Monthly Archives: February 2013

Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet reconstructs the story of black politics in the rural American South from the 1850s through the Great Migration. By centering his history on the black community in their arduous journey from slavery to “freedom” over the longue durée, Hahn exposes a history that is often at odds with the received wisdom of the Civil War as a sectional conflict primarily fought between the (white) Union and Confederate armies. Instead, Hahn sees the Civil War as “the largest slave rebellion in modern history” and Reconstruction as nothing short of a social revolution (Hahn 7). In many ways, I feel this book works as an answer to Walter Johnson’s call in his famous essay “On Agency,” which called for a detailed consideration of the internal politics of the slave community beyond “everyday resistance” (Johnson 116). Also like Johnson, Hahn does not oppose “everyday resistance” to “revolutionary struggle” – rather he sees everyday resistance as laying the foundations for what might be termed the Great Slave Revolt. Some, such as Peter Kolchin (see his review in the American Historical Review), have taken exception to Hahn’s definition of politics as “encompass[ing] collective struggles for what might be termed socially meaningful power” (Hahn 3), but I found Hahn’s argumentation in this regard to be overwhelmingly persuasive. Clearly influenced by W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, and James C. Scott – among others – Hahn focuses on the self-organization of the oppressed, whose efforts to “build the new society in the shell of the old” are the keys to understanding (and encouraging) revolutionary social change. The more common approach imagines appeals to power – such as petitioning and demonstrating – and top-down reformist projects as the methodology of “responsible” social change, which in this story is embodied in federal Reconstruction policy. By exposing the existence of a collectively fashioned black counter-structure in the antebellum South, Hahn is able to show how the Civil War created the conditions for the successful antislavery revolution, whose defining element was black participation.

Another of virtue of the book is Hahn’s consistent challenge to the exceptionalist trend in historiography – and American political culture – by setting the southern social revolution in its world context of agrarian struggles for land. The ideological power of a more just distribution of social wealth was not limited to Civil War America, as Hahn regularly reminds us throughout. “40 Acres and a Mule” should thus been seen as a revolutionary slogan for land redistribution, similar to innumerable struggles for land throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Algeria to Vietnam.

The following is a tentative bibliography that I intend to explore over the course of the semester. Please keep in mind that the categories are rather arbitrary, since certain books could fit just as well in a number of classifications. I look forward to your input, since most of you are more familiar with the historiography of nineteenth century America than I am.

Aspects of Subaltern Resistance and Self-Organization

1. W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
2. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938)
3. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990)
4. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983)
5. Robin D.G. Kelly, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994)
6. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974)
7. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
8. Tara Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom (1997)

Emancipation/Reconstruction Period

1. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)
2. Michael Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (2001)
3. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001)

Slavery

1. Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987)
2. Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976)
3. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943)
4. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998)

Race

1. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (1990)
2. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987)
3. William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot (1970)

Nineteenth Century Political Economy

1. Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union (2011)
2. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (2001)

Neither historical writing nor popular memory has been kind to the Southern planter elite, and rightfully so: slave-owning white supremacists are not a sympathetic breed. Arch-reactionaries they may be, but too many postbellum representations of this class have teleologically highlighted the supposedly parochial backwardness and stupidity of these historical losers. But it would be a gross error to think this was always the case, as they were one of the most powerful segments of antebellum American society, and the salesmen (“producers” was their euphemism of choice) of the nineteenth century’s most prized raw material, cotton, the fuel of the industrial revolution. Brian Schoen’s The Fragile Fabric of Union demonstrates the centrality of cotton to the union and disunion of the United States, and takes seriously the modern, classically liberal economic vision of the Southern plantation bourgeoisie.

Persuasively downplaying the accepted wisdom of irrational romanticism as the chief factor in Southern politics, Schoen argues that the Southern planter class was drawn into the union with the North, and later out of it, due to their political-economic calculations based on the cotton trade. Initially, federal union made sense due to the North’s ability to manufacture the relatively meager cotton production of the southern states. By the 1820s, regional interests strongly diverged, as revealed in twelve years of tariff debates, which –unlike other historians – Schoen views as central to the development and articulation of sectionalism. Contending and incompatible visions of the national economy emerged in these debates: Northern manufacturers sought a protective tariff that Southern cotton planters enthusiastically opposed by invoking the “free trade” theories of Adam Smith. These rival economic interests and ideologies continued to clash into the 1850s, when secession seemed the logical response to a federal government increasingly hostile to planters’ material interests. In perhaps the key innovation of the book, Schoen emphasizes the impact of favorable conditions in the international cotton market, in which the US “Cotton South” was the vital source of raw materials for the dominant British textile manufacturers. This conception of their “global” importance greatly abetted the decision to secede. So great was their confidence that a Confederate politician remarked that they possessed a “firm and universal conviction that Great Britain, France and Russia will acknowledge us at once in the family of nations” (264). King Cotton was to deliver prosperity, protection, and recognition to the Confederate States of America, and for a time this was a realistic idea. In the end, the planter class is shown to be rational actors integrated in the global capitalist market – a far cry from the stereotype of backwater agrarian patriarchs.

Schoen’s book is strong due to its powerful foregrounding of the role of cotton in the history of the United States. An alternate history of the US without cotton would likely be unrecognizable to us. However, Schoen’s work is less convincing in its pretention to reveal the “Global Origins of the Civil War,” as promised in the subtitle. The British manufacturing interests and the American commercial do not make up the globe; Schoen only seriously investigates the role of Anglo-American trade and diplomacy in the making of the civil war. Passing references are made to Southern overtures to the French, however these are brief and Schoen utilizes no French sources. Spanish sources are also ignored despite the significance he ascribes to the Mexican War in exacerbating sectional conflict. Furthermore, Schoen’s emphasis on diplomatic sources, particularly the favorable attitudes of British diplomats toward Southern secession, limits this study’s international outlook to Anglo-American diplomatic relations. This falls somewhat short of Thomas Bender’s call for transnational historical work that “understand[s] every dimension of American life as entangled in other histories. Other histories are implicated in American history, and the United States is implicated in other histories” (6). While the importance of the British export market cannot be understated in Schoen’s argument, little substantial knowledge of domestic British developments is betrayed in the text.

Overall, Schoen’s work is highly recommended due to its clear-sighted focus on the power of material interests to shape history, as well as its ability to balance structural forces with individual human agency.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
– Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

I am happy that the opening paragraph of Walter Johnson’s “On Agency” quotes Marx on the question of structure and human action, so that I won’t have to (ok, I lied, I reposted it above). Aside from giving this blog its title, I, like Johnson, think of those two sentences as a particularly powerful formulation regarding both historical analysis and political action. While some view events solely as the product of long-term structural developments, and others excessively emphasize the ability of individuals to shape their own trajectory, Marx’s guidelines elegantly hit the nail on the head.

Much of humanity could be said to have experienced life as a continuous stream of extraction for the material benefit of others. James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of the Resistance: Hidden Transcripts is a sustained meditation on the myriad ways that oppressed people continually resist their subordination, short of open rebellion. Scott argues that the vast majority of interactions between dominant and subordinate unfold according to what he calls “the public transcript,” or the rules of conduct imposed by the dominant. In other words, the exploited are forced to, or seek to, confirm the expectations of their exploiters in order to carry on with their lives without enduring additional hardship. Conversely, the “hidden transcript” consists of the behavior the subordinate group produces away from the gaze of the powerful. Scott’s point is not that the hidden transcript contains the “truth” while the public transcript is “false,” but that both patterns of behavior are governed by power relations, and are shaped by and for the expectations of their consumers. In other words, all behavior can be described as social performance.

Though Scott constructs his argument using examples from across the globe and historical epochs, his line of inquiry is premised on two important limitations of scope. First, he is solely concerned with analyzing resistance to oppression in everyday situations, not in open rebellions, revolutions, or wars. Equally important is his disclaimer that he examines only severe cases of oppression and exploitation, such as “slavery, serfdom, and caste subordination,” with additional examples culled from “patriarchal domination, colonialism, racism, and even from total institutions such as jails and prisoner of war camps” (x). These cases, he argues, are representative enough to be able to glean a general pattern of resistant practices.

One of the most thought-provoking implications of this argument is the contention that far too much social science research is based solely on the public transcript, or sources produced by and for the powerful (xii, 13). This bias inevitably privileges the views of dominant powers over those of their subordinates, and fundamentally distorts our understanding of past and present. The book is therefore designed to be a theoretical intervention that seeks to reveal unseen vistas of inquiry: the domain of what Scott labels “infrapolitics,” or “the circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups…like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum” (183). Unlike many who argue that dissent sanctioned by or invisible to the dominant classes only strengthen the rule of the powerful, Scott argues that infrapolitics provide the necessary infrastructure for future open revolt. There is great value in this argument, I think. He argues that a full account of social history must take into consideration the public and hidden transcripts of both subordinate and dominant groups. In order to do this, one must consider the behavior of dominants with other dominants, dominants with subordinates, and subordinates with other subordinates. This is certainly a tall order, but Scott is able to live up to the challenge and the book is filled with many productive arguments that would take far too much time for me to summarize them here.

However, in a curious but key chapter, “False Consciousness or Laying it on Thick?,” Scott attempts to dispense with the Marxian conceptions of false consciousness and hegemony. Scott is not convincing. Despite his assertion to the contrary, he reconstructs the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a straw man. In fact, Scott’s arguments do not appear to significantly diverge from the followers of Gramsci that I have read, except that Scott is perhaps overly focused on black-and-white examples of domination! At times his definition of what actions constitute “resistance” becomes so broad that dissimulation appears to be the only tactic that he approves of. Significantly, Scott’s argument ignores any discussion of the collaboration of subordinates in the domination of others. This is a major omission, especially considering his strident defense of those who dissent within the confines of dominant ideology. Such a mode of analysis threatens to declare resistance everywhere – and therefore nowhere. To quote Johnson’s wonderful phrase, “breaking a tool and being Nat Turner [are] not identical” (118).

In the end, Scott largely concurs with Marx’s statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire regarding the dilemma of structure versus individual agency, and thus with Johnson and a host of other scholars. Scott argues the subordinate is constrained by “a form of domination [that] creates certain possibilities for the production of a hidden transcript,” however, “whether these possibilities are realized or not, and how they find expression, depends on the constant agency of subordinates in seizing, defending, and enlarging a normative power field” (132). Domination and the Arts of Resistance surely helps us to think more critically about supposedly “quiet” periods of history, and maps out some exciting approaches to interpreting the activities of the oppressed as well as the oppressors.