Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Classes start today
2010-01-04 00:00 (America/Denver) | CA
Classes begin today. Visit the link below for the academic calendar of your choice.
History students who have a section meeting time before the lecture meets should attend their section anyway.
Please see our News announcement about waitlists for instructions on how to sign up on an electronic waiting list for full classes.
https://waitlist.ucsb.edu/
hm 12/18/09; 12/29

Letters, Bodies, and Crimes: Love Letters and the Anatomy of Sentiment in Northern Mexico, 1876-1929
2010-01-11 00:00
As perhaps no other field of inquiry, the history of emotion, especially romantic love, seems dominated, almost premised upon, a search for attributes experiencing some sort of prolonged “rise” (and never “fall”). Romantic love has been the scale used to chart, variously, the rise of the civilizing process (as in the work of Norbert Elias); the rise of emotional self-control (as in the work of Peter and Carol Stearns); the rise of sentimentality; the rise of “American individualism” (as in Karen Lystra’s book, Searching the Heart); and the rise and/or spread of intimacy (as in Stephanie Coontz’s work, Marriage, A History). Yet another rise, this time of introspection and the quest for self, is the dominant concern of Volume IV of A History of Private Life, where Alain Corbin’s emphasis on the increasing need for self-scrutiny and for the development of techniques of self-comprehension, leads him to stress the importance of writing (as in private diaries and letters, a point to which I want to return).
Instead of contributing to such teleologies (or adding another of my own), I’d like to begin with a different premise, one that stresses the historicity of romantic love (and emotion more generally). Many of the contributors to Cuidado con el corazón: Los usos amorosos en el México moderno (INAH, 1995), published more than ten years ago, for example, insist on the importance of studying what they refer to as the norms of romantic morality in specific regional and temporal contexts. In common with more recent anthropological work concerned with the relationship between love and social and cultural change in places like Nepal and rural China, the goal becomes understanding how emotions accrue meanings only through specific interactions, in particular places, and at given moments of time, creating dominant (and not so dominant) “structures of feeling”that come to characterize any given era (making periodization of such eras a problem for investigation rather than assumed to follow divisions based on traditional political criteria). What I’d like to do in my talk is to look briefly at love letters, one of the means by which a history of emotion, especially romantic love, might be undertaken.
William E. French is associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the past director of the Latin American Studies Programme at that institution. He is the author of A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico (1996) and coeditor of Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (1994) and Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence (2007). He has published articles in the Hispanic American Historical Review and the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and contributed to the Oxford History of Mexico. He is currently completing a book on love letters, diaries, and courtship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico.
hm 1/4/10; 1/5

On the Look and Logos of Zen Art
2010-01-11 00:00
“Everyone’s looking for something.” Some of us have found it, or part of it, in Zen Art, though the types of things we look at, the way we talk about them, and the sorts of Zen we draw from them may be dramatically different. Indeed, the easily joined words “Zen” and “Art” exist in dynamic tension, grammatically as well as conceptually, and bring to mind other intersections: “East” and “West,” practitioner and scholar, past and present. This paper explores some of the tensions, or perhaps currents and cross-currents, that accompany modern looking at and explaining Zen Art. It offers an episodic history of the formation and reception of Zen Art in modern era and reconsiders, somewhat insistently, figures such as Arthur Waley, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, and, even, Murakami Takashi.
Cosponsored by he East Asian RFG , Art History (as part of its “Thinking Through Media” series), History, and the East Asia Center
hm 1/5/10

Discussion of the Publishing Process
2010-01-11 00:00
Susan Ferber, the executive editor of Oxford University Press, will talk on the nuts and bolts of the publishing process, with plenty of time for questions. Light refreshments will be served.
Please note that the time was changed (originally 12 noon).
hm 1/3/10; 1/4

Up the Yangtze
2010-01-12 00:00
A luxury cruise boat motors up the Yangtze, navigating the mythic waterway known in China simply as “The River.” The Yangtze is about to be transformed by the biggest hydroelectric dam in history. At the river’s edge, a young woman says goodbye to her family as the floodwaters rise towards their small homestead. The Three Gorges Dam — contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle — provides the epic backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a dramatic feature documentary on life inside modern China.
Sponsored by the IHC?s Oil + Water Series and the Community Environmental Council.
hm 1/8/09/ 1/12

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
2010-01-15 00:00
Bartels is the author of Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice (1988) and Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2008). He will also deliver a public lecture Thursday, January 14 at 4 PM in Lane Room, 3824 Ellison Hall.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science.
jwil 28.xii.2009

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
2010-01-21 00:00
Wired for War – The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
“[P.W. Singer] has written what is likely to be the definitive work on this subject for some time to come.” Financial Times
Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, P.W. Singer reveals how science fiction is fast becoming a reality on the battlefield in his new book Wired for War. Singer argues that a massive shift in military technology and the advent of robotic warfare is changing not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself. The author of the eerily prescient award-winning books Corporate Warriors, about private military contractors, and Children at War, about child soldiers, Singer will discuss his recent work.
Admission is free for UCSB students with valid UCSB ID.
Co-presented with the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and USCB Center for Nanotechnology in Society.
Books will be available for purchase and signing.
jwil 04.i.2010, hm 1/6/10

ROUNDTABLE: The Future of the University: Equity and Access
2010-01-21 00:00
A panel discussion treating the futures of racial, ethnic, and economic diversity in the UC system in an era of budget crisis and fee “deregulation.” Will the University of California still serve all the people of California, and which students or prospective students stand to be most affected as the UC system moves toward greater privatization?
Panelists include Professors Julie Carlson (English, UCSB and Academic Director, Project Excel), Marisela Ramos (History, Latino/a Studies, University of the Pacific), Claudia Martinez (Director of Academic Preparation, UCSB), and Jeffrey Stewart (Chair, Black Studies, UCSB). Student activists will be invited to attend and participate in post-panel discussion.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Future of the University series and the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center.
hm 1/4/10

The Methodological Challenges of Researching Postcolonial African Histories
2010-01-28 00:00
Within the field of African history, scholars have just begun to historicize Africa’s postcolonial era, roughly marked by the independence of Ghana in 1957 to the present. This new endeavor presents significant methodological challenges, since African states have not always had the means nor the political will to maintain state archives. This scenario has prompted scholars to ask whether a history of postcolonial Africa needs to explore alternative archives located outside of official state institutions, such as non-government agencies, popular culture productions, and orality.
Stephan Miescher will lead a discussion about these issues in the context of the African Studies RFG’s 2009-10 theme of “Performance, Orality, and the Postcolonial State.”
Sponsored by the IHC’s African Studies RFG.
hm 1/20/10

The Importance of Hubert Harrison (1883-1927): The Voice of Harlem Radicalism and an Intellectual/Activist Ahead of His Time
2010-01-29 00:00
Perry is a long-time union activist and editor for the National Postal Mail Handlers Union. He is the author of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (2008). He edited Theodore W. Allen’s Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (2006).
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy.
jwil 28.xii.2009

The Ancient City
2010-02-01 00:00
Participants in Professor Digeser’s 213AB research seminar (Spring 2009-Fall 2009) will make individual presentations on their research.
Sponsored by the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group and the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Ph.D. Emphasis.
jwil 04.i.2010

The Iranian Presidential Election and the Emergence of the Green Movement
2010-02-03 00:00
Mohammad Amjad has just returned from Iran where he was an activist in the protest movement following the Iranian elections. An expert in Iranian nuclear diplomacy and foreign policy, he received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Riverside, in 1986/.
Sponsored by the IHC, Center for Middle East Studies, the Department of History, and the Mellichamp Chair-Religious Studies Dept. For additional information call 893-4245, or email cmes@cmes.ucsb.edu
hm 1/30/10

Women Sweatshop Workers: Victims of Exploitation or Agents of Change?
2010-02-04 00:00
Quan is Associate Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and this year’s Hull Lecturer.
She also speaks on Friday at 1pm in the History dept.
Co-sponsored by the Feminist Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Multicultural Center.
hm 12/30/09

Missing Link: China and Global Struggles Against Walmart
2010-02-05 00:00
Quan is Associate Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and this year’s Hull Lecturer.
She also speaks on “Women Sweatshop Workers: Victims of Exploitation or Agents of Change?” Thursday,February 4, 4 PM,Multicultural Center. Co-sponsored by the Feminist Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Multicultural Center.
hm 12/30/09

Stalin's Great Terror: Historic Photo Documents and Memorial Culture Today
2010-02-08 00:00
Tomasz Kizny will present his documentary photo project that gives faces and voices to the victims of The Great Terror in the USSR (1936-38).
First, historic prison portraits of the victims with biographical notes accompanied by excerpts from diaries and private documents are shown.
Next, Kizny presents his recent photographs of the Soviet killing fields and the heirs of the victims in Russia to reveal the immense topography of terror and to bear witness to the atrocities of the past remaining in the present.
Tomasz Kizny is a Polish photojournalist who was a founding member of the clandestine association Dementi and author of Gulag: Life and Death inside Soviet Concentration Camps (2004).
Sponsored by the departments of Comparative Literature, Germanic Slavic & Semitic Studies, History, Political Science and the IHC.
hm 2/3/10

Under the U.N. Flag: The International Community and the Genocide in Srebrenica
2010-02-09 00:00
Hasan Nuhanovic is visiting California for a lecture at the UCLA Human Rights Colloquium Series and joins us at UCSB to give a talk on the events surrounding the fall and genocide of the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in July 1995. Nuhanovic is a Bosnian Muslim who worked as a translator for the United Nations. As such he worked very closely with the Dutch Battalion (DutchBat3) tasked with protecting the unarmed population of Srebrenica. His mother, father and brother were all killed in the genocide after the Dutch Battalion refused to grant them, or any other civilians refuge within the UN compound, as mass executions by the Serbian forces were taking place.
Mr. Nuhanovic’s book, Under the U.N. Flag: The International Community and the Genocide in Srebrenica (2007) offers the first publicly available account of the terror and inhumanity experienced by those seeking sanctuary from genocide who placed their lives and their trust in the hands of the peacekeepers. Unarmed, starved and deprived of basic human needs the people of the ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica placed their complete reliance on the promise of protection by the United Nations. This book is compiled from firsthand experience of the events by Hasan Nuhanovic as well as other survivors of the genocide. It provides a detailed chronology covering the days leading up to the notorious days in July 1995 when the genocide of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica began and the subsequent period during which the world media continued to propagate the message that nothing sinister was going on: it took the best part of six years before genocide was officially deemed to have taken place in 2001. This unique account is both an exhilarating read and a major work of historical reference. (amazon UK page; foreword)
The lecture is open to the public and will be followed by a discussion.
**For more information, see this transcript of this March 2006 PBS/Frontline interview with Mr. Nuhanovic.**
In January 2000 PBS also aired a film, “Srebrenica: A Cry from the Grave.” The companion website offers a overview of the film, which includes testimony by Mr. Nuhanovic. (I noticed that most of the links on the Resources Page are broken, however.)
The BBC has compiled a timeline of the siege (July 6-19) with embedded clips of news reports.
Gendercide Watch offers an excellent, relatively brief overview page: Case Study: The Srebrenica Massacre, July 1995 as well as a gallery of 14 photos.
Wikipedia’s Srebrenica Massacre page offers extensive background information and images.
Mr. Nuhanovic’s visit is sponsored by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, the Global Studies Program, the Human Rights Council, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
hm 2/6/10

The Place of Liberal Arts in a Public University
2010-02-11 00:00
The idea of a liberal education is threatened today by the assumption that learning is insignificant if it does not have immediate economic and commercial impact. This panel will examine the values underlying the idea of free and open-ended inquiry and the place of the liberal arts in a public university.
Participants include: Professors
Laurie Monahan, (History of Art and Architecture, UCSB and Director, Arts Research Initiative),
David Gross (Physics, UCSB and Director, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics),
Wade Clark Roof (Religious Studies, UCSB and Director, Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life), and
Charles Wolf (Film and Media Studies, UCSB).
Sponsored by the IHC’s Future of the University Series.
hm 2/6/10

Twenty years after the Fall of the Wall: Assessments, biographies, perspectives
2010-02-15 00:00
POSTPONED until Winter quarter 2010 due to visa problems
Daniela Dahn was born in Berlin, studied journalism in Leipzig and worked as a TV-journalist. After 1981 work as a freelance journalist and writer. In 1989, she was a founding member of the civil rights group “Demokratischer Aufbruch.” Numerous prizes, such as the Fontane prize,
the Tucholsky prize, and the Boerne prize, and various professorships in the UK and USA. Her latest book is titled: Wehe dem Sieger! Ohne Osten kein Westen, Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 2009. (amazon.de page).
Co-sponsored by the German Department, Center for Cold War Studies and International History, and the History Department
hm 10/7/09, 10/9

Our Spirits Don't Speak English: Indian Boarding School
2010-02-17 00:00
A Native American perspective on Indian Boarding Schools, this film uncovers the dark history of U.S. Government policy which took Indian children from their homes, forced them into boarding schools, and enacted a policy of educating them in the ways of Western Society. It gives a voice to the countless Indian children forced through a system designed to strip them of their Native American culture, heritage and traditions.
Chip Richie, 80 min., 2008, English, USA.
hm 1/5/10

3rd Annual Ask-a-Vet Forum
2010-02-17 00:00
Student Veterans at UCSB, an organization of undergraduate and graduate students, will hold its third annual Ask-a-Vet Forum this Wednesday, February 17. The event will be at 7:30pm in the SRB-Multi Purpose Room. A panel of student veterans will discuss their experiences in the military and as returning students, and will respond to questions from the campus community.
For more information, click here.
jwil 14.ii.2010

Pythagoras the Theurgist: Images of the Ideal Philosopher in Late Platonism
2010-02-19 00:00
Heidi Marx-Wolf is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba.
This talk is sponsored by the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group and by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Ph.D. emphasis.
jwil 10.ii.2010

Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership in Europe: The View from Germany
2010-02-19 00:00
Professor Paul Spickard (Department of History, UCSB) is a specialist on Race and Ethnicity in the United States and in Comparative International Perspective. An award-winning teacher, among his many books are Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group Revised Edition (2009); Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (2007); and Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (2005).
Sponsored by the IHC’s Identity Studies RFG.
For more information, please visit:
hm 2/10/10

Latex and Blood: Science, Markets, and American Empire
2010-02-22 00:00
The Lawrence Badash Distinguished Lecture
Sponsored by the Lawrence Badash Speakers’ Fund and hosted by the UCSB Center for Science in Society
During the 20th century, the United States developed a unique kind of empire, one bound together less by military conquest and direct political administration than by the expansion of markets, corporate influence, and cultural exchange. The political and economic ties between the United States and the Republic of Liberia, cemented in the 1920s when the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company successfully established a major rubber plantation in the country, exemplify this new imperial relationship. Yet, the transformation of Liberia into America’s rubber empire depended on new tools of seeing and new forms of scientific and medical expertise. Through a focus on the Harvard African Expedition to Liberia in 1926, the motion picture record it gathered, and the place of rubber as a precious commodity in the global economy, Prof. Mitman’s talk will investigate the relationships between science, business, and the state in the economic transformation of nature and a nation.
Gregg Mitman is William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and professor of medical history and science and technology studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. His most recent books include Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film, 2d ed. (2009) and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (2007).
This event is free and open to the public. The UCSB History Associates and the Department of History will co-host a reception following Prof. Mitman’s lecture.
jwil 08.ii.2010

Hauntings: Ghosts from a Nazi Childhood
2010-02-23 00:00
The Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies cordially invites you to the eighth Dr. George J. Wittenstein Lecture.
Professor Mahlendorf will discuss some unexpected reader responses to her recently published memoir, “The Shame of Survival: Working through a Nazi Childhood”, and the ghosts they raised up for some readers and for herself.
Ursula Mahlendorf was a member of the faculty of the departments of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies and of Women’s Studies from 1957 to 1992. She studied, taught and wrote on 19th and 20th Century literature from a feminist, psychoanalytic perspective. Reader responses to her recently published memoir, The Shame of Survival: Working through a Nazi Childhood, will form the basis of her lecture/reading. Professor Mahlendorf is presently Dickson Emeriti Professor at UCSB.
hm 2/10/10

"The Ugly American" (1963)
2010-02-23 00:00
The Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) will be showing the 1963 film “The Ugly American,” based on William Lederer’s and Eugene Burdick’s bestselling novel of the same name, which was first published in 1958.
Prof. Salim Yaqub will offer commentary and lead a Q & A session after the movie.
Harrison Carter MacWhite (Marlon Brando) is the new U.S. ambassador to Sarkhan, an imaginary country in Southeast Asia. Sarkhan is wracked by nationalist ferment, which MacWhite initially attributes to communist subversion. Eventually, however, MacWhite comes see that the politics of Sarkhan are far more complex than he realized, and that even well-intentioned U.S. policies can alienate the very people they are designed to help. Released in 1963, the film uncannily foreshadows the U.S. debacle in Vietnam.
hm 2/16/10

"Traces of Trade: A Story from the Deep South"
2010-02-24 00:00
In this feature documentary filmmaker Katrina Browne discovers that her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She and nine cousins retrace the Triangle Trade and gain a powerful new perspective on the black/white divide.
Discussion with Professor Wade Roof and Dr. Gloria Willingham following the screening.
Katrina Browne, 86 min., English, 2008, USA.
hm 1/5/10

Cultural Diffusion Across Eurasia, 500 BC-AD 200
2010-02-24 00:00
The transmission of a vast number of art motifs, technologies, and cultural traits from West to East in prehistoricperiod was due to the speed of communications and trading networks across the Eurasian Steppes beginning in the
second millennium B.C.. The formation of larger territorial states, nomadic confederations and empires (such as the Xiongnu) beginning in the first millennium BCE also facilitated these transmissions, which before then had mostly consisted of sporadic, cultural diffusion between the Western borders and China’s Inner Asian frontier. In this talk Prof. Barbieri-Low examines four case studies of cultural transmission, which date from between 500 BCE to around 200 CE: glass eye-beads, Chinese patterned silks, Roman silver plate, and the Ionic capital. Prof. Barbieri-Low investigates not necessarily how these features were diffused or by what route, but how the indigenous societies chose to adapt (or not to adapt) new ideas and technologies according to their pre-existing cultural preferences and repertoires.
Sponsored by the IHC Archaeology Research Focus Group and the East Asian Cultures Research Focus Group.
jwil 20.ii.2010

Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State
2010-02-26 00:00
The Colloquium on Work, Labor, and Political Economy hosts JENNIFER KLEIN (Yale, History) and EILEEN BORIS (UCSB, Feminist Studies) this Friday, February 26 at 1 p.m. in 4041 Humanities and Social Science Building. They will discuss their paper, “Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State.” A copy can be downloaded from the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy web page at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/labor/.
Klein is Professor of History and the author of For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (2003). Boris is Hull Professor of Feminist Studies and the author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework (1994).
A light lunch will be served at the workshop.
hm 2/22/10

Was it the Boston Tea Party? Why Americans Drink Coffee
2010-03-02 00:00
In this talk, Professor Topik considers the political economy and culture of coffee consumption in the Americas. He argues that it wasn’t the Boston Tea Party that turned coffee into the Liberty Drink. Rather, economic and political factors in North and South America shaped this consumer culture.
Steven Topik is Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he concentrates on world history, with an emphasis on Latin American and especially Brazilian history. His latest works focus on commodities as a means of studying world history and include The Second Conquest of Latin America (1997, with Allen Wells); The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America: 1500-1989 (2003, with William Clarence Smith); and From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000 (2006, with Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank). He is currently working on a world history of coffee from 1500 to today.
Sponsored by the IHC Food Studies Research Focus Group.
jwil 22.ii.2010

Blaming the past: Apologizing for ancestral misdeeds
2010-03-02 00:00
Dr. David Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus, University College, London, is the author of many works, including the well-known The Past is a Foreign Country.
Dr. Lowenthal also be available to meet with graduate students and faculty, hosted by our public history program, from 4-5 in HSSB 3008.
As recommended reading before the talk Prof. Lowenthal suggests his TLS review “Beyond Repair: Apologies for the past replace our Hopes for the Future,” Times Literary Supplement (Nov. 24, 2006), pp. 3-4, which reviews:
John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), and
Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford University Press, 2006).
The full text follows below:
“Beyond Repair: apologies for the past replace our hopes for the future”
[review of John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), and Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford University Press, 2006)], Times Literary Supplement Nov. 24, 2006, pp. 3–4
The Age of Apology peaked with 1990s’ contrition chic: Bill Clinton apologized for slavery, Tony Blair for the Irish Famine, the pope for the Crusades. Australia declared a “National Sorry Day” for past mistreatment of Aborigines, with little to show by way of present improvement. Posthumous mea culpas dispense cheap cheer. They show how venial are our own sins next to forebears’ crimes. Past sinners are excoriated for not thinking and acting as right-minded people do today. Censorious tracts name and shame perpetrators of history’s atrocities, demanding remorse and redress for victims’ heirs. A descendant of Sir John Hawkins, his T-shirt inscribed “So Sorry” and “Pardon”, marked the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade by kneeling in chains before 25,000 Gambians, asking forgiveness for his ancestor’s crimes. Hawkins was the second slave-trader thus chastised: the National Maritime Museum 1988 Armada show demoted Sir Francis Drake to a minor slot to “dissolve old myths and prejudices” (really a ploy, fumed an aggrieved Plymouth worthy, to mollify Spain in impending EC talks). And the habit persists: John Betjeman’s daughter has recently apologized to Slough
History is written by the winners, it is commonly said. But heritage—history shaped to present purposes—is increasingly fashioned by the losers. Ex-colonial peoples, minorities, tribal indigenes everywhere demand reparations—atonement for the suffering of those deprived of autonomy and agency, repatriation of treasures purloined or pillaged or purchased, compensation for past injustices. These claims carry much moral weight. Sacred writ in UN and UNESCO protocols, restitution diktats feature archaeologists’, art historians’, and museums’ codes of ethics .
Historical wrongs, however, are more rectified in rhetoric than in reality. When the Afro-Caribbean MP Bernie Grant harangued parliament to return the Crown Jewels to Africa, he specified neither which jewels nor to what country they should go. And reparations for recent injustices spawn perplexing and divisive issues. Should amends be personal or collective or conjoined, as in the symbolic imagery of Washington’s Vietnam Memorial? Should compensation be allocated in line with injury or need or faith or ancestry? Most reparations come from states; should firms and individuals also pay compensation? What about German and Swiss banks, French railways, global art and antiquity dealers found complicit in the Holocaust? What of ancient injuries that wound the pride, shrink the purse, cripple the power, or constrain the will of remote and perhaps putative descendants? How can reparations for lost land or houses, money or mementoes, be weighed against repatriation claims for human remains or against redress for slaughter or torture or incarceration? What recompense can succour children of Argentinean “disappeareds” told in their teens that their “parents” are in fact their parents’ murderers? Among millions maltreated by history, John Torpey notes, an unseemly contest for the status of worst-victimized often ensues.
Torpey’s short and scintillating book, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed, explores reparation demands ranging from official apologies and admissions of wrong-doing to memorials, cash payments, health and welfare aid, and property return to groups and individuals. Chapters on post-apartheid Namibia and South Africa, on Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian Second World War internees, and on legacies of slavery that still disable African-Americans suggest his topical scope. But the book’s greatest merit is its profound and lucid critique of the causes and political, legal, economic, and symbolic implications of reparation claims . Compassionate erudition, deft demolition of holier-than-thou posturing, and clarity of expression make this a minor classic reminiscent of Paul Bator’s 1983 The International Trade in Art. Torpey rightly links current campaigns to redress wrongs with the broader trend, consequent on widespread public pessimism, refocusing attention from the future to the past. “The shift from the millenarian striving for a utopian future to the struggle to repair past wrong-doing” reflects convictions “that the transformative projects of the century just past have left little but brutality and dashed dreams in their wake.” This rude awakening began, in my view, with the existential angst of the Bomb and nuclear fallout. It culminated with 1970s’ collapse of confidence in vaunted technocratic cures for hunger, disease, racism, inequality, illiteracy; growing suspicion that environmental degradation and social dysfunction were incurable; and attendant misgivings about the sagacity or probity of statesmen, corporate leaders, and scientists. Torpey, in contrast, stresses the failed promises of socialism in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet dissolution.
Coming to terms with past became an obsessive preoccupation, first in postwar Germany, then worldwide. Increasingly, nations and minorities dwelt not on past triumphs and achievements but on defeats and traumas, not sagas of progress but litanies of infamy and suffering. And post-colonial dogma (multicultural, feminist, indigenist) elevates blame for any imagined injustice into a call for restitution. Some fear, following the recent Armed Forces Act granting pardons to over 300 soldiers executed for military offences in the First World War, that compensation claims will swiftly follow.
The moral merit (if patchy fulfilment) accorded such claims would astound our forebears, just as their benighted views now appall those ignorant of history. Many today find it incredible that racism and genocide and gross inequality are the usual human condition; until recently most civilized people condemned not slave but free labour. Few recall that in the 1830s, when enlightened Britain ended slavery in its West Indian colonies, compensation went not to ex-slaves for deprivation of liberty but to slave owners for deprivation of property. We may well lament past misdeeds, but current morality cannot justify anachronistic defamation of their perpetrators, acting by the moral climate of their own day.
Reparations programmes leave much grief unresolved, sometimes exacerbated. Bitterly resented are disparities among claimants that stem from unequal social and political clout, access to media and legal aid public sympathy, and, not least, distance in time from the injustices complained of. Many jailed and tortured in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile are still alive or leave children to plead their cause; fewer Holocaust victims remain; none survive from the Armenian massacre of 1911, no child of an American slave could now claim her 1865 promise of 40 acres and a mule. Endemic racism and accrued inequities impoverish slave descendants to this day, but since most African Americans have ancestors who were slave owners as well as slaves, even symbolic atonement seems unfeasible. This has not prevented fearful Brown University alumni from stipulating that their gifts not be used for reparations. No wonder pain persists. That it might now be hard to identify deserving victims of the Crusades does little to assuage Muslim feelings of victimhood, though what is sought is less reparations than revenge.
The global spread of reparations and restitution brings together victims and advocates the world over. Holocaust survivors, First Nations Canadian tribes, South African apartheid sufferers, Australian Aborigines, and American slave descendants deploy similar arguments and strategies. Some discomfiting ironies result. African Americans equate their historic wrongs with those of Holocaust victims’, whose reparations they eye with unrequited envy. Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa press for a British apology for forebears’ Boer War incarceration in “inaugural” concentration camps. Hereros in Namibia contend that German massacres there from 1904 to 1907 were a Holocaust dress rehearsal.
Five times longer than Torpey and weighing over four pounds, The Handbook of Reparations emanates from Pablo De Grieff’s International Center for Transitional Justice in New York. Its twenty chapters and appended primary documents deal only with recent and current issues. Strong essays on reparations psychology, mental health issues, and gender justice follow exhaustive regional chapters, most on Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and failed truth commissions in El Salvador and Haiti exemplify global reparations’ difficulties, notably victims’ conflicted feelings about monetary compensation: accursed consolation prizes for irretrievable losses? Attempts to “shut our mouths” by buying amnesty for perpetrators? But many case studies, laden with details of legislative history, legal cases, lists of grievances, categories of claims and claimants, are short on analysis. Useful insights are buried in a mass of miscellanea.
Payments discussed go beyond reparations strictly speaking. The UN Compensation Commission for 1990–1991 Gulf War damages in Kuwait settled three million claims with rare speed. But without apologies or cash from Iraq, UNCC payouts represent victors’ largesse, not retributive justice. Lavish US government payments to 9/11 victims’ families accompanied no finding of fault, let alone finding the perpetrators. Moreover, Congress set up the Compensation Fund not to succour the kin of victims, but rather to prevent economic collapse; aiding the bereaved was an afterthought appended to a fund “created out of fear that recourse to the courts would threaten the precarious financial health of the airline industry.”
The few overlaps are revealing. On Japanese-American reparations the Handbook stresses the mechanics of redress along with judicial and federal action following the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. Acknowledging accomplishment, the authors cite the danger of “enabling people to feel good about each other for the moment, while leaving undisturbed the attendant social realities.” Torpey is more subtle and incisive. He shows how, as with Jews who only “after they had become assimilated into and prosperous in post-war American society [sought] to call attention to the Holocaust,” post-internment success enabled Japanese-Americans to claim reparations as Americans. Furthermore, “precisely by speaking up about the injustices done them…the Japanese-Americans became more genuinely American.” On South Africa, Christopher Colvin’s Handbook overview and Torpey both highlight the paramount conflict between the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s overriding aim, enabling perpetrators to tell their stories without fear of reprisal, and victims’ needs for apology and frustrations when amnesty barred claims against perpetrators.. But while Colvin dwells on the constitutional dilemmas posed by amnesty, Torpey illumines local events in broader context. The widely publicized anti-apartheid movement alike drew on and energized world-wide crusades against racial injustice, and legal advocacy nurtured in the American civil rights’ movement shaped reparations’ strategies. Looking behind apartheid to native land claims that hark back to 17th-century European colonization, South African reparations claimants converged with tribal restitution crusades in the Americas and the Antipodes.
Reparations politics reflect two related fetishes. One is a quixotic yearning, amidst recent atrocities and present calamities, to restore a seemlier past. “In the absence of a plausible overarching vision of a more humane future society,” concludes Torpey, “the significance…of people’s recollections…become[s] magnified: righting past wrongs” supplants visions of tomorrow. The second fad is narcissistic therapy. We blame not only our forebears but our former selves; “people eager to be praised as the salt of the earth,” Russell Baker once wrote, “are apologizing for the low-lifers they used to be.” Reparation parlays confession into collective therapy. We innately long to make whole what has been smashed. Young children exhibit faith in restorative powers that rejoin things broken and bring the dead back to life. To restore something or someone to the state it was before harm was done is not only achievable, it is obligatory. As Brandon Hamber’s psychological essay in The Hanbdook notes, the child in us also feels responsible for causing the injury and must make amends—reparation—to relieve the guilt.
For society at large, therapy dwells on the past to secure future well-being. To heal social fractures, to assuage past wounds, to reunify citizens of nations requires Truth and Reconciliation, as South Africans saw. But “making good again” requires both repentance and recompense. Generosity to Israel and Jews in the biggest reparations programme ever implemented was essential, Adenauer saw, not only as atonement but to rehabilitate Germany in the global community. As Torpey writes, “the reckoning with abominable pasts becomes the idiom in which the future is sought.”
hm 2/22/10; 2/24
