Category Archives: Thinking About History

Cultural Dissonance in a 19th-Century Newspaper Illustration

The post originally appeared in Surfacing Memory: Seeking the Voices that Inform Me, a multimedia site where seminar leader Susan Morse explores artifacts and heirlooms in an effort to reconstruct her own family’s history. Our gratitude to Dr. Morse for sharing this personal story here in hopes that it will serve as a model for Humanities Core students’ own oral history and artifact-based research projects this quarter.

“Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in your neighbor’s moccasins” (Cheyenne Proverb)

Just above illustrations pictured below was written the date

I’m not sure if this date refers to when the nine panel “funny” was originally published in the newspaper or to when it was pasted in the McNiven (my great great grandmother’s and then Jesse McNiven’s) Scrapbook. There are very few clues to indicate in which newspaper (or in which country) this illustration was even printed. Given my knowledge of the McNiven family time-line, there is a distinct possibility it appeared in a Canadian newspaper prior to the family exodus to the then American territories to the south. Then again, in 1879 they may still have been in Scotland.

What interests me about these possibilities is that the illustration clearly demonstrates a fascination with empire; in particular with the clear demarcation between the old inheritance-based British Empire and the newly expanding American empire making its presence known deep into the “Wild Western frontier.” What’s more, the panels characterize — or even satirize — a clear cultural dissonance between these positions that makes possible a third and more compelling ethnographic reading outside of empire altogether.

So let’s try walking through this illustration wearing different pairs of moccasins to see how each fits beginning with the caption at the end of the illustration which reads:

Given ethnolinguistic references from the 19th century, it is clear from the caption that an American Indian (pejoratively described as a “Red Shirt”) and a cowboy (also referenced negatively as an untamed or wild “Broncho Bill”) have been invited to a hunting event but one that will not align with their expectations. The superior “Master of Hounds” serves as the host for this occasion, and given this final revelation it seems clear that from a socio-cultural context this event would be both foreign and unknowable to the two American men, something that gives satire some legs. Spoiler aside, the caption confirms the medium’s rhetorical design as one that will draw on cultural dissonance to drive a particular narrative.

Our narrative begins with an American Indian traveling together with a fairly stereotypical characterization of an old “Wild West” cowboy. The two ride together in peace and in harmony with each other and in nature; the horses also moving in step. The teepee and war bonnet place the American Indian in a tribe, like the Cheyenne, that hunts and follows the seasons and the movement of big game; bison in particular. Other noteworthy markers — such as the feathers and long war bonnet — situate the American Indian riding in the front as both his tribe’s leader as well as a singularly courageous and prominent member of his tribe.

Traditionally, tribal members earn their first eagle feather to commemorate a rite of passage into adulthood. I witnessed this ritual annually while coaching and living on the Salish-Kootenai Reservation in Arlee, Montana while I was an undergraduate. Tribal elders presented High School seniors with an eagle feather along with their diplomas at the Graduation ceremony. After the presentations were completed, one of the Tribal Elders explained that the American Indians from the northwest and plains region consider the eagle to be the bravest and strongest of all birds. Not only does this spirit travel with the feather, but also anyone who possesses and wears a ceremonial eagle feather carries honor and pride at being one of the First Peoples (feathers were offered to all non-tribal seniors as well). As a final gesture, the Tribal Elder waved his feathers over the crowd as a means of wishing everyone in the community prosperity, peace and happiness.

Additional feathers are then awarded following actions recognized by the tribe as courageous or heroic. The feathered head dress pictured above, for example, conveys much more than this man’s role as the tribal chief. This war bonnet signals a lifetime’s worth of feathers earned through heroic action. Additionally, the warrior’s pole he carries and the horse he rides contain a number of overflow feathers earned. Finally, both the war bonnet and warrior’s pole are ceremonial, reserved for special occasions, and serve as a sign of respect for the coming event – say, for example, a ritualistic hunt or an invitation to meet with a “neighbor” in the Cheyenne sense of the word.

This ethnographic reading of the two Americans, however, may have been lost on the readers of the time who might have preferred instead to see these men as wild and weak or inferior in comparison to the imperial power whose newspaper they read. The chief, for example, carries his own teepee, a task usually reserved for women in the tribe. This, along with a hyperbolic abundance of ceremonial feathers offers those sympathetic to the British Empire a rhetorical reading of this so-called great and heroic leader as anything but formidable or worthy. The cowboy representative of the American Empire maintains an even weaker position, since he trails behind the chief and rides a paint horse. The paint horse — a mix of Barb, Andalusian and Arabian breeds — was originally brought to the frontier during the Spanish “conquest” of the Americas by Cortez and his Conquistadors. Nineteenth century associations of the paint horse by white colonizers and Europeans were pejorative given its mixed blood, connections with a defeated imperial intervention and its most common association as the “Big Dog” or “God Dog” of the American Indian, in particular with those tribes that hunt and wage war on the plains.

Additionally, although later panels of this illustration clearly name the cowboy as a man, the depiction above not only feminizes him, but it also places him in an even more inferior, weaker position in contrast to the already emasculated chief. His long, free flowing hair characterizes his identity as untamed, wild and therefore “savage” or uncivilized according to beliefs that were widely-held by Europeans (as well as by their descendants living in the established states of America) at this time. As a representative of the American imperial machine, the feminized American stands in sharp contrast to the masculinized British “Master of Hounds” (not yet pictured but named in the closing caption). This man — the “Master” — is a figure with distinction, a man fronting a clear title and legacy bound to a deep, long-standing aristocratic British tradition. Unlike the “Master,” the cowboy bears the name “Broncho Bill.” His identity characterizes him, in part, as a “broncho” (or the more common bronco) which in “Wild West” equestrian circles describes an untamed and untrained “frontier” horse. Interestingly, it is also a term used to denote a mustang, another mixed breed of range pony introduced to the American territories by the Spanish (and which continue to run feral in the hills to this day). Moreover, this man is identified by first name only and does not garner societal distinction enough to hold a family name; therefore this (Imperial agent) “broncho” represents an uncivilized, culturally mixed emasculated man, but this is not a reliable ethnographic reading. Let’s get back to that…

The second panel in the series reflects — on the one hand — a harmonious, symbiotic relationship between the American Indian and his cowboy companion. In this frame, the cowboy prepares what is mockingly described as “light refreshment” presumably for both men as the chief smokes a pipe, a ceremonial gesture signaling agreement with a covenant between parties or preparation for a planned ceremonial event. Perhaps he smokes in this case to acknowledge the invitation to join “the Hunt.” The horse adorning the teepee elevates this animal to a spirit or totem animal that symbolizes a balance between personal drive and untamed passions, between individual agency and a responsibility to others, quite suitable given the chief’s role in his community. Harmony extends also to the two horses standing behind the teepee that have been acculturated to two different traditions, and that live and rest comfortably together which parallels the two men who bear markers to clearly different yet compatible ways to exist and to live together.

On the other hand, the designation of this space as a “Wild West Camp” recalls earlier depictions of the American representative of empire as uncivilized and weak. What’s more, the cowboy performs a woman’s labor by preparing the refreshment and probably also by serving the chief who currently smokes alone. I’m partial to the symbiotic and harmonious reading, of course, but as someone who studies this history, I must acknowledge the generosity of such a narrative in hindsight given widespread and systematic atrocities perpetrated against the First Peoples by agents of American imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Negative attitudes about the First Peoples were perpetuated in part through cultural dissonance (through the notion of a “gender frontiers,” for example), the implications of which are clearly depicted in panel three. It appears that a well-dressed local (looks a little “dandy” to me) on an afternoon walk has just happened on the cowboy and the chief engaging in some afternoon teepee relations — so to speak — with the chief having taken a superior position. This interaction sharply mocks American colonizers (represented by our “broncho”) as having succumbed to or been seduced by the so-called “unnatural behaviors” of the “savage” American Indians.

Additionally, the depiction of the chief places him in an overtly sexually aggressive stance counter to the man passing by. This exchange facilitates what might have counted in 19th-century America as a threat to white culture; first, through a mixed race, same-sex relationship and second, through the aggressive encounter triggered by the exposure of, what looks like, a naked and virile “Indian” chief to the startled, unarmed white stranger shown as innocently passing by. The cultural reality, however, is that heteronormative ideals and constructs didn’t really exist among American Indian tribes until they were imposed on them by European colonizers. And — as an interesting aside that the illustrator may not have known — American Indian hunters traditionally abstained from intercourse for a few days prior to a hunt as part of a ceremonial practice (abstinence from sex to produce an abundant bounty during the hunt).

The threat of a blended culture to imperial civilization and legacy continues to figure prominently in panel four. Clearly, the sight of the American Indian chief and “Wild West” cowboy seems so strange and “savage” in contrast to the waiting members of the British hunting group, that neither the “civilized” men nor beasts among them including the dogs can control its feelings or “sensation[s]” of desperation. At the same time, and funnily, the two Americans calmly and quietly enter the scene to witness pure chaos as the well-dressed, British fox hunters struggle to sit or to control their mounts and hounds marking a clear dissonance between the cultural groups.

The cultural disconnect depicted in this frame and implied throughout the illustration extends primarily to the differences between what counts as a hunt for each group. The British riders with their hounds are waiting for a Fox Hunt, a sport of leisure (pffft) that goes back to the 16th Century that does not yield any food as bounty for a successful run. The primary objective of this kind of hunt is the performance of human superiority over animals, of wielding control over a pack of trained dogs to chase down and to kill the red fox. These unarmed riders (chasers more than hunters) work together with the “Master” of the hounds to control and to direct their hounds as they search for, chase down, and kill a fox victim. The Master may then choose to reward those hunters who perform most admirably during the event with some trophy from the dead fox — a paw, the mask, or the tail (the biggest honor). The remaining carcass is then tossed to the hounds. Very civilized indeed and then light refreshment follows.

However, one doesn’t have to look beyond the above panel to recognize that the chief and his partner had a much different hunt in mind. The chief who is positioned as standing and surveying the landscape in front of him, clearly, searches for big game — most likely bison — as the objective of the hunt. This hunt does not describe a mere sport for those in the American “frontier.” The hunt for bison (buffalo where I come from) which may last a single day or several, ideally yields tens of animals all of which are honored, eaten, worn and otherwise utilized by members of the tribe. No part of the animal goes to waste. In terms of a hunting bounty, the hunter responsible for bringing a buffalo down with his bow and arrow is entitled to claim the hide and some of the choicest meat cuts as his prize.

An even more special prize for American Indians — like the Cheyenne — is marked by a hunter’s first kill, where as his trophy and as an important rite of passage, he will drink some of the blood of his kill. While drinking the blood of a freshly killed animal may seem at first savage (and certainly would for the Fox Hunters), this is in reality a culturally short-sighted position. American Indians live in harmony with nature, belong to the land and see themselves as brothers to the animals they kill. Blood symbolizes the force that gives life to all beings. The blood, along with the animal that sacrifices it, is a gift that deserves and demands respect (a message my Navajo godfather Jimmy John relayed to me throughout my childhood). A hunter who drinks the warm blood of the animal he has killed demonstrates his deep respect for the animal’s sacrifice. It also symbolizes that the life of this animal will continue in the hunter. In death, the animal’s body (and blood) serves as a gift that will ultimately prolong the lives of many in the hunter’s tribe. Given this naturalist reading of the scene, the calm entry of the two men signifies their harmonious relationship with nature, with their horses and with each other.

The British hounds, however, are not in harmony with this nature but express such a discord at the sight of these two individuals and their horses that the American men must hide until the more “civilized” and trained hounds will no longer be negatively affected (or even influenced) by their presence (which really pushes the “othering” boundaries).

Throughout these panels, the harmony and symbiosis of the two American men persists, despite rhetorical efforts to depict them as weak, emasculated and inferior. This symbiosis and harmony between the men, their horses and their inner nature or “impulse” continues in frame six as the men are thrown from their mounts. It is unclear what particular impulse led to this unexpected ejection (perhaps it simply mocks them as irrational creatures), but the double stop of the horses and the double flight of the men further illustrates an equity between these two men even though they clearly come from different cultural backgrounds (and from different equestrian traditions). They remain in harmony with each other and with the natural world including with their inner “impulse.” And their horses aren’t getting ready to run away from the men (which you’ll notice on the next frame).

In panel seven the two Americans are back on their mounts and chasing after “information” about some “natives” depicted above that look quite like British citizens, don’t they? In fact, these “natives” resemble 19th-century bobbies, a police force first put in place in London in the early 19th century to maintain law and order on the British home-front. Perhaps the spoof here is on the American wanton disregard for the British imperial claim on the western territories. These two “wild” Americans lack the decorum to perform accordingly at the Fox Hunt. Their very presence disrupts the event precisely because they are “savage” outsiders or “others” in the context of European Imperialism. Further taking the above panel into account, they wildly chase these “natives” without control over their own trajectory (or their mounts) at the same time as they fail to recognize the so-called “native” claim to the land as conferred by the panel’s caption. There is a sharp irony that features one of the First Peoples in this fight against the “natives”: one, because he travels with a member of the American Imperial team and two, because the British bobbies claim “native” ownership, which, as we know, was but one of many attempted European interventions on territory already fully populated by a diverse, self-regulating, autonomous indigenous population.

Have you noticed a clear lack of narrative between some of these panels? So have I! Two consistent features, however, seem to be the persistence of satire and the two Americans. The above scene, for example, satirizes “frontier” scouting techniques, although it is quite unclear what these men are trying to find, and where the third guy came from. Maybe they are still scouting for the “information” they were seeking in the previous panel. The above depiction of “Broncho Bill” mocks his lack of scouting skills as he presumably uses his hand to reach for scat and other tangible clues about the particular “scent” they seek. The illustration pokes further fun by depicting the American Indian as literally utilizing a white man to accomplish this same task (which seems much more practical) and which degrades the white man’s and the cowboy’s ethos. In reality, however, American Indian scouts enjoy a long-standing reputation as quasi-diviners who can detect and read seemingly obscure natural signs, or pick up a trail by vibration and sound, or observe and gather vital knowledge about an enemy without detection.

And so we come to the final frame in the series, which appears to answer a few unanswered questions, offers a clear commentary about the two American riders, and throws an additional means for understanding the “hunt” into conversation. As it turns out, the hunt and the scouting excursion seem, in the last few frames, to have been to locate one of any available run-away horses for the British rider to carry him back home. Although many of these panels have promoted a claim of British superiority, when it comes to real riding, this Brit and his mount look spent. In this panel, the Brit trails behind both American riders who begin and end their journey on their own horses, illustrating that they are both good riders and possess “good riding knowledge,” perhaps a positive nod to having “impulse” that may be akin to sound horse sense. This stands in stark contrast to the Britisher who was dismounted and who lost control of three different horses. It doesn’t appear that he even travels home on his own horse. Also noteworthy is that while there were consistently negative characterizations of the two American men, they are referred to in these final lines as “our Wild West friends” who (you may have noticed) have been riding and working together for some panels now.

“Our Wild West friends” bring me to the final tidbit about this peculiar illustration. According to the caption that follows this final panel (the one we began our discussion with), the hunt was set to meet in Hertfordshire, but there is no Hertfordshire in America or in Canada. The closest is a county located in southern England. After all of this consideration and analysis, in the end, it is possible this illustration may not have been published or set on the North American continent at all but rather took place in the 19th-century British imagination.

Perhaps this illustration nods to early iterations of the “Wild West” spectacles, the most famous of which are the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows. If you do any digging, you’ll certainly notice a lot of Bills as headliners (Pawnee Bill, Buckskin Bill, Buffalo Bill…Broncho Bill). Smaller versions of these shows began in England in the early 1870s and featured an array of “frontier” types that fed consumer curiosity about “unnatural” oddities of the American “Wild West” including cowboys, American Indians, infamous outlaws, lady sharp shooters, etc. These curious figures were all put on public display and observed and marveled and consumed for their “strange” manners like any number of traveling “freak shows” and other marvels of nature that were popular in Europe in the 19th century. Is it possible that “Our Wild West Friends” depicted as living in symbiosis and harmony with each other and in nature were actually meant to stand in as marvels of nature in a kind of illustrated “Wild West Freak Show” published in a British newspaper way back on January 1, 1879? If that was the intention, then the joke is on them for having missed the deeper meaning. I think I prefer walking around in my neighbor’s moccasins for a few moons…

After Professor Sharon Block’s lecture on Thursday, April 13th, I decided to add a postscript:

The moccasins to the left above are mine and were made in the traditional way. Men perform the hunt and women perform the remaining labor. They dress the animal, prepare the meat, other animal parts, and hide: scrape, tan, chew (yes, you read that correctly) and smoke the leather. The bead work was done by Jeannie Peak whose mother is very famous in the region for traditional beaded crafts she made for famous people like the Queen of England and Roy Rogers (of old Western Film and Radio Spectaculars). Many members of the area tribes — including many of my Salish friends in Arlee, MT — are descended from American Indians converted in the late 1800s to Catholicism (see the Mission in St. Ignatius, MT). The flower on the two pieces above is the “Salish Rose,” symbolic of femininity, fertile bounty (reproduction), and the natural cycles of life. The Salish Rose also has a second meaning that most outside of the community might not know; it is a symbol of the Catholic Sacred Heart of Christ. The second piece — the necklace featured to the right above — is traditionally worn by Salish women who participate in tribal and intertribal dancing ceremonies and rituals called Pow Wows (during fourth of July weekend in Arlee). The Shawl Dance or the Traditional Dance are danced by the American Indian woman to celebrate her femininity, her role within the tribal community, and her direct connection to mother nature.

Susan Morse is a continuing lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she has enjoyed teaching for many years. She received her PhD in German Studies from the UCI Department of European Languages & Studies in 2006. She also studied Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Psychology and English at the Universities of Montana and Arizona, which is another reason why she loves teaching in the Humanities. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory and the limits of representation in the Holocaust. In addition to leading seminars in Core, she also enjoys teaching a Romantic Fairy Tales course for the Department of European Languages & Studies and Comparative Literature.

The Intersection of Race and Gender in Oroonoko

Why might it be valuable for our students to read race and gender together to understand the power structure of empire in Aphra Behn’s novel – not only in the plight of handsome prince Oroonoko and his beautiful Imoinda as individuals, but also for the economic and social structure of the slave trade? What could students learn about reading both categories together, rather than just for one? The instability of the woman narrator’s voice in her description of a slave market in the triangle trade is a useful place for students to begin understanding this intersection:

Those then whom we make use of to work in our plantations of sugar are Negroes, black slaves altogether […]. Those who want slaves make a bargain with a master or a captain of a ship, and contract to pay for them when they shall be delivered on such a plantation. So that when there arrives a ship laden with slaves, they who have so contracted go aboard and receive their number by lot; and perhaps in one lot that may be for ten, there may happen to be three or four men, the rest women and children; or be there more or less of either sex, you are obliged to be content with your lot. (12-13)

Edward Francis Finden, Slave market in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1824)

In lecture Prof. Jayne Lewis spoke about keywords that locate the narrator among white slaveowners and buyers by starting off in the first person: “we make use of” the Africans for the sugar plantations on which she was a guest. She establishes some distance from “those who want slaves” as employers, though her visit benefits from slaves’ “work”. “They” as buyers “bargain,” “contract,” “pay,” terms that continue to identify them in the third person: here, slave buyers are white. They are also most likely male, as illlustrations indicate, and ownership makes probable. The recently licensed commerce to use Africans for profit seems almost fair: in this marketplace, buyers do not know who will be in any “lot” they have contracted for: perhaps “three or four men,” with as an afterthought “the rest women and children”? (For immediate profit in the sugar fields, the men are singled out.) But this poses a moral problem that the narrator cannot solve in first and third person narrative: in the key moment: “you are obliged to be content with your lot.” The decision may be a choice of the captain or master, but the word “lot” suggests it is something you accept as some sort of economic if not social contract. But who or where are “you”? You are a buyer – context makes it clear that you are not a slave, because slaves have no ability to contract and therefore no obligation in this situation. The slave market is a scene of identity shock. Tamara Beauchamp suggested to me that the ordinarily feminized reader of the romance, the ‘you’ in the passage, may be in an identificatory relationship with the slaves, but I don’t read the “you” that way. However, I would agree that there is irony floating around here: as a woman, the narrator is obliged to be “content with her lot” in some ways: she cannot rescue the lovers, much as she sympathizes with them. But neither can she articulate the relationship of her realistic scene to her romantic tale of the lovers. Perhaps this break is signaled by the sudden move to “Coromantien,” the first word of the next paragraph, where the narrator reclaims her authority.

Frontispiece to Irish edition of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equino (Dublin, 1791)

Among secondary sources for research on the intersection of race and gender, I would recommend Laura Brown, in her Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Cornell, 1993). Brown does not use this passage, but she takes Oroonoko as “a theoretical test case for the necessary connection of race and gender.” Brown argues that the “reductive normalizing” of the romantic narrative must be read together with the experiences of the slaves “because they are oriented around the same governing point of reference, the ubiquitous and indispensable figure of the woman.”

For compare and contrast work, I would recommend The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself; here the slaves are divided into “parcels,” or as he later says “lots,” and the buyers rush to “make choice of the parcel they like best.” But Equiano, an ex-slave, writes from the point of view of the “terrified Africans,” men, women, and children. The question of fairness here is seen from the slaves’ point of view. (I would agree that Equiano’s task is different as a man writing in 1791, but that too would be worth comparing.) Behn’s narrator could perhaps glimpse the possibility of describing the slave market this way, but her use of first-, second-, and third-person pronouns shows that she cannot yet articulate or integrate it into the story.

Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Ed. Janet Todd. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.

Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print.

Equiano, Olaudah. Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.

Vivian Folkenflik is an emeritus lecturer in the Humanities Core Program, where she taught for over three decades. She is the editor and translator of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, the Marquis de Pelleport’s novel The Bohemians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (Columbia University Press, 1992). She is also the author and archivist of our program’s institutional history at UC Irvine. Her thought and teaching have been at the center of many cycles of Humanities Core, and she continues to act as a pedagogical mentor for seminar leaders in our program.

Yesterday and the Dangers of Impulse Democracy

This essay first appeared on Saturday, January 29th on Susan Morse’s Humanities Core website Empires Will Fall, where she blogs alongside the students in her seminars. She has graciously shared this post with the Humanities Core Research Blog.

Andrew Zyglis, “Twitter Tirades.” Originally published in the Buffalo News, November 29, 2016.

Yesterday was January 27th, and for some people it was just another Friday, another step toward a weekend marked perhaps with overestimated potential or targeted for solitary reflection or some other form of leisure. For others, this day signaled the end of an insufferably long presidential premiere filled with a flurry of carefully choreographed executive orders signed by our newly sworn in “intimidater” and chief, or as others in the social media world have donned him, our “reprimander” and chief. For me, yesterday has meaning that moves far beyond the banality of the every day and toward the impulse diplomacy now being practiced with dangerous consistency by our late night “tweeter” and chief, my personal favorite of his nick-names. I guess what I have come to realize is that after just a few days in office, yesterday began the first day of the end of strategic and formal American diplomacy as I have experienced it during my medium young life-time and the potential return to shameful policies best left in the past.

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the General Assembly of the United Nations to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 27, 1945. As a holocaust scholar, I have spent years reflecting on the slow but legalized process of removing Jewish members from their rightful place in German society in the years following Hitler’s rise to power. Initially, Jewish citizens were intimidated then compelled to leave their homes to escape the persecution made possible with the September 15, 1935 establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. Recognizing the clear dangers of remaining in Nazi Germany, some families – early on – were able to leave and to begin a new life elsewhere. However, as Hitler passed legislation to freeze Jewish assets and began closing the Reich’s borders to prevent Jewish families from leaving the nation without first paying an Exit Tax, it became next to impossible for these citizens to escape the very real dangers that this newly burgeoning empire presented to them. Only a few prominent or otherwise lucky individuals with outside connections, like Sigmund Freud, were “sponsored” financially by patrons willing to purchase their freedom and to ensure their continued existence.

Although the willing executioners sympathetic to the Nazi cause are remembered as the grand perpetrators of the Holocaust, an unforgivable and unfathomable act of human evil in the 20th Century, the list of other complicit nations is long and should not be forgotten. Our very own United States government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt played its own shameful part.

John Knott’s cartoon “Please, Ring the Bell for Us,” July 1939.

In February 1939, months before the cartoon to the right fully expressed the general unwillingness of the United States government to intervene in Hitler’s anti-Semitic agenda, two public servants called for responsible action. NY D-Senator Robert Wagner and MA R-Representative Edith Rogers offered for consideration a bi-partisan piece of legislation that would grant safe passage and sponsored refuge to 20,000 Jewish children under the age of 14. This call to action corresponded with some other national efforts at the time to save Jewish children and families from Nazi occupied Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The most well-known of these efforts, England’s Kindertransport, saved close to 10,000 Jewish children in a nine month period between 1938 and 1939. Meanwhile in the United States, the Wagner-Roger’s Bill shamefully did not even pass through committee for a vote opportunity, with opponent arguments ranging from the claim that the nation couldn’t allow 20,000 individuals beyond the then immigration quota to the fear that these children would one-day grow up to take American jobs from other citizens; either way, these are inexcusably flimsy arguments against a clear-cut moral imperative.

During that same year, another event – the tragic journey of the MS St. Louis – further informs this history and day of remembrance. In June, 1939, 900 Jewish mothers, children and other family members were on their way to Cuba to join their husbands, fathers, and brothers, who had gone before them to establish a foundation for a new beginning. After spending several days off the coast of Cuba, at a distance so close that families could hear and see one another, the ship was turned away where it headed to the coast of Florida to make a final plea for refuge. It was not long before the MS St. Louis was also refused entry by President Roosevelt and was forced to make what must have been an unbearable return journey. As disheartening as it is to know that nearly one third of these people were captured and murdered by the Nazis, it is also unsettling to discover Hitler made an example of this failed refugee journey in a major propaganda campaign that highlighted the idea that these Jews were so undesirable, that no nation would accept them. [Editor’s note: In the past few days, an activist Twitter called St. Louis Manifest has been using images of Jewish refugees turned away at US borders to make a poignant commentary on Trump’s immigration ban.]

Our nation did not accept those war refugees in 1939, and it was shameful. Following the end of WWII, the United States revisited its policies, establishing the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, which “removed all racial barriers to immigration and naturalization and granted the same preference to husbands as it did to wives of American citizens.” Further reforms were put in place in 1965 and again in the 1970s, making this a nation that welcomed war refugees. I’m sure many of us have family members who came to this country as a result of political tyranny or due to war. In my case, the two surviving members of my Armenian family put down their roots in America after escaping the village of Parchang in Turkey in the early 1900s.

Why have I gone to such lengths to revisit this history? It is precisely because yesterday, President Trump dishonored these traditions as well as International Holocaust Remembrance Day when he made an announcement that he had signed yet another executive order. This is one which steps United States policy back to 1939 and brings us full circle to the beginning of my blog when I first drew attention to the dangerous implications of Trump’s Impulse Diplomacy. Here are just a couple examples from this, Trump’s first week in office:

On January 23rd, while standing in front of the CIA memorial wall, honoring the sacrifice of American field agents, who died in service of our nation, Trump first uttered the phrase that has since become his most recent mantra regarding the Iraq War that, “if we kept the oil you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil. But okay. Maybe you’ll have another chance. But the fact is, should have kept the oil.” This not only has dangerous implications for the men and women in the military currently assisting Iraqi troops in their campaigns against ISIS, but it also blows up US-Middle Eastern relations. Also, didn’t he say during his campaign that ISIS was Obama’s fault?

On January 24th, following publication of climate science data, images from the poorly attended inauguration, and other factual evidence that doesn’t meet with the president’s approval, Trump responded by ordering a Media Blackout on multiple government agencies. This ban required that targeted agency Twitter accounts (e.g., EPA, USDA, Department of Interior, National Parks) be closed and that all public announcements and data receive government approval prior to publication. [Editor’s note: Here is an NPR round-up on the many rogue Federal Twitter accounts that have sprung up in the past week as protest.]

On January 25th, Trump signed an executive order to take “steps to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border,” in order to “achieve complete operational control of the southern border.” Trumps repeatedly promised during his campaign and more recently via his “diplomatic” Twitter feed that Mexico would pay for it. Later that night, during his first Presidential interview with ABC News reporter David Muir, he was reminded that the Mexican President had unequivocally stated that Mexico would not pay for a wall, to which Trump’s response was: “He has to say that. He has to say that. But I’m just telling you there will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form. And you have to understand what I’m doing is good for the United States. It’s also going to be good for Mexico.”

On January 26th, following Trump’s Twitter taunts, his “Wall” executive order, and his ABC News interview, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto canceled his scheduled, traditional “meet and greet” visit to the White House. Trump succeeded in blowing up US-Mexican relations, but he still plans on building the wall, which will most certainly place the burden of payment on U.S. taxpayers.

And yesterday, on January 27th, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump announced the executive order, which takes our country back in time to its 1939 era policies. This is a “Muslim Ban,” designed to protect the nation from “Islamic Terrorism.” It prevents citizens belonging to seven Muslim nations from entering the United States for at least 90 days until serious vetting can be completed. The nations targeted are: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. The order also indefinitely suspends the admission of Muslim refugees from Syria (but it will allow for Christian refugees from Syria).

Just to be clear here – Trump was elected as the Republican candidate, and he has a Republican Congress. Ultimately, the flurry of executive orders that he has signed throughout his first week in office definitively illustrates that his impulsive govern-by-the-gut practice is not limited to his foreign diplomacy. Regarding the “Muslim Ban,” Trump has repeatedly stated that preventing acts of violence against American citizens from “Islamic Terror” is one of his highest priorities. So let’s take a minute to process. The 9-11 attacks were perpetrated by citizens from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt, all countries not included on the executive order. Other attacks or attempted attacks on US soil going back to 9-11 include the shoe bomber (from England), the underwear bomber (from Nigeria), the San Bernadino shooters (he is from America, she is from Pakistan), the Fort Hood attacker (from the United States), the Boston Bombers (from Kyrgyzstan), and the Orlando Night-Club attacker (from the United States). Okay, none of these individuals are from the nations included on the “Muslim Ban,” either, so what’s the point? Optics for his supporters while safe-guarding his Big Oil Agenda? I’d say Big Oil Empire building gets a big Yep!

The good news, if there is some to glean from this muck of a new administration, is that some of these executive orders won’t necessarily lead to the desired end, beyond having offered the president his photo op, because they require Congressional approval for minor things like the allocation of funding and resources (e.g., building the “Wall,” moving forward with the pipeline projects – #standwithstandingrock). The executive order calling for a complete investigation into voter fraud in the 2016 election goes beyond the authority of the President, because only the Department of Justice or the FBI have authority to make this call and only after they have established evidentiary justification for such an investigation – meaning that it is founded on the basis of having real facts in hand rather than on the basis of Trumpian alternative facts. With respect to the most recent executive order, the “Muslim Ban,” which impacts visitors, refugees and green card holders, it is possible that this is an illegal action altogether.

Photograph taken at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., January 21, 2016.

Regarding the image above, “Japanese Americans against Muslim Registry”- Right. Ya, the U.S. did that too during WWII – I have made a couple of personal resolutions. One, I will voice my dissent often and loudly so long as is necessary. And Two, if Trump eventually signs a “Muslim Registry” executive order – which he may be waiting to do until February 19th to align himself with President Roosevelt, who signed Executive Order 9066 to intern 100,000 Japanese-Americans in their own home country – then I have decided that I am Muslim. I will sign the registry myself, and I will encourage all non-Muslims to join me in line. Weirdly, he seems obsessed by size, especially by crowd size…

How to Make a Barbarian in Three Steps

South African road sign (1956). Image via Hulton Archive, Getty Images.

The election of a man with no political experience that won the hearts and minds of many in America by loudly proclaiming what for years the political Right has been saying has been denied them by PC culture: the ability to say out loud that religious minorities, blacks, women, gays and transgender folk, non-white immigrants, non-white citizens, feminists, fatties, and uglies have gotten too uppity and comfortable and need to be reminded of their place; that we represent the limit to the America dream (and not the forms of economic dispossession that enable the .1% to hold onto obscene amounts of wealth and resources). There is a firm belief that the ills of society are caused by the barbarians that have infected America from within and the barbarians that remain at the gate waiting to take from us what ours. In this configuration, I have been rendered the barbarian (though I have been before, as many of us have): I am a Muslim-born, middle eastern immigrant, a divorced childless middle-aged feminist with a doctorate in the Humanities. I am now the intersection of the axes of the new barbarian explicitly articulated by the Trump campaign.

In this moment of wild political uncertainty in the United States and as a barbarian myself, I am immensely grateful to be able to teach Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a text written in apartheid South Africa. Coetzee was eight years old when apartheid was formally instituted in 1948, and witnessed the emergence of the 1950 Population Registration Act, which registered and classified all South Africans racially into one of three categories, “white”, “black”, or “colored”, the latter which included mix-raced as well as Indian and Asian individuals. It should be noted that these distinctions were based on appearance, often dividing members of the same biological family into different racial categories. Thus, Coetzee’s ability to describe and deconstruct patterns of institutional separation and quotidian and routinized cruelties against an “other” is informed in no small part by having lived the dystopian reality of apartheid South Africa, the institutional organizational of which was largely influenced by a real-life white fraternal conspiracy called the Broederbond. It is not insignificant that Coetzee was born to Afrikaner parents and, while he openly resisted Apartheid, nonetheless was a privileged member of South African society: In this book, he beautifully relays the subtle truths about privilege and its many losses.

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South African apartheid-era sign (date unknown). Image via the BBC.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a mapping of colonial relationships, a philosophical challenge to the cruelties of civilization hidden behind paranoid invocations of the “other”, and a cautionary tale of privilege as itself a momentous loss.

The text is an exquisite breakdown of how the other, in this case the barbarian, is a construction informed largely by paranoia and projection. Early on in the narrative, we learn that Colonel Joll’s soldiers capture a dozen local fisherman for no other reason than they were hiding, a fact that the Magistrate characterizes as “[t]he reasoning of the policeman” (18). This reasoning to which he points is, of course, circular: The distrust of the policeman for the “other” renders any act by this “other” ipso facto suspicious. By definition, there is no benefit of the doubt for the barbarian, the truth of which justifies the expansion of the security apparatus of the empire at every turn.

Overcrowding in American Federal prisons, Image via Criminal Justice Information.

Moreover, the conditions which produce “the barbarian” are the conditions mandated by the empire itself. These nomads, now prisoners, are forced into a small space in the yard, using a corner as a latrine, entirely limited in their movement to the enclosed area and fully dependent on the care of those who imprison them. Then — and here’s the kicker — the locals begin to complain about these “barbarians” because they are intrusive: “[t]he filth, the smell, the noise of quarrelling and coughing become too much….A rumour begins to go the rounds that they are diseased, that they will bring an epidemic to the town….the kitchen staff refuse them utensils and begin to toss them their food from the doorway as if they were indeed animals” (20). The other as lazy, as violent, as uncouth is a fact made of the institutions of power, not merely adjudicated by them.

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area at Camp X-Ray of Naval Base Guantanamo Bay (January 11, 2002). Image via Reuters File.

Thus what this scene does is reveal to the reader the patterns of subjugation, and it seems to take a mere three steps: (1) Those invested with power are taught to distrust them and imprison them because they are others/“barbarians.” (2) They impose conditions which are vile and inhuman, and limit their scope of life to satiation of immediate biological needs, and thereafter (3) justify their prejudices and the exclusion of the barbarian/other with reference to the filth and their “animal behaviors” of the other as proof of natural differences. Thus, in this scene we see the use paranoia and fear as a justification for dispossession, and dispossession as key to the maintenance of institutions of power and control. Of course, in case we missed this lesson the first time in the text, this process is repeated when the Magistrate is imprisoned (e.g., 80, 84) showing how the process of dehumanization is the one stable in the functioning of power, and where we can most clearly apprehend the vicissitudes of privilege.

The book reveals that privilege blinds one to the obvious, a sentiment eloquently expressed by a thought attributed to the Magistrate: “There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it” (155). When he is imprisoned and denigrated, the magistrate is surprised, taken unawares, even as he has watched so many suffer before him: “’Why me?’ Never has there been anyone so confused and innocent of the world as I. A veritable baby!” (94). He continues a few lines later:

Deliberately I bring to mind images of innocents I have known: the boy lying naked in the lamplight with his hands pressed to his groins, the barbarian prisoners squatting in the dust, shading their eyes, waiting for whatever is to come next. Why should it be inconceivable that the behemoth that trampled them will trample me too? (94)

Operations in the Warsaw Ghetto in April and May of 1943 to empty the Ghetto and deport its remaining holdouts — men, women and children. Image via the New York Times.

This perfectly encompasses the main lesson of the novel: If routine forms of cruelty can be used against “others”, you cannot be surprised when that same law and order comes to oppress you as its other. Moreover, just as you once believed the law was just even in its violence, you cannot be surprised to find yourself alone when you desperately need the protection of others (as they needed yours). And yet, we will be surprised. The truth of privilege is both that one is blind to the injustices hiding behind the letter of the law, and caught alone the moment when the law reveals its irrationality.

The final lesson is that we need the protection of others. In his own process of being othered — through denial in prison, through torture, through ritualized humiliations that conscript the townsfolk into the process of punishment and dehumanization — the Magistrate finds himself alone, wishing he had come to know his townsfolk better and to know if they, like he, detested the things unfolding around them since the arrival of the men of the capital. Observing the cruelty he fantasizes about the kinds of people that may surround him but which he does not know, people who are as bothered by the sound of the suffering inflicted on others around them: “If comrades like these exist, what a pity I do not know them” (104). Solidarity is a cornerstone of political protection, the Magistrate comes to realize at the moment when he is already taboo. Privilege will always be a loss at the moment in which the law turns from its false promise of protection to a mechanism of cruelty, punishment, and dispossession.

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Japanese-American child with family belongings en route to California internment camp (Spring 1942). Image via U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

What the book does not let us forget is that the force of law, while real, and routinely exercised to dispossess the already vulnerable, is nonetheless localized, limited, and ultimately, fragmentary. In a political world where racism is proclaimed openly, where acts of violence are following the new empowerment of hate in America, where it is unclear what laws will be enforced and against whom in the months and years to come (not to mention the laws to passed and undone), we must remember once and repeat to ourselves daily what our own UC Irvine Comparative Literature Professor Etienne Balibar says in Politics and the Other Scene: “[t]here is autonomy of politics only to the extent that subjects are the source and ultimate reference of emancipation for each other” (10). Let us take this seriously and remember that we are the source of support and liberation for one another. We can no longer assume a caring state will help the dispossessed, that the law answers the distress of the victim of hate and violence, that the person terrorized in front of you will be saved by someone else, that calling the police will end in what you would call justice. The fact we did for so long in the face of testimony by those subjected to the cruelty of the state betrays the extent that we are also under the spell of disavowal that marks the existence of the Magistrate until he becomes “othered” (see for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Works Cited

Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson and Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002).

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin Books, 1980).

Sharareh Frouzesh is a seminar leader in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she received her PhD in Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on identity formation and the privileging of particular identities through an exploration of the concept of guilt. Her interdisciplinary work engages with 20th and 21st century Iranian and Iranian-American Literature, postcolonial Anglophone and World Literatures, as well as literary theory, political philosophy, and postcolonial, critical, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories.