Cultures of United States Imperialism

Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

This (654-page) anthology of essays aims to integrate the study of foreign relations and the study of American culture, breaking down boundaries between internal and external imperialisms and generally rejecting the idea that America is special because it hasn't had an empire (except for those little island states taken over at the end of the 19th century). Authors look at the ways in which America's project has been a fundamentally imperial one since the beginning.

Some of the noteworthy essays that I may need to refer to later:
-Donna Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," on the fear of degeneration and white male anxiety in the founding of the AMNH (this essay originally appeared in Social Text and also appears in Primate Visions)
-Bill Brown's "Science Fiction, the World's Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910-1915," is fantastic - analyzes the ways that scifi from this period merges man's perfect body and the extensions of his machines to imagine the technological manipulation of distant "prosthetic" places (as exemplified by the Panama Canal - which is the gap which Hercules creates in the body of the earth, in the image appearing on the cover of the book). Brown contrasts this emphasis on the perfect body with the previous century's scifi, and scifi from Europe, which sees science as a way to recuperate lost bodies or make up for deficiencies. Brown is at Chicago and co-edits Critical Inquiry - he also has written on "Thing Theory," which Janet had referred me to earlier this year and which integrates the analysis of the movements of material objects into an analysis of lit
-Vincente Rafael's "White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the US Colonization of the Philippines" contrasts the United States census, which was used as an "educational" tool by American colonizers intent on "lifting" certain Filipinos above others, and which fixed categories of race and gender, with Filipino street theatre which celebrated indigenous gender categories and created a Filipino identity
-Amy Kaplan's "Black and Blue on San Juan Hill" describes the controversy over TR's description of the supposed "cowardice" of the black soldiers during the Rough Riders' surge over San Juan Hill - Kaplan writes that the black community resisted this categorization, and that the way that TR focused on this cowardice, and the supposed disorganization of the Cuban resisters who assisted the United States, shows that race, and the organization of categories, was the most visible "happening" in the middle of a confusing battlefield. This episode also shows how TR lumped Cubans and American blacks together - they are seen as usable, when commanded by a white man, but not effective soldiers if working by themselves.
-In "Anti-Imperial Americanism," Walter Benn Michaels (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, writes on race, literature and national identity) describes how pro-KKK southern writers saw themselves as "colonized" by Reconstruction.
-In "The Patriot System, or Managerial Heroism," Susan Jeffords talks about the Gulf War (which took up an inordinate amount of space in this book - see pub date, 1993) - she writes that Americans justify the war by describing themselves as the most competent of techno-managers - it's interesting to think about how different this thesis would look if applied to the current Iraq War...

Through Other Continents

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

This book is a call to think outside the limits of American literary study (and study of other literatures as well). Dimock calls for interpreting American culture as an extreme holism incorporating human experiences reaching back into "deep time" and across the globe, a paradigm she sees as best illustrated by the spread of religion and languages. (She also uses Deleuze/Guattari's rhizome idea to illustrate this.)

Articulating an understanding of humans as fundamentally connected through the experience of embodiment, she then goes on to destabilize any number of other supposed "connections" which create the categories by which we define our academic studies. "Eras," she argues, should be seen as more plastic; even death should not curtail our inclusion or exclusion of particular people in categories of inquiry (this is a post-human moment). Dimock argues that the nineteenth century, with its expanding scientific knowledge, created opportunities for some people to see themselves as part of a "species" instead of as nations.

An example of a person in the nineteenth century American scene whose thought must be seen as transcending these boundaries is Thoreau, whose interest in the Bhagavad Gita Dimock sees as a "translation" across time. (John Brown, she argues, is also translated "across death" by his actions and by Thoreau's writings.) The acts of reading, writing, and translation are all radical acts, she argues, which challenge the primacy of time and allow us to hear the dead and reaffirm connections between ourselves and those who live far from us. Ezra Pound and fascism; Henry James in Italy; Robert Lowell and Vietnam all show up in different chapters. Her final chapter, on Gary Snyder and Native American and Japanese thought about tricksters (liminal animal/human figures), animals and ecology, reaffirms her conclusion that embodiment points the way to connection and empathy.

Dimock is in the English and American Studies departments at Yale. She recently co-edited a book on transnationalism and literary studies, Shades of the Planet, with Lawrence Buell; has written a book on Melville and individualism; and co-edited, with Priscilla Wald, a special issue of American Literature which I should read: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges (Duke UP, 2002).

Bananas, Beaches, and Bases

Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

Enloe, a political scientist at Clark and author of multiple other books about women, empire, and labor, sets out to prove basically that women exist in the arena of international politics. This is one of those ideas that seems obvious to an American Studies eye - of course there are women at every turn; of course gendered assumptions allow constructions such as military bases and light industry factories and tourism to exist - but may be transgressive when considered in light of assumptions about how diplomacy works.

Considering such figures and sites as Carmen Miranda, diplomatic wives, prostitutes who service military bases, and women who work in garment industries, Enloe tries to show that modernization "relies on women's contentment with traditional roles" - as auxiliaries, sex objects, or consumers. (In other words, "not only is the personal political, but the international is personal.") Enloe also shows instances of resistance to this general trend, as when diplomatic wives campaigned in the 1970s to be granted the status of "private persons" (rather than auxiliaries to their husbands' work), or when Philippine leaders asked that American soldiers be required to be tested for venereal diseases, as the prostitutes around military bases had to be, or when Mexican garment workers protested after the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, after which company indifference killed many of their co-workers.

In The American Political Science Review, Anne Sisson Runyan liked the book, though wished that Enloe had been more specific in describing exactly how international politics becomes "masculinized" (and men render concepts such as risk, security, and nationalism wholly masculine). In The Women's Review of Books, Anne McClintock (she of Imperial Leather, which I haven't read) loved the book; she especially liked how Enloe focused on the gap between women of privilege and women with no social capital, and how the first group is sometimes complicit in the oppression of the second.

Risk Society

Title: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, trans. Mark Ritter, 1992; orig. published in German in 1986)

Author: Ulrich Beck, German sociologist, who holds positions at the University of Munich and the London School of Economics. His works revolve around globalization, ecology, individualization, and the changing nature of work. Among his other recent books are The Normal Chaos of Love (1995, written with his wife!); Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk (1995); The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (1996); Power in the Global Age (2005); and Cosmopolitan Vision (2006).

Review: Beck's "Risk Society" is a post-industrial order in which the logic of wealth will give way to the logic of risk: in other words, he who has the most toys does not win; rather, he who can best evade the dangerous consequences of everybody's toys is the winner. The unfortunate part is that complete evasion may be impossible, meaning that everybody is at risk from everybody else's modernizations. Modernity, Beck argues, has perpetrated supposedly unforeseen "side effects": many of his examples are ecological, such as radioactivity, pollution, environmental illness, etc. In these cases, the logic of progress, which called for technological advancement without thinking of the price, has created regression and danger of unforeseen types. Traditional structures of knowledge - government; science, as currently practiced - are insufficient to contain these dangers.

Beck calls for an increase in what he calls "reflexive modernization" - a phase of modernity in which science and technology will become constantly self-critical and self-regulating. He calls the state of mind which has allowed science and technology to operate without checks an example of "counter-modernity" - those who believe in sci/tech in a religious way are undermining the principles of open reflection and assessment upon which modernity should be founded.

Additionally, Beck analyzes the style of individualization which he sees coming about in a post-industrial society. Work, he argues, now requires people to be flexible and single. It also extends these requirements to both genders. Industrial society required that women remain in the household, so that men could work, but this was in and of itself anti-modern. Now that women have learned to demand equal personhood and prerogative, nobody knows how to handle the resulting conflicts within marriages. This riff on individualism seems a bit disconnected from the information on risk.

Julianne Moore as a San Fernando Valley housewife afflicted by environmental illness in the totally terrifying "Safe" (1995).

As for potential holes that could be poked, were one to be in a poking mood, many of Beck's conclusions, especially in the section on gender relationships and in his thinking on work, seem to apply mainly or mostly to European/American/Western society - and society of a certain economic class, at that. Beck would argue that the new politics of risk means that class will no longer matter, because risk will be spread over all human bodies. But his argument already kind of eats itself, because, as he writes, those with more money and education will do better at managing risks - will know what kinds of food not to eat, will be able to buy bottled water, live further away from chemical threats, etc. I can buy the idea that the threat will spread over a wider range of social class, but not that it will threaten all equally.

As for his thesis about individualization and how it is affecting gender relationships, I would argue that there are many, many societies in which women have not been able to perceive individualization as their due. This is still a Western phenomenon, and an affluent one, at that. Thus, the seismic changes Beck points to seem only to be seismic for certain sectors. Is he assuming that as goes Germany and the United States, so goes the world?

Photograph of four-year-old with lymph system severely affected by fallout from Chernobyl. Taken by Paul Fusco.

Other books I've read which use this theory: None I've read so far; I know some upcoming ones will, though.

War Without Mercy

View of the Hiroshima bombing.

Title: War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)

Author: John W. Dower, professor of Japanese history at MIT. Holds a PhD in history and Far Eastern languages (Harvard). His other books include Empire and Aftermath (1979) ("a study of the life and times of the diplomat and prime minister Yoshida Shigeru"); Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1999); and most recently Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999), which won the Pulitzer, the Natl Book Award, and the Bancroft Award. He's also executive-produced a doc called "Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima", which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988.

Argument: During the Pacific War, racism on the part of both the Americans and Japanese made it easier to prosecute a conflict which was notable for its bloodiness and severity. The reason why the Japanese and Americans were able to slip into a friendly postwar relationship even after such carnage is that the stereotypes employed on both sides were multifaceted, mutable, and almost universal in their historical experience. Thus, rather than believing that the postwar years spoke to the possibility of elimination of past historical racism, Dower proposes that the most frightening thing about these kinds of racist ideologies is that they can be stowed away and applied to whatever conflict comes up next, even if the enemy is not of the same race or nationality.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Part One: Enemies
1. Patterns of a Race War: An overview of the racist ideologies at play in the American and Japanese understanding of each other. Dower points out that these ideologies must have made it easier for each side to commit atrocities and carry out full scale war; he also writes that racisms of this kind are mutable and constant conditions of human interaction. The fact that stereotypes and ideologies of the war era were easily adapted to peacetime conditions (instead of being a menacing, base simian, the Japanese were seen as pets; instead of incubating xenophobia, the Japanese ideology of purity led to a desire to purge the nation of the recently failed regime).

2. "Know Your Enemy": An analysis of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" installment on Japan serves as the centerpiece for an explication of American stereotypes about Japan, as well as background material for an understanding of why the Allies treated Japan as they did in the postwar era. Meanwhile, a parallel description of the pamphlets and manifestos read by Japanese soldiers and citizens shows that inside Japan, America and the West were viewed as aggressors possessed of a traitorous history of empire - aggressors whose downfall was essential to the health of the world. Dower uses these two sources to show how stereotype worked on either side: these types "followed patterns of contrariness", in which the type was seen as the opposite of the favorable national ideal; "the positive self images of one side were singled out for ridicule and condemnation by the other"; both sides espoused surprisingly similar ideologies of "liberation, morality, and peace"; images of the enemy as "incorrigibly evil, base, or mad" led to genocidal policies or practices; and finally, "there was a free-floating quality to portrayals of the enemy - a pattern of stereotyping particular to enemies and 'others' in general, rather than to the Japanese foe or Western foe in particular" (29) (see Richard Drinnon).

3. War Hates and War Crimes: Dower begins with two questions: why were Japanese seen in the US as being so much worse than the Germans in the atrocity department? And why did Japanese propaganda portray the Allies as "the real barbarians of the modern age" (34)? Answers to the first include the idea that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, were "suicidal" or irrational; that the incomplete defeat of the Japanese would only, in the history of such a long-standing nation, mean that the Japanese would begin to build up forces for a revenge blow; and finally, the idea that Japan required a "psychological purge" to free it of its "madness" - we should inflict pain and suffering on all of the citizens, this argument went, as a necessary method of ridding the Japanese of their abnormal psychology (56). Meanwhile, the Japanese saw us as having had a long-term ambition to gain supremacy over Asia; having interfered militarily in Japanese affairs in the past; and having a current plan to commit atrocity in order to send Japan back into the class of "slave state" (58).

Part Two: The War in Western Eyes
4. Apes and Others: Representation of Japanese people as subhuman or inhuman took several forms: representation as animals (monkeys, bees, snakes); representation as madmen; representation as children. Dower uses cartoons, official propaganda, etc., as examplars. These attached representations, Dower writes, "blocked seeing the foe as rational or even human, and facilitated mass killing" (89). Dower points out that while these stereotypes remained somewhat constant and translated from earlier eras, the United States became availed of stronger and stronger technological methods of extermination, resulting in a deadly combination (93).

5. Lesser Men and Supermen: Even ethnographers and anthropologists who were supposedly more sympathetic to the Japanese ended up reinforcing these ideologies of supremacy by espousing condescending or ethnocentric views about Japanese "national character". Before the war, Japanese were seen on the whole as "lesser men", incapable of achieving Western levels of technological dominance; as they began to achieve victories, not the least of which was their strike on Pearl Harbor, their status slid into that of "superman", which was nonetheless not necessarily an upgrade ("subhuman and superhuman were not mutually exclusive...but complementary" [116]).

6. Primitives, Children, Madmen: More coverage of social-science's contributions to Japanology during the war, which often consisted in diagnosing the "problem" of the Japanese character (one theory: they were toilet trained too early and too strictly, which meant that they were control freaks who could not compromise or surrender). The diagnoses generally separated into three categories of primitive, childlike (or adolescent - often the Japanese were compared to teenage gangsters), or mentally ill.

7. Yellow, Red, and Black Men: Dower associates racism against the Japanese with that against the Indians and African-Americans of the United States, specifying that this racism saw the Japanese (or Asians in general) as "the yellow horde", set to invade American shores. The "Yellow Peril" was made all the more perilous by the mass' growing adoption of American and Western technology (Dower uses Fu Manchu novels starring a mad Asian scientist to make this point). Here Dower also includes information about black American sympathies for the Asian nations beset by US racism.



Bugs Bunny cartoon satirizing Japanese culture, using many race stereotypes described by Dower.

Part Three: The War in Japanese Eyes
8. The Pure Self: A major component of Japanese racism against Westerners was situated in the "impurity" of the Westerner or the foreigner, as opposed to the superiority of the Japanese "stock". Dower points out that the concept of Japanese "purity" was rooted in religious practice and mythohistory. The Yamato race, Japanese ideology held, could be traced back to a celestial origin. Purification as an active prescription, Dower writes, "was understood to mean: 1. expunging foreign influences 2. living austerely and 3. fighting, and if need be, dying for the emperor" (228). Late-war developments such as the training of kamikaze pilots were associated with this fundamental idea. The flip side of this iconicity of purity was the essential corruption of the Westerners in opposition to Japan - Japanese belief in this corruption/egotism/weakness, Dower writes, led the Japanese to misread American commitment to the Pacific War, in the early years of the conflict (260).

9. The Demonic Other: Here Dower explicates the role of the "stranger" in Japanese culture, which is an ambiguous and sometimes threatening one. During the war, Westerners were seen as the dark side of the stranger, which would manifest itself in beastly or atrocious behavior. (Dower cites multiple examples of Japanese stories about American war atrocities.) Dower also tells the story of Momotaro, a Japanese folk hero who, as an exceptionally bright and strong young lad, exorcises multiple demons. This story influenced many Japanese ideas about heroism and military service (see: the kamikaze pilot). Dower points out that although Japanese cartoons did depict Japan as Momotaro and the Allies as the demons to be defeated, the fact that specific Allies (Churchill, Roosevelt) were identified as enemies gave them a human identity that was denied the Japanese in the analogous position (256).

10. "Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus": The story of the idea of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, an entity intended to establish Asia as an imperial holding of Japan. Examining an official report which survived the purge of such paperwork after V-J Day, Dower writes that the racism which saw Japan at the middle of this Pan-Asiatic world "reflected Western intellectual influences as well as Western pressures", and that the "patterns of supremacism" embedded in Japanese writing about other Asian races was "analogous" to Western racisms (265).

The USS Saratoga after hits by a series of kamikaze pilots, February 21, 1945.

Kamikaze pilots.

Part Four: Epilogue
11. From War to Peace: Transformation of racist ideas about the Other happened surprisingly rapidly on both sides of the Japanese/American divide. Japanese people employed the alternate vision of "the stranger" - the more positive permutation - in order to facilitate increased acceptance of the American occupying forces. Americans re-cast their "simian" enemies as pets, or saw themselves as "parents" or "doctors" to the Japanese "children" or "patients". However, in later years, Japanese business ascendency has been seen in the West as another indication of Japanese "superhumanity" - shades of old stereotypes continue.

Reviews: In the Pacific Historical Review, D. Clayton James wrote that Mercy was one of the standout books on the Pacific War, called it relevant and provocative, but wished that Dower had not been so obsessed with linking happenings of the Pacific War to later foreign policy interactions: "his thesis might have been more closely reasoned" if he had not tried to do so. In Reviews in American History, Robert Rosenstone called the thesis of racism-as-motivating- factor "simple", but then writes that the inclusion of the Japanese intellectual history complicates what could have been a well-worn argument. Rosenstone also believed that a pile of evidence about racism, such as Dower presents, cannot attach an attitude to a deed - a fault which he attaches not just to this book, but to any so-called "attitudinal history". Moreover, he pointed out, no matter how many historians write books about racism, racist stereotypes still retain a frightening power over human events.

Vocab words: "shibboleth" (a cultural marker of some sort, as "a custom, habit, mode of dress, or the like, which distinguishes a particular class or set of persons"); "ratiocination" ("the process of reasoning").

The burned back of a victim of the Hiroshima bombing.

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968); David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-45 (1984).

Population Bomb

Title: The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968)

Author: Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, president of the Center for Conservation Biology, and professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He's called himself "an unusual academy specimen," due to his "having had only one tenure-track job (Stanford), which I've held for 44 of my 72 years." He has written widely, both biological/scientific work and more popular environmental nonfiction. A recent book of the latter ilk, written with Anne Ehrlich, was titled One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (2004).

Argument/structure: Every bit of enviromental immiseration we complain about is being brought on us by a simple problem: people have too many kids. Food shortages; water shortages ("By 1984, the US will be dying of thirst", Ehrlich proclaims [97]); "psychic" problems caused by overcrowding (64); an overreliance on dangerous methods of environmental engineering (pesticides, etc)—all of these stem directly from our insistence on having as many offspring as we damn well please. This insistence is tied up with ideologies of continual material progress and technological optimism (i.e., "if we could just figure out a way to do it, the United States could feed the world!")

Ehrlich sees his project as a fundamentally humanitarian one: if fewer people are born, fewer people will starve (the front of the book reads, scarily: "While you are reading these words, four people will have died from starvation - most of them children"). His book is prescriptive, offering examples of letters which the reader could use as models of political action (readers are told to send letters to congressmen urging them to support programs limiting population growth; send letters to the Catholic Church asking them to change their anti-contraception policy; send letters to television networks requesting that programs glorifying families with large numbers of children not be aired).

Most interesting of all to me is Ehrlich's insistence that we cannot use the ideology of free choice to justify bearing a large number of children. The concept of "family planning" comes in for an amount of scorn, because in the end, Ehrlich argues, it tends to continue to produce an inordinate number of children. Ehrlich believes that the government should a) include abortion in the range of options considered to be valid "family planning" and b) fund the entire range of "planning" programs, once they are modified to include abortion, at a much higher level. It's interesting that Ehrlich does not come right out and say that government should require people to have fewer children, but he does seem to be pointing in that general direction.

At the end of the book, Ehrlich compares the problem of population growth to cancer, writing "I wish I could offer you some sugarcoated solutions, but I'm afraid the time for them is long gone." His best-case scenario involves a "die-off" of millions of people, combined with good governmental management which saves the optimum number for future carrying capacity of the earth. This can sound incredibly brutal, and critics of the book have pointed that out (including Betsy Hartmann, who, Wiki writes, applied a feminist critique to the argument in her book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control & Contraceptive Choice [1987]).

So this is an illo I found doing a Google Image search for "Population Bomb". It's by a retired geologist named John Holden, whose drawings all seem to have some kind of intimate engagement with the kind of science that speculates about possibilities. I want to buy some, but in the meantime, this will have to do, I suppose. I wish I knew more about the popularization of the Population Bomb concept - I can think of a but a couple of random cultural examples, including the movie Zardoz (1974), in which an elite technocratic class incites the underclass to kill each other instead of breeding, in hopes of controlling their demographics.

Books I've read which cite it: Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life. Buell argues that Ehrlich's alarmism about the population crisis ended up doing the environmental movement more harm than good, because when it didn't all come true, people were reaffirmed in their fundamental belief that nothing was really wrong at all. (Here is an article by Gary Becker, economist, who points out that while populations have not had the immediate dire effects that Ehrlich predicted, the trend in recent years has been toward low population growth in rich countries and high growth in developing countries - a trend which Becker suggests could be reversed by immigration policies, were this not politically unfashionable.)

Buell also points out that the first bit of Ehrlich's book, in which he leaves a hotel in India with his wife and very sensibly singular daughter and is plunged into a mass of teeming humanity, can be read as being very anti-developing country (or almost racist - see Hartmann's critique, cited before). Why use Calcutta as a paragon of overpopulation, when American examples might be called into play?

According to Wikipedia, the book was included on several "Worst Books of the Century" lists by conservative groups (though of course, Origin of Species and Silent Spring showed up on these as well, so, as they say, whatever).

Ehrlich argued in an article published by Grist in 2004 that although many of his dire predictions did not come true, the bulk of his warnings have held: "Some things I predicted have not come to pass. For instance, starvation has been less extensive than I (or rather the agriculturalists I consulted) expected. But it's still horrific, with some 600 million people very hungry and billions under- or malnourished. What I predicted about disease and climate change was essentially right on. And of course the movement the 'bomb' helped to fuel softened some of the impacts. Many people said not to worry - that marvelous technological fixes would make it possible to take wonderful care of even 5 billion people. We now have 6.3 - you judge how well technology is doing. Bottom line: substantial criticism, little embarrassment."

Leads to follow up on: There's more in here about supersonic transport (SST), which Lindbergh rallied against in his later years, and about which I know little. An activist handbook to the issue, advertised in the beginning of Pop Bomb: William Shurcliff, SST and Sonic Boom Handbook. The problem was also mentioned on pp 60 and 128. On p 21, Ehrlich addresses the question of space colonization as a solution to surplus population, citing Garrett Hardin as one who has studied the question and found that we would fill up the remaining planets in the solar system too quickly to make the solution work. On p 62, Ehrlich cites a New York Times article about Russian conservationists' efforts to save Lake Baikal. On p 103, Ehrlich writes that there was an effort underway when the book was published to cultivate protein-rich molecules of food on petroleum - an effort which, Ehrlich says, had not been fully proven to be useful. Whatever happened to that? On p 126, Ehrlich writes that pesticides were directly associated with anticommunism by people in the Agricultural Chemical Association, in 1964, as a riposte to the environmentalist claims that pesticides were killing off fish populations.

Strange Weather

Poster for 1939 World's Fair.

Title: Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991)

Author: Andrew Ross, of NYU's American Studies department (but called a "professor of social and cultural analysis"). Areas of interest are "labor and work; urban and suburban studies; intellectual history; social and political theory; science; ecology and technology; cultural studies." Lately, he seems most interested in labor and globalization. Ross' other books are multitudinous: No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (Routledge, 1989); the awesomely-titled The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (Verso, 1994); The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town (Ballantine, 1999); Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade-Lessons from Shanghai (Pantheon, 2006; Vintage, 2007). Many of his books are published or co-published by non-scholarly presses.

Argument: After reading a couple of reviews of this book, I was happy to find out that I wasn't the only one who had a hard time discerning the overall argument. In general, it's something about the inherent contingency and mutability of Science and Technology. Also, "isn't it interesting when Science/Technology hit the public sphere?" I think that's basically it. The book's chapters also succinctly illustrate - at least, to me - the dangers of choosing extremely contemporary topics for academic study. Some of these are fairly dated now.

Chapter-by-chapter:
One: New Age—A Kinder, Gentler Science?: New Age philosophies (of 1991 - see comment above) are antiscientific, in that they reject many of the accepted tenets of "Western" medicine, etc. However, they use Western scientific discourse in the way they present their ideas, showing that they still believe in the legitimacy of the inherent form. There is also a split within New Age between those who believe in the use of machines for New Age ends (like machines that re-calibrate brain waves, and the like) and those who believe only in the "body's energy". Also, new advances in physics, which bring the field closer to metaphysics, have narrowed the gap between New Age and "straight" science. Ross attends a New Age conference, and reads their magazines, but doesn't do any ethnography.

Two: Hacking Away at the Counterculture: There're people called hackers, and while they're nominally anti-establishment or maverick, they are actually usually white men who fit into a profile of the postmodern Protestant success story: "hacker culture celebrates high productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy, and an obsessive identification wtih online endurance (and endorphin highs)—all qualities that are valorized by the entrepreneurial code of silicon futurism" (90). Ross wants to open up the concept of "hacking" to include any form of technoliteracy (or literacy of other stripes) that challenges existing systems of rationality.

Three: Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum: This chapter would be the most valuable to me, because it's historical, examining the convictions of Hugo Gernsback, "the father of science fiction" who believed that SF's role was to explain features of the fantastic new science and technology of the era to the public, and to recruit new scientists. Ross uses Gernsback as a touchstone to describe interwar faith in engineering and technology and the culture that sprang up around that faith, including describing the debates within science fiction fandom around the issue of scientific legitimacy. (Here is the discussion of the 1939 World's Fair and its futuristic idealism, as well.)

Cover of a Gernsback magazine.

Four: Cyberpunk in Boystown: White male folklore of the 1980s, Ross argues, is embodied in novels by cyberpunk writers such as William Gibson (Neuromancer). He writes that these imaginings of radical urban decay, often penned by suburbanites, took the place of the frontier fantasies we all know and love so well. Here, the body has disintegrated into a machine or a system, which Ross juxtaposes to other 80s masculine pinups like Arnie and Stallone.

Neuromancer fan art.

Boy, was I confused by this Keanu Reeves movie, when I rented it at a sleepover in middle school.

Five: Getting the Future We Deserve: This is a chapter about imaginations of the future, with brief histories of the interest groups who have parlayed futurology in the twentieth century. Departing from the technocratic ideals he discussed in the third chapter, Ross describes how futurism moved from being the business of those who would imagine socialist technological utopias, and into the hands of corporate or governmental interests, who would like to perpetuate the status quo.

Six: The Drought This Time: Another chapter that would be useful to me, about the effect of globalism on thinking about weather (though, once again, in light of events in the past fifteen years, this reads more like a primary source than a secondary one). Here's an overview of the previous theory of global cooling, and its effect on thinking about global warming, as well as short historical sections on previous populist weather observers, like James Pollard Espy. These briefly gloss changes in weather observation in the history of the United States, making brief contingent points about the history of nationalism (cue Anderson's Imagined Communities). The Weather Channel: Nationalizing, but corporatizing, weather information.

Reviews: In Technology and Culture, Rosalind Williams opined that the book lacks a coherent development of argument but says that a more serious objection is that Ross wants to interdisciplinize to the point of mishmosh ("instead of any meaty research or analysis, we are served a salad of secondary references dressed with quotations from Marx, Foucault, Geertz and other usual suspects"). She also wrote that the book is political without offering any concrete solutions, and that it has no clear audience, besides other cultural critics. Howard Segal, in the Journal of American History, wrote that Ross, while refreshingly non-technophobic, for an academic, fell into the dreaded technological-determinist trap, seeing technologies as drivers of culture, rather than products of it.

Vocab words: "negentropic" ("causing or accompanied by a decrease in entropy or an increase in order [sometimes with the implication that the second law of thermodynamics is being contravened]"); "mensuration" ("the action, process, or art of measuring; measurement").

More 1939 World's Fair publicity.

Things to look up: Technocracy (see references). Joe Egressia, "blind eight year old who discovered the telephone company's signal tone while whistling" (84). US government attempts to waterlog the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War (203).

Books to follow up on: Primary: Scifi mags from the 1920s/1930s: Frank Reade Weekly Magazine (cited in Michael Ashley, ed., The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, Part One); Science and Invention; Radio News.

Secondary: William Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941 (1977); Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power (1988); Henry Elsner, Jr, The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation (1967); Helen A. Harrison, Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's Fair, 1939/40 (1980); Raymond Williams, The Year 2000 (1983) and "Ideas of Nature", in Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980) ; Arthur Wrobel, ed., Pseudo-Science and Society in Nineteenth Century American Culture (1987).

Reading National Geographic

Title: Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Authors: Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins. Lutz, an anthropologist, is now at Brown and writes that her interests include "cultural understandings of the emotions, popular photography and ideas of race and gender in the U.S., changes in local democracy with economic restructuring in the last part of the twentieth century, and militarization and its shaping of social life beyond the battlefield," but that for the last ten years she's been working on projects dealing with society and the military (she also works for the American Friends Service Committee!) Her most recent book is about Fayetteville, NC: Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Boston : Beacon Press, 2001). Collins, who is now in a sociology and women's studies department at Wisconsin, lists her interests as "Qualitative Sociology, Rural Sociology, Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Economic Change and Development, Sociology of Gender." Her most recent book is Threads: Gender, Labor and Power in the Global Apparel Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Argument: The Geographic, a middlebrow cultural production par excellence, has been normalized as an "educational" and "positive" publication, one which Americans and other Westerners look to for an enjoyable and "objective" window on non-Western cultures. Lutz and Collins hold that the production of the photographs in the magazine is regulated by a system of understood rules and norms held by the publishers and editors, imparted to the photographers, and expected by the public. These rules and norms (especially during the period they propose to examine, 1950-1986) demand(ed) a portrait of the non-Western world that is free of strife, violence, hunger, and trouble; colorful; sensual; inviting; and positive. Overall, these qualities are meant to add up to what L & C call a "conservative humanism" - a view of the world that normalizes the "other" by proposing that "we're really all alike under the skin."

L & C hold that, in the end, although this point of view is nominally positive and affirming, it means that the photographs have "rarely cried out for change, raised painful, unresolvable questions, embarrassed, or caused discomfort...in general, they have existed as a beautiful, somewhat compelling body of evidence that the third world is a safe place, that it is made up of people basically like us, that the people who are hungry and oppressed have meaningful lives, and that the conflicts and flare-ups we hear of in the news occur in a broader context of enduring values and everyday activities. These images obscure the American relationships with the third world that have structured life there in profound ways; they deny real social connections even as they evoke empathy" (280).
In their survey of readers' attitudes towards Geographic photographs, L & C found that pictures showing children (particularly, happy children) were consistently ranked as the "most enjoyable." "The magazine's focus on children alone or in other groups of children is consonant with the sociological reality in which children are not integrated into the adult world of work or leisure and with the cultural belief that the child is a special kind of person rather than a miniature or even protoadult" (107). This photograph of a Garifuna child, by Susie Joy Rust, is titled "Joy in Motion," and its caption reflects this bias toward romanticization of childhood: "Beaming with pleasure after doing flips with his friends, Antheon Petillo of Dangriga romps along a well-worn path that connects his schoolhouse to a palm-lined Caribbean shore. Antheon and his classmates at Sacred Heart Elementary School are being taught Garífuna history and language, part of an effort in Belize to keep this culture alive."

Chapter by Chapter:
One: Comfortable Strangers: The Making of National Identity in Popular Photography: An introduction which situates the Geographic in the realm of "mass culture" (using the Frankfurt School's formulation) and points out that among "edutainment" products, very few have the "cultural legitimacy of the Geographic" - a legitimacy that stems, in part, from its associations with "the state, national identity, and science" (7).

Two: Becoming America's Lens on the World: National Geographic in the Twentieth Century: A history of the formation of the Geographic's cultural authority (as laid out in the previous chapter). Includes information about early Geographic editorial guidelines for content in the magazine (27), the story of the magazine's adoption of color photography (32); the magazine's association with the government (34). Overall, describes the development of the Geographic's idea of American national identity: "rational, generous, and benevolent" (46).

Three: Inside the Great Machinery of Desire: Perhaps the most interesting chapter, methodologically, in which L & C gain access to the internal workings of the magazine, attending editorial meetings, hovering over layout artists while they work, and interviewing photographers and editors about how they "frame" a story during its development. Also presents interesting information on how the marketing and advertising departments contribute to choices of subject matter and frame: "Africa is an unpopular subject, as are social problems...articles on small, endearing animals, or endangered species" are popular (83). The process of creating the magazine, the authors write, is a "highly negotiated" one, in which the editors seek to receive a "constant supply of what they consider very good pictures - photographs that operate within traditional realist frameworks, yet contain elements of surprise and interest", while still allowing photographers a degree of autonomy (85).

Caption written by Geographic website: "A Woman of Faith, Photograph by David Alan Harvey. With nine decades of living etched on her face, Mãe Filinha exudes the quiet authority of her position as leader of the Sisterhood of the Good Death. This religious group practices Candomblé, a belief system based on African traditions and influenced by Catholicism and South American Indian rituals. The sisterhood is known for processions marked by singing and praying as members move through the streets of Cachoeira. During Candomblé ceremonies adherents enter trances and commune with their gods. The chanting and beating of drums can last well into the night." Interestingly, the site also includes information about the technical details of the photographic equipment used, intimating that the reader could (should?) participate in the production of similar pictures.

Four: A World Brightly Different: Photographic Conventions, 1950-1986: An analysis of the "surface content" of the photographs, done by coding a random sample. In this chapter, the authors introduce the wide range of themes they will problematize in future chapters. The view the authors see emerging through this sample is one of a non-Western world "of happy, classless people outside of history but evolving into it, edged with exoticism and sexuality, but knowable to some degree as individuals" (116). They hold that the evaluation of this view should be based "not on the intentions of the magazine's makers but on the consequences of its photographic rhetoric" (117).

Five: Fashions in the Ethnic Other: Here, L & C describe shifting interests in "other" cultures throughout the postwar time period, pointing out differences in regional coverage (the Pacific Islands receive far more attention, proportionally, than other regions, for example), and changes in coverage during times of US political involvement in the country in question (see: formerly positive, then negative portraits of Ferdinand Marcos).

Six: The Color of Sex: Postwar Photographic Histories of Race and Gender: Interpretations of photographs of non-white females, with emphasis on how they were used as exemplars of "unspoiled" sensuality and womanhood (and maternality), in contrast to a Western womanhood perceived "ruined" by education and careerism. Here, too, an analysis of the bare-breasted issue - the darker the woman, L & C found, the more likely she was to be bare-breasted in the magazine (this is still true).

Availability and sensuality of non-Western women is a mainstay of the Nat Geo appeal. "Introduction" and caption written by the Geographic: "Salvador, Brazil, 2002. Photograph by David Alan Harvey, Magnum. Introduction: 'I call Brazil the "land of the 10,000 senses" because of the lushness and diversity of it all. Just the Amazon rain forest alone fills the sense with its sounds, smells, colors, even its silences.' -National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis. Caption: In Bahia, Africa cultural traditions are strong and set the rhythm at Carnival. That most sensual of festivals hold sway every February from Recife to Rio."

Seven: The Photograph as Intersection of Gazes: An intimate analysis of the"gazes" to be found in Geographic photos, including the direct gaze at the camera (which was more likely to be seen in photographs of the powerless - darker, younger, poorer, more female - subjects); the gaze within the photographic rectangle; and the gaze of the subject upon his/her own reflection in a mirror, a Polaroid, or a camera's viewfinder.

Eight: The Readers' Imagined Geographic: An Evolutionary Tale: Introduction of the sample of white Americans used for the ethnographic portion of this book. The most interesting part of this chapter is the assessment of the evolutionary views of the readers - an assessment which finds that "the categories of primitive or traditional, civilized or modern, were assumed by virtually everyone we talked to in the interviews" (236) and that "modernization is sometimes viewed as analogous to transmitting disease - as a kind of physical, determinate process outside human intentionality" (240). L & C found strong currents of Rosaldo's "imperialist nostalgia" (246) within readers' reactions to photographs of modernizing peoples, but also point out that the overriding contradiction and confusion of readers' responses mitigate against any pinpointing of operative ideologies - readers were more likely to use and combine several different ideologies while describing a picture's content.

Nine: The Pleasures and Possibilities of Reading: A final chapter that seeks to examine the real-life implications of the reader responses that the Geographic solicits. Here is where L & C arrive at the conclusion that the humanism provoked and enforced by these pictures is essentially conservative, and that human differences "that could tell us something important about history...or be turned critically on our own society...become construed as superficial, even if attractive, flourishes that can be pulled back to reveal a confirmation of important Western values" (277). This humanism, they claim, following Barthes, "cannot accommodate differences of interest or account for incidents of injustice" (282).

Here, a Western scientist working in Guyana to study catfish employs "local residents" to help him gather the fish. The scene, which depicts non-Westerners stooped over and supervised by a white Westerner, evokes questions about colonial relationships, especially ones shaped around "science"; questions not examined by the Geographic-written caption ("'Hard Science,' Photograph by Randy Olson. 'It’s very difficult to catch fish in streams with large rocks and fast water,' says Larry Page. So he hired help. Raising a ruckus, local residents drive fish into the scientists’ nets. In calmer waters researchers go 'hoggin’'—wading into the shallows, then sticking a hand into a log or other dark, wet place. 'You pull out whatever is in there,' says Page, 'and hopefully all your fingers as well.'"

Reviews: In a long review in AQ, Kathryn VanSpanckeren wrote that the book is "comprehensive," "generous-spirited", "readable", but adds, "This straightforward book does not offer striking new theoretical formulations...instead, it bristles with specific information and offers concise reviews of theoretical positions only if they are helpful in understanding the magazine." Her main criticism lies in the omission of text in the analysis, and says that techniques of literary theory and the greats of postcolonial theory could have been employed to advantage. She also holds that L & C should have done a better job at situating the magazine within magazine history. Most of all, she criticizes the book for re-inscribing the central fallacy of the magazine itself: not allowing the non-Western peoples a voice. In Science, Heidi Larson (of Unicef) wrote that she wished the captions themselves had been given more attention, especially in the chapter in which the authors interviewed white Americans using uncaptioned pictures as prompts. Reviewing the book for the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Joseph Wood liked the way the book "turned the tables" on National Geographic, examining it the same way it examines others, and writes that the book "illustrates quite effectively how our view of the world is socially constructed."


This photo, called "Afghan Girl", by Steve McCurry, ran in a 1985 edition of the Geographic. In 2003 the magazine made an effort to find the subject, named Sharbat Gula. The way that the magazine wrote up this search is fascinating, in light of the conclusions Lutz and Collins draw: the search was framed as an exploration in and of itself, looking for the anonymous woman whose "direct gaze had intrigued the West for so long" (see L & C on the gaze of the photographed, chapter 7). By dramatizing the search in this way, the magazine appears to have glossed over the fact that the reason Gula remained anonymous was that the magazine had failed to identify her in her initial portrait (see L & C's conclusions on the anonymity of the non-Western subject), as well as to re-inflect the viewer's relationship with the subject with significant overtones of desire.

The follow-up picture, which has Gula, now a mother, holding the magazine, echoes previous Geographic pictorial compositions in which the subject is seen as engaging with his/her depiction in the magazine - a construction which L & C holds is fundamentally reflective of the idea that the Geographic, and by extension, the Western world, has brought self-awareness, history, and change to the rest of the world (208). The Geographic's reflections on the search for Gula also noted that she had not even seen the photograph until they "found" her - a fact which the Western reader could see as indicative of the tremendous difference and distance between Gula's life and their own, given the iconic nature of the photograph. The slightly icky connotations of this relationship - isn't it sort of weird that we've been enjoying her beauty for so many years, while she's been living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, an experience which has clearly aged her beyond her chronological age? - are not explored.

Follow up: "Brazil...is often portrayed in popular culture as a kind of sister state to the United States, complete with the same vast area, wealth of resources, frontier with Indians, and much immigration" (125).

New words: "hebete" ("dull, stupid, obtuse"); "ludic" ("of or pertaining to undirected and spontaneously playful behaviour").

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Christopher Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward Curtis (1982); Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (1985); Bernard MacGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (1989); Susan Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (1989); Roy Preiswerk and Dominique Perrot, Ethnocentrism and History: Africa, Asia, and Indian America in Western Textbooks (1978); Richard Ohmann, Politics of Letters (1987) (on the development of the magazine market); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (1989); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988); Min-Ha T. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989); Eric Wolf, Empire and the People Without History (1982).

Poem: "In the Waiting Room", by Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It was dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," The caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked, women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover;
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came a "oh!" of pain
Aunt Consuelo's voice
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I we were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should I be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
I couldn't look any higher
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, of even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely…."
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

Late Victorian Holocausts

Title: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001)

Author: "Marxist environmentalist" Mike Davis, he of Ecology of Fear (2000), City of Quartz (1990), and a million other books with subjects including slums, car bombs, avian flu, San Diego, and Las Vegas. Believer mag called him "LA's sole public intellectual." He sometimes teaches at UC/Irvine, but doesn't hold an "official" PhD. He has sometimes been assailed for lack of accuracy, but this story in the Nation says that a lot of these attacks come from people who have interests in development in LA (NB: Davis sometimes writes for the Nation).

Argument (in 150 words or fewer): This is, self-consciously, a work of "political ecology." Famines in India, China, Brazil, the Philippines, and Africa, which hit hard in the end of the nineteenth century, had as their proximate cause the variations of a climatological phenomenon called "ENSO" ("El Nino - Southern Oscillation"), but were exacerbated and prolonged by the mismanagement of governments which were either colonial (India), or facing huge pressures from imperial powers (China, Brazil). People in these nations were being forced to integrate into a global capitalist system, and as a result, there was a tragic breakdown of traditional structures - both material, as in well irrigation systems, planned grain storage, and systems of sustainable farming; and social, as in protective governments, patrimonial obligations, and mutualism - which had been in place to mitigate earlier ENSO-related events. Imperial powers, which in Davis' argument means "Britain," turned a blind eye to the sufferings of the people who died in gruesome numbers - not only from hunger but from epidemic diseases preying on weakened refugees (Davis estimates 30 to 50 million dead) - refusing substantial relief and sometimes even exacting increasingly onerous taxation. Davis writes that the pictures he uses in the book - most of which were taken by missionaries - were intended as "accusations, not illustrations" (22).

Chapter-by-Chapter: The first section of this book - parts I and II - "take up the challenge of traditional narrative history," describing in detail the processes of the famines of the late nineteenth century, "providing dozens of examples of malign interaction between climactic and economic processes" (12). Colonialism, Davis shows, followed and exploited famines and social disruptions, meaning "each global drought was the green light for an imperialist landrush" (12). Davis also, in this section, points out that many uprisings and rebellions of the late nineteenth century, including the Boxer Rebellion and the Brazilian War of Canudos, were precipitated by these famines.

Part III is almost entirely scientific, explaining the process of discovery of the ENSO system. There is a short moment when Davis explains the stakes of a scientific explanation for famines - if, as Victorians believed, sunspots caused stoppage of monsoons, how could the British be responsible for crop failure? - but the chapter is generally technical.

Part IV returns to the historical, grounding itself mostly in a review of the most current scholarly literature about nineteenth century economic processes, attempting to situate this structural information within the context of the ENSO events. These chapters cover "the perverse logic of marketized subsistence, the consequences of colonial revenue settlements, the impact of the new Gold Standard" (I never even thought about how that would affect global markets...) "the decline of indigenous irrigation, informal colonialism in Brazil, and so on" (15). And so on! This section also covers the ways in which new crops and ways of cultivation created massive ecological problems, especially in northern China.

There's no conclusion. Consequently, this book feels incredibly emotionally front-loaded.



Illo from Kipling's short story "William the Conqueror," published in Ladies' Home Journal in 1896. Note the rosy, happy Indian children.

Reviews (significant flaws?): Holocausts won the World History Association Book Award for 2002. The Journal of World History gave it a positive review, while acknowledging that historians of India, China, and Brazil may find flaws in the highly sprawling synthetic treatment of those histories. The Pacific Historical Review noted that "the notion that Britain governed India in its own interest, with scant regard for Indian peasants, will surprise few readers" and wrote that although it's crucial to Davis' argument to establish that indigenous governments managed famine better than imperialist ones, Davis has trouble directly proving this (and didn't even try to do so in the case of Brazil). The Journal of Economic History praised Davis for his ambitious world perspective, and added, "Although Davis necessarily relies on secondary sources, he has the ability to identify the best of the recent scholarship." This reviewer, like myself, wished that Davis had added a conclusion in order to tie all of the pieces together, characterizing the work that the reader is forced to do as "heavy lifting" (this, at least, makes me feel like I'm in good company in my confusion - if an Economic Historian had difficulty, I am not going to feel badly about my own constant back-flipping of pages to figure out where in the world was Carmen San Diego). Science called the book "ideological and misleading" and said that Davis tried too hard to pin the blame for all of this suffering on "a small band of theologically zealous and murderously scheming Londoners", when in actuality China, for example, bore a lot of the "blame" for its own suffering. To my mind, this reviewer was overly invested in simplifying Davis' argument - it was clear to me that Davis tried very hard to show how the pressure that the Chinese government was under from imperialism was partially what caused their system to fail. Science calls this government "an imploding, spent, and irresolute civilization," a definition which smacks to me of the very same Western racism which Davis describes.

New words: "sublated" ("to remove or take away" or "to disaffirm or contradict"); "brigandage" (highway robbery, pillage, piracy); "rinderpest" ("a virulent, infectious disease affecting ruminant animals, esp. oxen, characterized by fever, dysentery, and inflammation of the mucous membranes"); "sand jiggers"; "bastinado" (verb, meaning "to beat with a stick, thrash, or thwack"); "transhumance" ("the seasonal transfer of grazing animals to different pastures, often over substantial distances"); "hecatombs" ("a great public sacrifice (properly of a hundred oxen) among the ancient Greeks and Romans, and hence extended to the religious sacrifices of other nations; a large number of animals offered or set apart for a sacrifice" - Davis uses this to indicate the number of famine victims, interestingly); "Noachian" (from the age of Noah - Dying Planet uses this word too, in a fine example of synchronicity); "loess" ("a deposit of fine yellowish-grey loam which occurs extensively from north-central Europe to eastern China, in the American mid-west, and elsewhere, esp. in the basins of large rivers, and which is usually considered to be composed of material transported by the wind during and after the Glacial Period"); "geomantic" (from "geomancy", or "the art of divination by means of signs derived from the earth, as by the figure assumed by a handful of earth thrown down upon some surface...hence, usually, divination by means of lines or figures formed by jotting down on paper a number of dots at random"); "calumny" ("false and malicious misrepresentation of the words or actions of others, calculated to injure their reputation; libellous detraction, slander"); "ultramontane" ("a strong adherent or supporter of the Papal authority"); "entrepot" ("temporary deposit of goods, provisions, etc."); "dipole" ("a pair of non-coincident equal and opposite electric charges or magnetic poles (usu. but not necessarily close together); an object, esp. a molecule, atomic particle, etc., having such charges or poles; dipole moment, the product of the distance between the two charges or poles of a dipole and the magnitude of either of them; the electric or magnetic moment of a dipole"); "orographic" ("relating to the physical features and relative position of mountains"); "thermocline" ("a temperature gradient; esp. an abrupt temperature gradient occurring in a body of water; also, a layer of water marked by such a gradient, the water above and below being at different temperatures"); "multidecadel" (belonging to several decades); "antipodean" ("of or pertaining to the opposite side of the world"); "chernozem" ("black earth or soil (see BLACK a. 19), a type of soil, rich in humus, characteristic of natural grassland in cool to temperate semi-arid climates, as in central and southern Russia, central Canada, etc"); "swidden" ("an area of land that has been cleared for cultivation by slashing and burning the vegetation cover"); "autarkic" ("(economically) self-sufficient"); "debenture" ("a certificate or voucher certifying that a sum of money is owing to the person designated in it; a certificate of indebtedness"): "monopsony" ("a state of the market in which there is effectively a single buyer or consumer for a particular product, who is therefore in a position to influence its price; a consumer in this position"); "littoral" ("of or pertaining to the shore; existing, taking place upon, or adjacent to the shore"); "dreadnaught" ("a fearless person").

Facty bonbons: Lord Lytton was accused of plaigarism twice - once by his own father (45). Conspiracy theories about Westerners during famines included the idea (this from Korea) that Westerners would cut off women's breasts to fill the cans of condensed milk that they lived off of (125). A "Maxim gun" was the first self-powered machine gun.

Leads to follow up on: 1) Missionary photographers used advances in photographic technology to take pictures of famine victims (pp 52, 147). 2) There was a lot of talk about the selling and eating of children during famines, but Davis does not analyze British or American use of this information - was it intended to condemn the victims for their actions, or to highlight the difficulty that the victims faced? 3) Many correspondents said that a particular horror of the famines was that wild animals, themselves starving, came out in droves to eat victims (pp 132, 137, 202). 4) Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, reported on famines in India in 1897 for Cosmopolitan magazine (155). 5) Included among American organizations that sent famine relief: Native Americans, Kansas populists, and black church groups (165). 6) In 1965, a scholar named Esther Baserup "inverted Malthus," arguing that population growth was an engine, not a brake, to economic success (307).

Books to look for: Secondary: Gilbert Fite - The Farmers' Frontier, 1865-1900 (1987; Amazon link); Richard Grove - Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (1995; link to Google Books).