October 2007 Archives

The assignment here was to argue that gender is/is not a useful category of analysis for understanding phenomena like imperialism and class.

The tour of Don Chombo’s hillside hortaliza had been impressive. Everywhere, his slashed-and-burned land yielded maize, red beans, tomatoes, chiles, and green squash. Toward the end of our visit, my agricultural development friend Lorenzo offered to loan Don Chombo some fertilizer. “I don’t know much about working with fertilizer,” Don Chombo replied curtly, and turned toward the next field.

Why did Don Chombo refuse what seemed to be in his interest? Was his refusal based in racial prejudice, since Lorenzo was a white North American? In class, since Lorenzo seemed wealthier? In gender, since Lorenzo was unmarried and known for compassion and gentleness? Perhaps the answer is all or none of the above. But the questions illustrate the principle categories historians use to analyze and explain the past. As academic history narrows its focus to the story of oppression, categories of race, class, and gender have become increasingly prominent.

Historians love novelty. Every year university presses publish hundreds of new interpretations of history, and reject hundreds more. The field is marked by “turns”: the literary turn, the cultural turn, the transnational turn. Professors and authors must labor to stay up-to-date, lest they be charged with a lack of secondary literature in their own work. Somewhat paradoxically, historians have helped create a flash-in-the-pan sort of business.

It is remarkable, then, when an interpretation has staying power, when a book is still being referred to and challenged nearly 30 years after its initial publication. Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is such a book. Winner of both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft, the book’s influence is also demonstrated by the challenges to its interpretation, including T.H. Breen’s recent Marketplace of Revolution. Breen makes his dispute with Bailyn’s interpretation explicit, citing shortcomings of the ideological interpretation which he means to address. Does the challenge succeed? One way to compare the two accounts is to examine a few pages of each work, analyzing in detail the use of sources and the style of presentation. How do these authors attempt to persuade, and how effective are their methods?

“History is about oppression,” a U.S. historian explained to our class of first year graduate students, indicating what has become the historian’s trinity of race, gender, and class. This obsession, he said, may be “incredibly limiting”, but since the historians’ project involves the dismantling of patriarchy, white supremacy, and exploitive capitalism, it is also “incredibly necessary”. History is a strident chorus, forcefully reminding readers of past (and present) injustices.

Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

“What stories did they tell themselves,” Laura Briggs asks of U.S. policymakers, “that enabled them to see their collusion in the economic brutalization and increasing malnutrition of working-class people in Puerto Rico . . . as ‘doing good’ (58)?” Reproducing Empire has many projects in mind: to explain globalization in terms of colonialism and development, to include the U.S. as a full participant in colonialism. The project suggested by this quote, however, is central. Ostensibly, Briggs is talking about the cultural issues – gender, sexuality, science, race, family – that have defined the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico. But the almost unspoken story behind the story she tells is a Marxian tale of the expropriation of land, the creation of the proletariat, and the production of bourgeois myths. We learn that U.S. helped create a working class by dispossessing the Puerto Rican peasantry and developing the island’s industries, and then used the sexuality of Puerto Rican women – prostitution policy, birth control initiatives, and finally sociological and anthropological renderings of the “culture of poverty” – to remain in power. It is this latter tool of domination that Briggs brings to light in the book; she means to show that “representations of working-class Puerto Rican women have never been innocent” (203).

And so, to North Americans who are concerned with Puerto Rican women, she says, “A plague o’ both your houses.” Puerto Rico does not need your vilification of patronization. Whether they saw Puerto Rican women as dangerous prostitutes (conservatives) or as mistreated “welfare queens” (liberals), both groups have denied that the U.S. had much to do with Puerto Rico’s troubles to begin with, and both have extended U.S. domination over the island and its residents.

The only heroes in the story are Puerto Ricans who saw through the veil of hegemonic language: groups who held that poverty was created by outside forces, by racism and discrimination, by colonialism – not by the Puerto Rican family. Thus, as Briggs tells us in the final chapter, the book “represents a genealogy of the demonization of poor women in the welfare reform debates of 1994-97” – a debate profoundly informed by the “culture of poverty” thesis of the controversial Moynihan Report and Oscar Lewis’ La Vida (192).

Briggs’ study is in many ways a theoretical tour de force, as the epilogue makes clear. The underlying assumption, however, is the centrality of power. Who has it, who doesn’t, and why? In her story, U.S. people maintain their power over Puerto Rican people (sometimes inadvertently, as with mainland feminists in the 1970s) through studies and policies that address reproduction. Science and government are weapons of class warfare.

Briggs seems to be profoundly disillusioned with the intellectual effort to extend help to the oppressed. All our “sources of optimism – Marxism, feminism, nationalism, and science” – have been found “wanting” (209). Does Briggs have an alternative positive project in mind?

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virgina (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975).

Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982).

The American historical profession experienced something of a revolution in the 1960s. As historians gradually came to a general consensus that historical scholarship should be more inclusive of Indians, blacks, and women, they also disagreed sharply on the form of that inclusion. For some, it was a way to “speak truth to power”; for others, a way to reconstruct a more precise picture of the past. Many historians of these marginalized groups at first depicted their subjects as victims of brutal oppression, then corrected that depiction by attempting to show that the marginalized had “agency”: control over their lives and their oppressors.

Historians soon encountered a dilemma. Can the powerless wield power? Do structures – major events and forces – or struggles – everyday lives of ordinary people – deserve the most attention? How does one write history that avoids what Peter Novick calls “overdrawn portrayals of lower-class militancy,” on one hand, and studies of the “minutiae of everyday underclass existence” on the other?

Take the case of colonial Virginia. Clearly the history of the region cannot be told without reference to slavery, the institution described as the “central paradox” and “great transforming circumstance” of American history. But what of slaves themselves? Should they be studied for their own sake or for the impact they had on the broader society? This paper will discuss how three leading historians of early America use African-Americans in their narratives of colonial Virginia and, in turn, what African-Americans themselves contribute to the story. Each is a masterpiece, and each author’s approach makes a vital contribution to the historiography – Philip Morgan’s comprehensiveness, Edmund Morgan’s emphasis on class conflict, and Rhys Isaac’s imaginative methodology – but ultimately Isaac’s study shows the most promise. Slaves in his account present themselves as human beings with crucial connections to the rest of society.

A little exercise for our Theory & Practice class. It may feel a little elementary, but I think there is something clarifying about the idea-material conditions binary.

Seldom has a historical phenomenon so concerned (and disturbed) intellectuals as the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. Philosophers, sociologists, novelists, and economists alike sought to exalt and condemn, extend and resist this new thing called capitalism. Amid this sea of intellectual debate, two figures stand out. In fact, capitalism can scarcely be discussed a century later without reference to Karl Marx and Max Weber.