located right on the beach at Shangani Point, is a backpacker hotel to which younger tourists flock to drink the local Tusker beer and watch the sunset from the large verandah bar. Even the house of Tipu Tib, the most famous of the Zanzibari slavers and the companion of Stanley on his Congo searches for the source of the Nile, is now a set of private homes; it is identifiable only by its black and white tiled steps, being 20 There are a number of accounts in the journal Central Africa of attacks by ‘pagan’ natives on these early resettlements. For example, vol. 1 (1 February 1883), pp. 18–27, has an account by Chauncy Maples of the Mabwangwara raid upon the mission settlement at Masasi. Maples later authored a pamphlet on the same subject, entitled ‘The Mabwangwara Raid upon Masasi’, in which he notes that the raid was so serious it forced the mission to send ‘back to Zanzibar forthwith the whole of our released slave community’. Central Africa, 2 (1 April 1884), pp. 68–70, has a similar account of a raid by hostile tribes on an inland mission settlement, entitled ‘The Boondei and Digo War’ (UMCA Archives, TC E41–F7, Appeals and Leaflets). Such accounts are a popular feature of the journals, stressing the dangers of mission work, and emphasizing the moral differences between ‘pagan’ blacks and the converted blacks of the mission settlements.


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mentioned in some of the guidebooks. The spice plantations, now largely defunct as commercial enterprises, are sites for spice tours, which are promoted by touts on every corner. More interestingly, for the connections we are exploring, the slave pens at the large Anglican Cathedral of Christ, now located below a café and soft drinks bar in the cathedral grounds, are open to tours. Also visited by tourists are the caves at Mangapwani, to the north of the town, where illegal slaves were reputedly kept after slavery was abolished.21 A powerful memorial to the lives lost in the slave trade has also been erected: a square pit, like a large open grave, in which the figures of slaves stand, their heads and shoulders showing above ground level. South of Stone Town is Mbweni. The girls’ school there, St Mary’s, has been converted to a hotel, one which is making the history of the mission very much part of its appeal for tourists, restoring the old mission buildings. The erstwhile co-owner, who began the project, did considerable research in local archives, and published a short account of the Mbweni complex.22 She has also provided notes on the buildings in the hotel foyer, and the buildings are being restored in the light of this knowledge. In short, the possibility of the use of sites originally connected with slavery as an institution, and with the missionary presence which it provoked, as features of a new wave of ‘trading’ in tourists, is very much part of what is happening, or projected to happen, at these Tanzanian sites.23 Turning to Bagamoya, we might recall that the Ujiji–Bagamoya slave trail was also the trail along which Livingstone’s ‘faithful African bearers’ bore his body to the coast. This journey created an enduring Victorian myth about what the late imperial world saw as ideal relations of whites and blacks: kind if demanding masters, and simple but loyal servants. This notable event is now memorialized at Bagamoya in a shrine on the shore directly in front of the mission, a roomy chapel surmounted by steps and a large cross which supposedly marks the resting-place of Livingstone’s body before it was shipped home for burial in Westminster Abbey. I say ‘supposedly’ because in fact the body never rested here, and indeed no structure existed on the shoreline at the time. In fact, as mission records show, the body rested in a small chapel, which still exists within the Catholic mission compound some 500 yards inland, and which bears a small sign to this effect. The coastal shrine is much more recent, but it provides a far more dramatic site for this mythic event, with the cross silhouetted against the ocean, than the rather small chapel lost among many more imposing buildings of the mission compound. On either side of this memorial cross, hotels have developed along the beach front. These hotels began as very small affairs, owned by expatriates who were 21 The caves shown to tourists were almost certainly not used for this purpose, but happen to be close to Stone Town in a good location to be fitted into a day tour, which also encompasses a spice factory and the chance to snorkel at one of the better beaches on the north of the island. Thus tourism rewrites history, and reorders space, to fit its own demanding schedules. 22 Flo Liebst, Zanzibar: History of the Ruins at Mbweni (Zanzibar: Out of Africa, 1992). The book is on sale in Stone Town at the tourist outlets. 23 For a cynical estimation of the ways in which the current government is exploiting this potential, see Abdulrazak Gurnah’s account of tourism and its role in the economic development and future of Zanzibar in his novel Admiring Silence (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996).

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obviously banking on Bagamoya becoming a major tourist center. The opening of a hard surface road to replace the three-hour bumpy ride along the 60 or more pot-holed miles which previously separated Dar from Bagamoya has increased the tourist appeal of the town.24 In 1995, the first ever passenger flight from Dar landed at a small dirt landing-strip constructed on a point of land about six miles to the south. This event was greeted with joy by the expatriate hotel owners: a German and his South African wife, who owned (and were still building themselves) the thatched beach huts of the small hotel just south of the beachside Livingstone cross, and by the French manager of the larger hotel to the north of the monument. These new traders on the Bagamoya site hoped for a tourist industry based on beach sports. But they also saw the potential of the very dilapidated remnants of the buildings from the early German colonial period, and the mission, with its stirring connections with Livingstone’s last journey, as attractions which could be developed. The trading possibilities for these sites are still imbricated with the past in complex ways, and perpetuate narratives which are problematic in a post-colonial context. Perhaps for this reason, tours also now emphasize that Kaole, a little to the south of the town, is the site of one of the oldest mosques on the East African coast, built in the twelfth century. They thereby at least suggest an alternative to European colonial period history as a vital part of this location. Bagamoya long had an unenviable reputation in backpacker literature for muggings and robberies, some quite violent. The tourists who got there were often warned not to walk the dusty unmade streets without a local guide hired to ‘protect’ them. Local hotels insisted that anyone leaving their grounds, even for the short walk to the mission, be accompanied by one of their staff. Local expatriate hoteliers in the mid-1990s speculated that this high crime rate was because Bagamoya had no single culture, no organization or social structure which could hold it together. They hinted that its inhabitants, descendants of people brought there as slaves from all over the interior of Tanzania and as far away as Lake Nyasa, speaking different languages and having vastly different cultural traditions, had never managed to create a socially cohesive unit. This, they asserted, was why the town was so violent. Alternatively, they offered a more immediate, and more convincing, materialist reason for the crime rate, pointing to the phenomenally high rate of unemployment among the young people in the town. Whatever the reason, the local hoteliers in the 1990s were convinced they had the answer: if more tourists could flow in, they would provide local youths with employment in the growing service industry. Bagamoya, like Zanzibar, they averred, would acquire a new prosperity, and with it a new identity as a successful, modern site of purchase, where the American dollar and the Euro could be used to buy an African experience, inscribed in the body of the African present. Bagamoya had only to travel the same road as Zanzibar – in this case, a literal road, constructed to replace the old road from Dar – along which tourists and opportunity could flow. 24 Occasional dhows still travel between Dar and Bagamoya, but no regular sea-service exists, as is the case with Zanzibar. Officially, foreigners and tourists are now forbidden to hire dhows or to take passage with them, though this rule is frequently flouted by the younger backpacker crowd.


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The development of Bagamoya College of the Arts, founded in 1981, and its subsequent growth, due in part to the designation of Bagamoya by the Tanzanian government as a site for a thriving international youth culture festival, is a sign of this local development bearing fruit. There are many positive elements to this process, of course. Cultural tourism projects of this kind form an important component of what is now termed sustainable development programs in many locations worldwide, and (it is argued) attract a new and more discriminating type of tourist, one who is interested in preserving and celebrating local cultures. The analysis of these programs and their role in sustaining and/or altering cultural heritages deserves a longer and more complex treatment than I can attempt here.25 But as my earlier argument implied, reconstructing the site as a trading place for tourism, for all its immediate benefits to the local economy, may simply be renewing in a different mode the practices implicit in the more frankly exploitative practice of slaving and the economically covert side of the mission venture. But perhaps even more significant than the issues arising from this conscious exploitation of these historical sites is what I might characterize as the unconscious reproductions of these practices on sites which have witnessed a multiplicity of performative practices at any one time. Some of these are manufactured, and others perhaps are the product of a form of cultural or historical leakage. Let me conclude by examining one way in which the space of Stone Town might be seen as the site of such unconscious ‘leakages’ into cultural tourist ‘performances’ of practices undertaken on the same sites in earlier periods.26 A government-sponsored dance performance for tourists takes place from time to time in the grounds of the Arab fort, located next to the House of Wonders (Bait al Ajaib) and the Sultan’s palace, now a museum. Together, these constitute the main public buildings stretched across the foreshore between Shangani Point and the dhow harbor. In the evenings, along the shore in front of these buildings, food stalls serve grilled squid and fish with peri-peri sauce, along with various local dishes such as grilled bananas, as well as the now universal chips, and small grilled chops and steaks. The food acknowledges the various waves of invasion – Arabic, Portuguese, and now Euro-American – which have washed over this space. Like all successful trading centers, it has changed to accommodate the tastes of its customers. 25 For an initial glance at the current UNESCO policy on the role of cultural tourism in sustainable development programmes, see UNESCO, ‘Cultural Tourism’, 2002, at , 28 January 2006. There are, of course, vast amounts of information on cultural tourism on the internet: 2002 was declared the United Nations year for Cultural Heritage, and Stone Town was placed on the World Cultural Heritage List in 2000. The listing acknowledged its architectural value and its symbolic importance in the suppression of the slave trade by figures such as Livingstone, as the citation states: , 15 January 2006. 26 These performances are very different from the much more sophisticated performances offered at the Bagamoyo [sic] Arts Festival, although the issues involved in commodifying culture for international consumption remain in all such instances, and pose questions which need to be discussed in a broader context than this chapter attempts. For the programme of the 23rd festival, see Chuo Cha Sanaa Bagamoyo College of Arts, at , 28 January 2006.

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Inside the fort, a far more sophisticated and complex simulacrum of this same process is enacted. ‘African’ dancers perform a series of dances, while the audience, mostly European and American tourists, are offered a very superior barbecue, which is advertised as an ‘authentic African feast’. This feast consists of a grill of fish, chicken and steaks, with the ubiquitous peri-peri sauce, bananas and corn in husks. Of course, one would be hard put to say which ‘authentic’ African cuisine this all represents; as with the food, so with the dance. The dozen or so dancers change costume several times, enacting dances from a wide variety of regions and cultural traditions within East Africa. At a suitable point, they invite the more daring and younger tourists to learn a ‘local’ dance. In a sense, the performance re-enacts the integration of the cultures that the more innocent food stalls along the front offer. This may simply be read as a signifier of what Zanzibar is, and always has been: a place of trade, of meeting, of exchange between many cultures. But there is a more complex and potentially sinister reading possible. It is worth recalling that, prior to the Arab settlement, Zanzibar was occupied by indigenes quite distinct from the mainland peoples. These aboriginal Zanzibaris, now few and restricted mainly to the island of Pemba to the north, are not of the same provenance as mainland Africans. Thus the presence of mainland Africans on Zanzibar has always been a product of a peculiarly violent and disruptive import economy, initiated first by Arab slavers and then complicated by the ‘enlightened’ forces of the European colonizers and their missionaries. The ‘African’ dancers of the modern tourist performance are the residual cultural legatees of mainland Africans brought to Zanzibar by the earlier enterprises of slavery and missionizing. The dances they develop and teach the audience as part of the newly developing cultural tourist industry are based, once again, on imported, mainland energy and skills. In a way, the dancers, like the slaves before them, have brought the images and potency of the interior – that barbarous place which the missionaries and explorers sought to conquer but entered only slowly, with difficulty and with the aid of their purchased African helpers – to this alternative space, a space sanitized by international tourism, licensed to provide an easy and comfortable reproduction of the performance of ‘darkest Africa’. Just as the mission texts of the late nineteenth century reproduced Africa and Africans in ways which made them acceptable to those who paid for their enterprises in the metropolitan centers of Europe and America, so contemporary performances enact a similar reconfiguration of Africa, to serve a new market. In this respect, enterprises seemingly as different in purpose and as remote from each other in time as missionizing and cultural tourism may overlap in unexpected ways, and even bear subtle traces of the earliest form of trading on these spaces: the slave enterprise. What exactly, then, constitutes the relationship between these various ‘trading’ enterprises of slavery, missions and tourism, which have laid down seemingly indelible traces on these complex sites of purchase? How can we not read the present trading enterprise of tourism through the patterns of the past, and through the ways in which the theatre of the present re-enacts the performances of capture, dislocation and conversion which have flowed across this site for centuries? For such sites and their living practices are very much part of the ‘archive’ of evidence through which places like modern Stone Town and Bagamoya need to be read. Such places preserve many historical memorials of their brutal and turbulent past, items such as on-site


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inscriptions, buildings and monuments, but they also retain the social practices and enactments (both conscious and unconscious) through which the traces of these same histories continue to influence social practice. These are also important parts of the record, and for such living practices a concept of the text not as an inert document or monument nor as ‘memorialized’ inscriptions, but as social performance, as living theatre, might be more appropriate. I have sought to demonstrate that this idea of a ‘theatre’ of practice might link very different kinds of events, and to suggest that the kinds of evidences and practices we associate with different kinds of texts – archival texts, for example – and site-specific memorializations or practices which are more usually the concern of ethnography can fruitfully inform one another. But it might also open up the whole idea of social practice itself if we perceive that it can usefully be understood as a ‘theatre’, one in which specific roles are allotted to different groups. The members of these groups are ‘framed’ and defined within what we might term an ongoing and persistent dramaturgical model. In this regard, it is significant that in missionary texts of the late nineteenth century, East African slavers are always characterized as ‘Arab slavers’ and their victims are ‘African slaves’, suggesting an absolute division of the two groups along racial and ethnic lines. In practice, this simply does not represent the facts. Tipu Tib, to take the best-known example, was of African and Arab parentage, as were many of the slavers. Peoples of partial Arab descent from the coastal regions were also enslaved, or were born into slavery after their African mothers were taken as wives or concubines by their new Arab owners. In these mission texts, I would argue, such descriptors are therefore best understood as signifying a specific, fixed role in a dramatized narrative of social interaction, in which Arabs (sometimes also referred to as Mussulmen) are cast as the enslaving villain, while pagan Africans (often also referred to as ‘blacks’) are the innocent victims. In this ‘play’, the role of rescuer and savior is reserved for white European Christian actors. Each role is clearly defined by a dramaturgy which overrides any more complex account of the interactions and shared practices of these various groups, such as that which I’ve offered. Thus the patterns of the ways in which Africans, Arabs and Europeans were and are ‘staged’ offers an example of just how persistent such defining ‘roles’ can be, and how they might function across and between different and even (consciously) opposed social and ideological formations, such as slavery, missionary rescue practices and modern cultural tourism, to preserve a persistent set of social relations. What, then, has really happened in Zanzibar and in Bagamoya? Is the cultural tourism now so vaunted and so wooed by the local government and by the international entrepreneurs who fund its growth really a new development, or merely a renewal of old social patterns? Do the salvation and freedom it seems to offer form only a new enslavement, or perhaps a fresh conversion to a foreign ‘religion’ of tourism and development which invites, indeed insists on, an alienation of the people from their origins as the price they must pay for release and salvation? Or is this far too simple a reading? Are the roots of these littoral cultures themselves so deeply imbricated in the act of selling and being sold that no other tradition can now be said to exist? Are these sites of purchase ineradicably stamped as sites of commercial exchange, in which people are the permanent and seemingly unchanging commodity?


Chapter 3

The Bible Trade: Commerce and Christianity in the Pacific Anna Johnston This chapter examines the ways in which missionaries were involved in the introduction of Western modes of commerce, labor relations and manufacturing in nineteenthcentury Polynesia. It focuses in detail upon the written record of the missionaries of the London Missionary Society (LMS), one of the predominant British organizations in the region, and argues that representations of trade and commerce proliferated in missionary texts because evangelical Protestants believed that trade was a critical indicator of the success of the Christian project during this period. The South Pacific came to have an important role in the LMS’s foreign activities, and in the British public’s imperial consciousness – a connection which was hardly coincidental. From the time of the first voyages to the islands of the South Pacific by Europeans, interest was intense: Romantic ideas about the lost Eden, the noble savage, and utopian island cultures pervaded visions of the area, and there was sustained demand for accounts of these cultures. The LMS capitalized on this popular interest, sending their inaugural mission to what was then called Otaheite in 1797 with great fanfare and publicity. But the missionaries were strictly controlled by the directors of the society, who were somewhat distrustful of their ill-educated representatives, and eager for them not to be awarded hero status. More successful missionaries later took hold of the public’s imagination and became folk heroes in their own right, figures like John Williams and William Ellis ultimately commanding considerable influence in imperial circles. This influence came about primarily through their adept use of publication. LMS missionaries were always prolific producers of texts – from the annual reports required by their home Society, to their voluminous personal letters to fellow evangelists and family, to the printed accounts of their travels, travails and adventures. Prominent missionaries like Williams and Ellis produced their own versions of their Pacific experiences, in addition to those versions produced by the Society’s ‘home’ writers. But their accounts are compromised, in the sense that they were produced in the interests of the missionary society and the individual evangelist: they are frankly propagandist. The focus of this chapter, then, is necessarily on the ways in which missionary writers represented and mediated their relationships with indigenous peoples and other Europeans; readers are given little information about Pacific Islander perspectives on colonization. Despite the glowing nature of many missionary accounts, the LMS missions to Polynesia were not always the public relations successes that the home Society would have liked. The first group of LMS missionaries were singularly unsuccessful in their evangelizing efforts, while individual missionaries appear to have been

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utterly confounded by the cultural differences they encountered and the extreme isolation they experienced. Local resistance and political unrest led ultimately to the majority of the first LMS group decamping to Sydney. Indeed, many parts of the cross-cultural relationship between British missionaries and Pacific Islanders proved to be highly controversial, and issues of sexuality, government and trade proved most contentious. The islands of the Pacific had a somewhat ambiguous political status, at least in imperial terms: they constituted a kind of de facto colonial entity, though the British seem to have been reluctant to make any formal claim until competition with other imperial nations eventually drove them to do so. But for much of the century, missionaries appear to have acted as surrogate colonial rulers, albeit under their own aegis, forming their own versions of colonial states. Arguably, their intervention to some extent made possible the later wholesale colonization of the region, and their ambiguous relationship with European colonial and trading interests typified missionary experience in the region. The philosophy of ‘Christianization through civilization’ was central to LMS missions from the very beginning, and in some ways the early missionaries focused on ‘civilization’ at the expense of ‘Christianization’; later evangelists were more successful in integrating the two. The education of children, the limiting of extended family groupings, the abolition of gender-segregated cultural practices (other than those sanctioned by Christian ethics), the construction of European-style housing, and the establishment of Western methods of agriculture and industry were all seen as being essential to instilling ‘civilized’ attitudes and values. Given the attention paid to material questions by their supporters (and by their detractors), the LMS representatives were vulnerable to criticism when the British public felt that the missionaries had got that balance wrong. These problems were a direct result of the somewhat improvisational nature of these early missions: missionaries to the South Pacific, up until 1819, were supported by the Society only in their passage to the mission field, and no further salary or allowance was paid.1 The Society expected their missionaries to rely on the generosity of their local ‘congregations’, and on their own labors for supplies of food, clothing and shelter – a hopelessly optimistic view. Missionary narratives, particularly early ones, routinely indicate the deliberate use of a politics of supply in the mission field, constantly remarking that supplies were withheld from them because the missionaries had offended the local leader or community, because food was needed for indigenous religious purposes, or because the missionaries were deliberately being made to feel unwelcome. As Andrew Porter has noted, ‘the perennial complaints by missionaries about inadequate salaries were exacerbated by extreme isolation, highly irregular contact with the outside world, and desperate shortages of supplies. Trade in these circumstances became essential to subsistence’.2 Missionaries resorted to bartering European goods such as cloth; trading, either selling produce grown by themselves or acting as agents between island producers and Europeans; or establishing industries. The first influence on the 1 Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1797–1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 119. 2 Andrew Porter, ‘“Commerce and Christianity”: The Rise and Fall of a NineteenthCentury Missionary Slogan’, Historical Journal, 28:3 (1985), p. 610.

The Bible Trade: Commerce and Christianity in the Pacific

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introduction of commerce and trade, then, was their own survival, but this apparently unavoidable conjunction between ‘commerce and Christianity’ proved extremely controversial for the Pacific missions.3 While some Christians could justify the use of commercial means to effect religious reform, others found the idea repugnant. John Orsmond, an LMS missionary at Tahiti, wrote to the Directors in disgust in 1837 that ‘“we are a set of trading priests, our closets are neglected, and our cloth disgraced”’.4 The 1830 Report of the LMS, on the other hand, had argued for the importance of commercial activity on the grounds that the indigenous peoples’ former habits of indolence were incompatible with a consistent profession of Christianity. The rapidity with which the islanders are advancing in commercial enterprises; the eagerness with which many engage in trade; the increased number of ships visiting their ports; and the consequent influx of foreigners have also produced irregularities and occasional inconvenience to the missionaries … [although such commercial activities] are unequivocal marks of their industry and advancement in civilization.5

Some missionaries attempted to set up industries, including sugar mills, cotton mills and coconut oil mills. These were largely unsuccessful, perhaps due to the missionaries’ somewhat naïve assumptions about the willingness of indigenous peoples to supply free labor, as well as significant political mistakes such as engaging a former West Indian slave overseer to manage the sugar mill.6 The captains of passing ships warned the Pacific Islanders of the exploitative use that British industries made of indigenous labor in other parts of the world, and, in consequence, labor and official permission to trade were generally withheld from these doomed enterprises. Still, as Graeme Kent notes, ‘a number of missionaries in the process became wealthy men, a fact seized upon by their adversaries, particularly by the traders with whom they came into competition’.7 This conflict between missionaries and European traders on the one hand, and the internal conflict of missionaries acting as traders on the other, epitomizes the complex politics of trade and commerce in missionary texts and Pacific history. Missionaries attempted to introduce a European-styled system of agricultural economics, encouraging production of goods for trade rather than immediate consumption or barter, and in the process they significantly influenced the distribution and accumulation of capital. These changes in turn altered social relations. The LMS deputation led by Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet in the 1820s advised that:

3 See my Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially Part 3, for an extended discussion of this controversy. 4 John Orsmond, qtd in Gunson, Messengers of Grace, p. 120. 5 LMS, Reports of the London Missionary Society, 1796–1870 (School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London), 1830, p. 5. 6 Graeme Kent, Company of Heaven: Early Missionaries in the South Seas (Wellington: Reed, 1972), p. 54. John Gyles was sent to Tahiti to teach the agriculture of trade crops; he was apparently not particularly effective at missionary work because he was used to the rather different relations he had experienced with slave populations (Gunson, p. 40). 7 Kent, p. 66.

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Economies of Representation, 1790–2000 A Missionary’s usefulness in these insular regions – so remote from continental intercourse, so separated into small communities – extends to everything that concerns life or godliness. He has not only to instruct his charges in the principles of the Christian faith … but he must teach them how to act in all the stations and relations which they sustain; he must shew them in what manner they may build better houses, construct more effective canoes, manufacture domestic furniture, cultivate new crops upon their waste grounds, prepare oil, sugar, tobacco, cotton, &c. &c., for use, or for commerce. In a word, it rests with the minister of religion to form anew the character, not of individuals only, but that character which shall henceforward, for ages, distinguish a whole people.8

If the devil made work for idle hands, the LMS missionaries were keen to encourage productive, time-consuming labor to assuage heathen idleness. The Reverend Samuel Marsden, an influential missionary figure in Australia and New Zealand, was ‘decidedly of the opinion that religion [would] never flourish in the [Society] Islands without the encouragement of industry among the natives, and that commerce will prove the best stimulus to industry’.9 The indigenous leader Pomare was praised by missionary commentators because of his desire to establish trading relations with Europeans – E. Prout wrote, ‘they soon saw what had always been seen, that Christianity is the precursor of civilization and commerce amongst chiefs and people, by creating wants and desires unknown before. They required better houses, furniture, clothes, and many other things, the value or convenience of which they had learned from the missionaries’.10 The encouragement of both industries and industriousness, then, was believed to result in a kind of capital-based selfimprovement, for individuals and for Pacific Islander cultures as a whole. John Williams energetically promoted this commercial philosophy: he declared, ‘wherever the Missionary goes, new channels are cut for the stream of commerce; and to me it is most surprising that any individual at all interested in the commercial prosperity of his country can be otherwise than a warm friend to the Missionary cause’.11 In his book tellingly titled Missionary Enterprises, he wrote that ‘the blessings conveyed … by Christianity have not been simply of a spiritual character … civilization and commerce have invariably followed in her train’.12 Williams tied the Christian message to commerce with a wonderful organic metaphor: I am convinced that the first step towards the promotion of a nation’s temporal and social elevation, is to plant amongst them the tree of life, when civilization and commerce 8 Rev. Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet, Journal of Voyages and Travels by the Rev. Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet, Esq. Deputed from the London Missionary Society, to Visit their Various Stations in the South Sea Islands, China, India, &c., Between the Years 1821 and 1829, 2 vols, comp. James Montgomery (London: Westley and Davis, 1831), vol. 2, pp. 550–51. 9 LMS, Reports, 1816, p. 4. 10 E. Prout, Missionary Ships Connected with the London Missionary Society (London: LMS, 1865), p. 31. 11 John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands: With Remarks upon the Natural History of the Islands, Origin, Languages, Traditions, and Usages of the Inhabitants ([1837]; London: Snow, 1838), p. 584. 12 Ibid., p. 578.


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will entwine their tendrils around its trunk, and derive support from its strength … The Missionaries were at Tahiti many years, during which they built and furnished a house in European style. The natives saw this, but not an individual imitated their example. As soon, however, as they were brought under the influence of Christianity, the chiefs, and even the common people, began to build neat plastered cottages, and to manufacture bedsteads, seats, and other articles of furniture.13

By the 1850s, the slogan ‘Commerce and Christianity’ had great appeal. As Andrew Porter explains, the influence of commerce within evangelization was justified both for British and Pacific trade. He cites Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s 1860 argument: ‘Commerce … is intended to carry, even to all the world, the blessed message of salvation … [and Christianity has] the effect of training the human race to a degree of excellence which it could never attain in non-Christian countries’, giving ‘value to life’, ‘dignity to labor’ and ‘security to possession’, with the result that a Christian people would tend to be a wealth-producing people, an exporting people and so a commercial people’.14

In evangelical discourse, British trade could represent an extension of British philanthropy; conversely, by introducing colonial nations to commerce, British merchants were providing the means of economic and spiritual uplift. However, many critical observers of missionary endeavor saw the coalition of trade and Christianity as inimical. Hypatia Bonner asked, ‘is it justifiable [or] honest, to attribute to the confused and contradictory teachings of Christianity results which have been obtained by purely secular and material means – educational, medical, industrial, and economic?’15 Others believed that LMS agents like Williams and Pritchard were making ‘unchristian’ amounts of money out of trade. It is unlikely that many missionary traders deliberately kept indigenous primary producers ignorant of the ways of commerce, but they certainly did not act aggressively to achieve good results for them. In Rarotonga, a European beachcomber told the local people that ‘the Missionaries, from interested motives, were keeping them in the dark upon these subjects; but that if they would allow him to manage their trade with the shipping, he would procure for them five or ten times as much’, a scenario repeated elsewhere in the region.16 During the early parts of the nineteenth century, in particular, the Pacific was undergoing a kind of double European incursion. As Harold Maude suggests, Moving west from Tahiti was the increasingly confident army of militant Christianity … From the bustling wharves of Sydney, on the other hand, there were simultaneously moving east the vanguards of commerce, equally confident of success as they developed

13 Ibid., pp. 581–2. 14 Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, qtd in Porter, ‘“Commerce and Christianity”’, pp. 597–8. 15 Hypatia Bonner, Christianizing the Heathen: First-hand Information Concerning Overseas Missions (London: Watts & Co., 1922), pp. 2–3. 16 John Williams, pp. 224–5, my emphasis. For a detailed discussion of the (fraught) relationship between European beachcombers and the missionaries in the Pacific, see Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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Economies of Representation, 1790–2000 the trading potentialities of the various island groups, exchanging the products of England’s industrial revolution for salt pork, sandalwood, bêche-de-mer and any other island product from which profit might be made.17

Inevitably, there were significant conflicts between ‘missionary traders’ and other European traders. In some ways, this issue proved rather like the friction between missionaries and other Europeans over cross-cultural sexual encounters: missionaries were quick to condemn what they saw as immoral and exploitative relations between the two cultures, but many proved incapable of resisting sexual temptation themselves. Similarly, missionaries criticized the exploitation of island produce and Pacific Islander labor by European adventurers, but then manipulated indigenous labor and manufacturing for their own benefit. Those thwarted by the missionaries were quick to point out their hypocrisy, and keen to disadvantage evangelical trade. Peter Buck notes that part of the missionary discouragement of other white traders in the Cook Islands involved the introduction of church-controlled laws which enforced taxes on traders from which missionaries exempted themselves.18 Conversely, LMS commentators railed against those they called ‘selfish merchants at Sydney, [who,] fearing lest their interest might suffer, persuaded the Governor to levy a heavy duty on all imports from the South Sea Islands, the immediate effect of which was to shut them out from that market. Thus the infant trade of Raiatea, and the beneficent purposes of its missionary, were cruelly destroyed’.19 It is evident here that the moralization of trade effectively attempted to exempt missionaries from charges of profiteering, but like much missionary rhetoric, this logic demands the acceptance of evangelical philosophies. In the final part of this chapter, I want to look briefly at some of the specific trade exchanges that existed in the region during this period, and gesture towards some of the broader questions suggested by missionary involvement in trade. It is evident that, within missionary contexts, indigenous and European groups appeared to commodify their own and the other’s culture. I want to look briefly at two aspects of this. The first is another crucial factor in the ‘Christianization and civilization’ process, the introduction of textuality to the Pacific missions. William Ellis, a fully trained printer, arrived with a printing press in 1817, and the press was established on the island of Mo’orea in that year. The arrival of the press was seen by the Society as a foundational event in the development of the South Pacific missions, and many missionary narratives of the ‘South Seas’ missions, such as C. Silvester Horne’s The Story of the L.M.S, celebrated the moment when ‘King Pomare set up the first types, and printed the first sheets, amid the most indescribable excitement and enthusiasm on the part of his subjects’.20 Naturally, these first sheets were translated 17 H.E. Maude, ‘Foreword’, The Works of Ta’unga: Records of a Polynesian Traveller in the South Seas, 1833–1896, eds and preface by R.G. Crocombe and Marjorie Crocombe, Pacific History Series 2 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1968), p. xi. 18 Sir Peter Buck [Te Rangi Hiroa], Mangaia and the Mission, eds and intro. by Rod Dixon and Teaea Parima (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, in association with B.P. Bishop Museum, 1993), p. 41. 19 Prout, p. 41. 20 C. Silvester Horne, The Story of the L.M.S. 1795–1895 (London: LMS, 1894), p. 42.


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copies of scripture. In both missionary narratives and, it would seem, in indigenous cultures, the book came to represent an artifact of modernity and Western cultural capital in itself; particularly, for the missionaries, the Bible. Missionary writers represented the introduction of the Bible into colonial cultures in a kind of doubled discursive time – as both a symbol of modernity, brought into being by that machine of modern times, the printing press, and as a (colonial) reinstatement of the Bible’s status as unchanging and universal.21 Prout’s Missionary Ships Connected with the London Missionary Society noted that ‘the Camden was freighted with five thousand Testaments in the language of the people – a gift more precious in their estimation than much fine gold’.22 Later, the John Williams was ‘freighted with 5,000 Tahitian Bibles, 4,000 Pilgrim’s Progress, and other useful books, an iron chapel, printing materials, and iron tanks to receive the oil which the natives so willingly contribute to the Society’.23 Prout’s representation of the Bible as a commodity, as ‘freight’, was in one sense literal; elsewhere, he described the LMS missionary Aaron Buzacott’s arrival at Rarotonga with Bibles: ‘So eager were [the local community] to possess the treasure, that Mr. Buzacott could scarcely keep them from breaking open the boxes. And it was much the same at Managua and other islands, where all were ready, not merely to possess, but to purchase at its cost price the Sacred Word’.24 Significantly, Prout’s message was tied in with a message about the economics of missionary Christianity: the fact that local communities were prepared to pay for the Christian message (albeit at ‘cost price’!) seemed to give the project a notable gloss. Of course, for the LMS missionaries, such apparent willingness to engage in these transactions did indeed represent a success in seeming to indicate that the local people had been converted to Christianity and to the capitalist market system. This was a recurrent theme across many mission fields. The second example of cultural commodification and transaction is the ‘trade’ in artifacts from mission communities back to Britain. In evangelical texts and philosophy, the goods traded for European books seem to have been the physical artifacts of indigenous religious cultures. In just a single instance of this recirculation of indigenous artifacts as ‘proof’ of missionary triumph, the LMS deputation lead by Tyerman and Bennet wrote at length of the maro of the indigenous elite: When a new king was consecrated, by ceremonies too filthy to be detailed, he was invested with the maro … of net-work covered with red feathers, and to which an additional lappet is annexed at the accession of each sovereign. This splendid train, which was wont to be wound about the body, and flowed upon the ground, is twenty-one feet in length, and six inches broad. The needle by which the fabric was wrought is still attached to it, and according to report no stitch could be taken with it, but thunder was forthwith heard in the heavens. The symbolical marks, which are apparent on the plumage and texture, indicate that many hundreds of human victims have been sacrificed, during its gradual making 21 See my ‘The Bookeaters: Textuality, Modernity, and the London Missionary Society’, Semeia, 88 (2001), 13–40, for a discussion of this issue. 22 Prout, p. 55. 23 Ibid., p. 70. 24 Ibid., p. 74.

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Economies of Representation, 1790–2000 and extension, when the sundry monarchs, by whom it has been worn in succession, wrapped themselves with its folds, as their insignia of authority. This sacred maro has, therefore, never been completed, nor might have been, so long as the ancient system continued, for it was intended to be lengthened to the end of time, or at least to the end of empire in the island. Hence, almost every hand-breadth of the patchwork that composed it represented a separate reign, and reminded the national chroniclers of the prince’s name, character, achievements, and the main incidents of his time; this robe might be regarded as an hieroglyphic tablet of the annals of Raiatea.25

They note with triumph that ‘Tamatoa has cast off this relic of idolatry, and sent it, as another trophy of the gospel victories here, to the Museum of the London Missionary Society’.26 Indeed, the LMS museum was inundated with items dispatched as proof of success in trading Bibles for the artifacts of Indigenous religions and cultures, described in Tyerman and Bennet’s Journal as the ‘spoils of the gospel’.27 Pacific peoples had long been part of a complex trading culture, and they possessed a far more sophisticated understanding of the nature of trade than it is likely the LMS missionaries realized. As Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have suggested, in the symbolic exchange of goods, objects passed in each direction, invested with values and intentions probably misread by both recipients.28 These exchanges were not introduced into a void – they may have possessed novel values, but they often acquired meanings somewhat different to those intended by the givers.29 This is true of much trade in colonial cultures, of course, but the difference in these missionary contexts is that these exchanges were invested with both material and spiritual significance. The LMS was keen to promote their material success: by the end of the century, the Society lauded the success of the Tahitian ‘civilization’ process, noting that they were importing £35,000 of goods per annum from the UK, Australia and America.30 The Society was equally pleased to receive the ‘donations’ which local congregations had sent, for such material support seemed to signify long-term commitment to Christianity as well as providing sorely needed funds for the always cash-strapped society. The less celebrated result of missionary encouragement of trade was that opportunistic relationships were established as a result. The role of missionaries in providing the environment for such unequal exchanges, despite their inevitable disapproval of exploitative cross-cultural relationships, points to the inadequacy of the moral argument for colonization sustained for so long within the British imperial imagination. The peoples of the South Pacific, like other colonized peoples, were always aware of this. Indigenous populations were also well aware of the dubious alliance of evangelical and commercial interests. This Maori account is reported in a missionary narrative from New Zealand, though the story is one circulated through 25 Tyerman and Bennet, vol. 2, pp. 526–7. 26 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 527. 27 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 86. 28 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), p. 19. 29 Ibid., p. 20. 30 Horne, p. 50.


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many missionary texts, about many colonial cultures: ‘“Later on a rumour gained credence that while we knelt before the altar to pray the preacher cried: ‘Look not upon the things of this earth, but upward’; and we looked upward. This was done with the intent that we should not see how, behind our backs, our lands were being appropriated by the ravenous incoming white trader’”.31

31 William Baucke, qtd in Bonner, Christianizing the Heathen, p. 7.


Chapter 4

In Search of M. Leprae: Medicine, Public Debate, Politics and the Leprosy Commission to India Jo Robertson This chapter is about bacillary exchanges, imagined or otherwise, which functioned as cautionary metaphors for concerns about the dangers of commerce, understood in the broadest sense, between the East and West.1 The Leprosy Investigation Commission was sent from England to India in 1890–91; while the investigation can be thought to have been well ahead of its time scientifically, in reporting its findings it was at the mercy of larger political forces. The symbolic value of the investigation was heightened in the context of imperial imperatives created by complex and increased flows of population, and the not unrelated and heated public debate about the dangers of leprosy in England and in India. The level of interest and expectation made it necessary for the commissioners to address the diverse theories about leprosy proposed by influential members of the medical profession, as well as to engage with a tide of public opinion that had been gathering strength for most of the last half of the nineteenth century. Their report reveals a dialogue with many invisible interlocutors and suggests that in the face of the elusiveness of the microbe that they had been sent to isolate, and of the vastness and complexity of India, the commissioners themselves were overwhelmed by their task. The Commission was sent to India on 23 October 1890 and arrived at Bombay on 17 November. It had been dispatched by the National Leprosy Fund, which had begun as the Committee for the Father Damien Memorial Fund. The expressed motivation for the investigation was to pay tribute to the life and personal sacrifice of Father Damien de Veuster, who had died in April 1889 after spending sixteen years on Molokai, in Hawaii, caring for people with leprosy. His death seemed to indicate conclusively that leprosy, as a germ disease, was communicable.2 The popular response to the death was pity and admiration: Edward Clifford, who had corresponded with Damien, described him in Fortnightly Review in messianic terms: 1 Attention has been paid to the medical politics of the Commission: see Michael Worboys, ‘Was There a Bacteriological Revolution in Late Nineteenth-Century Medicine?’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 38 (2007), pp. 20–42. On the colonial and imperial politics, see Sanjiv Kakar, ‘Leprosy in British India, 1860–1940: Colonial Medicine and Missionary Medicine’, Medical History, 40:2 (1996), pp. 215–30, and Jane Buckingham, Leprosy in Colonial South India: Medicine and Confinement (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2002). 2 ‘A Victim of Leprosy’, British Medical Journal (26 January 1889), p. 222.

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Damien presented his body ‘as a living sacrifice’, suffered bitter opposition, jealousy and misunderstanding; after his death, he manifested ‘his power on earth’ through his inspirational effect on others. This inspiration would perhaps lead, through the work of the Commission, to the ‘salvation of India’.3 In his article, Clifford dramatically depicts this connection between Damien and India: Treatises had been written, thousands of facts had been collected, medical science had been at work, but all reform seemed as far off as ever, when suddenly the sentiment of every heroic soul – and, thank God! English souls are heroic – was touched by the death of Damien, and prince and people rose to the work of freeing India from leprosy.4

The space left by Damien’s death was to be filled by the English people, or in Clifford’s words, ‘Prince and people rose to the work’. More specifically, the Father Damien Memorial Fund took over the role of reaching out to the leper, particularly in India. At the first meeting of the Memorial Fund, the Prince of Wales explained that the death of Father Damien ‘has brought home to us that the circumstances of our vast Indian and Colonial Empire oblige us, in a measure at least, to follow his example.’5 The claims of those in Hawaii were weighed against the more numerous claims of the leprosy sufferers of India and the other colonies: For our own fellow-subject, India, with its 250,000 lepers, and our colonies, with their unnumbered but increasing victims to a loathsome disease that has hitherto baffled medical skill, have a far stronger claim on our aid than the poor natives of the Hawaiian Islands could ever have had on the young Belgian priest who has given his life for them.6

The committee formed itself separately from the Royal College of Physicians and its leprosy committee. Correspondence indicates that initially the College was not particularly happy with the Father Damien Memorial Fund, seeing it as the outcome of enthusiasm rather than expertise.7 But the Fund assembled a cast of luminaries – members included the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Randolph Churchill, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, the Bishop of London, Sir William Jenner, and the Hon. G. Curzon, as well as prominent members of the medical fraternity – and was presided over by the Prince of Wales. By the end of June, the executive committee had decided that Damien’s memory should be perpetuated in four ways: a memorial would be erected to him at Molokai; a fund would be established for lepers in the United Kingdom; two studentships would be endowed for doctors to study the disease; and an Indian Leprosy Commission was to be appointed.

3 Edward Clifford, ‘Father Damien and Leprosy in India’, Fortnightly Review, 52 (1889), pp. 140–52. 4 Ibid., p. 144. 5 National Leprosy Fund, Journal of the Leprosy Investigation Committee, 1 (August 1890), p. 6. 6 Ibid. 7 Papers of the Committee on Leprosy, 1858–98, Ms 4119/198, Correspondence from the Royal College of Physicians Leprosy Committee, Royal College of Physicians Archives and Manuscripts Collection.

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In addition to calling for subscriptions to fund these projects, a dinner was held at the Hôtel Métropole on 13 January 1890. In his speech, the Prince of Wales proclaimed the ‘wide prevalence of leprosy in the Indian Empire as an undoubted fact’, and the general impression that ‘the disease is increasing in India, as well as in many of our colonies.’8 In India, lepers were a public spectacle: ‘The vast majority roam over the country as beggars, shunned friendless, and uncared for, until they drop down and die or perhaps drown themselves in some public well.’ The speech was followed by one from Sir Andrew Clarke, the President of the Royal College of Physicians, who described the increase in the disease in frightening terms: the evidence was conclusive that not only did leprosy exist in larger measures than in recent years, but that new germ centres were springing up in various quarters and the old centres were widening, and before England and the civilized world there was looming a condition of affairs which might, by growth, threaten civilization.9

The Commission was to defend Britain by saving India from leprosy: it was expected to produce a scientific substitute for self-sacrificing martyrdom, and act as a defense of civilization. (At one stage in the dinner, the Archbishop of Canterbury refers to it as a crusade.) Yet in a swift sequence of shifts, the leprosy-affected subjects of Damien’s benevolence, newly represented as exerting a claim on Britain, soon to be worthy recipients of medical and scientific research, were settling back into a more familiar pattern of representation. The Prince of Wales, in stressing the dangers of the disease, exposed to public attention a meat worker in the city who suffered from leprosy.10 In spite of the expressed intentions of the National Leprosy Fund, Damien’s inspiration had not lasted very long: benevolent intentions were underpinned by deep-seated anxiety. These anxieties arose out of a heightened awareness of vulnerability to the transmission of disease that came about as a result of increased flows of population. The second half of the nineteenth century was remarkable for an expansion in commercial and population exchange; a ‘truly multilateral network of world trade’ emerged as a result of a long-term revolution in shipping and train travel.11 Flows of population were stimulated by ‘Falling freight rates, greater speeds, and more extensive international communications’, which in turn ‘induced a rising share of the British population to emigrate.’ But these flows were not only outwards, for ‘Increased mobility and greater information also made return migration much more feasible, with the result that something like forty per cent of emigrants returned home.’12 There was also movement 8 ‘The National Leprosy Fund’, Times, 14 January 1890, p. 7. 9 Ibid. 10 The Prince of Wales announced that ‘there is at this very moment a leper with his hands distinctly infected by the disease in one of the large London meat markets’; see also ‘The Alleged Case of Leprosy at the Meat Markets’, Times, 19 June 1889, p. 13; ‘The Case of Leprosy in the London Meat Market’, Times, 21 June 1889, p. 5. 11 P.J. Cain, ‘Economics and Empire: The Metropolitan Context’, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 42. 12 Cain argues that figures of outward passenger movement are no indication of longterm migration. Between 1853 and 1920, there were over 8 million outward passenger

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between colonies: Northrup writes that ‘After the British Isles, the most important source of overseas emigrants within the nineteenth-century Empire was British India.’ Much of this was migration due to indentured labor, and between 1834 and 1924, nearly one-and-a-half million Indians traveled to Mauritius, Réunion, British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, the French Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, East Africa, Natal, Fiji, Burma, Ceylon and British Malaya.13 Exchanges of population from west to east and back again, as well as transcolonial migrations, were predicated upon economic exchange, and inadvertently facilitated bacillary exchange. One of the National Leprosy Fund’s ideas was to have a leprosy ward in London, a response to the ‘fluctuating foreign population that our shipping trade is constantly bringing to our shores’. The ward was to facilitate a ‘special study of leprosy’ in a city that was ‘the center of all knowledge’ as much as it was ‘the center of wealth and enterprise’.14 In the face of the concern that leprosy was returning from the colonies, a special leprosy ward would serve the dual purpose of containing sufferers and facilitating research. The disease spoke to deep-seated anxieties in part because of its attack on the integrity of the body. In 1867, Sir Erasmus Wilson had produced case studies of eighteen Europeans and one ‘native’, all of whom had lived in India, Ceylon, Mauritius or the West Indies. These studies charted the distinguishing features of the disease.15 The collective effect is of a metamorphosis in disposition and physical appearance – a descent from what constitutes a human being to something else. A child began to change in countenance and behavior, while the alterations to another ‘gave an occasional gleam of savageness to his countenance’. Their faces and skin were altered, as features ‘spread out’, ‘enlarged and flattened’. The skin became covered in spots that changed from ‘beautiful pink’ to ‘purple’ and finally ‘dirty brown’, or shone as if it were greasy. On the face, the skin thickened around the eyebrows, nose, lips, chin and ears, giving the face ‘a frowning and dejected expression’.16 One sufferer looked like a Satyr: ‘His features were large and of a deep red-brown or copper colour; the forehead was deeply wrinkled and studded with tubercles; two of the tubercles at the upper angles of the forehead resembling young horns; the brow was thickened, heavy, frowning and deprived of hair; the eyes suffused with redness … The voice was hoarse and sonorous’.17 Another begins to look like ‘a native’: ‘From his infancy he was somewhat darker in complexion than his brother and sister … but during the last few years, and especially the last twelve months, has become swarthy, and at present is darker than a native of India’.18 The ability to speak deteriorated, and the body altered its shape: in one patient, ‘the rest journeys from England and Wales and over 1.5 million from Scotland, p. 46. 13 David Northrup, ‘Migration from Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific’, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Porter, pp. 88–100. 14 National Leprosy Fund, Journal, 1 (August 1890), p. 7. 15 Erasmus Wilson, ‘Observations on the True Leprosy or Elephantiasis, with Cases’, Report on Leprosy by the Royal College of Physicians Prepared for, and Published by her Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, with an Appendix (London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswood, 1867). 16 Ibid., p. 237. 17 Ibid., p. 239. 18 Ibid., p. 240.


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of the fingers were bent in different directions and the hands distorted. He was unable to use his hands and was incapable of walking’.19 All Europeans at the outskirts of the Empire were potentially in peril. The scientific ambitions for the Commission arose from the discovery of the leprosy bacillus, and more generally from the developing science of germ theory. The bacillus had been discovered nearly twenty years before, in 1873, by G.H. Armauer Hansen, in a period when medical theories of disease were changing quite dramatically; but while disease was being rethought as having a single causative agent, as Worboys points out there was not as yet a single germ theory, but many.20 Medical explanations of disease took into account predisposing causes, causative agents, and contributing factors that may have triggered the onset of an illness, but debates about leprosy were more often about the management and degree of state intervention than about etiology. In addition, medical opinions on the contagiousness of leprosy functioned as markers of expertise within the medical fraternity, as sophisticated views served to distinguish the professional medical approach from popular understandings. Scientific and humane thinking was ranged against public opinion, which was characterized as ignorant, prejudiced, misguided, wasteful and inhumane.21 In the public imagination, leprosy was represented as increasing in the colonies, while in India it was described as a growing problem and an imperial responsibility. The case for legislation that would ensure segregation was negotiated in the public domain with a view to putting pressure on the Government of India, at least throughout the last half of the century. Public debate on leprosy consisted of a complex of medical, political, missionary, colonial and imperial discourses, with all parties at pains to represent themselves as humane and responsible. Although it was seemingly a response to a single death, the Commission was in fact the culmination of a set of debates that in the popular imagination had long connected leprosy with India: as early as 1862, when the Royal College of Physicians was instituting its questionnaire to the colonies, the Times had expressed the wish that the interrogatories be extended to India ‘where the malady is by no means infrequent among the lower classes of the native population in various districts.’22 A month later, it was claimed that the extent to which the countries of the East were infected with the disease was in proportion to the physical and moral degradation of their people,23 and in 1864, a lengthy article from the Bengal Hurkaru was republished, in which it was claimed that ‘our streets and bazaars [are] furnishing us with terrible illustrations of the ravages which this disease makes on the human face and figure’, the dimensions of the problem in India making it the concern of both the ‘philanthropist and the statesman’.24 It was in the light of this kind of discussion that India seemed the obvious site for a modern, scientific investigation into the disease when Damien died. The commissioners began and carried out their investigation in the full glare of the public, making it 19 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., p. 244. Worboys, pp. 20–42. Ibid., p. 31. ‘Leprosy in Our Colonies’, Times, 17 October 1862, p. 10. ‘Leprosy in the East Indies’, Times, 26 November 1862, p. 9. ‘Leprosy in India’, Times, 5 October 1864, p. 10.

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remarkable that at the end of their journey, they simply vanished from public view. For the National Leprosy Fund, who had brought the Commission into being, public views of the disease would be overwhelmingly influential in shaping their responses to the findings of the Commission. Medical reports and newspaper reporting did not belong to separate domains, but overlapped and reinforced each other. In the British colonies alone, considerable effort had been devoted to medical reports and works on leprosy. In the 1860s, Davidson had written on leprosy in Madagascar and Tilbury Fox on leprosy in the East.25 Intercolonial communications were by no means unknown: for example, Dr Hillebrand, in Honolulu, exchanged experiences with Macnamara in India.26 At the same time, the Leprosy Committee of the Royal College of Physicians set up, conducted and published its own report between 1863 and 1867, and R.H. Bakewell investigated Beauperthuy’s ‘cure’ in Venezuela and reported back to the College in 1868 and to Parliament in 1871.27 In the decade of the 1870s, an even more intense exchange of information took place. Henry Vandyke Carter published on leprosy in the Bombay Presidency, and Gavin Milroy, the most influential member of the Royal College of Physicians’ Leprosy Committee, reported on leprosy and yaws in the West Indies.28 Vandyke Carter wrote on leprosy in Norway and India, and then reported on leprosy in North Italy, the Greek Archipelago and Palestine, as well as in Kattiawar; Planck published in the same year on leprosy in the North-West provinces of India.29 In this period, trials with gurjon oil were conducted and reported on in the Madras Presidency, and Hillis published a report on the same treatment on the basis of his experiences in Mahaica, British Guiana.30 Lewis and Cunningham produced their report on leprosy in 25 Andrew Davidson, Tubercular Leprosy in Madagascar (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1864); Tilbury Fox, ‘Leprosy, Ancient and Modern with Notes Taken During Recent Travel in the East’, Edinburgh Medical Journal, 11 (1865–66), pp. 795–804. 26 Papers of the Committee on Leprosy, 1858–98, Ms 4119/198, Correspondence from Hillebrand to Macnamara, of Honolulu, Sandwich Islands, Calcutta, February 3, 1866, Royal College of Physicians Archives and Manuscripts Collection. 27 Papers of the Committee on Leprosy, 1858–98, Ms 4119/291 and following, Correspondence from Dr Bakewell to Dr Beauperthuy, 14 July 1868, Royal College of Physicians Archives and Manuscripts Collection. 28 H. Vandyke Carter, Report on the Prevalence and Character of Leprosy in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, Byculla, 1872); Gavin Milroy, Report on Leprosy and Yaws in the West Indies Addressed to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies (London; Great Britain, Colonial Office, 1873). 29 Vandyke Carter, The Pathology of Leprosy: with a Note on the Segregation of Lepers in India (London: J.E. Adlard, 1873); idem, On Leprosy and Elephantiasis (London: George Edward Eyre, 1874); idem, Report on Leprosy and the Leper Asylums of Norway with References to India (Great Britain, India Office, 1874); idem, Modern Indian Leprosy: Being the Report of a Tour in Kattiawar, 1876 with Addenda on Norwegian, Cretan and Syrian Leprosy (Bombay, 1876); idem, Reports on Leprosy (Second Series) Comprising Notices of the Disease as it Now exists in North Italy, the Greek Archipelago, Palestine and part of the Bombay Presidency (Great Britain, India Office, 1876); C. Planck, Report on Leprosy (in India) ([Naini Tal?], 1876). 30 Report on the Treatment of Leprosy with Gurjon Oil and Other Remedies in Hospitals of the Madras Presidency [Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, No. LII)


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India for the Sanitary Commission, Hewlett wrote on leprosy in Bombay, and Davidson on leprosy in Mauritius.31 In the 1880s, Beaven Rake reported on leprosy in Trinidad, and Dr Phineas Abraham wrote on the etiology of the disease.32 While the medical reports would not have been available to the general public in Britain or the colonies, an examination of the Times reveals that various medical viewpoints were filtered into, reiterated and even debated in the public sphere. Letters to the Editor, for example, became legitimate terrain for debates within the medical fraternity, or between the public and the Government of India. In the Times, medical authority was deployed freely in the public domain, supporting Worboys’s contention that knowledge of the disease contributed to medical status.33 Questions of contagiousness and communicability were debated, and various medical opinions as to how the disease may have been transmitted were enlisted. Questions of responsibility, the limits of medical efficacy, and what was to be hoped for from medical research were discussed.34 Readers of the Times were treated to an appeal for funds for a young Englishman who had been born in Calcutta and arrived in England in 1863, having contracted the disease. The authorities of Sir Henry Thompson, Erasmus Wilson, Robert Liveing, Tilbury Fox and Dyce Duckworth underpinned the appeal.35 William Johnston wrote about his use of carbolic acid as a cure, of the experimental method of Claud Bernard, and of the value of a study of leprosy in India.36 As to contagiousness,37 the Archdeacon Henry Press Wright mobilized medical authority by citing the experiment conducted on the condemned criminal Keanu. His letter was bolstered with a medical report on the case from the board of health in Honolulu.38 In a subsequent edition of the newspaper, his view was corrected by Robert Liveing, in order to point out that there was no evidence to demonstrate that the disease was contagious in the ordinary sense of the word.39

(Madras: Government Press, 1876); J.D. Hillis, Report on the Employment of Gurjun Oil in the Treatment of Leprosy at the Leper Asylum, Mahaica, British Guiana (British Guiana, Demerara: Royal Gazette Office, 1878); Report on the Leper Asylum at Mahaica for the Year 1877 (British Guiana, Demerara: Royal Gazette Office, 1878). 31 T.R. Lewis and D.D. Cunningham, Appendix B Leprosy in India, 12th Annual Report of the Sanitary Commission with the Government of India (Calcutta, 1877), pp. 174–219; T.G. Hewlett, Report on the Prevalence of Leprosy (Bombay: Sanitary Commissioner, 1878); A. Davidson, Report on Leprosy in Mauritius (Mauritius, 1879). 32 Beaven Rake, Report on Leprosy in the Trinidad Leper Asylum for 1889 (Port of Spain; Government Printing Office, Port of Spain, 1890); Phineas S. Abraham, ‘The Etiology of Leprosy: A Criticism of Some Current Views’, Practitioner, 42 (1889), pp. 153–60. 33 Worboys, p. 31. 34 ‘Leprosy in India’, Times, 5 October 1864, p. 10. 35 Surgeon, ‘Oriental Leprosy’, Letter to the Editor, Times, 18 March 1875, p. 8. 36 William Johnston, ‘Tubercle and Leprosy’, Letter to the Editor, Times, 3 June 1882, p. 6. 37 ‘Is Leprosy Contagious?’, Times, 7 April 1883, p. 6. 38 H.P. Wright, ‘Inoculation with Leprosy Performed’, Letter to the Editor, Times, 19 November 1888, p. 13. 39 Robert Liveing, ‘Inoculation of Leprosy’, Times, 22 November 1888, p. 3.

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Once the National Leprosy Fund was established, Dr Phineas Abraham made a case for more research, while describing what was known of the disease.40 Very few of these articles did not include the claim that leprosy was on the increase in the colonies. In 1862, when the Royal College of Physicians were to embark on their survey, it was stated that ‘In some parts of India one person in every hundred is a leper; and in some parts of the West Indies, as well as the Sandwich Islands, this disease is also very prevalent.’41 Twenty-five years later, Wright’s urgent letter to the editor argued that the disease was spreading in the colonies, drawing a response from the Royal College of Physicians that reiterated the findings of their investigation twenty years before.42 But Wright insisted unequivocally that leprosy was ‘spreading far and wide, and in some regions with a fearful rapidity.’ He cited St Louis physician Dr Ernest Besnier’s address to the French Academy of Medicine, which claimed that ‘every year, soldiers, sailors, merchants, sisters of charity, and others bring back with them the malady into France, and in Paris the St Louis Hospital receives constantly lepers in all stages of the disease.’ Wright also expressed the danger for those at home: If you determine to spread abroad the dangerous opinion that the leper cannot convey his disease to others; if everywhere and under all conditions free intercourse be permitted even to lepers (they are coming back from America in ever-increasing numbers), not many years will elapse before that which I clearly foresee will come to pass. Put poor and helpless lepers in one of those miserable fishing villages where cholera finds so ready a home, and you may then fully expect after a certain time has elapsed to see a raging leper-centre in our own country.43

By the time the National Leprosy Fund was preparing to raise funds for the Commission to India, Abraham, the Medical Secretary for the Fund, was able to conclude with authority that ‘leprosy is really increasing in many parts of India, in South Africa, and in some of our West Indian colonies.’44 In an accompanying article, Roose averred that ‘The eradication of leprosy from our Eastern Empire would indeed be a splendid monument to Father Damien’s memory – in truth a monumentum ære perennius.’45 In 1876, the Times had carried a long and informative article on leprosy in India.46 Under the guise of responding to an earlier letter from a member of the Indian Medical Service urging that the visit of the Prince of Wales to India be commemorated by eradicating leprosy for the sake of the unfortunates affected by the disease as well as the sake of the healthy, while also claiming to outline ‘the chief facts that bear on the case’, this article imports the debate and politics around leprosy in India into the public domain. This debate is set up as an opposition between the work and advocacy of 40 Abraham, ‘Leprosy and Its Causes’, Fortnightly Review, 52 (1889), pp. 150–52. 41 ‘Leprosy in New Brunswick’, Times, 10 November 1874, p. 4. 42 Wright, ‘The Spread of Leprosy’, Letter to the Editor, Times, 8 November 1887, p. 13; idem, ‘Leprosy’, Times, 11 November 1887, p. 3. 43 Wright, ‘The Spread of Leprosy’. 44 Abraham, ‘Etiology of Leprosy’, p. 152. 45 Robson Roose, ‘Lepers and Leprosy in Norway’, Fortnightly Review, 52 (1889), pp. 847–53. 46 ‘Indian Leprosy’, Times, 10 April 1876, p. 4.


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Dr Henry Vandyke Carter, and the Government of India’s sanitarian orientation.47 The article claims that Carter’s newly published reports on leprosy in Norway and India, and the case that these establish for the value of legislation in controlling the disease, have prompted the Government of India (once it had decided not to extend its resources in this area) to stop Carter’s enthusiastic advocacy. The Government’s response ‘has been that nothing is to be done; that Dr Vandyke Carter is to terminate his enquiries, that Drs Cunningham and Lewis, whose hands are already full, are to continue Dr Carter’s scientific and microscopical work, and that the Sanitation Committee and health officers are to collect the general facts – an addition to their present duties which is not likely to be performed as to bring the facts into any embarrassing degree of prominence.’ In addition, ‘The Government has even been so unwise as to assign reason for its decision, alleging the magnitude of the evil and the cost of dealing with it as pleas which justify leaving it to increase unchecked and further stating that ‘segregation commends itself to those who believe that leprosy is in some way or other contagious’.48 After the alarmist letters of Wright in 1888, and the College’s response, the Indian Government’s position is made clear in a later article entitled ‘Leprosy in India’. Essentially, the position is that while the only measure to effectively stamp out the disease would be absolute segregation, this is impracticable in India and ‘for the present the Government can do no more than encourage the grant of medical and charitable relief to lepers in voluntary hospitals and leper asylums.’49 In June 1889, Robert Pringle, retired Surgeon-Major of the Sanitary Department, restated the policies of the Indian Government: ‘During the last 12 months several allusions and indeed articles on the subject of leprosy have appeared but I think it will be allowed that the climax was reached when the heroic sufferer in the leper isle of Molokai [i.e. Damien] closed his life of self-denial and devotion as a fellow sufferer with and partaker of the terrible disease to which he fell a willing victim.’50 Pringle refers disparagingly to the unique views of the sanitarian advisors of the Government of India, but while he makes a plea for the beggars who are soon to be subjected to government control, he joins those, like Wright, who see in leprosy a cause for alarm in the Empire and at home: I may mention that in the increase of this leprosy in India lurks a subtle danger to the health of the Briton in that country and ultimately in his own, and this is far more subtle than can be realized by the unprofessional observer, and it is one to which the Government’s attention will have to be specifically drawn.51

47 The politics of the rivalry between the Sanitation Department and the Indian Medical Service is discussed in Buckingham, Leprosy in Colonial South India. The policies of the Government of India and the Sanitary Department are described in Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 48 ‘Indian Leprosy’. 49 ‘Leprosy in India’, Times, 26 November 1888, p. 4. 50 Robert Pringle, ‘The Government of India and Leprosy in India’, Letter to the Editor, Times, 12 June 1889, p. 4. 51 Ibid.

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The next day the annual meeting of the Epidemiological Society, which was reported in the Times, debated the spread of leprosy. Readers were told that Dr Phineas Abraham gave a paper, ‘Leprosy: A Review of Some Facts and Figures’, and after the examination of two cases, Robert Pringle delivered a paper, ‘On the Increases of Leprosy in India: its Causes, Probable Consequences and Remedies’. In the discussion that followed, there was the suggestion that ‘one of the possible consequences of this increase of the disease in India was that it would spread to Britain and all other countries which had intimate relations with India unless prompt and effective measures were taken to prevent it.’ Even though Dr Brudenell Carter stated that there was no cause for alarm, the chair Dr Thorne Thorne concluded that as there seemed to be ‘a preponderance of evidence that leprosy was on the increase in different parts of the world, it was necessary that measure should be promptly taken to prevent its spread.’ He called for Government action, a compulsory system of segregation, and noted the need for careful inquiry.52 The Government of India was publicly challenged to involve itself in measures against leprosy. The medical domain, the popular domain, and issues of governance were interrelated; more specifically, debate about the governance of India was not confined to India, but took place (in part) in the Times. The Journal of the Leprosy Investigation Committee, edited by Abraham as Medical Secretary to the Committee, was instrumental in setting the stage for the work of the Commission. It detailed their progress, accompanying these accounts with reports on leprosy from all parts of the world, while experts such as Patrick Manson were also called on to comment. International debates were summarized in a section entitled ‘Abstracts of Debates, Reports etc’.53 A confusing diversity of views on the etiology of the disease was expressed: most were prepared to subscribe to the view that leprosy was contagious, but there was no agreement about how this might occur. For William Moore, it was a phase of inherited syphilis, communicable by inoculation; for Beatson, leprosy emerged from within the system, but products could form that were capable of setting up similar action in the tissues of others.54 For Murray, it was a poison, communicable by inoculation or through a broken surface of the skin, while Francis argued that it was a disease that arose from ‘non-integrity of the blood’; both hereditary transmission and vaccination may be responsible for its propagation.55 Van der Straaten subscribed to Jonathan Hutchinson’s view that it was caused by eating fish, while D.D. Cunningham, from his laboratory in Calcutta, supplied a series of possible questions to be put to those in charge of the leprosy asylums that were underpinned by the assumption that leprosy was a disease of locality.56 Manson crustily put the Fund in its place by arguing strongly for priority to be given to the pathologist and the work of the laboratory, so that the life history of the bacillus could be determined:

52 ‘The Spread of Leprosy’, Times, 13 June 1889, p. 10. 53 These included reports from Jamaica, Trinidad, Burma, Fiji, Cyprus and Hawaii in the first number of the journal. 54 National Leprosy Fund, Journal, 1 (August 1890), pp. 27, 33. 55 Ibid., pp. 46, 57. 56 Ibid., pp. 54, 59.


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until pathological science has spoken very much more decidedly on the subject of leprosy than heretofore, philanthropists and governments have no opportunity, unless it be to subsidise and encourage the pathologist … Without scientific guidance there can only be blind, methodless, ineffective groping in the dark, and the time and money that might be spent in attempts to cure and exterminate leprosy would simply be thrown away.57

Most called for a closer study of the disease, convinced that science would bring enlightenment, but there was no consensus regarding the value of segregation of sufferers. Moore stated that ‘wholesale segregation would be opposed to the sympathies of people in many parts of India’, while Murray recommended ‘perfect isolation of the sick, separation of the sexes, and removal of children’.58 It was expected that the investigation would resolve these differences of view. The second number of the journal reported on the progress of the commissioners as they arrived in Bombay and traveled to Hyderabad. It also assembled evidence of the complex political scenario in India in such a way that it set the stage for the commissioners to effect a resolution in this field as well. Through an exchange of correspondence, it is clear that the Government of India had appointed local commissioners and notified local governments. It indicated its willingness to cooperate with the Commission, but explicitly reserved its right to accept or reject any conclusions. A draft leprosy bill had been under consideration since 1889, so the Viceroy told Sir Somers Vine, the Honorary Secretary for the National Leprosy Fund, that the Fund’s appeal for subscriptions would not be circulated in India until this legislation had been put in place.59 But a preface to the reports from the local governments, in response to the Government’s draft legislation, stated quite clearly that ‘Considering the conflicting opinions of those consulted, the Government is advised that there is no safe basis for an enactment even of the restricted description proposed.’60 Most tellingly, this statement frames reports from the local governments that unambiguously request stronger legislation and stronger measures.61 The Government was being very bold in its refusal to be pressured, just as the National Leprosy Fund was, by publishing these exchanges, clearly attempting to embarrass the government of India.62 In the very midst of this reporting, two newspaper accounts from India were reproduced in the Journal. The second, longer report from the Times of India welcomes the Commission as an adroit maneuver terminating three years of debate in the country.63 The account opens the door onto the troubled stage of the continuing politics of leprosy legislation in India, and the reporter argues strongly for the newspaper’s right to comment on matters of public health, even in the face of government opposition to the public call for legislation that would ensure segregation of those affected by leprosy. 57 Ibid., p. 39. 58 Ibid., p. 47. 59 Ibid., p. 29. 60 Ibid., p. 31. 61 For the progress of this legislation, see Buckingham. 62 Worboys also points this out, p. 32. 63 ‘From the Times of India, 18th November, 1890’, extracted in the National Leprosy Fund, Journal, 2 (February 1891), pp. 22–6.

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The Commission The fundraising dinner at the Métropole had set the stage for the Commission to be conducted in a modern scientific mode: ‘young men, fresh methods and new zeal were to be brought to bear on the subject’.64 The task for the commissioners was ‘to acquaint themselves with the features of the disease as it appears in the Empire’, by ‘travelling from centre to centre, and from asylum to asylum, and personally enquiring into the histories of as large a number of lepers as possible.’ In the final stages of their investigation, they were ‘to assemble at some hill station in order to supplement their enquiries by pathological and bacteriological researches.’ In five months, the commissioners covered hundreds of miles, from Bombay in the west to the south, through Hyderabad and Madras, to Madura. They set out then in two parties: one went to Rangoon and Mandalay, in what is now Burma; the other departed from Calcutta to travel into the north-west as far as Peshawah. Members of the investigating party personally examined over 2000 lepers, and compiled exhaustive charts of their observations. Often they went to asylums, where they were able to inspect the inmates, while in cities and towns where there was no asylum, lepers were herded into the local civil hospital compound for inspection.65 In numerous instances, the investigators noted that of those presented for examination, several were not actually suffering from the disease.66 Considering that they had left England with a barely tacit agenda to make a case for the detention and isolation of those with the potential to threaten civilization, the commissioners’ observations and arguments were, to their credit, measured and well considered, albeit clearly made with the voices of the ‘experts’ at home in their ears. They attempted to mediate the disjunction between the views that informed their investigation, and their observations. But there are moments in their report that reveal the sheer complexity of their task. Their observations had to be made ‘at a distance’, and they remark that ‘The arrival of the Commission at any place frequently caused many lepers to leave the locality. The small number collected here [Burdwan] is possibly to be explained in this way’.67 Evidence of their outsider status is provided in two further instances, in the acknowledgment that ‘in consequence of the conditions of life in India few adult women were seen’, and the remark that they were excluded from examining members of the higher castes – in Tarn Taran, for example, they noted that ‘many wealthy lepers live in a separate quarter of the town. It was not possible to obtain any information from them’.68 In addition, people affected by the disease had their own ideas about appropriate cures; in the same place, ‘Owing to the reputation that 64 ‘The National Leprosy Fund’, Times, 14 January 1890, p. 7. 65 Leprosy in India: Report of the Leprosy Commission in India 1890–91 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1893). 66 They note the errors in diagnosis, reporting that in places with an asylum there was a 5% rate of error and in places without an asylum a 9.5% rate. They acknowledge that ‘if a deduction be made, say, of a tenth of the lepers returned for India, a not inappreciable diminution in the estimated leper population will result.’ Ibid., p. xxii. 67 Ibid., pp. 9, 18, 20. 68 Ibid., pp. xix, 36, 23.


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the water of a tank close to the temple founded by Arjan, the fifth Guru of the Sikhs, has for healing powers in leprosy, large numbers of lepers, who bathe in and drink the water, congregate in the town’.69 Many of the asylums seemed to be functioning perfectly well. In Bombay, one founded by Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a leading Parsee noted for his benevolence, was situated in contravention of every ‘conventional’ precaution ‘in the middle of a bazaar.’ There, A colony of about one hundred and seventy lepers – men, women, and children, healthy and diseased – inhabit the place, which consists of several alleys along which water trickles in a central gutter, with badly built mud huts on both sides. The lepers are free to come and go, and by the provision of the founder each man and woman receives daily one seer of rice and three pie (about 1/5 d.) …70

It was noted that: The Superintendent of the Dharmsala has been resident … for twelve years and continued free from leprosy. His predecessor lived in the same quarters for thirty years and did not develop the disease. The indigent quarter of the Dharmsala is close to the leper colony, yet no instance could be discovered showing that the disease spread to the former.71

This germ centre, so close to the residents of the city, had arguably not functioned in the way that medical experts such as Sir Andrew Clarke had predicted that it would. The Asylum in Madras provided evidence of excellent care in pleasant surroundings: The garden is planted with trees and flowers, and the comfort of the inmates is considered in every way. The sanitation of the Asylum and ventilation of the wards is thoroughly well arranged. The diet is liberal, and the marked effect of this on the health of the patients is at once evident. The most varied attempts at palliative treatment, some of which have met with distinct success … have been carried out in this Asylum.72

The commissioners attempted to describe for their readers the magnitude of the impact of cultural difference that they experienced. They carefully pointed out their ‘doubt’, their ‘hesitation’, and their concern to guard against ‘personal opinion regarding a country of which they know but little’. They described India as a medical ‘terra incognita’ and cautioned against easy assumptions: ‘Comparisons between Indian and European life are only too readily made, and in the study of a disease the Western standard applied to all conditions alike.’73 Their attempts to cultivate the bacillus epitomize the bewildering nature of the whole investigation. In the hill stations of Almora and Simla, two separate teams conducted completely independent experiments.74 Both announced excitedly, in the British Medical Journal, that they 69 Ibid., p. 22. 70 Ibid., p. 16. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid, pp. 13–14. 73 Ibid., p. 38. 74 I have dealt with this aspect of the Commission’s work in ‘Leprosy and the Elusive M leprae: Colonial and Imperial Medical Exchanges in the Nineteenth Century’, História,

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had cultivated the bacillus, but as reported later, ‘Agar tubes containing cultures of the supposed leprosy bacillus were sent to London, where they have been examined by several bacteriologists. As it is understood that the bacillus found in these tubes does not correspond in morphological characters with the leprosy bacillus, there may have been some accidental contamination.’75 In searching for M. leprae, the commissioners found it impossible to escape a confrontation with India in all its complexity. They explained the difficulty in obtaining precise statistics as a result of the ‘Oriental indifference which is encountered everywhere and the eagerness of the Indian to agree with any suggestion made by the enquirer’.76 Ironically, they expressed themselves in metaphors of territory that had been only tentatively conquered. Referring to the difficulties in obtaining definite statistics, they wrote: The Commissioners have felt all along the insecurity of the ground invaded, and … shall point out how various are the factors which possibly may have an influence over the leper population, and that before the alarming statements of the rapid increase of leprosy over India are accepted, the most critical and scrupulous tests must be applied.77

While much of what the commissioners wrote is deliberately cautious, there is also the impression of a surrender in the face of enormity. For example, in attempting to analyze the disease’s demographics, they noted a connection between the dryness of the climate and a small leper population. They commented that ‘Whether this is only accidental it is difficult to say, and perhaps too much attention must not be attached to it. It is not intended to advance any theory on the strength of these observations. Yet the fact seemed significant enough to deserve especial mention, all the more as all three censuses bring out this general principle.’78 Similarly in their comments on individual circumstances: ‘The factors to be considered are the personal health and wealth of the individual, and the degree to which he is liable to suffer from such diseases as are caused by bad nourishment, poverty, overcrowding, and other specially endemic conditions. To obtain such details is exceedingly difficult in a vast empire like India.’79 Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, 10 (Supplement 1, 2003), pp. 13–40. 75 ‘The Leprosy Commission in India’, British Medical Journal, 7 February 1891, p. 269; ‘The Leprosy Commission in India’, British Medical Journal, 28 Feb 1891, p. 475; ‘The Leprosy Commission in India’, British Medical Journal, 9 May 1891, p. 1031; ‘Leprosy Commission’, British Medical Journal, 23 May 1891, p. 1137; ‘Apparently Successful Cultivation of the Bacillus Leprae’, by A.A. Kanthack and Surgeon-Major Barclay (Members of the Leprosy Commission), British Medical Journal, 6 Jun 1891, p. 1222; ‘Pure Cultivation of the Leprosy Bacillus’, British Medical Journal, 20 June 1891, p. 1330; ‘Cultivation of the Leprosy Bacillus in Serum’, British Medical Journal, 27 June 1891, p. 1395; ‘The Leprosy Commission’, Lancet, 7 Feb 1891, p. 324; ‘The Leprosy Commission’, Lancet, 28 Feb 1891, p. 500; ‘The Bacillus of Leprosy’, Lancet, 20 June 1891, p. 1397; ‘The Leprosy Commission’, Lancet, 27 June 1891, p. 1440; ‘The Leprosy Commission in India’, Lancet, 8 August 1891, p. 303; ‘The Leprosy Commission’, Lancet, 29 August 1891, p. 498; ‘The Leprosy Commission’, Lancet, 10 Oct 1891, p. 827. 76 Leprosy in India, p. 38. 77 Ibid., p. 37. 78 Ibid., p. 64. 79 Ibid., p. 71.


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In discussing the effect of famine on the numbers of those with the disease, they generalized that ‘During seasons of distress, such as it is perhaps only known in India, life is reduced to a struggle for existence, and herein the leper must succumb quickly, partly on account of his own miserable condition, partly on account of the poverty of his fellow men, which compels them to withhold a helping hand.’ They expressed a special plea to those who ‘realise these points’ and who will ‘exercise forbearance with the Commissioners with regard to the many shortcomings in the report, and especially in this chapter, where India is discussed as a unit.’80 In their attempt to establish some understanding, they drew comparisons in size between Indian provinces and parts of Europe: ‘If it is to be remembered that Bengal is almost as large as Spain, that the Punjab, and the North-Western Provinces, respectively, occupy only 15,000 and 8,000 square miles less than the whole British isles, and that the Bombay Presidency covers an area nearly twice as great as Great Britain and Ireland, an idea may be formed of the difficulties, it might be said futility, of drawing general deductions.’81 In the process of mapping diseased bodies over this vast continent, the Commissioners ended up making what would turn out to be, to those at home, an unwelcome decision. They wrote: Leprosy has been called an ‘Imperial Danger’, which as such deserves the fullest attention of the Government of India. Imperial, no doubt, leprosy is, for no part of India is free from it, but a danger it can only be, if it be shown to increase at such a rate as to undermine the health and life of the general population ….82

After some close reasoning based on the censuses of 1871, 1881 and 1891 and the mistakenly diagnosed cases, the commissioners stated that ‘The lepers in India have been enumerated on three different occasions, each time by different men and under altered conditions, and yet we find that the figures of the three censuses agree as much as can be expected.’83 Loath to give a decided opinion on this subject, the Commission think, that the evidence of the census excludes the idea of an increase in leprosy, and points rather to a gradual decrease at the present time; but it may be safer to assume that the diffusion of this disease has remained stationary. Anyhow an ‘Imperial Danger’ leprosy has not become as yet ….84

Against those alarmed at the so-called increase of the disease in India, they write: Though all these statements cannot be taken as absolute, and are not free from doubt and above criticism, they at least show that, in any comparison of two areas, all concomitant conditions which may influence the population at large must be carefully considered; and this has been only too often neglected by those who raised the outcry about the rapid increase of leprosy in India.85

80 81 82 83 84 85

Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., pp. 84–5. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 97.

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The report took some time to become available.86 William Tebb claims that its publication was held up because the statistics on leprosy in India had not yet been completed, but in reality its conclusions were ‘strongly objected to.’87 Two editions of the report were eventually forthcoming in 1893. The one published in Calcutta and printed by the Superintendent of Government Printing Office was titled Leprosy in India: Report of the Leprosy Commission in India 1890–91, while the other edition was authored by the National Leprosy Fund, President HRH The Prince of Wales, and appeared under the title Report of the Leprosy Commission in India.88 The British edition is distinguished by a prefatory ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Leprosy Commission’ issued by the National Leprosy Fund, which frames the conclusions of the report and distances itself from some of the most significant. The report was a huge disappointment to the Fund because it did not verify what everyone expected to have confirmed. It made six conclusions: 1. Leprosy is a disease sui generis; it is not a form of syphilis or tuberculosis, but has striking aetiological analogies with the latter. 2. Leprosy is not diffused by hereditary transmission; and for this reason, and the established amount of sterility among lepers, the disease has a natural tendency to die out. 3. Though, in a scientific classification of diseases, leprosy must be regarded as contagious, and also inoculable, yet the extent to which it is propagated by these means is exceedingly small. 4. Leprosy is not directly originated by the use of any particular article of food, nor by any climatic or telluric conditions, nor by insanitary surroundings; neither does it peculiarly affect any race or caste. 5. Leprosy is indirectly influenced by insanitary surroundings, such as poverty, bad food, or deficient drainage or ventilation; for these, by causing a predisposition, increase the susceptibility of the individual to the disease. 6. Leprosy, in the great majority of cases, originates de novo, that is, from a sequence or concurrence of causes and conditions, dealt with in the report, and which are related to each other in ways at present imperfectly known.89 The Fund stated in its Memorandum that it accepted only conclusions 1, 2, 4 and 5. It disagreed with the third on contagion and inoculation, and the sixth on the origin of leprosy, remarking that ‘the evidence adduced does not justify the conclusions’. In addition, the Fund was very disappointed that the Commission had come to the 86 ‘Report of the Leprosy Commission’, Lancet, 18 March 1893, pp. 610–11. 87 William Tebb, The Recrudescence of Leprosy and its Causation: A Popular Treatise (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), p. 298. 88 This was published for the Executive Committee by William Clowes and Sons 1893, but inside the front cover, this British edition bears the same title page as the Calcutta edition and in fact states that it was published in Calcutta. Apparently, the National Leprosy Fund simply removed the hard covers of the Calcutta editions and rebound the reports, so as to include their memorandum. 89 Leprosy in India, p. 384.


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view that ‘neither compulsory nor voluntary segregation would at present effectually stamp out the disease, or even markedly diminish the leper population, under the existing conditions of life in India’, and on that basis had advised against any imperial act of law to contain lepers. The Fund refused to endorse this view, indeed stating that it ‘entertain[ed] a precisely opposite opinion’ and appending recommendations for segregation.90 In India, the recommendations of the Commission were only one aspect of the negotiation between the Government of India, the presidency governments, and public opinion represented by the Indian middle class that had begun with the 1889 Leprosy Bill, continuing with the 1896 Leprosy Bill and the 1898 Lepers Act. In spite of opinions expressed by the provincial governments, class interests and a desire to protect trade, legislation was arrived at targeting vagrants but avoiding workers and home-dwellers with the disease. Sanjiv Kakar explains that the government of India’s response to leprosy is one instance of highly constrained disease control that was not limited by a fear of Indian reprisals, while Jane Buckingham explains how this occurred, in her analysis of the fissures between the Colonial Government, the provincial governments and the Indian elite, so that at each remove from Britain, the exercise of power became increasingly subject to negotiation and opposition. In India, it suited the Government to adopt the recommendations of the Leprosy Commission, while in Britain, the danger of contagion had been too heavily invested in publicly for it to be abandoned, even when the Commission found that there was no evidence to indicate any increase in the disease in India. As Worboys suggests, the National Leprosy Fund, having set up the Commission to bring closure to the issues of contagion and segregation, ended up increasing uncertainties,91 and there was a consensus that the investigation contributed nothing new. In comparison to the public spectacle that had been offered at the onset, the Commission’s disappearance off stage was barely heralded. Only in June 1895 was there offered any official acknowledgement of the work of the commissioners, and by then, two of them had died.92 George Buckmaster, the appointee of the National Leprosy Fund, lecturer at St George’s Hospital and former Radcliffe Fellow, Magdalene College Oxford, was silent, and Alfredo Antunes Kanthack, the Royal College of Surgeon’s appointee from St Bartholomew’s, Clinical Assistant and Midwifery Assistant, was the only commissioner to attempt a defense of the Commission’s findings.93 No one dared even to imagine that they should be considered worthy successors to Father Damien; and in spite of the fact that knowledge of modes of transmission of leprosy has not advanced much further in the twenty-first century, the commissioners were to be treated as if they had, indeed, been tainted by their own investigation.

90 National Leprosy Fund, President HRH The Prince of Wales, Report of the Leprosy Commission in India (Executive Committee: William Clowes and Sons, 1893). 91 Worboys, p. 33. 92 ‘The National Leprosy Fund’, Times, 26 June 1895, p. 6. 93 A.A. Kanthack, ‘Notes on Leprosy in India’, Practitioner, 50 (1893), pp. 464–9; 51 (1893), pp. 67–71.


Chapter 5

Coincidences and Likely Stories: Perverse Desire and Viral Exchange in the ‘Origin’ of AIDS Susan Knabe In 1959 the US Air Force ordered a special team to venture deep into the jungles of Central Africa. Their mission was as simple as it was bizarre – catch chimpanzees and bring them back to America. It was the height of the cold war, Elvis was a rising star and John F. Kennedy was preparing for a run at the presidency. No one had heard of AIDS. This mission was one of several during the 1950s in which 65 infant chimpanzees were captured and sent to Holloman Air Force base in the New Mexico desert. One of those caught in 1959 was called Marilyn.1

In February 1999, reports in the scientific and popular press hailed, as of fundamental importance in the search for the origin of AIDS, the discovery of the remains of a chimp who had died infected with a simian version of the virus associated with AIDS. The discovery confirmed, the newspaper reports suggested, the first absolute link between AIDS and a small area in western Africa. ‘Marilyn’s Mission: Solve the HIV Riddle’ (continued inside as ‘The secret life of Marilyn the chimp’) tells the story of a chimpanzee caught in Africa in 1959, and brought to the US for space research.2 Marilyn died in 1985. Because she had tested positive for simian immuno virus (SIV), an HIV-like virus, and her sexual and research history suggested that she had acquired the disease as an infant in Africa, her remains were frozen, pending the development of more advanced viral technology. In 1995, analysis of her SIV revealed that she and two other chimps belonging to a subspecies from an area in central western Africa had the same form of SIV. Moreover, this particular virus was very similar to HIV-1. The fact that it occurred in the Pan troglodytes troglodytes subspecies, which inhabits the same part of central western Africa as the first HIV-infected humans, allowed the research team to conclude that they had identified the species as the origin of HIV, and to suggest that the virus might have been transferred from the chimps (in which it does not cause symptoms) to humans through the eating of chimpanzee meat.

1 Cameron Stewart, ‘Marilyn’s Mission: Solve the HIV Riddle’, Weekend Australian, 6–7 February 1999, p. 1. 2 Stewart, pp. 1, 6.

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This news story is one in a long and tangled series of originary stories which seek to fix the origins of AIDS in terms of relations between first and third world. These relations are shot through with the specters of illicit and perverse sexuality, of trade in bodies – both animal and human – for research, pleasure and profit, and, as such, they recreate and reinforce an historical balance of trade between first- and thirdworld nations. What I hope to explore in this chapter is how ideological anxieties circulating within the political, social and psychological space of the ‘West’ seek to rewrite this traffic in bodies, diseases and desires under the rubric, in Western terms, of perversion and technology. In doing so, I will be teasing out the various discourses of the epidemic, scientific and ‘non-scientific’, which are constitutive of its apparent historical trajectory, an historical trajectory which I am defining arbitrarily through the ‘localization’ of the origin of AIDS to western Africa with the identification of a simian version of retroviral immune deficiency. Telling Tales I: Green Monkeys, The Science of AIDS, and (De)Constructing the Narrative of Science If members of the newspaper-reading public were surprised at all by the announcement of a definitive link between the origin of AIDS and geographical western Africa, it was by the relative recentness of the ‘discovery’, since the African and simian ‘origin’ of AIDS had by the mid-1980s achieved within popular consciousness both a degree of common-sense plausibility and the patina of scientific truth.3 An important volume in establishing the latter was the October 1988 edition of Scientific American, headed ‘What Science Knows about AIDS’. As Cindy Patton points out, the verb ‘knows’ carries with it certainties that exceeded the actual state of research into AIDS/HIV.4 This edition was reissued in 1989 as a book, The Science of AIDS, a title which further reifies the state of knowledge.5 While the virus is clearly the star of The Science of AIDS, appearing on the cover in a colorized photomicrograph, and in the majority of the photographs and illustrations throughout the book, the remaining illustrations clearly indicate the ideological work being done. The full-page photo of a green monkey (illustrating ‘The origins of AIDS’), as well as several photos which show people attending a funeral for a ‘victim’ of AIDS, receiving educational information about AIDS, and in a hospital situation, all of whom are persons of color and most of whom obviously are located in Africa, establish AIDS as a geographically and racially ‘other-ed’ disease. The rhetorical use of these photos maintains the pristine quality of the science of AIDS found in North American and European laboratories – the lovingly photographed viruses – while at the same time distancing the origin and effects of that virus onto the central African 3 In the question period following delivery of this as a paper, the vast majority of the audience acknowledged that they too were surprised that this discovery was ‘news’. The scientific debunking of the green monkey theory of viral origin sank without a trace in the popular media. 4 Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 65. 5 Scientific American, The Science of AIDS: Readings from Scientific American Magazine (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1989).

Perverse Desire and Viral Exchange in the ‘Origin’ of AIDS

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bodies, both simian and human. The representations further underscore the allegedly simian origin of AIDS – the authors list the most likely candidate as the African green monkey – and its African connections, connections which are tenuous at best and contradictory at worst. The way in which these inconsistencies are papered over is revealed through a graphic which provides a quick comparison table of various types of monkeys and their viruses, and ‘man’ and his virus. The iconic representations of line drawings of various monkeys and a lounging man wearing sunglasses recreate the standard evolution of ‘man’ through ascending orders of primates, in ways which suggest both the plausibility of the relationship between simian and human immune deficiency viruses, and a potential mechanism for it (evolution), without offering any direct evidence of either. The privileged position of scientific and medical discourses, such as those within The Science of AIDS, has increasingly been problematized and opened up by the tools of textual analysis; critiques by feminist and queer theorists have advanced this project as it pertains to AIDS. As Michael Scarce notes in ‘Harbinger of Plague’, A great deal is at stake in viewing scientific knowledge as culturally constructed knowledge, for this allows one to begin to understand science within its context, not simply as unquestionable truth and objective fact. … A study of scientific knowledge can reveal as much about the culture from which it was produced as the world which it attempts to explain and unravel … The reflexive acknowledgment that sciences are laden with the values of the cultures from which they stem provides an entry point for disruption in the sense of re-imagining scientific knowledge in ways that are less sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic.6

Moreover, while Scarce identifies his disruption of scientific discourse as potentially recuperative, a critique of scientific discourse in light of the experience of AIDS provides us not with a series of fully formed alternatives, but rather with a series of fragments, partial stories, which point to the violence with which these narratives of science were constructed. Paula Treichler’s observation that AIDS is an ‘epidemic of signification’ and ‘a plague of discourse’ locates that originary violence, as well as the locus of potential intervention, within language.7 Or to put it another way, the frames which science provides to organize experience and information necessarily, as Steven Epstein notes, ‘work to exclude alternative ways of interpreting an experience’.8 For instance, Epstein observes that distinctions between primary and predisposing causes of AIDS were lost once the debate moved ‘Outside of the medical and scientific professions’. He adds that ‘the various usages of the word “cause” not only blurred these meanings but embedded notions of causation within a more general vocabulary of moral blame … 6 Michael Scarce, ‘Harbinger of Plague: A Bad Case of Gay Bowel Syndrome’, Journal of Homosexuality, 34:2 (1997), p. 2. 7 Paula Treichler, ‘AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification’, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 31. 8 Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 50, my emphasis.

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[and] the genesis of the new epidemic of immune dysfunction was considered all too often with a view to assigning culpability’.9 This movement away from the specificity of precise medical terminology is exacerbated, he argues, by a tendency to see science as ‘a producer of certainty’, a tendency which increases the further one journeys from the research front. However, he notes that this movement from qualified hypotheses to unqualified facts is observable in both the medical and lay reports over the period in which HIV was first posited as the cause of AIDS.10 He remarks that Conventional views of science presume a top–down model of knowledge dissemination. True ideas originate within a select community of educated specialists; from there, they percolate ‘downward’; eventually, in watered-down or distorted form, they penetrate the consciousness of the masses. But as Stephen Hilgartner has argued, this model fails to capture the ways in which ‘popularized knowledge feeds back into the research process’ … As Hilgartner noted, ‘when one looks carefully for the precise location of the boundary between genuine scientific knowledge and popularized representations, one runs into trouble ….’11

An example from discourses on homosexuality in Canadian medical journals, offered in the next section of this chapter, demonstrates how it is possible to move between qualified and unqualified accounts of medical phenomena. Telling Tales II: Retained Foreign Objects and Elided Foreign Bodies In December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s list of mental disorders, following an intensive campaign by gay men and lesbians. There is an interesting realignment within the medical literature of this time to refocus on corporeal (rather than mental) aspects of homosexuality and their relationship to disease, a realignment which reaches its fullest expression within the medical literature during the AIDS crisis.12 The (re-)pathologizing of the gay male body (and through perverse desire, the gay male mind) took place with startling rapidity once AIDS was identified with male– male sexual practices, though this (re-)pathologizing was already becoming evident in the wake of the APA decision.13 Indeed, the first mention of homosexuality in the

9 Ibid, p. 53. 10 We saw this earlier with the ways in which the titles of Scientific American worked to eliminate uncertainty about the state of HIV/AIDS research. 11 Epstein, pp. 141–2, my emphasis. 12 Michael Lynch and Gary Kinsman make this connection explicit: Lynch, at the time, in his 1982 article, ‘Living with Kaposi’s Sarcoma and AIDS’, Body Politic, 88, pp. 31–7, and Kinsman in his analysis of the AIDS crisis in Canada in The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero Sexualities (Montreal: Black Rose, 1996). 13 Susan Knabe, ‘Moral Pan(dem)ic: Deviance and Disease in Canadian Medical Discourses on AIDS, 1981–1990’, Ph. D. dissertation (Peterborough, ON: Trent University, 1999), p. 57.


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CMAJ index following the APA decision is S.S.B. Gilder’s 1974 summary of nonNorth American medical literature of interest to Canadian practitioners. Under the heading ‘Bizarre and superbizarre’ in his regular column of ‘Overseas Reports’, Gilder first relates the Lancet report of a male transvestite taking oral contraceptives, whose presenting with pulmonary embolism is diagnosed as the result of the man’s ‘inappropriate’ use of female hormones. The second case he chooses to retell, designated the super-bizarre, concerns a British Medical Journal report on what were to become known over the next decade within the medical press as ‘retained foreign objects’. Gilder tells us of the unrelated presentation to emergency of two men, ‘young homosexuals’, with ‘deep central abdominal pain’ and that ‘On inspection, the umbilicus was seen to be vibrating, and a cylindrical mass was felt arising from the pelvis and heard to be humming’.14 The inevitable had happened, Gilder concludes: the men had been using vibrators for ‘sexual stimulation per anum … [and] one day the instrument was inserted too far and disappeared up the rectum’. Gilder is not satisfied to merely retell this; at the close of his report, we are told that the author himself ‘once spent a Saturday afternoon extracting a chicken carcass from a rectum’ and that this is evidence that ‘there is no limit to what some folk will do’.15 The inclusion of this anecdote serves to frame the preceding report literally in the realm of the super-bizarre. It heightens the degree of estrangement, already exacerbated by the tone in which the details were related, to the point where all context becomes lost. While we are specifically told that the vibrators were inserted to provide sexual stimulation, we are not told the circumstances which brought the author’s patient (and we have to assume a patient here, since all the author provides us with is a rectum) to his attention. Certainly we do not know if the patient is male or female, how they presented, nor any details which might make the single piece of information contained in the statement ‘I once spent a Saturday afternoon …’ signify in specific ways.16 The assumptions of homosexuality, of perverse desire, of sexual stimulation, are all read onto the claim by its positioning with respect to the preceding report. The example demonstrates the degree to which the objectivity and neutrality of some medical information is, in fact, illusory, while at the same time indicating that the illusion is sustained by the very structures in which it arises.17 In this case, the author’s own unsubstantiated report of a single occurrence of a given practice is 14 Qtd in S.S.B. Gilder, ‘Overseas Report’, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 110:2 (19 January 1974), p. 144. 15 Ibid. 16 One of the things never discussed in articles about ‘retained foreign objects’ is the possibility that the patient might not have consented to the insertion of the object. If a gay man’s body could be assaulted, then the possibility exists that the straight man’s body could also be vulnerable. 17 In the parallel universe of medical education – that ‘see one, do one, teach one’ etiquette of medical information traded among various levels of house-staff (residents, interns, clinical clerks, students) – these stories of ‘retained foreign objects’ were popular fare when I was in medical school. The stories began with the plausible, even the mundane, in most commonly some reference to homosexual sex or AIDS, and proceeded, invariably through the intermediary story of the anally retained sex toy, to the fantastical and grotesque.

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secured within the article by its juxtaposition to a report published in a prestigious medical journal, and in turn by its own publication. That the first article, the anchor for the ‘science’, itself may be of questionable provenance is suggested by the degree of speculation inherent within the nature of the report, and underscored by the retelling by Gilder: ‘what happened, believe it or not …’. The issue at hand here is not whether these stories are true, or if, indeed, there ever was some basis in fact for their existence; rather, it is that each step towards the bizarre is made plausible by its association with other ‘known facts’ about homosexuality. The instability of this nexus, however, allows us to then ‘read’ back from the bizarre to those ‘known facts’ and so inflect them with the full force of perversion distilled from these associations, inflections which necessarily circulate around and through the scene of anal intercourse. The implied perversity of the anecdote is read back across the putative sexual practices of the gay men in the previous case, and thence to the sexual practices of all gay men. The transvested body of the first case is thus conflated with the bodies of gay men, further supporting the ‘common-sense’ relationship between homosexuality, anal penetration and effeminacy. This relationship emerges again and again in the medical and lay media during the AIDS crisis, through what Leo Bersani calls ‘the seductive and intolerable image of a grown man … unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman’.18 Keeping in mind not only the ambivalent and multi-dimensional ways in which information moves between scientific and non-scientific discourses, I would like to turn to the doubling of the alleged site of the origin of AIDS, the simian body, with what Catherine Waldby identifies as the primal scene of transmission of AIDS: queer (anal) sex. This doubling elides the differences between simian and queer bodies, and between raced bodies and queer bodies. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind, as Waldby notes, that in the Freudian sense the primal scene is ‘a retrospectively constructed rather than recollected scenario’.19 Consider once again the ideological work which the illustrations from that table of viral equivalences in The Science of AIDS must perform: the elision of the gaps between simian immunodeficiency viruses and HIV, between animal and human. In a publication that erases/deraces homosexuality and whiteness almost completely from both text and photos, this diagram functions as the singular indication of the necessary ‘connection’ between simian bodies and white (homosexual) ones. Moreover, the recumbent (white) (male) form of the icon for ‘man’ contains within it codes which, read against the ‘commonsense’ knowledge of AIDS in North America, are suggestive not only of the sexual passivity (and anal receptivity) assumed to be the primal scene of infection in the West, but also of the role of recreation and sexual tourism assumed as central in the transmission of AIDS from Africa to North America. As I mentioned at the outset, there are myriad originary stories associated with AIDS, starting with the 1981 reports which announced the first clusters of the

18 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, in AIDS, ed. Crimp, p. 212. 19 Catherine Waldby, AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 78.


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syndrome, locating it within the gay communities of New York and San Francisco.20 From a Western standpoint, the transmission modes of AIDS were initially fixed within the site of queer desire, even if, prior to the identification of the virus, the exact conditions of that mode were not definitively known.21 Once information about a connection between AIDS and Africa became popular knowledge, this information was assimilated into a queerly inflected trans-Atlantic viral migration story which, in turn, quickly achieved an originary status of its own. For instance, in 1985, Dr Barry Hamilton-Smith, in an article on sexually transmitted diseases in Canadian Family Physician, gives the following gloss on AIDS: This disease is probably caused by the HTLV-III virus [HIV]. It may have originated in Central Africa where it affects both sexes, was brought to Haiti by returning visitors, and acquired there by vacationing homosexuals. The majority of cases have been in homosexuals, Haitians (both homosexual and heterosexual), and people exposed to blood products, such as hemophiliacs and addicts who use intravenous drugs.22

Hamilton-Smith locates the origin of AIDS in Central Africa (the African green monkey hypothesis had yet to be formed at the time this article was written) and refigures that originary site through the primal scene of transmission wherein AIDS moves from third to first world – the act of queer sex. Moreover, his configuration carefully places the perverse desire of queer sex, its counterpart third-world (racially other-ed) sex, and diseased or deviant bodies (hemophiliacs and injecting drugusers) on one side of a medical (and ideological) barrier, and the Western population on the other. One of the more egregious examples of the way in which queer sex remained at the center of the medical and popular imagination during the early part of the epidemic is the way in which speculation about an increased rate of anal intercourse among African heterosexuals (practiced, it was alleged, as a ‘primitive form of birth 20 M.S. Gottlieb et al., ‘Pneumocystis Pneumonia – Los Angeles’, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 30 (1981), pp. 250–52; A. Friedman-Kien et al., ‘Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Pneumonia among Homosexual Men – New York City and California’, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 30 (1981), pp. 305–8. The reiteration of this originary story is quite striking in the medical and popular literature of the first decade of the AIDS crisis; its psychic importance derives from the way in which it marks the moment when ‘things changed’, while at the same time reinscribing that moment as occurring within a legitimating medical discourse. 21 The important point is that, regardless of the alleged cause speculated about during the pre-virus years, in each case the cause was located within some aspect or consequence of perverse sex: poppers, amebic and parasitical infection, anal intercourse, ‘toxic’ sperm. The argument that ‘AIDS is a disease that results from the oxidising of the inside of the body from repeated exposure to semen resulting from passive anal intercourse’ was still being put by an ‘expert’ medical witness in an Australian court in early 2007: see Jeremy Roberts and Elizabeth Gosch, ‘HIV sceptic backs unprotected sex’, Australian, 31 January 2007, p. 5. 22 Barry Hamilton-Smith, ‘Changes in Sexually Transmitted Disease’, Canadian Family Physician, 31 (1985), p. 816. Hamilton-Smith does not provide any references for his conclusions about the migration of AIDS to North America or his information about the disease, although the rest of the paper is well documented.

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control’) was thought to be responsible for the ‘heterosexual’ nature of the epidemic in Central Africa.23 As Cindy Patton observes, In the early years of the epidemic, then, ‘black’/‘heterosexual’ AIDS and ‘white’/ ‘homosexual’ AIDS were banished to an imaginary space, ‘Africa’, and linked together, not through intimations of cross-racial/cross-preferential pairings, but through a metaphoric cross-inscription of bodies … African (black) heterosexuals were homosexualized through their allegedly greater practice of anal sex – anality being a chief Western symbol of homosexuality.24

These assumptions – that there was an absolute difference in rates of Western versus African heterosexual anal intercourse, and that this was the reason for differing patterns of HIV infection between the West and Africa – were eventually superseded, in medical discourses, by the suggestion that it was an increased incidence of genital ulceration, due to sexually transmitted diseases in Africans, which facilitated transmission during vaginal intercourse.25 As the multiple stories of viral migration and of African (heterosexual) anality indicate, where perverse desire enters the story of how AIDS came to the West is up to the individual story, but enter it, it surely does. This mobilization, Patton suggests, occurs because these stories are able to combine ‘widely recognizable ideas that are woven into … medical discourses and have framed popular beliefs about disease and migration for a century’.26 Telling Tales III: The Secret Life of Marilyn the Chimp This article begins oddly: it is almost self-consciously sepia-toned in its evocation of the ‘story’ of Marilyn, and in situating the tale of the displaced bodies of infant chimpanzees within the Cold War era. However, within this historical framing evoked through references to Kennedy, Elvis and the Cold War, the article also introduces the specter of an older history of bodily displacement, and both of these histories contribute to the way in which the ‘discovery’ of viral origin becomes legible. I think that it’s difficult to read the description in my epigraph without it resonating in ways which evoke other involuntarily displaced bodies ‘from deep in … the jungles of Central Africa’, bodies offered as a self-renewing technological solution in the expanding economy of the Americas, but also as objects of colonial sexual desire and exchange. As Robert Young argues in his discussion of the imbrication of the sexual and the economic in the colonial trade in bodies, ‘The history of the meanings of the word “commerce” includes the exchange of both merchandise

23 Meurig Horton, ‘It’s a Straight World After All: Heterosexualizing the Pandemic’, in Acting on Aids: Sex, Drugs & Politics, eds Joshua Oppenheimer and Helena Reckitt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), pp. 254–69. Patton discusses the way in which AIDS became ‘hyperheterosexualised’ in Africa through the trope of the female prostitute and through the ‘denial of homosexual routes and the erasing of transfusion-related cases’ (Inventing AIDS, p. 91). 24 Patton, Inventing AIDS, p. 91. 25 Ibid., p. 94. 26 Patton, ‘Queer Peregrinations’, in Acting on AIDS, eds Oppenheimer and Reckitt, p. 236.


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and of bodies in sexual intercourse.’27 With this in mind, it is possible to see how the article’s celebration of Marilyn’s role as a ‘breeder’ also recalls the instability between human and animal bodies which underwrote the justification of slavery. As Angela Davies notes, the women who were slaves ‘were not mothers at all, they were simply instruments guaranteeing the growth of the slave labor force. They were breeders – animals whose monetary value could be precisely calculated in terms of their ability to multiply their numbers’.28 Reading Marilyn’s fecundity back onto contemporary black bodies puts in play anxiety about the uncontrollable fecundity and hypersexuality of black women, in the West and in Africa. However, the discursive mobility between human and animal bodies also facilitates the article’s flagrant anthropomorphizing (and Westernizing) of Marilyn. She rhetorically occupies the dual roles available to 1950s womanhood – platinum blonde sex-goddess ‘Marilyn’, and stay-at-home-mom and baby factory; we are told that it was Ham, a male chimp, who ‘pav[ed] the way for America’s first manned space flights’, while Marilyn’s ‘less glamorous’ life consisted of ‘steadily mating and giving birth to more than a dozen babies’. At the same time, the emphasis on the technological dimension of the chimps’ raison d’être, the means by which American anxieties about Soviet space domination were successfully allayed, is only ever partially able to paper over the concomitant specter of ‘commie pinko queer’ as the sustaining rhetoric behind these nationalist anxieties. Lee Edelman, in discussing the ways in which the 1964 arrest of Lyndon Johnson’s chief of staff Walter Jenkins for ‘indecent gestures’ in the men’s room of a Washington YMCA functioned within the rhetoric of continued McCarthyism, notes that homosexuality threatened the security of the nation because it ‘threatens the security of heterosexual unions’.29 Edelman reads the men’s room incident against Barry Goldwater’s statement in response to the technological anxieties of the space and arms race made the same year: ‘I don’t want to hit the moon. I want to lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin and make sure I hit it’.30 Edelman suggests that anxieties around gender, sexuality and technology are conflated within the discourse of the Cold War. He argues that by threatening the stability of the boundary between those two heavily defended ‘countries’, the disturbing psychic associations activated in the arena of the public men’s room allow for the figurative conflation of a (perceived) threat to the integrity of the nation’s (male) bodies and a (perceived) threat to the integrity of the nation, especially when that nation, like America after the War, finds its borders for the first time subject to penetration by the missile technology of its foes.31

27 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 182. 28 Angela Davies, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 7. 29 Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 153. 30 Ibid., p. 151. 31 Ibid., p. 162.

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With this in mind, it is possible to see how the subtitle of the newspaper article, ‘The secret life of Marilyn the Chimp’, serves to further underscore the specter of McCarthyism which the historical setting of the article confers: the fear of the ‘secret’ queer ready to betray his gender and his country.32 At the same time, the phrase evokes the way in which AIDS, initially at least, seemed to function as the means by which the concealed sexual orientation of someone who, in other respects, appeared to be heterosexual was revealed.33 Certainly debates over widespread testing for HIV in the mid-1980s revolved, in part, around the fear that the tests would, de facto, be used to identify individuals who were homosexual, and that a positive test would automatically confer not only a diagnosis of HIV infection, but also of homosexuality. This fear was underwritten by the belief that ‘the superior technology of the test applies itself to the person’s interior, the combination of their antibodies and their confession, their sexual history’, and so elicits a coerced confession of transmission, the telling of a secret.34 According to the rhetoric of the article, there is something queer about Marilyn, since she harbors a secret. This secret is that she was infected by SIVcpz as an infant in Africa. We know this through her posthumous confession of transmission: her ‘sexual partners’ were not infected and she had not been ‘exposed to human blood or involved in AIDS experiments’. The slippage in the article (her serostatus becomes ‘her HIV’, not ‘her SIV’) underscores the ways in which Marilyn’s body comes to signify, when it operates as though it were human. Thus, this posthumous confession of transmission, her secret, ‘her HIV’, becomes, by the oscillating logic of transmission, the revelation and indictment of a species, and their ‘natural habitat … central west Africa – the place where the HIV-1 virus was first detected in humans’ – as the sites of ‘the origin of HIV-1 which leads to AIDS’.35 Marilyn’s ‘natural habitat’ quickly slides into ‘that place where the HIV-1 virus was first detected in humans’, a shift which works to stabilize the complex history of conflicting and competing originary stories by juxtaposing Marilyn’s originary infection with ‘the first documented case of HIV in a human … traced to a central African man in 1959’.36 The doublings that this history depends upon derive their rhetorical effectiveness from a mobilizing of colonialist assumptions about disease and habitat. The selective use of the word ‘habitat’ to refer to areas of human settlement sets up a qualitative difference between the ways in which Western (colonizing) human bodies and their African (colonized) counterparts are presumed 32 Alan Sinfield notes the way in which the ‘open secret’, the tacit agreement not to acknowledge homosexuality, operates to keep the topic always at the ‘edge of public visibility’ and thus under surveillance. ‘The open secret constitutes homosexuality as the “unthinkable” alternative – so awful that it can be envisaged only as private, yet always obscurely available as a public penalty for deviance’. Cultural Politics – Queer Reading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 47. 33 This continues to be the case, particularly among gay men in ethnic and racial minority communities, where the ability to ‘pass’ as heterosexual is compromised once the nature of the illness becomes apparent. 34 Waldby, p. 122. 35 Stewart, pp. 1, 6. 36 Ibid., p. 6.


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to inhabit space.37 The ‘naturalization’ of the location of SIVcpz in the bodies of chimps (‘because unlike humans, chimpanzees such as Marilyn can live with HIV their entire lives without falling ill’38) places these animal bodies firmly within what Cindy Patton identifies as the discourse of tropical medicine, a discourse which is already imbricated in the discourses of colonialism. … the very idea of tropical medicine rests on the ability to reliably separate an indigenous population perceived to be physically hearty but biologically inferior from a colonizing population believed to be biologically superior even while subject to tropical illnesses … Tropical medicine grows out of and supports the idea that the First World body is the proper gauge of health: the Third World is the location of disease, even while its occupants are not the subjects of tropical medicine. Tropical medicine points to a map that already hierarchizes bodies, placing Europeans and European health at the pinnacle.39

The position of chimpanzees as the ‘colonized other’ is further developed within the article when we are told that the researcher who positively identified Marilyn’s SIV, Dr Hahn, ‘believe[s] that the virus in central Africa was transmitted from chimpanzees to humans as a result of humans eating the chimps’ and, moreover, that this practice has increased ‘as forest clearing leads growing numbers of people into the natural habitat of Marilyn’s relatives’.40 Once this transmission from animal to human has occurred, however, the second of Patton’s ‘competing colonialisms’, the discourse of epidemiology, comes into play to account for the way in which HIV has spread throughout Africa: Dr. Hahn says that it has been recent socio-economic changes in Africa that have created the conditions for the HIV virus to become an epidemic. ‘Increasing urbanisation, breakdown of traditional lifestyles, population movements, civil unrest, and sexual promiscuity are all known to increase the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and thus likely triggered the AIDS pandemic’, Dr. Hahn said earlier this week.41

This laundry list of reasons for the spread of HIV within the population of Central Africa seems eerily reminiscent of similar lists of factors said to have led to the spread of HIV among gay men in North America and Western Europe a quarter of a century ago. The moral judgement inherent in phraseology such as ‘sexual promiscuity’, as well as the negative valuation of potentially neutral terms such as ‘urbanization’ and ‘population movements’ by virtue of their association with non-neutral terms such as ‘civil unrest’, resonate with earlier AIDS-related discourses. These discourses, which borrowed heavily from existing medical and moral discourses of sexually transmitted

37 Richard C. Chirimuuta and Rosalind J. Chirimuuta, AIDS, Africa and Racism (London: Free Association Books, 1989), p. 129. 38 Stewart, p. 6. 39 Patton, ‘Queer Peregrinations’, p. 239. 40 Stewart, p. 6. 41 Ibid.

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diseases, instated sexual promiscuity42 and perverse desire as the hallmarks of AIDS, and revealed the extent to which these discourses were already hetero- and Eurocentric. Moreover, as Sander Gilman notes, prior associations between raced bodies and sexually transmitted diseases, especially syphilis, were based on assumptions about these bodies’ ‘perceived sexual difference – their hypersexuality’,43 and these assumptions clearly remain operational in terms of how the AIDS epidemic is understood globally. More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which this list seems to be underwriting a call for a type of cultural stasis, wherein a return to traditional lifestyles is presented as a possible solution to the AIDS pandemic. I think that there are certain parallels which can be drawn between the Western indictment of the breakdown of traditional lifestyles as a cause for the AIDS epidemic in Central Africa, and demands that indigenous people remain ‘traditional’ in order to avoid becoming a ‘dying people’, their authenticity tainted by Western cultural influences. These indictments are especially pernicious because they deflect attention from the continuing legacy of colonialist involvement in Central Africa, already heavily implicated in all aspects of the AIDS pandemic. As Meurig Horton observes, medical discourses in Africa are most comfortable with conceptualizing disease and epidemic within terms which are based on a ‘colonial understanding of African life as traditional, ahistorical, and unchanging’.44 And, while Hahn’s identification of urbanization and population movements as important factors in the spread of disease is, perhaps, an attempt to acknowledge the changing conditions of life in contemporary Africa, the negative framing of these factors undercuts this acknowledgement by refiguring a nostalgic return to ‘traditional lifestyles’. In this way, the colonialist discourses of epidemiology and tropical medicine operate as sites of commerce wherein, once again, blame for the epidemic is shifted onto the bodies of those who are not human, not white, not male or not heterosexual. By way of conclusion, I would like to cast back to the way in which ‘retained foreign bodies’ became mobilized through medical reading and rereadings, and cast forwards to the arbitrary end of the origin debate provided by this account. Historically, as Jonathan Goldberg’s reading of the place of sodomy in Spanish new world conquest narratives suggests, we read backwards, and historical accounts thus attempt to justify, to render authoritative through the hindsight we are able to bring to them, actions which are in excess of possible justification. While, as he notes, the truth of these accounts ‘would seem to be guaranteed by history’, he concludes that Post facto, preposterously, the body of the sodomite takes on the status of an origin, serving as the cause and justification for what was done to the Indians, but its originary status is troubled not merely by being presented as an aftereffect but also because, cross-dressed, 42 The issue of sexual promiscuity was heavily divisive, and there was fierce debate in the gay press during the first decade of AIDS over the role it played in the epidemic. For a discussion of this debate, see Douglas Crimp, ‘How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic’, in AIDS, ed. Crimp, pp. 237–71. 43 Sander Gilman, ‘AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease’, in AIDS, ed. Crimp, p. 101. 44 Horton, p. 262.


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it is a double body and the only truth it testifies to is the preposterous nature of colonial accounts, that the ideological production of the text will never justify the atrocities of the European invasion of the New World.45

The retroactive reattribution of the origin of HIV to simian bodies post facto leads to the recirculation of the originary stories which first came to light in the 1980s, originary stories which, as I noted earlier, also struggled to bring together Africa, HIV transmission, monkeys, humans and disease in light of an understanding of the disease that took as its originary moment an act of male–male sex. The continuing excesses of this first generation of African origin narratives trace a trajectory of viral movement between animal and human which is implicitly racial as well as sexual, and, I would argue, queer, if not necessarily homosexual. These narratives are mirrored in the preposterous justifications which underpin this particular originary story within a moralizing Western discourse in which disease is ostensibly shorn from questions of desire, economic reality and lived experience, even as it is offered up as occupying the animal body, the raced body, the perverse body, the other body, the ‘queer’ body. At the same time, the apparently extraneous information with which this particular originary story, the article ‘Marilyn’s Mission’, begins presents us with an additional series of preposterous justifications: narratives whose excesses are also secured through the mobility of bodies across and between the lines of race, gender, sexuality and species. These narratives, while seeking optimistically to instate a potential technological solution to a foreign-based threat to Western nations and bodies through the bodies of Pan troglodytes troglodytes chimpanzees, are unable to control the ways in which this technological solution contains those excesses which raise the specters of earlier ‘stolen’ foreign bodies, as well as the immanent penetration of the Western body/politic by foreign objects. Race and sexual perversity continue to function as a ‘pattern of displacements which offer us a carnal Africa as the “source” of AIDS, transported home to the bosom of the white western family via the “monstrous passions” of “perverts” and “the promiscuous”’.46

45 Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 184. 46 Simon Watney, ‘Missionary Positions: AIDS, “Africa,” and Race’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 1:1 (1989), p. 96.


Chapter 6

Junk International: The Symbolic Drug Trade Brian Musgrove Spectacular value-adding between third-world production sites and first-world retail marketplaces; the entrapment of indigenous workers in cycles of low-pay dependence and intimidation; ruthless profit maximization; the easy penetration of sovereign economic zones; altered social habits and habitual consumerism in such zones; the flow of untaxable cash from local economies to off-shore finance centers; local franchising as the agency of aggressive, transnational cartels or monopolies – all these characterize globalization. They also describe the processes of the international drug trade, the commerce in ‘junk’, which William S. Burroughs recognized in The Naked Lunch (1959) as the very model of a colonizing capitalism at its most efficient pitch: there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on basic principles of monopoly … Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession … Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy … The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.1

Will Self observes that Burroughs’s drug writing ‘creates a synecdoche through which he can explore the being of man under late capitalism’2 – the ‘satirical visions of cancerous capitalism and addictive consumerism’ catalyze the Beat sub-universe of Burroughsian narco-allegory.3 As Marx understood in his anthropology of the commodity fetish, all economies are propelled by myths and symbols, and the Burroughsian symbology of drugs provokes a broader interrogation of structural problems and contradictions in the processes of global commodity-exchange. Burroughs’s verdict on ‘junk international’ is echoed in the policy-studies research of Paul B. Stares’s Global Habit, where the drug trade again emerges as the descriptor par excellence of globalization’s unstable tendencies. Stares regards the deregulation of global markets and banking, as well as the American-led victory in the Cold War, as facilitators of an unprecedented worldwide drug economy: ‘just as legitimate transnational entrepreneurs have been able to exploit the opportunities of a globalizing free market economy, so have … drug trafficking organizations. 1 William S. Burroughs, ‘Introduction. Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness’, The Naked Lunch ([1959]; London: Corgi, 1986), p. 9. 2 Will Self, ‘The Literary Monkey’, in Junk Mail (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 9–10. 3 Self, ‘Junking the Image’, in Junk Mail, pp. 61–2.

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The expansion in trade, transportation networks, and tourism has not only made it easier for them to distribute drugs’; the ‘integration of the global finance system’ has also proved to be a major service-provider of ‘opportunities to launder money’. In addition, Stares notes, ‘the growth of mass media and global telecommunications has undoubtedly increased the global awareness of drugs and propagation of drug fashions around the world’.4 The innovative privateering which underpins the world free market is ideally geared to the production of narco-wealth. The ‘black’ market in drugs and the ‘white’ overground economy converge in the global shake-up, where revolutionary changes abet the unpoliceable work of criminal empires; these are syndicates whose centralist, corporate aspirations are systemically identical to those of licit business. In this sense, the monocultural ethos and strategic marketing plans of Coca-Cola are indistinguishable from those of the Cali cocaine cartel – ‘cocacolonizations’ – which interpellate the customer into a lifestyle, a mindset, and a cycle of compulsive consumption, ‘degraded and simplified’. Stares’s study is grounded in the familiar point that free-trade capitalism is inimical to the integrity of nation-states, and corrosive of regional identities and differences. Consequently, it is also highly attentive to the drug trade’s galvanization of earnest international discussion on these matters. Stares suggests that diplomatic talk-fests on the drug trade have at least, and at last, begun to encompass issues which have preoccupied postcolonial scholars for some time: unresolved questions of national, ethnic and class inequity; tensions in first-world and developing nation relations; and volatile geopolitical dynamics which might worsen, rather than be rectified, by a new world economic order. In spite of his intention to provide a balanced, factual, statistical account of the drug trade, Stares sees the arena of realpolitik dissembled by drugs-as-metaphor. Global Habit embraces Burroughs’s idea that the drug trade is not the Other but the Brother of legitimate capital; in the age of globalization – a neo-colonial era structured by the military, commercial and telecommunicative powers of an essentially American imperium – the interlinkage of cultural imperialism and mobile commodities as symbolic ‘drugs on the market’ is apparent. Indeed, Stares concludes, the lynch-pin of postmodern globality, the advertising image-economy, is historically culpable in the promotion of ‘addictive’ practices. And the contemporary regime of the image, the style, the attitude, and the increasing uniformization of global consuming habits was accelerated by the dispersal of American popular culture post-1945. Stares writes: In the same way that these trends have helped homogenize consumer tastes and created mass markets for … blue jeans, T-shirts, hamburgers, rock music, and Walkmans, they have also apparently influenced the international demand for drugs … America’s growing cultural influence after World War II clearly contributed to the rise of a mass market for drugs in Western Europe … information also points to the more recent effect of Western influences on stimulating drug consumption in parts of the postcommunist and developing world.5

4 Paul B. Stares, Global Habit: The Drug Problem in a Borderless World (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1996), p. 6. 5 Ibid., p. 62.

Junk International: The Symbolic Drug Trade

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Here, then, the drug trade operates within the monopolistic tendencies of globalization, its image-making monolith, and the erasure of disparate identities, restructured as one within new patterns of consumption. This reading of drugs as symptomatic of a specific phase of economic–cultural modernity has a longer genealogy, dating to the First World War and its aftermath, when writers with an interest in drugs, like Aleister Crowley and Aldous Huxley, visited the United States. Crowley’s ‘Cocaine’ (1917), for example, explored America’s technical–commercial society and its damaging contradictions. The essay offered a social interpretation of America’s drug-of-the-moment as perfectly attuned to the pace of modern capitalism, ‘which demands intensive stimulation’ in both industrial production and the headlong rush into escapist recreation.6 Huxley likewise regarded the totalizing character of American modernity as pivoting on the national mania for ‘inebriation’, enacted through the surrogacies of mechanic pleasure: in the first shockwaves of mass culture, the technologies of cinema, radio and recorded music, and in the orgies of the Jazz Age, the underground drink-sprees of American Prohibition and the postwar cocaine craze. Above all, American modernity was a drug, an intoxicated escape from reality – ‘freedom … from history’ – and an entrepreneurial dream in which ‘factories are perpetually renewing themselves’ to the revolutionary requirements of a history-less, commodity-addicted bourgeoisie.7 This framed the social vision of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932),8 where the officially peddled drug ‘soma’ is a mechanism for anaesthetizing dissent, emotion and memory, embedded in a value-system based on conspicuous over-consumption. The futuristic soma tablet was the primary signifier of the novel’s hypnotic, Fordist dystopia, where profligacy was policy and the pleasure of consumptive forgetfulness was mandatory. For Crowley and Huxley, as for Burroughs, drugs were not alien to the structure of capital but, rather, fundamental to the mental architecture of America’s drive to productivity and economic dominance. The addiction and havoc visited upon the populace by drugs were entirely consistent with the unstable energies of technomodernity and the worship of ‘wealth – the most dangerous of narcotic drugs. It creates a morbid craving – which it never satisfies’.9 Addiction was the central nervous disease of imperial-capital, making no distinction between the systematic narco-colonization of the individual addict and the social body; Crowley and Huxley theorized drugs as the symbolic mark of modernity and radical change in these terms. Both also had the premonition that a developing socio-economic order, powered by American values, produced sensory disarrangements which had a close analogue in the drug experience. And these were germinal instances of an anxiety that gripped many countries after the Second World War, in debates over that old-fashioned term ‘Americanization’ – debates which again foregrounded the advent of American modernity as a kind of cultural drugging. 6 Aleister Crowley, ‘Cocaine’, The International (October 1917), p. 294. 7 Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926; 1957), p. 281. 8 Huxley, Brave New World: A Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932). 9 Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, eds John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (London: Arkana/Penguin, 1989), p. 188.

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Given its record in the nineteenth-century opiate trade, and its two Opium Wars with China, no nation was better equipped to understand the interrelation of drugs and the economics of imperialism than Britain. Thus, in the wake of the Second World War, when tectonic shifts in international relations saw the United States emerge as Western superpower and the results of colonialism were revisited upon the United Kingdom, drugs became a discursive site where a national neurosis appeared. From August 1951, when London’s Daily Telegraph revealed ‘A New Drug Traffic in Britain’ and September’s Evening Standard exposed ‘The Drug Smokers’ – homegrown British ‘vipers’ who had discovered marijuana – a ten-year crusade began.10 It brought drugs, Britain’s exhausted postwar condition and Americanization into a morally panicked constellation; coupled with the arrival of new forms of popular culture, drugs gave a fresh complexion to the established British genre of ‘invasion’ stories. John Gosling and Douglas Warner’s study of ‘vice’ in the 1950s, The Shame of a City, typified one dimension of this. In a panoramic invasionist survey, Gosling and Warner saw the drug trade as both a return of the colonially repressed, and a sign of Britain’s inability to regulate its borders: ‘with the influx of thousands of coloureds from the West Indies and Asians from India, Pakistan and elsewhere … the marijuana came with them … It came in ships … It was carried ashore by individuals … Boxes containing the drugs were tossed over quayside walls … or were dropped overboard and picked up on the flow of the tide’.11 This was not so much smuggling as it was an irresistible commodity-inundation, a sickening imbalance-of-trade and unaccounted cash-flow, made possible by the officially established networks of imperial commerce. A second strand of postwar drug discourse was crystallized in Norman Phillips’s book Guns, Drugs and Deserters (1954), which revealed the conduits of British imperial administration as readily adapted to the drug trade. In the Middle East, Phillips found that with the ‘tremendous flow of military transport’ during the Second World War, the British army’s lifeline became a channel for the drug trade: ‘Only the sketchiest examination could be given the trains and motor convoys … Hashish began flowing into Egypt in the kitbags of troops returning on leave from Palestine, in lorry tool boxes and inside spare tyres on staff cars’.12 This laid the foundations of the postwar ‘drug problem’, and bankrolled the ‘Nationalism … spreading among the Arabs’ via a ‘mixture of drugs and politics’.13 Like Gosling and Warner, Phillips identified the irresistible flow of drugs with the crisis of decolonization. Nevertheless, and at a time when the United States was financial reconstructor and military guarantor of western Europe, blame for the developing drug trade was directed at America. The drug trade focalized fears that America’s commercial dynamism, promoted through its powerful media, heralded a new order 10 ‘A New Drug Traffic in Britain’, Daily Telegraph, 28 August 1951, p. 1; ‘The Drug Smokers’, Evening Standard, 5 September 1951, p. 1. 11 John Gosling and Douglas Warner, The Shame of a City: An Enquiry into the Vice of London ([1960]; London: Panther, 1965), pp. 110–11, 113. 12 Norman Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters: The Special Investigation Branch in the Middle East (London: Werner Laurie, 1954), p. 68. 13 Ibid., p. 84.


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of cultural homogenization and new patterns of ‘narcotizing’ consumption. The potential impact of this cultural drugging on British youth – the nation’s future – was a point of extreme concern. The postwar period was the time of the teenagers. They had more education and training opportunities at secondary and tertiary level; they had more money; there was a galaxy of gadgets and cultural experiences to consume – ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ was the era’s catchphrase. The American success in capturing Britain’s exploding youth market, at the connected levels of commodity, image and experience, seemed unstoppable, as Harry Hopkins gloomily observed: from ‘hula-hoops to Zen Buddhism … from Rock’n’Roll to Action painting … and beatniks … Striptease clubs completed the “Fordisation” of sex, supermarkets of shopping and Wimpy bars of eating’.14 In his pioneering cultural study The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart lamented this new free market, with its ‘Competitive commerce’ appealing to Britain’s ‘“degraded”’ classes.15 Nowhere was this more evident than in the ‘jukebox boys … who spend their evening listening in harshly lighted milk-bars to the “nickelodeons”’ surrounded by ‘the nastiness of their modernistic knick-knacks’ affecting ‘an American slouch’, which Hoggart considered a ‘[complete] aesthetic breakdown’.16 To him, it was ‘a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation’, lived within ‘a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life’.17 Americanization thus threatened a youthful turn away from ‘meaningful’ and ‘constructive’ leisure to the artifice of instantaneous pleasures – like drug-taking. This was soon manifest in the subculture of ‘schoolboy gangmembers swallowing assorted illegal tablets outside the local fish-and-chip shop in their search for “kicks”’,18 and ‘the ranks of jazz-crazy youngsters [where] the cult of “reefer” smoking has been so closely bound up with jive musicians’.19 ‘Where jive is, youth is. And there, too, is marijuana. It is the drug of America’, Robert Fabian wrote in London after Dark.20 London hipster George Melly agreed, remembering that ‘British modern jazz men had smoked [marijuana] in imitation of their doomed [American] heroes from the middle-40s on’.21 The obsession with drugs and American jazz appeared conspiratorially in Donald McIntosh Johnson’s Indian Hemp: A Social Menace – the most widely read ‘authority’ on the topic in Britain in the 1950s. In America, Johnson warned, ‘The marijuana vice … has spread … to the young people of all classes. It may well be that in Britain the same process is happening with Indian Hemp’. Indian Hemp 14 Harry Hopkins, The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963), p. 454. 15 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments ([1957]; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 243. 16 Ibid., p. 247. 17 Ibid., p. 248. 18 Brian Wells, Psychedelic Drugs: Psychological, Medical and Social Issues (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 40. 19 Robert Fabian, London after Dark (London: Naldrett Press, 1954), p. 38. 20 Ibid., p. 41. 21 George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 109.

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conjoined American popular culture and Soviet subversion – the Russian development of ‘mind-drugs’ – as related menaces: ‘In this twentieth century we have already had atomic warfare, poison gas warfare, nerve warfare, cold warfare – and we have had drug warfare too … what [better] weapon could there be for waging the Cold War than … the use and consumption of noxious drugs within the ranks of your enemy that will corrupt his youth’? And in drug warfare, cannabis – the drug of America – was the perfect means to ‘condition the mentality of a whole population’, with its capacity to derange ‘the collective unconscious’ and to breach ‘the mental barriers of individuality with the increased facilities of telepathic communication and of hypnotism’. ‘Indeed’, Johnson cautioned, ‘it would seem that we already have our miniature laboratories in our [American-style] “hot jazz” dancing clubs, where … “reefer” smoking is an essential part of the proceedings’.22 Dope was symbolic fashion-and-commodity warfare, and in a final appeal to young British fashionaddicts, Johnson turned to the opinion of journalist Chapman Pincher: ‘“Reefers and rhythm seem to be directly connected with the minute electric waves continually generated by the brain surface. When the rhythm of the music synchronizes with the rhythm of the brainwaves, the jazz fans experience an almost compulsive urge to move their bodies in sympathy”’. The warning to Britain was sharp: ‘For the rhythm of the jazz drum substitute the rhythm of totalitarian propaganda; and the point which I wish to make will be appreciated’.23 Once again, at a time when the United States was looked to as custodian of western European democracy, the reach of American power, fashion and commodity fetishism was regarded as no less a threat than the USSR. America was an evil empire whose mainspring was narcotization – the willful drugging of subject, abject, peoples. American literature and cinema also trafficked drug narratives across the Atlantic. In 1952, the Midlands city of Wolverhampton shut down screenings of an American movie known as The Devil’s Weed (alternatively titled Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell).24 Anti-cannabis crusaders approved, on the grounds that ‘such knowledge as that imparted by this film is dangerous knowledge’, especially for ‘a popular cinema audience, composed to a large extent of young people’ mesmerized by American habits.25 Anomalously, this hysterical anti-marijuana picture, made in 1936, was reviewed in 1950s Britain as an incentive for local youth to copy ‘doomed’ American trends. The 1956 film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s drug novel The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) was a box-office hit in the UK.26 This was perhaps especially because its lead, Frank Sinatra, had spearheaded ‘the teenage movement … Frankie S., after all, was … the very first teenager’, according to British cult-novelist Colin MacInnes, and his performance invested the drug experience with a dark glamour.27 22 Donald McIntosh Johnson, Indian Hemp: A Social Menace (London: Christopher Johnson, 1952), p. 105. 23 Ibid., pp. 108–9. 24 The Devil’s Weed/Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell, dir. Dwain Esper ([1936]; Alpha Video, 2003). 25 McIntosh Johnson, p. 105. 26 Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm ([1949]; London: Transworld, 1964); The Man with the Golden Arm, dir. Otto Preminger (United Artists Films, 1956). 27 Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners ([1959]; London: Allison and Busby, 1992), p. 52.


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Later, ‘juvenile delinquency’ came to Britain from the States on celluloid. The Wild One, featuring Marlon Brando, was first in 1954 – though known only by reputation in Britain, where it was censored.28 The James Dean vehicle Rebel without a Cause told the story of a middle-class drop-out;29 but it was the slum kids in The Blackboard Jungle who awakened British teenagers, showcasing Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the Clock’ and thereby doing much to launch rock and roll in the UK.30 The Teddy-Boy cinema riots that were cued by ‘Rock around the Clock’ in 1955–56 led to bans on Blackboard Jungle in parts of the country. As Britain’s most troublesome youth fraction, the Teddy Boys pre-dated the full-scale arrival of American pop culture, and the ‘very American mould of the brute and the hipster’ adopted by the Teds was an overlay on an existing urban subculture:31 ‘a neurotic continuity [that ran] from the “street arabs” of the 1840s, through the “gangsters” of the 1860s, the “un-English” Hooligan of the 1870s [to] the “Americanized” teddy boys’.32 The Teds were the model for later style cults, and the sociological prototype of British adolescent deviance, but the refusal to see them as home-grown louts was largely cued by their drug-taking. As conspicuous consumers of amphetamines, the Teds deregulated Britain’s youth drug scene, giving drugs style and attitude in a consuming lifestyle directed towards aggressive public self-assertion. Daniel Farson, memoirist–historian of London’s West End, wrote of the days before rock and roll and the Teds that Soho’s cafés, pubs, streets and parties were relatively tame and ‘there was no viciousness. People were simply out to enjoy themselves’.33 By 1956, Raymond Thorp wrote in Viper: The Confessions of a Drug Addict, the Americanized speed-freak ‘Teddy Boys were taking over in the jazz clubs. In the old days … smoking and popping [injecting heroin] had somehow been done without viciousness … everyone was your pal … now all sorts of people were taking to the drugs, the law was becoming annoyed’.34 ‘Viciousness’ became a by-word in Britain for discussing Ted-style drug-taking, suggesting the way in which benign patterns of ‘indigenous’ drug-consumption were altered along American lines: even low-life junkies and delinquents were barbarized, rather than civilized – ‘degraded and simplified’ – by the new order of consumerism. At the same time, America’s Beat Generation writers peddled the drop-out drug lifestyle to the UK’s young. Peter Vansittart’s memoir In the Fifties accused the American Beats of inciting British youth to ‘toxic freedoms’.35 By the end of the decade, he recalled, in ‘the New Towns and universities, in suburbs, on the tube, at bars, the young and would-be young ostentatiously carried Allen Ginsberg’s poem 28 The Wild One, dir. Laslo Benedek (Sony Pictures, 1953). 29 Rebel without a Cause, dir. Nicholas Ray (Warner Bros./Kit Parker Films, 1955). 30 The Blackboard Jungle, dir Richard Brooks (MGM, 1955). 31 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: Paladin, 1973), p. 183. 32 Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 23. 33 Daniel Farson, Soho in the Fifties (London: Pimlico, 1993), p. 145. 34 Raymond Thorp, Viper: The Confessions of a Drug Addict (London: Robert Hale, 1956), p. 151. 35 Peter Vansittart, In the Fifties (London: John Murray, 1995), p. 226.

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Howl, and William Burroughs’s Junkie … and The Naked Lunch … celebrating drug-addiction, with homosexuality added’.36 Historian of the United Kingdom’s underground, Nigel Fountain, remembered that after the Beats ‘Drink, junk [and] poetry … filtered into the consciousness of the young’,37 while underground hero Jeff Nuttall recollected that the drug-taking Beats encouraged British ‘Delinquents and misfits … to work at their delinquency with a veritably Wesleyan zeal’.38 Nineteen-year-old Roy Kerridge, one of Britain’s early ‘with-it’ commentators on his own generation, described the copy-cat British Beat-drug scene in his ‘Teenage Who’s Who’ of the 1950s as ‘largely intellectual, or at least pseudo-intellectual’. Kerridge pronounced in the New Statesman that ‘these bohemians have done their best to live up to the public’s image of a beatnik, and mostly they’ve managed it. They live for parties, and take benzedrine, marihuana or worse, to keep themselves going’. He noted, too, the Beat-inspired subculture’s propensity to commercial exploitation and slavish fashion-following, pouncing on Jack Kerouac’s success to pan the Americanization of British youth and to mock the Beats themselves: ‘the whole beatnik racket in Britain is a bit of a fiddle, as there have always been groups of leftish bohemian artists, but no one noticed them until Kerouac came along [and] Kerouac, for a believer in poverty as a way of life, hasn’t done too badly for himself’.39 The Beats were not merely surrounded by rumors and suspicions of drug use – they practiced it and preached it, wrote about and promoted it. And they cashed in on it, with a cynicism that was seen as quintessentially American. The striking theme of the British response to drugs in the 1950s is, in fact, encapsulated in this perception that the drug traffic and its cultural imaging were somehow consistent with ‘America’. The issue of drugs was extensively seen, and used, as a site to interrogate the more broadly subversive agenda of American cultural and commercial imperialism, so much so that it remains remarkable that popular histories, and academic studies like Alan Sinfield’s Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, neglect to mention the important role that drug discourse performed in the nation’s neurotic coming-to-terms with its new identity as clientstate.40 The equally striking characterization of Britain playing the role of potential ‘addict’ to America’s ‘pusher’ – the vendor of consumerist opiates for the masses – indicates the prevalence of drugs-as-metaphor in the period. Britain’s mainstream press, and establishment voices like Donald Johnson, believed that drugs signified systemic crisis: the derangement of the national ‘collective unconscious’, the mental reconditioning of ‘a whole population’. A brief reality-check underlines the point. In Britain in the 1950s, the drug scene was inconsiderable: in a population of over 50 million, there were 217 registered

36 Ibid., p. 178. 37 Nigel Fountain, Underground: The London Alternative Press 1966–74 (London: Comedia/Routledge, 1988), p. 2. 38 Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 165. 39 Roy Kerridge, ‘A Teenage Who’s Who’, New Statesman, 24 September 1960, p. 424. 40 Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).


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morphine-heroin addicts in 1950, rising to 332 by 1958;41 in 1957, there were 50 arrests for cannabis.42 Cocaine had virtually disappeared, and hallucinogens like LSD were unobtainable outside experimental medicine or clinical psychiatry. In this context, it is tempting to judge the mountain of books and column-inches devoted to the nation’s ‘drug problem’ as simple hysteria. However, the explicit equation of licit and illicit commodities as agencies of cultural alteration, with the simultaneous trade in appliances, intoxicants and attitudes regarded as an homogenized front, shows the raising of drugs on a symbolic scale to articulate resistance to the new order of capital and to warn of the nation-state’s impending decay. The perception of drugs as substance, style and value-laden symbol – but as merely one component of a general, unequal system of commodity and image-trade – helped to define a response to the coming age of American hegemony. Despite Britain’s own shameful, freebooting imperial past – and its adventures in the international drug trade – drug debate roused Britons to moral indignation, reservations about the future world that a standardized market would build, and the shifting power-relations it would require. Drug panic was thus a means to transpositively theorize the inner processes of an embryonic globalization as essentially destructive. This case-study of Britain in the 1950s gives historical substance to the observations of William Burroughs, and the analysis in Global Habit, which conjure with drugs as a supremely relevant contemporary ‘synecdoche’. As both writers recognize, drugs shadow and parody the cult of ‘legitimate’ commodity fetishism. The radically innovative capture of new markets; commodity addiction; the inability of sovereign nation-states to regulate or resist; the toxicity of freemarketeering; the mass-hypnosis of style – all of these comprise a vision in which the trope of ‘addiction’ embodies the habits, patterns and aspirations of liberal economics. And like many overground economies, the drug trade deals in ‘junk’ – ‘junk’, cultural detritus, the garbage of an habituating regime which, William Burroughs believed, ‘degrades and simplifies the client’ who will ‘crawl through a sewer’ to get the product. And the pyramid-selling of junk, Burroughs says, symbolizes a system where the ‘junk merchant’ continually performs the right to peddle the ‘ultimate merchandise’ and to feed on peoples of the world. Tragically, Stares concludes, with no brake on the engine of international capital, and no moral mitigation on the driving ideology of the unitary free market, the traffic in drugs and other kinds of junk will be an everexpanding global habit. We will live – or already live – in a world where a weekend of ‘Ecstasy’ can be bought for the same price in Belgrade, Berlin and Baltimore; where the heroin in Seoul, San Francisco and Sheffield comes from the same source, with the same informal guarantees of quality-control; where the cocaine in Madrid is identical to the cocaine in Manchester – and so is the Coke.

41 Donald B. Louria, The Drug Scene (London: Corgi, 1970), p. 58. 42 Brian Inglis, The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs (London: Coronet, 1977), p. 193.


Chapter 7

Redefining the Shebeen: The Illicit Liquor Trade in South Africa, c.1950–1983 Anne Mager The South African Breweries (SAB) World of Beer in Johannesburg takes the visitor on a tour of the history of brewing in Africa.1 Towards the end of the tour, and adjacent to a reconstruction of a mine shaft where sweaty black men heap mounds of gold ore onto a trolley, is a simple sub-economic house like many others built by the apartheid regime in the 1960s. The internal walls of the front two rooms have been knocked down to enlarge the space. A motley collection of chairs is arranged around the walls. Quart bottles of beer, glasses and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs litter the tables in the center of the room. Photographs of an earlier generation of mission-educated men and women are suspended on the walls. In the kitchen, a scattered collection of old SAB beer-crates serves as seating. Cartons of sorghum beer are strewn about. Blaring out above this tableau are the taped voices of African women engaged in ridiculing men. The voices of male customers are apparently oblivious to this female derision, self-absorbed and embroiled in men’s drinking talk. This house is a township family home. It is also a shebeen, a place of illicit liquor-dealing, and an icon of black resilience to colonial domination. It represents the market through which the South African Breweries became one of the largest brewers in the world. Tourists who visit the empty house within the SAB’s corporate showcase in the city can also tour ‘real shebeens’ full of everyday drinkers in Soweto. The SAB Centre is the start of a Gauteng ‘shebeen route’ that takes in the Hector Petersen Memorial, the photographic collection of the 1976 student uprising, and Winnie Mandela’s garage museum.2 As a tourist trip, it is set to rival the older, colonial Cape wine route. If the ‘shebeen route’ is the brainchild of African entrepreneurs casting about for new opportunities, it is also an idea that asserts the legitimacy of an African drinking culture over and against colonial habits of liquor consumption. It implies that African ways of socializing with liquor are centered not on the pub nor the barbecue, but the shebeen, a space marked out by African initiative in the context of the limitations of colonialist and apartheid legislation. It is a celebration of women and men who defied the ban on the drinking of ‘European liquor’, 1 In 2002, the SAB merged with Miller, an American brewing company, to become SAB Miller. 2 The Hector Peterson Memorial in Soweto is named after a school student who was shot and killed by the South African Police in 1976, sparking off the student uprisings that rocked the country for months.

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reopened the opportunity for Africans to profit from liquor sales, and seized the freedom to choose where and with whom to ‘have a drink’. It marks the coming together of colonial commerce and African consumers in an authentic African place. This chapter maps competing representations of the shebeen in African journalism, fiction and autobiography. It explores the ways in which these representations have also been a set of practices linked to economic interests and relations of power in apartheid African townships. As more and more African people were drawn into the shebeen economy, and as African political ideologies gained ground, new groups gained the power to ‘name’ and to redefine the shebeen as place and as space. With the consumption of ‘European liquor’ banned since 1928, the sale of homebrewed liquor forbidden, and convictions for liquor offences well over a million by 1954, Africans living in the cities developed a resilient culture of illicit brewing and contempt for the law. African writers and white historians have demonstrated that this culture nurtured a generation of urbanized, streetwise shebeen-goers.3 Many of these youths were the sons of shebeening mothers whose illicit profits kept their children at school longer than most of their peers. By the late 1950s, they had outgrown the age when they spent their time as innocent lookouts for their mothers, protecting the shebeen as a place of profit and conviviality. Africans of the city, they moved fast and set trends; their urban lifestyles and urbane masculinities centred not on older patriarchal regulations of who might drink liquor when, but on unbridled consumption, style and pleasure.4 They entered the space of the shebeens as their second if not their first home.5 A popular monthly magazine, Drum, provided a creative space for this generation – the place where artists and writers found each other, sought comfort, and forged an intelligently critical stance on life in the urban townships. Drum’s shebeens were the jazzy, smoky, vibrant centres of the creative youth culture of Sophiatown, a freehold and racially mixed township in Johannesburg. They were synonymous with spiv masculinity and male sexual conquest: they were the haunts 3 See The ‘Drum’ Decade: Stories from the 1950s, ed. Michael Chapman (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989); Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London: Faber and Faber, 1959); Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom (London: Faber and Faber, 1954); Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963); Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (Johannesburg: Raven, 1985); The World of Nat Nakasa: Selected Writings of the Late Nat Nakasa, ed. Essop Patel (Johannesburg: Raven, 1975); Paul la Hausse, ‘Drink and Cultural Innovation in Durban: The Origins of the Beerhall in South Africa, 1902–1916’, in Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa, eds Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), pp. 78–115; Phil Bonner, ‘“Desirable or Undesirable Basotho women?” Liquor, Prostitution and the Migration of Basotho Women to the Rand, 1920–1945’, in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (Cape Town: David Philip; London: James Currey, 1990), pp. 221–50; Belinda Bozzoli with Mmanthu Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983, Social History of Africa Series (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991). 4 See Anne Kelk Mager, Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945–1959 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1999), pp. 133–5, for a discussion of the significance of beer in establishing hierarchies among boys and men. 5 Leading African writers of the 1950s dedicated their autobiographies to grandmothers, mothers and aunts who ran shebeens: see Mphahlele; Peter Abrahams; Modisane.

The Illicit Liquor Trade in South Africa, c.1950–1983

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of notorious gangs who drove American cars and wore two-tone shoes. In Drum, shebeens were represented as ‘spots’ where sophisticated Africans met to drink in style. The magazine’s images disrupted and displaced the colonial association of shebeens with African ‘excess’ and criminality. Drum journalists were acutely aware of the increased stratification occurring among Africans in the cities. They ranked shebeens according to the type of liquor they served, the friendliness of the queen, and the ambience of the ‘spot’; the class of customers and the comfort of the establishment determined the tone. Can Themba frequently visited ‘Little Heaven’, Sophiatown’s ‘poshest shebeen’, reached by climbing a flight of rickety stairs. Tucked away at the end of a long shabby passage, ‘the spot’ was immediately welcoming. Bright lights, ‘modern jazz music of the hottest kind’ and plenty of beer and brandy offset the warmth of ‘the queen’, who knew her regulars by name.6 In Can Themba’s hierarchy, ‘Little Heaven’ was a ‘handsome and respectable shebeen’, its patrons nurses, teachers and policemen. But there were other kinds of shebeens, defined by the representation of the shebeener as ‘out to make money, and damn the customer’. These were places where ‘doping’ (watering down spirits to make them go further) was everyday practice, and Can Themba condemned them: ‘They are dirty, and crowded and hostile. The shebeen queen is always hurrying you to drink quickly, and swearing at somebody or other. “You b—s act as if you’ve licenses to drink!” She sells everything, brandy, gin, beer and skokiaan, hops hoenene, barberton, pineapple, and even more violent concoctions’.7 Women writers, too, differentiated between ‘clumsy and untidy’ skokiaan queens who hung around backyards, and fashionably dressed shebeen queens who kept a sharp eye on the needs of customers, relegating sorghum beer drinkers to the kitchen to protect the sensibilities of ‘high-class’ customers. For shebeen queens themselves, toughness was a shield against the chicanery of penniless, thirsty customers and male sexual aggression. Their skill in devising appropriate masks drew on two longestablished traditions. The older of these was female, devised by women compelled to endure patriarchal relationships. Their restricted languages and avoidance behaviors were part of a female code of respect, but they were also masks behind which they might hide their feelings in order to present an image of subservience to men. The second tradition was that invented by Africans entering the colonial economy and for whom masking became a means of self-protection in negotiating with white employers and officials.8 But there were critical differences between the malecentered journalism of Drum writers, and representations of shebeens by women writers. Respectability and dignity, critical aspects of mature African femininity, were central concerns for women. For Ellen Kuzwayo, these attributes were carefully reserved for the character of the women themselves, whereas the rowdy places were cast as a source of annoyance for African family life.9 But significantly, dignity 6 D. Can Themba, ‘Let the People Drink!’, in ‘Drum’ Decade, ed. Chapman, p. 100. 7 Ibid. 8 See Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 23–5, for a discussion of masking. 9 Kuzwayo, pp. 25–30.

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and respect were not part of Drum shebeen discourse, and nor was the dichotomy between family and shebeen life. For Drum writers, shebeens were both ‘home’, and places where Drum journalists were made and tested.10 Paradoxically, shebeen pieces published in Drum were often more complex than the rest of the magazine, working against representations of glamour, consumerism and imitative values, while simultaneously promoting them.11 In the best of the boozy columns, the shebeen as space was filled not by an overbearing maternal figure, but by a tension between desire and lived experience. In these pieces, the images of injustices and human weaknesses that wracked township lives are too intense for discursive collusion with idealized lifestyles. The unglamorous dimensions of a culture centered on drink are rendered particularly stark when women other than the shebeen queens are brought into view. Casey Motsisi describes how Sis Skeleton, ‘a doll who is as pretty as can be but is so thin’, was pushed out of a shebeen and the door closed tightly behind her because the men drinkers did not like her singing. To celebrate her departure and revive the ambience, the shebeen queen placed ‘a straight of mahog [brandy] on the table … saying it’s on the house’.12 Motsisi’s former school teacher, Can Themba, portrays the once lovely Marta as an abused alcoholic, battered by her husband. Drunk on Monday morning, Marta passes the bus stop: Her baby was hanging dangerously on her back as she staggered up Victoria Road. Somebody in the queue remarked dryly, ‘S’funny how a drunk woman’s chile never falls.’ ‘Shet-up!’ said Marta in the one vulgar word she knew. She stood, swaying a moment on her heels, and watched the people in the queue bitterly. A bus swung round the Gibson Street corner and narrowly missed hitting her. Three or four women in the queue screamed, ‘Oooo!’ But Marta just turned and staggered off into Gibson Street, the child carelessly hanging on her back.13

As one critic notes, the nonchalant style of Drum writers hides deep concern for the ‘township types’ who lived on the fringe – ‘the suicidal nature of their lives, the inversion of values, their lack of feeling for others, and the total lack of any aim in life’.14 The images of the frail young women who hang about shebeens stand in stark contrast to the mask of the capable, tough, ‘two hundred pound weight’ entrepreneurial Aunt Peggy who wobbles her way across the floor, her ‘beefy right arm’ held out, calling, ‘Money on the table first … or else’.15 10 Lewis Nkosi, ‘The Fabulous Decade: The Fifties’, qtd in Chapman, ‘Preface’, in ‘Drum’ Decade, ed. Chapman, p. 7. 11 Dorothy Driver, ‘Drum Magazine (1951–9) and the Spatial Configurations of Gender’, in Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, eds Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (New York: Routledge: 1996), p. 231. 12 Casey Motsisi, ‘Casey’s Beat: Auntie Changes Her Mind’, Drum, February 1977, p. 35. 13 D. Can Themba, ‘Marta’, in ‘Drum’ Decade, ed. Chapman, p. 121. 14 Esther Sangweni, ‘Black Journalism and Black English Literature in South Africa’, M.A. dissertation (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1986), p. 45. 15 Motsisi, ‘Casey’s Beat: At Sixes and Sevens’, Drum, October 1976, p. 71.


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Shebeen journalism worked within but also against the grain of Drum magazine’s discourses of romantic love and idealized nuclear families that were its stock-in-trade. Unhappy domestic relationships are a constant theme. Motsisi’s ‘ever-loving’ wife served him food, scrubbed his back in the bath tub, brewed him liquor in moments of crisis, kept house and raised their daughter, but she suffered the consequences of his drinking: ‘And to think that when those people of yours at that Drum place of yours pay you, you come home carrying litres of mahog and cigarettes. But not even a piece of meat and a packet of candles,’ the ‘ever-loving’ bellows as she peels the paint off the walls and demands to know, ‘What sort of man are you? I’ve never seen such a lazy man like you who does not care for his house and yard’.16

Inevitably, their fights were stopped by his hasty retreat to Aunt Peggy’s, or the intervention of their young daughter. Romanticizing and mythologizing were kept for the shebeen queen as mother, a composite figure seen in Motsisi’s Aunt Peggy, Eskia Mphahlele’s Aunt Dora and Can Themba’s Fatty of the ‘Thirty Nine Steps’. The ideal shebeen queen for Drum writers was one who allowed maternal feeling to seep through the tough exterior and so to comfort young men. Motsisi celebrates Aunty Peggy’s ability to advise on his impending marriage, as she offers ‘A wet motherly kiss, a hug and a pat on the shoulder with the words: “Yes you’re a man, son. I never know who it is but I know she will make you a good wife” … And such and such and such and such hugs, kisses, reminders that I’m her son … you know’.17 They were mothers who lived for their sons: ‘they chose this life and accommodated the hazards, my mother wanted a better life for her children, a kind of insurance against poverty by trying to give me a prestige profession, and if necessary would go to jail whilst doing it’.18 Perhaps this romanticism served as a mask for Drum journalists whose own mothers were shebeeners. At the very least, it hindered journalistic recognition of the masking game so central in the lives of female shebeeners. Even less do Drum writers scrutinize the men (their fathers) who abandoned these larger-than-life, resourceful women. Aunt Peggy and several other prominent queens apparently have no lovers, but they do have children whom they educate to high school and beyond. When husbands enter the texts, they are seldom given even-handed treatment. Thus, Ma Tladi’s husband has a ‘babalaas bek’ (hangover mouth), which he is repeatedly told to shut. The ability to name fathers, husbands and lovers is complicated by the writers’ positioning themselves as ‘sons’ of shebeen queens. It is not impossible that acknowledging drunken shebeen patrons as father figures came too close to the bone for some of the writers, and perhaps the Andy Capp figure in the cartoon feature Shebeen Sarah was an attempt to find a composite shebeen father. But the characters cloned from the English cartoon strip remained trapped in their original identities.19 16 Motsisi, ‘Casey’s Beat: After the Nagging … the Drinking’, Drum, July 1977, p. 63. 17 Motsisi, ‘Casey’s Beat: At Sixes and Sevens’, p. 71. 18 Modisane, p. 38. 19 See Drum, July 1976; Drum, August 1976; Drum, September 1976; Drum, December 1976; Drum, February 1977; Drum, March 1977; Drum, July 1977.

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The significant others of shebeen queens were cast as bootleggers – ‘mailers’ or ‘gwevas’ in the argot of the illicit liquor trade – often white policemen and ‘coloured’ men paid to buy liquor at white bottlestores. Indeed, Aunt Peggy threw a farewell party for her ‘white cop gweva’ on his transfer to Cape Town.20 These representations of corruption pointed to a growing problem for the state. The unevenness of the 1928 Liquor Act, with its brewing exemptions and consumer permits, created an administrative nightmare and endless opportunities for graft. By the early 1960s, apartheid police admitted that they had lost control of the illicit liquor trade in home-brewed beer and ‘European liquor’ across the country.21 Government officials began to ask why the state itself should not profit from the lucrative African trade in ‘European liquor’ as it did from the sorghum beer industry, worth 3 million Rand annually in 1961. The process of ending prohibition in 1961 heralded the displacement of earlier colonial discourses by apartheid rhetoric. At the center of this discursive struggle were parliamentary debates on the ‘native liquor problem’. Like their predecessors, prohibitionists in parliament in the 1960s pleaded for retaining colonial trusteeship over people ‘emerging from primitive barbarism’. South Africa’s success with colonialism, they claimed, would be jeopardized if European liquor were supplied to Africans whose tribal system had broken down: ‘We must maintain ourselves here or die’.22 An ‘immature people’ would misconstrue the privilege of European liquor, perceiving it as an elevation in status. Repeating an enduring mantra of colonialism, the prohibitionist lobby warned that liberalizing the liquor laws would lead to sexual violence and uncontrolled expressions of passion and desire.23 The language of the apartheid regime was more powerful and the arguments more multifaceted than the older discourse of rampant sexual disorder, however. Apartheid ideologues drew on the language of ‘black peril’, mobilized white envy, and condemned the inefficacy of colonial law. Prohibition itself, politicians claimed, had fostered ‘terrifying breeding places of trouble and violence’, allowed ‘swanky shebeens’ to flourish, and enabled blacks to become rich.24 In 1961, illicit liquordealing accounted for 60% of the national liquor trade. Was the government to leave blacks to continue enriching themselves, or take steps to transfer liquor profits to whites? For if the state controlled the sale of liquor, the proceeds could be used for township administration and black housing. The apartheid equation was neat: ‘white taxes’ could then service ‘white areas’ exclusively. The all-white parliament voted for the lifting of prohibition on the sale of European liquor to Africans in 1962. In the new dispensation, ‘European liquor’ was to 20 Motsisi, ‘Casey and Company’, Drum, September 1978, p. 76. 21 UG 55/1960, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the General Distribution and Selling Prices of Intoxicating Liquor (Pretoria, 1960), p. 8, Chairman: Avril Malan. 22 Frans van Wyk, qtd in ‘Farmers Want Liquor for Africans’, Cape Times, 24 April 1958, p. 2. 23 See Anne Mager, ‘The First Decade of “European beer” in Apartheid South Africa: The State, the Brewers and the Drinking Public: 1962–1972’, Journal of African History, 40:3 (1999), pp. 367–88. 24 Minister of Justice, House of Assembly [South Africa], Debates, 16 June 1961, col. 8287.


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be sold by the Bantu Areas Administration Boards (BAABs) in the African townships. Local BAABs would retain 20% of the profits, and the remainder was to be remitted to the department of Bantu Administration for financing apartheid schemes. Liquor outlets – on- and off-sales – would be built alongside the beerhalls. The ban on shebeens was retained, and controls over home-brewing extended, for if the BAABs were to make a profit then the illicit trade had to be stamped out. The apartheid state was clearly not prepared to acknowledge what all Drum journalists knew – that ‘a different way of drinking had evolved and it could not suddenly disappear’.25 Liquor ‘liberalization’ was accompanied by intensified racial prejudice and tightened control over commercial activity. Racial fears of uncontrolled desire, drunkenness and disorder filled the white press.26 The BAABs were repeatedly reminded that ‘trading by Bantu in white areas is not an inherent primary opportunity for them, but should be allowed only where necessary, within the urban Bantu residential area for the benefit of the Bantu’.27 Within the African townships, businesses were required to ‘confine themselves to the provision of the daily essential domestic necessities of the Bantu’, but ‘Bantu’ needs were so narrowly defined that ‘dry cleaners, garages and petrol-filling stations’ were excluded as opportunities for black investment.28 Ironically, the racial discourse that closed off the last remaining avenues for African entrepreneurial activity propelled more and more people into shebeening.29 Nat Nakasa’s prediction that ‘the shebeens will be with us for a long time to come’, was amply borne out.30 Notwithstanding the renewed ban in 1962, Casey Motsisi, ‘Shakespeare of the shebeens’, and hundreds of others, continued to ‘hotfoot it down to Aunt Peggy’s’, so that by the end of the 1960s there were over 4000 shebeens in Soweto alone. Since the proprietors of these high-risk cash businesses kept no books (apart from Aunt Peggy’s ‘black book’ of debtors) and had no bank accounts, their share of the turnover in liquor retailing can only be estimated. Certainly, their contribution to soaring liquor profits was recognized within the industry, and shebeens helped to augment liquor sales across the board. Between 1963 and 1971, national sales of spirits, malt beer and wine rose by 60%; Bantu beer sales climbed by 76% in the same period.31 As the legislation intended, white liquor producers, retailers and the racially exclusive white state were the major beneficiaries.32 The BAABs’ liquor profits were 25 Nat Nakasa, ‘And So the Shebeen Lives On’, in The World of Nat Nakasa, ed. Patel, p. 15. 26 Mager, ‘First Decade of “European beer”’. 27 Secretary for Bantu Administration and Development, Circular Minute No. A 12/1–A8/1, 14 February 1963 in CTCC Bantu Affairs Committee Minutes, September 1962 – August 1963. 28 Ibid. 29 The Bantu Laws Amendment Act (1964) forbade trading without ministerial permission. 30 Nakasa, ‘And So the Shebeen’, p. 15. 31 Staff Reporter, ‘Bantu Beer Is Booming’, Pretoria News, 29 December 1964, p. 9; J.L. Rusburne and H. Hamman, A Survey of the Liquor Industry in South Africa, 7 (Statsinform Pty: July 1972), pp. 33–8. 32 Herald Reporter, ‘Cheers in Beer Says OD Man’, Eastern Province Herald, 19 October 1973, p. 23. ‘OD’ is Oude Meester, whose Chair, Dirk Hertzog, reported a near doubling of profits for the financial year ending 30 June 1973.

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so much higher than their minimum budget requirements in the urban townships that the state commandeered considerable sums for grand apartheid schemes. Rather than drinking themselves into homes and onto football fields, as the regime had promised, Africans were drinking themselves into the apartheid system.33 Discontent with the apartheid regime – and with the shebeens – reached boiling point for black students in the mid-1970s. In September 1976, four months into the Soweto student uprising, an offensive was launched against shebeens in Cape Town’s African townships.34 Over 3000 school students set BAAB liquor outlets and beerhalls on fire, and within a few days students had sacked hundreds of shebeens, overturning drums of maize beer and smashing bottles of whisky, brandy and wine in the streets. Students mounted roadblocks and searched cars.35 The townships reeked of liquor and the streets were littered with broken bottles.36 Angry migrant workers grumbled, how could boys tell men when and where to drink? ‘Ndiyi ndoda utywala ndabolukela’, complained one patriarch, a commented translated as ‘I am a man and therefore I automatically qualify to become a drinker’.37 The shebeeners were furious: ‘“what is the relation of the shebeens to the cause for which they claim to fight?’”, a shebeener demanded to know.38 Seven of the eight bottle stores in Langa had been destroyed, putting an end to a monthly turnover of R6million.39 Shebeeners closed their doors and retreated to back rooms, while beerhalls on the East Rand and in Soweto went up in flames. The press was at a loss to explain the students’ antipathy to liquor. A white journalist put student action down to ideology: ‘I would guess it’s a sign of the puritanism that so often comes along with Black nationalism in its idealistic – if quite intolerant – early forms’, he opined.40 Motsisi was also dubious of the new black consciousness worldview: ‘Black power! All very well. If kept within reason. Without reason it all adds up to black plunder’.41 Students’ own statements point

33 See Mager, ‘First Decade of “European Beer”’; ‘New Body to Help African Alcoholics’, Rand Daily Mail, 26 June 1967, p. 3; Isaac Mathe, ‘And Now: Drinking Clubs’, Star [Johannesburg], 3 March 1964, p. 18, which recounts the rise of teenage ‘“social drinking”’ clubs; and Business Reporter, ‘Township Sale of Liquor Outstrips Food’, Eastern Province Herald, 25 April 1972, p. 15. The claim is based on figures from a survey conducted by Bill Davies, ‘Retail and Service Activities in the Bantu Township in Port Elizabeth’ (University of Port Elizabeth Institute for Planning Research, n.d.). 34 See Carol Hermer, The Diary of Maria Tholo (Johannesburg: Raven, 1980), and Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (Johannesburg: Raven, 1983), pp. 321–62, for an account of the student uprising of 1976. 35 Cape Times Reporters, ‘Man Shot Dead in New Unrest’, Cape Times, 12 October 1976, p. 1; see also ‘Shebeens Had Warning Before the Rioting’, Star [Johannesburg], 14 October 1976, p. 5. 36 See various accounts of the conflict in the Cape Times, 12–14 October 1976. 37 ‘A Man is Entitled to Have his Drink’, Argus [Cape Town], 16 October 1976, p. 17. This is one of six stories on a page with the banner headline ‘Shebeens’; see also notes 38, 43–5. 38 Staff Reporter, ‘Blitz Angers Shebeen-owners’, Cape Times, 14 October 1976, p. 1. 39 ‘No Liquor for Two Years?’ Argus [Cape Town], 16 October 1976, p. 17. 40 Hector Sauer, ‘Shebeen Bashing: The Reasons Why’, Star, 15 October 1976, p. 16. 41 Motsisi, ‘Casey’s Beat: Live Fast, Die Young’, Drum, January 1977, p. 47.


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to more complicated and more personal motivations than political ideology:42 ‘Our fathers spend their weekends at the shebeens … When they finish work on Fridays they go straight to the shebeens. They spend all their wages there. We see them for the first time on Monday morning when they come home to ask our mothers for money to go to work’, said a Fezeka High pupil.43 ‘The complete destruction of the Black man’s soul through the undermining and the collaboration of the shebeens has got to stop now and forever’, explained another.44 ‘We cannot achieve our aims when half the nation is drunk. We are not fighting amongst ourselves. We are disciplining those who won’t listen’.45 For the next decade, shebeeners lived with the intermittently enforced prohibition of radical activism, and suffered the slur that coupled their livelihoods with the oppressive apartheid regime. It was not until black consciousness writers began to recognize shebeen queens as members of the African community that an alternative discourse emerged, and the political stigma of shebeening began to fade. Black consciousness writers recognized that the ambiguous place of shebeen queens – as self-interested capitalists and providers of services to black people – marked out a role for them as conspiratorial figures in the anti-apartheid struggle. In the writing of the ‘post ’76 generation’, shebeen queens were portrayed as black people capable of ‘conscientization’ or attaining awareness of a common black identity and ‘politicization’ into radical black activism. Thus, Mongane Serote’s ‘Joyce’ (the ‘ma’ or aunty of the stereotypical mother figure was now stripped away), who runs a ‘high class shebeen’, plays her part in the armed struggle by tipping off the assassin of a policeman who is dining in her shebeen.46 In this text, shebeen queens act in the interests of a cause in ways defined by activist men. In contrast, no glamorous roles appear in black women’s writing. Instead, shebeen queens are cast as thwarted businesswomen spurred to action by their own anger, and fantasies of retaliation against oppressive officials. In Miriam Tlali’s ‘Gone Are Those Days’, a shebeen queen has a dream of murdering the township manager.47 The ‘deed’ is committed collectively by a ‘procession of shebeen queens’, who dose the victims – ‘the white wasters and their wives’ – with a lethal domestic cocktail of household detergents and insecticides.48 The collectivist theme springs partly from Tlali’s own project: she deploys her authorial voice in the service of black women by telling their stories, collected through conversations. The collectivist theme also reflects the significance of mutual aid and communal self-help in providing capital and credit for the informal retail liquor trade. This literary rehabilitation of shebeen queens and their livelihoods followed on the massive growth of the illicit liquor trade in 42 See Michael Fridjhon and Andy Murray, Conspiracy of Giants: The South African Liquor Industry (Johannesburg: Divaris Stein, 1986), p. 51; their argument collapses all antiliquor protests into one. 43 ‘Liquor Poisons the Minds of our People’, Argus [Cape Town], 16 October 1976, p. 17. 44 ‘Shebeens “Must Go”’, Argus [Cape Town], 9 October 1976, p. 4. 45 ‘Drive to Clean up Shebeens’, Argus [Cape Town], 3 January 1977, p. 2. 46 Mongane Serote, To Every Birth its Blood (Johannesburg: Raven, 1981), p. 260. 47 Miriam Tlali, ‘Gone Are Those Days’, in Footprints in the Quag: Stories & Dialogues from Soweto (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1989), pp. 93–101. 48 Ibid., pp. 99–100.

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the wake of the student uprisings. Soweto’s population of approximately 1.5 million (officially 1.2 million) in 1979 was served by an estimated 2,250 bootleggers, and numerous illegal storage depots. Shebeen sales accounted for 70% of the bottled beer trade.49 Not surprisingly, liquor producers, notably the SAB, took up the rhetoric of shebeens as legitimate African drinking-places and began to pressurize the apartheid regime for recognition of the illicit liquor trade. Colonial ideas about liquor and race drew on and mobilized white fears and envy, and circumscribed the place of Africans in liquor commerce. More specifically, these discourses associated shebeens with an essentialized African character given to excess, criminality and aggression. African writing on shebeens was an attempt to resist this representation, and to assert a rhetorical power commensurate with the significance of shebeens in the social landscape of African townships. African discourses at different moments inflected and displaced colonial discourses of ‘the illicit liquor trade’, albeit that they were unstable and dominated by discordant constructions of the figure of the shebeen queen. In the 1950s, African representations of shebeeners tracked between colonial discourses of the concoction-brewing shebeen queen, and the sophisticated Sophiatown maitre d’ of Drum magazine. From the mid 1970s, shebeeners were depicted as political activists, economic survivors, proto-feminist businesswomen, and even apartheid collaborators. These representations constituted overlapping elements of a discursive struggle to displace colonial discourses of liquor and stereotyped notions of African character. In the period under scrutiny, the illicit liquor trade facilitated women’s economic agency and created a social milieu out of which a new urban African culture was forged. It also provided an avenue for some Africans to accumulate wealth, and others to exit from their perceived social responsibility. In so doing, the illicit liquor trade was subversive not only for the apartheid regime, but also for radical African nationalist discourses.

49 Supplement to Financial Mail, 25 March 1983, pp. 3, 59.

Chapter 8

The Textuality of Tourism and the Ontology of Resource: An Amazing Thai Case Study Guy Redden Tourism is now claimed to be the world’s largest international trade, a rise which appears to be indicative of the late-capitalist shift towards the commodification of the immaterial.1 Indeed, in selling images of a diversity of places and the means to translate them into leisure experience, tourism is the paradigmatic cultural service industry of a globalizing world. It is predicated upon the communications and transport capabilities that link actors from different places to an unprecedented extent. Thus the tourist, for Zygmunt Bauman, is the embodiment of mobility and freedom of choice that global consumerism both promises and requires: they are someone who can ‘thank God daily’ for making them so.2 In Bauman’s view, the tourist is nothing less than a metaphor for the beneficiaries of globalization, for those with capacity to make the most of circuits of exchange. The obverse is the existence of classes who have lesser degrees of mobility, deal with its negative consequences, or perhaps worse, are compelled to be mobile in ways they would not choose or cannot control – refugees, migrant workers, the trafficked. Tourism studies has long since been haunted by the possibility that a source of great pleasure and wealth may sometimes cause inequality, in the form of a price that others pay for the mobility of the privileged. Impact studies have shown that tourism in less wealthy countries can establish imbalanced power relations between locals, and those who have the power to sponsor activities that are arguably adverse to toured ecologies and communities or some members of those communities. One theoretical orientation in the field, which Kevin Meethan labels the ‘commoditization hypothesis’, posits that the spread of the commodity relation is a ‘corrosive destroyer of cultures’, in that non-native cultural demands, and appropriations of local culture that change its meaning, are foisted upon host communities by paying outsiders.3 The supposed reduction of cultural diversity born of the demand for ‘international standards’ by tourists can be seen as a form of cultural imperialism

1 John Frow, ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’, in Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 100. 2 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 102. 3 Kevin Meethan, Tourism in Global Society: Place, Culture and Consumption (Houndmills, Hants: Palgrave, 2001) p. 5.

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or ‘coca-colonization’.4 And on a geopolitical level, tourism can be seen as creating dependencies between metropolitan (tourist-generating) and peripheral (touristreceiving) nations, resulting in the replication of ‘colonial or imperialist forms of domination and structural underdevelopment’.5 Affinities with colonialism are commonly noted, though rarely developed. Affinities with colonialism have also been identified on the level of representation. There is little doubt that, in a broad sense, much tourism promotion draws upon generic features of colonial discourses: stereotypes and binary oppositions that mark the difference of particular places and peoples from the familiar, and a kind of adventurous and appropriating gaze reminiscent of the ‘imperial eyes’ of colonial agents.6 In their review of first-world tourism marketing of third-world destinations, Echtner and Prasad recognize myths of colonial discourse, the overarching one being the ‘myth of the unchanged’, which is conveyed by a given country being represented with reference to its natural resources, or artifacts associated with traditional ways of life. This sense of timelessness suggests a place ripe for a journey of discovery by an addressee enjoined to relive colonial-style adventures in places implicitly different from home.7 In addition, countries are coded through a range of colonial stereotypes, from the exotic opulence and mystery of the Oriental to the uncivilized primitive of frontier Africa. At the same time, we have to ask what these resemblances amount to in ideological terms, because they exist anterior to the imperial context. As John Frow notes, there is an inherent hermeneutic problem of representing and understanding the Other in already available terms.8 It is at least possible that tourism simply ‘repurposes’ a convenient lexicon without engendering anything like colonial relations – after all, it is a consumer industry in an age when fantasy-derived associations rather than functional utility drive much consumption.9 Marketing logic dictates that such meanings are relentlessly positive in tone; their primary use lies in symbolically marking products, not fixing the truth of the world or validating the violent arrogation of power. But even if it is simply a means to a commercial end, the promotion of tourism still involves representations that nominally claim to depict what places and people are ‘really’ like. These representations are designed to direct the production of socio-economic relations, relations which are also shaped by regulatory frameworks: today, these frameworks are shaped by the governmental, 4 George Hughes, ‘Authenticity in Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research, 22:4 (1995), p. 783. 5 Erik Cohen, ‘The Sociology of Tourism: Approaches, Issues and Findings’, in The Sociology of Tourism: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, eds Yiorgos Apostoloupolos, Stella Leivadi and Andrew Yiannakis (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 53. 6 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 7 Charlotte M. Echtner and Pushkala Prasad, ‘The Context of Third World Tourism Marketing’, Annals of Tourism Research, 30:3 (2003), p. 669. 8 Frow, p. 73. 9 Nicholas Abercrombie, ‘Authority and Consumer Society’, in The Authority of the Consumer, eds Russel Keat, Nigel Whiteley and Nicholas Abercrombie (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 44–51.

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intergovernmental and commercial institutions and individuals that promote the (selective) liberalization of the international trade system. Accordingly, we can ask whether elements of a colonial style of discourse that have been transposed into new contexts constitute a form of control over the ‘mode of representation’ informing cross-cultural relations, such that the circumscription of the meaning of the Other continues to skew representation towards the interests of the powerful. In this chapter, I explore these issues with regard to a Thai national tourism campaign. Thailand, which translates as ‘land of the free’, is unique among Southeast Asian countries in never having been a European colony. However, it has been argued that political sovereignty was maintained partly because of trade concessions since the Bowring Treaty of 1855, which granted the British high levels of access to Thai markets.10 Successive Thai governments have upheld relatively free markets and cooperative relations with Western nations. Thailand’s role as an American logistics base and site for soldiers’ ‘rest and recreation’ visits during the Vietnam–American War boosted national infrastructure, and laid the foundations for the country’s tourism industry. Tourism was to lead the stellar economic growth experienced from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s, and it remains Thailand’s largest single source of foreign currency earnings. Operators enjoy low costs, and a laissez-faire approach to regulation.11 The case study is the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s ‘Amazing Thailand’ campaign, which first ran in 1998 and was subsequently extended for a number of seasons. The campaign was a direct response to the Asian economic crisis of 1997–98 that had followed the international financial community’s sudden retraction of US$23 billion from the Thai banking sector over the course of a few months.12 Thais themselves referred to this period as ‘Ton-tee IMF’ (roughly, ‘the IMF age’) to signify the travails of the economic depression in combination with the austere public spending measures that were imposed as conditions of IMF loans. As Giron and Correa note, the Asian crisis was ‘one of the most serious in the history of world capitalism’, yet hardly touched consciousness elsewhere in the world.13 As well as causing the collapse of many businesses in the finance and property sectors, the flight of capital led to the devaluation of the Thai currency, the baht, so that Thai organizations that had taken loans in foreign currencies (including the national government) saw the value of their debts rise drastically. ‘Amazing Thailand’ was designed to boost tourism arrivals to 17 million per year, to earn much-needed foreign currency.14 However, its central strategy was to present the country as something of 10 Rosalind C. Morris, ‘Failures of Domestication: Speculations on Globality, Economy and the Sex of Excess in Thailand’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13:1 (2001), p. 65. 11 James David Fahn, A Land on Fire: The Environmental Consequences of the Southeast Asian Boom (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003), pp. 45–9. 12 Michael R. King, ‘Who Triggered the Asian Financial Crisis?’, Review of International Political Economy, 8:3 (2001), pp. 438–66. 13 Alicia Giron and Eugenia Correa, ‘Global Financial Markets: Financial Deregulation and Crises’, International Social Science Journal, 51:160 (1999), p. 183. 14 Nick Kontogeorgopoulos, ‘Sustainable Tourism or Sustainable Development? Financial Crisis, Ecotourism, and the “Amazing Thailand” Campaign’, Current Issues in

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a ‘golden paradise’. The irony that the Thai government’s recovery plan was to sell the image of Thailand as an exotic, unperturbed wonderland, at a time when its imbrication in global capital flows had ushered in an unprecedented socio-economic crisis, led me to collect a range of Amazing Thailand materials in 1998 and 1999, when I was a lecturer at Prince of Songkla University in the south of the country. The Amazing Thailand campaign was essentially a branding exercise. It was organized quickly and was designed to supplement rather than to replace existing promotional materials. The core of the campaign was the glossy posters that were mass-produced and distributed in tourism regions within Thailand and abroad during 1998 and 1999. Numerous organizations were permitted to use the campaign imagery, resulting in a sense of its pervasiveness. It appeared on hoardings, bags containing tourism information for new arrivals, and in any number of other ephemeral forms from phone cards and postcards to Thai Airways in-flight meal boxes and fast food advertisements. The logo comprised the Amazing Thailand slogan with a line drawing of an eye. Materials usually had dark, principally black, backgrounds, while fonts were often white, gold and multi-colored. The main photographic images of the campaign show smiling tourists (individually or in heterosexual couples), each wearing an elaborate pinnacled coronet (called a chadha) that is used in Thai manora dancing and is worn by Thai kings during their coronation ceremonies. Each crown is variously embossed with miniaturized wonders of Thailand: Thai foods, dancing couples in traditional dress, traditional Thai architecture, statues of Buddha, hill tribe women, temples, crafts, monks, elephants, rivers, beaches, mountains, and so on. The tourists look up towards these jewels in their radiant golden crowns, with suitably amazed expressions on their faces. As well as the images and striking, sensuous aesthetic, the second notable dimension of the campaign was the categorization of Thailand into ‘nine facets of travel’ identified as being ‘unique to the Kingdom’: ‘amazing shopping paradise’, ‘amazing tastes of Thailand’, ‘amazing culture and heritage’, ‘amazing world heritage’, ‘amazing natural heritage’, ‘amazing Thai arts and lifestyle’, ‘amazing sports’, ‘amazing agricultural produce’, and ‘amazing gateway’.15 These rubrics were used as marketing tools for promoting particular attractions, each acting as a product in the brand range. This extended an approach already exemplified by Thai tourism promotion publications. The first line of the brochure Thailand: A Golden Wonderland (which was published before Amazing Thailand, but continued to be distributed as part of the campaign) claims that the land’s ‘enduring traditions exemplify a quintessential “Thainess” which indelibly colors the nation and gives the sense of an ancient land that is different’.16 Such brochures, and the campaign as a whole, having set up the theme of a distinctive Thai essence, proceed to represent it metonymically. This metonymy works by depicting, in verbal and visual signs replete with images of wondrousness, bounty, refinement and tradition, the cultural particulars which supposedly constitute that whole.

Tourism, 2:4 (1999), p. 323. 15 Amazing Thailand 1998–1999, brochure (Tourism Authority of Thailand, 1998). 16 Thailand: A Golden Wonderland, brochure (Tourism Authority of Thailand, 1996), p. 6.


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The images employed suggest the seamless identity of Thai people, place and culture, through the representations of Thai society reproducing its indigenous forms: cuisine, crafts, dress, performing arts, and so on. The emphasis is on the material appearance of things markedly Thai, and the performance of rituals which involve them, from long-tail boating to wearing silk. The brochure Amazing Thai Festivals and Events 1998 invites the tourist to experience an array of local activities. Both people and things become representative embodiments of the national spirit; their main discursive function is to be typical. The provenance of specific rituals – who the participants are, and their roles in contemporary culture – are largely elided, resulting in the sense that ‘this is what the locals do’.17 There is frequent mention of continuity, emphasizing that Thailand retains its cultural integrity today. For example, the brochure Amazing Natural Heritage argues that Thailand is not only a country of ‘immense natural wealth’, but that it has retained an extraordinary amount of this natural heritage.18 Perhaps the most extreme case is to be found in the lyrics of the Amazing Thailand song, ‘Thailand, the Golden Paradise’, which is particularly rarefied for not having to intersperse the rhetoric with mundane touristic particulars: I dreamed of a Kingdom green as jade, Where stone ruins stand in the palm tree’s shade, Where rice fields stretch from hills to the strand, And the beaches glisten with fine white sand. Thailand, Thailand, golden paradise, Thailand, Thailand, where tranquil dreams entice. I long to touch the light, And feel the jasmine night, In Thailand, land of a thousand smiles. I dreamed of the city where I was born. Electric by night, serene in the dawn, Where glittering temples and palaces stand, Next to towering pagodas ancient and grand. The hilltops rise where the rivers part, The orchids bloom in the jungle’s heart, The silk soft glow of a maiden’s glance, As she bends her hands in a ritual dance.19 Overall, the depiction of the indigenous sphere as a site for the production, circulation and consumption of authentic cultural forms constructs Thailand as an ethnically 17 Amazing Thai Festivals and Events 1998, brochure (Tourism Authority of Thailand, 1998). 18 Amazing Natural Heritage, brochure (Tourism Authority of Thailand, 1998), p. 11. 19 ‘Thailand, The Golden Paradise, Official Theme Songs of Amazing Thailand’, cassette liner (Tourism Authority of Thailand, 1998).

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unified, autochthonous wonderland. This seems consonant with the argument that a primary motive of tourists is the search for authenticity. In his influential early work, The Tourist, Dean MacCannell argues that modern tourists seek experiences of ‘premodern’ cultural wholeness as a panacea for their everyday experiences of social fragmentation.20 For Charles Grivel, the traveler is a person from a culture marked by mobility who goes to find the Other at home, to find people ‘still there, where they belong, hemmed in by the region in which they live’. To find, indeed, that ‘they are this region’.21 In these terms, Amazing Thailand seems to be a form of ‘soft primitivism’ in which experience of a putatively timeless, unified culture is seen as an enchanted palliative to cultural complexity and disintegration.22 Significantly, Amazing Thailand materials depict the tourist as someone who can experience the authentic Thailand without disturbing the logic of its autochthony: as is common in tourism brochures, the locals are presented as ‘objects to gaze upon’.23 The tourist is inserted into the scene as a neutral sightseeing figure, of the kind Jonathan Culler sees as determined to read a sign as being a sign of itself, or, as John Urry puts it, as a photographic realist who gathers experiences of the Other through ‘gazing’.24 For instance, the brochure Bangkok and the Central Plains suggests that the Choa Phraya river ‘offers a glimpse of traditional riverine lifestyles, affording insights into the history and character of this wondrous city’.25 Tourists are frequently shown in positions of privileged witness of local cultural production, as brief insiders to a cornucopia. They are not attributed with agency, but are depicted as above all experiencing immersion in all things Thai. We must also account for another dimension of the promotional materials, one that is not much concerned with authenticity. Exogenous cultural forms, ones that are alien to the fetishized class of the uniquely Thai, are also offered to the tourist. As Erik Cohen has pointed out, much holiday activity actually consists in doing things you can do at home but in a nicer place.26 Cohen challenges MacCannell’s view that tourism is a kind of modern pilgrimage focused on the search for the authentic in the experience of cultural otherness. ‘Traditional Thailand’ is complicated by the sense that the country possesses a double nature: images of chain store shopping, modern transportation, non-native sports, credit-card purchasing, liquor, plush international standard accommodation and international brand names slip into the promotional 20 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 3. 21 Charles Grivel, ‘Travel Writing’, in Materialities of Communication, eds Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 244. 22 Marion Bowman, ‘The Noble Savage and the Global Village: Cultural Evolution in New Age and Neo-Pagan Thought’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 10:2 (1995), p. 142. 23 Echtner and Prasad, ‘The Context of Third World Tourism Marketing’, p. 665. 24 Jonathan Culler, ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, American Journal of Semiotics, 1:1/2 (1981), pp. 127–40; John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990), p. 3. 25 Bangkok and the Central Plains, brochure (Tourism Authority of Thailand, 1998), p. 6. 26 Erik Cohen, cited in Tom Selwyn, ‘Introduction’, The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism, ed. Selwyn (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), p. 3.


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discourse at various points. The welcome bag distributed to arrivals at Don Muang airport in Bangkok shows the crowned female tourist gazing at the ‘wonders of the kingdom’ above an advertisement for a Hard Rock café.27 On the cover of an Amazing Thailand discounts booklet, the same figure seems to gaze upwards beyond the traditional jewels in her crown, to the catch phrase ‘Thailand prefers Visa’.28 In Bangkok, discos are offered alongside the chance to watch Thai kohn dancing.29 Nature and cultural sites are punctuated by the modes of transport that make them accessible, such as the rented mountain bikes that one can use to see the Sukothai Heritage park, or the four-wheel drives that allow one to experience authentic hill tribe culture in the north.30 Although Thailand is a ‘golden wonderland’, it is also, in another modality, extremely modern, able to furnish certain kinds of very contemporary consumer experiences. The necessary aporia which arises from the positioning of the subject as the witness of the timeless autochthonous nature of Thailand, but in actuality is involved in contemporary transnational socio-economic relations, is evident in the discourse. Yet these ‘alien’ forms are represented as incidental: nominal, not essential, presences in the heart of the local. Because there is no rhetorical anxiety about embedding these particulars into a placespecific myth of origins, Thailand’s oxymoronic double nature achieves coherence. Although the concession to the presence of the non-indigenous is made, it does not lead to depiction of outside agents – such as tourists themselves – as being at all responsible for the appearance of the non-local in the ambit of the local. Visa, Hard Rock Cafés and discos are not given any cultural provenance or ethnic category. If Amazing Thailand focuses on embedding the paraphernalia of the traditionally Thai in a narrative of Thai self-origination, it is also an advertising window for ‘global’ products which tourists will also consume on their Thai travels. Perhaps the ultimate symbol of this merging of global and local lies in the licensing of Amazing Thailand images to corporations like McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which then realize their cachet directly for promotion of their own global products. A McDonald’s puzzle distributed in the company’s Thai outlets invites us to ‘Have a Great Time in Amazing Thailand’. It pictures an enormous statue of a giant – a character from the Thai Ramakien myth – which guards the entrance of Wat Prakaew Temple in Bangkok against the entry of evil spirits. Yet the giant has forgone its normal aloof indifference to all-comers in order to put its hand on the shoulder of Ronald McDonald, who waves at us, smiling. The Ontology of Resource From the point of view of marketing strategy, the depiction of Thailand as both culturally unique, and as able to furnish the conditions of home, makes sense. The ‘total product’ of a tourism destination comprises attractions, perceived qualities 27 Amazing Thailand 1998, 1999. Your Free Welcome Bag, paper bag (Tourism Authority of Thailand). 28 Your Guide to Great Savings, booklet (Tourism Authority of Thailand/Visa, 1998). 29 Bangkok and the Central Plains, p. 11. 30 Chiang Mai and Northern Thailand, brochure (Tourism Authority of Thailand, 1997), p. 11.

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of the destination that differentiate it as a product, which provide its particular allure, and at the same time, facilities – resources that promise familiar comforts.31 Far from upsetting the ideology of ‘Amazing’ Thailand, the figuration of Thailand’s confinement to its own enduring modes of being in heritage, crafts and rituals, when read alongside the paradoxical openness to the presence of outside socioeconomic elements, allows us to understand the admixture of the local and non-local as being essential to the aura of the commodity of the holiday. Amazing Thailand, itself ‘scarce’, becomes knowable to a non-Thai consumer, who requires certain modes and standards of home to be present abroad as one of the literal conditions of knowing the foreign place. Tourism, as Frow has shown, involves mapping expectations onto empirical experience.32 It is a kind of reading of received textual markers onto sights (even if, as is possible, one’s own reading challenges promotional discourses). Promotional rhetoric aims to guide the tourist’s practice towards a profitable set of commodified experiences. Representation of the way Thailand is, is determined by such exigencies of selling tourism products: the meanings offered are inseparable from their commercial use. Tourism destinations ‘are logically the point of consumption of the complex of activities that comprises tourism experience and are ultimately what is sold by place promotion agencies on the tourism market’. In terms of promotional strategy, this creates for the marketer the practical ‘problem of defining and subsequently delimiting a place as a product’.33 With regard to Amazing Thailand, the ways in which the essentially Thai is depicted are not as objective as they seem, but are categories of potential consumer experiences, experiences available in conjunction with the particular series of commodity exchanges which makes tourism possible. This ontology renders being as that which is commercially useful: Thailand is made to exist as a finite set of resources for consumption, and nothing politically contrary to this. This apparently banal, ‘practical’ activity of rhetorically circumscribing the meaning of Thailand as a tourist destination has ideological consequences on two levels. First, it elides the conditions of production of tourism as well as its material and social effects; second, on a broader scale, the picture of Thailand as a harmonious wonderland suggests that it is both an autonomous, self-determining nation (responsible for the way it is) and a unified one, ethnically and politically. This is a picture that cannot but occlude the historical complexity of the country, its internal diversity, its imbrication within the global economy and, above all, its social problems. With regard to the first point, the promotional rhetoric omits to explain the conditions upon which places are produced for tourist experience. This constitutes a form of commodity fetishism, a term used by Marx to describe the way in which market exchange encourages people to focus attention on the objective qualities

31 Brian Goodall, ‘The Dynamics of Tourism Place Marketing’, in Marketing Tourism Places, eds Gregory Ashworth and Brian Goodall (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 259. 32 Frow, p. 65. 33 Gregory Ashworth and Henk Voogd, ‘Can Places be Sold for Tourism?’, in Marketing Tourism Places, Ashworth and Goodall, pp. 6–7.


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of commodities, rather than the underlying social processes of their production.34 Tourism seems to be a transparent activity constituted in the relationship between a tourist witness and the locals being themselves. However, performances of authenticity are largely staged in the spectacles organized by the tourism industry.35 As with most commodities (excluding perhaps those marketed under the rubric of ‘ethical consumerism’), the conditions of production are excluded from the marketing communications. A salient example of this can be found in the tourism of northern Thailand, which emphasizes the experience of visiting ‘authentic’ villages. Hill tribe women are literally among the jewels in the crown of the tourist figures upon which the Amazing Thailand campaign visually centers. The tourist, the person whose demand partly determines the conditions of place, is led to believe they are experiencing the way that the native ‘really’ is. However, Jean Michaud’s ethnography revealed the tough conditions under which Hmong tribespeople are able to be involved in the trade.36 He estimates that up to 97.7% of the proceeds of hill tribe tourism goes to ethnically Thai middlemen. Meeju Morlaekoo, an Ahkha tribe activist who herself has performed for tourists, describes the situation of her people as ‘no different from keeping animals in cages’.37 She explains how tourism income is regularly extorted by local officials: ‘If there is 100 baht, they take it. If there is 1,000 baht, they take it’.38 Indeed, far from experiencing their status as jewels in the crown of Thailand, the hill tribes people are a captive labor market. Most are refugees without capital or rights, who are forbidden to travel outside their local districts, and are granted limited licenses to farm the land. Michaud found that Hmong tourism workers, who putatively represent the tribe, were outcast from it because of their deviation from social norms. Many were opium addicts, who sold the drug to foreigners, and those who accepted paying guests adapted their lifestyles to suit, eschewing the agrarian ways of life upon which Hmong culture is based. This is, of course, an extreme and disturbing example of the way in which tourism can directly sponsor iniquitous social relations when claiming to offer only the experience of the culture of autonomous agents. Yet problematic impacts are not limited to the staging of spectacle, but include issues of basic infrastructure: the ecological impacts of rapid development, rises in the cost of living for locals because of tourist-oriented pricing, exclusion of local agriculturists from land used for tourism, and the low wages and lack of job security for tourism industry workers due to the seasonal nature of the industry, fluctuations in arrivals, and ownership

34 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, at , Chapter 1, Section 4. 11 July 2007. 35 MacCannell, The Tourist, pp. 91–107. 36 Jean Michaud, ‘A Portrait of Cultural Resistance: The Confinement of Tourism in a Hmong Village in Thailand’, in Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies, eds Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), pp. 128–54. 37 ‘The Region: Indigenous Peoples Call for Equal Civil Rights’, New Frontiers, 5:4 (1999), pp. 1–2. 38 Ibid.

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of many tourism resources by non-locals.39 According to Joe Bandy, ‘fifty-five per cent of every tourist dollar spent in developing countries leaks back to developed countries according to World Bank estimates’.40 While tourism increases overall income and opportunities for some social groups in certain areas, it has few benefits for farming communities, and it attracts considerable controversy as a form of land-use in Thailand. Along these lines, the 1998 Bangkok art exhibition ‘Never My Land’ directly critiqued the Amazing Thailand campaign’s golden wonderland image, replacing the ‘c’ of ecotourism with a ‘g’.41 On a cultural level, tourism can lead to tensions as tourists do things that deviate from the norms of the host culture, such as nude sunbathing, drug-taking and being drunk in public.42 Discourses of tourism promotion are also a source of popular knowledge about places, raising broader issues of the politics of representation. The second sense in which the circumscriptions of the promotional discourse act ideologically is that, above and beyond their articulation with the material effects of tourism, they spread politically disputable impressions of place. Thai history is inseparable from complex power relations with foreign forces. Amazing Thailand depicts an essential, unitary Thainess that, as Thongchai Winichakul has shown, has never existed apart from its construction in geopolitical rhetoric. According to Winichakul, the modern Thai nation ‘was simply the space left over from direct colonialism’ when the Siamese monarchy incorporated small tributary kingdoms with diverse languages, cultures and religions, through negotiation with European colonial administrations.43 While Vietnamese, Cambodian and Burmese areas were integrated more seamlessly, the ongoing separatist conflict in the majority of Muslim Malay southern provinces is testament to this legacy. The 1997 financial crisis was a contemporary instance of outside influence over Thai affairs. According to the United Nations Commission for Trade and Development, the direct cause of the crash was the withdrawal of short-term investments in Thailand by foreign investors.44 This did not reflect fundamental weaknesses in the Thai economy, but perceived risks among foreign financiers about a property bubble.45 After the crash, the IMF, through the instrument of conditions attached to its loan to the Thai government, assumed real power in Thailand. Its public spending restrictions obviated the introduction of unemployment benefits, which was scheduled for 1998 and which had been promised to Thai workers by law in the 1991 Social Security Act. Simultaneously, unemployment in Thailand 39 Erik Cohen, ‘Marginal Paradises: Bungalow Tourism on the Islands of Southern Thailand’, Annals of Tourism Research, 9 (1982), pp. 189–228. 40 Joe Bandy, ‘Managing the Other of Nature: Sustainability, Spectacle, and Global Regimes of Capital in Ecotourism’, Public Culture, 8:3 (Spring 1996), p. 558. 41 Never My Land, brochure (Sunday Gallery, Bangkok, 1998). 42 Lisa Palmer ‘On or Off the Beaten Track: Tourist Trails in Thailand’, UTS Review, 4:1 (1998), pp. 67–91. 43 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation ([1988]; Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), p. 131. 44 Dilip K. Das, Asian Crisis: Distilling Critical Lessons, United Nations Commission for Trade and Development, Discussion Paper 152 (December 2000), pp. 6–7. 45 Giron and Correa, p. 187.


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rose dramatically, from 1.2 million to 3 million between January and August 1998, while many of the new urban unemployed had no family farms to return to, creating a social crisis of a type hard to imagine in countries with developed state welfare provision.46 Representing Thailand through the figure of traditional harmony is especially ironic in that its very ‘modern’ economic crisis could not be solved by a return to those traditional agrarian ways of life constructed as typical of the country in the Amazing Thailand promotion. While all cultures have traditions, the representation of Thailand as in essence traditional seems to reproduce some longstanding codes by which non-Western Others are discursively rendered timeless, often in contrast with the supposedly progressive cultures of the West. As James Clifford explains, typification in the sense of ‘metonymic freezing’ of the native ‘in which one part or aspect of people’s lives come [sic] to epitomize them as a whole’ creates the sense of ‘native people confined to and by the places to which they belong’, even though ‘groups unsullied by contact with a larger world have probably never existed’.47 In Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian argues that Western anthropology has been constituted through the premise that the Other inhabits a different time from the Self.48 This temporal distancing is mapped onto space in the supposition that the ethnographer travels to discover places with very different temporal valencies. Whether this gaze is chauvinistic or idealizing, Fabian’s point is that it denies coevalness between the Self (the ‘observer’) and the Other (the reified object of anthropology). There are similarities between such an anthropological gaze and the tourist gaze constructed by Amazing Thailand, in the sense that the tourist is promised an experience of a unique traditional culture, while the co-constitutive power of contemporary historical relations is effaced. Despite these affinities, it is hard to see Amazing Thailand as a simple extension of colonial discourse. Its function was to catalyze mass consumption, and it was initiated by the Thai government rather than imposed from outside. This official idealized image of nation designed for the consumption of others can be seen as a kind of ‘strategic Orientalism’.49 It provides a readily identifiable and hegemonic image of national unity that differentiates Thailand internationally.50 The repression of internal ethnic and political differences is the counterpart of its portrayal as a unique autonomous entity. However, rather than legitimating colonialism, this is ideologically consistent with the context of neo-liberal globalization. As a discourse structured by multinational corporate interests and international organizations, it has superseded statist paternalistic concepts of development, instead positing that unfettered transnational commercial activity free from state interference is a superior source of economic growth. In doing so, it relies on a key myth that all parties 46 Ji Giles Ungpakorn, Thailand: Class Struggle in an Era of Economic Crisis (Bangkok: Workers’ Democracy Book Club, 1999), pp. 18, 35. 47 James Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Cultural Studies, eds Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 100. 48 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 49 Penny Van Esterick, Materializing Thailand (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 95. 50 Maurizio Peleggi, ‘National Heritage and Global Tourism in Thailand’, Annals of Tourism Research, 23:2 (1996), p. 441.

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are free to trade and to benefit on the same terms, regardless of the capacities and resources already at their disposal. Essentialist tourism promotion represents the engagement between host and guest as the meeting of self-responsible agents, and above all, constructs Thailand as responsible for the way it apparently is. In contrast with the fantasy of ‘Amazing Thailand’, the globalization of markets – which allows both international tourism and the transnational capital mobility which caused the crisis – involves an intensification and multiplication of power relations and social effects between places, organizations and persons. In a globalizing world, where, as Bauman notes, levels of access to transnational mobility and its benefits have a bearing upon social stratification, recognition of imbalanced, shared histories, and critical analysis of specific transnational flows of people, money, information and power, seem vital for any kind of ethical orientation aimed at establishing equitable relations. Understanding the effects of tourism and the commercial rhetorics which promote it is an important part of such processes, given the scale of the industry and its prominence as a source of knowledge. Tourism generates both transnational material relations and images of place which go largely uncontested, and which, even if fantastical, occlude representations that may problematize international commodity relations. In these terms, the palpable disjunction between the rhetoric and reality of Amazing Thailand, circa 1997–98, appears to be no coincidence.

Part II Reading Exchange


Chapter 9

Text as Trading Place: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother Ross Chambers I: On Agencing It matters whether one considers a text to be a kind of emanation from a monadic, individual subject, as our tradition of literary history has done with its focus on authors and ‘their’ works; or whether one conceives it, alternatively, as an agency of mediation: one that produces subjectivities as an effect of the relation that reading the text brings about. In this second understanding of text, there is a place for the first (the readable subjectivity is identical with that of the author, who is the agent of textual production). But in addition, it becomes possible to conceive and theorize a split between the act of authorial agency that produces the text, and the agencing of an intersubjectivity that is performed by the text, a split such that the readable ‘subject’ is other than the subjectivity of the author as well as different in relation to the reading subject. In this case, the text is conceived as an ‘assemblage’ or ‘device’ – two possible ways of translating the French word agencement often employed by Deleuze and Guattari in their writings – that functions as a kind of trading-place.1 Its agencing makes available, through reading, forms of subjectivity that, for reasons that are ultimately ideological, may not have direct access to cultural expression, or which that culture, in turn, may not have direct knowledge of. Textual agencing, in that sense, becomes a ‘presencing’ of otherness through the intersubjective mode known as reading. Where Gayatri Spivak once influentially asked, can the subaltern speak?,2 we may wish therefore to substitute questions concerning how that which is deprived of a direct voice may nevertheless be presenced otherwise; and fields like feminism, postcolonial studies or queer studies that have a constitutive interest in the other and otherness may find it helpful to explore the concept of agencing as an alternative to the contradictions into which one is led by formulations like ‘speaking on behalf of the other’ or ‘giving voice to the silenced’, which are couched in the language of common sense that aligns subjectivity and agency directly, and hence also exclusively.

1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–316.

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Years ago, Emile Benveniste made a key distinction between language as énoncé (or statement) and language as énonciation (or utterance).3 My theoretical distinction between text as the expression of an authorial subjectivity, and text as the agencing of an intersubjectivity, is a consequence of the split Benveniste’s distinction defined – a split because it is axiomatic that there is no statement that is not also an utterance, and vice versa. In statement, the subject is exhausted by its grammatical function, and coextensive therefore with the predication: if I say ‘I think I’ll go to the movies tonight’, ‘I’ is defined as the subject who is thinking of going to the movies, period. It is in utterance, however, that subjectivity becomes a function of the intersubjective relation the discourse mediates, so that the subject of utterance, unlike the subject of statement, becomes an inexhaustible object of interpretation (or ‘reading’). On hearing the utterance ‘I think I’ll go to the movies tonight’, I might wonder, why does she go to the movies so often? Why the movies rather than staying home and watching TV? Is she obliquely inviting me to accompany her? Or am I being given the brush off? etc. Thus, the subject of utterance is constructed, definitionally, as other than, although not unrelated to, the subject of statement, and the ‘receiving’ subject becomes a reading subject, rather than the passive recipient of an already determined ‘message’. Texts may thus turn out to have what is called a psychoanalytic or political ‘unconscious’, understood to be refracted through an authorial subject; but equally they can be read as presencing a subjectivity different from that of the subject of the statement, understood as aligned with the personal agent through whom the discourse (as both statement and utterance) is produced, that is, with the speaker or (in literature) the author. Furthermore, there are devices for blocking the statement-function of language and for depersonalizing the readable subject of utterance so as to dissociate it, at least partially, not only from the person, and the personal subjectivity, of an author, but from person and personality altogether. Since Mallarmé memorably described poetry a century ago as the ‘illocutionary disappearance’ of the poet, the theory of écriture (writing, or better still, writerliness) has flourished in France as a theory of the depersonalization that the concept of subjectivity (understood as an effect of discourse and so as a function of intersubjectivity) permits. But in writers like Mallarmé, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida or Deleuze,4 this theory seems inevitably to take a metaphysical turn, and to become a theory of the linguistic sublime, most often a ‘dark’ sublime. But depersonalization need not necessarily imply sublimation, and the voiceless other that écriture is thought to make present may well be, for example, communitarian, and therefore social in nature, rather than metaphysical. It may be a form of subjectivity that represents (although ‘represents’ is not the right word) those deprived of cultural presence because politically marginalized, minoritized, denied or excluded: the mentally ill, for instance, indigenous peoples in many countries, the so-called third world in the economy of capitalist globalization, and so on.

3 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, 2 vols ([1966]; Paris: Gallimard, 1974). 4 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Text as Trading Place: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

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Despite Deleuze’s partiality to a certain Nietzschean vitalism that is deeply metaphysical in character, he and Félix Guattari have powerfully suggested this communitarian understanding of otherness in their concept of writing as ‘minor’ literature, and of minor literature as a dialect of a majority language, one that represents a becoming-minor of that majority language, and simultaneously offers a symptomatology of majoritarian cultures – those that ignore, exclude or otherwise separate themselves from the otherness, social or metaphysical, with which they are, nevertheless, in continuity.5 Agencement, in their terminology, is the device or assemblage that brings about this minoritizing of majority languages, which is simultaneously a depersonalization of authorship and a presencing of communitarian and other forms of otherness. Where Deleuze seems mainly interested in writing as a symptomatology and in the becoming-minor of language, I turn towards the more pragmatic issue of textual agencing as a way of presencing an other, putatively communitarian, subjectivity in majority cultures through the function of reading. That is, I am interested in agencement as the production of a reading effect through which the depersonalized intersubjectivity is produced that renders authorial agency, as it were, anonymous; and in writing, therefore, as the device through which that intersubjectivity is produced, the trading-place or comptoir where otherness is presenced to readers (a bit like so many exotic goods becoming available to the West at some colonial outpost), and agences a becoming-minor of readerly consciences. Furthermore, where the French tradition has very largely interested itself in avant-garde or experimental writing, I’m inclined to think that the idea of the agencing of an intersubjectivity and the presencing of otherness might also breathe some new life into the ancient rhetorical theory of tropes. If these are defined, after Laurent Jenny, as those turns of language that require the response of reading, turns that occur in quite ordinary forms of discourse,6 can they be described as instrumental in the presencing of otherness, through reading, that writing as the agencing of intersubjectivity performs? In teaching the literature of AIDS, I have been struck by the persistence, as a pedagogical issue, of two problems. Using Spivak-like formulations as shorthand, I’d say the first problem poses the question, how can AIDS be made to ‘speak’, and specifically to speak through writing, in class? This is a problem that attaches to witnessing writing in general, say Holocaust testimonial or war writing, which frequently meditates on the inadequacy of ‘words’ in relation to the reality of extreme events. The second problem, though, is more specific to the historical realities of AIDS; it has the same structure as the first, but is of particular interest to postcolonial scholars, and I’ll address it more specifically in this chapter. How can non-Western AIDS – the reality of an epidemic that is ravaging the populations of a broad equatorial swathe around the globe – be made to ‘speak’ to and in the West, particularly given its absence from the vast majority of AIDS texts which are mainly written, in the 5 My understanding of these matters is indebted to the excellent introduction to Deleuze by Daniel W. Smith, ‘“Introduction. A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze’s “Critique Et Clinique” Project’, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. xi–liii. 6 Laurent Jenny, La parole singuliére (Paris: Belin, 1990).

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West, by white, middle-class authors whose texts also, and not coincidentally, seem oblivious even to the ravages of AIDS in Western minority and ghetto populations? And I reformulate these two questions as a pedagogical problem: how can novice readers – who subscribe almost by definition to a theory of text as the vehicle of an authorial subject – be made sensitive to text as intersubjective agencing, and be made aware of the otherness it makes readable? I don’t have specific answers to these difficult questions, and I’ll merely hint at a general answer by turning soon to a rather exceptional text in the corpus of Western AIDS writing, Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘dual autobiography’ My Brother.7 This is a text that functions rather visibly as trading-place in the intersubjective sense I am giving to the phrase. But I don’t want to leave the question of teaching, which I think is a crucial one, without saying that I am working in the framework of a ‘general theory’ of haunting, that is a hauntology in the sense of Derrida’s punning axiom: no ontology without a hauntology. I mean that I assume that énoncé-theory is haunted by the effects of enunciation that it ignores; that classrooms epitomize cultures that are haunted by various forms of ‘obscenity’ – including AIDS – to which they are largely oblivious; that Western AIDS writing is haunted by the equatorial epidemic that it mainly refrains from mentioning, and so on. As an educator, my task is to make the ghosts who don’t speak readable; to presence them. And – to return now to the issue of figuration or troping – I understand that task to entail my becoming a professor of allegory, or, as a student of mine (who was often thoughtfully silent in class) once put it, ‘moderator of inborn anguish’.8 Kincaid’s writing models rather clearly how that task might be performed. In the context of a commonsense theory of text, the word allegory is usually translated etymologically to mean ‘speaking other’: the ‘I’-subject of the textual statement is understood to mean (i.e. intend) more and other than ‘it’ (the statement) says. But supposing we understood allegory not so much as someone speaking other, and more as otherness speaking in ‘someone’s’ discourse? Supposing we understood the trope of allegory as an agencement, such that the ‘other’ subject of the intersubjectivity becomes a depersonalized ‘it’, differing from the personal agent of the agencing, an ‘it’ that means (signifies) more and other than ‘I’, the subject of the statement, can say? This ‘it’ would be like a ghost in the text, presenced through an act of reading that responds to the textual agencing. But reading, we know, is always, simultaneously, an act of discovery and an act of recognition. As readers, we discover in the text what we always knew and even expected, but had not acknowledged: an uncanny otherness that, like ghosts, is essentially familiar or, in the case of witnessing texts, and as my student put it, an ‘inborn’ anguish – one that nevertheless has to be made real or present to us through the agencing work of a ‘moderator’. Primo Levi likens Holocaust writing to a reveille or wake-up call in an alien language, one that we nevertheless understand because obscurely, subconsciously, 7 Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). 8 The student, Charlie Snyder, confirmed to me that in choosing the word moderator he had intended to convey a double sense, of mediating and of mitigating the anguish. I thank him for giving me permission to quote his essay. Charlie Snyder, ‘Stooped Shoulders: The Burden of Witnessing’, unpublished essay.


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we are always already expecting its message. It is like the Polish word ‘Wstawac’, uttered very quietly each morning by the night guard in Levi’s block at Auschwitz. This quiet command was not only meaningful but could also afford to be, as he says, ‘subdued’ (sommesso) – inadequate to the pain it announced – because its message was awaited.9 In Western AIDS writing, the equivalent wake-up call is the phone call from the hospital announcing a friend’s or lover’s death: it catches one unawares even though it is expected; and it awakens one also, like Levi, to pain. My task as a professor of allegory, then, is to help witnessing texts perform that act of awakening – of awakening to the otherness speaking in the text, which is also the reader’s ‘inborn anguish’ – by helping my students to discover what it is to read. Often I fail the texts in that respect, and sometimes – perhaps – they fail me; but once in a while, too, a text like My Brother comes along that aids and abets me powerfully in the task. My Brother allegorizes itself, most notably, as a phonecall from your mother, or more accurately from a friend of your mother, asking you to call her. The mother, and the friend, live in the Caribbean island of Antigua; you, the recipient of the call that invites you to call back to Antigua, live in Vermont. The axis of the agencing corresponds, then, to the split – the continuity and discontinuity – between the rest and the West, the equatorial and the temperate, the colonial and the metropolitan, AIDS and obliviousness to AIDS: That Thursday night when I heard about my brother through the telephone, from a friend of my mother’s because at that moment my mother and I were in a period of not speaking to each other …, I was in my house in Vermont, absorbed with the well-being of my children, absorbed with the well-being of my husband, absorbed with the well-being of myself.10

In a quite conventional sense of the word allegory, this passage is allegorizing the text’s agencing function. The friend is the agent of the agencing, an author-figure therefore; Kincaid herself is a figure of the reader; and the mother with whom she is not on speaking terms and whom she is called to call back is the object of reading – yet it is all about a kind of unknown: ‘my brother’. The call finds Kincaid-as-reader plunged into self-absorption, ‘absorbed with the well-being of my children, absorbed with the well-being of my husband, absorbed with the well-being of myself’, living exclusively, as it were, in Vermont, with no thought for what is other to Vermont. (And this hammered out, somewhat obsessive sentence itself both underscores this absorption and epitomizes the book’s own obsessive style, to which I’ll return.) Yet, self-absorbed as she is, Kincaid also has foreknowledge of the message that wakens her from absorption: When I spoke to this friend of my mother’s, she said that there was something wrong with my brother and that I should call my mother to find out what it was. I said, What is wrong? She said, Call your mother. I asked her, using those exact words, three times, and three times she replied the same way. And then I said, He has AIDS, and she said, Yes.11

9 Primo Levi, ‘Se questo è un uomo’ (Survival in Auschwitz), trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 63. 10 Kincaid, My Brother, pp. 6–7. 11 Ibid., p. 7.

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The message from her mother, about her brother, that she is invited to read, because it is not delivered to her direct, is one that she can formulate (‘He has AIDS’) and receive confirmation of (‘Yes’), because it is something she already knew but was oblivious of. She does not need now to call her mother, because this message is ultimately the reader’s message, not the mother’s or the friend’s: a message about the reader’s other. Yet the call itself, and the anxious repetitive dialogue, ‘What is wrong?’ – ‘Call your mother’, are indispensable: without them, there would be no awakening from obliviousness. And from the anxiousness of this thrice-repeated dialogue we can extrapolate an understanding of the obsessiveness of the book’s own style. Both a reader’s other-oriented attention, drawn by textual redundancy (as a mode of emphasis), and a text’s equally emphatic reticence – its circling anxiously around what it does not, cannot, say – are necessary for the agencing to result in an act of reading, and thus to produce responsiveness, in the reader, to the otherness of the text: that which ‘speaks’, but speaks allegorically, in and through it. This means, of course, that for a reader of My Brother, the message ‘Kincaid’s brother Devon had AIDS and died of it’ – a summary of the book’s textual statement or énoncé – is not the equivalent of the message ‘He has AIDS’, but the equivalent of the act of enunciation ‘Call your mother’. What the book’s phonecall is about is something both more and other than its stated (enunciated) message, which suffices to wake us from our absorption and to inspire in us the question ‘What is wrong?’, but does not answer that question, except obliquely. The answer depends on our having a foreknowledge of it, and is figured, therefore, by the mother, with whom Kincaid-asreader is not speaking, and by the brother, whom – it will become clear – she barely knows. The intersubjectivity the book’s agencing seeks to set up, then, is the baffling relation it describes between a certain, self-absorbed ‘Vermont’ and an ‘Antigua’ both known and not known to Vermont, an Antigua described in this instance as the site of an AIDS epidemic in its equatorial form, and particularized (for Kincaid and for her reader) by her brother Devon’s life, and his death. One might want to call this reading relation, characterized by the anxious dialogue ‘What is wrong? – Call your mother’ and by the foreknowledge ‘He has AIDS’, a postcolonial subjectivity. The book’s obsessiveness, I think, which agences this intersubjectivity, is compounded of three kinds of interrelated troping. A constant practice of allegory, supplemented by a kind of permanently unstable, shuttling attention that I’ll describe as parekbasis rather than digression, so as to take advantage of the Greek word’s etymological sense (something like ‘moving away in all directions’), merges into a diffuse symbolism that ‘throws together’ (syn+bolein) figures like Antigua, the mother, the brother, the brother’s AIDS, gardens and gardening – gardening, that is, under conditions of both fertility and devastation – so as to present, as Lyotard would have it, the unpresentable:12 an unpresentable whose name, in this case, I’ll suggest is death. ‘I decided’, Kincaid says, recalling a childhood perception, ‘that only people in Antigua died, that people living in other places did not die and as soon as I could, I would move somewhere else, to those places where the people

12 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 13.


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living there did not die’.13 Her story, then, is of having realized that project, but only to learn – from the friend’s phonecall about the brother she scarcely knows – that one doesn’t leave Antigua behind, one doesn’t escape death. For readers of the book, living in their own self-absorbed Vermont of well-being, the book’s enunciation, ‘Call your mother’, means, therefore, remember death, but also something like: remember that you are not disconnected from Antigua or AIDS or death; remember that the otherness of all these things is a part of you; it is a foreknowledge that you have, or an ‘inborn anguish’. What Kincaid remembers functions, therefore, as a reminder, to me, of my own foreknowledge. But also, what I just characterized as a postcolonial intersubjectivity, on a certain socio-historical plane, turns out simultaneously to be a relation to the more metaphysical otherness the text names as death. Their equivalence depends on a certain textual equivocation, in which it is the dead – Devon prime among them – who stand simultaneously for Antigua, and for death itself, the event that awaits all the living, and of which we have foreknowledge though we cannot know it. So I’ll conclude with some remarks about prosopopoeia as a presencing of the dead and a device of haunting, and about the genre that I call dual autobiography, which enacts the dynamic of prosopopoeia in its narrative structure, by combining into one story the story of a dying and the story of a survivorhood. Stories that are connected by a relation of love, but disjoined by the guilt of the survivor who writes, and ultimately the survivor who reads. II: Figurations of Otherness The allegories in My Brother (and an alert reader quickly comes to suspect that the book is a tissue of allegories – a suspicion that is, of course, self-confirming), are not presented as a matter of authorial intentionality or certainty, along the lines of: I know what I mean, it is for you to guess what my meaning is. Rather, the reader’s involvement is procured by a display of authorial uncertainty: is this meaningful? I don’t know whether there is a meaning, or what the meaning is. Kincaid’s memories – the things she recalls that so antagonize her fellow Antiguans, notably her mother, who interpret them as accusatory reminders of past errors and injustices, matters that to the perpetrators are best forgotten – are presented similarly. She (Kincaid) is just one who remembers, or (in the case of allegory) one who wonders what, if anything, things mean. The responsibility of deciding what, if anything, is signified by the memories and allegories, is ours. She is agencing, not functioning as an author(-ity). Not surprisingly, then, the first obvious allegory in the book (the first less obvious allegory being the hospital mentioned in the opening sentences) is also a memory: that of the swarm of red ants that attacked Devon on the day following his birth, as if in anticipation of the multiplying virus that was to cause his death. ‘This was an incident no one ever told my brother, an incident that everyone else in my family had forgotten, except me’, says Kincaid;14 and she describes her mother’s narrowed

13 Kincaid, My Brother, pp. 26–7. 14 Ibid., p. 6.

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eyes when, watching over Devon in his illness, Kincaid reminds her of the ants. Her ability to remember, she says, is ‘perhaps the thing she [the mother] most dislikes about me’.15 But Kincaid then goes on to disclaim any responsibility except that of the agencer: ‘I was only wondering if [the incident] had any meaning … I don’t believe it has any meaning, this is only something that a mind like mine would think about’.16 If the mother is guilty then it is for her, the mother, to acknowledge it; if the red ants allegorize AIDS, it is for the reader to decide. And the idea that interpreting the narrative allegorically (what the reader does) may be simultaneously an acknowledgement (like the mother’s) of guilt – a guilt one may have forgotten or become oblivious of, like the mother here, or like Kincaid herself in the well-being of her Vermont home before the phone call – is an implication whose force will become stronger as the book develops. But the mind that is given to asking the question of meaning is also a mind that, once it is awakened from its absorption in well-being, proves capable of a restless energy, and falls into a kind of unending displacement or parekbasis, as thought shuttles between, and among, a set of topics that are distributed along some key coordinates. These coordinates include Vermont and Antigua; the present and the remembered past; ‘my family’ (i.e. the husband and children in Vermont) and ‘the family I grew up with’ (the mother and Kincaid’s three half-brothers); myself, then, and my mother and brother; my situation as a successful writer in the United States and my brother’s stunted life as one whose birth in Antigua was the occasion of my own escape, with the result that ‘his life is the one I did not have’.17 This here-and-there mental shuttling is enacted diegetically in the three back-and-forth trips Kincaid makes in the course of her brother’s illness and death: one following the friend’s telephone call, a second some time later (taking the children to visit their grandmother), the third for the funeral. It is reproduced too in the linguistic shuttling between the formal English of Kincaid’s prose and the frequent parenthetical reminders, when Devon’s or her mother’s speech is reported, of the dialect in which their words were actually spoken. If this practice of linguistic shuttling works (as Deleuze would have it) as a becoming-minor of the dominant language, it is also a device of rhetorical interruption, a reminder, and a factor of contrast and incongruity between Kincaid’s polite phrasing and the crude English that, she says, ‘instantly reveals the humiliation of history, the humiliations of the past not remade into art’.18 Like the ‘permanent parekbasis’ Friedrich Schlegel identified as the mode of Romantic irony, with its constant frame-breaking, all this shuttling – at once thematic, diegetic, and rhetorical – of Kincaid’s prose destabilizes the reader’s attention by ceaselessly diverting it from its focus, and diverting it again.19 Thus, and by way of an example, the hospital in which Devon lay mortally ill – apparently the topos of the book’s opening paragraph – is not, the prose immediately adds, the hospital in which he was born, for the reason that he was born at home. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 176. 18 Ibid., p. 108. 19 Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), no. 108, p. 13.


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A description follows, not of the hospital, but of the family’s evening routines, which are mentioned because the birth of Devon at home interrupted them: that night they did not occur, in the same way that the hospital of Devon’s illness was not the hospital of his birth. A principle of negativity thus functions to introduce the supposedly irrelevant into the sphere of relevance, like Antigua into Vermont in the book as a whole. But also the interruption of Devon’s birth caused a displacement. The children were sent to neighbours’ homes; and the daughter of the woman Jamaica went to was to die soon after, and ‘died in my mother’s arms’, as did a second woman slightly later, ‘Miss Charlotte by name’, who had a heart attack. Since dying in my mother’s arms is what, metaphorically, Devon in his illness is also doing, and his death is thus foreshadowed in the events associated with his birth (events associated negatively and by displacement), this paragraph of ceaseless parekbasis that opens the book has shuttled its way full circle by the time it closes. But it is for the reader to perceive this relation between beginning and end that constitutes the paragraph’s underlying sense, and to do so by constructing the relevances that otherwise go unstated between death and birth, hospital and home, negotiating constantly interrupted, displaced and negative relations. It is as if the paragraph had a topic sentence that is not so much withheld as it eludes formulation, and for which the practice of shuttling substitutes, both distracting us from it and inviting us to supply it as an underlying theme, accessible only as an object of reading. This is a practice not unlike raising the question of the meaning of an event or episode – say, that of the red ants – and leaving the reader to determine whether there is such a meaning and, if so, what it is. But because, in the book as a whole, the textual parekbasis is governed by the axis represented by Vermont and Antigua, the assumedly Western reader is not permitted to forget for long that the absent topic sentence, the meaning to be constructed, lies on the Antiguan side of the duality all this textual shuttling does and does not bridge. Whereas Kincaid writes and the reader reads on the Vermont side, the otherness the textual agencing presences, or seeks to make present, as the object of reading is on the side of – although not quite the same as – the topics among which that first paragraph shuttles: the side of coloniality, the third world, the humiliations of history, and the island where living is living, as Devon does from his birth to his dying, ‘in death’, the side where one can be ‘dead but still alive’.20 Devon’s AIDS, the inevitability of which underlies the foreknowledge of it that Kincaid displays on receiving the friend’s phonecall, is the text’s key figure for this ‘other’ side of the West; it is relevant to the West in the way that the hospital in which Devon was not born is nevertheless relevant to his death, and the routines that did not occur are relevant to his birth: as a negativity present in, because implied by, the positive. But if interruption is both a factor of divergence and a principle of relevance, then – that which produces disjunctions and displacements but also signals, as a kind of symptom, the presence of a negativity in the positive (and vice versa) – the interruption to the family’s nightly routines that was Devon’s birth foreshadows two other interruptions that occur in this text, paralleling, perhaps, the three backand-forth shuttles between Vermont and Antigua that Kincaid makes. One is the interruption to Kincaid’s life that occurred three years after Devon’s birth, and as 20 Kincaid, My Brother, pp. 88, 95.

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a direct result of it: the interruption as a result of which ‘his life is the one I did not have’. To relieve the financial strain on the family of this extra mouth, Kincaid was sent to live with another family, as she had been sent to a neighbor on the night of his birth; she thus received the education she would not have had had she remained at home, and so became in due course the writer who lives in Vermont, oblivious of the world of her brother and her mother. The other is the corresponding and compensatory interruption to her self-absorbed Vermont life that is the call from her mother’s friend about her brother’s illness, the interruption that reminds her of the relevance that had been broken by the divergence of Kincaid’s life from her brother’s, and initiates the shuttling between Vermont and Antigua, the present and the past, my life and his, that furnishes the text’s subject matter. It is as if two stories that ought to have been one have become broken pieces that the text now seeks to reassemble, in compensation for the event of their having diverged. But instead, it can only shuffle the broken pieces around, in the way that it shuffles all these interruptions, as it shuttles between the two halves that no longer fit. So this is where parekbasis, or moving away in all directions, merges into the act of throwing together that is symbolism. For symbolism is a throwing together that, again, shifts the responsibility for discovering a salvaging meaning onto the text’s reader, who is invited to read into presence the lost unity of things that the surviving pieces, whether taken together or examined individually, no longer embody. Among the pieces shuffled together because they are related, in this way, by an only negative relevance, like Vermont and Antigua, are the three interruptions themselves, but also the brother, the mother and the island of Antigua with which they are associated – the island together with its metonyms: the garden, the hospital, Mr Straffee’s funeral home – and finally the disease of AIDS. Each of these seems to offer a key to understanding, both individually and in relation with each and all of the others; but each also withholds knowledge and understanding, in the first instance from Kincaid herself, who makes the content of her (allegorizing, shuttling) mind available but for us to work with, and to interpret as we can and will – and so from us readers, too, to whom it is offered, but without guarantees. Devon, for instance, Kincaid has known only for the first three and the last three years of his life. ‘Who is he?’, she wonders, ‘How does he feel about himself, what has he ever wanted?’21 And after his death, and the completely unexpected revelation of his homosexuality – he who had such a reputation as an irresponsible ladies’ man – she asks which of the various Devons she cannot piece together was he, ‘which one of his selves made him happiest? I cannot tell this, and perhaps neither could he’.22 And if Devon’s truest reality lies in his AIDS, that is, in the fact of his having lived all his life ‘in death’, it is significant that he himself could not name his illness, calling it the stupidness (‘de chupidness’) instead, in the way, perhaps, that he favored the uninterpretable inarticulacy of the truups sound, made by sucking air through pursed lips, that Kincaid presents as characteristic of him. Kincaid turned to writing, she says, ‘out of desperation’, and knowing instinctively that in order to understand her brother, ‘or to make an attempt at understanding his dying, and not to die with him, 21 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 22 Ibid., p. 191.


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I would write about it’.23 But since she herself does not know or understand Devon, the point of her writing can only be achieved if it finds a reader, one whose reading would compensate for what the writing fails to do. She did once know such a perfect reader, one William Shawn, but this perfect reader is now dead; and so she has had to write ‘about the dead for the dead’.24 For, she adds, ‘I can sooner get used to never hearing from him – the perfect reader – than to not being able to write for him at all’.25 As readers who are living, we have been told, then, that we must be the perfect reader, able to read what the writing fails to say, and that we cannot be the perfect reader, who is with Devon, among the dead. On the side of the irretrievable other, to which the writing seeks to give presence without itself having direct access to it. Of the mother, ‘the taste of this awfulness, this bitterness’, her destructive way of loving her children and of doing for them only what suits her – the mother who sent Kincaid away in favor of the sons she had with Mr Drew – something not unlike what is said of Devon is true.26 Although she has known her, unlike Devon, intimately and all her life, ‘I know nothing of her’, Kincaid confesses.27 Again both like and unlike Devon, who is associated with Antigua because it is the place of death that has stunted his life, the mother is identified with the island, but as something like its very embodiment. For if Antigua is a garden, fertile both in principle and in fact, this garden is traversed by devastation, and Antigua is the place where, Kincaid thought as a child, people die and where, she sees as an adult, they cannot love one another. It is the place that would have prevented her from becoming a writer in the way that it prevented Devon, who was ‘not meant to be silent’, from developing his talents (as a musician, for instance) and from fulfilling himself as a gay man.28 It is the place of ‘worthlessness’, and so also of the ‘stupidness’ that is AIDS: My brother who was lying in the hospital dying, suffering from the virus that causes AIDS, told the brother who is two years older than he is, the brother I am eleven years older than, that he had made worthlessness of his life (‘Me mek wutlessness ah me life, man’) … He said to me that he couldn’t believe he had AIDS (‘Me carn believe me had dis chupidness’). Only he could not say the words AIDS or HIV, he referred to his illness as stupidness (‘de chupidness’).29

So, if it is AIDS – that which Devon can only name with a word that simultaneously euphemizes its reality and generalizes it, while manifesting in its linguistic form the humiliations of history – that names the nameless answer that only a perfect reader might divine to the set of questions that are posed by these symbolic figures (the brother, the mother, the island where people die), then the single insistent question that sums up all these disjoined but converging questions is the one Kincaid thrice asked her mother’s friend on the telephone, before herself formulating the answer, 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Ibid., pp. 195, 196. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 29.

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an answer of which she had a kind of foreknowledge that made it inevitable: ‘He has AIDS’. The question is: ‘What is wrong?’ This is the question the text poses, through its allegorizing, its shuttling parekbasis, its symbolic shuffling, in the assurance that we as readers have foreknowledge of the answer, as Kincaid had foreknowledge of the answer in her phone conversation, even though the perfect reader, Mr Shawn – he who would have had true knowledge, not just foreknowledge – is dead. III: On Haunting and Being Haunted But if true knowledge exists only among the dead, then there is another word – the word ‘death’ – that names the nameless answer to the text’s question: ‘What is wrong?’ To write about the dead for the dead, as Kincaid does, assumes that the knowledge they have that is unavailable to the living (except as foreknowledge) is the knowledge of death. Since, however, writing that is about the dead for the dead is also addressed to the living, to us who are alone capable of reading such writing, this in turn means that the master trope governing the textual agencing is prosopopoeia, the trope that turns discourse to the purpose of presencing the dead – and through them and their knowledge, death – for the living. Etymologically mask-making, prosopopoeia is defined as a way of voicing, in discourse, what is itself deprived of the power to speak: inanimate objects, animals, the gods, but more particularly (especially in the theatrical context from which the metaphor of masking derives) the dead – for example, the ancient heroes who come to life again, per agency of masked actors, on the stage. In the way that actors are possessed by their role when they don a mask, a text can give presence – for us, as readers – to what its agencer may not either know or understand, something that may well also be that which, despite our foreknowledge, we do not, ourselves, wish to contemplate or even to be reminded of. It is a known truth, Kincaid points out, that the dead do not die, although the knowledge tends to come ‘as if it were new, as if no one had noticed this before’.30 They move with us, ‘like a form of shadowing’, as ghosts; and it is this shadowy haunting of life by death that we know but have to be reminded of, that prosopopoeia actualizes by agencing a relation of reader to text.31 Now, having such knowledge – or having the foreknowledge it implies – we can be unreceptive to prosopopoeia like Kincaid’s mother in the cemetery, shaking off the lizard that climbs her dress: ‘As she shook the lizard off, she said that she hoped it wasn’t one of those people, meaning the dead, come to tell her something that would make her want to join them (“Eh-eh, me wahrn you, dem people no get me, you know”), and she said this with a laugh’.32 Or alternatively we can be like Kincaid’s now dead father-in-law: ‘one of the ways I became a writer’, she says, ‘was by telling my husband’s father things he didn’t want me to tell him but was so curious about that he would listen to them anyway’.33 AIDS has caused Devon to cross a certain line separating death from life (that is, from even the form of life 30 31 32 33

Ibid., p. 121. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 123–4. Ibid., p. 180.


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‘in death’ that has been Devon’s lot in Antigua). ‘On one side, there is life, and the thin shadow of death hovers over it; and on the other, there is death with a small patch of life attached to it’.34 But as a consequence of crossing that line he has ceased to live under the regime of silencing that prevails in Antigua, the regime to which Kincaid refers when she says that he ‘was not meant to be silent’. He can ‘speak’, though, only under the condition of mask-making as an act of agencing; that is, he can be made to ‘speak’ – which implies as its condition that there be a reader more like Kincaid’s father-in-law than like her mother. Kincaid, as the agencer, can make his voice present, albeit only as that which – by virtue of its being read – shadows her text. So although it is her voice that is haunted, and it is able by virtue of that hauntedness to perform an act of haunting, in relay as it were with Devon, the haunting is realized, however, only by and in a readership curious about the things they don’t want to be told. The trick of Kincaid’s prose that I cited as a form of linguistic shuttling, in which she quotes in parentheses the Antiguan dialect of her brother and her mother, is also an enactment of the dynamics of prosopopoeia as haunting. Her elegant formulations are ‘shadowed’, in this way, by the parenthetical language that bespeaks the humiliations of history; and we can see, therefore, that there is a prosopopoeia of coloniality here (of Antigua, the land where people die) that doubles as a prosopopoeia of the dead (Devon’s shadowy voice in Kincaid’s text) – of the dead, that is, whose knowledge is the knowledge of death. The relay structure of the prosopopoeic text, haunting because it is haunted, is reproduced, however, through the generic characteristics of dual autobiography, of which My Brother is a paradigmatic example. For dual autobiography is a narrativization of the dynamics of agencing as a prosopopoeic relay in which the relation of a narrator to a protagonist prefigures that of the reader to the text. In this genre, although two stories (the protagonist’s and the narrator’s, Devon’s and Kincaid’s) are told as if they were one, there is characteristically a hiatus that intervenes at the point of relay, often marked by an interruptive phone call, when the story of the dying protagonist (in this case Devon) culminates in his death and is ‘picked up’, after this interruption, as the story of the narrator’s survivorhood. As a result, the whole constitutes the narrative of the becoming-ghostly of the protagonist and of the concurrent becoming-haunted of the narrator. In Kincaid’s text the stark sentence, certainly the simplest in the book, ‘My brother died’, marks this point of suture, at the beginning of the narrative’s second section.35 But recall now that remembering and reminding are Kincaid’s specialty, for which she is disliked and distrusted in Antigua, a specialty for which, as an agencer, she declines responsibility. The mode of narration that makes a single story of the two stories told in dual autobiography – a story of the protagonist’s short-term survival and of the narrator’s long-term survivorhood – is that of a remembering in the statement (énoncé) that is a reminding in the enunciation, that is, of a becominghaunted that functions as an act of haunting. The crucial moment of interruption that is sutured at the mid-point of the narrative – the moment, that is, of death (when the dead protagonist’s story is picked up as the story of the narrator’s survivorhood) – is reproduced now, but in the split between the whole narrative as statement and 34 Ibid., p. 96. 35 Ibid., p. 87.

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its effect as utterance, that is, between its remembering and its reminding. And thus a new becoming-haunted is enforced, not this time on the part of the narrator, but in the mind of readers subjected to the narrator’s reminding, and able to acknowledge, like Kincaid’s father-in-law, their foreknowledge (foreknowledge of coloniality, foreknowledge of death), and thus to emerge from their self-absorption into a state akin to Kincaid’s hauntedness. Reminding produces the form of hauntedness we call reading out of the form of hauntedness we call remembering, which is itself a response (or a counterpart) to the becoming-ghostly of the protagonist. It does so through a relay that reproduces the now double narrative of the becoming-ghostly of the protagonist and the becoming-haunted of the narrator (that is, the story of the statement), but reproduces it as a becoming-ghostly of the narrative text that is simultaneously a becoming-haunted of the reader (which is the ‘story’ enacted in the utterance). The agencing text, here figured by the person of the agencer as narrator of a dual autobiography, is haunting to the extent that it is haunted, as Kincaid is haunted by Devon; but it is haunted/haunting also, only to the extent that it finds a reader hospitable, like Kincaid’s father-in-law and unlike her mother, to being haunted, that is, susceptible to realizing – on the reader’s own account – the otherness that shadows the text. Her claims of neutrality notwithstanding, we can see that the narrator-agencer, in this, is both like and unlike the protagonist, since each of them is able to haunt, but only the narrator is subject to being haunted; and like and unlike the reader, each of the two being hauntable, whereas it is only the narrator who haunts. As agencer, it is she, then, who mediates a shift: from the story in the statement, in which she is haunted, to the story as an enunciation that haunts the reader. Now, the name of the hauntability this narrator shares with the reader is guilt, the form of consciousness induced by the message ‘He died’ – the guilt, that is, of the survivor. It is guilt with respect to the dead that a reader has in common with an agencer whose reminding, therefore, is no longer quite like Kincaid’s causing of her mother’s eyes to narrow by recalling the incident of the red ants because, now, she does not disclaim responsibility. I mean that, whether or not she intends to make the reader guilty, she does freely acknowledge her own guilty status in her role as narrator. Kincaid’s guilt, in her text, takes many forms. She accuses herself of having wanted her brother to die (‘I was so tired of him being in this state, not alive, not dead’); of having quarreled with him on her last visit to see him before his death, so that she did not ‘kiss or hug him goodbye’; of having not loved him ‘because I did not know him’; and of having not recognized her feeling for him as being love.36 She knows that from Devon’s birth she ‘did not wish him dead; I only wished that he had never been born, because it was his birth that plunged our family into financial despair, his birth and his father’s illness’, with the result that ‘I was sent away to help a family disaster that I did not create’.37 But the crucial occasion of her guilt is the neglect of her brother, together with the hostility towards her mother, that was entailed by her having been sent away, the event that caused the two stories in the énoncé to diverge, since one continued to live ‘in death’ in Antigua while, becoming a writer, Kincaid gained ‘firm footing’, and another family, in the West. 36 Ibid., pp. 108, 138, 150–51, 159. 37 Ibid., pp. 141, 150.


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Guilt is thus the sign of a crucial divergence in the two stories, one (Devon’s) mere survival but the other (Kincaid’s) a successful survivorhood; as such, it makes a mockery of the pretence that they are the same story at the same time as, under the guise of hauntedness, it sutures the break that divides them, through the mechanism of relay. But it is the fact of writing, therefore, that most obviously manifests this state of guilty survivorhood.38 Kincaid is telling the story that, unjustly, Devon – who was ‘not meant to be silent’ – was unable to tell; and necessarily she tells it badly since it is not her story: as the survivor who writes, she definitionally cannot and does not know that of which she writes, the silence and the death that are the other of her writing. This otherness she cannot tell direct, but only presence it, for a reader, through her agencing, the very fact of her writing, as much as the writing itself, signifying – making readable – the death of the other. In other words, the story in the statement – that is, the story of the becoming-haunted of Kincaid – is also and simultaneously the story of her becoming an agencer – one whose writing, as an agencement, can cause its reader to become haunted, but by virtue of the reader’s own foreknowledge of guilt, and thus to realize, through reading, the presencing of otherness that the text mediates. Where writing manifests the writer’s guilt by virtue of its being, precisely, writing, a sign of survivorhood, the form of guilt characteristic of the reader’s survivorhood is, therefore, and concomitantly, reading: reading as an acknowledgement on the part of a survivor of the relevance to the survivor of the other’s death that ‘speaks’ in the haunted text (and hence of death itself as the name of that shadowy, readable otherness). The difference, however, is that whereas Kincaid’s guilt in her role as writer–narrator–agencer has a personal dimension by virtue of her remembering, it is transmitted to or reproduced in readers, through her reminding, as a social fault, the sense of an injustice towards a community, and motivates reading as a becomingconscious of that fault. In most AIDS writing in the West, this social guilt has to do with homophobia and the stigmatization of people with AIDS. Kincaid’s text is simultaneously an exemplary AIDS text in this respect – it is accusatory with respect to the oblivion to which PWAs are consigned – and, less characteristically, doubled by an equivalent function as postcolonial allegory, in which Devon’s AIDS signifies the equatorial epidemic that is neglected in the West, but also the general condition of living ‘in death’ that is inflicted on so many of the West’s former and continuing colonial possessions. It jogs our memory, then, of all the forgotten, of those who were ‘not meant to be silent’, but whose words – words like ‘chupidness’ and ‘wutlessness’ 38 Kincaid identifies two childhood incidents as the biographical source of this conjunction of writing and guilt. In one, she was plunged into the oblivion of reading and forgot to change her baby brother’s diaper. She was cruelly punished for this neglect by her mother, who burned her books. In the other, linked to the first through the love of literature as a forerunner to a career in writing, her mother sent away a boy who shared Kincaid’s enjoyment of books, ostensibly so as to save her daughter from the fate of ‘ending up with ten children by ten different men’ (p. 28). These incidents form part, Kincaid adds, of the ‘many horrible events that shaped and gave life to the thing I was to become, a writer’ (p. 134) – that is, one whose story has diverged from that of the family in which she grew up, the fate of having ten different children by ten different men being the counterpart, for a woman, of Devon’s wasted life as one predestined by his womanizing – a cover for his homosexuality – to die of AIDS.

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that enact, but fail to describe, their historical condition – do not normally carry to the ears of Kincaid’s readers, except through agencing, because they live in ‘Antigua’, that is, ‘in death’. And the metaphysical dimension of the allegory – the prosopopoeia of the dead, and of death itself – is a further dimension of this construction of readerly consciousness as being, like the writer’s, a consciousness of guilt, but of guilt unlike the writer’s because it is an experience of guilt in the presence of writing, not of the guilt of writing. If Kincaid’s hauntedness haunts us, then, it is worth emphasizing that our hauntedness, as readers, is not necessarily the same as hers; it is for us to discover or rediscover our own hauntedness, not hers, in the act of reading Kincaid’s haunted text. She is not a spokesperson for the silent, speaking on their behalf, substituting her speech for theirs, or worse still, ventriloquizing a discourse, attributed to them, that is in reality a discourse of the West, a discourse of the living, absorbed in their own well-being. She does not know, she says, that of which her text speaks; and she writes in order to say just that, and to acknowledge the guilt entailed in saying that. If she knew it, she would not be in a position to write, as the story of her divergence from her Antiguan family demonstrates; her ability to write signifies, then, in and of itself, that which he does not, cannot say. If the text is a ‘vehicle’, then, it is certainly not as spokesperson for anything, except itself. It is only the vehicle of its reader’s recognition that there is an otherness: an otherness that itself haunts or shadows the text, for that reader, as otherness haunts or shadows all the actions of the living, since every ontology, as Derrida would say, implies a corresponding hauntology. And in the way that a text like My Brother jogs that recognition, performing an act of reminding that actualizes a certain foreknowledge of what the text does not itself know and cannot say – something that it is convenient (perhaps too convenient?) to call death – so my task as a teacher is to jog my students’ recognition of ‘inborn anguish’ and acknowledge that their classroom too is a haunted place, shadowed by AIDS, and shadowed as AIDS in the West is shadowed by an equatorial epidemic of infinitely more disastrous proportions, as metropolitan places are shadowed by colonial spaces where people live ‘in death’, and as life itself is shadowed by the fact of death and more particularly by the memory of those who have died. Fortunately, it is an implication of agencing that I do not have to know or understand all those shadowing things on my own behalf; much less to speak on their behalf, or even to ‘represent’ them. It is enough for me to be their agencer. But that in itself is a baffling and often self-defeating task, in which my only guidance comes from the texts I teach and the acts of agencing they perform for me. It is one such agencing text, a strikingly beautiful, singularly uncompromising and insidiously haunting one, which I’ve tried to describe in this chapter.39

39 This chapter develops a theory of testimonial writing and reading that frames my Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial and the Rhetoric of Haunting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). I regret that it has not been possible to discuss critical work on My Brother that has appeared more recently. Most important, from my angle, is Sarah Brophy’s chapter ‘Angels in Antigua’ in her Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony and the Work of Mourning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

Chapter 10

Raw Deals: Kngwarreye and Contemporary Art Criticism Catherine Howell When Emily Kame Kngwarreye died, the art world mourned. Following the artist’s death in late 1996, large cloths were draped over her works at art museums around Australia, out of respect for the customs of the Anmatyerre, Kngwarreye’s Central Western Desert community.1 I want initially to explore and reflect on this act of covering over, because I think it has important resonances for the argument that follows, an argument which pursues issues of Aboriginality and art, cultural difference and intercultural exchange, and which questions the sorts of deals that are being made in Australian art criticism. This argument does not take up the serious allegations of faking, fraud or dealer monopolies that have plagued the Australian indigenous art market, and which remain a major issue.2 My concern is rather with the ways in which various aesthetic discourses have, in their discussions of Kngwarreye, deliberately excluded those questions deemed extra-textual. Predictably enough, these have typically included questions of identity, the economics of cultural exchange, and the historical circumstances of artistic production. In February 1998, the then Queensland Art Gallery opened what was to become the first national touring retrospective of works by an Aboriginal woman artist, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye-Alhalkere – Paintings from Utopia’. In ‘Fluent’, Australia’s contribution to the 47th Venice Biennale, this same elderly Anmatyerre woman became, along with Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson, an ambassador for contemporary Australian art practice.3 Yet after the media circus which ensued, and which accelerated following Kngwarreye’s death, after all the debates about the ‘Emily Industry’ and the attempts to reconcile Kngwarreye with the metropolitan, the question of how we might best approach this major artist’s body of work remains unanswered. Critical approaches centered on material culture may unconsciously 1 For a general introduction to Aboriginal women’s art of this region, see Christine Nicholls, ‘An Introduction to the Women Painters of Utopia, Northern Territory’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia, 32:1–2 (December 1999): 1–27. 2 For a recent outbreak, see Ashleigh Wilson, ‘Indigenous Art Suffering to Feed the Dealers’, The Weekend Australian, 4–5 March 2006, pp. 1, 19–20. 3 ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye-Alhalkere – Paintings from Utopia’ was first exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, from 20 February to 13 April 1998, later touring to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria [sic]. The accompanying cultural space of the Utopia Room, as described here, was shown in its full form in Brisbane. ‘Fluent: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson’ first appeared as Australia’s representative exhibition at the 47th Venice Biennale, later touring to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where it appeared from 20 December 1997 to 15 February 1998.

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slide into a colonialist discourse which speaks of indigenous tradition in terms of artifacts, and regards its artistic products as the relics of a once-authentic presence. Alternative approaches which evacuate questions of Aboriginality and instead seek to claim Kngwarreye for various aesthetic canons (as great artist, great abstractionist, great modernist) face similar accusations of Eurocentrism.4 With this deadlock in mind, consider the following question: in a public institution devoted in some sense to visibility, to the richness of image-making in historical and contemporary cultures, what does it mean to put a hidden object on display? Whether or not the covering-over in mourning of Kngwarreye’s work is interpreted as a ceremonial act of acknowledgment, growing out of or attempting to increase public awareness of the pain and injustices of the Aboriginal-Australian past – thus enacting a curatorial project towards reconciliation – the visual effect of these large, dark, draped squares was striking. In the context of the clean, modernist gallery space (particularly the Adelaide and Brisbane state galleries), these tactile expanses of cloth elicited a certain curiosity and even frustration in the viewer. What images, what stories, what worlds lay behind the curtain? Yet the visual rhetoric of a displayed invisibility, a pointed hiddenness, is itself tantalizingly familiar. In terms of Australian indigenous art, it has a very specific historical location. Contemporary indigenous art and its attendant industries, comprising art dealerships, galleries and souvenir businesses, emerged in the early 1970s at Papunya, west of Alice Springs. As Sally Butler notes, ‘the first Desert acrylic paintings were completed by elders from different language groups’, who had been ‘forcibly relocated to Papunya … by government authorities from 1961’.5 While these early works were known for their precise depiction of ceremonial grounds and other sacred information including dancer’s paths and ‘objects forbidden to the sight of the uninitiated’,6 Butler writes that The explicit nature of these paintings disappeared after disputes arose among the elders regarding aspects of sacred knowledge made available for inappropriate audiences. The elders regarded the art as an opportunity to revive cultural strength in the displaced community and subsequently sought formal solutions for simultaneously transferring and concealing secret-sacred knowledge.7

The famous Central Western Desert style of ‘dot painting’, which derives from ceremonial body and ground designs, proved to be a uniquely successful means by which indigenous artists could explore traditional iconography while responding 4 See Rex Butler, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the Undeconstructable Space of Justice’, Eyeline, 36 (1998), pp. 24–30, and Michelle McDonald, ‘The Problem of Criticism: Emily Kame Kngwarreye’, Art Monthly Australia, 108 (1998), pp. 20–21; for further discussion by Butler, see his ‘Aboriginal Art out of Context’, Eyeline, 55 (2004), pp. 26–9. 5 Sally Butler, ‘The Enigmatic Object of Discourse: Interpreting the Art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’, Postscript [School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland], 2 (1998), p. 9. For further discussion by Butler, see her ‘Emily Kngwarreye and the Enigmatic Object of Discourse’, Ph.D. dissertation (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland, 2002). 6 Vivien Johnson, Dreamings of the Desert, exhibition catalogue (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1996), p. 24. 7 Butler, ‘Enigmatic Object of Discourse’, pp. 9–10.

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to the demands of cultural integrity and artistic expression. Contemporary dot painting styles range from the disciplined formal patterning for which Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s works are renowned, to Kngwarreye’s looser, seemingly more expressionistic approach. Of course, dot painting has also become the emblematic popular sign of pan-Aboriginality; and, by extension, of (inter)national identity. Moreover, this style now holds the position of a significant representational commodity within global Western as well as Australian indigenous visual cultures. Court cases over the unauthorized use of dot-painting images, including the mimicking of this ‘indigenous’ style by non-indigenous artists on corporate logos and tourist memorabilia, serve to highlight both the enduring fact of this commodification and, more hearteningly, the increasing ability and willingness of indigenous artists to assert their cultural and legal rights of ownership. Art critic Vivien Johnson interpreted the early, detailed Papunya paintings as ‘an accurate record of [the artists’] cultural traditions and an externalisation of an acute longing for the Dreaming places whose stories they told’.8 Kngwarreye’s work, while no less inspired by the cultural heritage of her country, Alhalkere, differently interprets the cultural imperative to tell its stories. Yet while her images have specific titles referring, for instance, to important yam or emu dreaming sites (and it was from the yam seeds that the artist took her bush name, Kame), her mark-making does not outline forms or illustrate recognizable objects but creates layered, shifting fields of color and line.9 The artist is often quoted as saying, ‘Whole lot, that’s whole lot … That’s what I paint: whole lot’.10 The visual interplay of concealment and disclosure in Kngwarreye’s work is thus a complex representational strategy with a dual purpose: in Butler’s words, it fulfils the artist’s ‘inherited responsibilities to pass on dreamings to the next generation, [and engenders] respect for her culture within a non-indigenous audience’.11 Yet unless the potential viewer were already familiar with the gallery spaces and with the specific works located therein, this knowledge, while relevant, would have been of little practical use during the mourning period. While the paintings as such were still on display, they were also conspicuously concealed. For this viewer, these covered paintings recalled those dark, introspective works by the American painter Ad Reinhardt and Pakeha New Zealander Colin McCahon, as well as the Catholic Good Friday, a time when particular religious icons are either removed from view or left in situ, draped over with cloths. This is not to suggest the complete commensurability of these differing perceptions of spirituality and concealment, a sum total out of which we might extract the final meaning of this culturally specific ritual act. Instead, it hints that in these urban spaces, a complex perceptual negotiation took place. Viewers were invited to consider and 8 Vivien Johnson, Dreamings, p. 24. See also Victoria King, ‘Embodied Perceptions: Aboriginal Expressions of Place’, in Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia, ed. John Cameron (Double Bay, N.S.W.: Longueville Books, 2003), pp. 286–95. 9 Margo Neale, ‘The Utopia Room’, Museum National, 7:1 (1998), p. 11. 10 Robert Hollingworth, ‘Looking at (not Seeing) Reconsidering the Art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’, Art Monthly Australia, 115 (1998), p. 15. 11 Butler, ‘Enigmatic Object of Discourse’, p. 10.

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perhaps name for themselves the familiar as well as the unfamiliar aspects of their encounter with these objects. In memory, the dark space of Kngwarreye’s hidden paintings remains a site of uncanny generative power, and serves as an affirmation of indigenous cultural vitality. I now want to move, in the second part of my chapter, to a more detailed analysis of one specific ‘aesthetic’ or art-critical attempt to come to grips with Kngwarreye’s work, in an attempt to consider the attractions and limitations of this method for indigenous art writing more broadly. Robert Hollingworth’s critique of Kngwarreye in Art Monthly begins with the best of intentions. Following Ian Burn, Hollingworth argues persuasively for a ‘rehabilitation of perception’, suggesting that this might – finally – offer a critical approach to Kngwarreye which could acknowledge the cultural specificity of the artist’s work, without rendering it meaningless or unapproachable for the non-indigenous viewer. In contrast to critics who argue that we should not attempt to reconcile the ‘irreconcilable’ of Kngwarreye’s work, Hollingworth attempts to map out a third interpretive option. Drawing from Japanese writer Keiji Nishitani, Bataille and contemporary physics, his intention is to theorize an ‘emphatic inclusiveness’ in Kngwarreye’s work. Hollingworth is a convincing writer, and is evidently committed to engaging with Kngwarreye’s work in the context of contemporary art criticism. However, I maintain that his solution to the ‘problem’ of Kngwarreye’s work is limited by the terms he employs in order to discuss it, and that ultimately, his approach is constrained by an aesthetic dilemma which has important resonances for the display, criticism and reception of Indigenous art worldwide. The key to this dilemma is Hollingworth’s reliance on the golden key of perception to offer a ‘way in’ to Kngwarreye’s work. Perception is installed at the very heart of his model, as indicated by the first words of his title: ‘Looking at (not Seeing)’. As we start to wonder how the act of looking might escape the supposedly negative connotations of ‘seeing’, Hollingworth finds refuge in theories of visual perception. Quoting Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting, Hollingworth explains that this distinction has first of all to do with the socialized nature of perception: ‘For human beings collectively to orchestrate their visual experience together it is required that each submit his or her retinal experience to the socially agreed description(s) of an intelligible world’.12 Seeing, then, is a matter of interpretation, in which we select particular items from the visual field, and categorize them according to known frames of reference. To use a familiar (if deeply misleading) metaphor, it is thus a kind of processing, in which the impenetrable flow of ‘raw data’ is broken up into manageable chunks. In short, Hollingworth wants us to rethink this empiricist legacy of classification as interpretation. Of course, for any individual the processing of perceptually derived information is continually shaped by diverse social and environmental factors, and Bryson’s model implies that different societies will employ different frames of reference. Thus, Kngwarreye’s art will be meaningful in different ways for urban, nonIndigenous viewers and the Anmatyerre people who inhabit Kngwarreye’s Alkahere country. However, according to Bryson, the Cartesian tradition by which Western visual thinking is shaped – the tradition of abstraction, which divides subject from 12 Norman Bryson, qtd in Hollingworth, ‘Looking at (not Seeing)’, p. 16.


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object and figure from ground – is incapable of dealing with the holistic nature of Kngwarreye’s art. Returning to Kngwarreye’s statement, ‘That’s what I paint: whole lot’, he wants us to rethink the material world as a continuous field of transformations. While Kngwarreye’s marks are ‘graphic recording[s] which may be equivalent to body/world experience itself’, they are not outlines. Her use of dot and line is thus seen as ‘a very ingenious means to speak of “being” as an indivisible system of inclusiveness’.13 But Hollingworth’s solution to the fact of cultural difference is not to emphasize the enduring fact of Other cultural readings (specifically, indigenous readings) of the works, as did curator Margo Neale at the Queensland Art Gallery’s Kngwarreye retrospective. Like those critics who seek to claim Kngwarreye as a twentiethcentury abstractionist, Hollingworth appears to leave aside questions pertaining to Kngwarreye’s ‘age, her femaleness and her Aboriginality’, in favor of a return to ‘the actual paint on canvas’.14 Following Ian Burn, Hollingworth notes that ‘our current way of seeing is to read theory onto the image rather than to look at the work itself; to treat the art object as a rhetorical surface … rather than to engage with it in a perceptual way’.15 Burn’s proffered solution, which Hollingworth endorses, is that we attempt to ‘recover’ perception, and thus realize ‘the visual density of art making’.16 But doesn’t this condemn any so-called mediated way of viewing art in favor of a more primal confrontation between viewer and art object? Hollingworth’s use of the word ‘recovery’ appears to imply that a way of seeing might exist which would allow us to receive the visual/sensory data as data, rather than as objects which are always/already inscribed within our cultural system of interpretation. In this way, the author (perhaps unconsciously) invokes the idea of the authentic versus the represented (the signifying or virtual) object, favoring the former just as Giles Auty does when he tells us ‘there’s no such thing as bad drawing – there’s only bad looking’.17 At the time he wrote that, Auty was Senior Art Critic with the Australian, Australia’s (only) national daily newspaper, and often criticized, at least within Australian visual arts media, as a Eurocentric conservative – more recently, he has put forward his views in the magazine Quadrant.18 According to Auty, it is the artist’s duty to close the alleged gap between ‘what we see and what we think we see’, by laboring away at the ‘difficult’ yet ‘potentially rewarding’ business of accurate

13 Hollingworth, p. 16. 14 McDonald, p. 20. 15 Hollingworth, p. 15. 16 Ian Burn, qtd in Hollingworth, p. 15. 17 Giles Auty, ‘The Big Picture’, Weekend Australian, 5–6 December 1999, Review section, p. R23. 18 See, for example, ‘Political Bias in the Arts: Australia’s Other Red Centre’ (2001), at , and the more recent ‘Blue Poles, Modernism and the Novelty Trap’, at . Quadrant is generally regarded as a vehicle for conservative views on cultural and political matters, although this generalization by no means applies to all its contributors.

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perception.19 Yet curiously, Auty’s emphasis on perception and artistic creation as work (he favors quasi-Marxian descriptors such as ‘laboriously’, ‘toiling’ and ‘struggling’) tends to reduce the class- and race-inflected senses in which artistic activity might be seen as the exclusive preserve of individuals who possess the sensitivity necessary to the proper creation and/or reception of the work. By contrast, Hollingworth’s approach implies a return to what is – at least potentially – a more elitist attitude to art-making and art-viewing. It is of course significant that Hollingworth, in delineating the limits of the rationalist discourse which he argues has failed to ‘mobilise the viewer beyond Eurocentric conventions’, is compelled to resort to the language of poststructuralist philosophy.20 In noting the presence of this discourse, my intent is not to invoke the postcolonial critique of theory-centric language. It is somewhat simpler, although it too focuses on the art critic’s terminology as a contested site of meaning – a place where scandalous profiteering is less uncommon than we like to think. Perhaps I am disturbed by the fact that although Hollingworth suggests that ‘we can be perpetually alert to the potential for new comprehensions of the world picture and we can learn from other cultures’, he seems to make no genuine effort to do so. Perhaps it is too easy for the critic to refer to ‘the essential nature of Kngwarreye’s tribal knowledge’ only in passing, before getting down to the serious business of theory.21 To do him justice, Hollingworth is certainly not arguing that we can only understand Kngwarreye if we have read Bataille. But do not the pronouncements from avant-garde intellectuals such as Nishitani, Bataille and Deleuze which grace Hollingworth’s argument simply function as yet another metanarrative overlay to Kngwarreye’s work, and exactly the kind of metanarrative the author has earlier deplored? This is not to negate the necessity – or the inevitability – of theory, simply to suggest that Hollingworth’s less than critical use of these thinkers generates a particular aporia which he is unable to recognize or incorporate into his discussion. This aporia is the utopian theme permeating the thought of all the philosophers he cites, that longing for a ‘third possibility’ which ‘operates outside language and the enclosures of rule-regulated empirical knowledge’.22 The quest for this third possibility in theories of indeterminacy, ‘phase transformations’, ‘formlessness’, ‘inner experience’ and the like disguises what I think we might term an (unarticulated) desire to return to the numinous dimension of experience. If postmodernism’s hankering after the numinous is grounded within a consciousness of failure, the grand failure of the Cartesian system to enact capture of the world, the accompanying contention that all language or representation occurs under the sign of the symbolic order poses a significant problem for the political unconscious. In Hollingworth’s writing, as in Deleuze, this dilemma is expressed via apocalyptic metaphor: ‘[Kngwarreye] seems to reach into the texture of “consciousness” and present for our consideration another potential for what this can actually be … [She] takes us

19 20 21 22

Auty, ‘Floating an Idea’, Australian Weekend Magazine, 5–6 December 1998, p. 23. Hollingworth, p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 17.


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onto a new field of the immeasurable, away from enclosure to the outside’.23 It is this desperate utopianism which, in the context of ‘Looking at (not Seeing)’, gives rise to the nostalgia I mentioned in relation to Hollingworth’s attempt to revalue perception. Hollingworth has previously assured us that he is not interested in transcendence, but he makes it very difficult for me to agree. Perhaps unintentionally, his argument comes to illustrate Rudolf Arnheim’s law that ‘the cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself’.24 The debates over Kngwarreye’s work remind us that as writers, teachers, administrators and policy-makers, we have both the opportunity to enter into debates over indigenous art and cultural policy, and the responsibility to at least struggle towards making non-arbitrary choices when confronted with any seeming cultural impasse. To speak of ‘incommensurability’ or ‘otherness’ here may be to draw a quasi-mystical veil over indigeneity, identity and cultural production and consumption that prevents engagement with the very practical questions currently facing artists, curators and critics – to say nothing of tourist businesses such as souvenir manufacturers, which also depend on the standards set by ‘the museum complex’. For example, for curators, this has everything to do with the practicalities of exhibition design. Why does Hollingworth, in line with other critics who seek to reclaim Kngwarreye in terms of modernist aesthetics, fetishize the art object while neglecting the situated relationship between artist, artwork and viewer? I have argued that the operation of postmodern nostalgia in Hollingworth’s text precludes his engagement with the question of ‘tribal knowledge’ and the possibility of ‘educating’ the non-Indigenous viewer. However, from my perspective, it would be very wrong to dismiss curatorial endeavors (such as the covering-over of Kngwarreye’s paintings) as token acknowledgements of cultural difference. Nor are these efforts simply nostalgic signs or relics of original meanings that have been irretrievably lost, as the site of artistic reception shifts from the Indigenous artist’s regional community to the ‘white space’ of the urban gallery. To illustrate this contention, I would like to conclude with two pertinent examples. A 1999 solo exhibition at Brisbane City Gallery began with a quote from the artist, Michael Nelson Jagamara: ‘Without the story, the painting is nothing’.25 This quote, which also provided the exhibition title, was acted upon with the appearance of a wall text and seven didactic wall-panels alongside the paintings, telling something 23 Ibid., p. 17. 24 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 13. 25 Michael Nelson Jagamara is a Warlpiri man and custodian of stories, who began painting professionally in 1981 at Papunya. Today he is one of the most widely collected and prominent Australian artists. See Vivien Johnson’s monograph, Michael Jagamara Nelson (Sydney: Craftsman House/G and B Arts International, 1997). ‘Without the Story, the Painting is Nothing: Michael Nelson Jagamara’, a major exhibition of new work by the artist, was exhibited at Brisbane City Gallery from 11 June to 25 July 1999, curated by Simon Wright. Brisbane City Gallery was a civic arts and cultural institution, formerly located in Brisbane’s landmark City Hall building. The site is now occupied by the Museum of Brisbane; Wright is now Director of Griffith Artworks and DELL Gallery at QCA (the Queensland College of Art).

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of Jagamara’s life, his philosophy, and the custodial stories and iconography which inspire his art. This approach will surely be familiar to most of us, and it can accommodate varying levels of complexity and cultural sensitivity, ranging from the two-line story ‘explaining’ an image on a tourist postcard to extensive information gathered in consultation with the artist and presented in the gallery context by professional curators. A key issue for the use of wall-texts for indigenous art within a traditional museums context is that such texts often fail to convey the fact that artworks which draw from particular landscapes, objects or Dreamings are not generally representative in a transparent way. Texts might describe the meaning of Indigenous artworks reductively, or by using exoticist language. Or they might suggest, temptingly but again misleadingly, that the meaning of Indigenous artworks is latent and requires only ‘decoding’ by an appropriately informed interpreter, in order to become fully accessible. The use of wall-texts at the Brisbane City Gallery was notable in this regard, because it avoided these errors and succeeded in adding complexity and nuance to an often fraught interpretive approach, one with many potential pitfalls. The wall-texts sought to reveal layers of meaning in the works presented, and did not flinch from pointing out specific challenges for interpretation. In particular, the introductory text to the exhibition (presented as a wall-text and repeated as part of a photocopied gallery guide) provided a clear statement of intent, while also revealing a cool-headed view of the myriad issues inherent in this approach: Michael Nelson believes that the conceptual element in his art [‘the story’] is as important as, if not more important than, the paint itself [‘the painting is nothing’]. He emphasises the notion that in Aboriginal societies, everything has meaning – and often, multiple meanings, […] Audiences from non-indigenous backgrounds may respond to these works by referring to the wall labels and short written descriptions which provide condensed accounts of the symbols used in the work. These devices are limited in their accuracy and an issue which arises is that the works are ‘read’ as if they were part of an homogeneous Western Desert culture. There are many cultures throughout the desert, and while some language groups do share things … they remain distinct from each other, like paintings from different artists. Viewers are therefore encouraged to recognise meaningfulness in the works with the realization that full understanding, and meaning itself, are often held as the sacred property of the artist and their family. The irony in Michael Nelson Jagamara’s statement should now be apparent. For most of us, the story is out of reach. The real invitation being made is for a thoughtful cultural exchange – to consider the appeal of meaning and painting.26

The invitation to consider ‘meaning and painting’ together, as part of a cultural exchange, is especially significant. It signals attentiveness to the audience’s needs, as

26 Exhibition wall-text, on Xeroxed gallery handout, ‘Without the Story, the Painting is Nothing: Michael Nelson Jagamara, (Brisbane City Gallery, 1999).


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well as the artist’s individuality and his Warlpiri cultural context.27 And it reminds us that Michael Nelson Jagamara’s art practice, like Kngwarreye’s, is primarily enacted through the discipline of painting. For the artist, the ‘story’ might be primary, but it exists in dialogue with the painting, and the works’ reception takes its meaning outside the artist’s control.28 The approach at Brisbane City Art Gallery was born of extensive consultation involving the artist, his family, and representatives of the Papunya Community Council at Warumpi Arts (an artists’ agency of the Community Council, now defunct). Building on previous personal contacts with the artist, Wright traveled to Alice Springs, in central Australia, and Papunya, to meet him and his community, and to broach issues of exhibition, design and rationale, as well as legal issues of copyright and information management. It was here [at Warumpi Arts] that headline agreements regarding consultation with the artist and Warumpi Arts for roles in work selection, gallery and exhibition design and text publication were first raised […] I then researched the nature of the new works in discussion with the artist, and also discussed them with members of the Papunya community, namely Dinny Nolan and Paddy Carooll, to get a sense of how the works were being considered from various viewpoints. I also worked with Michael Eather and Simon Turner who were connected with Fire Works Gallery […] in order to flesh out the image bank I had accrued.29

Exhibition texts were proofed at Warumpi Arts for feedback and with time for any amendments, and both Warumpi and the artist were involved in the timing and nature of the exhibition opening event. This was to be the first public showing of a major group of works by the artist, known as ‘New Expressions’. Wright’s curatorial approach thus paid particular attention to the ways that the exhibition content might help to evoke meanings conveyed in the artworks themselves. Wright explains, I worked with the artist to move aside from a white-wall museological hang, and following a discussion that ranged through various options [of what] we might be able to do within the practical limits of budget etc., we took the idea of the desert after rain and opened it up a bit. A stereotypical ‘dead heart’ approach to the desert, which explodes in colour following rain, was inappropriate, so we worked with the conceptual link of rain offering new beginnings and an explosion of colour throughout Warlpiri homelands in the Tanami Desert – perfect for the presentation of MNJ’s new works.30

27 Exhibition materials were designed for domestic and international visitors unfamiliar with the material, and aged between eight and 80. Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006). 28 It is interesting to note, here, that the exhibition was originally pitched by the curator, and accepted by the Gallery, in fulfilment of the Gallery’s remit to present contemporary Australian art. Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006). 29 Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006). Fire Works is an established Brisbane gallery which represents Indigenous artists. 30 Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006).

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The overall exhibition design, together with wall-texts and small labels included next to works, helped to further a principle important to the artist: that the audience should see how the new works shown carried similar information to the more ‘traditional’ dot style paintings he was known for. The Kngwarreye retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery was able, with the larger budget available to a state cultural institution, to present an even more detailed approach to Indigenous cultural context. The exhibition was accompanied by the six-by-eight-meter space of the Utopia Room, an environment created in response to the needs of the artist’s community for a greater collaborative role and the broader public for greater contextualization. The Utopia Room contained lightbox displays of sacred rocks, sent to the gallery by Greeny Purvis Petyarre and Lindsay Bird Mpetyane, senior male custodians of Alkahere, to ‘show that the paintings in the exhibition have important stories’.31 It also included women’s ceremonial dance garments which had belonged to Kngwarreye, presented by Gloria Petyarre and handed over in an impromptu but important ceremony. On the walls were slides of Alkahere landscape, tracks and body art, ‘many of them sent by Greeny and Lindsay’.32 The room’s mood was thus less elegiac than a living celebration of Anmatyerre culture, as was amply shown by the contribution of senior members of Kngwarreye’s family and community to the exhibition. These contributions, which also took place in the performative gestures of story-telling, dance and song, were part of an extensive consultative process recognizing collaborative ownership of artworks and involved complex forms of cultural transaction between the Alkahere and local Indigenous communities and curatorial staff. As Margo Neale has described, the Utopia Room was less an anthropological site than a spiritual keeping-place; a space acknowledging the ‘two sites of engagement, that is, Utopia, the place of production, and the Gallery, the place of consumption’.33 The staging of such exhibitions demands ongoing consultation between artist, community, curators and the viewing public – and between local, state and national institutions and cultural bodies. This consultation, properly conceived, should be undertaken with a commitment to creating ongoing dialogues, not simply as a oneoff event.34 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wright suggests that the public domain might provide the most supportive environment within which to pursue this approach: ‘Balancing the interests of stakeholders and artists, particularly in the context of staging public exhibitions of indigenous art, in my opinion, requires higher levels of open consultation and strict adherence to protocols expected by community and

31 Neale, p. 11. 32 Ibid., p. 12. 33 Ibid. 34 For example, in the staging of similar projects, Wright acknowledges the support and guidance of ‘senior curators such as Margo Neale and Brenda Croft, major artists like Michael Nelson Jagamara, Thanakupi, Fiona Foley and Gordon Bennett, the Queensland government, the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export agency, Museums Australia, and the many remote and urban-based community arts centres where I have volunteered or undertaken work for the acquittal of public gallery exhibitions’; Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006).


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artist, than activities and practices common to private/market gallery interests.35 Such an approach need not require higher budgets, but it inevitably requires long lead-times, and even more importantly, it puts the focus on creating and sustaining personal and organizational relationships. I believe that with regard to the display and viewing of work by Kngwarreye, Michael Nelson Jagamara, or any other Indigenous artist, it is Neale’s and Wright’s respective approaches which come closest to the ‘third possibility’ Hollingworth strains after – and which amounts, ultimately, to something like an ethics of perception.

35 Wright, personal communication (29 September 2006).


Chapter 11

Sweet Beauty: West Indian Travel Narratives Claudia Brandenstein Upon his first arrival in 1816 at Cornwall, one of his estates in Jamaica, Matthew Gregory Lewis granted his slaves a ‘holiday’: ‘they were allowed as much rum and sugar, and noises, and dancing as they chose’ to celebrate the appearance of Europe embodied.1 At the outset, Lewis positions himself as (or perhaps more accurately, perceives himself to be) a giver of gifts and a granter of wishes, thereby establishing the terms for writing his Journal: ‘As I passed through their grounds, many little requests were preferred to me: one wanted an additional supply of lime for the whitewashing of his house; another was building a new house for a superannuated wife’.2 Lewis is also the awarder of prizes: mothers are given a dollar for each infant ‘brought to the overseer alive and well on the fourteenth day’; in addition to this, they are rewarded with ‘a present of a scarlet girdle with a silver medal in the centre which they are … to wear … on feasts and holidays’. The author explains that he expected that this notion of an order of honour would have been treated as completely fanciful and romantic; but, to my great surprise, my manager told me that ‘he never knew a dollar better bestowed than the one which formed the medal of the girdle, and that he thought the institution likely to have a very good effect’.3

Despite Lewis’s assertion that his intentions were merely ‘fanciful and romantic’, it should be noted that with the abolition of the slave trade, planters needed to develop inducements to slaves to reproduce. His act, then, is not only good economic sense, but an effective means of control as well. But Lewis complains that he is rewarded with ‘some choice ungrateful scoundrels’ for his ‘benevolent actions’: ‘on the night of their first dance, a couple of sheep disappeared from the pen, although they could not have been taken from want of food, as on that very morning there had been ample distribution of fresh beef’.4 While Lewis gives, his slaves steal. In this exchange it is he, not they, who has been duped and exploited, had ‘everything’ taken. Lewis’s slaves are the obverse of the gift-giving, obliging natives figured in Columbus’s letter; unlike Columbus, he has to contend with unruly locals. To celebrate his second arrival in 1818, Lewis’s slaves are again given a holiday. This time, they are so involved in revelry that ‘not one of the five pen-keepers chose 1 Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a Residence Among the Negroes in the West Indies (London: John Murray, 1845), p. 35. 2 Ibid., p. 57. 3 Ibid., p. 66. 4 Ibid., p. 68.

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to go to their watch last night’, and as a consequence, their ‘master’s’ cattle escape and eat his ‘best cane pieces’. The writer states that few of his slaves ran ‘to the scene of the action … the greatest part remained quietly in the negro-houses … singing their joy for my arrival with the whole strength of their lungs, but without thinking it in the least necessary to move so much as a finger-joint in my service … Such’, he concludes, ‘is negro gratitude, and such my reward for all that I have suffered on ship-board’.5 In Lewis’s self-representation he is the victim of injustice and unfair trade: he gives everything, seemingly receiving nothing in return, notwithstanding the fact that he has claimed the lives and labor of his slaves. Indeed, he is assured by one of his overseers that many of his ‘slaves are very rich, and that they are never without salt provisions, porter, and even wine, to entertain their friends and their visitors’.6 So idyllic is their lifestyle that Lewis literally wishes to trade places with them: I never witnessed on the stage a scene so picturesque as a negro village … and if I were to decide according to my own taste, I should infinitely have preferred their habitations to my own … the vegetables of the negroes are all cultivated in their provision-grounds, which form their kitchen-gardens; but these are all for ornament or luxury, and are filled with a profusion of oranges, shaddocks, cocoa-nuts, and peppers of all descriptions.7

While his slaves have so much leisure they can indulge in ornamental gardening, the author must devote his hours to running a plantation. Lewis argues that ‘the only laborious part of the business of sugar-making, is the digging [of] holes for the plants’.8 For all their visits to the sugar-works, imperial observers habitually pass over evidence of work and the conditions under which slaves are forced to labor. Momentarily ‘pausing’ in the boiling-house, where sugar-cane is processed by slaves, travelers allow their readers only brief glimpses into the inferno. Another imperial writer, Cynric Williams, describes his visit to a boiling-house in his Tour of the Island of Jamaica (1823), where ‘the steam from five or six immense boiling coppers soon induced me to retreat. I saw negroes here allowed to take calabashes full of the hot purified cane juice, half a gallon each at least’.9 Williams’s view is similar to that of Lewis, in that slaves are seen as the recipients of generosity they have done little or nothing to earn. And although the heat of the boiling-house forces Williams to retreat, he does not meditate on the conditions endured by the laborers – indeed, like Lewis, he points to the delights of their situation. Continuing his tour he writes, ‘the mill-yard was all bustle and merriment, songs and laughter mingled with the shrill braying of mules and bellowing of oxen’.10 In this carnival atmosphere, there are few signs of work, apart from that of the writer/traveler themselves. Annie Brassey, on her tour of a sugar-works in Trinidad, remarks that ‘The heat of the 5 Ibid., p. 141. 6 Ibid., p. 57. 7 Ibid., pp. 55–6. 8 Ibid., p. 44. 9 Cynric Williams, A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica, from the Western to the Eastern End, in the Year 1823 (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826), p. 6. 10 Ibid.

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boiling-houses was frightful, and the smell of rum and molasses quite overpowering; so I was thankful when I could feel that we had done our duty’.11 Writers turn away from slavery, preferring to aestheticize the environment, and by extension plantation life. Lewis highlights the picturesque qualities of the environs, describing the north side of Jamaica as ‘extremely beautiful and sublime … the beauty of the atmosphere [and] the dark purple mountains’ produced ‘a very picturesque appearance’.12 Janet Schaw, traveling to Antigua in 1774, likewise celebrates the island’s landscape and prizes its picturesque prospects. She paints a picture of a rich, cultivated, ordered place: the plantations enclosed by hedges particularly arrest her gaze. Thus a slave plantation becomes a site of sublime pleasure: whatever can charm the senses or delight the Imagination is now in my view … every breeze is fragrant with perfumes that mock the poor imitations to be produced by art … it is almost impossible to conceive so much beauty and riches under the eye in one moment … the beauty, the Novelty, the ten thousand charms that this Scene presents to me, confuse my ideas.13

What in some sense spoils this scene for the author is not slavery, but the effects of a ‘recent hurricane’. William Beckford’s Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica exemplifies the kinds of response to landscape that characterize plantation travelogues: The first appearance of Jamaica presents one of the most grand and lively scenes that the creating hand of Nature can possibly exhibit: mountains of an immense height seem to crush those that are below them … The hills, from their summits to the very borders of the sea, are fringed with trees and shrubs of a beautiful shape … and you perceive mills, works, and houses, peeping among their branches, or buried amidst their shades.14

In the plantation narratives, in which landscape is represented in terms of the picturesque, the sublime and the pastoral, nature provides a scenic frame or backdrop for slavery and plantation fields: slavery peeps among branches, or is ‘buried amidst their shades’. The sugar industry and slavery are conflated with the observer’s aesthetic response to the environment. Repeatedly describing his own perspective as that of the painter, Beckford produces himself as a colonial version of the eighteenthcentury traveler, taking a grand tour of the continent in search of the sublime and picturesque: From many situations you have views so much diversified, that, wherever you turn, a new prospect delights the eye, and occasions surprize by the magnificence of the objects, by the depths of shadow or bursts of light, by the observation of gloomy dells or woody

11 Annie Brassey, In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties (London: Longmans, 1885), p. 131. 12 Matthew Lewis, pp. 22–3. 13 Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, eds Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), pp. 90–91. 14 William D. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, 2 vols (London: T. and J. Egerton, 1790), vol. 1, p. 7.

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Economies of Representation, 1790–2000 plains, of mountain-torrents, and of winding-streams; of groups of negroes, herds of cattle, passing wains; and by the recurrence of every rural object that imagination can form, or attention discriminate.15

Significantly, travel narratives written after the virtual collapse of the sugar industry change in the ways they represent an uncultivated landscape. In the early narratives, the natural landscape does not appear to offend imperialism’s ‘finer sensibilities’, whereas uncultivated land is the subject of lamentations in the later works. And landscape itself is less often described than is trade, perhaps a marker of the increasing significance of commerce to the writers and the cultures they describe. References to trade abound in the later narratives, especially those written during the period of high imperialism, like Annie Brassey’s In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties (1885) and James Anthony Froude’s The English in the West Indies (1888).16 These texts, written after the decline of the sugar industry, focus on the production of coffee, cocoa and oranges, as viable and new forms of agriculture. Visiting a sugar estate, Brassey casts a different and more critical eye over plantation sites, declaring ‘there is something monotonous about fields of sugar-cane, when unrelieved by other vegetation’.17 And Anthony Trollope is relieved that ‘the canes and sugar, which after all, are ugly … appurtenances, were located somewhere out of sight’.18 It is no coincidence that cane-fields become very trying to the imperial eye at a time when sugar was no longer the profitable industry it had been. Landscape is the object of close investigation, as imperial visions have to be re-shaped and the islands need to be re-possessed. According to Trollope, ‘It is the waste land of the world that makes it picturesque … A country that is broken into landscapes, that boasts of its mountains, woods, and waterfalls, that is regarded for its wild loveliness, is seldom propitious to agriculture’.19 Post-emancipation travelers, whose eyes are trained to scan the landscape in different ways, can be located in the category of explorers and travellers described by Mary Louise Pratt as the ‘capitalist vanguard’.20 Their sights are set squarely on the usefulness of the landscape; the environment is appraised for its ability to yield riches aside from sugar, not for its picturesque prospects. While Brassey, who travels to the West Indies in her family yacht (the Sunbeam) dedicates her work ‘to the noble band of Navigators and Explorers, of all ages and of every nation, who have devoted their lives to Scientific Research, for the good of their fellow-men and the glory of their country’, her imagination is stirred not by tales of adventure or romantic scenery, but by tales of commerce and industry.21

15 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 16 James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies (London: Longmans, 1888). 17 Brassey, p. 101. 18 Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main ([1859]; Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985), p. 31. 19 Ibid., pp. 154, 153. 20 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 147–8. 21 Brassey, p. v.


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Both Brassey’s and Froude’s travelogues were written not only after the decline of the sugar industry, but when Britain was involved in the scramble for Africa. Having lost faith in the ability of the West Indies to yield treasures unbounded, Britain was setting its hopes on Africa as a resource with limitless commercial potential. Froude, who called himself an Englishman proud of his country, embarked on a mission to the West Indies in an attempt to revive British interests in the region. He quite deliberately styles himself a scout for British investors, including information on potential ventures, labor conditions, transport, and possible markets. He advocates the pursuit of new and different imperial dreams, such as the cultivation and location of markets for oranges and tobacco, pointing out that uncultivated and unused regions abound in these British possessions. Froude argues that new triumphs are not only possible, but are crucial to the vitality of the body politic. Drawing on the tropes of the original encounter narrative, he argues that ‘Skill and capital and labor have only to be brought to bear together, and the land might be a Garden of Eden. All precious fruits, and precious spices, and gums, and plants of rarest medicinal virtues will spring and grow and flourish for the asking’.22 He emphasizes that commercial (ad)ventures of all kinds are still possible in the islands: ‘In the West Indies there is indefinite wealth waiting to be developed by intelligence and capital’.23 Froude also informs his readers that the greatest gift that Britain can give, and moreover is morally obligated to give, is setting the black population of the West Indies back to work. Gazing upon an ‘uncultivated’ or ‘unimproved’ site in Dominica, Froude comments with regret, ‘here was all this profusion of nature … and the enterprising youth of England were neglecting a colony which might yet yield them wealth beyond the treasures of the old sugar planters’.24 Chris Tiffin notes that ‘Imperial teleology had a work-ethic slant whose watchwords were “use”, “function”, “progress”’,25 and Brassey, like Froude, exemplifies this imperial work-ethic. Brassey is at her imperial best when, after having consumed the contents of a cocoa pod, the taste of which she compares to ‘the most delicious lemon ice-cream, with a delicate soupçon of vanilla-chocolate’, she states that ‘it seemed a great pity that this delicious substance, which is also very nutritious and wholesome, should be completely wasted – as is the case; and [Sir Joseph, the proprietor of the cocoa plantation] quite agreed with me, and promised to consider the possibility of utilizing it in some way’.26 Brassey, too, suggests that imperialists are under a moral obligation to make the best use of the resources that empire affords, to accept the gifts that are offered. The eyes of the travelers under consideration here are drawn to all forms of money-making operations, to articles and items of commerce and export, to the activities of planting, cultivating,

22 Froude, pp. 140–41. 23 Ibid., p. 79. 24 Ibid., p. 141. 25 Chris Tiffin, ‘Progress and Ambivalence in the Colonial Novel’, in Re-Siting Queen’s English: Text and Tradition in Post-Colonial Literatures, eds Gillian Whitlock and Helen Tiffin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), p. 3. 26 Brassey, p. 142.

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harvesting and producing. Everywhere there are signs of production: sugar, cocoa, coffee, oranges, quinine, vanilla and pitch. No nineteenth-century West Indian travelogue would be complete without the obligatory ‘tour of duty’, the inspection of the sugar-works and other principal sites of production. These activities occupy a considerable portion of the narratives and (it seems) writers’ travels in the region. Anthony Trollope, writing mid-century, complained that ‘The inspection of a pen or two, perhaps occasionally of the sugar works … soon wears through the hours’.27 Brassey, in addition to her visit of the sugarworks, also visited Trinidad’s Pitch Lake, the raw materials of which were exported to metropolitan centers – although Froude, perhaps a less energetic traveller, refused invitations to visit this site, reasoning that ‘I could imagine [the pitch lake] without seeing and without undertaking a tedious journey’.28 Brassey writes, ‘the fumes of the sulphuretted hydrogen were almost overpowering, where the pitch or petroleum came bubbling up from somewhere in the nether world’.29 Spending much of her time in the West Indies visiting the lucrative sites of empire, Brassey complains of being ‘completely exhausted after [a] long day’s work’.30 At almost every turn the work of the slaves is erased, and it is the imperial observer, rather than those who labor, who suffers and sacrifices themselves. Although Brassey frequently focuses on the usefulness and productiveness of particular economic ventures, she does gesture towards the ugly face of commerce, stating, ‘My nature is not utilitarian enough to enable me to rejoice in the fact that the beauties of [the Bog Walk in Jamaica] are on the point of being desecrated by the introduction of a railway; clearly contrived no doubt, but still inevitably tending to deface one of the most charming spots on the earth with the traces of man’s prosaic handiwork’.31 What is particularly interesting about Brassey’s statement is that her father-in-law, Thomas Brassey, was a contractor who built railways in various parts of the empire, including India, Canada and Australia. But as the author comes to her (imperial) senses, she is able to reason that ‘the face of the scene’ will be spoiled only ‘for a time’, but ‘it will hereafter confer great benefits on the rich, fertile, but comparatively little-known valleys on the other side of the island; for vast tracts of rich country will be opened up, and their produce will thus be brought within reach of the European market’.32 The travelogues under consideration here rehearse and replay various tropes in their encounters with the West Indies, in their efforts to bring the spectacular specimens of empire home in ways that allow readers to more closely appraise and evaluate their commercial potential. In doing so, they continue the trend identified in Peter Hulme’s reading of the ‘first encounter’ between Columbus and the people of the Bahamas: a search for riches, for trade, for gain. The history of Europe’s interest in and response to the Caribbean, the obsession that so radically commodifies labor, is usefully summed 27 28 29 30 31 32

Trollope, p. 33. Froude, p. 64. Brassey, p. 127. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 251. Ibid., p. 251.


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up by Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place: ‘we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar’.33 Although Kincaid is referring to the imperialist and neo-imperialist exploitation of African slaves and their descendants, her comment is equally suggestive of the way in which the islands in the West Indies have been constructed and considered as a resource for old world exploitation – treasure islands to fill the coffers of Europeans. In the works considered in this chapter, the particular and physical beauty of the Caribbean is indistinguishable from the dreams of profit and paternalism, the twinned fantasies of European development and benevolence, which structure and rationalize imperial trade.

33 Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Plume, 1988), p. 37.


Chapter 12

Women’s Trading in Fanny Stevenson’s The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ Roslyn Jolly In April 1890, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, his American wife Fanny and her son Lloyd set off from Sydney on a trading voyage around the western Pacific, aboard the cargo ship Janet Nicoll. The voyage would last nearly four months and take them to about thirty-five islands, from Penrhyn in the east to New Caledonia in the west, and as far north as Majuro in the Marshall Islands. Most of the islands visited were independent ‘native’ kingdoms or republics, although some were under British, German or French colonial rule. The business of the Janet Nicoll was trade: representing the trading firm Henderson and Macfarlane of Auckland, the ship took on copra (dried cocoanut meat) and shell, and the itinerary was entirely determined by the requirements of collecting this cargo. Alongside the official business of the ship, the passengers and crew engaged in informal trading with the different groups of Pacific Islanders. Such trade was usually the first, and often the only, mode of interaction between the travelers and the local people. Fanny Stevenson’s record of the voyage, The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ among the South Sea Islands, details a fascinating array of such encounters, many of them between women.1 Her accounts reveal much about the politics of this ‘contact zone’ in which ordinary people of the islands, the elders and kings who ruled them, missionaries, traders, white government officials, and the visitors themselves, entered into various dialogues, negotiations, and contests for power.2 This chapter will discuss the politics of trade and its representation in

1 The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ among the South Sea Islands: A Diary by Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Roslyn Jolly (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004). The diary was first published in 1914 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. Fanny consistently mis-spelled the name of the ship on which she sailed, the ‘Janet Nicoll’. 2 My thinking about the space of the Janet Nicoll voyage has been influenced by Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), in which she describes contact zones as ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly assymetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (p. 4). Pratt’s use of the term ‘contact’ is borrowed from linguistics, where ‘contact languages’ are improvised, hybrid languages, developed to enable communication, often for the purpose of trade (p. 6). I will argue that although Fanny Stevenson’s trading encounters took place within a contact zone, she avoided the use of contact languages, preferring to believe that she could communicate by sympathy with women of different races. As well as drawing on Pratt’s work, my thinking about contact zones has been influenced by studies of the US–Mexican borderlands; see, for example, Annette Kolodny, ‘Letting Go

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four episodes from The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’: two failed trading encounters, at Maraki and Penrhyn, and two successful ones, at Natau and Nanomea. During the voyage, Stevenson traded for fresh food in order to vary the shipboard diet. More often, though, her narrative records her attempts to obtain souvenirs, curiosities, tapa and mats (which she would later use to decorate her homes in Samoa and San Francisco), and examples of local fashions and adornments. In return, she offered cash, tobacco – a kind of universal currency in the nineteenth-century Pacific – and European items of costume and jewelry. She embarked on the voyage equipped with a stock of such goods, specifically gathered for the purpose of trading with women: pieces of cotton ‘print’, dresses, combs, necklaces, gold rings, and wreaths of artificial flowers. These last were especially attractive on the atolls where very few flowers grew, but garlands were wanted for festive occasions.3 In a trading encounter at Maraki (sometimes spelled Mareki or Marekei), in the Gilbert Islands, now Kiribati, Stevenson’s desire for a bodily decoration was mirrored in the desire of local women for the objects of personal adornment she had brought with her. What might have been a mutually satisfying exchange of goods came unstuck, however, over the issue of cash payment and the intervention of a ‘civilized’ out-islander. The Maraki episode is part of The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’, although it did not take place on this particular voyage. The Janet Nicoll stopped there on 17 June 1890, staying only ‘a very short time’, but Stevenson inserted in her diary ‘A Note on a Previous Visit to Maraki’, explaining her connection to ‘a young Hawaiian I met under peculiar circumstances when we were here before’.4 This earlier visit was in August 1889, when the Stevensons were cruising among the Gilbert Islands on the schooner Equator.5 Stevenson’s ‘Note’ begins with a negative depiction of the people of Maraki: ‘The aspect of the people was more savage and ugly than we had heretofore seen, the faces brutal and unintelligent.’ Under her critical gaze, their primitive state was registered in the nakedness of ‘more than half-grown’ children, their outlandish bodily decorations, and the prevalence of illness and deformity among the population.6 Into this scene of degradation stepped ‘a fine-looking young Hawaiian’ who saluted the visitors with ‘the pleasant “Aloha!”’ The Hawaiian was to mediate between Stevenson and the local people in her attempt to purchase girdle, with disastrous results. The Hawaiian turned to one of [the women] and asked what she would take for her girdle; a dollar was the answer; at that I handed a half dollar and two quarters to the young man who, saying that it was too much, gave me back half the money. ‘They sell them for two fish-hooks’, he said, ‘and this is simply extortion’ … The exchange was made, and after a moment’s confabulation with a crowd of her neighbours the woman demanded the other Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers’, American Literature, 64 (1992), pp. 1–18. 3 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 63. 4 Ibid., p.157. 5 See The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994–95), vol. 6, p. 328 n. 6 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 158.

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half dollar. At this the Hawaiian asked for the piece of money she had, took it, and gave back the girdle. In an instant the whole place was in an uproar. Men bounded up with furious gestures; the old men in the Council House shouted with threatening yells, while the Hawaiian, leaping to his feet, his eyes flashing like a cat’s in the dark, defied them all. Fearful that harm might come to him after we were gone, I begged him to let me give the people whatever they might ask for, but he would not hear of it, and matters were the worse for my offer, as the people evidently understood it had been made.7

The visitors then walked away with the Hawaiian, ‘leaving the crowd in a state of ferment’: Pretty soon the crowd began surging round us; there was more furious talk, the Hawaiian looking very fine as he walked toward the mass of people, shaking his fists and, I am bound to say, interlarding his language with English oaths. When he had forced the crowd back by, I really think, the fire of his eye, he laughed in their faces contemptuously and turned to me translating the meaning of the scene.

The Hawaiian explained that the ‘old men’ who governed the island had ‘made another law, against him, placing him under tapu so that he could neither trade nor be traded with’.8 Upset at being ‘the innocent cause of so much trouble’, Stevenson was reassured by the Hawaiian, who informed her that he intended to leave the island anyway. The episode concluded with a visit to ‘his very pleasant house’, which provided a hospitable context for an exchange: ‘When we left he presented us with a girdle that he had somehow got hold of and his wife gave me a young fowl. I, very fortunately, had a handsome wreath of flowers on my hat which I took off and gave the wife’.9 Stevenson noted that one of the locals observing this, a young man she dubbed ‘the dandy of the village’, tried ‘to keep all speculation out of his eyes when I passed over the wreath. He could not do it. The red imitation currants held his gaze like fish-hooks’.10 The artfulness of Stevenson’s representation of this episode is remarkable; her account has all the classical narrative features: situation, complication, climax and ironic reversal. It is also a study in poetic justice, for Stevenson gets her shell girdle after all, not at an exorbitant price but as a gift. The gift she gives in return provides a chastening lesson to the greedy locals who, through their uncivil behavior, have forfeited the chance of gaining a desirable object. The simile of the fish-hooks to show the lure of the European trade-object is particularly clever, as it picks up the earlier mention by the Hawaiian of ‘fish-hooks’ as an alternative local currency, representing the real value of the girdle Stevenson wanted to buy. She clearly plotted her account to show an alliance between the ‘innocent’ visitor and the more civilized islander triumphing over hostile savages. 7 Ibid., p. 159. 8 Ibid., p. 160. This clearly influenced Robert Louis Stevenson in his plotting of his novella ‘The Beach of Falesá’, in which the protagonist is similarly tapu’d: see Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ in South Sea Tales, ed. Roslyn Jolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 21–7. 9 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 159–60. 10 Ibid., p. 160.

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Racial hierarchies are important here: in their Pacific travel-writing and fiction, Europeans traditionally favored Polynesians above Micronesians and Melanesians as the most attractive and advanced of the Pacific races, and Stevenson’s depiction of the individualized Hawaiian ‘looking very fine’ as he faces down the mob of ‘savage and ugly’ Micronesians fits exactly this pattern. In her account, the Hawaiian and the Europeans share an enlightened perspective upon the primitive practices of the locals, shown when the Hawaiian amuses the visitors with a list of the laws made by the ‘old men’, the entertainment consisting in the absurdity of the relations between offences and punishments: ‘Dancing, one dollar fine; concealed weapons, five dollars; murder, fifteen; stealing, twenty-five, and telling a lie, fifty dollars’.11 The implication that the people of Maraki do not know the proper value of things carries over from the trading scene to this account of local government, suggesting that only more civilized people understand what an object, or a crime, is really ‘worth’. The Hawaiian’s status is reinforced later when he asks for Robert Louis Stevenson’s card, a request Fanny calls ‘a piece of civilisation we were not prepared for’.12 Less obvious, but consistent throughout the presentation of the scene, is a preference for gift-giving over trade. Stevenson’s desire to obtain a shell girdle – the motivating force behind the whole episode – is satisfied when gift-giving replaces trade as the mode of interaction between herself and others. At the end of her ‘Note’, she recalls the final exchanges of gifts and expressions of friendship with the young Hawaiian and his wife: I had made up a little parcel for her, a red comb, a bead necklace, a bottle of fine scent, and a striped blue-and-white summer jersey, with a large silk handkerchief for her husband. The next day they, with their little daughter, came to pay us a visit on board, fetching with them three young fowls and a very fine, beautiful mat of a pattern I had not seen before … We have touched at no island where there has not been at least one person we were sorry to leave and should be glad to meet again, though this was the only place where these friends were foreign to the land.13

Stevenson’s account of the trading encounter at Maraki reinforces values of civilization and civility, some of them channeled through ideas of racial hierarchy, some of them expressed in a preference for gift-exchange over trade. What she does not note, although the reader of her text might, is her own destabilizing effect on the already complex relations between locals and visitors on the island. The trading scene is a political scene, and its relation to local tensions and power-struggles is made clear in a subsequent scene involving another Hawaiian (a missionary), local white traders, the captain of the Janet Nicoll, and the ‘old men’ who ruled Maraki (161–2).14 At Maraki, trade had been tainted by its association with white criminality, for there the

11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 163. 13 Ibid., pp. 162–3. 14 Again, this episode clearly influenced Robert Louis Stevenson’s presentation of island politics in ‘The Beach of Falesá’, especially Chapter 2, ‘The Ban’.


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Stevensons met the local white trader, Peter Grant, who was accused of murder.15 Stevenson called him ‘the most hideous ruffian I have ever beheld’ and provided a detailed physical description of his face which rivals, indeed exceeds, the ‘savage and ugly’ aspect she ascribed to the locals.16 Also absent from Stevenson’s account is any attempt to establish the perspective of the people she is so quick to denigrate: it seems probable that an episode in which the young Hawaiian stopped a profitable transaction with the rich white visitor would have been interpreted quite differently from the perspective of people with a long history of being cheated by white traders.17 Stevenson relied on the civilized native – a kind of native informer – to translate for her ‘the meaning of the scene’. In later episodes on the Janet Nicoll cruise she had no such intermediary, and gradually took upon herself the authority to translate the speech, gestures and actions of island people. This increasing confidence is evident in her account of her visit to Penrhyn (also known as Tongarewa, now in the Cook Islands), a pearl island where the Janet Nicoll stopped early on the cruise to take on shell. Stevenson explicitly linked this island to her experience the previous year: ‘This is the least prepossessing population I have seen since Mariki, and I am assured they are no better than they look’. Stevenson and one of the Janet Nicoll’s traders, an Englishman nicknamed Tin Jack, became caught up in a hostile parodic encounter with the local people. The episode began innocently, but quickly went wrong: As we walked along I happened to pick up a pretty little shell from the beach; the missionary’s fat daughter instantly gathered and pressed upon me four other shells, but as I held them in my hand living claws projected from inside and pinched me so that I cried out in alarm and threw them to the ground.18

It is unclear whether the gifts of the missionary’s daughter were given innocently or mischievously, but the opportunity they afforded for a laugh at the visitors’ expense was quickly taken up: An impudent young man picked up and offered me a worn aperculum [sic, probably operculum], saying with a grin: ‘Buy; one pearl.’ ‘I could not,’ I assured him with mock courtesy, ‘deprive you of so valuable an ornament; tie it round your neck.’ This feeble jest seemed to be understood and was greeted with shouts of laughter. The lad was cast down for a moment, and fell behind; pretty soon he came forward again, with a dog’s bone. ‘Buy,’ he said; ‘very good; twenty pounds.’ ‘I could not,’ I returned, ‘take from you a weapon so suitable to your courage.’ Of course I used pantomime as well as speech.19 15 See Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, vol. 6, pp. 327–8, 372 n. The stories surrounding Grant and his associates inspired some of the more unsavoury traders’ activities described in Stevenson’s ‘The Beach of Falesá’. 16 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 161. 17 Recounting attempts by the King of Apemama in the Gilbert Islands to enter the copratrading business, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that he was defeated by ‘the world-enveloping dishonesty of the white man’. Subsequently the king, Tembinok’, divided all white traders into three categories: ‘“He cheat a litty” – “He cheat plenty” – and “I think he cheat too much.”’ See his In the South Seas, ed. Neil Rennie ([1896]; London: Penguin, 1998), p. 214. 18 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 96. 19 Ibid.

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Her verbal retaliations provide Stevenson with some measure of control over the situation, and she presents herself and her companion as ultimately triumphant in the power-play enacted in this episode. ‘Several men and women offered us very inferior pearls at the most preposterous prices, at which Tin Jack and I jeered them, when the pearls were hidden shamefacedly. They knew as well as we that their wares were worthless’. The scene concludes with this assertion of certain and shared knowledge, but leaves a sour impression, and a lingering doubt about what was really at stake. The episode bolsters Stevenson’s self-characterization as someone who can take care of herself in challenging, even threatening, situations, while providing confirmation of her prejudice that the people of Penrhyn are ‘no better than they look’.20 This in turn is part of a process of rhetorical mapping that constructs Penrhyn as a ‘bad’ island, in contrast to the ‘good’ island just visited, Manihiki. Stevenson’s prejudice in favor of the Manihikians is evident from her speculation that they were the ‘“Gente Hermosa” (Beautiful People)’ discovered by the Spanish navigator, Quiros, and her comment that It is significant that Manihiki is always conspicuously marked on even the smallest maps of the world, no doubt from the fact that its delightful people have attracted so much attention from seamen that the place has acquired an artificial importance out of all proportion to its few square miles of reef.21

Stevenson’s personal map of the Pacific uses the island of Manihiki as its key reference point: the island’s impressive civic structures, the speak-house and the church, signify its double status as an example of both native civilization and successful colonization – a blend which maximizes the opportunities for dignified, equal and (apparently) mutually pleasing interactions between locals and visitors.22 In contrast, the island of Penrhyn is presented as savage, superstitious, a society at once overly disciplined and anarchic, a place of disorder where trading encounters go wrong, communication fails, and the visitors repeatedly offend and are offended by the locals. Thus, the event of the ‘yearly jubilee’, the ‘one week out of every year [when] all laws are held in abeyance’ is interpreted quite differently in relation to the two islands: at Manihiki, it is a time when ‘the island gives itself up to hilarious enjoyment without fear of consequences’ and the visitors are ‘delighted’ to find themselves there at this ‘most interesting period’; whereas at Penrhyn, it is a time when ‘the whole island goes on a gigantic “spree”’, and the island ‘is not a pleasant, or hardly a safe, abiding-place’.23 Manihiki and Penrhyn function, in The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’, as the poles of successful and unsuccessful interaction between travelers and islanders, with 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 81. 22 Peter Hulme identifies ‘stone buildings or literacy or an ancient heritage’ as the conventional indices of ‘native civilisation’ in colonial discourse; see Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3. Although not a stone building, the substantial Speak House at Manihiki clearly functions as such an indication of native civilization in Fanny’s account. 23 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 82, 99.


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which encounters on other islands may be compared. Different modes of exchanging goods strengthen the opposing representations of the two islands, the Stevensons’ visit to Manihiki being characterized by gift-giving rather than trade. Not having the flavor of commerce, these exchanges signify friendship and civility, being part of the round of welcoming visits and entertainments in which the Stevensons were absorbed during their whole time on the island. Tellingly, Stevenson distanced herself from the one transaction she did make that was purely commercial: ‘I was envious of the big town drum, made of hollowed cocoanut wood and covered with shark skin, very like one I had already got from the Marquesas, and deputed the trader to buy it for me’.24 This was the ‘Manihiki drum, vainly sprinkled on the outside with buhac powder, but supposed internally to be one clotted bolus of cockroaches’ that Stevenson later mentioned in a letter as part of the ‘barbaric trumpery collected by Mrs Stevenson’ with which their cabin on the Janet Nicoll was cluttered.25 What was paid for it, and whether it was difficult to persuade the people of Manihiki to part with such an important object, are not mentioned. At Penrhyn, fewer gifts were given, and those that were seem to have been less satisfactory. In the episode on the beach, gift-giving slid quickly into trade, or rather, a mockery of the trading process; the keynote of this encounter is incivility, for in the end nothing is traded but insults. The motives of the Pacific Islanders who engaged in the parodic trade-scene at Penrhyn can only be guessed. Perhaps it was the well-known greed of white people that they wished to mock, greed from which Stevenson herself was not exempt, as she showed in her avidity to possess the drum at Manihiki. Perhaps in picking up the first shell, she was guilty of a breach of manners that drew a punitive response. The mock trades proposed by the islanders were insulting because of the disparities of value involved – twenty pounds for a dog’s bone, ‘very inferior pearls at the most preposterous prices’ – and perhaps while the visitors were provoked to jeer at the goods offered, the locals were jeering at ‘that fashion of regarding money as the means and object of existence’.26 Or perhaps the hostility expressed in the episode was less intellectual and more visceral, given the history of the white traders’ dealings with the island. Penrhyn had lost most of its adult population in 1862–63. Peruvian labor traders had come to the island, promising the people the opportunity to earn money to build churches; in fact, those who took up the offer were sold to plantations owners in Peru as virtual slaves.27 This was one of the most notorious acts of ‘recruiting’ (also known as ‘blackbirding’, ‘kidnapping’ or simply ‘slaving’), whereby Pacific Islanders were persuaded, lured or forced to leave their homes and work in whiterun commercial enterprises (usually plantations) throughout the Pacific and around its rim. The nature of the arrangement could fall anywhere on the spectrum from indentured labor, which was possibly harsh in its terms, but legal, to effective slavery. Governments of Britain, as well as the Australian colonies of Queensland 24 Ibid., p. 90. 25 Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, vol. 6, p. 396. 26 Robert Louis Stevenson identified this as one of Europe’s dubious gifts to the Pacific: In the South Seas, p. 12. 27 H.E. Maude, Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Labour Trade in Polynesia, 1862–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), pp. 5–11.

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and New South Wales, made various attempts from the 1860s to the early twentieth century to regulate, reform or abolish the labor trade, as it continually threatened to turn into a revival of the slave trade. However, the traffic was hard to control, as it attracted some of the most violent and criminal elements of the white population in the Pacific. The labor trade represented the lowest point in relations between whites and Pacific Islanders; it led to many outrages being committed in acts of piracy by whites, and to retaliation. All Pacific trade in the second half of the nineteenth century took place in its shadow.28 Early in the Janet Nicoll’s voyage, at Penrhyn, Fanny Stevenson did not yet have a strong sense of this legacy (and it does not seem to have occurred to her that it might have been a reason for the local people’s hostile behavior towards visitors). But its effects upon Pacific communities became all too evident to the Stevensons later on in the voyage, when they visited the Ellice Islands. Stevenson noted that ‘these islands were a favourite recruiting place for slavers and, worse still, a haunt of the loathsome “Bully Hayes”’, a notorious pirate and ‘blackbirder’.29 Stevenson was informed by a local trader that the island of Funafuti had been the site of a devastating raid only four years earlier: In 1886 he was away from Funafuti. During his absence two American vessels, under the Peruvian flag, came to the island and distributed presents right and left to all who came to receive them. Naturally, the people were delighted, and when it was proposed that as many as liked should go to Peru to be educated by these kind people, they flocked on board in crowds. The King, anxious that as many as possible should participate in this good fortune, blew his horn, which is the royal summons. On the return of the half-caste [trader] two thirds of the population had gone, and the King was in the very act of blowing his horn again to gather in his remaining subjects, now reduced to the very young and the very old. It is needless to add that the vessels were slavers, and the entrapped islanders were never seen again.30

Armed with this kind of information, Stevenson was much readier to look for the reasons behind the behavior of the people at Funafuti than she had been at Penrhyn. ‘They have a bad name – are said to be a dirty, rough, dishonest lot,’ she recorded; ‘dishonest, that is, as far as cheating goes, but they do not steal. No wonder they are dishonest, for they learned in a good school’.31 The distrust was deep, but it did not stop the people of this region from transacting business with visitors. At the next island, Natau, where the Janet Nicoll stopped from 28 to 30 May 1890, the locals were trusting enough of whites to engage in an interesting trade: for a lump sum of twenty-five tons of copra, 180 people would be taken by schooner on an excursion around the island group. ‘The decks of the 28 On the Pacific labor trade, see Deryck Scarr, ‘Recruits and Recruiters: A Portrait of the Labour Trade’, in Pacific Islands Portraits, eds. J.W. Davidson and Deryck Scarr (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970), pp. 225–51, and George Palmer, Kidnapping in the South Seas ([1871]; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). 29 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 126; see Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales, p. 282 n. 30 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 120–21. 31 Ibid., p. 121.


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little vessel were closely packed with laughing, chattering people; the hum of their voices came to us like the sound of bees’, Stevenson recorded. Her next comment is a reminder of how easily their trust could have been abused – ‘It was just so, not very long ago, that slave-ships used to carry them away.’ A chilling view of these islanders as potential cargo is provided by one of the traders on the Janet Nicoll: ‘“What a haul that would be for labour!” remarked Tin Jack when he first caught sight of them’.32 At Natau, the shared desire to trade brought locals and visitors together on board the Janet Nicoll in the kind of scene that one recognizes as a set piece of Pacific travel-writing since the time of Bougainville and Cook: Pretty soon the canoes swarmed about the ship and we were overrun with eager venders of merchandise, mats, chickens, and eggs. One man followed me about beseeching me to buy a silver half dollar. ‘You want buy money?’ said he. ‘How much tobac you give?’ I bought one mat for ten sticks of tobacco, one for a comb, and one for a pattern of calico.33

However, in spite of their innocence about the distinction between currency and goods, what one trades with and what one trades for, these Pacific Islanders were not the children of paradise that the early European voyagers encountered. Experience of duplicity and violence had rendered them suspicious and watchful, feelings evident in the behaviour of the young women who came aboard the Janet Nicoll. Attracted by the opportunity to see a ‘“Beretani fafine’” (white woman)’ – a rare sight in these islands at that time – the women were nonetheless terrified of being kidnapped or otherwise harmed by the white men on the ship. Stevenson recorded their emotions, as she interpreted them: Soon after this I met on the companion stairs the captain, half dragging, half persuading one of the young women I had seen in the canoe to come down to the saloon. Naturally she did not understand that he was only trying to bring her to me. At the sight of me she gave a cry and, breaking loose from the captain, flung herself upon me and clung to me like a frightened child. I could feel her heart beating against my breast and she was trembling from head to foot. As she held me she bent down, for she was taller than I, and smiled in my face. Plainer than words her smile said: ‘You are a woman, too; I can trust you; you will protect me, will you not?’ I put my arm round her and talked to her in English and tried to soothe her fears. She understood my English as well as I her smiles … All the while, though I did not know it, the girl’s father was hanging about the companion way with a very dangerous expression on his countenance. After a little, another woman, seeing that no harm came to the first, was persuaded to come down to the saloon where she stood, quivering and starting like a timid, wild animal, ready to fly at a sound.34

Stevenson added the detail that ‘all the while the young girl was in the saloon the three large port-holes were entirely closed up by the faces of men, who watched every movement with the keenest anxiety’. She attributed the fearfulness of the women 32 Ibid., p. 124. 33 Ibid., p. 125. 34 Ibid., pp. 125–6.

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and the suspicion of the men to the impact of the slave trade, and commented on the difference in manners between Natau and Manihiki, an island that had escaped the slavers’ depredations.35 ‘So far from there being any fear shown in Manihiki,’ she observed, ‘the very children pushed through the darkness to clasp the white man’s hand, and after that there was no getting rid of the gentle, affectionate, little creatures’.36 At Natau, in contrast, trust had to be earned. In Stevenson’s narrative, gender is a powerful factor in breaking down the barriers between races created by the slave raids. As she recounts the episode in the saloon, the bond between women overcomes differences of race, culture and language, and dissolves the distrust produced by the actions of men. ‘Naturally’ the young woman cannot understand the captain’s intention, as he does not speak her language, but she can communicate ‘Plainer than words’ with Fanny Stevenson, because they are both women. Later in the day, the young women returned to the ship. They were ‘much less frightened’ although ‘still suspicious’ when Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson’s son, wanted to photograph them; but they were ready to do business with Stevenson herself. One ‘brought a chicken and some cocoanuts for a present to me, also another fowl which she wished to exchange for a comb, and a mat to exchange for cotton print, both of which I gave her.’ The other ‘brought some shells which she wished to have me understand cancelled the gift of the wreath. I wish I knew how to explain that I do not want return gifts; but that might be an unpardonable breach of etiquette’.37 There is some uncertainty here about the nature of the exchange – like so many visitors to the Pacific, Stevenson sometimes found herself adrift in the territory between trading and gift-giving – but overall the encounter is presented as a success, in which the shared values and interests of women triumph over the distrust produced by the greed and violence of men. The atmosphere of success continues in Stevenson’s account of the Janet Nicoll’s visit to Nanomea, in the Ellice Islands. This episode shows the ways in which informal trading between women took place alongside, and in spaces created by, the official business of the voyage. The Janet Nicoll arrived at Nanomea on 4 June 1890, but a ‘fearful surf’ kept her lying outside the reef for three days, unable to load her cargo.38 It was not until 7 June that the loading of cargo could begin – a dramatic and somewhat dangerous process given the still high surf – and, for the same reason, Stevenson recorded, ‘It is only to-day that any women have been able to get on board.’ The women came expressly ‘to make a trade’ with the white woman on the ship, and knew in advance what they wanted: ‘Each had an elaborate ridi [pandanus leaf skirt] for which she wanted two patterns of cotton print.’ The trade was thus initiated, and its terms set, by the island women, who occupy the active role throughout Stevenson’s representation of the scene. Her journal entry continues, ‘Then they began pulling off their rings to put on my hands; I did not like taking their 35 Despite the attempts of Peruvian slavers, not a single islander was ‘recruited’ from Manihiki in the 1860s (Maude, Slavers in Paradise, pp. 45–7), and in later decades the labor trade was concentrated in the islands further west. 36 Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 126. 37 Ibid., p. 129. 38 Ibid., p. 132.


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rings, but I need have had no scruples, for one of them with prompt energy removed a gold ring from my finger to her own’.39 Here, and at every subsequent stage of this encounter, Stevenson is shown as merely responding to, acquiescing with, or, occasionally, resisting the initiatives of the women from Nanomea. Not enough information is provided to show whether this distribution of power and energy in the women’s trading-scene parallels or contrasts with that which obtained in the official business transacted at the island. What can be determined is that Stevenson’s role in her encounter with the women is not as passive as it might seem, for she plays an unobtrusive but important part in adjusting values and attributing meanings. In the first trade, she alters the terms of exchange: ‘The bargain seemed so unfair that I added a necklace apiece of yellow and white beads.’ While motivated by generosity or justice, this action also adds to her prestige – ‘They were enchanted with the necklaces, calling everybody to look at them’ – while also implying that she has a better sense than her trading-partners of what things are worth. As the scene unfolds, we realize that while the Pacific Island women apparently control the action, Stevenson’s position as narrator allows her to control its representation, meaning and interpretation. She claims to be able to translate the women’s speech by interpreting their gestures: One woman kissed my feet (the island kiss) and sniffed softly up and down my arms. She was plainly saying to the others, ‘She’s just like a pickaninny; I would like to have her for a pet,’ holding out her arms as she spoke and going through the motions of tossing and caressing a baby.40

As Stevenson and the women did not speak the same language, this attribution of speech is a bold exercise of narratorial power. Later in the scene Stevenson attributes a similar viewpoint to the same or another woman, this time without providing any evidence for it at all: ‘One woman was most anxious that I should stop on the island with her. I really think she had some hope that she might keep me as a sort of pet monkey’.41 The authority to interpret signs, which Stevenson assumes here, and which underwrites her representation of the other women’s thoughts and motives, is explicitly addressed in the scene in relation to bodily marks and their meanings. She records that the Pacific Island women were fascinated by her skin, hands, feet and limbs, which they inspected minutely. ‘The discovery of vaccination marks caused great excitement, especially as one of them could proudly show similar “Beretani” [British] marks. Whether they were real vaccination scars or only accidental, I could not be sure. She, however, declared that they were true Beretani.’42 Stevenson leaves open – and perhaps in doubt – whether the woman from Nanomea is able correctly to interpret her own scars, but she never seems to doubt her own capacity to interpret the gestures and actions of the other women. There is a strange mixture of sisterly solidarity and imperial arrogance in this assumption that she could know what speakers of another language and members

39 40 41 42

Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., pp. 133–4. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid.

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of a vastly different culture were thinking and feeling, but the assumption gives her enormous power over the representation of her encounter with them. I suggest that Stevenson’s control of the meaning of this scene is linked to her ceding of control of its action. The thoughts and words she attributes to the Pacific Island women all work to minimize or efface her power and status as a white woman: she imagines that they regard her as ‘a pickanniny’, ‘a baby’, ‘a pet’, or ‘pet monkey’. They measure her hands and feet against their own and find them much smaller; ‘“Pickanniny hands and feet,” they said.’ (It is not clear whether this speech is reported or translated.) Their desire to dress and undress her makes her into a kind of doll. When embarrassed by their showing her bare arms and legs to their husbands, Stevenson ‘began to cry’, and again, this makes her seem childlike and vulnerable.43 Her narration of the episode shows a strong desire to invert patterns of colonial rhetoric that animalize, infantilize or commodify people of other races, and to turn those rhetorical maneuvers back upon herself, perhaps the expression of a wish to reverse, at least in this one representation, the appalling imbalance of power that marked most encounters between whites and Pacific Islanders in the nineteenth century. A phrase that Stevenson uses in this and many other scenes in the book is that the women ‘took possession’ of her.44 This idea develops into the fancy of becoming a possession or being regarded, potentially at least, as a possession by the other women. As their gaze is attracted first to the trade objects Stevenson offers, then to her clothes, and then her body (which the women inspect as closely as she will allow), the author depicts herself as being regarded increasingly as an object of wonder. This fancy, which can only with certainty be attributed to Stevenson, not to the women of Nanomea, needs to be placed in the context of other modes of trading and possessing human beings in the nineteenth-century Pacific, many of which the voyagers glimpsed. At Niue, Stevenson recorded, ‘Captain Henry wished to take a little girl home to his wife, but was not allowed, it being against the law that a female should leave the island’.45 At Manihiki, the travelers met three ‘beachcombers’: ‘an absconding produce-merchant, a runaway marine, and a young Englishman who was wrecked on a neighbouring island’.46 These men seemed indeed to be kept somewhat like pets, indulged but in some way constrained: ‘that they were under some subjection, we could see, but owned themselves well used’.47 In traditional Pacific cultures various kinds of adoption were practiced, the terms of which Europeans may not always have grasped. Robert Louis Stevenson recorded that at Nassau Island a local woman, ‘Mrs Jim’, ‘offered to give me her baby in exchange for Lloyd, which I accepted.’ Had this trade been effected, Lloyd’s future might be inferred from the treatment Stevenson himself received at the hands of Mrs Jim: ‘I was simply petted, smoothed, caressed, and fed like a pet animal’. These various ways of ‘taking possession’ of another were all relatively benign, but existed alongside the far more sinister form of human trading. A reminder of this other kind of ‘taking possession’ 43 44 45 46 47

Ibid. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 82.


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comes at the end of the Nanomea trading scene: ‘At last [the women] were warned that the ship would be off soon, so they fled to their canoes’.48 Interesting as they found the Beretani fafine and her goods, they had no desire to be caught on the ship and taken from their homes, as so many people of their region had been. Stevenson’s representation of herself as a potential ‘pet’ for these women both recognizes local practices of adoption, and rhetorically dissociates herself from the violent power that made whites in the Pacific much more often possessors than possessions. The episodes at Natau and Nanomea in The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ contrast greatly with those at Mariki and Penrhyn. They represent successful interactions between visitors and locals, in which the contempt, shame and incivility of the earlier, failed trading-scenes are replaced by mutual respect. The fact that the later trading encounters took place on board the ship may have been one factor in their success; on her own territory, Stevenson was better able to control the action and less likely to breach etiquette or stumble into explosive local political situations. That in the later episodes Stevenson’s interactions with Pacific Island women were not mediated by men (white or indigenous) may also have contributed to their success. Looking at the four episodes in chronological order, as this chapter has done, it is also evident that Stevenson’s attitude to trade developed as her Pacific travels progressed. The opposition between trade and gift-giving that characterized the earlier scenes gives way in the later ones to a pleasing continuity between giftexchange and trade. As she learned more about the labor trade, Stevenson became more sensitive to its damaging effects on the relations between whites and islanders, and worked harder both to understand the behavior of the local people, and to make herself less threatening to them. The scenes at Natau and Nanomea show the ways in which Stevenson became, over the course of the voyage, more adept both at the business of trading and at the rhetorical management of its representation. Her confidence grew that her sympathetic connection with other women, no matter what their race or background, allowed her to read the signs of the trading encounter and write their perspective into her account of it. Yet this very confidence may trouble the modern reader, for rather than dealing with the messy negotiations and compromises of meaning that come with ‘contact’ languages, Stevenson preferred to overleap the realm of language altogether as she interacted with the island women. In her accounts of those interactions, she creates a space of direct communication between women, where gestures speak ‘plainer than words’, and intuition supplies the meanings that the language barrier obscures. Although no doubt prompted by a genuine desire for connection, this tactic allows Stevenson to script the roles of the other women and thereby – in the narrative, if not necessarily in the action itself – to control ‘the meaning of the scene’.

48 Ibid., p. 134.


Chapter 13

Fair Trade: Marketing ‘The Mohawk Princess’ Anne Collett In her biography of the Canadian poet Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake, Betty Keller reports an incident that occurred in July 1894 on the trip home from London to Canada – a successful trip by all accounts, during which Johnson-Tekahionwake had not only been fêted as the new darling of the London salon circuit, but had negotiated the English publication of her first volume of poetry with Bodley Head. Keller writes: On her trip home, nursing her sore throat and feeling quite unwell, she found herself unable to avoid a large, talkative American woman. The lady was extremely upset about many of the customs she had found in England. ‘Why’, she said, ‘when I asked for ice water, they looked at me as if I were a North American savage!’ ‘Do you know’, said Pauline quietly, ‘that’s just the way they looked at me.’ ‘Oh’, said the woman, not at all abashed, ‘was your father a real wild red Indian?’ ‘Yes’, Pauline answered. ‘Why, excuse me’, said the woman. ‘You don’t look a bit like that!’ ‘Oh?’ replied Pauline. ‘Was your father a real white man?’ ‘Why, sure’, said the puzzled lady. ‘Excuse me, but I’m equally surprised’, said Pauline and sought refuge in her cabin. This encounter had been all she had needed to remind her that she was headed home.1 This exchange reveals Johnson-Tekahionwake as more than equal to her opponent – neither victim nor vanquished – and yet nevertheless constrained by and within the bounds of cultural expectation. She interprets and speaks with acumen, but that speech is met with puzzlement: she is not (and possibly cannot be) understood, at least within this historical moment. This chapter offers a brief analysis of cultural exchange ‘at cross purposes’ as figured in the construction, performance and representation of Johnson-Tekahionwake as ‘The Mohawk Princess’. Pale as Real Ladies, Joan Crate’s poetic reassessment and reconstitution of ‘The Mohawk Princess’, begins, ‘In the closet under the stairwell’:

1 Betty Keller, Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1981), pp. 86–7.

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Eva and I play with porcelain dolls. Their hypnotized eyes demand doilies for their table, embroidered pillows. Over their flaxen heads dangle woolen haloes …

For ourselves we steal Mother’s tatted collars to subdue the riotous dresses our grandmother stitched. We curl our hair and dust talcum powder over cheeks and eyelids, turn pale as real ladies.2 Pale as real ladies, fragile as porcelain dolls, the young Pauline Johnson and her sister play at being white like their mother – dusting their immature features with the powder of make-believe beauty and futures. Some twenty-five years later, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the Mohawk Princess – her father’s daughter – feathered and moccasined, bearclaw necklace gripping her throat, holds the stage of small-town Canada in the thrilling spell of blood-curdling yells and sonorous oration. ‘Dusky’ profile to the audience, her nose is proudly, defiantly Mohawk. Then the other Pauline reappears on stage in palest pastel of taffeta and satin – once again her mother’s English daughter – reciting the face-powder lyrics of patriotic sentiment and lost love. She is woman, she is poetess, she is the darling of Canadian society from east to west coast; she is that ‘breath of the wild’,3 that ‘soft-voiced descendant’, ‘the voice of the nations that once possessed this country’ – no longer a threat to any but themselves because ‘they have wasted away’.4 She is the sentimental and nostalgic reminder not only of what ‘they’ were but what ‘we’ were in our primeval state. She is ‘Tekahionwake’: ‘the Mohawk that humbly aspired to be the saga singer of her people, the bard of the noblest folk the world has ever seen, the sad historian of her own heroic race’. ‘How I would love to see you perform’ writes Crate, ‘your war whoops, your buckskin and pelts … And the tafetta [sic] as well … I’ve seen photographs and always wondered how you managed the change in the space of a fifteen-minute intermission’.5 To the expectant and somewhat restless audience of a small Manitoba town, Johnson’s act is introduced by a local dignitary with some caution and an eye to possible trouble from hecklers: ‘Now, friends, before Miss Johnson’s exercises begin, I want you all to remember that Injuns, like us, is folks!’6 She sings the song of the paddle …

2 Joan Crate, Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson (Ilderton, Ontario: Brick Books, 1989), p. 11. 3 Gilbert Parker, ‘Introduction’, in E. Pauline Johnson, The Moccasin Maker (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1913), p. 11. 4 Toronto Globe, 18 January 1892, qtd in Keller, Pauline, p. 60. 5 Crate, pp. 7–8. 6 Qtd in Keller, p. 121.

Fair Trade: Marketing ‘The Mohawk Princess’

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August is laughing across the sky, Laughing while paddle, canoe and I, Drift, drift, Where the hills uplift On either of the current swift.7 A voice is heard from the back calling, ‘Hey, squaw!’, but she does not falter, her voice does not break, she is poised, she is purposeful … Be strong, O paddle! Be brave, canoe! The reckless waves you must plunge into. Reel, reel. On your trembling keel, But never a fear my craft will feel 8 She is terribly alone: she is a woman who believes that her art is her life, that she can make a difference, can change the current of the larger life beyond the familial backwater of the reserve. She believes the personal is political. Her father is beaten to death and her mother lives and dies in the shadow of his death. The daughter struggles to maintain belief in her self and her art because she does not have a female inheritance or an artistic sorority from which to draw strength and support. She struggles to support herself and her mother on the proceeds of her art, believing herself to be less than she might be because she is forced to pander to her public. She sings the song of the paddle night after night, year after year … And up on the hills against the sky, A fir tree rocking its lullaby, Swings, swings, Its emerald wings, Swelling the song that my paddle sings.9 She is Miss Emily Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake: in Crate’s words, ‘the Chief’s youngest daughter. Poet, patriot, author, actor, lover, spinster, lonely … Half-blood was your word, preferable to half-breed. Half this and half that’.10 Born in 1861 into the mansion-house ‘Chiefswood’ on the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, of Mohawk father and English mother, her name and its accompanying pedigree are an identifying and determining label. ‘Miss Emily’ is signifier of the white legitimacy of the Howells family on her mother’s side; ‘Johnson’ is the English name of her father’s Mohawk family, signifying their allegiance to the British in Canada; ‘Tekahionwake’ is the ancestral Mohawk name she claimed publicly, after 7 E. Pauline Johnson, ‘The Song My Paddle Sings’, in Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) ([1912]; London and Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), p. 31. 8 Ibid., p. 32. 9 Ibid. 10 Crate, p. 7.

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the death of her grandfather John Smoke Johnson in 1886, that translates as ‘smoke from many campfires’.11 At the height of her popularity in the latter part of the 1890s, she was known to her adoring public as ‘Pauline’, but was billed throughout Canada, England and the United States as ‘The Mohawk Princess’. In an era when many might have agreed with the adage that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, the enormous popular success of Miss E. Pauline JohnsonTekahionwake – ‘The Mohawk Princess’ – might be seen to be something of an anomaly. Certainly the defiant vigor and longevity of her stage career, the sharpness of her wit, and the acuteness of her perception of people and politics as recorded in her own writings and the memoirs of others, gives the lie to those who, in all sincerity and good will, consigned the colored half of her racial identity to the convenient past. In a memorial introduction to the posthumously published collection of her poetry, Flint and Feather, the eminently self-important English literary critic Theodore Watts-Dunton observes that her death is ‘a great loss to Canadian literature and to the Canadian nation’, for ‘of all Canadian poets she was the most distinctly a daughter of the soil, inasmuch as she inherited the blood of the great primeval race now so rapidly vanishing, and of the greater race that has supplanted it’12 – a statement hardly likely to lull Tekahionwake’s unquiet spirit to rest. Even the large crowd of ‘Red Men’ who line Georgia Street through which Pauline’s funeral cortège passes on its way to the cemetery are remarked upon by Watts-Dunton for their lack – lack of motion and lack of speech. This is in all probability an accurate representation of those who stood ‘silent and motionless as statues’ in respect for the dead poet, but it is the ‘Red Men’ who are, by metaphorical extension, marked out from the crowd for extinction. The ‘Author’s Forward’, signed by ‘E.P.J.’, again (even after death) gives the lie to this presumption of silent acquiescence. She writes: This collection of verse I have named ‘Flint and Feather’ because of the association of ideas. Flint suggests the Red man’s weapons of war; it is the arrow tip, the heart-quality of mine own people; let it therefore apply to those poems that touch upon Indian life and love. The lyrical verse herein is as a ‘Skyward floating feather, Sailing on summer air.’ And yet that feather may be the eagle plume that crests the head of a warrior chief; so both flint and feather bear the hall-mark of my Mohawk blood.13

You don’t need to be able to read the smoke-signals to comprehend the import of this war cry. This is no acquiescent silence, but the ‘note’ is exemplar of the mixed message generated by name, costume, performance, poetry and prose of the ‘half-breed’. Despite the priority and political purport given to her Mohawk blood, Johnson does not sign herself ‘Tekahionwake’, but ‘E.P.J.’ In fact, flint and feather, 11 This is one of a number of translations of ‘Tekahionwake’ among which ‘double wampum’ is another (discovered since the initial writing of this chapter). It’s a translation that underscores the binary nature of Pauline’s inheritance. 12 Theodore Watts-Dunton, ‘Introduction: In Memoriam: Pauline Johnson’, in Johnson, Flint and Feather, p. xvi. 13 Johnson, ‘Author’s Foreword’, in Flint and Feather, p. xvii.


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dramatic and lyric, Red Indian and English, lie in uneasy balance – or is this too passive and easy a summation? Are they rather, deliberately brought together in creative tension? It is easy to render Pauline Johnson a passive victim of her ‘halfbreed’ status, too easy to deny her the authority of her self-construction and the independent agency of political purpose and performance. Even the cover of Betty Keller’s biography (published in 1981) images Johnson in sepia. Sepia is the tint of nostalgia, the photographs of great-grandparents whose images have either browned with age or have been deliberately colored to evoke the romantic past. Much of the critical commentary on her person and her poetry during her lifetime relegated Johnson-Tekahionwake’s performance to the brief moment of the present, and herself as representative of a romantic primeval past. Hers was ‘the voice of the nations that once possessed this country, who have wasted away before our civilization, speaking through this cultured, gifted, soft-voiced descendant’.14 A ‘cultured’ Indian maiden whose affiliation by blood and fealty to white British ‘settlement’ in the land of her forefathers was a convenient and politically useful image in which to trade. Sponsorship and celebration of her life by the aristocracy in England, and those who pretended to aristocracy in late nineteenth-century British Canada, was easy: it might be seen to be the generous act of the benevolent conqueror, and to create a useful alliance with a palatable nativeness that offered the builders of British Canadian nationhood the reflected aura of indigeneity. ‘The Mohawk Princess’ might be seen to be a gift to the Canadian nation, offering the possibility of genuflection to the nobility and romance of a primitive but spent people, and the means by which national guilt might be assuaged. So long as Tekahionwake could be rendered in sepia – veiled in the mists of legend and fantasy – she could be fêted and beloved. But Crate’s contemporary reconstruction and restitution of ‘a life’ represents Johnson-Tekahionwake somewhat differently. The cover of Pale as Real Ladies gives priority to the woman, not the costume. The light is still soft, the image still in profile (an angle said to be favoured by Johnson-Tekahionwake because it highlighted the only characteristic that declared her Mohawk blood – her nose), but ‘lady’ and ‘Mohawk’ would appear to coalesce. Crate renders her subject not only very much alive, but the site of contested identity generative of psychological and social disturbance. ‘Bill me as the Mohawk Princess’, writes Crate, Exhibit me buckskinned on a platform, chanting, my skin bitten by teeth, quills, clawed. To have you hear my voice, I will turn any trick at all.15 The buckskin and feather costume of Johnson’s performance has long been a site of contested authenticity and disputed rights of possession. A bricolage of personal and public iconography of ‘the Red Indian’, it represents a complex construction of self, deliberately designed to appeal to public desire for the erotic exotic, and yet also 14 Toronto Globe, Review of performance of 16 January 1982, qtd in Keller, p. 60. 15 Crate, ‘The Naming’, III, p. 41.

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designed to satisfy a personal desire to celebrate and bear witness to her father’s life and a native inheritance. Both native and white peoples have contested Pauline’s claim to indigeneity, and the costume of that claim, in its material and literary form, has at times been seen either as an act of dishonesty, or even one of prostitution. One must ask of those who would stand in judgement of what is undeniably a calculated use of costume, what possible option a woman and a ‘half-breed’ might have had, who vehemently wished her voice to be heard in a period when public space and public voice were predominantly white and male. As Crate declares, ‘To have you hear my voice, / I will turn any trick at all’. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake made politic use of the mannered lessons of a white education and a native tradition of performative storytelling, grafting the renowned oratory of her father’s people onto the poetic forms of her mother’s inheritance: a Mohawk princess is created, not born. In terms of genetic inheritance, Johnson-Tekahionwake was more than half white; in terms of Canadian law, she was Indian. Crate would seem to stand with those, like JohnsonTekahionwake, who would claim we are who we desire to be, and we belong to those to whom we give public allegiance. Crate’s poem ‘Encounter While Fishing’, located at the centre of her poetic reclamation of Tekahionwake, is based in part upon a poem by Johnson-Tekahionwake entitled ‘Shadow River’, in which her dark self is a shadow self, a self reflected in the river mirror, ‘Where not a ripple moves to mar / Shades underneath, or over’.16 This poem is pivotal to the collection of Johnson-Tekahionwake’s poetry, because it is one of the few personal poems in which she explores the tensions, the realities and the possibilities of her hybridity and her indigeneity. Drifting in a twilight world, between day and night, between heaven and earth, precariously but skilfully balanced on the moving, fluid tension of the river, Johnson-Tekahionwake might be seen to recognize and claim possession of her father’s inheritance: Mine is the undertone The beauty, strength, and power of the land Will never stir or bend at my command; But all the shade Is marred or made, If I but dip my paddle blade; And it is mine alone … … I only claim The shadows and the dreaming.17 In Crate’s poem ‘Encounter While Fishing’, Johnson is imaged as ‘Joined at the mouth, my reflection / and I ponder the cloudy river, / the wrinkled sky’. In a journey to the bottom of the river and the extended reaches of the sky, Emily Pauline is drowned: ‘Earthwash layers of river and sky / flood my nostrils, my 16 E. Pauline Johnson, ‘Shadow River’, Flint and Feather, p. 48. 17 Ibid.


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mouth. / I am upside drowning’, and the reflected self, shadow self, is re-possessed, in fact, born out of the uterine waters of that birthing / drowning: ‘I leave you Emily Pauline. /You leave me Tekahionwake. / A long gray cord of shore uncoils between us’.18 This poem is immediately followed by ‘The Naming’, in which Johnson-Tekahionwake, through Crate’s voice, publicly declares her allegiance to her father’s people: Call me Tekahionwake, the name of my great-grandfather. I am no longer Emily Pauline. Tekahionwake is the indigenous literary mother reclaimed. Reborn in her literary daughter, Joan (Pauline) will not allow her to be silenced: I speak of a history pierced from a jigsaw of flesh torn from dumb tongues. Under my skin blood beats along roadways barred with DO NOT ENTER signs, walls of small scars. I will not return to silence. Do you hear me?19 Is it Pauline who speaks, or Joan? Mother or daughter? ‘A face shifts’. Although Pauline/Tekahionwake achieved the status of a legend in her own time, her monument near Siwash Rock in Stanley Park is rarely visited except by the curious few (like me) who seek to recover something of a brief life that flared across the nation, and was damped out in Vancouver drizzle. According to Charles Lillard her poetry is only of value to tourists and grandmothers,20 yet she is the ‘real lady’ and the ‘literary mother’ upon which Crate would build the room that Virginia Woolf believed to be paramount to the success of the woman writer: Crate builds her historical reconstruction on shifting ground, the temporal and spatial displacement of a Greyhound bus traveling south from Prince Albert. Looking through the selfreflective glass of a night window, Joan is Pauline: Pauline, you are with me. Your face stares through the bus window, and I no longer know where I end and you begin …

18 Crate, ‘Encounter While Fishing’, p. 38. 19 Crate, ‘The Naming’, I, p. 39. 20 Charles Lillard, ‘A Choice of Lens’, Review of British Columbia: Visions of the Promised Land, ed. Brenda Lea White, The Moccasin Maker, by E. Pauline Johnson, and Malcolm Lowry, by Sheryl Salloum, Canadian Literature, 118 (1988), p. 155.

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Economies of Representation, 1790–2000 Tonight on this bus, I am half me and half you … I reach for your face, scratch glass … My eyes stare from the inside of the bus window outside, from the outside in, peering from dark to darkness … A face shifts. It is either you or me, Pauline.21

Crate is both protector and inheritor. She takes on Pauline’s robes and her cause, but she does not let them ‘become’ her. Here is no soft-voiced descendant: her words are ugly – not easy to say not easy to hear not easy to forget: Can you hear me? Powdered woman in the first row your plucked eyebrows creased with concern, look at me, diseased, scarred with smallpox, seeping gonorrhea, lungs smothered with T.B., drunk, pushed into a sewer, a reserve, the weed-choked backyard you never walk through, listen.22 Crate establishes a measure of historical (indigenous and female) continuity and authority through this creative ventriloquism, but she makes a claim on JohnsonTekahionwake’s spirit that does not seem entirely appropriate either to the historical moment of Tekahionwake, or to the extent to which Johnson maintained and celebrated the complex inheritance of white and ‘black’. Although Pale as Real Ladies is a beautiful and very moving poetic tribute, and a political statement of being indigenous and female, I would ask if this trade in the Mohawk Princess is any more ethically acceptable than those who paid to see her perform in town hall and barn, or those who invited her to supper as featured entertainment in the drawing-rooms of aristocratic London? Although, being Métis, Crate shares an historical and genetic indigeneity with Johnson, Pale as Real Ladies creates a poetic ventriloquism that inevitably simplifies and falsifies Emily Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s complex identification, construction and performance of racial and cultural inheritance. All who speak for her – those with the best of intentions, even Crate who speaks through her rather than with her – engage in a trade in the Mohawk Princess that renders her less complex and more passive than analysis of textual remains would indicate. Although necessarily constrained by the historical determinants of race and gender, Johnson-Tekahionwake was by no means the passive object of trade, although she might have been perceived as such by others – she was, after all, its progenitor. Canadian Born, the second volume of poetry published in her lifetime, included the all-important signifier (if the poetry was to sell) of her Indian self – ‘in costume’ – and was prefaced with a plea to,

21 Crate, ‘Prairie Greyhound’, pp. 7–8. 22 Crate, ‘The Poetry Reading’, pp. 18–19.


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Let him who is Canadian born regard these poems as written to himself whether he be my paleface compatriot, who has given me his right hand of good fellowship in the years I have appealed to him by pen and platform, or whether he be that dear Red brother of whatsoever tribe or province, it matters not – White race and Red are one if they are but Canadian born.23

Johnson-Tekahionwake was in fact determined to claim her stake (for herself and her ‘people’) in the ‘nation’. The costume and performance of the ‘Mohawk Princess’ is a deliberate and careful self-construction that trades in part upon the prevalent romantic literary image (assumed by the reading public to be ‘authentic’) of what it is to be ‘an Indian’ – that is, an Indian conveniently placed in the traditional past, safely picturesque in bead, moccasin and feather, an image at odds with competing notions of the savage, dirty and murderous ‘real wild red Indian’ whose scalping days are ended on reserves at the fringes of settler civilization. It is an image that is necessarily ‘romantic’ and necessarily ‘inauthentic’ because it must allow E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake to maintain a status above that of the anthropological specimen or the circus/fairground spectacle of the primitive. Thus, her costume Indian – ‘the Mohawk Princess’ – is a fascinating bricolage, ‘smoke of many camp fires’; her outfit (as designed in 1892) is described by Betty Keller: The costume consisted of a buckskin dress fringed at mid-calf length to show a redwoollen lining. The neck was round and cut very low, its edge decorated with silver brooches hammered out of coins; in later years she used these brooches to secure a set of ermine tails presented to her by the Hudson’s Bay Company. At her waist she attached the wampum belts, the Huron scalp she had inherited from her great-grandfather, and her father’s hunting knife. Buckskin leggings and moccasins modestly covered her legs, and from one shoulder fell a red woollen cloak.24

The costume might even be seen to represent a somewhat elaborate compliment to male favor – often the only means by which a talented girl might gain and maintain some small measure of public space. The red woollen ‘cloak’ was in fact the ceremonial blanket upon which the Duke of Connaught had knelt when made a chief of the Council of Six Nations. When asked on the occasion of her visit to London what had become of the blanket, Johnson-Tekahionwake is claimed to have replied with her usual careful courtesy, ‘Will you tell his Highness that the mantle that I wear was once honoured by his feet’.25 (She refrained from revealing that the ceremonial blanket had previously been used as a dust-cover for the piano in her old home of Chiefswood). Perhaps the scalp swinging from her belt, tantalizing whiff of the primitive that might lie beneath even the glamorous exterior of a ‘princess’, was that given her by her great-grandfather, Smoke Johnson, or perhaps it was the Sioux scalp graciously given her by the chief of the Bloods of southern Alberta – described by herself (surely with intention to shock) as ‘a beautiful braid of long brown-black hair, the flesh cured and encased in tightly stitched buckskin, and coiled about it

23 E. Pauline Johnson, qtd in Keller, p. 197. 24 Keller, p. 66. 25 Qtd in Keller, p. 79.

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close rows of turquoise Hudson’s Bay beads’.26 The bear-claw necklace was one of two offered her by male admirers, the poet Charles Mair and her artist friend, Ernest Thompson Seton. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s performance of self maintains a tenuous balance between the colored exotic erotica of the ‘other’ woman and the virginal innocence of the fair English maid. This is not a balance necessarily entirely attributable to a mixed-race inheritance, but one that is in part determined by a Victorian/Edwardian public understanding of the ‘stage woman’ whose public presence was perceived to be prostitution. Johnson needed to trade off a marketable ‘difference’ that would ensure her stage and salon space against an audience assurance of maidenly quality; in part because she wished to attract a cultured audience, but perhaps too because the self that she performed was something far more complex than available and assumed images of the ‘Red Indian’ would allow. In an article published in May 1892 in the Toronto Sunday Globe, entitled ‘A Strong Race Opinion on the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction’, Johnson-Tekahionwake asserts the Indian girl in modern fiction … must not be one of womankind at large, neither must she have an originality, a singularity that is not definitely ‘Indian.’ I quote ‘Indian’ as there seems to be an impression amongst authors that such a thing as tribal distinction does not exist amongst the North American aborigines. The term ‘Indian’ signifies about as much as the term ‘European’ but I cannot recall ever having read a story where the heroine was described as ‘a European’ … The story writer who can create a new kind of Indian girl or better still portray a ‘real live’ Indian girl will do something in Canadian literature that has never been done but once [that being Charles Mair’s Iena]. 27

Johnson-Tekahionwake goes on to describe ‘Winona’, the standard Indian girl of Canadian fiction, who is unattached to family name or lineage, merely ‘Winona’: this surnameless creation is possessed with a suicidal mania. Her unhappy, self-sacrificing life becomes such a burden both to herself and the author that this is the only means by which they can extricate themselves from a lamentable tangle, though, as a matter of fact, suicide is an evil positively unknown among Indians.

She then observes, with some acumen, that the average author gives ‘the impression that he has concocted the plot, created his characters, arranged his action, and at the last moment has been seized with the idea that the regulation Indian maiden will make a very harmonious background whereon to paint his picture’.28 Much of the critical commentary on Johnson-Tekahionwake herself falls into this category she so accurately delineates. The indigenous ‘other’ is represented as a picturesque feature of the landscape, and that which might render Canadian nationality distinctive and

26 E. Pauline Johnson, ‘Trails of Old Tillicums’ [1910], qtd in Keller, p. 111. 27 ‘A Strong Race Opinion on the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction’, Toronto Sunday Globe, 22 May 1892, qtd in Keller, pp. 116–17. 28 ‘A Strong Race Opinion’, qtd in Keller, p. 117.


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to some extent ‘authorized’: the necessary natural yet ‘different’ base upon which a civilized national culture might be mounted. It might be suggested that Johnson-Tekahionwake’s portrayal (both in word and costume) of the ‘red Indian’ lacked the authenticity she demanded of Canadian novelists. There are two things that might be said of this. The first is that her call for the representation of the real Red Indian in Canadian writing of the period that purported to realism, if not also historicism, was not unreasonable, and one that need not be asked of a theatrical – indeed, staged – performance of ‘Indianness’ (albeit under the label of ‘Mohawk Princess’). Why should authenticity be asked of Johnson-Tekahionwake’s self-representation merely because she is indigenous? Is the performance of self as indigenous the same as the performance of indigeneity? One might have a right to ask for ‘authenticity’ if she could be otherwise seen to misrepresent ‘her people’ (it would surely be impossible to misrepresent her ‘self’). Does Pauline’s ‘Mohawk Princess’ operate as representative of ‘her people’ – is she self-assigned spokesperson? The second point I would make is that in calling for ‘authenticity’ of representation, Johnson-Tekahionwake in fact stressed the nature of ‘Indian’ difference and refused a notion of the homogeneous ‘Red Indian’. She refuses an essentialist conception of ‘Red Indian’ that resides in the ‘traditional’ and the primeval past: Let us not only hear, but read something of the North American Indian ‘besting’ some one at least once in a decade, and above all things let the Indian girl in fiction develop from the ‘dog-like’, ‘fawn-like’, ‘deer-footed’, ‘fire-eyed’, ‘crouching’, ‘submissive’ book heroine into something of the quiet, sweet womanly woman she is if wild, or the everyday, natural, laughing girl she is if cultivated and educated; let her be natural even if the author is not competent to give her tribal characteristics.29

The Indian girl that Johnson-Tekahionwake would substitute might not be particularly complex, but what is particularly pertinent to this discussion is the acknowledgement, and desire for acknowledgement by others, of the modern Indian girl: ‘cultivated and educated’ and very much alive. This constitutes a rejection of the ‘sepia Indian’ and a plea for recognition of the Indian peoples as an integral and active part of the modern Canadian nation. These peoples are represented as historically and culturally diverse. They do not comprise a cohesive group, and Johnson-Tekahionwake herself, although she speaks for ‘Indian’ right of self-representation at the poetic and the political levels, does not necessarily represent ‘their’ interests in quite the way that Ernest Thompson Seton would have his audience believe. Significantly, his introduction to a collection of stories published after her death is entitled ‘Tekahionwake’ and he describes her as ‘the ideal type of her race … but developed by her white-man training’. ‘I am charged’, he writes, ‘with a message from Tekahionwake herself. “Never let anyone call me a white woman”, she said. “There are those who think they pay me a compliment in saying that I am just like a white woman. My aim, my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people”’. This is a people of the past tense – ‘ours was the race that gave the world its measure of heroism …’. Thompson Seton speaks of stories through which run ‘the sad note 29 ‘A Strong Race Opinion’, qtd by Keller, p. 121.

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that tells of a proud race, conscious that it has been crushed by numbers, that its day is over and its heritage gone forever’.30 This is a somewhat curious statement to make as introductory to a collection of stories that seeks to perpetuate that heritage, or of a woman whose stage and literary presence sought connection between old and new, indigenous and settler worlds, that this ‘heritage’ might continue, if not unchanged. Thompson Seton’s introduction is delivered in something of an unintentional caricature of ‘Indian oratory’ – something of a Hiawatha voice – ‘Oh, reader of the alien race, keep this in mind: remember that no people ever ride the wave’s crest unceasingly’, and so on.31 Although an ardent and loyal supporter and friend, Thompson Seton situates the Indian firmly in the (traditional) past and represents Tekahionwake as the romantic historian of that heroic but vanished race. ‘“Oh, why have your people forced on me the name of Pauline Johnson?”’, he claims she says, a statement (or question) that sits somewhat oddly with the knowledge that ‘Pauline’ was the name given her by her beloved father, signatory of his obsessive admiration of Napoleon, and was given preference over her first name, Emily, both within the family and throughout her stage career. In adopting an Indian name, Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake did not refuse her dual heritage, but politically and publicly identified that duality. In something of a ventriloquist act, Thompson Seton/Tekahionwake asserts, ‘I am an Indian. My pen and my life I devote to the memory of my own people. Forget that I was Pauline Johnson, but remember always that I was Tekahionwake, the Mohawk that humbly aspired to be the saga singer of her people, the bard of the noblest folk the world has ever seen, the sad historian of her own heroic race’.32 It seems to me very doubtful that Pauline Johnson would have asked the world to forget the English side of her heritage which she was careful to maintain in balanced tension with her Indian heritage throughout her stage career and her life. In the biographical sketch of her mother, published simply as ‘My Mother’, she reflects: ‘After forty years spent on a Canadian Indian Reserve, Lydia Mansion still wore real lace, real tortoise-shell combs, real furs’.33 She speaks of a woman who abhorred imitation fabrics and ‘imitation people’, those who pretended to Christianity but had no notion of Christian charity. She writes of a mother and father who shared their love of nature, the Anglican Church, Queen Victoria, books, animals, and the Indian people.34 An odd list – perhaps somewhat unfortunate in its ordering – yet an indication of the complex identity with which grappled, and played, a complexity that she would not trade for an imaginary notion of ‘authenticity’.

30 Ernest Thompson Seton, ‘Tekahionwake (Pauline Johnson)’, Introduction to E. Pauline Johnson, The Shagganappi (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1913), p. 9. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 E. Pauline Johnson, ‘My Mother’, in The Moccasin Maker, p. 70. 34 Ibid., pp. 70–71.

Chapter 14

How Queer Native Narratives Interrogate Colonialist Discourses Wendy Pearson I’ve always been proud of being Mohawk, of being from here. I am proud of being gay, even though everywhere I turned someone was always telling me not to be either. In the city they didn’t want me to be native. In this place, they don’t want me to be gay. It can drive you crazy!1 Making heterosexuality historically visible is difficult because, under its institutional pseudonyms such as Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Domesticity, and Population, heterosexuality has been permitted to masquerade so fully as History itself.2

The protagonist of Mohawk lesbian writer Beth Brant’s short story ‘This Place’ is a young gay native with AIDS, who returns to his mother’s house to die. While the apparent point of the story is the way in which native spirituality and acceptance of his sexuality help David to face his death, other aspects of this complex and moving story recall, from a Mohawk perspective, the effects of European colonialism on the people, the culture and the land. When his sister brings his nieces and nephews to visit, David is afraid for them: Afraid the virus would reach out of his body and grab these babies and eat at them until they, too, disappeared in its grip. The virus put a fear in him – a fear that he could wipe out his people by breathing, by talking, by living. David saw, in his dreams, the virus eating away at this place until it was gone.3

David’s fear is a very contemporary one: the fear of contamination evoked by AIDS, particularly in a North American context, after the syndrome was first recognized in and associated with gay men in the United States. At the same time, David’s nightmare of the ‘virus eating away at this place’ is a reminder of the historical consequences of colonialism for native people, an evocation of a history in which viruses did indeed ‘wipe out his people by breathing, by talking, by living’ and in which ‘this place’, the place of native belonging, was incurably infected by Europeans. Jonathan Goldberg argues that the story of colonialism is always imbricated with the history of sexuality, while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick contends that history is 1 Beth Brant, ‘This Place’, Food & Spirits: Stories (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers; Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1991), p. 50. 2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Gender Criticism’, in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, eds Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: MLA, 1992), p. 293. 3 Brant, ‘This Place’, p. 50.

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heterosexual – or more precisely, heterosexuality is History.4 The colonization of the Americas by the Old World is thus also the triumph of discourse, particularly of the discursive constructions that make history heterosexual and, by implication, white. Goldberg suggests that the invisible heterosexuality of European history creates a ‘plague of discourse’5 that infects the colonized, just as European viruses created historical plagues that destroyed native peoples and cultures. The most salient element of Goldberg’s argument is, I think, his critique of historical explanations of the epidemics inflicted upon the native population that reduce the decimation of a people to the state of an accident. He points out that identifying the viruses, rather than the Europeans who introduced them to the Americas, as ‘chiefly responsible’6 for the nearly genocidal effects of the epidemics ‘removes moral explanation entirely, replacing it with a supposedly neutral, natural – indeed, biological – explanation’.7 The discourse of European colonialism, in which history is read after the fact for self-justification, renders epidemic as the natural. What Goldberg reads as a ‘plague of discourse’ unleashed on the native population, along with the physical invasion of the land, resonates with the ‘epidemic of signification’ that has, equally, infected the victims of that more recent epidemic, AIDS.8 Colonial discourse has made it possible for Western culture to read the history of AIDS backwards onto the bodies of those infected, marking those bodies as always already diseased through the specific practices (primarily anal sex) that supposedly equate homosexuality with vulnerability to the virus (see Knabe in this volume). David’s story, in ‘This Place’, thus brings together both the physical and the discursive effects of two epidemics whose histories may appear to some to have little in common. David’s body, David’s spirit, made whole (but not ‘cured’) within the story, suggests the possibility of reconciliation of both parts of David’s identity, of the recognition by his family and by the medicine man, Joseph (himself a twospirit9), that it is indeed possible to ‘be gay [and] be an Indian’.10 The healing that occurs between David and Joseph and ‘this place’ invokes the existence of not one, but two histories that Western society would like to consign ‘not merely to a past but to a past that is past and absolutely irrecoverable, cut off

4 Jonathan Goldberg, ‘The History That Will Be’, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 1:4 (1995), pp. 385–403; Sedgwick, ‘Gender Criticism’, pp. 271–302. 5 Lee Edelman, ‘The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and “AIDS”’, in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural History (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 79. 6 Albert Crosby, qtd in Jonathan Goldberg, ‘The History That Will Be’, GLQ, 1:4 (1995), p. 394. 7 Goldberg, ‘History That Will Be’, p. 394. 8 Paula Treichler, ‘AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification’, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 31–70, and Edelman, ‘The Plague of Discourse’, in Homographesis, pp. 79–92. 9 Native people have generally rejected the European term berdache, with its particularly inappropriate and pejorative origins; many native people use two-spirit more or less interchangeably with lesbian and gay. 10 Brant, ‘This Place’, p. 55.

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from the present’.11 As Sheila Rabillard argues, the essentialist underpinning of ethnographic studies of native culture manifests a desire for cultural and racial purity: the Indian culture is, ideally, the culture before contact with Whites, for the real Indian and the real White are defined by their difference from one another … This search for purity of definition, through its nostalgic narrative structure, works to sustain the twinned stereotypes of noble savage and degraded Indian. Both stereotypes, of course, along with the location of essential ‘Indianness’ in the past, contribute to the politically convenient and sentimentally soothing notion of the vanishing Indian who is, by definition, on the way to extinction.12

In defining what is Indian both as what is past, and as what is not ‘us’, this type of discourse attempts to render native cultural expression not merely as marginal, but as impossible, other than as universalized offerings to whiteness: not only can a dead people not speak, but attempts by Natives to express their own culture as presence, as present, can only be read within the discourses of white liberalism. This strategy of displacing Indian culture into the past, which is at once essentializing and silencing, is not entirely dissimilar from the discursive strategies by which cultural expressions of queerness are rendered invisible to the heterocentric gaze. Walter L. Williams, whose Spirit in the Flesh is the first significant academic exploration of homosexuality in Native cultures, notes that as late as 1975, ‘the American Anthropological Association voted “not to endorse anthropological research on homosexuality across national borders”’.13 Both Mohawk and gay, David’s identities are linked with what Sedgwick has termed the ‘overarching, relatively unchallenged aegis of a culture’s desire that gay people not be’.14 Underwriting the cross-identification of Western culture’s desire to eliminate the Other, and demonstrated by both writers I am discussing in this chapter, is the methodological attack on children: just as ‘gay and proto-gay kids’ are placed at the mercy of psychiatrists who claim to be able to render them acceptably heterosexual, native children have historically been made as white as possible, either through adoption or through education. The parallels between these attacks on children whose identities are either racially or sexually subaltern underlies Brant’s ‘A Long Story’, in which she alternates between the account of an Indian woman in the 1890s, whose children are taken away to become almost-white, and the contemporary tale 11 Goldberg, ‘History That Will Be’, p. 396. 12 Sheila Rabillard, ‘Absorption, Elimination, and the Hybrid: Some Impure Questions of Gender and Culture in the Trickster Drama of Tomson Highway’, Essays in Theatre/Etudes Théâtrales, 12:1 (November 1993), pp. 5–6. 13 Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 13. 14 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘How to Bring Your Kids up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys’, in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 164. While the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders has by and large been seen as a victory, one of its effects has been a shift to concentrate on the heterosexualization of children, through treatment of the ‘disease’ ‘Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood’. As Sedgwick argues, now that ‘curing’ adult homosexuals is no longer acceptable, the battle against homosexuality has been displaced onto children.

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of a native woman who loses custody of her child because of her relationship with another lesbian.15 Both Brant and Cree playwright/novelist Tomson Highway reverse the normative European perspectives on history and narrative. At the same time, as queer natives, they tell stories that are complicated by the historical destruction of native sex/gender systems and by the importation into native culture of western homophobia and heteronormativity. If Brant’s stories are told from a Mohawk perspective, they are told equally from a lesbian perspective, just as Highway’s plays and novel are both Cree, and gay. It is hardly surprising, then, that in ‘This Place’, David’s story calls into view a reverse discourse of infection that serves to remind the reader that native bodies, native spirituality, and native understandings of gender and sexuality have all been contaminated by the trade goods of European colonialism, by the effects not only of European guns but of less obviously noxious imports. As Brant herself puts it, in her essay ‘Physical Prayers’, Church and state have long worked as consorts in the colonization of Aboriginal peoples. With the guns came the Bible. With the Bible came the whiskey. With the whiskey came addiction and government over our affairs. With government came reserves, and loathing of all that was natural. With loathing came the unnatural; the internalization of all they told us about ourselves. And the beliefs hold fast in some. There are christian Indians, and there are homophobic Indians … The love that was natural in our world, has become unnatural as we become more consumed by the white world and the values therein. Our sexuality has been colonized, sterilized, whitewashed.16

Tomson Highway’s 1998 novel Kiss of the Fur Queen tells the story of two Cree boys, Champion (Jeremiah) Okimasis and his younger brother Dancer (Gabriel), who are born on a trapline in northern Manitoba in the 1950s. They are sent away to residential school as young children, where they suffer sexual abuse at the hands of priests. They are later sent to high school in Winnipeg, where Jeremiah studies classical piano and Gabriel covertly takes up ballet. As young adults, the brothers are bitterly divided by Gabriel’s homosexuality, and their divergent attitudes to their Indianness. The last part of the novel shows the brothers coming together to attempt to reconcile both their native identity and their sexuality through their art, which itself melds native culture, mythology and story-telling with play-writing, music and dance. The story ends with Gabriel’s death from AIDS, and the final wink of the Fur Queen, the compromised Trickster17 whose kiss begins the novel and who

15 Beth Brant, ‘A Long Story’, in A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women, ed. Brant (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988), pp. 100–106. 16 Beth Brant, Writing as Witness: Essays and Talk (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1994), pp. 59–60. 17 Tomson Highway says that ‘… in Indian (eg. Cree, Ojibway), there is no gender … So that by this system of thought, the central hero figure from our mythology – theology, if you will – is theoretically neither exclusively male nor exclusively female, or is both simultaneously’. He then adds that ‘Some say that Weesageechak left this continent when the white man came. We believe she/he is still here among us …’. ‘A Note on the Trickster’, in Kiss of the Fur Queen (Toronto: Double Day, 1998), p. iv. Highway uses the Trickster’s Cree


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‘is still here among us – albeit a little the worse for wear and tear – having assumed other guises’.18 In 1951, the boys’ father, Abraham, the aptly named patriarch of the Okimasis clan, becomes the first native to win the world championship Sled Dog Derby in Oospaskooyak, Manitoba. Abraham is presented with a silver trophy by the Fur Queen, that year’s winner of the town’s annual beauty pageant. The photograph of their father, trophy in hand and being kissed by the Fur Queen, becomes the brothers’ icon. However, the novel hybridizes the Fur Queen from a white teenager tricked out with a tiara and a cape of arctic fox into a Cree Trickster, a compromised and compromising mixture of the colonial and the pre-colonial, of the serious and the camp – in other words, a Trickster, who like the Weesageechak story the brothers tell, always gets a little shit on her/his coat.19 The image of the Fur Queen presides over the brothers’ lives: Champion is conceived in the aftermath of the Fur Queen’s kiss, as Abraham sees her becoming ‘one with the northern sky … a shifting, nebulous pulsation, the seven stars of the Great Bear ornamenting her crown’. Abraham later tells his sons that as he watched, entranced, ‘the Fur Queen smiled enigmatically, and from the seven stars on her tiara burst a human fetus, fully formed, opalescent, ghostly’.20 Nine months later Champion is born, only to be transformed into Jeremiah by the priests at his school. The mythic figure of the Fur Queen thus becomes one of three specters who haunt this novel. The others are the ghost of Highway’s brother, Rene, who died of AIDS, and whose shadowy image dances on the front cover of the book, superimposed on a snowfield and a clouded winter sky; and Helen Betty Osborne, a seventeen-year-old Cree woman who was raped and murdered in 1971 in The Pas, Manitoba, by four young white men, whose memory is repeatedly invoked in the novel. The spectral nature of these memories of trauma allows Highway to invoke their stories in ways that surpass the limitations of the (auto)biographical and the factual. Rather than locking the novel into a mimetic reproduction of the tragedy of native/gay lives, a narrative that cannot help being at once partial, marginal, circumscribed, and ultimately unfaithful to the complex reality of how native (and gay) people live in the present, Highway creates a hybrid of Western and Native practices that allows his story to move beyond the generic conventions that normally separate mythic from realistic narratives, tragedy from comedy, and fiction from fact. As Sheila Rabillard notes of Highway’s best-known plays, The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Highway employs ‘the strategy that Bhabha name (Weesageechak) in Kiss of the Fur Queen and her/his Ojibway name (Nanabush) in the two Rez plays. 18 Highway, ‘A Note on the Trickster’, p. iv. 19 In ‘the entrails’ of a Winnipeg mall, the brothers remember that ‘“Weesageechak comes down to earth disguised as a weasel” … “And the weasel crawls up the Weetigo’s bumhole” … “In order to kill the horrible monster.” “And comes back out with his white fur coat covered with shit?”’ Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen, p. 118. For a discussion of the coprophiliac nature of Trickster stories and their relevance to questions of anality in Highway’s plays, see Peter Dickinson, Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 20 Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen, p. 12.

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terms the hybrid – in language, form, frame, even acting style, venue, and audience’, and thus partakes of ‘the power of hybridity to disturb colonial authority.’21 While Highway seems less inclined than Beth Brant to say, ‘I do not write for those of you who are white. I write for my own’, there are moments in both the plays and the novel when the dialogue switches to Cree.22 Although it is glossed in the novel (with the exception of the dedication), translations were not accessible to non-Cree-Ojibwayspeaking audience members at performances of the plays. Mark Shackleton argues that use of the forbidden indigenous language is a form of resistance in its own right, but adds that The untranslatability of cultures is, in fact, one of the themes of Kiss of the Fur Queen, and humour, an important aspect of Highway’s work, is … culturally specific. Highway has said, ‘When you speak Cree you laugh constantly’, and in Kiss of the Fur Queen he contrasts Cree … delight in what is bawdy and physical with the stuffy Puritanism of English.23

Susan Knabe suggests, in a discussion of language and embodiment in the novel, that for ‘both Gabriel and Jeremiah … language, complete with its ambiguities and inadequacies, obstacles and possibilities, is experienced corporeally: the taste of alienation, and of desire’.24 Throughout the novel, the two brothers negotiate the linguistic pitfalls of hybridity and biculturalism, as AIDS, sexual abuse and even concert pianist prove untranslatable from English to Cree, just as Cree concepts of ‘matters sensual, sexual, and therefore fun’ are unspeakable in English.25 It needs to be noted, however, that Highway combines the deployment of native humor, translatable or otherwise, with traditions of camp to reinstate the supposedly excessive sexualities and bodies of the queer and the native. This produces a hybrid text that is both Cree and Western, both funny and tragic, but that makes no clear cross-identifications between these terms: the Western can be fun, the Cree tragic, as easily as the reverse. The last scene of the novel, and of Gabriel’s life, is hilarious, campy and tragic all at once: as the sweetgrass smoke sets off the hospital fire alarms, and the hospital staff, fire chief and priest all bang on the locked door, Jeremiah scoops his mother inside from under the noses of Western authorities, Gabriel’s weeping lover holds him in his arms, and Adele Ghostrider (the shaman) hangs the mother’s rosary beads around the neck of ‘a Ken doll sporting cowboy hat and white-tasselled skirt’.26 Little wonder that the Fur Queen ends the novel by winking at Jeremiah, even if locating the humour embedded in the tragedy might offend some Western sensibilities. 21 Rabillard, p. 17. 22 Brant, Writing as Witness, p. 52. 23 Mark Shackleton, ‘Language and Resistance in the Plays of Tomson Highway’, in Postcolonialism and Cultural Resistance, eds Jopi Nyman and John A. Stotesbury (Joensuu: University of Joensuu, 1999), p. 219. 24 Susan Knabe, ‘Corporeal Resistance/Corporeal Reconciliation: Body and Language in Kiss of the Fur Queen’, in Connections: Non-Native Response to Native Canadian Literature (in Memory of Dr. Howard Adams), eds Hartmut Lutz and Coomi S. Vevaina (New Delhi: Creative Books, 2003), p. 134. 25 Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen, p. 190. 26 Ibid., p. 303.


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While the various hybridities in Kiss of the Fur Queen work to disrupt ‘colonial authority’ and to disturb the universalizing (white) assumptions of traditional literary criticism, the intertextualities between the novel and ‘reality’ also work to disturb the notion of heterosexuality as History, and to displace a subaltern (native/gay) subjectivity from the margin to the centre of the narrative. Highway’s move to foreground the subjectivities of native people, particularly women, children and two-spirits, also serves to embed the novel in the realm of the social, rather than of the purely psychological. The novel’s critique is not that these traumas occur to these specific individuals within the story, but that reader and writer alike live within a societal structure that permits and even encourages the idea that harm is only of importance if it occurs to someone who occupies the ideological position of subject within the dominant culture – that is, white, male and heterosexual. Thus, despite its many invocations of their lives, Kiss of the Fur Queen is not about Rene Highway or Helen Betty Osborne – or even about Tomson Highway. As Diana Brydon demonstrates, Highway ‘both invites and deflects such [autobiographical] readings, insisting that the novel must be read as a complex engagement with personal and social history, an engagement that locates the personal experience within a specific colonial context, and that seeks to carry the force of that personal anguish back into the public sphere to find appropriate forms of redress and progress’.27 Thus, Gabriel’s likeness in the novel to Rene Highway – both are younger brothers to piano-playing Cree, both were born on their father’s trapline in northern Manitoba, both were trained in classical dance, both died of AIDS – evokes not only Highway’s pain over his brother’s death, but also resonates within the sphere of the political. This transition from the personal to the political is perhaps even more clear in the way in which the specter of Osborne haunts the novel. As a teenager, Highway attended high school with Helen Betty Osborne in The Pas. In a 1995 interview, he says specifically that his rage against sexual violence towards women started when Osborne was gang-raped by four young white guys when she was trying to get home one day; her cunt was stabbed with a screwdriver fifty-six times. She died on the side of the road after they tossed her out of their car. And for sixteen years no one said anything, even though everyone in the town – the town council and the police – knew who did it. And then more than sixteen years later, one of them was charged and imprisoned, while the others went free.28

Highway adds that ‘What I want my work to do is (a) prevent that kind of thing happening to another native woman and (b) to educate our sons and our sons’ sons that it’s cruel to go around shoving screwdrivers up the cunts of women. That’s the kind of event that changes the lives of people around it. It changed me, and I will write this sort of stuff until the world stops treating women so poorly’.29 27 Diana Brydon, ‘Compromising Postcolonialisms: Thomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Contemporary Postcolonial Debates’, in Compr(om)ising Post/colonialism(s): Challenging Narratives and Practices, eds Greg Ratcliffe and Gerry Turcotte (Sydney: Dangaroo, 2001), p. 23. 28 Joanne Tompkins and Lisa Male, ‘Twenty-One Native Women on Motorcycles: An Interview with Tomson Highway’, Australasian Drama Studies, 24 (1994), p. 22. 29 Ibid.

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The metafictional aspects of the novel, its intertextualities with ‘real life’, work in a doubled fashion to make ironic ‘straight’ readings of the text and the ‘facts’ of native existence. After the performance of ‘Ulysses Thunderchild’, the play for which Jeremiah writes both text and music, and which Gabriel directs, choreographs and dances in, the brothers and Amanda Clear-Sky (actor, Ojibway, Jeremiah’s former classmate and occasional girlfriend) read a white reviewer’s response to the play: ‘“But the cannibal spirit shedding his costume at death, revealing a priest’s cassock, confuses the viewer. The image comes from nowhere. And goes nowhere”’. Jeremiah’s response is to ask, ‘“What’s she talking about?”’ Gabriel replies, ‘“You didn’t say it loud enough”’.30 By this point, the reader of Kiss of the Fur Queen should be well aware not only that the Weetigo is the cannibal spirit who eats little boys in Cree legend, but also that the Weetigo is the priest who rapes little boys, in the novel and in real life. If the fictitious reviewer misses this point does it mean, as Gabriel says, that Jeremiah ‘didn’t say it loud enough’? This question is not an idle one. Brant gives the example of the white editor who rejected ‘This Place’ because he believed ‘that the older Native woman in the story would not have been accepting of her son’s homosexuality’.31 Noting the insidiousness of this type of cultural imperialism, Brant adds that white editors often want to see Indians only in stories ‘full of pathos and victimization … They like to see us as “plight” rather than the dedicated survivors we are’.32 The story Highway tells in Kiss of the Fur Queen could have been a story of ‘pathos and victimization’, but Highway is able to use the admixture of Cree and Western narrative styles to address serious issues of misogyny, homophobia, violence and sexual abuse, without, as Diana Brydon points out, ‘abandoning the ludic play that signals survival and the triumph of a perspective that refuses to be silenced’.33 If ‘Ulysses Thunderchild’ does not ‘say it loud enough’, in part because Jeremiah hasn’t yet unlocked the memory that will make the transformation of the Weetigo into the priest signify for him – and thus for the audience – as it already does for Gabriel, it also recalls the complex of arguments raised by Highway’s second play, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.34 This play situates itself primarily as a critique of the way in which gender relationships on the reservation, including misogynist violence, are played out within the context of the colonial present. While I don’t want to reanimate that debate here,35 the crucial scene has relevance to the work Highway seems to be doing in Kiss of the Fur Queen. When Dickie Bird Halked, a young man suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, rapes Nanabush with a crucifix, the crucial image is not that of a native woman being raped by a native man, but of a native 30 Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen, p. 285. 31 Brant, Writing as Witness, pp. 38–9. 32 Ibid., p. 39. 33 Brydon, p. 15. 34 Tomson Highway, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1989). 35 Alan Filewod discusses the accusations of misogyny raised against Highway by white feminist and native critics in the context of both performance history and issues of cultural authenticity: ‘Receiving Aboriginality: Tomson Highway and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity’, Theatre Journal, 46 (1994), pp. 363–73.


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person raped by the symbol of European/Christian religion. What the audience sees on stage is both an individual act of violence by a man against a woman, and what Brant calls ‘the legacy of our community rape’.36 The complicity of the crucifix itself in the act of rape is repeated in Kiss of the Fur Queen: ‘Father Lafleur bent, closer and closer, until the crucifix that dangled from his neck came to rest on Gabriel’s face. The subtly throbbing motion of the priest’s upper body made the naked Jesus Christ … rub his body against the child’s lips, over and over and over again’.37 It is at this moment when Jeremiah, at the age of eight, realizes what the ‘dark, hulking figure’ bent over Gabriel, ‘the Weetigo feasting on human flesh’ actually is, that he takes refuge in denial: ‘Had this really happened before? Or had it not? But some chamber deep inside his mind slammed permanently shut. It had happened to nobody’.38 Thus, the reproduction, in Kiss of the Fur Queen, of a reviewer’s inability to hear what the playwright is saying suggests that Highway is responding to criticisms of his own play, and that Jeremiah will not be able to ‘say it loud enough’ until he comes to terms with his own past. Ironically, it is Gabriel’s response to the white reviewer that unlocks ‘the padlocked doors’ of Jeremiah’s memory: ‘Now he remembers the holy man inside him, the lining of his rectum being torn … cigar breath billowing somewhere above his cold shaved head’.39 Jeremiah had been dreaming of his father and of the Fur Queen when Father Lafleur woke him; like his biblical namesake, Abraham Okimasis sacrifices his son to his god and the Fur Queen vanishes, unable, it seems, to protect him from the priest. The seeming impotence of the Cree in the face of Christianity is symbolized in the loss of both the boy’s name and his hair. All of the various traumas that occur to the characters are, in a sense, governed by the equation that the teenaged Jeremiah makes while listening to a high school history lecture. Highway recreates, in the heavily German-accented voice of Jeremiah’s teacher, Herr Schwarzkopf, the populist European account of the arrival of white people in the Americas. Jeremiah, the seventeen-year-old Cree scholar, translates only two words: ‘Penetration … 1492’.40 At the same time Jeremiah is learning this important lesson – a lesson he has absorbed so thoroughly that he doesn’t notice that Herr Schwarzkopf’s history elides any possibility that the Cree people might also have their own account of these events – Gabriel is also learning an important lesson. Confronted with the ‘essence of maleness’, as illustrated by both the prostatic gland of a fetal pig and the not inconsiderable attractions of his (male) biology teacher, Gabriel contemplates what is ‘wrong with the essence of femaleness … that it should leave him as cold as stone’. He remembers Father Bouchard’s teachings that ‘the union of man and woman’ is ‘the union of Christ and his church’.41 In these few pages, Christianity is effectively imbricated with misogynist violence, with homophobia, and with the rape of the New World. 36 37 38 39 40 41

Brant, Writing as Witness, p. 73. Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen, p. 78. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., pp. 285–7. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 125.

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When Jeremiah unwittingly reduces the history of European colonization of his people to the two words ‘Penetration … 1492’, it seems that Highway is intimating the ironic reversal of the very trope of sexual perversion with which the conquerors rationalized their own violent inhumanity. Where the Spaniards, in particular, figured the ‘Indian’ as sodomite, Highway recasts the figurative ‘Spaniard’, especially the priest, in the role of sodomitical rapist. In doing so, he parallels in fictional terms the argument made by queer theorists such as Jonathan Goldberg in their examinations of the sodomitical narratology so prevalent in the journals and diaries of the Spanish invaders. Goldberg notes that if the accusation of sodomy is meant to signal how unlike the Spaniards the Indians are, how repugnant their practices and very beings must be, how much their relations to each other and to their own bodies fail to communicate with Spanish practices, they also offer an uncanny mirror of Spanish desires, above all the desire to violate. For the Spaniards want these bodies, to trade them as possessions, to enslave them to do their work. They want the gold that distends their orifices.42

Indeed, Robert Young makes the connections between sexuality and colonialism even more clear when he argues, It is clear that the forms of sexual exchange brought about by colonialism were themselves both consequences and mirrors of the modes of economic exchange that constituted the basis of colonial relations; the extended exchange of property which began with small trading-posts and the visiting slave ships originated, indeed, as much in the exchange of bodies as of goods, or rather of bodies as goods: as in that paradigm of respectability, marriage, economic and sexual exchange were intimately bound up, coupled with each other from the very first.43

That this argument can be extended to the ways in which the colonizers both created and exploited a narrative about the sexual behavior of all natives, women as well as two-spirits, to reconfigure their rapacity as the benign spread of civilization is pointed out by Beth Brant in ‘Physical Prayers’: Those first whitemen who stumbled across our world had no experience of how we thought and believed. They couldn’t grasp the concept of peoples living with the sun and the moon … Peoples who were not ashamed or afraid of bodily functions or sexual acts. Peoples who had a rhythm that pulsed to that of Earth. The whiteman saw none of this except for the unashamed celebration of sexuality. They were so spellbound, they filled reams of paper on the subject. The Jesuits especially gloried in recounting every sexual act. The Spanish and French wrote home to Europe about the sexual ‘looseness’ of Native women. Of course, these men did not mention the word rape, a common occurrence perpetrated on my women ancestors.44

42 Goldberg, ‘Discovering America’, in Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 196–7. 43 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 181–2. 44 Brant, Writing as Witness, p. 58–9.


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Sexuality becomes the sign of difference, but for Brant and Highway it also operates as a sign by which natives can distinguish themselves from the sexual cruelties of the colonizers. Heteronormativity, with its inbuilt notions of female inferiority, thus comes to signify the ‘plague of discourse’ brought to native peoples, along with the penetration of Christian missionaries into the New World. Thus, the various instances of sexual violence committed by native people reflect the destruction of native systems of understanding sex, gender and sexuality, as well as the theft of language. Simon Starblanket, in Dry Lips, insists that Cree, a genderless language, is better than English: ‘weetha … Christ! What is it? Him? Her? Stupid fucking language, fuck you, da Englesa. Me no speakum no more da goodie Englesa, in Cree we say “weetha”, not “him” or “her”.45 Beverley Curran quotes Highway as saying in interview that learning English and French was difficult, in part because these language insisted on gendering his reality in ways that often made no sense: ‘the biggest stumbling block I faced at every point was the issue of gender … I couldn’t believe, for instance, that in French “vagina” is masculine and a prostate gland … is feminine. It’s just so outrageous.’46 The imposition of a foreign system of understanding sex/gender and sexuality has threatened the most intimate levels of First Nations lives, and both Brant and Highway are explicit about linking this loss to forced acculturation into the heteronormative regimes of Christianity. Highway, in particular, links gendered language to patriarchal religion, arguing that ‘in the Indian language, and in the whole linguistic structure, and therefore the whole theological structure such as it was before it became seriously affected by the whole missionary effort, there existed very much a concept of God as a woman’.47 The rape of Patsy by Dickie Bird Halked in Dry Lips thus recalls the influence of Christianity in the devaluing of Native women, and the devastation caused by alcohol, which deformed Dickie Bird even before his birth. But several critics, notably Denis Johnston, have expressed dissatisfaction or puzzlement with the ending of Dry Lips, where it is revealed that the events of the play were not ‘real’ but were instead a dream.48 The dreamer, Zachary Keechigeesik, wakes up naked on the couch, at the point where the play began, and is joined by his wife, Hera, and their baby. While this recalls the traditional interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedies, in which marriage is always the proper resolution, it also suggests a more postcolonial reading. What takes place on the reservation during Zachary’s dream resonates with Highway’s choice of a quotation from Lyle Longclaws as the epigraph of the play: ‘before the healing can take place, the poison must first be exposed’.49 In both Dry Lips and Kiss of the Fur Queen, the narrative exposes the poisons of misogyny, of homophobia, of childhood trauma, of alcohol, and of despair. When Zachary wakes 45 Highway, Dry Lips, pp. 110–11. 46 Qtd in Beverley Curran, ‘She? He? Weetha? The Dramatic Translation of Gender in Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing’, in Indigeneity: Construction and Re/presentation, eds James N. Brown and Patricia M. Sant (Commack, New York: Nova Science Publishers, 1999), pp. 120–21. 47 Qtd in Curran, p. 121. 48 Denis W. Johnston, ‘“Lines and Circles: The ‘Rez’ Plays of Tomson Highway’, Canadian Literature, 124–5 (Spring–Summer 1990), pp. 254–64. 49 Lyle Longclaws, qtd in Highway, ‘A Note on the Trickster’, n.p.

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up and lifts his baby in his arms, it seems that he is awakening from the nightmare of colonialism. But he does not do so in a return to a pre-colonial world; his awakening occurs within the context of colonialism and suggests the need to go forward, rather than back. Dry Lips, like Kiss of the Fur Queen, thus partakes of what Goldberg has called ‘the history that will be’, the reclamation of both past and future from the stranglehold of whiteness and heterocentrism. In Eve Sedgwick’s terms, while both Highway’s plays and his novel necessarily mobilize paranoid strategies – revealing to a primarily white audience the colonial violence they might not want to see – their larger impetus is reparative, following the desire to ‘let the healing begin’ after the poison has been exposed.50 As Peter Dickinson argues with respect to Dry Lips, ‘the dominant figure/ground frameworks of indigeneity tend to get deliberately skewed in Highway’s plays. The performance of (ab)originality on stage requires white, heterosexual audiences, in particular, to reimagine their relationships not only with Indigenous peoples, but with other marginalized communities as well, including women and queers’.51 As an incarnation of the Trickster, the Fur Queen’s kiss, smile, laugh and wink are repeated throughout the novel at moments of crisis in the brothers’ lives. She invokes a complex hybrid of white colonialism, and native survival and resistance; the latter are figured in the novel primarily through the twin weapons of humor and art. In this sense, the novel itself partakes on a metafictional level of those qualities it ascribes to the Fur Queen. The shadowy photograph of the dancer Rene Highway on the cover further implicates gender/genre crossings: the gender ambivalence of the Trickster and of the Cree language, the hybridization of fiction and (auto)biography. The resonances in the text with the real life histories of Highway and his brother are complicated, at least in terms of Western precepts of narrative genre, by Tomson’s insistence in the preface that ‘all the characters and what happens to them are fictitious’.52 As Goldberg puts it, ‘The history that will be is, after all, as much how we recount what happened as how we project a future; the history that will be is, inevitably, a history of the present, that divided site that must look both ways at once’.53 Both Brant and Highway demonstrate that it is possible to do just this: that in negotiating what it means to be both native and a two-spirit, it is possible to ‘look both ways at once’. This is a history that may make white people uncomfortable, or that straight people may not wish to hear. It is also, however, a history of hope, a history in which alliances are possible across and within identity groups. This is the world that Beth Brant shows us a glimpse of, if only as something that might come to be, in the story of ‘Turtle Gal’. When nine-year-old Sue Linn’s mama dies, she is taken in by her friend James William Newton, ‘Sweet William’. Sweet William is elderly, black, gay, and alone after the death of his partner, Big Bill. And yet 50 See Sedgwick’s arguments about the relationship and difference between paranoid and reparative reading strategies in her ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is about You’, in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 1–37. 51 Dickinson, p. 186. 52 Highway, ‘A Note on the Trickster’, p. vi. 53 Goldberg, ‘History That Will Be’, p. 386.


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he’s prepared to help one little girl stay with someone who loves her, safe from the hands of the government agencies that neither he nor Sue Linn trusts. Turtle Gal’s new family is a hybrid one, no more likely to be recognized by the government than Sweet William’s marriage to Big Bill. Yet Sue Linn is already learning a new history at school, where a black teacher explains the relationship between the enslavement and transportation of Africans, the genocide of Indians, and the colonization of the Americas in terms a child can understand.54 As Brant says in one of her essays: ‘As a Mohawk, I am very much inside my own world-view, my own Nations, and I am looking at you’.55

54 Brant, ‘Turtle Gal’, Food and Spirits, pp. 101–16. 55 Brant, Writing as Witness, p. 49.


Chapter 15

New Life Stories in the New South Africa Judith Lütge Coullie In the first six years after the democratic elections in South Africa 1994, autobiographical texts in English written by whites outnumbered those by black South Africans by roughly three to one. Although whites have always had greater access to the print medium, their dominance in the early post-apartheid years is significant not only because the ratio of white to black South Africans is roughly one to five, but also because the racial balance of published life-writing was markedly different in the last decade of apartheid. In the 1980s, the numbers of autobiographies published by blacks and whites were more or less equal; if we include in black life-writing the short testimonies of illiterate or semi-literate black South Africans (transcribed, edited and collected by white researchers), then volumes of black lifewriting published in the last years of apartheid outnumber those by whites by about four to three. This turn-about begs explanation: why, post 1994, did black South Africans, having been given political rights in a society which protects freedom of speech, produce relatively fewer autobiographical texts than they did during the last years of apartheid? And why did whites become more prolific? During the 1970s and 1980s, anti-apartheid activists used testimony to inform readers about oppression in South Africa, persuasion directed not only at South Africans but also at the international community, whose pressure on the South African Government became increasingly significant. The decrease in autobiographical production by black South Africans in the post-apartheid era could therefore be interpreted as an indication that testimony was a crucial weapon; once apartheid had been routed, the need for it did not seem so great. Political liberation having been achieved, what continuities and what differences are evident in the works that were published in this period? We can begin by suggesting that there are three broad categories of life-writing in English published in South Africa between 1994 and 2000, and that of these three categories, the first two are a continuation of narrative traditions practiced during the years of formal apartheid (1948–1994). The first, which I will not focus on here, consists of generic ‘personal memoir’ which aims primarily to record aspects of the subject’s life: a career, travels, or an interest. Such autobiographies either avoid discussion of apartheid, or treat it simply as one of a number of contexts of the individual’s life. These themed, ostensibly apolitical memoirs are all written by white South Africans; it would be impossible for black South Africans to write about their lives without dealing with the impact of the historical moment.1 In the second category are those life-stories 1 An extreme example of how whites can recount lives apparently insulated from political realities is Mary Holroyd’s Weigh-Less Forever (Durban: Creda Press, 1997). Stephen Watson’s

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which aim to recover portions of history or experience suppressed under the apartheid regime. The third group, a new kind of writing, includes those autobiographies in which the subject responds to the demise of apartheid, some by tackling issues or experiences which arise out of the new political dispensation, others by exploring the personal dimensions of politics: the difficulties of achieving reconciliation between the African and European worlds, between dissonant cultural and philosophical paradigms. Such texts are especially significant because they grapple with the intersections of power, history, truth and the self. The second type of autobiographical text, which addresses broader historical concerns from the vantage-point of one individual, was generally banned, especially if the writer was a banned or listed person. Although they were unbanned in the last years of white rule, new accounts exposing hitherto suppressed events and experiences still serve important needs in post-apartheid South Africa, as the full extent of the deception is beginning to be apprehended. These testimonies continue to defy attempts to dismiss the majority, by showing the ways in which history impacts upon the lives of the oppressed, and how these people can impact upon history. Included in this group are the white-authored, black-subject life-stories of Mpho ‘M’atsepo Nthunya (recorded and edited by Kendall) and Katie Makanya (recorded and edited by McCord), along with The House in Tyne Street, in which Linda Fortune revisits her memories of the now destroyed District Six.2 This largely (but not exclusively) ‘Colored’ enclave at the foot of Table Mountain in Cape Town was literally bulldozed out of existence when Fortune was in her early twenties; her representation of this destruction of an entire community exposes what has been silenced in official accounts. Autobiographies which tell of apartheid’s obverse – the story of the liberation struggle – rectify the official version regarding communistcontrolled ‘terrorists’. The most famous of these is Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela.3 The man credited by Mandela as playing a crucial role in the negotiations which led to South Africa’s transition to democracy, committed communist Joe Slovo, was perhaps one of the most hated of anti-apartheid whites. Chief of Staff (and founder member) of the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe, and later National Chairman of the South African Communist Party, Slovo fled South Africa after years of harassment and the threat A Writer’s Diary (Cape Town: Queillerie, 1997) is an interesting exception: it seeks an intensely personal, introspective mode, but the realities of contemporary South Africa intrude. 2 The output of white-authored, black-subject testimonies decreased significantly in this early post-apartheid period, and the nature of the relationship between writer and subject seems to have become more intimate. Nthunya, a barely literate cleaner, recounts (in English, not her mother tongue) a life characterized by hardship and personal tragedy: Mpho ’M’astepo Nthunya, Singing Away the Hunger: Stories of a Life in Lesotho, ed. K. Limakatso Kendall (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996). Katie Makanya was virtually a second mother to McCord, having been intimately connected to her family for 35 years through her work at McCord’s father’s mission hospital: Margaret McCord, The Calling of Katie Makanya: A Memoir of South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1995); Linda Fortune, The House in Tyne Street: Childhood Memories of District Six (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 1996). 3 Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela ([1994]; London: Abacus, 1995).

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of a life in jail. The posthumously published story of his early life illuminates ‘the history of our liberation struggle’, and portrays a man very different from the apartheid state’s depiction of him as evil incarnate.4 The third category, autobiographies which grapple with or respond to the realities of life in post-apartheid South Africa, includes those of Mandela’s jailer and friend James Gregory, and that of policeman Bushie Engelbrecht.5 In 1995, Engelbrecht was appointed as head of the new Special Investigations Unit, established to probe high-profile crimes in post-apartheid South Africa. Only loosely autobiographical, A Christmas to Remember focuses on investigations into the politically motivated killings which were a continuation of the political turmoil of the 1980s. Englebrecht claims that ‘from the time that hostilities between members of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) broke out in the early 1980s, political violence has claimed at least 14,000 lives in KwaZulu-Natal and displaced hundreds of thousands of people’.6 The book exposes the complexities of the much vaunted ‘rainbow nation’, and suggests that the new South Africa has to work with apartheid’s legacy of widespread unemployment, poverty, a dangerous mix of unrealistic expectation and hopelessness (coupled with lack of education), racial and ethnic tensions, high levels of violent crime, and militarization of the general population. Topical in a different way are those memoirs which present diverse attempts to reconcile the African and European worlds. The only black authored texts among these are those of controversial academic William Makgoba, who is principally concerned with the transformation of tertiary education, and Wilfred Cibane.7 In neither instance is the author’s primary concern with personal transformation: Makgoba characterizes himself as someone who has already successfully negotiated the divide, whereas Cibane’s wish that the ‘two worlds’ of South African society ‘become one’ is for social, rather than personal, transformation.8 It is hardly surprising that black South Africans are not writing about their endeavors to situate the self between, or negotiate, contradictory cultural and philosophical paradigms, given the fact that South Africa’s indigenous peoples have for many generations been obliged to adapt to Western paradigms. Cibane’s story is a case in point. It traces his life from goat-herd in rural Zululand to cosmopolitan businessman. After being charged with contravention of the Group Areas Act, Cibane and Robert Scott, his partner and friend of over 50 years, left South Africa in 1967. On returning in the early 1990s, Cibane finds himself ostracized by his Zulu family, whose world of the black township he can no longer inhabit. His world – the bourgeois white world of the large suburban garden, pool and sundowners – is equally alien to 4 Mandela, ‘Foreword’, in Joe Slovo, Slovo: The Unfinished Autobiography (Randburg: Ravan Press; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), p. ix. 5 James Gregory with Bob Graham, Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend (London: Headline, 1995). 6 Bushie Engelbrecht with Micel Schnehage, A Christmas to Remember (Midrand: Maskew Miller Longman, 1999), p. 22. 7 M. William Makgoba, Mokoko: The Makgoba Affair; A Reflection on Transformation (Florida Hills SA: Vivlia, 1997); Wilfred Cibane, Man of Two Worlds: An Autobiography (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 1998). 8 Cibane, p. 159.

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them, and they cannot accept his relationship with Scott. His regret that he and Robert would not live to see the union of their two worlds – Zulu and European – makes a rhetorically effective conclusion, perhaps, but the narrative demonstrates that Cibane no longer has a world apart from Scott’s. In demonstrating the hegemony of Western lifestyles and values, Cibane’s story represents a failed attempt to reconcile African and European worlds, and a failure to recognize that failure. Autobiographical attempts by white South Africans to grow beyond the virtually unassailable and unyielding boundaries of their own hegemonic culture vary in approach. In Sarah Penny’s account of personal transformation, her endeavors seem sincere but are of limited success. The Whiteness of Bones is the story of a young white woman’s journey through Africa – a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood, from grief to acceptance, from cultural myopia to a measure of comprehension of her ‘place in a country and a continent which had turned their backs on one another for over forty years’.9 In Zimbabwe, she is approached by a group of hostile black men. Her fear of rape is mixed up with her racism: Of course [rape] wasn’t the preserve of black men, white men raped too, but their inflictions did not summon the same blanket terror … Across the enormous gulf, black society was alien and incomprehensible. Its members had been offered up to us as servants and now we feared that we would be offered up as victims.10

Penny recognizes the naiveté of the liberal view that the opposite of racial oppression is egalitarianism, oblivion to race. When she is mocked and groped by black men, she can no longer deny that it is her race as much as her gender which marks her as a target: This black/white thing, this man/woman thing – I wanted these divisions to be myths only, but they would not become myths. I am mocked because I am white, I am molested because I am a girl. If I pretend not to see the divisions, they will still exist and others will insist on them. Africa is a continent of polarisations. To the black mass I am the enemy. For the first time in my life, I was essentially aware of myself not as a young woman, but as a young white woman. A member of the white race.11

The comments reveal the ways in which markers like race and gender work to dissipate, or intensify, a sense of alienation or vulnerability, but they also point to the ways in which such texts foreground the personal experience of racism and sexism in the post-apartheid period. Nicki Arden’s The Spirits Speak appears to be a more profound embrace of Africa. Her training to be a sangoma (a traditional African healer and diviner), conducted during lengthy visits to South Africa over a period of two or three years, proves to be the solution to chronic and severe depression. The narrative is compelling: 9 Sarah Penny, The Whiteness of Bones (Johannesburg: Penguin, 1997), publisher’s note, back cover. For obvious reasons, white South Africans were not permitted to travel to most countries in Africa throughout the apartheid years. 10 Ibid., p. 84. 11 Ibid., p. 118.


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Arden finds herself ‘wedged between [her] western being and experiences for which there are no explanations’.12 More problematic than these spiritual experiences, however, are some of the rituals and animal sacrifices, as well as clashes between value systems, and between diagnostic and therapeutic models. For instance, on one occasion Arden’s teacher is indifferent to her warnings about the dangers of the spread of AIDS, when blades are reused on patients. Arden resolves the conflict by capitulating to African traditions, reasoning that the fault lies not in misguided and risky beliefs and practices but in her (Western) desire to understand; rationality desiccates magic, disperses wonder. The transcendence of the superficialities of Western rationality, individualism, consumerism and relentless technological advancement that is apparently afforded by indigenous cultures situates this work within the ‘new age’ movement. Contrastingly, conservationist Ian Player’s autobiography Zululand Wilderness is primarily a moving tribute to his life-long friend Magqubu Ntombela, the Zulu who was ‘a guide and mentor on my long and continuous journey to selfunderstanding’13 and who led Player to a wisdom – an essentially African spirituality – which very few whites have experienced. In an ironic reversal of the cliché of the white man bringing enlightenment to Africa, Player gradually learns to overcome the crudities of racism and the rigidities of his ‘civilized’ European value system, and thus to open himself to the wisdom of Magqubu: the illiterate black man teaches Player to ‘overcome a darkness in me … he helped me to deal with my shadow’.14 Not all South Africans feel compelled by radical political change to engage in the profound self-scrutiny evidenced in Player’s narrative. Some of those who supported apartheid, like past President and joint Nobel Peace Prize winner with Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, feel constrained to account for their role in the past. His The Last Trek – A New Beginning is a defensive chronicle of the progress of apartheid and his part in it. Although de Klerk’s life-story does not depict a person engaged in intense self-examination, the text is clearly an attempt to locate a home in what the author recognizes is indeed a new South Africa. He seeks to do this by exonerating himself and other Nationalists; indeed, he represents himself as a prototype for Nationalists and Afrikaners.15 De Klerk argues that the Nationalists were able to reconcile devout Christianity with their support for repressive and unjust policies because they ‘like any other people in the world at any time in history … were products of our time and circumstances’.16 The book’s implicit argument is that apartheid was a political blunder – an error in judgement, rather than a crime against humanity – that he came to realize needed to be corrected, and acted accordingly. De Klerk’s narrator ventures forth in this ‘last trek’ to the new South Africa, contending that he

12 Nicki Arden, The Spirits Speak: One Woman’s Mystical Journey into the African Spirit World (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), p. 104. 13 Ian Player, Zululand Wilderness: Shadow and Soul (Cape Town: David Philip, 1997), p. 2. 14 Ibid., p. 8. 15 Frederik Willem de Klerk, The Last Trek – A New Beginning: The Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. xiii. The migration of Boers (that is, Afrikaners) in the Great Trek of 1838 was primarily motivated by the desire to escape British control. 16 Ibid., p. 15.

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has earned his place in the sun because he was ‘part of the solution [to apartheid], and not part of the problem’.17 A (perhaps inevitable) comparison of Mandela’s and de Klerk’s texts shows an interesting parallel in the titles: both employ the metaphor of life’s struggle as a journey – Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom alludes to his speech from the dock during the Rivonia Trial and connotes a triumphant conclusion to a lengthy struggle, whereas de Klerk’s The Last Trek – A New Beginning fails to resolve an uneasy tension between a sense of enforced exile in evoking (while ostensibly ‘ending’) a profound sense of persecution among Afrikaners, and the promise of a fresh, unblemished future. A comparison reveals two other dissimilarities: one is that Mandela and his ghost writer do a better PR job for the autobiographical subject than do de Klerk and his co-author, since Mandela’s narrator is reserved and august, while de Klerk’s is grudgingly apologetic but unrepentant.18 The other is that there are no blatant contradictions between Mandela’s self-characterization and his account of the past, and those of other autobiographers. However, de Klerk’s self-portrayal and his account of the progressive dismantling of apartheid are seriously undermined when placed in the context of the network of assertions made in post-apartheid lifewriting. For instance, the process of reform which de Klerk documents is shown by Eugene de Kock, George Bizos and, indeed, the testimony of hundreds of South Africans before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), to coincide with a continued terrorist campaign against anti-apartheid activists. De Klerk’s repeated insistence that even after he became President he was never party to nor even aware of the decisions of the State Security Council, which authorized the formation of state-funded terrorist organizations, is contradicted by the commander of Vlakplaas, one of the notorious covert counter-insurgency units, Eugene de Kock.19 His testimony was narrated to journalist Jeremy Gordin from prison, and Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State details de Kock’s role in the state’s secret counter-insurgency campaign. This enterprise involved fraud, theft, illegal trade in diamonds, ivory, gun-running, torture and murder, but de Kock makes no apology for his zealous support for the apartheid regime: ‘we believed that the end justified the means’.20 Moreover, de Kock takes pride in his self-image as someone who did what had to be done, ‘a man of action’ who was good at what he did.21 Since none of his superiors who ordered or condoned the actions of secret state organizations have 17 Ibid., p. 337. 18 Mandela credits Richard Stengel as collaborator and editor, but also as writer of ‘the latter parts’ (p. ix). De Klerk acknowledges Dave Steward’s help and says that he could well be referred to as co-author (p. xiii). De Klerk’s unyielding TRC submission caused Desmond Tutu (also a Nobel Peace Prize winner) to despair: ‘I cried for De Klerk – because he spurned the opportunity to become human’. Qtd in Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Times Books, 1998), p. 158. 19 These are also known as death squads: see Eugene de Kock (as told to Jeremy Gordin), A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State (Saxonwold: Contra, 1998), p. 292. In 1996, de Kock was found guilty of 89 charges, including six of murder; he was sentenced to two life sentences plus 212 years’ imprisonment. 20 Ibid., p. 103. 21 Ibid., p. 44.


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been brought to book, and since most of his colleagues have turned state’s witness, de Kock’s testimony arises out of a sense of betrayal.22 But at the core of A Long Night’s Damage is a kind of emotional blankness, a vacuum from which the speaking voice emerges. The relentlessly enumerated details gesture simultaneously to the presence of an impersonal narrator, and to his absence. Referring to another amnesty applicant’s testimony, Stephen Watson comments upon the poverty of the language in which the atrocities are recounted. It is as though the language itself had gone numb, even dead, in relation to the act itself. Nor is this just a matter of context, a kind of retrospective decorum, or even indifferent court-reporting. Even that poverty, that numbness, carries with it a suggestion of brutality and thus, for all its blandness, strikes one as another form of violence: ‘[we] kept on hitting him until he died’.23

One finds no evidence of repentance, or conscience in de Kock’s testimony. This is not a man grappling with his situation in Africa – the extent of his regret seems to hinge on de Kock’s sense that he made an inappropriate career choice.24 His revelations belong in the third category – that is, those which respond to the new political dispensation – because they clearly would not have emerged had the apartheid regime not been overthrown. His confession can be seen at least in part as an attempt to gain pre-publicity for his amnesty application. Two other autobiographical narratives – by George Bizos and Antjie Krog – also arise to some extent out of the decision (taken by the negotiating parties in the early 1990s) to address the past through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. George Bizos’s No One to Blame? In Pursuit of Justice in South Africa is in part a response to the fact that, contrary to what was hoped, the TRC did not expose all of the truths about the victims of the apartheid state.25 A human rights lawyer, Bizos was involved in a number of applications to oppose amnesty, but nevertheless calls for understanding for perpetrators. However, his is an understanding which emerges from a position of 22 Gordin, de Kock’s scribe, says that he too is appalled that de Kock alone should take responsibility while his superiors enjoy freedom and handsome severance packages: ibid., p. 24; see also George Bizos, No One to Blame? In Pursuit of Justice in South Africa ([1998]; Cape Town: David Philip; Bellville: Mayibuye Books, 1999), p. 216. Even though he was clearly pivotal in the steady erosion of law and the establishment of clandestine hit squads, former President P.W. Botha remained unrepentant until his death in 2006. He refused to appear before the TRC, and won his appeal against the R10,000 fine imposed on him for ignoring a subpoena. F.W. de Klerk continues to live in peace. 23 Watson, p. 155. 24 When he realized that ‘the game was pretty much up’ (p. 244), de Kock took early retirement and a handsome package. He then went into his own arms business. The scale of the tragedy caused thereby can be partly gleaned from Engelbrecht’s account in A Christmas to Remember; Saunders and Southey estimate the deaths in ZwaZulu Natal at 10–12,000 in their Dictionary of South African History, 2nd edn (Cape Town: D. Philip, 2001), pp. 34, 101. 25 This hope was perhaps unrealistic, given the fact that the State-owned iron manufacturer (ISCOR) is reputed to have incinerated forty tons of government documents prior to the 1994 elections. Bizos remarks: ‘One wonders what else would have been discovered had the shredding machines not worked so hard after the dawn of the new era in South African politics’ (p. 189). On unsolved mysteries, see Bizos, p. 237.

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difference from and superiority to Afrikaner nationalists; this is not true for Afrikaners Antjie Krog, or Wilhelm Verwoerd, the grandson of the architect of apartheid. Their understanding must emerge from a position of redefined identification, and thus the process of self-reconciliation which they undergo involves shame, guilt, the need for absolution, and acceptance of their (reconstituted) Afrikaner identities. Krog’s experiences as reporter on the TRC for two years prompt her painful inner pilgrimage and the writing of Country of My Skull. She realizes that reconciliation is needed not only between victim and tormentor – and the equation of these with black and white is soon undermined – but between self and memory. Throughout the narrative, she literally and figuratively comes to terms with pain-laced fragments of history, and in so doing she locates herself in that past, in the present of disclosure and exposure, and in the future of the emerging new South Africa. But resolution exacts a high price: she wrestles not only with the ethics of narrative appropriation in reporting on the testimonies, but also with language’s limitations. She strains to find the words to recount the eruptions of anguish, yet she is repulsed by her profession as wordsmith, as purveyor of misery: No poetry should come from this. May my hand fall off if I write this. So I sit around. Naturally and unnaturally without words. Stunned by the knowledge of the price people have paid for their words. If I write this, I exploit and betray. If I don’t, I die.26

How can language transcend its own banalities, its deficiencies, to record grief, guilt, the torments of experience? Sarah Penny explains that the repeated narration of trauma can be the opposite of therapeutic. Instead of a form of release it becomes a hollow performance, a scab under which the pain continues to fester: ‘Once you have been required to discuss a horrible tragedy a number of times it becomes a story. Once you’ve replayed the unfolding drama, shot by shot, scene by scene through your mind’s eye, it becomes cinemascope. It loses authenticity. It becomes hackneyed’.27 By way of contrast, Krog recognizes gratefully that it is through the operation of the TRC that a new South African-ness is emerging: because of you this country no longer lies between us but within it breathes becalmed after being wounded in its wondrous throat in the cradle of my skull it sings28 The desire for narrative closure, for historical resolution, is articulated in the desire for miracles. The symbol of the new South Africa holds within it the promise of reconciliation between the unendurable knowledge of the past and the primal yearning for renewal, absolution and redress. In their life-writing, many – but not 26 Krog, p. 49. 27 Penny, p. 16. 28 Krog, pp. 278–9.


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all – white South Africans are striving to measure up to the ideals of the new South Africa. Not wishing the racism of the past away, they implicitly acknowledge that ‘From the fact that good may come from evil, and from disaster relative happiness, it does not follow that evil and disaster are not what they are’.29 Krog shows that, for whites, respect for and pleasure in South Africa’s cultural diversity does not necessarily involve obsequiousness, nor self-seeking political correctness. Singing the multi-lingual new national anthem – which is itself a marvel of reconciliation – she says, ‘And I wade into song – in a language that is not mine, in a tongue I do not know. It is fragrant inside the song, and among the keynotes of sorrow and suffering there are soft silences where we who belong to this landscape, all of us, can come to rest’.30

29 qtd in Watson, p. 152. 30 Krog, p. 217.


Chapter 16

Postcolonial Pedagogy and International Economics Leigh Dale [A] culturally powerful value … understands the market itself as a valuable moral force, with profit and a good living the just rewards for those who work hard enough.1

In the past two decades, scholars in the field of post-colonial studies have routinely and rightly called for increased attention to the nuances and specificities of colonialism. Representative is Luise White, in the opening pages of the essay which concludes the influential collection Tensions of Empire. After consolidating her claim that ‘recent research has shown colonialism to be far more fragmented than earlier studies revealed’, White comes to the view ‘that the dichotomized categories of rulers and ruled are obsolete and that colonial situations might be studied for their ambiguities as much as for their injustices.’2 In two quite obvious ways, this assertion is true: first, relations of domination and oppression are frequently complicated by affiliations between individual members of apparently discrete groups; second, it is the duty of scholars to search for more sophisticated views than those given by common sense or first appearance, and to offer nuanced and plausible understandings of past and present. There are, however, ways in which this call for attention to nuance and complication might itself be problematized. In this chapter, I want to argue that there are contexts in which this line of reasoning, now more or less orthodox in postcolonial studies, has limits. Those contexts discussed here are teaching, the academy, and (academic representations of) international relations of trade. To elaborate briefly on the first two of these, teaching and the academic context, White’s assertion seems to me (potentially at least) to create a tension between the ethics of scholarship, and the ethics and efficacy of pedagogy: should we, in teaching, at all times be troubled as much as by ambiguity as by injustice? Perhaps one could suggest that this is a question of scaffolding complexity: in teaching, one tends to make a progression from less to more difficult concepts. If we begin with complication, in the name of scholarly rigor, where does that leave discussion of injustice? At the heart of what I see as the difficulty posed by White’s remark is the question of audience: what is appropriate in a scholarly volume directed towards academics and graduate students 1 Daniel Callahan, What Price Better Health? Hazards of the Research Imperative (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press; New York: The Millbank Memorial Fund, 2003), p. 220. 2 Luise White, ‘Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and Central Africa’, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 437–8.

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might need to be rethought when presented to those coming to post-colonial studies for the first time. I also want to engage with what I think is the implied teleology in White’s remark, indicated in the term ‘obsolete’: an assumption that there is an almost inevitable movement towards the present which correlates with increasing intellectual sophistication, thence an increased level of detachment, a morally superior judiciousness. I assumed precisely this kind of ‘progression’ from past to present, from simplicity to complexity, from passion to detachment, when I asked students to give in-class reports on key texts in post-colonial studies in a tertiary course on postcolonial literature. I asked two students each week to complete a report on a key text, setting these texts in roughly chronological order and, as I saw it, increasing levels of complexity. I was struck by the students’ enthusiasm for works of the 1950s and 1960s, by politically engaged and impassioned writers like Aimé Césaire, Kwame Nkrumah, C.L.R. James and Albert Memmi, along with slightly later works by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Jamaica Kincaid. By way of contrast, responses to the dozen or so introductions to post-colonialism (as an academic practice) prescribed for the later weeks were dutiful but dour. To presume, as one might, that the students were ‘not ready’ for the ‘more sophisticated’ arguments in these more recent works is belied by the subtlety and energy they demonstrated in responses to the literary texts they were reading at the same time. Interestingly, those few students who did see value in the more overtly ‘theoretical’ texts seized on precisely that call to complicate (and not just to differentiate) the colonial field, and they invoked this ‘scholarly’ argument repeatedly to oppose those who declared emphatically that colonization had been an injustice. This is not to say that the invocation of simplicity, any more than the invocation of complication, is necessarily desirable practice. With that contention in mind, I want now to turn to textbooks of International Economics, and their representation of ‘Africa’, focusing on the subtopic of trade. This is to move to the third context noted in the introduction above, as one in which we might test White’s assertion, while still bearing in mind questions of pedagogy. Economics does not generally come under the rubric of ‘postcolonial studies’, even though the teaching of this subject is perhaps one of the most important sites at which knowledge of the (once?) colonized world is generated in modern universities, and thus in policy-making and government. ‘International trade’, a topic in the field of International Economics, routinely brings poorer countries and peoples into view, but the differences between the simplistic and condescending accounts of the ‘third world’ in this field, and that of post-colonial and even popular representations of poorer countries and peoples, is stark. The nuances and even the main skeins of economic theory are not especially well known to most modern researchers in the humanities (yet they were to nineteenthcentury scholars). What is generally known, to lay and scholarly audiences, is the long list of failed reforms to help the poorer countries of the world, almost invariably former colonies of European powers. In particular, there is frequent condemnation in the broadcast media of so-called trade ‘negotiations’, which have repeatedly aimed at leveraging open markets in poor countries while protecting rich producers. Even the critics are not exactly shouting from the margins: Joseph Stiglitz, Deputy VicePresident and Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000, has claimed

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that the effect of these negotiations has generally been to make ‘some of the poorest countries in the world … worse off’.3 United Nations representative for Africa, Stephen Lewis, argued in his 2005 Massey Lectures that ‘there is simply no way for Africa profitably to export its own primary agricultural commodities’.4 Does poverty matter? It seems to: average life expectancy in high income countries is 78; in low income countries, it is 47.5 While the infant mortality rate for countries rated as lower middle income, upper middle income, and high income – measured per 1000 live births – ranges from 40 to 7 respectively, for low income countries, most of them in Africa, infant mortality is 121 per 1000 live births, or around 12%.6 And for the poor, the trends are downward.7 The relative decline of commodity prices, which underpin the vast bulk of income in poor countries, is spoken of in an oddly off-hand way in the academic field of International Economics. One author of a textbook, Thomas Pugel, remarks that, ‘When all is said and done, the relative price of primary products may have declined as much as 0.7% a year since 1900 … or there may have been almost no trend. There is a weak case for worrying about being an exporter of agricultural extractive products on pricetrend grounds’.8 What remarks like this highlight is that whereas growth is normative for the rich – and commensurately, increased longevity – stasis is the normative condition for the poor, and being normative, undeserving of condemnation or even inquiry. As an example of this blindness, it can be noted that the best academic estimates put the number of human beings captured and sold by ‘wholesalers’ in Africa and transported by British and European merchants to the Americas at around 12 million; perhaps ten-and-a-half million survived the voyage.9 These gasp-inducing figures alert us to the longevity, the pervasiveness, and the impact on individuals and larger histories of a trade in human beings that spanned centuries. But if one modern estimate suggests that some 12 million people in the world today live in conditions

3 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 7. 4 Stephen Lewis, Race against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005), p. 17. 5 Dominick Salvatore, International Economics: Eighth Edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), p. 378, using World Bank, World Bank Development Report for 1997 and 2003. Salvatore argues that while differences between standards of living in high income and low income countries ‘remain very large’, ‘per capita incomes adjusted for purchasing-power parity (PPP) greatly reduces measured differences’. Authors using World Bank data from the following year increase life expectancy for poor countries by more than a decade, to 58! See Dennis R. Appleyard, Alfred J. Field, Jr and Steven L. Cobb, International Economics, 5th edn (Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin, 2006), p. 410. These figures are derived from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2004. 6 Salvatore, p. 378, using World Bank, World Bank Development Report for 1997 and 2003. 7 Thomas A. Pugel, International Economics, 12th edn (Boston: McGraw Hill Irwin, 2004), p. 334. 8 Ibid., p. 317. 9 Gad Heuman and James Walvin, ‘Introduction to Part One’, The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and James Walvin (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 4.

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of or akin to slavery, why do we generally understand slavery as an historical rather than a contemporary phenomenon?10 Saskia Sassen argues that inequality is writ large even in the heart of the great metropolises which are the chief financial beneficiaries of modern trade. She asserts that ‘inside global cities we see a new geography of centrality and marginality. The downtowns of global cities and metropolitan business centers receive massive investments in real estate and telecommunications while low-income city areas are starved for resources’.11 Such an observation is crucial in showing that the contestation between rich and poor cannot be distanced from any particular time or place, nor is it a struggle between ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds – indeed, the separation between the peoples of these places is every day undone by proof of connectedness in the most intimate and brutal ways. In contrast to this reality, soothed by the raft of legislation, institutions and covenants that seem to shift radical forms of inequality and violent deprivations of rights to places and peoples beyond the horizon of empathy, wealthy elites repeatedly point to the sanctity of the market and the safety of civilization to reassure that ‘such things’ do not happen ‘here’ or ‘now’ – or that if they do, they are the fault of the poor. In such circumstances, questions about the relative invisibility of exploitation become urgent, particularly in the light of the continuing influence of faith in growth and improvement founded on the assumption that ‘now’ is so much better than ‘then’ for ‘them’; but are such questions asked in studies of countries and peoples who experience extreme poverty? Studying International Economics More than ever, students in universities are also consumers, and at the moment of purchasing a textbook they are almost purely positioned that way. For the student of international economics, the trip to the bookshop will be a fairly expensive one: their textbook might retail for as much as US$200, and the rapid turnover of editions probably makes it less likely they can manage with a second-hand copy. (The existence of large numbers of high-priced books, many of them in their eighth, tenth, or twelfth edition, is a testament to the popularity of courses in the field.12) Before sampling 10 ‘Church Sorry for Slavery’, Australian [newspaper], 10 February 2006, p. 12. The claim was made by Thomas Butler, Bishop of Southwark, in the context of a debate over the role of the Church of England in slavery which took place at the Anglican General Synod in Britain in February 2006. 11 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. xxvii, xxvi. 12 My sample of undergraduate textbooks represents around half of the more popular books on sale in North America. Other big sellers not considered here include Charles W. Sawyer and Richard L. Sprinkle’s International Economics, 2nd edn (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2006), Robert J. Carbaugh’s International Economics, 10th edn (Ohio: Thomson/SouthWestern, 2005), and Mordechai E. Kreinin’s International Economics: A Policy Approach, 10th edn (Mason, OH: Thomson/South-Western, 2006). Slightly less popular are James Gerber’s International Economics, 3rd edn (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2005), and Henry Thompson’s International Economics: Global Markets and Competition (Singapore: World Scientific, 2006). Essays in International Trade and Human Rights: Foundations and Conceptual Issues,


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the content, let me comment a little on these books themselves as objects: they are huge – and a search of abebooks.com suggests that they don’t come cheap. One of the bigger sellers was Dominick Salvatore’s International Economics: Eighth Edition (2004). Thirty-two shops listed the book for sale, at various prices, the most popular being US$132, the most expensive $178.92 (the study guide a snip at $92.25). Most books averaged around $100: Thomas A. Pugel’s International Economics, 12th edn (2004, 2 copies); Paul R. Krugman and Maurice Obstfeld’s International Economics: Theory and Policy, Seventh Edition (2006, 7 copies); Dennis R. Appleyard, Alfred J. Field, Jr. and Steven L. Cobb’s International Economics, 5th edn (2006, 5 copies). Beth V. Yarbrough and Robert M. Yarbrough’s more innovatively titled The World Economy: Trade and Finance, Seventh Edition (2006) retailed for around the same, although a handful of copies were available for half that price. Steve Husted and Michael Melvin’s International Economics, Sixth edition (2004) ranged from $59 to $188.53; likewise, there were cheap copies of Robert M. Dunn, Jr., and John H. Mutti’s International Economics: Sixth Edition (2004), but one UK seller was charging $219.59. Moving inside the covers, we find a curious convergence of positivism and imperialism: economists do not ‘argue’ or ‘claim’, they ‘discover’ and ‘show’. What is striking to a postcolonial reader is the degree to which first-world wealth is normalized and rationalized, while the poverty of five-sixths of the world’s population is either ignored or pathologized, a point on which there is remarkable unanimity. Chapter headings are more or less the same, key intellectual figures and theories are reiterated from one book to the next, and the tone is remarkably, consistently, authoritative, even and perhaps especially while the authors make the most tendentious claims. For example, Husted and Melvin boldly assert that ‘Irrespective of government policies, there is always a tendency for economic growth to occur. Increases in population imply a growing labor force. Investment in new plant and equipment by firms implies a larger and larger capital stock.’13 And there is even a bit of mutual admiration: outlining the need for her ‘European focus’, Barbara Ingham asserts that the American textbooks are ‘almost without exception authoritative and stimulating’.14 Where these textbooks do acknowledge debate, it is relocated to that time of ubiquitous error, the past: ‘Since about 1965, the views of most economists and policy makers on the development process have changed dramatically. Many of the stylized facts accepted earlier have now been recognized as incomplete, irrelevant, or just plain wrong.’ Warned about the pitfalls of history, students can now know eds Frederick M. Abbott, Christine Breining-Kaufmann and Thomas Cottier (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) present issues from a legal perspective, while Dennis Patrick McCarthy’s International Economic Integration in Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2006) takes an historical view. A valuable polemical source is International Economics and International Economic Policy: A Reader, eds Philip King, Sharmila King and Gaetano Antinolfi, 4th edn (Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2005). 13 Steve Husted and Michael Melvin, International Economics, Sixth edition (Boston: Pearson; Addison Wesley, 2004), p. 279. The authors go on to acknowledge that ‘actual patterns of factor growth and technical innovation differ quite substantially across various countries’. My point is simply that their account makes growth normative. 14 Barbara Ingham, International Economics: A European Focus (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004).

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that ‘developing economies respond to prices and incentives and can benefit from international trade based on comparative advantage or economies of scale just as developed economies do [emphasis in original].’15 Given this general conformity of perspective, argument and value, which mirrors the homogenizing vision of culture and economy, the variations between these books are relatively small. Thus much is made of minor differences in layout and case studies, as well as ‘improvements’ from the previous edition, in prefaces which energetically promote the text in hand. Another remarkable feature is the consistency in the positioning of ‘enemies’ of Economics. Whereas in disciplines like History, Literature and Philosophy, ‘dissent’ is customarily located within a particular discipline or field, as competing theories and interpretations are played off against each other to create a space for the new, in these volumes ‘opponents’ are defined in a much simpler and more surprising way: as non-economists. This distinction hinges on the fact that Economics presents itself as a highly theorized discipline, where theory is set in opposition to common sense and experience (and criticism of the over-reliance on theory in the discipline is, of course, itself a well-worn cliché). Again and again, readers are warned about the problem of making simplistic assumptions based on common sense, media reports, the arguments of politicians, and their own feelings or values, points which I will examine in a little more detail below. In promoting the gospel of free trade, readers are reminded that no less than 98% of economists agree with the assertion that trade advantages all countries; critics are those outside the discipline, and needless to say there is no supporting reference which allows us to check this claim, or even the parameters of the ‘survey’ which it purports to record.16 One of the most common and perhaps the most powerful deployment of ‘theory’ comes in the use of the notion of ‘comparative advantage’. Comparative advantage does not, as lay readers might expect, refer to the fact that one country might have an advantage over another in producing a particular item. (When country X has an advantage in producing steel because it has abundant reserves of iron ore, or coal, where country Y does not, that is called ‘absolute advantage’.) The term ‘comparative advantage’ refers to the relative level of profit obtained by producing one item rather than another, in the same place. For example, for reasons relating to the cost of labor and materials, country Z might profit more by producing wool or weapons than cheese or computers. The theory of comparative advantage implies that Z will ‘outsource’ the production of cheese and computers, maximizing its profits by concentrating on the production of wool and weapons. Although more sophisticated research, not to mention later chapters in these same textbooks, all point to the distorting effects of such a simplifying model – which presumes, for example, that there is no cultural investment in remaining a producer of cheese or computers – the theory is nevertheless repeatedly used to ‘prove’ that ‘all countries benefit from trade’. Where competing economic theories are noted, they are subtly discredited by being relocated into the realm of the poor and the political. Robert C. Feenstra writes that ‘The idea that developing countries might be subject to a decline in their 15 Beth V. Yarbrough and Robert M. Yarbrough, The World Economy: Trade and Finance, Seventh Edition (Mason, OH: Thomson South-Western/Thomson Higher Education, 2006), p. 333. 16 Gerber, p. 11.


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terms of trade, particularly for primary commodities, is associated with the Latin American economist Raúl Prebisch. While there is little evidence to support that hypothesis in general, it is still the case that declines in the terms of trade due to growth have been observed’.17 In this account, Prebisch seems intellectually isolated in his opposition to classic Ricardian theory (although this way of conceiving the debate is not mentioned), and his work is implicitly marginalized in being associated with a region in which there has been heated contestation of both neo-colonialism and neo-liberal economic policy. Feenstra does not mention that Prebisch’s research was done within the context of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), and there is no mention of the more general influence of the notion of core-periphery nor of Prebisch’s lasting intellectual influence through the work of dependency theorists.18 But Prebisch’s ideas are crucial to those who believe that unequal power was given to states able to monopolize industrial and other wealthgenerating processes associated with the ‘core’; 19 of this, nothing is said. The explanatory power of such theoretical models is created and sustained, in the face of criticism from ‘Latin America’, by invoking the authority of the ‘trained’ (economist) over the ‘untrained’ (everyone else). This is in contrast to research and theory in the humanities where the discourse of personal experience, although subject to robust criticism, has nevertheless in some fundamental ways transformed thinking about authority in almost all disciplines. Movements like feminism, anti-racism and anti-colonialism, as well as the discussion of ‘testimony’ and memory, have brought an ethical charge to many fields of humanities scholarship. By way of contrast, the authors of these textbooks consistently anticipate and belittle ethical objections to their claims and methods by positioning their critics as outside the discipline. The targets are not only those outside universities (particularly politicians, who are self-interested), but students (who are naïve), and academics in other disciplines (who are ill-informed). Take, for example, this apparently even-handed questioning of neo-liberal thought: Should low wages and poor working conditions be a cause for concern? Many people think so. In the 1990s the anti-globalisation movement attracted many adherents in advanced countries, especially on college campuses … It’s fair to say that most economists have viewed the anti-globalisation movement as at best misguided. The standard analysis of comparative advantage suggests that trade is mutually beneficial to the countries that engage in it.20 17 Robert C. Feenstra, Advanced International Trade: Theory and Evidence (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 338. The reference for Prebisch is The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems (New York: United Nations, 1950), while two references are given for the remarks about modern observations, one unpublished: Daron Acemoglu and Jaume Ventura, ‘The World Income Distribution’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117:2 (2002), pp. 659–94, and Peter Debaere and Hongshik Lee, ‘The Real-Side Determinants of Countries’ Terms of Trade: A Panel Data Analysis’, University of Texas at Austin, 2002. 18 Immanuel Wallerstein, World-systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 11–12, 17–18. 19 Ibid., p. 18. 20 Paul R. Krugman and Maurice Obstfeld, International Economics: Theory and Policy, Seventh Edition (Boston: Pearson, Addison Wesley, 2006), p. 267.

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Concluding their next section with a repeat of the question, whether the antiglobalization movement’s goal was ‘right’, Krugman and Obstfeld reiterate ‘the standard economist’s argument’ that ‘despite the low wages earned by workers in developing countries, those workers are better off than they would be if globalization had not taken place’.21 The authors then go on to rehearse a series of arguments against globalization, canvassing labor standards, the environment, and the effect on ‘local and national cultures’, answering these objections by invoking ‘the right of individuals in free societies’.22 Rhetorically, the authors seem to want to shame students into believing that there are no well-grounded arguments against coercing poor countries into free trade. It is not just the young and idealistic who are belittled: fellow academics in noneconomic disciplines receive the same condescension. Influential historian Paul Kennedy is lampooned by Krugman and Obstfeld for expressing concern over the fact that a country ordered by the IMF or World Bank to focus on producing exports might be unable to find a sufficient range of products (or indeed any product) that can be made more cheaply than another country – ‘why is that such a terrible thing?’ Kennedy’s concerns are dismissed by citing the hypothetical model which ‘proves’ that ‘gains from trade depend on comparative rather than absolute advantage’. Inevitably, ‘both’ [read, ‘all’] countries gain from trade’.23 Similarly, a case study is used to dismiss concern about low wages in a country Krugman and Obstfeld choose to call ‘Foreign’. ‘Certainly it is not an attractive position to be in’, they observe sympathetically, but one writer’s objection to the fact that the chief executive of a clothing company earned $2 million per year while central American workers of the same company earned 56 cents per hour is dismissed as ‘emotional’.24 In an effort to drive home this message, one pair of authors asks their readers, again rhetorically, ‘How would you feel if someone denied you the right to listen to the Rolling Stones or watch Jackie Chan movies, on the grounds that American cultural independence must be safeguarded?’25 This bizarre reversal implies that those potentially ‘deprived’ of music or films have ‘suffered’ in the same way as those living in countries and regions deprived of food staples by conversion to a cash economy and monocropping. This is poor logic, and pernicious insensitivity. If poor countries trade proportionately more than rich ones, it seems just possible that trade might not be the engine of wealth it is claimed to be, and thus cannot be used to transform the economy of poor countries. The fact that the average proportion of GDP traded by wealthy countries is around 16%, while the average proportion of GDP traded by poor countries is more than 50% higher at 27%26 is met with blind faith in the dictum that trade is the engine of growth. The focus on

21 Ibid., pp. 268, 269. 22 Ibid., p. 271. 23 Krugman and Obstfeld, ‘Labor Productivity and the Comparative Advantage: The Ricardian Model’, International Economics: Theory and Policy, Sixth Edition (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2003), p. 23. 24 Ibid., pp. 24, 26. 25 Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics, Seventh Edition, p. 271. 26 Pugel, p. 310.


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theory and the careful selection of case studies also facilitate what is, in the main, silence about levels of subsidies given to industries in Europe, the United States and parts of Asia which so disable trade from poor countries, although repeated criticism of the ‘distortions’ of the market seem to be aimed at those whom the writers dare not criticize by name, politicians and agro-business. In lieu of analysis, students are asked to memorize the gospel of trade: in a subheading of their International Economics, Husted and Melvin set out the chant, ‘The Gains from Free Trade: One More Time’.27 This kind of blindfolded learning and the policy implementation it facilitates leads one critic of such views, John Mihevc, to title his book The Market Tells Them So: The World Bank and Economic Fundamentalism in Africa.28 There is the occasional admission that theories about the inevitable benefits of free trade might not work as well for poor countries.29 Dunn and Mutti note that ‘The winners from free trade are owners of human capital (highly educated people), and those with financial capital invested in export industries’.30 This is a crucial acknowledgement, having implications not only for the distribution of wealth between nation states, but also within them. It is a claim which might be used to transform, or at least show that there are alternatives to, the arguments put by many of the authors of textbooks of international economics. But case studies which show these arguments playing out are rarely cited, the views of economists from poor countries seem not to exist, and the experiences of workers (let alone the unemployed) are authoritatively ventriloquized and then dismissed. Put another way, the skepticism which might be admitted via a more extended consideration of these claims – allowing such facts not to be seen as anomalous, but as requiring a rethinking of the political geography of economic theory – is not permitted by the authoritative tone which these authors adopt. One is tempted to speculate that a more critical approach, which admitted debate and uncertainty, might be seen as intellectual or ideological weakness (or both). To take this ‘weak’ position for a moment, rather than getting readers to memorize the chant that everyone wins, it might be more accurate to say something like: ‘the rich control trade negotiations and thereby retain the privilege and the capacity to insist on their right to penetrate the markets of poor countries while protecting their own. This is readily observable in the increasing wealth of the wealthy. And because economic research is concentrated in wealthy regions and nation-states, economists are not really in a position to understand properly the effect on the vast majority of the world’s people, who are poor, of advocating free trade. Long-term trends would seem to indicate that they are worse off, except in those cases where they have access to oil or mineral wealth’. But it seems that the cure for the unequal distribution of 27 Husted and Melvin, p. 157. 28 John Mihevc, The Market Tells Them So: The World Bank and Economic Fundamentalism in Africa (London and New Jersey: Zed Books; Penang and Accra: Third World Network, 1995). 29 For example, ‘the static application of comparative advantage may not be very helpful in providing guidelines for trade and specialization in a dynamic LDC [Less Developed Country] setting.’ Appleyard, Field and Cobb, p. 413. 30 Robert M. Dunn, Jr., and John H. Mutti, International Economics: Sixth Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 65.

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wealth and the continuing poverty of the vast majority is not less but more economic theory, and more economists to ensure it is implemented properly. For the moment – alas! – ‘no matter how sophisticated and careful research findings are, there will always be politicians formulating, and non-economists administering policies’.31 In valorizing a model economy as a high-growth, free-market one, imposing that model on poor countries, and denigrating other kinds of disciplinary knowledge and value which might be used to condemn such practices, modern advocates of ‘free trade’ give new impetus to imperialist assumptions about the inevitable association between race, and wealth or poverty. One of the unacknowledged axes of this dichotomizing of rich and poor, white and black, is that between urban and rural: there is an unstated assumption that the poor do not belong in the main street, a point emphasized in the work of Saskia Sassen. How do textbooks of international economics consider this connectedness between rich and poor, and more particularly the implication that questions such as safe conditions of work, environmental care, and the preservation of local cultures are not simply questions for ‘them’ but for those who profit from or visit the poorer countries? In an example remarkably similar to that of the music, cited above, the same writers include a one-page ‘case study’ of ‘The Shipbreakers of Alang’, on the north-west coast of India. Krugman and Obstfeld combat claims by Western activists about the dangerous nature of the work, and the negative impact on the environment of the ship-breaking, by citing the Indian laborers’ pride in their work.32 They represent activism as neo-colonialist condescension – although it’s worth noting that their choice of a case study in India to consider workers’ safety and the environmental impact of industry implicitly relocates debates about poorly remunerated, dangerous, and environmentally damaging work to ‘poor countries’. The authors ignore similar debates in their own country, while their focus on ‘western activists’ sets aside questions from Indian commentators. Rather than ventriloquizing for them, they might have chosen to quote Dilip D’Souza, who asks of his readers on the India Together website, must we do this balancing act? Should we balance these conditions, the measly pay, the goo, against the fact that they are better off than they would have been at home, at least financially? Is this a fair or reasonable exercise? The lesson of Alang, at least to me, is not so much about environmental and safety conditions here. Though of course I want those things addressed, of course I don’t want the West dumping its dirty work on India solely because Indians work cheap and standards are lax.

31 Appleyard, Field and Cobb, p. 431; see also Dunn and Mutti, p. 64. 32 Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics, Seventh Edition, pp. 272–3. An Indian press report by Dominique Girard, ‘Reviving Alang’, published in the Times of India, 11 Feb. 2006 and promising ‘further perfection of hygiene and security measures’, at , 13 February 2006, can be set against a 2003 Greenpeace account which notes the deaths of 24 workers in the previous three months: ‘Rainbow Warrior on “Toxic Patrol” in India’, at , 13 February 2006.


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The lesson, despite those thoughts, is about the conditions we tolerate here in India – safety, environmental, human above all – that make Alang possible. Alang will leave me brooding about that lesson for weeks.33

In asking their students to think about what ‘we’ should do about ‘them’, the writers of International Economics misappropriate that ethics of the local (which is used and complicated by D’Souza) in order to construct a moral high ground occupied, amazingly, by those who do not care. There will be no ‘brooding about that lesson for weeks’ among their students. This cold-hearted high-mindedness underpins repeated claims that institutions like the World Bank and the IMF work hard to alleviate poverty by making loans, and insisting on responsible economic management. For example, Dominic Salvatore, of New York’s Fordham University, writes that ‘A joint 1996 debt relief plan by the World Bank, the international monetary fund, and individual donor nations provided, through the Paris club, to take as much as 80 percent of the foreign debt owed to them by the poorest heavily indebted nations on condition that these nations adopt a strict program of market reform, including lower trade barriers, privatization of state industries, and more openness toward foreign investment.’34 Failures are the product of recalcitrance: ‘only four countries … qualified for the program’. In fact, these programs generally require privatization of service sectors, including utilities such as water and electricity; elimination of tariffs, to allow access to domestic markets for foreign goods (something often not fully reciprocated); prioritizing the servicing of debt; and implementing ‘cost-recovery’ policies in sectors such as health and education. These policies of ‘cost-recovery’ in health and education, implemented in various countries in Africa, have been particularly damaging: introducing school fees at primary school level, for example, dramatically lowered participation rates (particularly of girls), ultimately damaging not only ‘productivity’ but also social infrastructure and health. In stark demonstration of this contention, Stephen Lewis notes research indicating the inverse relationship between levels of education and levels of HIV infection, and documents at length a fruitless campaign to have these fees abolished.35 But the IMF and World Bank have long placed economic credentials above even the most basic civil rights. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, in his study of the historiography of interlacustrine Africa, for example, notes the continuing support of these two organizations for Milton Obote’s government in Uganda during a period in which attacks on people in the southern part of the country left 100,000 dead.36 Stephen Lewis writes, ‘What makes me nearly apoplectic – and I very much want 33 Dilip D’Souza, ‘Alang: Give us a Break’ on the India Together website, at , 13 February 2006; see also Manish Tiwari’s ‘Titanic Junkyard’, at , 13 February 2006. 34 Salvatore, p. 380. 35 Stephen Lewis, pp. 93–4; see pp. 71–106 for a discussion of the impact of fees, and largely fruitless campaigns to abolish them in the face of rigorous ‘cost-recovery’ policies demanded by international agencies. 36 Jean-Pierre Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History, trans. Scott Straus (New York: Zone Books, 2003), p. 297.

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to say this – is that the Bank and the Fund were fully told about their mistakes [in advocating such policies] even as the mistakes were being made. It’s so enraging that they refused to listen. They simply didn’t respond to arguments which begged them to review the human consequences of their policies. The fact that poverty became increasingly entrenched, or that economies were not responding to the dogma as the dogma predicted, made no difference … The credo was everything; the people were a laboratory’.37 My argument is that this indifference to the humanity of the poor, who are overwhelmingly concentrated in the colonized world, is carefully nurtured in textbooks which euphemize the destruction which Lewis and Chrétien describe: in these accounts, IMF and World Bank policies offer ‘market discipline’, ‘incentives to reduce costs’, ‘motivation to innovate’ – not poverty.38 Inevitably I am suggesting that the channels cut by empire are being dredged, allowing modern versions of racism that characterize the attitudes of the wealthy to the poor to flow uninterrupted in policy and political arenas. Lewis supports this apparently contentious claim: I can’t tell you how many meetings of donors I’ve attended at which the views of [diplomats towards] the national administration [receiving aid] bordered on slander, so intensely colonial it could turn your stomach. That’s not true of all, of course: there were some thoroughly committed diplomats. But there were far too many who resented their posting to a minor African country, and glowered their way through every meeting.39

He goes on to emphasize that the prejudices against the poor – the black, the invisible – were played out and accentuated in these ‘irredeemably’ colonial places where the cities and towns were a kind of refuge from apparently even more terrible places whose reputations were built on myth: ‘a surprising number of Western diplomats had seldom ventured beyond the capitals; they lived lives of rumor informed by gossip … And they were so stubbornly opinionated, so omniscient. And so often wrong.’ Lewis’s trenchant observations about prejudice are reiterated by Stiglitz. In the midst of surveying a series of interventions likewise ‘gone wrong’, Stiglitz remarks, ‘the IMF is not particularly interested in hearing the thoughts of its “client countries” on such topics as development strategies or fiscal austerity. All too often, the Fund’s approach to developing countries has had the feel of a colonial ruler’.40 Like Lewis, Stiglitz comments on the blind pursuit of ideology: ‘For the believers in free and unfettered markets, capital market liberalization was obviously desirable; one didn’t

37 Stephen Lewis, p. 16. The author of an IMF Working Paper entitled ‘International Trade and Poverty Alleviation’ – clearly but never explicitly a reply to repeated charges that the IMF has both inflicted and ignored the catastrophic effects of market liberalization in its policies – surveys the few empirical studies of the effects of market liberalization on the poor. Answering the question, ‘What does the empirical literature tell us?’, G. Bannister concludes that ‘in general, the results of the studies cited above are positive’ although the summaries used tell a slightly different story. IMF Working Paper WP/01/54, at , 15 January 2006. 38 Yarbrough and Yarbrough, p. 336. 39 Stephen Lewis, p. 101. 40 Stiglitz, p. 40.


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need evidence that it promoted growth. Evidence that it caused instability would be dismissed as merely one of the adjustment costs, part of the pain that had to be accepted in the transition to a market economy’.41 What is the outcome of these policies? The total debt of developing countries is now over 2.6 trillion US dollars.42 Of course, some academics believe this ‘doesn’t necessarily signal a problem’, even if countries like ‘Burundi, Liberia, Rwanda, Serbia and Montenegro, Sudan, and Zambia each owe debt more than 400 times their respective annual export earnings’.43 The desire for ‘trajectory’ is powerfully felt for those who map their own lives and careers onto narratives of development which inform and establish the normativity of perpetual increase. The value given to movement over stasis, growth over consolidation, profit over sustainability, is reflected in the preference repeatedly shown in these textbooks and in economic policy-making for innovation and ‘reform’ over analysis and historicized thinking. This structure of value takes a distinctive form in colonial environments where capitalism is harnessed to, or harnesses, the logic of racism and ethnocentrism to fashion a set of values in which capitalism ‘complements’ the ideology of colonialism. This formulation, outlined by Claude Ake, results in a self-renewing system of exploitation in which the colonizer’s monopoly of ‘civilization’ rationalizes brutality: ‘Every assault on the colonized person could be defended as a necessary concession to the realities of his state of development … somehow, the more inhuman the practice of colonialism, the more plausible its ideology’.44 By deploying a narrative of progress with the desire to legitimate the accumulation of capital at its heart, these writers can represent the poor as being ‘treated in a manner commensurate with their stage of development.’45 And the brutality is further masked by the rhetorics of national interest and identity protection which characterize contemporary trade relations and trade legislations, while the drive for increased return on capital fuels the destruction of cultures and environments, imperiling the health and lives of workers worldwide. Some critics of free trade and deregulation argue that there is a direct relationship between the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies, the destruction of local economies, and the proliferation of industries relying on slave labor: that such policies do not simply take advantage of, but create and reinforce radical inequalities usually based on the old axes of race, gender and place. They point out that the economic policies ‘Promoted by international lending organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund … [push] certain countries to export women for labor (the Philippines) – making them vulnerable to trafficking – or to develop economies based on tourism (Thailand), with the huge dependence on sex tourism’.46 As countries shift the demand for services from the public to the private 41 Ibid., p. 222. 42 Yarbrough and Yarbrough, p. 341. 43 Ibid., pp. 345, 347. 44 Claude Ake, ‘The Congruence of Political Economies and Ideologies in Africa’, in Political Economy of Contemporary Africa, eds Peter C.W. Gutkind and Immanuel Wallerstein, 2nd edn (Beverly Hills, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1985), p. 230. 45 Ibid. 46 Janice G. Raymond et al., The Comparative Study of Women Trafficked in the Migration Process: Patterns, Profiles and Health Consequences of Sexual Exploitation in

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sector, ‘the cost is not only increased but has been shifted – mainly to women – who must supply these services themselves, work harder or migrate overseas for family survival on the worsening economic conditions’.47 ‘Women are heavily recruited … both in their own countries and overseas in the low wage, piece rate, casual jobs, with hazardous work conditions, and where social protection and mechanisms for collecting bargaining are absent’.48 ‘The chain of exploitation, based not only on the worker’s nationality but also on gender, combined with her undocumented status and responsibilities for coping with a succession of familial, economic, political, social, educational, and health crises, puts her in a position of accepting “cualquier cosa” or “just about anything”’.49 One of the more ironic and terrible elements of this acceleration in direct exploitation has been the commensurate tightening of laws pertaining to immigrants and minorities.50 And as the legal transfer of populations becomes more difficult, ‘traffickers become the major … players to facilitate international migration’, often undertaken in horrific conditions.51 In a hideous reversal of the ‘Middle Passage’, the Atlantic crossing made by slave ships carrying human cargo from Africa to the Americas, ‘28 Dominican women bound for the sex industry in Western Europe, died of suffocation in a closed container while being transported by traffickers by sea’.52 The logics of racism and of exploitation of women are condensed in the observation, again made in the report on the trafficking of women, that ‘Foreign men are quoted as saying that Filipino wives are subservient and exotic, and that getting them into countries on six month visitors visas is cheaper than using women in prostitution’.53 The questions which end James Walvin’s chapter ‘Consuming Passions’, the introduction to his study of slavery in the British empire, seem pertinent here: ‘How many people made the connection? How many realized the interdependence between black slavery and the material pleasures of white life; between untold black misery and the expansion of white pleasure?’54 Such misery, and the symbiosis between pleasure and pain (for rich and poor respectively) are rarely the subject of discussion in textbooks of international Five Countries (Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Venezuela and the United States), ([N. Amherst: CATW, 2002]), p. 2. 47 Ibid. Another ‘structural problem’ is male demand, among which is the fact that ‘sex has been tolerated as a male right in a commodity culture’. 48 Ibid., p. 33. 49 Ibid, p. 41. 50 Sassen, p. xxviii. 51 Raymond et al., p. 3. 52 Ibid., p. 4. This occurred in 1985. 53 Ibid., p. 28, citing Jordan Haduca and Ma. Elenita Alba, A Study on the Causes of Violence and Death of Filipino Mail-order Brides in Australia (Quezon City: International Studies Department, Miriam College, 2000), and Nikki Barrowclough, ‘The Shameful Story of Australia’s Serial Husbands’, The Age Magazine, Good Weekend, 6 May 1995, pp. 46–51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63–4, 67, cited by Raymond et al. as ‘Serial Sponsorship Trafficking through Marriage’. 54 James Walvin, Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire, 2nd edn (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), p. 9.


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economics, which on the rare occasions that they develop meaningful case studies prefer to focus on those countries that have experienced significant economic growth. The term ‘miracle’ is repeatedly used to describe wealth creation on a national scale,55 as well as the work of individual entrepreneurs. In the early twenty-first century, this term is associated most frequently with Asia: indeed, the focus has shifted from Japan (in the 1980s) to south-east Asia (in the 1990s) thence to China and India (in the twenty-first century). At the heart of this is faith in the magic of wealth – there is certainly no mention of the significant role played by infrastructure like education or health care in generating such economic growth. As an extreme example of this faith in money, take this account of how students need to think about the invasion of Iraq: ‘the entire Iraqi economy needs rebuilding, amid significant turmoil in its major export market – oil’.56 Running over what they see as the major events of the world in the past couple of years, the same authors claim that ‘the case, scale, and scope of such events underscores the widespread perception of the increased importance of international economics for understanding world events. Luckily, just a few simple tools of economic analysis can provide a great deal of insight into the ever-changing world economy’.57 This blind faith in economic theory has no parallel, I think, in humanities education, which has been energized by an ethic of inclusivity and critique, much of it informed by the struggle against colonialism. Against this trend, at the heart of some of the most influential educational institutions of the world, pop-neoliberal values are being memorized and tested, credentialing new generations of political and commercial leaders. These textbooks are also characterized by what Michael Taussig refers to in passing as ‘the magic of style’, ‘the contrived manner by which objectivity is created’ by writing which presumes a judicious mode in the face of radical inequality (and in the case Taussig discusses, terror so complete and so integral to industry that it might be a model for exploitation globally).58 In that sense, they seem closer to those ‘Public discourses about need in modern capitalism [that] relentlessly disguise themselves as concerned with natural and essential desires produced by the autonomous choices of informed consumers’ than they do to academic discourses which seek to restore the messiness of that ‘massively complex intersection of micropowers and macropowers, local desires and collective interests, imagination and restriction’ that shape production and consumption in colonial environments.59 One of the more striking aspects of this rhetoric is avoidance of or discomfort about words like poverty and deprivation: certainly there is studious eschewing of any terms which might associate the authors with critiques of capitalism. This makes the primary challenge to humanities academics a pedagogical one, in which we must

55 See for example Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics, Seventh Edition, p. 244, who do at least use scare quotes. 56 Yarbrough and Yarbrough, p. iii, my emphasis. 57 Ibid., my emphasis. 58 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 37. 59 Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, & Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), p. 216.

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balance carefully the sometimes competing, sometimes complementary claims of ethics and complexity in formulating critiques of both past and present. One aspect of this challenge is to look from our own disciplines to the world at large – and to our colleagues in other parts of the academy – in balancing that call for ethics, and complication, in scholarship and teaching.

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Index

Abercrombie, Nicholas 94 Aboriginal art xxii, 123–33 Aboriginal peoples 166, 172 see also indigenous peoples Aboriginality 123–5, 127 pan-Aboriginality 125 Abraham, Phineas 47–8 Abrahams, Peter 84 Acemoglu, Daron 199 activism 91, 202 adoption 154–5, 171 advertising xvii, 74, 99 see also marketing aesthetics xxii, 77, 96, 123–6, 129, 137 Africa xxiii, 9, 28, 59, 64–7, 69–71, 194–5, 203, 206 scramble for 139 see also Central Africa, East Africa, Madagascar, South Africa, Tanzania, Western Africa, Zanzibar, Zimbabwe Africans 13, 18, 28–9, 66, 181 see also Bantu, Zulu agencing/agencement 107–15, 118–22 agency 92, 98, 161 AIDS xxii, 59–71, 109–21, 169–70, 172–5, 187 pandemic 69–70 writing 110–11, 121 Ake, Claude 205 Alba, Ma. Elenita 206 Algren, Nelson 78 allegory 73, 110–14, 121–2 Amazing Thailand Campaign 95–104 Amazon basin 5 America: Central 5–6, 11 North xvi, 60, 64, 166–7, 169 see also United States American cinema 78–9 Americanization 75–6, 77, 79–80 Americas, the 15, 66, 170, 177, 181, 185, 206 Andes 6 animals 64, 67, 69–71, 101 animal sacrifice 187

Annales Apostoliques 20–22 anthropology xii, 8, 73, 103, 171 anthropological gaze 6, 103 objects 165 Antigua xxii, 111–17, 119–20, 122, 137 apartheid xxiii, 83–92, 183–5, 186–90 anti-apartheid 91, 183–4, 188 post-apartheid xxiii, 183, 185, 188 Appleyard, Dennis R. 202 Arden, Nicki 186–7 Arnheim, Rudolf 129 Ashworth, Gregory 100 Asian Crisis 95 Aspinall, Algernon E. 13 assemblage 107, 109 Australia xv, 38, 123–33, 140, 149 authenticity xxiii, 14–15, 70, 98–9, 101, 127, 161, 167–8, 190 autobiography xxii, xiii, 180, 183–9 dual xxii, 110, 113, 119–20 see also life stories autochthony/autochthonous 98–9 Auty, Giles 127–8 Bagamoya 17–22, 25–29 Bahamas 6, 140 bananas/banana trade xix, 11–14, 16 Bandy, Joe 102 Bantu 89–90 Barclay, Surgeon-Major 52 Barrowclough, Nikki 206 barter/bartering 32–3 Bartolovich, Crystal xviii Baucke, William 39 Bauman, Zygmunt xv, 93 Beat Generation 79–80 Beckford, William D. 137–8 Benedek, Laslo 79 benevolence xvi, xxii, 43, 135, 141 Bennet, George 34, 36–7 Benveniste, Emile 108 Bersani, Leo 64

230


Bible trade 37–8, 172 see also missions/missionaries Billing, Michael S. xvi Bizos, George 189 blackbirding 149–50 see also slavery body/bodies 8, 25, 42, 61–71, 132, 154, 178 animal 67–71 art/decoration 132, 144, 153 ceremonial 124 deviant, 65 diseased 44, 55, 170 displaced 66 doubled 70 foreign 62, 70–71 gay male 62, 64 queer 64, 172 raced 64, 67, 70–71 simian 61, 64, 68–9 trade in 60–1, 66–7 transvested 64 body politic 139 Bonner, Hypatia 35 Bonner, Phil 84 Bowman, Marion 98 Bozzoli, Belinda 84 Brant, Beth xxiii, 169–72, 174, 176–81 Brassey, Annie 136–40 Britain xx, 37, 42–3, 50, 55, 57, 76–81, 139, 149 see also England British Guiana 44, 46 Brooks, Richard 79 Brydon, Diana 175 Bryson, Norman 126–7 Buck, Sir Peter 36 Buckingham, Jane 51 Burke, Timothy 207 Burma 44, 52 Burn, Ian 127 Burroughs, William S. xx 73–5, 80–81 The Naked Lunch 73; Junkie 80 Butler, Rex 124 Butler, Sally 124–5 Butler, Thomas 196 Cain, P.J. 43 Callahan, Daniel 193 Canada/Canadians xxiii, 62, 140, 157–68

nationhood 161, 166–7 native 169–81 Canadian literature 160, 166–7 see also Brant, Highway, JohnsonTekahionwake cannibalism 15–16, 176 see also Weetigo capital/capitalism xiii, xiv–xvi, xviii, xx–xxi, xxiii–xxiv, 33–4, 37, 73–5, 81, 91, 93, 95–6, 104, 108, 138–9, 141, 197, 201, 204–207 Caribs 9–16 Carib War, the 10 Caribbean, the xix, xxii, 3–16, 44, 111, 140–41 see also Antigua, Jamaica, West Indies Carter, H. Vandyke 46 Central Africa 17–18, 19, 59–60, 65–6, 68–70 Chambers, Iain 79 Chapman, Michael 84 chimpanzees xx, 59, 66–71 Chiquita 11 Chirimuuta, Richard C. 69 Chirimuuta, Rosalind J. 69 Chrétien, Jean-Pierre 203 Christianity 18, 21–3, 31, 34–7, 39, 168, 172, 177, 179, 187 Christianization xvi, 32, 36 Cibane, Wilfred 185–6 civilization/civility 32–4, 36–8, 43, 52, 146, 148–9, 178, 205 civilizing mission xv, xvi, 161, 165, 167, 196 class xviii, 57, 61, 74, 85, 93, 110, 128 Clifford, Edward 41–2 Clifford, James 103 Cobb, Steven L. 202 cocaine 74–5, 81 cocoa 138–40 coffee 138 Cohen, Erik 94, 98, 101–102 Cohen, Stanley 79 Cold War 59, 66–7, 73, 78 color 8–9 Columbus, Christopher 6–8, 135 Comaroff, Jean xxi, 38 Comaroff, John L. xxi, 38

Index commodity/commodities xiv, xvii–xviii, xx, xxiii, 15, 29, 37, 74, 76–8, 81, 101, 125, 195, 199 addiction 75, 81 cultures xiv, xvi exchange 73, 100 fetish xviii, 73, 78, 81, 100–101 racism xviii relations 93, 104 commoditization hypothesis 93 comparative advantage 198 contact zone 143 Correa, Eugenia 95, 102 Cree 172–4, 176–7 legend 175 language 174, 179–80 Crate, Joan 157–9, 161–4 Crosby, Albert 170 Crowley, Aleister 75 Culler, Jonathan 98 cultural exchange 123, 130, 157 Cunningham, D.D. 46–7 D’Souza, Dilip 202–203 Das, Dilip K. 102 Davidson, Andrew 46–7 Davies, Angela 67 de Klerk, Frederik Willem 187–8 de Kock, Eugene 188–9 de Veuster, Father Damien 41–4, 48–9, 57 Debaere, Peter 199 Deleuze, Gilles 107, 109, 128 Dening, Greg 6 development xiii, xiv, 24, 27, 29, 101, 103, 141, 197, 204–205 underdevelopment 94 Dickinson, Peter 180 Dirlik, Arif xvi, xxiv disease xx, 43, 45, 62, 66, 68–71, 75 see also AIDS, leprosy, sexually transmitted disease Dissanayake, Wimal xviii Dominica 9–16, 139 dot painting 124–5 Driver, Dorothy 86 drug trade xx, 73–81 addiction 75, 80, 101 wars 78

231

Drum magazine 84–89, 92 Duckworth, Dyce 47 Dunn, Robert M. 201 East Africa 17–29, 44 Echtner, Charlotte M. 94, 98 economics, as discourse/discipline xix, xxiii, 8, 81, 194, 198 as practice 7, 33, 37, 76, 123 international xix, 194–8, 200–203, 206–207 neo-liberal xv, 81, 199, 205 economic rationalism xv economic theory 194, 198–202 Edelman, Lee 67, 170 Edson, Wesley 13 Einhorn, Arthur 14 Ellis, William 31, 36 embodiment xviii, 93, 97, 117, 174 see also body/bodies Engelbrecht, Bushie 185 England 36, 41, 43, 47, 52, 139, 157, 160–61 English peoples/identity 20, 42, 158–9, 161, 166, 168 un-English 79 English language 114, 145, 151, 174, 179, 183 epidemiology 69–70 see also disease Epstein, Steven 61–2 Esper, Dwain 78 Etherington, Norman 18 ethnicity xiii, xxiii, 15 ethics xxii–xxiii, xv, 32, 104, 133, 164, 190, 193, 199, 203, 207–208 ethnocentrism 205 Eurocentrism 124, 128 Europe/Europeans 9, 20, 29, 44–5, 55, 69, 74, 76, 135, 140–1, 145–6, 151, 166, 169–70, 178, 186, 197, 201, 206 colonies 11 democracy 78 exploration 17 history 170, 177 imperialism xiv, 6–9, 26, 28, 31–7, 71, 102, 169–70, 173, 178, 194 liquor 83–4, 88–9

232


market 140 religion 177 tourism 28 trade 11, 195 viruses 170 European Union 11 evangelization 35 see also Christianization exoticism 94, 96, 161, 166 Fabian, Johannes 103 Fabian, Robert 77 Fahn, James David 95 Farson, Daniel 79 Feenstra, Robert C. 198–9 feminism 92, 107, 199 Fermor, Patrick Leigh 13 Field, Alfred J. Jr. 202 Fieldhouse, D.K. xvi Filewod, Alan 176 Fortune, Linda 184 Fountain, Nigel 80 Fox, Tilbury 46–7 free trade 11–12, 74, 198, 200–202, 205 French 9, 20, 26, 143, 178 language 179 tradition 109 Fridjhon, Michael 91 Friedman-Kien, A. et al 64–5 friendship 8 Froude, James Anthony 138–40 Frow, John 93–4, 100 Geertz, Clifford xiii gender xiii, xviii, xxiii, 32, 67–8, 71, 152–3, 164, 169, 172, 176, 179–80, 186, 205–206 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) xiv genocide 181 Gerber, James 198 gift giving 7, 146–7, 149, 152–3, 155 Gilder, S.S.B. 63–4 Gilman, Sander 70 Gilroy, Paul xiv Giron, Alicia 95, 102 globalization xiii–xvii, 73–5, 81, 93, 103–104, 108, 199–200

gold 3–5, 8–9, 83 Goldberg, Jonathan 70–71, 169–71, 178, 180 Goodall, Brian 99–100 Gordin, Jeremy 188–9 Gosling, John 76 Gottlieb, M.S. et al 64–5 Graham, Bob 185 green monkeys 60–61, 65 Gregory, James 185 Griffiths, Gareth 19 Grivel, Charles 98 Grossman, Lawrence S. 12 Group Areas Act 185 Guattari, Félix 107, 109 Gunson, Neil 32 Gurnah, Abdulrazak 22 Habermans, Jürgen xv Haduca, Jordan 206 Hamilton-Smith, Barry 65 Hamman, H. 89 Hatt, John 13–14 haunting/hauntology 110, 113, 118–22 Hawai‘i/Hawaiian 41–2, 144–7 Henschel, Fr. Joh. 18 Hermer, Carol 90 heterosexuality 67, 169–70, 175 Heuman, Gad 195 Hewlett, T.G. 47 Highway, Rene 173, 175, 180 Highway, Tomson xxiii, 172–80 Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing 173, 176–7, 179 Kiss of the Fur Queen 172–7, 179–80 Hillis, J.D. 46 HIV infection 59–62, 64–6, 68–71, 117, 203 see also AIDS Hmong tribespeople 101 Hoggart, Richard 77 Hollingworth, Robert 125, 127–9 Holroyd, Mary 183 homophobia 121, 172, 176–7, 179 homosexuality 62–8, 80, 116, 121, 170–72, 176 Honychurch, Lennox 9 Hopkins, Harry 77 Horne, C. Silvester 36, 38 Horton, Meurig 65–6, 70

Index Hughes, George 94 Hulme, Peter 148 Husted, Steve 197, 201 Huxley, Aldous 75 hybridity/hybridization 162, 173–5, 180–81 image trade 81, 161–8 indentured labor xv, 11, 44, 149 indeterminacy, theories of 128–9 India xx, 41–57 Indian/Indianness (native), as identity 171–2, 176, 181 as stereotype 5, 157, 160–62, 165–8, 178 indigeneity 3–16, 129, 161–2, 164, 166–7, 180 indigenous artifacts 37–8 see also maro indigenous labor 33, 36 see also blackbirding indigenous peoples/cultures xvi, xix, xxii, 28, 31–39, 70, 97, 108, 123–33, 180, 185, 187 see also Aboriginals, Caribs, Cree, Mohawk, Native Canadians, Pacific Islanders Ingham, Barbara 197 Inglis, Brian 81 International Monetary Fund xiv, xxiii, 11, 95, 102, 200, 203–205 intersubjectivity 107–12 Iraq 207 ivory 17, 188 Jagamara, Michael Nelson 129–31, 133 Jamaica 11, 44, 135–7, 140 jazz 75, 77–9, 85 Jenny, Laurent 109 Johnson, Donald [McIntosh] 77–8, 80–81 Johnson, Vivien 124–5 Johnson-Tekahionwake, Pauline xxiii, 157–68 Johnston, Denis 179 Johnston, William 47 junk 73, 81 see also drugs

Kalinago Barana Auté (Carib Cultural Village) 15 Kanthack, A.A. 52, 57 Keller, Betty 157, 161, 165 Kent, Graeme 33 Kerridge, Roy 80 Kincaid, Jamaica 110–22, 141, 194 My Brother 110–22 King, Michael R. 95 Kinsman, Gary 62 Knabe, Susan 62, 174 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame 123–33 Kontogeorgopoulos, Nick 95 Krishnaswamy, Revathi xiv, xv Krog, Antjie 189–91 Krugman, Paul R. 199–200, 202, 207 Kuzwayo, Ellen 84–5 La Hause, Paul 84 labor trade 149–50 see also indentured labor, slavery landscape xxii, 130, 132, 137–8, 166 language 85, 88, 102, 108–10, 114, 119, 124, 128, 130, 152–3, 155, 174, 178–9, 189–91 contact 155 indigenous language 174 see also Cree, English, French Lee, Hongshik 199 lepers/leprosy 41–57 aetiology 50 bacillus 53–4 demographics 54–5 leper asylum 52–3 segregation of lepers 49–51, 57 Leprosy Investigation Commission xx, 41–2, 45–57 Levi, Primo 111 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 135–7 Lewis, Stephen 195, 203–204 Lewis, T.R. 46–7 Liebst, Flo 25 life stories/life-writing xxiii, 183–91 see also autobiography Lillard, Charles 163 liquor trade 83–92 see also shebeen Liveing, Robert 47

233

234


Livingstone, David 17, 24–6 Lodge, Tom 90 London Missionary Society (LMS) 31–9 Longclaws, Lyle 179 Louria, Donald B. 81 Lynch, Michael 62 Lyotard, Jean-François 112 MacCannell, Dean xx, xxi, 15, 98, 101 MacInnes, Colin 78 Madagascar 47 Mager, Anne [Kelk] 88–90 Makanya, Katie 184 Makgoba, M. William 185 Male, Lisa 175 Mallarmé, Stéphane 108 Mandela, Nelson Rolihlahla 184–5, 188 Maori 38–9 Marilyn the Chimp 59, 66–9, 71 marketing xvii, 74, 94, 96, 99, 101, 157–68 see also advertising maro 37–8, Marsden, Rev. Samuel 34 Marx, Karl xviii–xix, 73, 100–101 Marxism xx, 128 masking/mask-making 85, 87, 118–19 Mathe, Issac 90 Maude, Harold E. 35–6, 149 McCarthyism 67–8 McClintock, Anne xviii McCord, Margaret 184 McDonald, Michelle 124, 127 medicine, tropical 69–70 Meethan, Kevin 93 Melanesia/Melanesians 146 Melly, George 77 Melvin, Michael 197, 201 memorial/memorializing 24–5, 28–9 Michaud, Jean 101 Micronesia/Micronesians 146 migration 43–4, 66, 206 Mihevc, John 201 Milroy, Gavin 46 minor literature 109, 114 misogyny 176–7, 179 missions/missionaries xx, 17–29, 143, 179 Anglican missionaries 19 Catholic missionaries 18–21

missionary texts/narratives 31–9 see also London Missionary Society Mitchell, Carleton 13 Miyoshi, Misao xiv Moberg, Mark 12 modernist aesthetics 129 modernity xiv, xv, 14, 37, 75 Modisane, Bloke 87 Mohawk xiii, 158–61, 169, 171–2, 181 Mohawk Princess, see JohnsonTekahionwake, Pauline monoculture 11, 13, 15 Morlaekoo, Meeju 101 Morris, Rosalind C. 95 Motsisi, Casey 86–90 Mphahlele, Eskia 84, 87 Murray, Andy 91 Mutti, John H. 201 Myers, Gordon 12 Nakasa, Nat 84, 89 National Leprosy Fund 41–2, 44–5, 48, 51, 56 nationalism 76, 187 black nationalism 90–92 nationhood/nationality 161, 166–7 native/s xxiii 7, 8, 14, 101, 103, 135 belonging 169 narratives 171–81 informer 147 see also indigenous peoples Neale, Margo 125, 132 Nkosi, Lewis 86 Nkotsoe, Mmanthu 84 Northrup, David 44 Nthunya, Mpho ’M’astepo 184 Nuttall, Jeff 80 Obstfeld, Maurice 197, 199–200, 202, 207 oil 207 opium/opiate trade 101 Opium Wars 76 Orientalism 103 Orsmond, John 33 Osborne, Helen Betty 173, 175 Pacific Islander 31–4, 36, 38, 143, 149–51, 154 Pacific Island women 153–5

Index Pacific Islands xxii see Hawai‘i, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia Palmer, George 150 Palmer, Lisa 102 Papunya 124, 131 Papunya style of painting 125 parekbasis 112, 115–6, 118 Parker, Gilbert 158 pastoral, as trope 137 Patton, Cindy 60, 66, 69 Pattullo, Polly 13 pedagogy 193–4, 207–8 Peleggi, Maurizio 103 Penney, W.H. 23 Penny, Sarah 186, 190 perception 126–7 Cartesian 126, 128 ethics of 133 performance xx, 17, 27–9, 101, 157, 160–61, 166–7, 190 Phillips, Norman 76 picturesque, as trope 137–8, 165–6 piracy 150 Pirates of the Caribbean 15–16 Planck, C. 46 Player, Ian 186 Polynesia/Polynesians 31–9, 146 Pomare 34, 36 popular culture, American 74–5, 77–8 Porter, Andrew 32 Porter, Darwin 13 postcolonial studies xiii, xxiv, 107, 193–4 postmodernism 74, 128 postmodern nostalgia 129 poverty 54, 56, 185, 195–7, 202–204, 207 Prasad, Pushkala 94, 98 Pratt, Mary Louise xvii, 94, 138, 143 Prebisch, Raúl 198–9 Preminger, Otto 78 Price, Danforth 13 primitivism 98, 165 Pringle, Robert 49 printing/printing press 36–7 prohibition 88–9 prosopopoeia 113, 118–19, 122 see also haunting Prout, E. 34, 36–7 Pugel, Thomas A. 195, 200

235

Pusey, Michael xv queer/queerness 64–5, 71, 171 queer natives 172 queer studies 107 queer writing xxiii, 169–81 Rabillard, Sheila 171, 173–4 race xiii, xviii, 13, 16, 60, 64, 66, 70–71, 92 154, 160, 164, 167–8, 186, 202, 205 mixed race 160, 166 racial purity 171 racial hierarchies 146 racial balance 183 see also apartheid, color racism 89, 186–7, 191, 204–206 commodity racism xviii Rake, Beaven 47 rape 173, 175–9 passim, 186 Ray, Nicholas 79 Raymond, Janice G. 205–206 reading/reader 107–11, 117 reconciliation 124, 190 religion xiii, 21, 34, 38, 102, 177, 179 see also Christianity Rhys, Jean 10 Ricardian theory 199 Roose, Robson 48 Royal College of Physicans 42–3, 45–6, 48, 57 Rusburne, J.L. 89 Salvatore, Dominick 195, 203 Sandiford, Keith xvii–xviii Sangweni, Esther 86 Sassen, Saskia xviii, 196, 206 Sauer, Hector 90 Scarce, Michael 61 Scarr, Deryck 150 Schaw, Janet 137 Schlegel, Friedrich 114 Schnehage, Micel 185 Scientific American 60 science/scientific discourse xx, 41–3, 45, 49, 51–2, 56, 59, 60–62, 64 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 169–70, 171, 180 Self, Will 73

236


Senior, Olive 3–6, 9 Sennett, Richard xv Serote, Mongane 91 Seton, Ernest Thompson 167–8 sexuality/sex xiii, xx, xxiii, 32, 36, 60, 71, 172, 178–9 sexual abuse/violence 172, 176, 179 commerce/exchange 66–7, 178 hypersexuality 67, 70 sex industry 206 perversion 178 see also heterosexuality, homosexuality sexually transmitted diseases 69–70 Shackleton, Mark 174 shebeen xxi 83–92 shebeen queen 85–7, 91–2 shebeen journalism 84–9 Sheriff, Abdul 17, 22 simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) 59, 64, 69 Sinfield, Alan 80 slavery xvii, xx, xxii, 17–29, 67, 135–7, 149–50, 195–6, 206 Arab slave trade 17–18, 23, 29 slave labor 205 see also blackbirding Smith, Daniel W. 109 Smith, Kevin 14 smuggling 10, 76 Snyder, Charlie 110 sodomy 178 South Africa xxi, xxiii, 48, 83–92, 183–91 South Pacific see Polynesia Soweto uprising 90–92 Spiritans see Catholic missionaries spirituality 169, 172, 187 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 107 Spanish 8–9, 178 conquest narratives 70 language 8 Stanley, Henry Morton 17, 24 Stares, Paul B. xx, 73–4 Stengel, Richard 188 Stevenson, Fanny [Mrs Robert Louis] 143–55 Stevenson, Robert Louis 146–7, 149 Steward, Dave 188 Stewart, Cameron 59, 68, 69 Stiglitz, Joseph E. 194–5, 204–5

Stone Town 17–19, 22–5, 27–8 story-telling 132, 162, 172 Striffler, Steve 12 subjectivity xvii, 107–12, 175 see also intersubjectivity sublime, as trope 137–8 Sued-Badillo, Jalil 6 sugar trade xvii, xxii, 135–41 Tahiti 33, 35, 38 Tanzania 17–29 Taussig, Michael xvii, 207 Tebb, William 56 Teddy Boys 79 testimony 183–4, 189–90, 199 textuality 36, of tourism 93–104 Thailand 95–104 Themba, D. Can 85–7 Thompson, Sir Henry 47 Thomson, Robert 12 Thorp, Raymond 79 Tiffin, Chris 139 Tipu Tib 24, 29 Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum 125 Tlali, Miriam 91 tobacco 9, 139, 144 Tompkins, Joanne 175 tourism xx, 11–17, 24– 9, 74, 83, 93–104, 205 ethnic/cultural tourism 13–16, 27–9 sex tourism 64, 205 tourism studies 93 trade xi, xiv, xvii–xxiii, 31–3, 35–9, 43–4, 57, 60, 93, 101, 104, 136, 138, 140–41 concessions 95 Genoese xix, 8 international 193–207 negotiations 193–4, 201 networks 6 objects 145, 154 women’s trading 143–58 see also banana trade, Bible trade, body trade, drug trade, free trade, labor trade, liquor trade, slavery, sugar trade, World Trade Organization trafficking, of people 206 travel writing xxii, 13, 135–41, 143–55

Index Treichler, Paula 61, 170 trickster xxiii, 172–3, 180 Trinidad 136 Trollope, Anthony 138, 140 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 12 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 188 Tyerman, Rev. Daniel 34, 37–8 Uganda 203–204 Ungpakorrn, Ji Giles 102–103 United States xx, 11–12, 38, 67, 69, 73–83, 85, 114, 160, 169, 201 see also America, North Urry, John 98 Van Esterick, Penny 103 van Wyk, Frans 88 Vansittart, Peter 79–80 Ventura, Jaume 199 Voogd, Henk 100 Waldby,Catherine 64, 68 Wallerstein, Immanuel xiii–xvi, xix, 199 Walvin, James 195, 206 Warner, Douglas 76 Warner, Marina 11 Warumpi arts 131 Waters, Malcolm xviii Watney, Simon 71 Watson, Stephen 183–4, 189, Watts-Dunton, Theodore 160

237

Weetigo 176–7 see also cannibalism Wells, Brian 77 Western Africa xx, 59–60, 68 West Indies 135–41 see also Caribbean Western Pacific 143–55 White, Luise 193–4 Wilberforce, Bishop Samuel 35 Williams, Cynric 136 Williams, John 31, 34–5 Williams, Walter L. 171 Wilson, Ashleigh 123 Wilson, Erasmus 44–5, 47 Wilson, Rob xviii Winichakul, Thongchai 102 witnessing 109–11 Worboys, Michael 45, 47, 51, 57 World Bank xiv, xxiii, 11, 102, 194, 200, 203–205 World Trade Organization xiv, 11–12 world-systems theory xiii, xvi Wright, Archdeacon Henry Press 47, 48 Wright, Simon 131–3 Yarbrough, Beth V. 198, 204–205, 207 Yarbrough, Robert M. 198, 204–205, 207 Young, Robert [J.C.] xiii, 66–7, 178 Zanzibar 17–22, 24–6, 28–9 Zimbabwe 186 Zulu 185–7

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