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“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger… Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999). p.247

(thanks Susann)

On Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Subaltern Studies II. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1995].

Last week I was able to dip my toes into the vast literature on Subalternity[1] via Gyan Prakash’s American Historical Review forum piece, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism” (though after rereading my last post I’m not so sure it was clear where I got my inspiration). For this week’s post, I decided to engage with one of the seminal texts of Subaltern Studies group. In “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” Ranajit Guha criticizes historians of peasant uprisings in India for uncritically adopting the ideological claims of their sources, which are mostly British colonial records. First, Guha cuts down the prevalent view dismissing peasant uprisings in general as “purely spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs” (2). Instead he argues “Insurgency…was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses” (2). Second, Guha brings in a temporal analysis to describe how discourses and documents perform legitimacy based on their chronological proximity to the events in question. In this regard, he distinguishes between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. What he calls primary sources are records produced by the colonial administration, colonial elite, and native collaborators as the event unfolds. The historical profession holds these in the highest regard, despite their often value-laden interpretations. Guha reminds us that such “texts are not the record of observations uncontaminated by bias, judgment and opinion” (15) and need to be considered critically. Primary documents most often consist of the “prose of counter-insurgency” that gives his article its title. After all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. While this insight appears simple enough, Guha stresses the need to go beyond merely reversing the roles within a colonial document, but we will save that criticism for the discussion of tertiary sources to come. What he calls secondary sources are often produced by witnesses, participants, and onlookers, but after a significant period of time has passed. Colonial memoirs are the fixtures of this genre, and they often masquerade as objective despite being colored by years of deliberation. Finally, tertiary sources are written further still from the actual events, usually by supposedly ‘disinterested’ historians. Guha’s use of tertiary seems to be equivalent to the standard idea of a “secondary source,” and he spends much of his time analyzing the historiographical practices of these works.

Guha goes further than to merely indict scholars who sympathize with the colonialists over the peasants; his main targets of criticism seem to be the tertiary sources produced by Indian nationalist and radical authors on the subcontinent. For Guha, both nationalist and Marxist historiographies are anxious to attribute the author’s own desired ideological motivations as the impetus for the revolt, which “amounts to an act of appropriation which excludes the rebel as the conscious subject of his own history and incorporates the latter as only a contingent element in another history with another subject” (33). Bourgeois-nationalist historiography reads “an elite consciousness…into all peasant movements as their motive force” (38), while leftists tend to be “blinded by the glare of a perfect and immaculate consciousness” and they “[see] nothing, for instance, but solidarity in rebel behavior and fails to notice its Other, namely, betrayal” (40). While Guha clearly prefers leftist historiography that sympathizes with the peasants over their colonial and native overlords, too often the role of religiosity in the revolt is completely ignored, and the rebel is effectively turned into a secular European socialist. Guha ends by appealing for the insurgent “to recover his place in history,” basically through a more nuanced and sensitive scholarship (40) – an argument that recalls the great “agency” debate.

One can see why this essay has proven so influential in postcolonial literature and works of American historiography, such as A Nation Under Our Feet. Guha’s strength is his sensitive and creative analysis of sources as performances in order to make reliable conclusions about historical actors who did not produce and maintain their own archival records. Guha’s criticism of the ideological appropriation of past subjects by present historians also speaks to the literature of Middle Eastern Studies, as religiosity was similarly ignored in much of the historiography until the Iranian Revolution. To make matters worse, the rise of “Islamic fundamentalism” simply reversed the bias in the literature to a certain extent, and religiosity became the only thing many observers saw as the motivating social force in the Middle East.

A fundamental argument of A Nation Under Our Feet is that the American Civil War constituted a social, political, and economic revolution. Though this proposition sounds odd to the many who disagree, I believe there are serious benefits to taking such a view of the transformation of American society wrought by the war. In a previous course, Allen Matusow’s “Industrializing America,” my paper considered the view that the victory of the Union amounted to America’s bourgeois revolution, through which a new social class (the owners of capital) defeated their rivals (the owners of slaves), captured effective control of the state and began to reshape society along “legal-rational” lines in accordance with their interests in industrialized capital accumulation. While the idea of the Civil War as “the Second American Revolution” appears to be first sketched out by American historians in Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization,[1] the triumph of the Northern bourgeoisie is thoroughly explored in Sven Beckert’s more recent The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896. My view was also significantly influenced by similar arguments made in David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness and Barrington Moore, Jr.’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. A limitation of these histories (with the exception of Roediger) is that they have conceived of this political-economic revolution as primarily a top-down affair carried out in the interests of the powerful. While I see histories of the elite as enormously important given their disproportionate influence over society relative to their numbers, it is no less important to consider how those at the very bottom of society experienced events, and how their actions contributed to the making of the social order. Researchers in all fields too regularly ignore such a perspective, an omission that reflects and reinforces the current balance of power.

In this context, Steven Hahn’s exploration of the revolutionary experience of slaves and freedpeople from the bottom-up helps to fill an important gap in the literature. Hahn’s framing was influenced by the “history from below” movement in Western social history (pioneered by such works as E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class) and the Subaltern Studies group that revitalized South Asian (and wider postcolonial) historiography in the 1980s. While works focusing on political-economic elites, such as Beckert’s Monied Metropolis, are absolutely essential for understanding the development of American history, subalternists argue that “elite nationalism rewrote history and…its rewriting was directed at both contesting colonial rule and protecting its flanks from the subalterns.”[2] In revealing a largely ignored realm of action by subaltern actors, Hahn has done us all a great service. In the context of the American Civil War, it is important to understand that the northern bourgeoisie who bankrolled the Union effort were fighting on multiple fronts: to destroy the Confederacy and the power of the cotton planters while simultaneously limiting the autonomy of freedpeople and taming the northern working class. Reading from both perspectives thus becomes absolutely essential. History needs to be understood not just at the top or the bottom, but from the bottom all the way up, or the top all the way down.

This is partly why I find the study of revolutions so fascinating and appropriate for the American Civil War era. In order to be persuasive, the subject demands comparative approaches both internal and external to the society in question, as well as a clear analysis of social conditions. In times of revolution, the contradictions of one system are exposed and the possibilities for restructuring are exploded wide open. Yet the outcome of the new order is also inherently limited by the conditions created by the ancien regime, as well as the agency of the revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, and their relation to one another. Hahn’s story of agrarian transformation and subaltern self-organization helps to illuminate how the goals of the northern white bourgeoisie were often coopted and modified by those supposedly on the receiving end.

On a related note, I look forward to today’s lecture by Robin Blackburn, whose book An Unifinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln appears to explore many of these questions.

Bibliography

Beard, Charles A. and Mary R. Beard. The Rise of American Civilization. New York: Macmillan, 1937.

Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed, 1986.

Guha, Ranajit. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Subaltern Studies II. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1995].

Prakash, Gyan. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.” American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 5 (Dec. 1994): 1475-1490.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness. London: Verso, 2007 [1991].

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.

How to approach and best conceptualize the ignominious history of race in the United States is a perennially challenging question for historians, generation after generation. While systemic inequality has been a feature of the European settler-colonial project since the arrival of the first colonists in North America, the methods of implementing and maintaining this inequality have changed greatly over time, as have the ways that people rationalized it. If Barbara Fields’ “Ideology and Race in American History” argues that race “is a purely ideological notion” (151), then Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny is the history of the development of that ideological construction. In great detail and precision, Horsman reconstructs and analyzes the origins and evolution of racial “Anglo-Saxonism” from its origins in sixteenth century England up through its deployment in the antebellum United States. Horsman seeks to answer how and why racialism triumphed as the ideology of American expansionism.

Racialism, which views all history as that of the struggle between races, has deep roots in European thought. Horsman traces the cult of ideological Anglo-Saxonism to Henry VIII’s break with Rome, in the attempt to establish a uniquely English church (10-11). In doing so, Henry’s religious propagandists emphasized the arrival of Germanic tribes in England in the fifth century over the traditional story of Roman settlement. These Germanic tribes were said to have introduced political liberty to England and that a great culture had flourished until the Norman invasion and occupation. This view formed the basis of the myth of an Anglo-Saxon golden age that would continue to capture the imagination of British parliamentarians in the seventeenth century and American revolutionaries in the eighteenth. This Enlightenment-era conception of Anglo-Saxonism stressed the institutional, as opposed to racial, superiority of the Anglo-Saxons, who were thought uniquely disposed to good government.

Horsman convincingly demonstrates that expansion and, literally spoken, empire, had been on the agenda of the earliest American revolutionaries, including the radical Thomas Paine (81, 85), but that conceptions of racial superiority were largely absent from these intentions. A number of shifts in political and intellectual history congealed to shift the emphasis: the new Romantic thinkers who stressed the particular, individual, and emotional over Enlightenment-era universalism; the development of German philology and linguistics, which traced the origins of Northern Europeans to an Aryan civilization that marched east and settled in Europe; the dissemination of phrenology and other pseudosciences that claimed to objectively stratify races physically; and most importantly, the successful expansion of the British and American empires. All of these early nineteenth century developments pointed in the direction of essentializing intellectual inquiry, inscribing various peoples with inherent, unchanging qualities. These “races” were then ranked more or less based on the level of political power they had consolidated up to that point.

This shift in ideology found fertile roots in the American social context, which found white Americans in stark conflicts of interest with its two classical “Others”: African slaves and the indigenous population. The ascendant profitability of African chattel slavery helped white society rationalize enslavement, while early American hopes to “improve” – or remake in their own image – the indigenous population crashed on the rocks of the Indians’ often-steadfast resistance to colonialism. By the time of the Mexican War, Northerners and Southerners alike reached a consensus that they embodied the zenith of Anglo-Saxon civilization, and their success vis-à-vis their competitors was all the proof they needed. Spreading their superior economic, political, and cultural systems became Americans’ civilizing mission by the end of the nineteenth century.

Horsman’s account is persuasive, and the book is well-documented and brimming with racialist thinkers and quotes. This is so much the case that long sections become are reduced to a barrage of names and quotations. This aside, my main criticism regards the lack of what Kolchin might refer to as “actual social relations” (Kolchin 157, 159, 170, 172). While the book is comprehensive regarding the intellectual history of Euroamerican racialism, it engages little with specific events and is close to being a pure history of ideas as such. Horsman can be largely excused for this due to his exceptionally documented history of racialism, but it is left to other historians to determine the more material implications of this ideology, as well as more specifically render how the material conditions were conducive to the wide acceptance of such an ideology.