Tag: United States

Anatomy of a Feminist Diplomacy Campaign

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A review of The Banality of Good : The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking, Lieba Faier, Duke University Press, 2024.

On the face of it, fighting human trafficking has all the banality of a good deed. The adoption in 2000 of a UN Protocol on human trafficking, with a heavy focus on the sexual exploitation and abuse of migrant women, was a positive act of feminist diplomacy and was lauded as such by feminist groups in the West and in developing countries. The UN template set the stage for the development of a new international regime of norms and guidelines for how national governments, NGOs, and international organizations should actively work together in this fight. With the Trafficking in Persons Report published yearly, the US Department of State must be praised for having given teeth to the UN Protocol, allowing a carrot-and-stick approach to ensure compliance while naming and shaming bad performers. The US government was bold enough to point finger at one of its closest allies, Japan, whose treatment of migrant women brought under an entertainer visa scheme was clearly violating basic human rights. Japan did a good thing by applying international best practices and diminishing abuse: within two years, the number of Filipino women entering Japan on entertainment visas dropped by nearly 90 percent. All stakeholders can take pride on this result: women’s groups, feminist leaders, UN diplomats, American Embassy staff, Japanese case workers, law enforcement officers, and the victims themselves. This may not sound like a big deal, but they all did well. Hence, the banality of good.

Turning Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil on its Head

Under this narrative, the banality of good denotes step-by-step progress in the advancement of human rights and the fight against human exploitation. But let us pause. All of the above is not the story that Lieba Faier tells, and her expression “the banality of good” in fact has the opposite meaning. She uses it “to refer to the perils of this campaign’s globalized institutional approach, which ultimately privileges technical prescription and bureaucratic compliance over the needs and perspectives of those it means to assist” (p. 11). All stakeholders aiming to do good and alleviate the plight of victims of human trafficking missed their original goal or had to compromise on their principles. By bringing a global solution to local problems, the international community only made things worse. Foreign women working in the sex industry were forcibly deported on criminal charges of visa overstay; grassroot NGO workers became complicit in the expulsion of those they were supposed to protect; while police raids pushed the sex industry further underground. In titling her book The Banality of Good, Lieba Faier of course has in mind the expression “the banality of evil” coined by Hannah Arendt to denote the fact that evil can be perpetuated when immoral principles become normalized over time by people who do not think about things from the perspective of others. Evil becomes banal when people don’t feel bad when they do evil. Here, the banality of good reflects the opposite attitude: people don’t feel good when they are supposed to do good. They know something is wrong, but they can only attribute it to “the system” or hope that their action contributes to the realization of a greater good.

Over and over in Lieba Faier’s narrative, individuals and groups committed to the betterment of foreign women’s plight had to compromise on their strategic goals and core values. The original impetus to fight against traffic in women came from Asian feminist organizations and grassroot human rights groups in Japan, Korea, and South-East Asia. Beginning in the early 1970s, they built a regional coalition to respond to a rising tide of Japanese sex tourism in the region. They also had a broader agenda that was anti-capitalist and anti-colonial at its core, seeing sex tourism as the reflect of structural inequities among nations and between genders and classes. But the US feminist groups who picked up their fight obscured the structural factors foregrounded by the earlier efforts of women’s groups in Asia and framed human trafficking as a uniform global issue that warranted a single global response. This global feminist movement coined the expression “sexual slavery” to articulate a singular, abstract, deterritorialized global practice, overlooking racial, national, and class inequalities among women. They formed an alliance with the human rights movement to launch a campaign for the abolition of “violence against women,” with human trafficking as a key instance of this violence. Lieba Faier describes how a globalist feminist project then became a UN-centered global human rights initiative: the drafting and adoption of the Trafficking Protocol was based on compromise by both Asian grassroot organizations and US feminist groups, who were themselves divided between prostitution abolitionists and sex worker rights’ advocates. By establishing a formal definition of human trafficking and then collecting data on it, the protocol promised to recognize human trafficking as a global phenomenon for states to measure and institutionally address.

Reframing Sexual Violence

But when national governments decided to act, they did not focus on human trafficking as a matter of violence against women. Rather, they reframed the issue once again, this time as a matter of transnational organized crime warranting a punitive solution. What US-based feminism had identified as violence against women would be reframed as a generalizable problem of criminal violation enacted by individual private citizens against other private citizens. A model of redistributive justice was discarded in favor of a carceral model. Of the three Ps framework—preventing trafficking, protecting victims and prosecuting traffickers–, the third P was prioritized and the two previous ones were sidelined. In Japan, grassroot NGO workers produced “trauma portfolios” of victims, collecting personal accounts of suffering to argue that foreign sex workers deserved protection and assistance, not treatment as criminals. NGO caseworkers’ accounts were so moving that American diplomats made the controversial decision of placing Japan on the Tier 2 Watch List of the 2004 Trafficking in Persons Report. For Japanese bureaucrats, this was a huge blow to national pride: most of the advanced countries were on the so-called Tier 1 list, but only Japan was ranked Tier 2. Something had to be done to restore Japan’s standing in the international community. The same narratives that had moved NGO activists and US diplomats into action were now perceived as a matter of national shame.

As Lieba Faier remarks, “People care about others for different reasons and thus to various ends” (p. 95). For NGO workers, reporting on victims’ stories of abuse to US embassy officials was a way of using gaiatsu, or foreign pressure, to induce reforms in domestic policies. But the Action Plan that the Japanese government enacted in 2005 was a bureaucratic exercise, devoid of compassion or concern for social justice. The “Roadmap to Tier 1” was rich in international best practices and indicators, but disconnected from facts on the ground. As a result of the screening process, migrants that were denied the status of victim were forcibly repatriated to their home countries or held liable for illegal residence (fuhō taizai). Only those officially recognized as victims of human trafficking received protected status, with a residency permit allowing them to remain in Japan or assistance to go back home. As one NGO caseworker confided to the author, “Sometimes I don’t feel good about the work I’m doing. These migrants have nothing back home” (p. xiv). Or as another worker put it, “They don’t have anywhere to go. For many, their life of extreme poverty in the home country is much worse than what they have now” (p. 15). These NGO caseworkers didn’t feel that justice was being served by those international protocols, but if they refused to participate in them, they worried that the situation would be worse. So they complied with the “bureaucratic glue and strings” (p. 171) attached to being part of an international campaign against trafficking in women.

Support Comes with Strings Attached

Lieba Faier complements her fieldwork with archival work and interviews with UN officials and government representatives in Japan and in the United States. She dissects the various frames and translations that a social issue has to go through in order to become a legal provision in an international protocol; and how a UN template in turn translates into reality and alters the lives of women who may or may not be designated as victims of international trafficking. She brings an ethnographic eye to practices of helping migrant workers, campaigning for women’s rights, drafting UN templates, and translating legal texts into policy options. She reads “against the grain of bureaucratic documents to see the contradictions, aporias, and impasses embedded in them” (p. 101). As she describes it, the United Nations acts as a clearinghouse for such efforts, erasing history and geographical differences in the interest of establishing a standardized international practice. As she points out, “the rote adherence to an institutional protocol comes to stand for necessary structural change” (p. 13). Well-intentioned humanitarian campaigns produce unintended harm through bureaucratic routines and institutional priorities. These efforts prioritize protocol compliance over survivors’ needs, perspectives, and lived realities, leading to repatriation, compromised quality of life, and even criminalization of those they aim to help. The Japanese government offers assistance to only a small portion of those foreign workers suffering abuse and exploitation: “In 2018, only seven trafficking victims received repatriation assistance, and this number dropped to five in 2019” (p. 211). These “lilliputian pockets of improvement” (p. 213) mask egregious failure to put an end to human trafficking. Even those who benefit from repatriation programs fall victim of “cruel empowerment” (p. 185): humanitarian programs designed to empower them through financial literacy or other neoliberal models of development fail to address the structural inequalities of the status quo.

Lieba Faier’s scholarship is informed by the years she spent as a volunteer in Japan, the Philippines and the United States working alongside NGO workers assisting migrant women and lobbying the UN and governments to address the mistreatment of foreign women working in the sex industry and other exploitative sectors. As she writes, “Doing multi-sided research involving multiple organizations in three different countries over many years had advantages insofar as I sometimes heard part of a story in one organization or country and the rest of the story in others” (p. 19). Her findings were also buttressed by the availability of US diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, which documented internal processes and political motivations. Grassroot perspectives allowed her to question the way these migrant women’s plight was addressed in international policy forums. As she notes, “the global approach to this issue was sidelining, if not displacing, the expertise and guidance of the experienced NGO caseworkers whose labor was central to it” (p. xii). While these NGO workers were sometimes themselves former labor migrants and had a deep understanding of the situation they tried to alleviate, the organizations that brought the issue to an international public stage were headed mostly by academics, journalists, or lawyers with little direct knowledge of facts on the ground or contacts with grassroot organizations. She also questions the exclusive focus of the international campaign on the sex industry and the lack of attention awarded to other forms of exploitative labor, such as the conditions faced by Asian workers who come to Japan under the Technical Intern Training Program (Ginō Jisshū Seido), which she describes as a cover-up for cheap and disposable labor acquisition. Her advocacy for migrant rights doesn’t stop at one particular category, but is informed by “a vision of justice that asks national governments and their citizenries to see foreign workers as part of their imagined community” (p. 140).

A Plea for the UN

The Banality of Good is informed by the vision that “other worlds are possible,” as stated in the book’s opening dedication. But what are the alternatives? As a French diplomat committed to a feminist diplomacy agenda, I would not easily dismiss the United Nations’ approach to human trafficking or the work done by American diplomats to document Japan’s insufficient efforts in applying human rights standards. I agree with the author when she states that “if international guidelines are themselves problematic, little will be achieved by compliance with them” (p. 120). But this should serve as a rallying cry to devote more attention and resources to UN multilateralism and human rights campaigning. The Trafficking Protocol, with its lack of a credible enforcement mechanism and its emphasis on criminalization and border protection, is an easy target for attack. But internal debates show that the work was perfectible and that other policy options were put on the negotiation table. Mary Robinson, then UN high commissioner for human rights, pushed hard to have a human rights perspective embedded in the text. She proposed the addition of specific references, provisions, and language to acknowledge the rights of migrant workers, not just sex workers or those recognized as victims of trafficking; and she argued for strengthening the “victim protection and assistance” provisions in the draft protocol to allow for financial resources being devoted to helping victims of human trafficking. The fact is, we don’t have an alternative to the UN, and bottom-up approaches are compatible with international summitry or legal text draft-making. Concepts such as “responsibility to protect,” “rights-based approach” or “human security” are not just abstract notions devoid of any content; they alter facts on the ground and induce real changes for people in need of international protection. Misperformance is no reason for inaction.

The Celibate Plot

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A review of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life, Benjamin Kahan, Duke University Press, 2013.

CelibaciesLiterary criticism has accustomed us to read sex between the lines of literary fiction. What Maisie Knew was what her parents were doing in the bedroom; The Turn of the Screw would have the heroin screwed if the door was unlocked; and Marcel Proust’s Lost Time was time not spent in the arms of his lover. According to this view, literature is when the author wants to suggest something about a person or thing, but then for whatever reason he or she may not wish to explicitly state what is on his or her mind, and so the author writes a novel, or poetry. Psychoanalysis has several words for this urge to dissimulate and beautify: sublimation, repression, transfer, displacement, defense mechanism, the conflict between the super-ego and the id. They all refer to the transformation of socially undesirable impulses into desirable and acceptable behaviors. But what if the opposite was true? What if no sex means no sex, and there is no dark secret to probe into? The French philosopher Michel Foucault hinted at this possibility in his History of Sexuality when he criticized the repressive hypothesis, the idea that western society suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century due to the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society. Foucault argued that discourse on sexuality in fact proliferated during this period during which experts began to examine sexuality in a scientific manner, cataloguing sexual perversions and emphasizing the binary between hetero- and homosexuality. By opposition, Roland Barthes, Foucault’s colleague at the Collège de France, proposed a concept to bypass the paradigm of sexuality and go beyond the binary construction of meaning: the Neutral. “I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm,” he wrote. According to Barthes, the Neutral, or the grammatical Neuter (le neutre) operates a radical deconstruction of meaning and sexuality. It allows us to reexamine from a fresh perspective the question of le genre, understood in its dual sense of literary genre and of gender. 

The repressive hypothesis

Biographies of Roland Barthes point out that he remained a bachelor all his life and shared an apartment with his mother, to whom he devoted a vibrant eulogy at the time of her death. Barthes was also a closet homosexual, never avowing in public his penchant for boys and his dependence on the gigolo trade. His works are almost silent on his sexuality. Barthes’s homosexuality concerned only a private part of his life; it was never made public, because it simply wasn’t. Homosexuality was never for Barthes anything other than a matter of sex, limited to the question of the choice of a sexual object. He wasn’t gay (a term that functions as a seal of identity), and would never have been part of the political movement for the recognition of homosexual rights. This indifference was not a repression: it was another way of expressing what being modern meant for him, even if Bathes’ modernity was closely related to a certain resistance to the modern world. In a society obsessed with the new and the rejection of conventional forms, it is attachment to the past that now constitutes a form of marginality or even clandestinity and, as such, a heroism of the ordinary. Being modern doesn’t just mean taking part in the intellectual or artistic spectacle of contemporary society. It also, and above all, means constructing meanings, words, ways of being, cultural and textual interventions that precede what a society makes available. To be modern is to make one’s desire come to language. In this sense, Benjamin Kahan’s Celibacies, a work of literary criticism and cultural history, articulates other ways of being modern. Focusing on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance’s Father Divine to Andy Warhol, Kahan shows that the celibate condition, in the diverse forms that it took in the twentieth century, meant much more than sexual abstinence or a cover for homosexuality. To those who associate the notion of celibacy with sexual repression, submission to social norms, and political conservatism, he demonstrates that celibacies in the twentieth century were more often than not on the side of social reform, leftist politics, and artistic avant-garde.

Celibacies is placed under the sign of Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, with a quote used as an epigraph that opens the book: “Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or even don’t want to do.” Sedgwick deemed the hermeneutic practice of uncovering evidence of same-sex desire and its repression in literature, “paranoid reading.” To this trend, she opposed a reparative turn in literary studies: reparative reading seeks pleasure in the text and works to replenish the self. Sedgwick’s injunction to move from paranoid to reparative reading has been diversely followed. On the one hand, queer studies continue to read the absence of sex as itself a sign of homosexuality or of repressed desire, as an act of self-censorship and insincerity. The closeted subject has internalized social norms and keeps the true self hidden from outside views, sometimes hidden from the conscious self as well. By opposition, the queer subject brings desire to the fore, and challenges tendencies to oppose private eroticism and the systems of value that govern public interests. On the other hand, queer theory rejects normativities of all stripes, including homonormativity. It understands sex and gender as enacted and not fixed by natural determinism. Since the performance of gender is what makes gender exist, a performance of “no sex” creates a distinct gender identity: no means no, and abstinence from sex is not always the sign of repressed sexuality. It is possible to theorize gender and even sexuality without the interference of sex. But according to Kahan, celibacy is distinct from asexuality, understood as the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity. Celibacy is a historical formation or a structure of attachment that can be understood as a sexuality in its own right. Its meaning has evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it has be used as a synonym for unmarried, as a life stage preceding marriage, as a choice or a vow of sexual abstinence, as a political self-identification, as a resistance to compulsory sexuality, as a period in between sexual activity, or as a new form of gender identity organized in a distinct community culture. Celibacies used in the plural reflect these overlapping meanings and cast a light on literary productions illustrating the impact of modernism in America.

The educated spinster

Celibacy once was a recognized social identity defined by its opposite, heterosexual marriage. According to Simone de Beauvoir, “the celibate woman is to be explained and defined with reference to marriage, whether she is frustrated, rebellious, or even indifferent in regard to that institution.” Its determinants were political and economical rather than sexual or sentimental: celibacy was a necessary condition for middle- and upper-class white women to gain legal and financial independence. At the end of the nineteenth century, “marriage bars” required the dismissal of female employees upon their marriage or the prohibition of the employment of a married woman. Educated women who wanted to enter a career or a profession had to remain unmarried or to hide their marriage. They did so in large numbers: “Of women educated at Bryn Mawr between 1889 and 1908, for instance, fifty-three percent remained unwed.” For this reason, celibacy is at the very heart of the history of labor in America. It is also a key component of social mobilization and civic campaigns: in the United States, unmarried, educated women composed much of the rank and file of social movements campaigning for universal suffrage, temperance, and social purity. The centrality of celibacy for first-wave feminism cannot be emphasized enough. For the author, women’s “choice not to marry is indicative of a willingness to think outside existing social structures and thus it is associated with freedom of thought.” For their male contemporaries, it was also associated with ridicule. Women campaigning for female suffrage were belittled as “suffragettes”; and other expressions disparaged women who had chosen to stay single (“singletons,” “bachelorettes,” “old maids,” “spinsters.”) The male bachelor, by contrast, was seen as socially able to marry but having delayed marriage of his own volition; he could be characterized as “a good catch,” “a stag,” or “a jolly good fellow.” 

Celibacy’s history is imbricated with the history of homosexuality. Discussing Henry James’ novel The Bostonians, Kahan investigates one of the most contested site of celibacy in the history of homosexuality: the Boston marriage. The term “Boston marriage” describes a long-term partnership between two women who live together and share their lives with one another. In James’s satirical novel, the romance between the heroin Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor, a Boston feminist and social campaigner, is placed on equal footing with the romance between Verena and her other suitor, Basil Ransom. This love triangle is often read as a lesbian plot: Olivia’s decision to leave her parents’ house, move in with Verena and study in preparation for a career in the feminist movement is seen as the result of a love attraction. Benjamin Kahan proposes another interpretation based on the constitutive role of celibacy as a means for independence and self-determination. The Boston marriage, which does not grow out of “convenience or economy,” is associated with collaborative literary production. It reflects Henry James’ own condition as a lifelong bachelor and his conception of authorship as a vocation. The artist, like the bachelor, is fundamentally monadic and stands apart from social spheres of influence: “rather than seeing James’s celibacy as only an element of a homosexual identity, I understand it as a crucial component of his novelistic production.” In a separate chapter examining the work of Marianne Moore, a twentieth-century American poet, Kahan sees echoes of her lifelong celibacy in her poetics and conception of time. Moore’s “celibate poetics” involve a lack of development within the poem, a lack of climax, a backwardness that reverses the passage of time, as well as pleasure in difficulty, lack of explicitness, and a style at once shy and flamboyant. Moore’s remark that “the cure for loneliness is solitude” makes solitary existence a fully contented mode of sociability and a crucial part of her poetics.

Black celibacy and queer citizenship

In his effort to make celibacy be seen as progressive and pleasurable, Benjamin Kahan underscores that the celibate condition in the twentieth century was not restricted to middle-class white women. Black celibacy was advocated by a now forgotten figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Father Divine, “an intellectual and religious leader who believed he was God.” His cult, the Peace Mission Movement, organized his followers into interracial celibate living arrangements called kingdoms. These celibate communes were a direct response to economic conditions: rents in Harlem were prohibitively high, making necessary for families to share apartments or take in lodgers. Cooperative housing also echoed the calls from Claude McKay, a socialist and a poet, to seize the means of production and organize the black community on a self-sustaining basis. Lastly, black celibacy and chastity vows countered racist depictions of the black body as oversexualized and promiscuous. By making a celibate identity available to black subjects, Father Divine allowed black men and women to participate in the public sphere and created economic and spiritual opportunities for racial equality. Celibacy was also used as a strategy for queer subjects to circumvent the prohibition preventing homosexual immigrants from becoming American citizens. Before the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, the queer citizen could, according to the letter of the law, belong to America so long as he remained celibate or was not “caught in an act of moral turpitude.” The British poet W. H. Auden became an American citizen in 1946 by practicing “cheating celibacy,” a position both inside and outside the rules that he thematized in his 1944 poetic essay The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest”. This long poem is a series of dramatic monologues spoken by the characters in Shakespeare’s play in which Caliban renunciates his former self in favor of a queer form of belonging. But as Kahan notes, “black queer writers like Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes had significantly less ability to move in and out of America’s borders than white authors like Auden.”

Kahan’s choice to associate Andy Warhol with celibacy is disconcerting. The pop artist was openly gay and had a reputation for promiscuity and swishiness. His art collective, the Factory, was populated by “drag queens, hustlers, speed freaks, fag hags, and others.” But “‘gayness’ is not a category that we can control in advance.” If Warhol’s declarations can be taken at face value, he claimed that he didn’t have any sex life: “Well, I never have sex” and “Yeah. I’m still a virgin,” he responded in an interview. Evidence also suggests that the Factory wasn’t the “Pussy Heaven” or “Queer Central” journalists once described: according to one witness, celibacy organized life at the Factory, and Warhol’s abstinence from sex shaped relations of power and subjection. As Kahan sees it, the tradition of celibate philosophers underwrites the Factory’s mode of government and theorizes a concept of group celibacy. Warhol’s marriage to his tape recorder exemplified his rejection of traditional marriage and emotional life: “I want to be a machine.” In the view of a contemporary, “everything is sexual to Andy without the sex act actually taking place.” His celibacy operates at a zero degree of desire. My Hustler, his 1965 movie with film director Paul Morrissey and actor Ed Hood, presents a twisted celibate plot characterized as much by sexlessness as by sex. Valerie Solanas tried to kill Andy Warhol in 1968 because she claimed “he had too much control of [her] life”. In the SCUM Manifesto she published before her attempted murder, the radical feminist urged women to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Kahan places both Warhol and Solanas in a tradition of philosophical bachelorhood that precludes sex in favor of alternative modes of governance.

Celibate readings

In the conclusion of Celibacies, Benjamin Kahan argues that celibacy should not be abandoned to the American political right, with its apology of abstinence before marriage and traditional gender roles. Celibacy from the 1880s to the 1960s has been on the side of reform and modernism. Celibate women could access public space and the professions at a time social norms prevented educated married women from entering the workforce. In the 1930s, celibacy was a possible option availing economic advantages to African-Americans in Harlem or allowing queer foreigners to access U.S. citizenship. Celibacy could also be a philosophical choice or a condition for artistic production. Having a room of one’s own was easier when one didn’t have to share the apartment with another person or raise a family. Forms of celibacies have also been animated by “sexual currents, desires, identifications, and pleasures.” Celibacy’s imbrication with homosexuality is not just a modern invention: depictions of “Boston marriage” in the late nineteenth century had strong implications of lesbianism. But celibacy was not only a pre-homosexual discourse or the result of sexual repression: it was a form of sexuality in its own right, entailing a more radical withdrawal than is the case with the closet homosexual or the scholar practicing sexual abstinence. No sex means sex otherwise, or a different form of sexuality. Looking to literary works of fiction and poetry through the prism of celibacy leads to valuable insights: Kahan reads a “celibate plot” in Henry James’ The Bostonians or Andy Warhol’s My Hustler, and highlights a “celibate poetics” in the poems of Marianne Moore or W. H. Auden. This book is published in a series devoted to queer studies because, as the author argues, “celibate and queer readings overlap without being coextensive.” Much as queer theory has the effect of “undoing gender,” the primary purpose of the Neutral according to Roland Barthes is to undo the classifying function of language and thus to neutralize the signifier’s distinctive function. “L’écriture célibataire” is the form the Neutral took in American modernism.

From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter

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A review of Policing Protest: The Post-Democratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection, Paul A. Passavant, Duke University Press, 2021.

Policing ProtestLet’s begin with a tale of two cities. The first—let’s call it Gotham—is a city where crime and violent protest run rampant. Hoodlums and thugs control the streets. City Hall is corrupt and incompetent. Police officers are powerless. An anti-Western, anti-rationalist, racialist, segregationist ideology has declared war against individual freedom and freedom of thought. Vigilante groups have taken control of entire neighborhoods and established a reign of permanent violence, looting businesses, attacking representatives of public authority, setting fire to courts of law and to the premises of police departments. The chaos that accompanied the takeover of these Red Guards has caused dizzying increases in crime. Even so, influent voices are calling for the defunding of police and the abolition of prison. Law enforcement officers have to obey strict rules of engagement. They have to wear body cameras to record their interactions with the public or gather video evidence of their eventual mishandling of a situation. There are discussions about streaming these video feeds online, in real time. The second city—dubbed The Big Apple—is a place where a militarized police patrols the streets like an occupation army, clamping down on any form of dissent. Business interests have privatized vast portions of the public space, evacuating any undesirable people including climate change activists, protesters distributing antiwar pamphlets, or trade union picketers who could disrupt the consumer’s experience. With the full support of politicians, police forces have responded to a previous wave of crime with a zero tolerance policy they now apply to all kinds of public protest, in violation of the First Amendment of the American Constitution. This “Broken Windows” doctrine has had no effect on crime, but now justifies disproportionate use of force, excessive length of custody, and “shock and awe” tactics against protesters. People demonstrating for social justice or against racism are treated like criminals and are arrested without any legal basis. Democracy is undermined, and the government increasingly behaves like an authoritarian state.

A Tale of Two Cities

The first city is a fiction. It exists only in the alt-right world of alternative facts and post-truth reporting. The second city is how Paul Passavant describes the evolution of law enforcement and order maintenance in the United States. Policing Protest is a political science book that documents the rise of a “post-democratic state” in America through an analysis of the way police has become more hostile to protesters, thwarting the rights of free speech and free assembly enshrined in the American Constitution. It is based on legal analysis of court decisions, proceedings from civil actions against the NYPD, interviews with activists and with lawyers, reference to press coverage and books recounting the Occupy Wall Street movement, and textual analysis of video footage and testimonies. Although it uses standard tools of the social sciences, the research methodology does not include participant observation or questionnaire survey research, which constitute the Gold Standard in sociology. Passavant builds on a large previous scholarship highlighting a perceived decline in the guarantees offered to rights of free speech and assembly in America. Scholars have documented how policing in the United States became increasingly militarized in the 1980s and 1990s. Some point to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, as causing more repressive practices in law and policing. Others see evidence of a repressive turn as early as the 1970s, instrumented as a backlash against recently conquered civil rights. Still for others, police is inherently hostile to civil rights activists and anti-racist protesters. For the proponents of Afro-pessimism, anti-Blackness is a constituent element of policing in the United States. Passavant rejects both the essentialism of Afro-pessimism and the historicism of descriptions based on rational choice theory. For him, we should analyze the hostility against Black Lives Matter as a political antagonism, not an ontological condition. But police’s excessive response to protesting should not be seen as a rational response based on utilitarian efficiency. Passavant highlights the significance of affective attachment to “kicking ass” that goes beyond instrumental rationality of the neoliberal state. He describes the emergence of a “post-democratic, postlegitimation state shaped by neoliberal authoritarianism and haunted by the figure of black insurrection.”

Police abuse of force against protesters became a political issue in the United States at the end of the 1960s. Images in the media of civil rights marchers in Birmingham or Selma, Alabama, or protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention being attacked by police, or antiwar demonstrators being killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, shocked the national conscience. Formed in 1967 to investigate the causes of civil disorder that had culminated in the urban riots of the summer this year, the Kerner Commission attributed the race riots to lack of economic opportunity for African Americans and Latinos, failed social service programs, police brutality, racism, and the orientation of national media to white perspectives. The 426-page report became an instant bestseller. It set into motion reforms to make police more legally accountable and to steer protest policing into a more tolerant direction. Beginning in some cities in the 1970s, the “negotiated management” model of protest policing emphasized dialogue and collaboration between police departments and groups planning acts of civil disobedience as part of a demonstration. Under the new model, police should expect and tolerate a certain amount of disruption to everyday routines when citizens exercise their First Amendment rights. During protests, police should avoid using force, and refrain from making arrests except when absolutely necessary. Arrestees should be processed with diligence and a certain degree of leniency. This model was in sharp contrast to the previous model of “escalated force” emphasizing brutal show of force and early dispersal, which was perceived as inciting an aggressive response from protesters. But the Kerner Commission report and the new model of protest policing met with fierce opposition. In December 1967, the Miami police chief uttered the now-infamous phrase, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Richard Nixon placed his 1968 presidential campaign under the banner of the “forgotten Americans,” the “non-demonstrators” who are “not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.” Conflating civil rights demonstrations, urban riots, and street crime, he set in motion a “war against crime” that was fought by his successors.

Broken Windows

In 1982, The Atlantic published the essay “Broken Windows” by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson. This controversial theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder. Starting with the NYPD, police departments began to target minor forms of disorder with zero tolerance in the 1990s. According to Passavant, “the transformation of policing in the direction of zero tolerance, quality of life, order maintenance policing, and enjoyment of ‘kicking ass’ was at odds with the principles of tolerance and restraint informing the negotiated management model of protest policing.” A new style of protest policing, dubbed “command and control,” emphasizes inflexible regulatory practices, strategic incapacitation based on risk assessment and surveillance, shock and awe tactics of disproportionate display of force, extralegal intimidation of protesters, and punitive postarrest detentions. This shift from negotiated management to more aggressive and violent protest policing methods can be attributed to three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an urban fiscal crisis, and a crime crisis. To illustrate the first crisis, Passavant takes the example of Supreme Court decisions regarding the use of public space, such as the exercise of free speech in shopping malls and urban centers, as the sign of a deeper crisis in political culture: commercial interests are encouraged at the detriment of democratic expression. To compensate the contraction of fiscal revenue caused by the exodus to suburbia, cities began to reorient their infrastructure away from residents and toward nonresidents who might visit city centers: consumers, tourists, and visitors attracted by sporting events or cultural manifestations. Lastly, the perception of a “crime wave” in the 1960s and 1970s led to the militarization of police and the abandonment of the negotiated management model of protest policing.

By looking at how the NYPD policed the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC), Passadant argues that when cities host mega-events, they are left with a security legacy that persists after the event is over. This legacy takes the form of armored vehicles, military-grade weapons, or security cameras that become embedded within the fabric of the urban environment. In the case of New York, politically motivated intelligence gathering and needlessly punitive arrest processing practices were first institutionalized during the organization of the 2004 RNC. When a city hosts a mega-event classified as a national special security events by the secretary of Homeland Security, it becomes eligible for federal money to enhance security. The Secret Service becomes the lead federal agency for developing and implementing security for the event, coordinating federal agencies and state and local police. Cities want to avoid a breach in security at all costs. The fear a repetition of the events that plagued Seattle’s 1999 hosting of the WTO’s ministerial conference, when massive street protests disrupted the event and caused mayhem in the city. But being perceived as capable of hosting a mega-event is also a powerful marketing tool for a city, as it generates a large economic windfall in the form of increased tourism and commercial activity. Like New Orleans’ hosting of the Super Bowl after Hurricane Katrina, New York submitted bids for several mega-events after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and was successful for its hosting of the 2002 World Economic Forum and the 2004 RNC. The first event was a rehearsal for the preparation of the second, which in turn shaped the way the NYPD reacted to Occupy Wall Street and to Black Lives Matter. Post-event assessments emphasized the perceived psychological effects of major shows of force, the role of intelligence or surveillance like the use of “undercovers” to infiltrate groups of protesters, and the NYPD’s “proactive arrest policy” directed against potential rioters. Hosting mega-events therefore produces a multiplier effect spurring the securitization of policing and urban environments. Much as the “Broken Windows” theory encouraged a horizontal dissemination of policing practices, the vertical dissemination of surveillance and control after a national special security event shapes institutions and methodologies in police departments long after the mega-event is over.

From OWS to BLM

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) left in its wake a paper trail of civil actions against the NYPD and other police departments, who were accused of excessive use of force and arbitrary arrests. It was a legally literate movement, with “legal observers” embedded among participants to document possible violations of civil rights by the police and later defend activists in courts. NYPD was found guilty of trespassing the law on many counts. But court decisions came too late to remedy the NYPD’s preemption of constitutional rights in the streets. They also failed to make the NYPD financially accountable for their policing, as civil damages arising from judicial settlements were absorbed into New York’s citywide budget. The case of a public administration violating its own laws raises a broader question. According to Max Weber, the monopoly of the legitimate use of force defines the rational-legal state and is used in an efficient and orderly manner. But there was nothing rational or orderly in the use of force by the NYPD during OWS protests. The overwhelming numbers of police dedicated to street demonstration and their heavy anti-riot equipment were displayed to intimidate protesters and force them into submission. There were numerous acts of verbal abuse and physical brutality. Rules were applied arbitrarily: in some cases, police would conduct arrests for even the slightest infraction such as putting one foot into the street when only use of the sidewalk was allowed. In other cases, illegal or unruly conducts on the part of demonstrators were tolerated and even encouraged or provoked. For Passavant, the role of excess is indicative of an affective attachment to the repressive nature of neoliberal order maintenance policing. Some police officers enjoyed “kicking ass” and reveled in the disorder they were causing. The arbitrary, aggressive, and overwhelming police behavior was calculated in order to cause fear and anger among the otherwise nonviolent crowd. As an aside, “this also had the effect of diverting the Occupy movement away from its political purpose of protesting economic inequality to a preoccupation with the NYPD.” Polices forces were not alone in reacting affectively to demonstrations and in enjoying the disorder they were causing: videos posted on YouTube of police subjecting protesters to violent treatment have become viral, eliciting in their comment thread a range of reactions going from indifference (“whatever”) to sadistic pleasure (“LOL”).

The death of Eric Garner at the hands of the police on July 17, 2014, was one of the events that helped trigger the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. When the NYPD local commander was informed by text message that Garner was “most likely DOA” (dead on arrival), he responded, “Not a big deal.” In Ferguson, Missouri, where black teenager Michael Brown was shot multiple times and killed by a police officer on August 9, 2014, imposing a fine on poor and black citizens for minor violations of the law and then issuing a warrant when they failed to comply was a kind of “primitive accumulation” that provided the city with 25 percent of its fiscal revenue. This is a kind of police “who enjoys impunity, and who are supported by political subjects who enjoy their enjoyment of impunity.” Much as the NYPD sought to repress, intimidate, and defeat Occupy Wall Street, it treated Black Lives Matter as a political enemy to be defeated by any means necessary. The full spectrum of repressive measures were used against the BLM movement: battlefield tactics of urban warfare and counterinsurgency, deployment of military-grade weapons such as LRADs, surveillance by counterterrorism units and undercover police, interception or blurring of communication signals, preventive arrests and grueling detention conditions. According to Passavant, these reactions are haunted by the specter of black insurrection. The protests and riots of the 1960s continue to weigh on the present. At the same time, the responses envisaged at the time—addressing inequalities in education, housing, employment, and degrading conditions of welfare—have now vanished from the political horizon.

Echoes beyond the United States

The conflation of civic protest and violent riots presented in the opening vignette (the “tale of Gotham”) is not new. In the 1960s, conservatives complained that the civil rights movement was spreading “mass lawlessness and violence,” when in fact it was the disorderly response of the authorities that fueled unrest and turmoil. Should we trust empirical evidence or alternative facts? Unfortunately, when they originate in the United States, both facts and fiction are export products. They influence the way other Western states organize their police forces, and how they perceive protests as a result of a “woke” ideology of ethnic polarization. European authorities and commentators took different attitudes regarding the two social movements reviewed in Policing Protest, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. It must be remembered that OWS was met with a great deal of sympathy in Europe, where hostility to market forces and unfettered capitalism runs deep. European cities became the center of occupation movements that paralleled the protests in New York and other American cities. In France, a political manifesto penned by Stéphane Hessel, a respected figure from the left, Time for Outrage! (“Indignez-vous !”), sold more than one million copies in a few months. In Spain, the Indignados Movement led to the creation of the Podemos political party that entered a coalition government with the left-of-center Socialists. Occupation of public places and urban parks, in large part self-disciplined, was monitored by the police without any major incident. The BLM movement was met with more reservation and dismissal. Denunciation of structural racism and police abuse of force strike a sensitive chord in countries like France, where political leaders reject all references to “police violence” (the preferred terms are “response to provocations” or “excessive use of force”) and deny that systemic racism in French institutions can even be an issue. On the one hand, police forces and the governments that mandate them try to avoid unnecessary deaths at all costs. They fear death at the hand of the police can spark violent riots and turmoil, as was indeed the case in France in 2005 and then again in June 2023. On the other hand, the same evolution toward the militarization of law and order and the escalation in the use of force can also be observed in Europe. How can we reconcile the categorical imperative “Thou shalt not kill” with the brutalization of order maintenance methods? There are no definite answers, but the reflection proposed by Paul Passavant in Policing Protest also finds echoes in Europe.

Passing for White, Passing for Black

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A review of Passing and the Fictions of Identity, Elaine K. Ginsberg ed., Duke University Press, 1996.

Passing

On September 10, 2020, the editorial director of Duke University Press issued a statement about Jessica Krug, a published author who for several decades had falsely claimed a Black and Latinx identity before being exposed as a case of racial fraud. The public statement was brimming with rage and indignation: “I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity,” the editor wrote. The feminist scholar was denounced as a case of deception and fraud, rendered more shameful by the fact that “early in her career, she took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars.” Confronted with her lies, Jessica Krug herself issued a blog confession in which she disclosed her original identity “as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City” who, because of “some unaddressed mental health” issues, had assumed a false identity initially as a youth and then as a scholar. Using a word tainted by a history of antisemitism, she described herself as “a culture leech,” apologized profusely, and asked to “be cancelled.” It turned out Jessica Krug wasn’t the only case of racial impersonation in academia: over the forthcoming months, other scholars were exposed as having claimed a false racial identity, including another author who had manuscripts accepted by Duke University Press even after she was denounced as a so-called “Pretendian,” or a person falsely claiming a Native American heritage. In another statement, the same editor indicated that “for months now, we at Duke University Press have engaged in difficult conversations about how we can do a better job of considering ethical concerns as we make our publishing decisions.” But she did not indicate whether the academic publisher would take measures to check the self-declared racial identity of its contributors, or how it would proceed in doing so.

Policing race, unpolicing gender

I remember being amused and puzzled by these media statements. I saw them as a typically American story as we like to imagine them in France: a narrative following a pattern of public exposure, legal confrontation, personal confession, atonement for past sins, and redemption, as was the case of Bill Clinton in the Jessica Lewinsky affair. Only in the case of white people assuming a Black identity there was neither mercy nor redemption: the culprits were expected to expose their shame publicly before disappearing into oblivion. And indeed, following her confession Jessica Krug vanished from public view, never to be seen again: she was, in effect, cancelled. To a certain degree, I can understand the outrage of the Duke editor and other persons who had been fooled into believing the usurpated identity of racial impostors. But only to a degree: there are also convincing arguments to support the fact that racial usurpation is not such a big deal, and should be treated with leniency. Whom did Jessica Krug harm by pretending to be black? Does having benefited from earmarked resources justify the policy of cancellation of a scholar who may otherwise have brought useful contributions to the field? What if it was possible to “play one’s race” as one plays a role? After all, isn’t it a central tenet of critical studies that identity is a fiction and that social roles are performatively enacted? According to Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble was published in 1990, gender is performance. Likewise, in Epistemology of the Closet, also published in 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that limiting sexuality to homosexuality or heterosexuality, in a structured binary opposition, is too simplistic. The discipline of queer studies that they helped establish is a broad tent: one does not have to prove one’s credentials as a gay, lesbian, or otherwise LGBTQI+ person to identify as “queer.” Likewise, in crip theory—the radical arm of disability studies—, a person is considered as disabled if she considers herself to be so. There are no checks of medical records or social security status: indeed, disability scholars deny doctors the exclusive right to declare who is disabled and who is not, and argue that disability status is biased against persons of color, people living in precarious conditions, and otherwise discriminated persons. Being disabled (or being queer) is a social construction, just like what is opposed to it, namely being able-bodied (or being straight). Why should race be treated differently? Are academics serious when they claim that race is also a fluid and reversible category?

The moral panic raised by racial usurpations of minority identity is a very contemporary phenomenon. To understand its roots, one has to delve into the American history of race relations, and to understand the academic context as it emerged in the 1990, especially in literature departments where questions of identity and fiction were most prominently raised. It was a time when the modern racial impersonators started their career, and when transracialism, although based in those cases on identity theft and deception, appeared as a feasible option. The book Passing and the Fictions of Identity, edited by Elaine K. Ginsberg and published in 1996, therefore provides a useful benchmark to assess contemporary debates in light of their foundational moment. The term passing designates a performance in which one presents oneself as what one is not, a performance commonly imagined along the axis of race, class, gender, or sexuality. In American literature, passing across race and across gender are thoroughly imbricated—most famously in the narrative of William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), in which the black couple escaped from slavery, she dressed as a white man and he posing as her servant, and in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) when Eliza, traveling to Canada, disguises herself as a white man and her young son as a girl. In the twentieth century, novels such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) added to the discourse of racial passing a third important sense of passing: the appearance of “homosexual” as “heterosexual.” Passing and the Fictions of Identity explores passing novels as a literary genre that complicates racial and sexual categories. It also considers passing across social status delimitations, as in The Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) in which the narrator, an Igbo African and a former British slave, becomes a free sailor and a pioneer of the abolitionist cause. It addresses gender crossing through a close reading of The Woman in Battle (1876), an account of Civil War cross-dressing that presents itself as the autobiography of Loreta Velazquez, a woman who masqueraded as a Confederate officer and spy during the war. Passing novels also include The Hidden Hand (or Capitola the Madcap), a picaresque adventure tale first published in 1859, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), in which national, racial, and sexual identities are presented as nostalgic constructions subject to a pathos of lost origins. Black Like Me (1961) is not a work of fiction but a realistic account of a journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African-Americans lived under racial segregation, by a journalist who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. Closing the book, Adrian Piper, a philosopher and a performance artist, offers her personal testimony as an African American woman who identifies herself as black but often passes for white because of her light-skin complexion.

The dilemma of passing

Passing for white is still a reality in contemporary American society, where African American identity was built on a history of slavery and segregation and where Blacks still suffer from racial prejudice and social exclusion. As F. James Davis writes in Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (1991), “Those who pass have a severe dilemma before they decide to do so, since a person must give up all family ties and loyalties to the black community in order to gain economic and other opportunities.” There is no forced “outing” of people who pass for white in the African American community: “Publicly to expose the African ancestry of someone who claims to have none is not done,” writes Adrian Piper. And yet passing is met with ambivalence and equivocation. In the novel Passing, one character remarks: “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.” By contrast, at the time the book was published, passing for black when one is white was deemed a complete impossibility. Adrian Piper, who was suspected of doing so, reacts violently to such accusation: “It’s an extraordinary idea, when you think about it: as though someone would willingly shoulder the stigma of being black in a racist society.” Based on her own experience, she considers being black as “a social condition, more than an identity, that no white person would voluntarily assume, even in imagination.” The many instances of microaggressions, discriminatory treatment, racial slurs, or racist conversations she overheard even in an academic context considered as “safe” justify her point: raised as an African American by a committed family, but as a person who “looked white” and “talked white,” she involuntarily passed as white and thus was able to witness the racist behavior of white persons who lower their guard when they think they are among themselves (as in the Saturday Night Life routine when a whitefaced Eddy Murphy experiences the sight of relief as a single black man exits a bus full of white passengers.) In Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin expresses outrage and mortification at a variety of incidents that would have been commonplace to black Southerners living under Jim Crow: being turned away from hotels and restaurants, made the target of racial animosity and sexual objectification, denied banking privileges, rejected peremptorily from jobs, required to use segregated toilet facilities, and forced to sit at the back of the bus. Clearly under such conditions, no white person would willingly become black.

There are several reasons why passing became a popular trope in American literature, and why literary criticism took on the subject with an enthusiasm bordering on frenzy in the 1990s. Cross-dressing and assuming a fake identity have always been a familiar ploy in literary fiction, from picaresque novels of sixteenth century Spain to the theater comedies of Shakespeare and Marivaux. The American legacy of slavery and racial segregation added an element of drama to this familiar plot. The fictitious characters of the passing novel and the unknown thousands of very real black men and women who passed out of slavery moved from a category of subordination and oppression to one of freedom and privilege. According to the one-drop rule, any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry (“one drop” of “black blood”) was considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). African blood is invisible on the surface of the body, allowing persons of mixed descent with a light skin and Caucasian facial features to pass as white. Crossing racial or sexual boundaries involves a suspension of disbelief that is at the heart of literary fiction: appearances are deceiving, identities are in flux, and nothing is what it seems. The visual force of passing, and especially the shock of its discovery after the fact, is extraordinary. Especially in the case of race, passing is not simply performance or theatricality, the pervasive tropes of recent work on sex and gender identity, nor is it parody or pastiche, for it seeks to erase, rather than expose, its own dissimulation. Unlike sexual identity which is not necessarily apparent, race is eminently visible, as if it were natural. Race is essential, communal, and public, whereas sexuality is contingent, individual, and private. The misperception of race is therefore surprising insofar as it contradicts the established belief in the strength of blood ties and genetic makeup. Racial passing resonates deep within the American psyche. Even though a significant proportion of white Americans, about 3.5 percent according to geneticists, are known to have some African ancestry, very few people who identify themselves as white are ready to acknowledge this heritage. According to Adrian Piper, “the fact of African ancestry among whites ranks up there with family incest, murder, and suicide as one of the bitterest and most difficult pills for white Americans to swallow.”

The fictions of identity

Through the contributions to this volume, passing was constituted as a literary genre and a productive space in which to interrogate identity in all its dimensions. According to one contributor, “passing is an act of resistance against dominant constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity.” As she explains, the discourse of racial passing reveals the arbitrary foundation of the categories “black” and “white,” just as passing across gender and sexuality places in question the meaning of “masculine” and “feminine,” “straight” and “gay.” For the editor in her introductory chapter, “just as the ontology of race exposes the contingencies of the categories ‘white’ and ‘black,’ so the ontology of gender exposes the essential inauthenticity of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’” Socially constructed identities seemed to connote an identity easily altered or cast off: one could be black or white (or Native American) by an act of volition, a conscious decision that would engage the rest of one’s life but that had no relation to one’s previous self. The facticity of identity made any experience of that identity necessarily inauthentic: “Passing is only one more indication that subjectivity involves fracture, that no true self exists apart from its multiple, simultaneous enactments.” It was accepted as a an article of faith that “identities are not singularly true or false but multiple and contingent.” There was no authentic self, but an assemblage composed by “a series of guises and masks, performances and roles.” Literature had first established passing as a trope, and literary criticism gave it its badge of honor. The 1990s were years of transformation in the humanities, and the university became a factory for ideas of gender transition and eventually of race fluidity. Under the influence of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, who are quoted at length in this volume, identities were read as fictions and constructed as fantasies. Race was compared to a “metaphor,” an “empty signifier,” a “mark empty of any referential content” or “the unheimlisch return of a desire” that could be as malleable as text. Then was a time to “construct new identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress.”

In such intellectual climate, it is no wonder that some enterprising individuals took critical theory at its own word and decided to experiment in real life the theses that literary critics and social scientists had proposed on the cultural front. If all identities are in passing and race is a masquerade, why not assume a different racial identity and pretend one belonged to a minority of color instead of dull and undifferentiated whiteness? If race is a role we play, why not choose the character we wish to embody and play the part accordingly? Of course, assuming a different ethnic identity involves lying about one’s “true” origins. But if race is a lie, lying about a lie is not a lie: it is all performance. There were several motivations behind the choice made by some individuals, mostly academics and performing artists, to take on the identity of an ethnic minority. First, the stigma once associated with being colored started to recede with the civil rights movement and the promotion of ethnic identities. In the ideologically charged climate of the 1970s, Black was beautiful, Native Indian was noble, ethnic was chic. There was a whiff of marginality and radicalism in embracing the cause of ethnic minorities fighting for their rights. As the author of Black Like Me experienced it, one could not act as a spokesperson of a group in which one did not belong. He chose to step aside and to support black separatism from a distance; others preferred to espouse the cause with which they identified unequivocally, and to play the part until the end. As a second reason, this was a period when ethnic studies and other interdisciplinary fields emerged as new and exciting disciplines. For a promising academic, it was important to position oneself where all the action was. If this involved lying about one’s ethnic origins, so be it. Most of the time, the deception began with a lie by omission or a sous-entendre that may have been based on family lore. In a nonsuspecting environment, there was no hard questions asked, and no need to provide minute answers about one’s genetic makeup. In some cases, what began as a histrionic role became an acting career. Academics spend their life on a stage and impersonate a role in front of a devoted audience. They tend to embody the ideas they defend to the point their appearance becomes inseparable from their discipline. Teaching ethnic studies made one feel part of this ethnicity.

The backlash against transracialism

And yet, transracialism has few modern proponents, and academics who are found to have lied about their ethnic origins are subjected to public shaming and a strict policy of cancellation. “In Defense of Transracialism”, an article published by the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in the academic journal Hypatia in spring 2017, was met with a barrage of insults and denunciations, and the journal’s editors had to publish an apology. How, then, are we to understand the backlash against racial trespassing and the cancellation of individuals who claimed an ethnic identity when in fact they were white? Why did race and gender follow different paths and ended up on opposite sides of academic debates, with transracialism denounced as wholly illegitimate while trans identities were recognized and even praised by gender theorists? First, the issue of passing involves not only an individual’s decision to change race, but also deliberately lying and deceiving about it. Academia is an industry that defines itself in large part by its ethical standards: having a career based on a lie makes other people angry and resentful. American ethics adds a layer or prudery and moral posturing to these manifestations of public outrage: remember that in the Lewinsky case, what was reproached to Bill Clinton was not to have had an affair with an intern, but to have lied about it. Denunciations of ethnic fraud also emphasize the fact that the culprits benefited from preferential treatment and financial resources originally earmarked to members of ethnic minorities: they “stole” these resources from others, who may have benefited from these affirmative action measures but could not. One may find this argument shallow and petty: there is more to academia than just money and a struggle for positions, and every social policy has its leakages. The resolution to curtail the phenomenon of passing also comes from the realization that it may have reached massive proportions. According to the 1990 census, two million Americans reported as American Indians and Alaska Natives. In 2000, almost twice as many gave the same answer to the questionnaire. Among them, in proportion, Latinos and highly educated adults as well as women were the groups most directly affected. Checking the “Native American” box is not only a means of gaming the university admission system: Native American cultures have experienced a kind of cultural renaissance, which increases the number of persons willing to associate with them. As a last argument, the reaction to Rebecca Tuvel’s article showed that feminists who support trans identities and queer studies are particularly ill at ease with the possibility of transracialism. They do not want to witness the contamination of gender debates with issues of racial transition. Policing race is also a way to police their own discipline and to erect barriers to avoid trespassing.

Hawai’i on Ice

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Duke University Press, 2022.

Cooling the tropicsMany public events in the United States and in Canada begin by paying respects to the traditional custodians of the land, acknowledging that the gathering takes place on their traditional territory, and noting that they called the land home before the arrival of settlers and in many cases still do call it home. Cooling the Tropics does not open with such a Land Acknowledgement, but Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (thereafter: Hi′ilei Hobart) claims Hawai’i as her piko (umbilicus) and pays tribute to the kūpuna (noble elders) and the lāhui (lay people) who “defended the sovereignty of [her] homeland with tender and fierce love.” She describes her identity as “anchored in a childhood in Hawai’i, with a Kānaka Maoli mother who epitomized Hawaiian grace and a second-generation Irish father who expressed his devotion to her by researching and writing our family histories.” She expresses her support for decolonial struggles and Indigenous rights, and participated in protests claiming territorial sovereignty for Hawai’i’s Native population. How can one decolonize Hawai’i? How can Hawaiian sovereignty discourse articulate a claim to land restitution and self-determination that is not a return to a mythic past? What about racial mixing, once regarded with anxiety and now touted as a symbol of Hawai’i’s success as a multicultural US state? What happens to settler colonialism and white privilege when the local economy and the political arena are dominated by populations originating from East Asia and persons of mixed descent? Is economic self-reliance a feasible option considering the imbrication of Hawai’i’s economy into the US mainland’s market? Can the rights of the Indigenous population be better defended in a sovereign Hawai’i? What is the meaning of supporting decolonial futures that include “deoccupation, demilitarization, and the dismantling of the settler state”? Can decolonization be achieved by nonviolent means, or do sovereignty’s activists have to resort to rebellion and armed struggle? What would be the future of a decolonized Hawai’i in a region fraught with military tensions and geopolitical rivalries? What can a decolonial perspective bring to the analysis of Hawai’i’s colonial past and possible futures? And why is academic research on Hawai’i’s history and society so often aligned with the decolonization agenda, to the point that decolonial approaches are almost synonymous with Hawaiian studies in the United States? More to the point: how can a PhD student majoring in food studies and chronicling the introduction of ice water, ice-making machines, ice cream, and shave ice in Hawai’i address issues of settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, Native rights to self-determination, and decolonial futures?

Decolonize Hawai’i

Unbeknownst to most Americans, and to all non-US citizen but a few exceptions, there is a thriving independence movement taking place in the Hawaiian Islands today. It was borne out of an unlawful US-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, it survived Hawai’i’s accession to statehood in 1959, and it is currently in opposition to the territorial encroachment by military infrastructure and other state interests over confiscated land and sacred sites. The Hawaiian soveignty movement doesn’t advocate a return to a mythic past. Simply put, Native communities demand respect for their traditional cultures, consideration for their role as stewards of the land, and empowerment to take part in all decisions that affect them. Since 2014, local activists have opposed the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a scientific endeavor with governmental support from Canada, France, Japan, China, and India. Slated to become the most powerful telescope on the planet, the stadium-sized facility threatens to desecrate one of the most sacred sites for Kānaka Maoli. Construction was temporarily halted due to a blockade of the roadway leading to the site, and further protests as well as legal battles prevented construction of the telescope to resume. Hi′ilei Hobart took part in the protests, helping to keep the basecamp of picketers provisioned with food and beverages. Participating in local struggles fed into her dissertation in more than one way. Firstly, it underscored the obvious: ice and snow are native to Hawai’i; they are not an imported commodity brought by Anglo-American settlers along with “civilization”. Those who tell the story of how ice first came to Hawai’i get it wrong: ice and snow have been there since time immemorial. During winter, snow frequently falls on the ice-capped summits of the island chain’s tallest mountains. But even confronted with this evidence, popular discourse continues to construe ice and snow as alien to Hawai’i, and to frame Maunakea―the site of the TMT―as a terra nullius unoccupied by the Native population and thus open for grabs and available for construction in the name of science and progress. Discursive logics have combined to produce Maunakea as “not-for-Hawaiians” (Kānaka Maoli were supposed to steer away from altitude, and the first individuals on record to climb the mountaintops were Westerners), as “not-Hawai’i” (outsiders picture Hawai’i as a tropical paradise of lush valleys and beaches), and as “not-Earth” (NASA used the desolate volcanic site for outerspace simulations of spacewalks on Mars and the moon). Cumulative efforts to frame Maunakea as empty and alien have resulted in disregard for Natives’ rights and belief systems.

The second lesson Hi′ilei Hobart could draw from her roadblock picketing is a better sense of the local cosmogonies that tie humans with nature and the elements in Hawai’i. For Kanaka Maoli, Maunakea’s snow, mist, and rain are not just atmospheric phenomena: they signal the lingering presence of gods (akua) and ancestors’ spirits who have been occupying the place even in the absence of humans. Local tales or mo’olelo kept by way of oral transmission carry foundation myths of the islands and mountains and attest to Maunakea’s central role in Indigenous place and thought, while animating the elements and other life forces with their own spirit and consciousness. Likewise, for the anthropologist, commodities are animated with a life of their own. According to Marx, a wooden table “does not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.” Ice and refreshments in the tropics are imbued with values, desires, longings, and social hierarchies. They have a history that intersects with the history of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the militaro-touristic complex in Hawai’i. Discourses about ice encapsulate ideas about race, modernity, gender, and the affective sensorium. They help rationalize Indigenous dispossession and contribute to the legitimization of imperialism. As historian Eric Jennings has demonstrated, the concepts of freshness and refreshment marked colonial relationships in the tropics. The hill stations and colonial spas built by the French and the British in their colonial outposts were predicated on the idea that fragile European bodies could not endure tropical heat and had to periodically regain some of their vigor in high-altitude places where conditions of life in the homeland were reproduced. The same logic explains how ice and frozen refreshments were progressively naturalized in Hawai’i’s foodscape. First to penetrate the Hawaiian market in the nineteenth century, ice cubes were associated with masculinity, alcohol consumption, saloon culture, plantation ownership, and white privilege. By contrast, the more feminine ice water came to be seen as a means to achieve temperance, mitigating the warm climate, and cooling after effort. Ice cream was a symbol of whiteness, sugary sweetness, purity, leasure, and innocent childhood; for young women, who could frequent the ice cream parlor without being chaperoned, the fast-melting delicacy was also synonymous with freedom and romantic encounters. Born on the plantations, shave ice is associated with brown labor, rural life, Asian migrants, mom-and-pop stores, and nostalgia for simpler times.

Infrastructures of the cold

As a third lesson of the author’s fieldwork as an activist came the realization that American society depends on thermal infrastructures, from the cold chain to keep perishable foodstuff to air conditioning and big houses protected from outside temperature. Freezers and refrigerators are essential to modern survival. These infrastructures have become so embedded in everyday life that they fade into the background, and their very invisibility guarantees that structures of dispossession and extraction go unnoticed. This is what the author labels “thermal colonialism”, defined as the modes by which temperature was managed and organized to favor settlers’ interests and reproduce racial hierarchies. Americans have become quite literally “conditioned” to experience coolness or frozen taste in hot weather, to the point that they consider the “right to chill” as constitutionally guaranteed. But desire for freshness and refreshment has a history: it is not biologically determined. We realize the importance of infrastructures of the cold when they fail us: the fragility of the cold chain in Hawai’i reveals itself after a hurricane, when lines of supply are disrupted, or each time the islands brace for an emergency. When things fall apart, networks of care and resilience take precedence over market relations and commercial interests. This is what Hi′ilei Hobart realized in the encampment at Mount Maunakea as she filled coolers with ice and drained their brown water to keep foodstuff fresh and edible. Managing community food resource pooling made her aware of food insecurity and thermal dependence in a state that heavily relies on imported goods and processed food. As her food studies turned to food work, she realized that “all that is frozen melts into water” (to paraphase Marx’s famous quote) and wondered whether Hawai’i had a future beyond the ice age: “what place does refrigeration have within Indigenous futures that move beyond settler capitalism, when coldness has played such an intimate role in these systems of oppression?” Draining water from coolers also drew her attention to melt as a condition of our current times marked by climate change and the images of fast-disappearing glaciers. She also discovered the materiality of freshness and frozenness, which pointed to a different kind of political economy as the one she had envisaged as a graduate student: an economy that is not based on commodity fetishism and labor exploitation, but on user value and short “farm-to-fork” circuits of exchange. Commodity trade, Marx argues, historically begins at the boundaries of separate economic communities based otherwise on a non-commercial form of production. As Marx explains, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Hi′ilei Hobart’s history of how artificial ice came to Hawai’i is heavily dependent on her sources. Scarce at the beginning, with a few advertisements and newspaper clippings (including publications in the local language, ‘ōlelo Hawai’i), they include a wider array of testimonies, photographs, business records, cookbooks, consumer goods, and personal memories as we move closer to the present. She first chronicles the great American ice trade, in which big blocks of ice harvested from lakes in the Northeast or in Alaska circulated the globe from 1840 to 1870, the year the first ice-making machines were introduced. The ice that went to the tropics was a luxury product, used in cocktails, to chill wines, and for service at fine hotels where American planters, Western missionaries, European tourists, and Hawaiian elites mingled. The ice importing business never really took off in Hawai’i: even though entrepreneurs petitioned the local rulers for monopoly rights and invested in storage facilities, the venture remained unprofitable and was interrupted in 1860 after two decades of sporadic shipments. King Kamehameha III had mixed feelings about alcoholic beverages and iced punches: ruling over a “semi-European” polity that was modernizing fast, he also leaned to the robust temperance movement championed by Western missionaries and patronage ladies. He eventually died in 1854 after drinking from a poisoned punch-bowl of iced champagne. Under the reign of the last Hawaiian monarch, King Kalākaua, Honolulu was a fast-growing city with all the trappings of a Western metropole. ‘Iolani Palace, the royal residence, had electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones even before Buckingham Palace or the White House. Among these technologies, ice machines and ice factories came into operation in the 1870s, transforming a once-foreign commodity into a local product.

Entering the Ice Age

Hawai’i entered the ice age at about the same period as the United States: when home refrigeration, cold chains for perishable goods, ice cream parlors, and soda fountains connected Honolulu’s domestic life to global standards of modernity. But unlike in the mainland, the use of freezing technologies were subject to colonialist frames of interpretation and local resistance. Settler reports of Kānaka aversion to ice stood as indictment of their slow pace to civility. Native people’s first contact with ice cream, taken as extremely hot instead of freezing cold, was derided as a sign of inferior civilizational status. Hawaiian-language newspapers, however, refuted implications that Kānaka Maoli were confused about or afraid of ice, and advertised the lavish cosmopolitan banquets including icy desserts served at the ‘Iolani Palace. But haole (foreigners), ali’i (elite Hawaiians), and maka’āinana (local commoners) reacted differently to frozen tastes, reflecting hierarchies of class, gender, and racialized proximity to whiteness. The racist and classist distinctions manifested themselves after US annexation during the pure food battles of the 1910s. The newly appointed food commissioner decided to apply US legislation strictly to ban poi, a local dish alternatively described as a truly delicious paste with yeasty flavor or “a native concoction that tastes like billboard paste,” and to increase the butterfat content of ice cream to mainland levels, contradicting local tastes and recipes developed by Japanese and Chinese ice cream vendors.

Shave ice and its “rainbow” of flavors is now offered as a metaphor for the “rainbow state” and its multiethnic, postracial population. As a symbol of Hawai’is racial landscape, the rainbow offers an important vehicle for the affective, and often tense, sentiments of identity and belonging. How did a food practice brought by Japanese migrants come to epitomize a US state, and how did a sugar plantation economy built along racial lines produce a racially harmonious society in the only US state with a nonwhite majority population? Shave ice offers an alternative narrative to forms of refreshment oriented toward white leasure, like the ice creams or tiki cocktails fetishized by the touristic gaze. Historians trace the origin of shave ice to Japanese agricultural workers and plantation store owners who brought the food tradition of kakigōri from Japan. Born in rural spaces where non-Hawaiians put down deep community roots, shave ice offers an alternative story about race and refreshment, one that is not tethered to whiteness and the leisure class. Asian immigrant populations in Hawai’i, once systematically marginalized, have become a “model majority” characterized by upward class mobility and adherence to nationalist values. They dominate the local economy, to the point scholars have forged the category “Asian settler colonialism” to describe the ascendancy of working-class communities of color. Hawai’i is now considered as a laboratory for multiethnic harmony as well as a harbinger of what the whole United States could become: a postracial nation, turning its back on its history of Native Indian extermination and Black enslavement. These fictions mask ongoing structural racism against Native Hawaiians and other ethnic minorities (Samoans, Filipino-Americans…) The shave ice success story glosses over such divisions and obscures Kānaka Maoli claims for Indigenous sovereignty. For present-day Hawaiians, it also brings back shared memories of childhood and nostalgia for “simpler times” characterized by community resilience, rural life, and low economic wealth. Again, this nationalist narrative envisioning an ahistorical and uncomplicated past erases a history of racial discrimination and labor exploitation, and produces “Hawaiians” as an always already multiethnic category that excludes indigeneity or Kānaka Maoli claims to place.

Hawaiian futures

I don’t see much potential in an independent, sovereign, or post-statehood Hawai’i that would grant Indigenous people rights of self-determination and privileges of territorial ownership. There are other ways to tackle the deep structural inequalities and discrimination that affect the Native population. As the French have experienced in French Polynesia, recognizing Indigenous rights is not synonymous with granting full independence or a right to secession. Politics of atonement and official apologies may be aligned with the Anglo-saxon protestant mindset, but they have their limits: short of reparations and restitution, they leave intact the structures of power that have led to Native dispossession and do not advance the living conditions of Indigenous populations. Economic needs must also be addressed, and the responsibility of all leaders, oriented toward independence or otherwise, is to chart a course that guarantees economic growth and sustainable development. I see tourism as a chance for Hawai’i, and militarization as a necessity borne out of historical and geopolitical concerns. Americans will always remember Pearl Harbor. Hawai’i is America’s first line of defense and its most strategic outpost in the Pacific. The security of the continent hinges on the continued presence of military forces which, along with tourism, form the twin pillars of the economy. Envisaging a decolonial future for Hawai’i seems to me more dystopian than real. And yet, with all these caveats in mind, I still find potential for decolonial approaches in modern scholarship about Hawai’i or other territories in the Pacific. Other Pacific islands have acceeded to independence and have demonstrated the viability, resilience, and vitality of Indigenous sovereign states. In the case of Hawai’i, but also the other US territories in the Pacific (Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa), solutions might exist toward or beyond US statehood without resorting to full independence. Besides, scholarship and politics are distinct endeavors. The challenge that decolonial studies must address is the decolonization of the mind. I see must potential in a decolonial perspective to the history of Hawai’i and other once occupied nations, and I learned much from reading Cooling the Tropics as much as I enjoyed reviewing it. One can quote Marx without being a Marxist; one can use decolonial scholarship without believing in a decolonial future for Hawai’i.

Disability Studies and Crip Theory

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, Duke University Press, 2023.

Crip GenealogiesCrip Genealogies is an anthology of texts that claim the pejorative word crip as a moniker to distance themselves from earlier contributions in the field of disability studies. Crip is a diminutive for “cripple” and is used as a slur to designate people with visible forms of disabilities, mostly physical and mobility impairments. It is also a word associated with violence and ghetto culture, as the Crips are one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in Los Angeles. Reclaiming crip as a definition of self-identity is a way to return the stigma against the verbal offenders and to express pride in being a member of the disability community. In the academic world, it is also a way to carve a niche for critical disability studies and to express solidarity with non-normative forms of living that may also include queerness and ethnic pride. Symptomatic of this convergence between academic currents and social movements is the proliferation of acronyms to designate minoritarian identities that may be based on sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTQ+), race and ethnicity (BIPOC, pronounced “bye-pock,” which stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color), mental health and physical disability (MMINDS, an acronym which stands for Mad, “mentally ill,” neurodivergent, disabled, survivor), or an intersection thereof (SDQTBIPOC, which stands for sick and disabled, queer and trans non-white persons). Most contributors to Crip Genealogies are part of this extensive community and define themselves as queer persons of color, diversely abled, and straddling the line between scholarship and activism. The publication is meant to provide foundational basis for crip theory as a discipline opposed to the apolitical and normative aspects of disability studies and that is “disrupting the established histories and imagined futures of the field.”

Crip ancestors

A genealogy is a history designed to shed light on a person’s origins or a family’s ancestral line. It involves forefathers, ancestors, elders, lineages, progenitors, siblings, cousins, relatives, and descendance. It also build upon myths of origin, narratives of displacement, acts of foundation, coming-of-age stories, acknowledgements of cultural transmission and biological inheritance. In cultural term, a genealogy may include schools of thought, intellectual traditions, disciplinary boundaries, seminal texts, and anthologies or primers. Part of the motivation of many contributors to this volume is to palliate the lack of ancestors and role models they can turn to when they try to ground their scholarly and activist practices. “Where are our queer elders?”, ponder two activists during a panel discussion in which they are asked to name their “crip ancestors.” The lack of obvious answers (beyond the figures of Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa) leads them to reflect on “the conditions that will allow disabled QTBIPOC elderhood to flourish,” some of which having to do with the avoidance of premature death, social exhaustion, cultivated marginality, and academic bickering. But the main responsibility for the invisibility of the crip queer-of-color subject falls on the cultivated whiteness of disability studies as an academic discipline and of disability rights as a social movement. According to Sami Schalk, “the early disability rights movement was often very white, middle-class, and single-issue focused.” Leslie Frye considers “how investments in whiteness that underwrite US disability rights have been obscured and where the traces of this movement’s racial legacy lie.” Investments in “making the cripple visible” led to the invisibilization of race, gender, sexuality, and all the other axes of individual or collective identity. The editor’s intention is therefore to underscore “not only the whiteness of the field but also the way in which it both stays white and perpetuates whiteness.” 

Histories of social movements often involve a succession of “waves” or the passing of the baton from one cause to the other. One refers to “third-wave feminism” or the “third wave of the civil rights movement” to describe the succession of challenges that feminism or the fight against racial discrimination had to face, in a linear progression that goes from oppression and alienation to self-determination and enlightenment. Likewise, the fight for disability rights seems like the logical next step once “we’ve done race/gender/sexuality.” The temporality of disability studies charts a progression from self-awareness and nascent identity to the mobilization for equal access and equal treatment, then the affirmation of pride and visibility, culminating in the disability justice movement and crip theory. It is believed that recognizing disability history will inspire persons with disabilities to feel a greater sense of pride, reduce harassment and bullying, and help keep students with disabilities in schools or universities. The authors reject such genealogies built around change, progress, and modernity. They refuse to engage in celebratory commemorations of disabled people’s advancement punctuated by legislative victories, from the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010. They are critical of the term “genealogy” itself, which creates “the illusion of descent as a line,” or of metaphors of genealogical trees, epistemological roots, native soil, and disciplinary fields, which inscribe “colonial temporalities and spatialities into our conceptions of scholarship.” ”Even the rhizome can be colonial,” they note in the introduction. Their ambition is to build “epistemologies of radicalized disability that do not comply with compulsory improvement, personal initiative, and change on the way to a good life.” The mixed genealogies they call forth need to “stay with the trouble” and nurture crip theory’s revolutionary potential: “crip disrupts convention and undermines social norms.” Not unlike what the deinstitutionalization movement did for people locked up in hospital wards and collective homes, crip genealogies deconstruct all aspects of institutions. 

A new wave of deinstitutionalization

Deinstitutionalization is a political and a social process which provides for the shift from institutional care and other isolating and segregating settings to independent living. The Independent Living philosophy is based on the assumption that people with disabilities should have the same civil rights, options, and control over choices in their own lives, as do people without disabilities. Crip Genealogies advocates a new wave of deinstitutionalization. The institutions under consideration are mostly academic: the authors grapple with the place of disability studies, and of crip theory as a nascent discipline, within the space of the North American university. The university’s dependency on diversity and inclusiveness is something both to be valued and criticized: according to Mel Y. Chen, “disability can confer a selective entitlement, or reveal an interior hierarchization.” Some forms of behaviors or modes of teaching and learning are valued over others: “in the university, agitated gesture—whether in the form of politically legible protest, aggressive physicality, or movement (including stillness or slowness) inopportune to class habitus—has no proper home, save perhaps in the possibilities of dance training or intramural sport.” For scholars coming from abroad, such as Eunjung Kim, “the institutional legitimacy in US academia came with a price, as it valued certain kinds of writing and thinking over others.” The unmarked human who embodies all scholarly virtues and properties continues to be “white, non disabled, masculine, ‘functionally’ social, and creditable.” “Academia, ableist to its core, rejects disability in its love for abilities.” The result, for scholars who don’t fit, is a feeling that they don’t really belong. This feeling is shared by the four editors: ”as the four of us worked together, we all confessed feelings of inadequacy to each other.” The “academic impostor syndrome” noted by Julie Avril Minich combines with a “disability impostor syndrome”: “I know I am not the only disability scholar to feel, constantly and simultaneously, both not academic enough and not crip enough.” But in the end, writes Alison Kafer, “we owe our loyalties to people, not to institutions.”

The authors are also critical of the disability rights movement as it has been institutionalized. Focusing its demands on self-determination, legal rights, and non-discrimination, the disability rights movement led to the advancement of disabled people who were considered as “good citizens” (white, heterosexual, and affluent) at the expense of others (non-white, queer, and poor). Nor did it question the fact that belonging to the working class or to an ethnic minority are factors that promote disabilities: precariousness, which affects a large part of these categories, is one of the main causes of disability because it comes with degraded, even dangerous living conditions and limited access to healthcare. People of color and queer people of color are often confronted with stigmatizing diagnoses of disability, such as “mental retardation” or “gender identity disorder,” whereas white people tend to receive less negatively connoted diagnoses, such as “attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD) or “gender dysphoria.” Historically, pejorative labels were often used by public authorities with a view to disqualifying immigrants, African-Americans, the poor, but also women whose “debility” was a major argument for sterilization (including white women whose behavior corrupted whiteness). This explains why minority rights movements have often perceived the need to distance themselves from disability in order to avoid being further stigmatized, involuntarily contributing to making queer people-of-color with disabilities invisible (this is by no means general: Sami Schalk claims the Black Panther Party has been an early supporter of disability rights.) It is this invisibilization that the disability justice movement tries to repair, by taking a close interest in intersectionality and also in mental disorders, which are also marginalized by the disability rights movement. For Tari Young-Jung Na, writing from the perspective of South Korea, the deinstitutionalization movement must expand into a movement for the liberation of nonnormative beings in society, including transgender people, sex workers, people living with HIV/AIDS, and other victims of “incarceration without walls.”

Decentering disability

The editors of Crip Genealogies made a laudable effort to include perspectives coming from outside the United States. The anthology contains chapters reflecting viewpoints or evidence from South Korea, Palestine, Vietnam, Kenya, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, and Australia. One of the contribution was written in Korean and translated into English, thereby contributing to a distancing from Anglosphere imperialism, although the editors acknowledge they included too few references in languages other than English in their bibliography. The article from South Korea indeed shows that modernity is not always synonymous with the West: in Korea, it came from neighboring Japan, both during the imperial occupation with the isolation of Hansen’s disease patients, and in more recent years with the import of the Independent Living movement through seminars and training. For Jasbir Puar, settler colonialism is very much alive in the West Bank, where a “number of Palestinians are maimed by Israel on a daily basis” and a policy of extreme spatial regulation keeps an entire population in a debilitating chokehold.  The analysis of a dance film, Rhizophora, featuring young patients affected by Agent Orange in a Vietnam Friendship Village, demonstrates “the possibility of queering and cripping chemical kinships that exist as alternatives to normative familial structures.” Faith Njahîra, who lives with muscular dystrophy, discovered late in childhood that she was disabled: growing up in Kenya, she experienced no markers of difference during primary school except remarks about her “walking style” and invocation of “chest problems” to limit participation in physical education. Kateřina Kolářová, who positions herself as a feminist, queer and crip scholar, reminds us that whiteness takes a different value in postsocialist Eastern Europe, where it is reproduced in conjunction with the pathologization of Roma people. Sony Coráñez Bolton uses the concept of “supercrip,” disabled individuals believed to have superior abilities to compensate their impairment, to analyze a novel written in Spanish by mestizo Filipino José Reyes. Mel Y. Chen describes a site-specific work of art by Indigenous Australian artist Fiona Foley installed in the Queensland State Library in Brisbane. Coming back to America, ethnic minority perspectives are offered on Asian Americans whose illness punctuates the myth of the”model minority”; an experimental zine project by a self-identified “queer crip Chicanx/Tejanx single mother” in South Texas; and the activism of the Black Panther Party as a precursor to today’s disability justice movement.

Assembling this edited volume in times of COVID-19 took place under the shadow of home confinement, city lock-downs, overcrowded hospitals, mandated teleworking, and Zoom conferences. For scholars critically engaged with disability studies, there are several lessons to draw from this pandemic. Because COVID-19 is associated with old age, fragility of the immune system, respiratory problems, or other health concerns, there is a worrying tendency to treat the lives of those most at risk as less valuable, as more or less expendable. Triage in hospitals became the most terrifying illustration of the hierarchy of human lives, between lives worthy of living and lives left to die. For Achille Mbembe, to kill or to let live, or “to make live and let die,” are the principal attributes of the sovereign state. As disability studies have shown, many disabled persons already experience a kind of social death. The coronavirus crisis has only provided an infallible justification for this death, making it more physical than social. At the same time, the pandemic situation and the imposed lockdowns made whole populations experience what is in fact only a banal fact of life or a permanent condition for millions of people living with disabilities. Being condemned to stay at home because public space is not accessible, facing shortages of beds and medical equipment in hospitals overloaded with patients, having to rely on social media to maintain a network of friends and relatives: all these situations sound familiar for a part of the population overlooked by public policies. As Jasbir Puar notes, “what has been widely fetishized as ‘pandemic time’ is actually what ‘crip time’ has always been—never on time, waiting out time, needing more time, unable to keep up with time, forced time at home, too long a waiting time.” The rapid development of remote working and videoconference, which has long been requested by people with disabilities to facilitate their participation in the economy and society, shows that a previously unsurmountable challenge becomes suddenly feasible once it is perceived as the only solution to continue to run the country’s economy and allow able-bodied people to carry out their activities. The authors remind us that “texting, now used by everyone, was created as assistive technology for Deaf people.” Likewise, videoconferencing can be considered as a crip technology.

Pertinence and impertinence

I realize my review may fall within “the reductive and extractive citational practices” that the authors criticize in their introduction. Why do I take an interest in crip theory, and why do I think this intellectual endeavor needs to be known beyond a small circle of social activists and academic pundits? Simply put, because of the pertinence of the question it raises, but also on behalf of the impertinence with which it addresses issues of pressing concern. The pertinence, or relevance, of crip theory seems obvious. The question of gender and sexuality, of race and identity, of minorities and rights, are at the center of contemporary debates. As Crip Genealogies makes it clear, the terms “queer” or “crip” are not limited to questions of gender or disability: from the moment we deviate from the norm, we are no longer really “straight” or “fit” even if we are otherwise heterosexual, able-bodied, or white. Disability justice activists, claiming the impossibility to achieve normality, suggest imagining new social configurations, new solidarity movements, a new public sphere which would not base participation in social life on abilities or capacities. The impertinence, or irreverence, of crip theory is just as remarkable. Crip Genealogies is relatively measured in this respect. To the more radically inclined, I recommend the reading of Testo Junkie by the transgender activist and philosopher Paul B. Preciado. Subtitled Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era in its English edition, it chronicles the author’s multifaceted and liminal experience taking testosterone and other pharmaceutical drugs as a political and performative act in order to undo all normative categories of gender, health, and ableness. Despite the obvious provocations, there can be something stimulating and positive about a crip theory approach. It allows us to desacralize, if need be, the discourse on disability and ableness, to remind us of its human character – not halfway but through and through. Disability studies share with ableism a number of implicit, unquestioned assumptions about what is “right” or what is “normal.” Crip theory makes fun of these conveniences, it jostles them cheerfully and not without humor. Again, this will not be to everyone’s taste. But that’s no reason not to listen to what crip theory has to tell us about human beings in their embodied and racialized selves, the way gender and ethnicity shape who we are, the forms of injustice that exist in relation to people who do not recognize themselves in the heteronormativity and whiteness inherent in our culture. Crip theory is here to stay, and should be engaged with a positive and open mind.

Coding and Decoding

Etienne RP1 Comment

A review of Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Duke University Press, 2023.

CodeIs there a pathway that goes “from information theory to French Theory”? Straying away from the familiar itineraries of intellectual history, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan invites us to take a path less trodden: a detour that allows the reader to revisit famous milestones in the development of cybernetics and digital media, and to connect them to scholarly debates stemming from fields of study as distant as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology. Detours and shortcuts are deviations from linear progression, reminding the traveler that there is no one best way to reach a point of destination. Similarly, there are several ways to read this book. One is to start from the beginning, and proceed until the end, from the birth of communication science during the Progressive Era in the United States to the heydays of French seminars in sciences humaines in the Quartier latin before mai 68. Another way is to start from the conclusion, “Coding Today”, and to read the whole book in reverse order as a genealogy of the cultural analytics used today by big data specialists and modern codifiers of culture. A third approach would be to start from the fifth and last chapter on “Cybernetics and French Theory” and to see how casting cultural objects in terms of codes, structures, and signifiers relates to previous methodologies of treating communication as information, signals, and patterns. The common point of these three approaches to reading Code is to emphasize the crossing of boundaries: disciplinary boundaries between technical sciences and the humanities; political demarcations between social engineering and cultural critique; and transatlantic borders between North America and France. The gallery of scientists and intellectuals that the book summons is reflective of this broad sweep: Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray are seldom assembled in a single essay; yet this is the challenge that Code raises, inviting us to hold together disciplines and methodologies that are usually kept separate.

The empire of code 

Let’s start from the present and move it from there. “Coding” now mostly means writing lines of code or computer software using a programming language such as JavaScript, Python, or C++. Codes can also designate social norms or cultural imperatives governing acceptable behavior in a certain context or within a subgroup. To “know the codes” means to be able to navigate a certain social world without committing blunders or impropriety. Of course, social scientists have taught us that social rules are best obeyed when one is not conscious of their imperium. Social norms must become embodied knowledge to be played spontaneously, and the best performance has the charm and immediacy of the natural, the innate, the unrehearsed. Culture cannot be recitated as a learned lesson or a set of rules. When social life is reduced to a system of codes, decontextualized from its rich background and reformatted for transnational circulation, then it becomes a simulacrum. This is why we should worry about the extension of the domain of the norm that is fueled by the twin forces of globalization and digital technologies. We are witnessing the weakening of the notion of culture, once thought of as a set of evidences shared and anchored in a territory, and today reduced to a corpus of explicit norms and cultural markers, which circulate on a global scale. The crisis in culture that Hannah Arendt diagnosed in 1961 has now given way to culture’s opposite: the reign of the explicit, the quantified, the normative. The disappearance of high culture as a shared implicit within territorial and social boundaries gives way to the sequencing of small bits of cultural content that are recombined to form a marketized commodity, as in UNESCO’s heritage list of intangible assets. These packets of texts and images circulate through networks that separate them from their point of origin and delivers them to the right place. If the network changes, due to congestion or broken links, routers can use an alternative interface to reach destination. 

There is a growing disconnect between the territory in which we live and the cultural references that we manipulate. National or religious identity is redefined as a set of cultural markers and signs of belonging that are decomposed and recomposed into new individual selves that are both unique and interchangeable. Coding implies normativity. We need new norms and regulation because things that seemed obvious, at least within a given cultural space, are no longer so. If everything is open to discussion and contestation, then we must make the rules explicit and as detailed as possible. This codification of social practice considerably reduces inner spaces of freedom and nonnormativity: the intimate, the private, the unconscious. Normativeness is the consequence of coding, the passage to the explicit, the quantification of affects. A grammar, for example, is a code and when we make a mistake, we are corrected. Contrary to language, code is acquired by apprenticeship or formal training: one must know the rules to practice coding, whereas it is not necessary to know grammar to practice a language. Coding follows a model of communication that makes each term explicit, where the receiver understands exactly what the emitter wants to say. This applies to social interactions, where what was previously left unsaid now needs to be specified, and even to the use of language, with the spread of global English and the standardization of public expression. In a multicultural context, it is recommended to speak as clearly as possible without using allusions, cultural references, and humor. The spread of artificial intelligence and chatbots will only reinforce this trend: in order to make ourselves understood by machines, or to allow machines to communicate between themselves, we must separate language from culture and minimize the noise generated through the process of encoding and decoding. 

The age of the seminar

This becoming-code of all cultural contents and social interactions has a long history. A surprising milestone in the advent of code is to be found in the works of philosophers, literary critics, and semioticians that are sometimes bundled together in the United States under the label of “French Theory.” Coding and decoding were definitely code words in French intellectual discussions during the 1960s and 1970s. “Assez décodé !” (Stop decoding/stop fooling around) was the title of a popular essay in 1978 that took aim at Roland Barthes’ new literary criticism and the abuse of technical jargon. Geoghegan identifies the 1960s as the period when “culture as communication” gave way to a preoccupation with “culture as code.” Cybernetics and information theory acted as both model and test bed for this transformation. They were part of a broader trend of social transformation based on the import of American technologies and institutions to fit postwar France’s condition. Techniques of management and human engineering were adopted en masse by an increasingly technocratic France. Funding from American foundations, tracing back to fortunes accumulated by robber barons and with links to the Cold War intelligence apparatus, supported the creation of research institutions that set new modes of organizing critical inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. A new research center and central forum for teaching social sciences was created within the Ecole pratique des hautes études as the “sixième section,” better known as the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales or EHESS. It modeled aspects of its study program on the social sciences in the United States, distancing itself from previous modes of scholarly organization in French universities. Its scope was resolutely transdisciplinary and experimental.  It pioneered the use of statistical methods and mathematical models in the humanities. Indeed, there is a book to be written on the fascination, some would say the math envy, exerted by mathematics and formal science on French social scientists as diverse as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Lacan. One locus for such collaboration was Lévi-Strauss’s research seminar on the utilization of mathematics in the social sciences,  which let to long-lasting interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and social critics.

The research seminar thus became a key site for the clinical analysis of the human condition, remote from the elegant discussions in cafés and salons that previously exemplified intellectual authority in France. The seminar was the domain of the expert, the specialist, the fieldworker. It displayed science in the making, and opened its ranks to any social scientist who had new research results to share, regardless of academic position or social authority. Later on, Michel Foucault would label this new kind of postwar thinker a “specific intellectual” whose political responsibility was akin to that of the “nuclear scientist, computer expert, and pharmacologist.” Structuralism imposed itself as the dominant paradigm, with its emphasis on codes, systems, communication, economy, and even informatics patterning of signs. The promise of scientific precision and far-reaching advances attracted younger scholars eager to chart bold yet rigorous programs in emerging research areas. Human sciences as envisioned by Claude Lévi-Strauss had one great aim: “the consolidation of social anthropology, economics, and linguistics into one great field, that of communication.” In particular, “social anthropology,” he wrote, “can hope to benefit from the immense prospects opened up to linguistics itself, through the application of mathematical reasoning to the study of phenomena of communication.” Lévi-Strauss was an enthusiastic reader of Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949). One of his early papers on the relevance of cybernetics on linguistics argued that engineering models of communication could be transposed onto all other fields of human activity, including linguistics, economic transactions, and the circulation of women within primitive systems of kinship. Through the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss sought to establish a physical infrastructure equal to the tasks of his emerging structural anthropology. His ascension to a chair at the Collège de France in 1960, and his concomitant establishment of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology, presented him with the long-sought opportunity to establish a research laboratory. One of his first initiatives was to acquire a copy of the Human Relations Area Files, a searchable database of two million index cards compiling ethnographic findings. Vast regimes of human data were disassembled into informational units for cross-cultural analysis. They were part of a global apparatus of knowledge that, paradoxically, unmoored cultures from local and embodied reality. Headquartered in Paris, UNESCO offered an early vehicle for bringing these new political techniques to the world.

Back to the future

Code insists on the transatlantic origins of the dominant paradigm in the sciences humaines, both institutionally and in terms of substance. The history of structuralism and poststructuralism has often been told, with an emphasis on the John Hopkins conference of 1966 that spearheaded the reception of French contemporary thought in North America. Here Geoghegan goes further back in time to highlight the way European nascent human sciences were incorporated into emerging logics of US communication science during World War II. As war swept Europe, the Rockefeller Foundation mobilized to bring threatened European intellectuals under the umbrella of US wartime science. An early recruit was Russian-born linguist Roman Jakobson, who founded the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as a successor to the celebrated Prague Linguistic Circle, mixing structural linguistics initiated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure with diverse insights from fields including Russian formalism, avant-garde art such as futurism and cubism, and relativity theory developed in atomic physics. For Saussure, language was like a game of chess: one did not simply speak but selected from among a field of possibilities prefigured by formal constraints and anticipated threats. With Jakobson, language became probabilistic and combinatoric, ordered on principles that followed the direction of cybernetics and communication science. Much as Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon used probabilistic sequences to predict series of words, phrases, and sentences, Jakobson described phonemes as probabilistically encoded and decoded series. Another Rockefeller foundation initiative was the establishment of the Ecole libre des hautes études in New York, which recruited Claude Lévi-Strauss but declined to support Jacques Lacan. Under Jakobson’s influence, Lévi-Strauss ceased to study the empirical facts of indigenous kinship and focused instead on the relations among terms that constituted a kinship system proper. With the aid of a French mathematician, he even found algebraic expressions for his kinship studies. The linguistics seminar Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss held at the Ecole libre made a field trip to AT&T headquarters to witness the performance of the Voder, a synthetic speaking device, in 1944. According to Geoghegan, the Ecole Libre was a methodological crucible, nudging French scholars away from a concern for social equality and redirecting them in technocratic directions. As he remarks, “this was indeed a strategy of political transformation of the sort that would become a pillar of American ‘nation building’ in decades to come.”

The last thesis proposed by Geoghegan—or the first if you follow the book order, from chapter one to chapter five—, is that cybernetics wasn’t an invention of World War II and the Cold War, as science historians sometimes assume. Code shows that “links among the Rockefeller, Macy, and Carnegie philanthropies forged in the 1930s and 1940s, well before the United States’ entry into World War II, guided subsequent initiatives in cybernetics, information theory, and game theory.” The roots of the project lie in Progressive Era technocracy and its agenda to transform social strife into communication engineering problems available for technical problem-solving. Welfare policies, not warfare, were the test bed for the rise of the communication sciences, and its first deployments were to be found in the colony, the clinic, the asylum, and the urban ghetto. As Geoghegan observes, “dreams of cybernetic post-humanism depended on disappearing the bodies of native persons and other subjects regarded as less than human.” Anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead thought that all existing human cultures were distributed along a great “arc” which covered the whole range of possible cultural traits. Each culture then selects along this arc a “pattern” of human possibilities that fits its environment and forms a coherent whole. After his pathbreaking master degree thesis that laid the groundwork of information theory, Claude Shannon’s PhD dissertation, completed in 1940, applied Boolean algebra to the orderly processing of eugenic data. The celebrated Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, initially convened in 1942, brought together mathematicians, anthropologists, engineers, and scientists from other disciplines, and popularized notions such as reflexivity, feedback loops, and error correction mechanisms. Scientific networks cultivated in the 1930s and consolidated in wartime military projects laid the foundation for interdisciplinary communication projects well into the 1950s.

Return to sender

There is a tendency to downplay the links between the natural sciences and the dominant paradigms in the humanities. This book show that the history of the human sciences in the twentieth century cannot be separated from the rise of the communication sciences. Fields such as anthropology, psychology, and semiotics served as experimental laboratories for the engineering of a society of digital media and codified culture. Far from trailing behind engineers and natural scientists, human scientists spearheaded the reconceptualization of cultural forms as forms of code that could be decomposed and recombined using mathematical tools. Efforts to transform the humanities and social sciences into a single field, the human sciences, oriented toward communication, cannot be separated from the rise of scientific philanthropy. The Rockefeller Foundation and a host of like-minded philanthropies funded by robber barons (e.g., the Ford Foundation; the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation; the Wenner-Gren Foundation) lavished generous funding on interdisciplinary research linked to research programs inspired by cybernetics and information theory. Their midcentury interest in these fields reflected progressive hopes to submit divisive political issues for neutral technical analysis. The long-standing aim of American philanthropies to reorient the humanities toward exact, quantifying, empirical, and rule-governed theoretical analysis found fertile ground in postwar France. Even if we should use the expression “French Theory” with caution, there was a theoretical impetus toward formalization, even a “math envy,” that shaped the dominant paradigms of structuralism and poststructuralism. A cybernetic turn of mind influenced French structuralists’ talk of codes, systems, and communication. While Barthes’s contrarian attitude or Lacan’s extravagant vocabulary carried a critique of technocratic rule, their seminars fit within the period’s emphasis on experts, codification, and structures. Their effort to remake French thought also ended up remaking American thought along the way. If we summarize the standard model of communication as a message sent by an addresser to an addressee through a channel involving operations of coding and decoding, the development of French Theory on American campuses was a case of return to sender.

I Can’t Breathe

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A review of Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Duke University Press, 2022. 

Breathing Aesthetics“I can’t breathe!” These were the last words uttered by Eric Garner, a Black resident of Staten Island who, on July 17, 2014, was put in a deadly chokehold by an NYPD officer for allegedly selling “loosies” or single cigarettes on the street. Garner suffered from asthma, a condition that, according to epidemiological data, disproportionately affects African Americans. Garner’s last words were also those of Elijah McClain and George Floyd, two other Black men killed by police just a few years later. “I can’t breathe” has become a rallying cry for our times and is used as an expression of the asphyxiating atmosphere in which activists declare that Black Lives Matter. The unability to breathe can be understood as both a metaphor and material reality of racism, which constrains not just life choices and opportunities, but the environmental conditions of life itself. It draws our attention to breathing as a political act: the capacity to breathe, or its preclusion, defines a new form of biopolitics in which some lives are deemed worthy of inhaling fresh air and some aren’t. Reclaiming ownership of the means of respiration, literally and figuratively, may delineate a new kind of respiratory politics that recognizes breathing as an unalienable right. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, an art critic and professor of environmental humanities, breathing is, more than ever, in the air. Of course, breathing is in the air. But it specifically is, now, in the Zeitgeist. It is a sign of the times that breathing’s intensity and its variations—submitting breathing subjects to chokehold or waterboarding, refraining from inhaling certain substances, filtering inhaled air through face masks, measuring one’s carbon dioxide emissions—now feature in our political imaginary as an expression of agency and control. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, the crisis in breathing predates the climate urgency, the Covid-19 epidemic, or the BLM movement. He sees its emergence and intensification around the 1970s, and tracks its expression in marginal, underground, or minoritarian art productions that may have escaped the radar screen of art historians but that, more than mainstream creations or popular art, may help us to capture what is at stake in the current inability to breathe.

The crisis in breathing

According to Tremblay, “the intensified pollution, weaponization, and monetization of air and breath since the 1970s amount to a crisis in the reproduction of life.” Breathing orients life toward death. It accompanies us from the cradle to the grave or, to be precise, from our first intake of outside air at a maternity hospital to our last breath on our death bed. Breathing takes place in increasingly toxic environments. To breathe is to be vulnerable to airborne particles or poisonous gas, or to bad odors and fool air. Air carries the means of life and death, and each respiration reproduces the movement of life—inhaling and exhaling, in and out, in and out. Being out of breath, deferring to exhale, breathing in sync, being left panting or gaping for air: these variations constitute a popular nomenclature for expressing experiences of hostile environments and efforts to make life within them more livable. Being aware of one’s breath doesn’t protect us from airborne threats or breathing impediments: if anything, it makes the process of breathing harder by adding a layer of consciousness to what usually goes on without thinking. Coming back to the cultural history that forms the backbone of Breathing Aesthetics, the 1970s were characterized by the triple attempt to purify, weaponize, and marketize air. Pollution and air quality became increasingly debated in these years, which saw mounting scientific evidence of greenhouse gas accumulation and global temperature rise. Weaponization of air and breathing took the form of police forces using tear gas and other toxicants against demonstrators with increasing frequency. Although international protocols and agreements, from the Geneva Protocol of 1925 to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, have prohibited the use of toxic gas and airborne germs as a method of warfare, chemical weapons were used in all major conflicts, including the Vietnam War where the spraying of Agent Orange led to long-lasting health incapacitation. As for marketization, the 1970s saw the emergence of a “breathfulness industry” ascribing therapeutic value to conscious respiration. Reiki breathing, opening one’s chakra, and aligning with one’s inner self became all the rage, and the business of breathing extended to all ages and social categories.

Not everybody is equal in front of breathing: “we are all breathers, but none of the same kind.” It is the author’s guiding principle throughout Breathing Aesthetics that “respiration’s imbrication of vitality and morbidity is differently felt by differently situated people.” Control over the means of respiration is unevenly distributed. When breathing is in order, an invisible line is dividing the haves and the have nots, the fully capable and the respiratorily impaired. This is not an intuitive argument: nothing is more free than air, and everybody in good health can afford to breathe regardless of condition of wealth or social status. The distributive effects of breathing impediments are indeed a matter of debate. For some scholars, global warming or airborne pollution are the great equalizers as they affect the whole of humanity without consideration for political or class borders. The burning of coal in Beijing, China, affects cities as far as Tokyo, Seoul, or Hanoi, and the carbon dioxide emissions liberated by Chinese powerplants have consequences for the entire planet. But for Tremblay, “toxicity does discriminate, and it does know boundaries.” In the United States, respiratory hazards and their pathologies, from asthma to lung cancer, are disproportionately concentrated in areas populated by low-income minorities, which amounts to structural and environmental racism. The respiratory enmeshment of vitality and morbidity is particularly acute in situation where the taken-for-granted nature of breathing is compromised by health or environmental conditions. As the lack of mechanical ventilators in American hospitals demonstrated, the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is a crisis of breathing. Many of the symptoms associated with Covid-19 are respiratory, from cough to shortness of breath to loss of smell; complications such as pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome also imperil breathing. We live in an age in which respiration can be put at risk, and where the material conditions of breathing require sustained investment.

Race and respiration

In Tremblay’s analysis, breathlessness imposes itself as a locus of colonial violence, racial discrimination, patriarchal oppression, and ecological degradation. The United States owes its existence to the single largest and most significant land grab in human history. In addition to deliberate killings and wars, Native Americans died in massive numbers from infections endemic among Europeans. Much of this was associated with respiratory tract infections, including smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and influenza. This history of dispossession and debilitation continued well into the twentieth century: the nuclear tests that took place on US soil near Indian reservations or in evacuated atolls of the Pacific have contributed to abnormally high thyroid and lung cancer rates among Indigenous populations. Settler colonialism was also associated with the slave trade and persistent racial exploitation of African Americans. The history of Black asphyxiation began with the drowning of enslaved people thrown overboard by slave ship owners during the Middle Passage to the Americas. Even today, policies aimed at controlling public spaces and preventing urban riots are depriving African Americans of their breathing space and capacity to voice their concerns. The burden of asthma in the United States falls disproportionately on Black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native people. But being Black or Latinx or Indigenous doesn’t cause asthma: the neighborhood does. Sociologists have shown that noxious and hazardous facilities are concentrated in minority and low-income communities. For some writers-activists, a war is being waged on the urban poor and the colored in America, and this war uses asphyxia and incapacitation to produce disabled bodies and lives cut short. Health disparities and environmental inequality call for environmental justice and redistribution of the means of respiration. Breathing and breathlessness also have a gendered dimension. There is growing evidence that a number of pulmonary diseases affect women differently and with a greater degree of severity than men. Childbirth labor involves respiratory techniques such as belly breathing and pushing for birth delivery. Part of the feminist movement’s ambition in the 1970s and 1980s was to “remove the man-made obstacles to breathing” and to claim the affinity between the feminine and the natural world while identifying breath as a conduit for intimacy between the two.

In Breathing Aesthetics, Tremblay addresses this politics of breathing tangentially. He defines a breathing aesthetics as a distinct mode of artistic creation and expression that takes breathing as its medium. Breathing is part of the aesthetic experience: according to Tremblay, breathing is “a mode of spectatorship in the same class as watching or listening.” Some works of art demand a certain type of breathing. They impose upon their public a certain kind of inspiring and expiring, controlling respiratory movements to produce a shared affect or breath. Common expressions reflect this affinity between respiration and the art experience A spectacle can be breathtaking, we may hold our breath at the end of a chapter, a story may leave us gaping for air, or we may fill our lungs in full appreciation of a beautiful scene. Critics have already commented upon literature’s engagement with breath: according to François-Bernard Michel, a French writer and pneumologist, Marcel Proust exhibited a literary sensibility to the weather because he suffered from asthma, and Raymond Queneau gave life to asthmatic characters because he was allergic to grass pollen. Cinema is the art form that shows the strongest connexion with the respiratory function. A movie can embark the public on a rollercoaster of laughing, crying, panting, and other respiratory emotions. Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle was about breathlessness and freedom to breathe as much as it is about challenging Hollywood to create a New Wave of cinema. Music also has a strong affinity with breath: wind instruments and brass are operated by blowing air through the mouthpiece and opening or closing holes to change the pitch. To conceive of music solely as a listening experience is to miss the point: hearing is passive, static, and detached from emotions; it hardly involves the body. Breathing, by contrast, brings the listener closer to the rhythm and harmonies played on stage. In the visual arts, some contemporary artists have taken air, smoke, and clouds as their primary material. Air sculptures are as unusual as they are ethereal, standing at the edge of materiality and drawing the public’s attention to lived and natural environments.

Minoritarian artworks and minority artists

It is Tremblay’s hypothesis that “since the 1970s, writers, filmmakers, and artists have experimented with breathing with extraordinary frequency.” Breathing Aesthetics presents itself as a series of attentive readings shedding light on the challenges of writing in the times of environmental crisis and social upheaval. The author devotes most of his attention to “minoritarian works created by marginalized figures who tend to contest the genre and media conventions traditionally valorized by artistic and academic institutions.” He uses the term “minoritarian” to refer “not to fixed positions but to an impulse, be it artistic or analytic, to contest the forces that make the world more breathable for some people than for others.” The artists and artworks curated in the book haven’t been chosen at random. Their engagement with breathing and breathlessness was a necessary condition, but another condition was their position as “minoritarian”, meaning here a circulation outside the commercial art circuit for the artworks and a belonging to ethnic or sexual minorities for the artists. The 1970s were a time when women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities hadn’t acquired or been granted the visibility they have in today’s art world. To be an artist and a woman, let alone a non-white woman, was seen as problematic. It is said that the last heated exchange between Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and her husband Carl Andre, prior to her defenestration (presented as an accident or a suicide), was about the lack of artistic recognition she was receiving as opposed to her husband’s success. Of the BDSM couple Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, art history mostly remembers the male performance artist who “nailed his penis to a plank” and whose disability condition (he was suffering from cystic fibrosis) indeed connected his art to breathing and breathlessness. Of Sheree Rose we know little, and her memoirs remain unpublished. Most of the authors surveyed in the book are women, although they tend to steer away from mainstream feminism and its insistence of a feminine “breath of life.” The minoritarian voices connected to Indigenous knowledge, Black feminism, or ecological awareness rely on respiratory rituals as tactics or strategies for living through the foreclosure of political presents and futures. Breathing together, or developing respiratory asynchrony, have inspired contingent models of social and political life that are contesting “the forces that make the world more breathable for some people than for others.”

Throughout the book, the author posits that ”respiration renders vitality and morbidity inseparable.” Individuals tend to notice breathing and air when those no longer fulfill their life-giving and life-sustaining functions: “becoming conscious of our breathing confronts us with our finitude.” Some people believe that there is a finite number of breaths that one is allowed to take during one’s life: each breath brings us closer to death, and to exhale is to die a little. The French call “la petite mort” the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or indeed with the encounter of great works of literature as described by Roland Barthes. A little death is also when something dies in you: lung cells die with every breath we take and cannot be regenerated. The entanglement between respiration and morbidity is magnified in the last breath that is supposed to separate life from death. Of course, things are not so simple: biological death has several definitions, from the cessation of brain activity to the irreversible stopping of heart and lung functions, and a person can be maintained under artificial respiration while being brain dead. Some TV series indeed play with this ambiguous passage by staging “last breath” moments that prove not to be final, causing bereaved families and the public to burst into involuntary laughter. According to Tremblay, “the fantasy that in the last breath the dying individual encounters finitude on their own terms fulfills a social function”: it introduces an unambiguous demarcation between life and death, helping survivors to part with the deceased and to go on with their lives. The last chapter of Breathing Aesthetics documents this rite of passage by analyzing two documentaries that take palliative care and the management of death in public hospitals at their main topic. Capturing the last breath poses many technical and philosophical issues: the last breath can only be named as such retroactively, and the persons involved have to give their informed consent to this breach of intimacy. Released before the advent of the Internet and social media, the two reality movies, Near Death (1989) and Dying at Grace (2003), anticipate a time when the last moments of beloved ones are recorded live on camera and the scene of death, with its last breath and stopping electrocardiogram beeping, become public events.

The politics of breathing

I have initially titled my book review “I can’t breathe,” the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement. But here I stand and hesitate: should I keep this title? I used it as an easy moniker only to catch readers’ attention and to echo the book’s concern with the devaluation of Black lives in the United States today. But of course, I can breathe, and I don’t feel privileged about that one bit. This separates me from the author, who tends to consider his own whiteness as a privilege. Throughout Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay is only interested in inequality insofar as it intersects with race, gender, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability. The analytical tools that he mobilizes are “feminist, queer, and trans, for those are the categories, along with race and ethnicity, that expose the constitution and construction of bodies.” Note that critical theory, along Marxist or continental philosophy lines, is not mentioned in the author’s toolbox. Disparities of wealth and class distinctions are not addressed. The reason we (they) can’t breathe is to be found in identity politics, not class warfare or social inequalities. It is not a matter of rich people stealing fresh air from poor people’s lungs, but of some categories being denied their fair share of breathing. Slogans should therefore be used carefully in order to avoid illegitimate racial appropriations. Tremblay warns against “the denial of structural and environmental racism” by the anti-mask campaigners who appropriated the “I can’t breathe” slogan to protest against mask-wearing and other Covid-related restrictions. He himself confesses that he took part in the demonstrations denouncing police violence in Chicago, but that he kept silent when BLM militants were chanting “I can’t breathe” and “we can’t breathe.” He recognizes he felt breathless at the time but that “his breathlessness couldn’t be equated with the breathlessness of protesters asphyxiated by environmental racism, police violence, or microaggressions.” As a French national with no connexion whatsoever to the United States, I have even less skin in the game. But I would be more ready than Jean-Thomas Tremblay to use the denunciation of breathlessness as a rallying cry because I believe our breathing condition should bring us together and not take us apart along identitarian lines. If a politics of air redistribution is to be put in place, it should be based on a universal right to breathe and grant equal access to breathable air, regardless of skin color or other marks of identity definition. Of all the works of art surveyed in Breathing Aesthetics, the one I feel the closest with is the music video “Breathing” from British pop singer Kate Bush, although this is the one that the author deems most compromised by its whiteness and lack of minoritarian impulse. 

The Echoes of Nuclear Explosions in the Pacific

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A review of Radiation Sounds. Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences, Jessica A. Schwartz, Duke University Press, 2021.

Radiation SoundsSound studies can take you to faraway places. Ethnomusicology, the study of music in its social and cultural contexts, has taught us to lend an ear to songs and musical genres performed by people distant from Western cultures and mainstream musical practices. In Radiation Sounds, Jessica Schwartz takes her readers to the Marshall Islands, an independent microstate in the Pacific, to listen to the distant echoes and silences brought forth by the nuclear testings that took place at the onset of the Cold War. From 1946 through 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests on islands and atolls now composing the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI). Symbolized by the strong visual of the mushroom cloud, these nuclear detonations included the 15-megaton Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on March 1, 1954, which led to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to the east of Bikini Atoll. The United States organized forcible relocations from the atolls made uninhabitable by the nuclear fallout, kept a moratorium on all information pertaining to the nuclear arms race, and submitted exposed populations without their consent to medical examination on the effects of radiations in a program code-named Project 4.1. Marshallese music and voices still carry the echoes of these nuclear explosions as they radiate through local politics, radio broadcasts, musical performances, folk songs, contaminated soils, and ailing bodies. Radiation Sounds gives equal importance to sounds and to silence, to music and to noise, to songs and to oral testimonies. It considers not only soundwaves, but also radio waves, oceanic waves, and nuclear radiations made sensible through the audible clicks of Geiger counters and the crackled voices of remembrance songs. It addresses the full spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths while staying attuned to their sociopolitical dimension. A nuclear blast is not only a visual flash: its delayed sound effect and ionizing radiations produce more lasting consequences, including for the voices that it smothers and the silence that is forced onto all parties.

Resonances of the atomic age

Jessica Schwartz’s scholarship focuses on how different communities throughout the Marshall Islands were diversely affected by the nuclear tests. She doesn’t give full detail on the conditions and methodology of her ethnography. As a doctoral student in musicology at New York University, she conducted fieldwork in the Marshall Islands for close to two years. She stayed in Majuro, the capital city with a population of 28,000, and also visited other atolls such as Kwajalein or Kili Island where population evacuated from Bikini and neighboring islands have resettled. She mentions at some point that she was teaching at a local school, and she refers on several occasions to her contacts with local politicians, women’s groups, the local radio station, musicians, singers, and antinuclear activists. She learned the local language, and gives transcripts of some of the songs she collected in Marshallese and in English. She quotes several anthropologists who have studied the Marshall islands and Oceanian cultures, some of whom have played a role in shaping local politics and cultural policies. Hers is not a classical ethnography with neatly composed chapters documenting all aspects of a local society. She writes in an impressionistic style that is sometimes difficult to follow. She introduces concepts such as radioactive citizenship, nuclear silences, and the Marshallese notion of the “throat,” but she makes no effort at rigorous theorizing, and uses theory literature in a sparse way. Unlike classical anthropologists, she is not interested in traditional music per se, or in local traditions in general. In her account, baseball and country music are as much part of the local culture as braiding wreaths for funerals or playing the aje drum. The Marshallese popular music repertoire includes modern rock or folk songs which sometimes refer to political issues (so-called remembrance songs, protest songs, and petition songs), as well as more traditional genres such as roro, songs based on ancient legends and originally performed to give guidance during navigation or strength for mothers in labor. But there is no strict division between past genres and present repertoire, as modern bands are blending the unique songs of each island with modern influences, such as rock, country, or hip-hop. There is even a Marshallese nursery rhyme called Kōṃṃan baaṃ (“Making Bombs”) that dates back from the nuclear testing period and that is apparently set to the tune of a Filipino planting rice song. Another song, Ioon, ioon miadi kan (“Upon, Upon Those Watchtowers”) was composed in 1944 and refers to the Japanese military occupation.

When Jessica Schwartz arrived on the Marshall Islands to do fieldwork in 2008, the debates and protests that had accompanied the 2004 renewal of the Compact of Free Association (COFA) between the US and the RMI were still a vivid memory. Through the COFA initially signed in 1986, the United States has maintained military presence in the Marshall Islands while recognizing the sovereignty of an archipelago they had administered as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) since 1947. Local politics at the time of independence was dominated by local chieftains or iroij. Article III of the 1979 Constitution recognizes the title and creates a Council of Iroij chosen from holders of the chieftainship among the several constituent islands. It was not until 1999, following political corruption allegations, that the iroij-dominated government was overthrown, with Kessai Note, a commoner of Japanese-Marshallese descent, elected by the Nitijeļā (Parliament) as president. He was defeated in his bid for re-election in 2007. Jessica Schwartz points out the role of the radio as the “voice of the nation” expressing “radioactive citizenship”: “radiation and the radio have been crucial components of sense making in the period of nation building”. Installed by the US after a report by Harvard economist Anthony Solomon had recommended nation-building efforts in 1963, radio was at the center of the independence movement or “break away,” followed by COFA negotiations and the debate over monetary compensation from US nuclear militarism. In Majuro, two radio stations, divided along political lines, competed for the Marshallese audience. American Forces Radio and Television also provides broadcasting services to Kwajalein Atoll, the site of the US military base. The COFA enables Marshallese citizens to live, work, and travel freely between the RMI and the United States in exchange for the US military’s lease of large parts of Kwajalein Atoll, including Kwajalein Island. Approximately 4,300 Marshall Islands natives have relocated to Springdale, Arkansas in the United States; this figure represents the largest population concentration of Marshall Islands natives outside their island home. The threads that connect these diaspora communities are mostly oral and give more importance to songs and speeches than to the written text. Like the vocal cords in the throat that vibrate to create the sound of the voice or the umbilical cord that connects the baby to the mother’s placenta, islands are said to be connected by invisible threads that weave a network of togetherness across the atollscape.

Vocal cords and umbilical cords

The Rongelapese were the population most severely affected by the US nuclear testing program, as they were exposed to the radiations from the fallout of the Bravo explosion and had to be moved to another atoll. In 1957, three years later their first relocation, the United States government declared the area “clean and safe” and allowed the islanders to return. Evidence of continued contamination mounted, however, as many residents developed thyroid tumors and, for pregnant women, birth miscarriages. In 1985, they were evacuated to Ebeye island in Kwajalein Atoll in an operation conducted by the international NGO Greenpeace. Together with other displaced persons from Enewetak, Utrik, and Bikini, the Rongelapese formed the ERUB organization and petitioned the US government for nuclear test compensations under section 177 of the COFA agreement. A first resettlement agreement was signed in 1986, but in 2000 the Marshall Islands government submitted a Change of Circumstances Petition asking for significantly more compensation than the $US 150 million initially awarded. As a result of the radiation poisoning, many Rongelapese people developed thyroid gland disorders or cancer and required thyroid surgery–a source of particular trauma because, for the Rongelapese, the throat (“bōrō”) is the seat of the soul, comparable to the Western concept of the heart. Jessica Schwartz sees Rongelapese women as victims of US “male vococentrism”: not only were they displaced, subjected to medical testings without their informed consent, and had to undergo thyroid surgery, but they were also marginalized and stigmatized as a result of their injuries and reproductive problems. Literally and figuratively, they didn’t have a voice in the decisions and processes that affected them. As the author notes, “the Geiger counter had a political voice that is more highly valued than the women with respect to their appeal for evacuation.” The exodus of the Rongelapese community is memorialized through songs that are performed at funerals and other ceremonies: “We sing on the anniversary of Bravo, at parties, at church, and especially when visitors come.” Some of the songs are intended as musical petitions addressed to the US government. In the song performances that the ethnomusicologist attended, elderly women affected by the radiation fallout struggled to harmonize and sang in a coarse voice. And when they were unable to hit the right notes as they sang, some would gesture to their throats and blame their damaged thyroids. Schwartz sees their musical performances as “an invitation to hear radiation sounding… where precarious voices sound strength.”

Turning to the diaspora from the Bikini Atoll, the anthropologist recalls a scene, recorded on film and distributed through newsreels in 1946, in which the US military governor of the Marshall Islands asked the Bikinian leader “King Juda” for his support in evacuating the Atoll before the nuclear experiments. The American couched his request in religious terms, asking the Bikinians to give up their islands “for the good of mankind” and promising to lead them to a land of salvation, “much as God had for the Jews.” But the only answer he could get from the Bikini leader was that “everything is in God’s hands.” The sentence, Men Otemjej Rej Ilo Bein Anij, abbreviated by the Bikinians as MORIBA, has become the motto of the islands. Today the descendants of those who were moved in 1946  live on Kili Island, on Ejit Island, Majuro, other parts of the Marshall Islands, in the United States, and a few in other countries.  They have been called “nuclear nomads” or “nuclear refugees.” They cannot go home because the United States has not kept its promise to return the islands to their pristine condition. The Bikinian nation formed in the mid-1980s in self-determination to protest the COFA. It is now complete with a flag, a national day (March 7, day of removal), a motto and an anthem as well as offices in Majuro and Springdale, Arkansas. Native communities claiming origin in Bikini now number 2,800 dispersed individuals out of an initial population of 167. For Schwartz, the injustices wrought by radioactive colonization account to a kind of “dissonance” in the global harmony that the Cold War was supposed to produce. Having been deprived a voice, local populations can only express their claims ventriloquially (through the voice of God) or metaphorically, through songs and musical performances. Singing is one way to create community and mobilize solidarity in the creation of new political subjectivities and communities of belonging. Songs express feelings of displacement and exile that have an unmistakable biblical tone. The Marshallese are a very religious people, and persons without religious affiliation account for a very small percentage of the population. Especially for Bikinese, church activities, both in church and in preparation, structure much of the community’s time. Hymns and religious songs therefore had a strong influence on the musical repertoire. Another strong influence is country music, heard on the military base of Kwajalein, which is appreciated as being from the heart (throat) and having to do with loss of land and/or love.

Kūrijmōj season 

The anthropologist spent Christmas Eve of 2009 on Kili Island, attending church service and recording Kūrijmōj (Christmas) songs in Marshallese. 1,2000 exiled Bikinians live on this tiny island and receive support from the US government that sometimes makes other islanders envious. For Schwartz, “spirited noise” or uwaañaañ, which applies to religious songs but also to traditional navigation and to ritualized ceremonies, is a way to reclaim the sovereignty that has been denied to them. According to Schwartz, drawing on Jacques Attali’s essay first published in 1977, “Noise can be read as a blockage in the system, a coded form of communication, or something that impedes understanding and needs to be resolved.” Noisiness is usually attributed to men: through vocal performances, war chants, and spiritual hymns, Bikinese men express their diasporic masculinity and spirit of self-determination. But these voices have not been heard by Americans, who made the land of their ancestors uninhabitable, and by other Marshallese, who reject Bikini’s aspiration to sovereignty. Masculinity is displayed in lagoon parades by “Gospel warriors” clad in grass skirts and holding paddles and sticks. This Gospel Day of parades and celebrations is a national holiday that commemorates the coming of the Gospel to Ebon Atoll in 1857. For the author, Americans strategically used Christian culture to dispossess the Marshallese of their properties, but it is worth noting that Marshallese also use Christian words and religious repertoire as a strategy to relate to Americans and extract compensations. The spirit of MORIBA works both ways. Navigational chants and stick charts are two traditional techniques of “wave piloting” through which islanders could find their ways across the atollscape. Indigenous knowledge systems have been eroded and fractured by a century of marginalization and silencing, but efforts are made to reintroduce them in the education system. Marshallese culture evolves around three institutions: government, church, and custom, and music is part of all of them. Songfest competitions are also part of the Kūrijmōj season. When Christmas is still a few months away,  islanders divide themselves into jeptas, which may be thought of as teams. These teams begin practicing the new songs and dances that will be performed from memory on Christmas Day. Each group may perform as many as fifteen to twenty songs. Before Christmas Day, the jeptas visit one another, engaging in competitive songfests in order to show off their skills and assess the competition. Songfests present an original mix of traditional customs and cultural practices, including “war-training exercises, church singing, line dancing, and the energetic moments of roro.”

Jessica Schwartz sees a dialectic between masculinist language expressed in Gospel Day parades or Kūrijmōj ceremonies and the matrilineal past that continues to shape the present. Anthropologists have described the Marshallese culture as a matrilineal society revolving around a complex system of clans and lineages tied to land ownership. In traditional culture, women protected the lands and lineage through songs through which the woman came to voice the end of war and direct peace among warring parties. “When a woman speaks, the man must give way”: women were seen as making decisions behind the scenes and as exerting the final say on matters of war and territory. Land was passed down from generation to generation through the mother, and land ownership tied families together into clans. Territorial appropriation and nuclear militarism have displaced women’s authority and power that was tied to the land. Majuro and Kwajalein have become highly masculinized spaces, and the ultimate authority of the feminine voice only remains in the echoes carried by songs and participation in customary practices. The author notes that domestic violence has now become a problem in the Marshall Islands, and that feminine voices have been silenced in a society that increasingly denies their rights and participation. She mentions the role of the women’s rights group WUTMI (Women United Together Marshall Islands) in supporting services for survivors of domestic violence, raising awareness about legal rights for victims of abuse, and underscoring the importance of women’s roles in climate conservation. One of the first songs she recorded was “Ioon, ioon miadi kan” (“Upon, Upon those Watchtowers”) that documents the indigenous population’s experiences of the Japanese and American military battles during World War II that resonates through the present. Composed in 1944 by the Marshallese female chief (leroij) Laabo, who was displaced from her land and forcibly assigned to a leper colony, the song is an embodied performance of disability, gender oppression, and voicelessness.

Pacific islands in the global imagination

Pacific islands, and Bikini Atoll in particular, continue to be present in the global imagination. Although Bikini is currently uninhabited with the exception of a few caretakers, it is recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site due to its role at the dawn of the Nuclear Age and is open to visitors aboard vessels that are completely self-sufficient if they obtain prior approval. Bikini lagoon diving is limited to fewer than a dozen experienced divers a week, costs more than US$5,000, and includes detailed histories of the nuclear tests. In what may now be perceived as a blatant case of cultural misappropriation and disrespect for local populations, the “bikini” swimsuit has become a worldwide fashion commodity. The French, who invented the design and the term in 1946, also speak of “monokini” for topless beachwear and “burkini” (a portmanteau word for burqa and bikini) for an Islamic attire that covers the whole body. French nuclear tests in the Pacific, which were conducted from the 1960s to 1995 in the Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia, led to the same controversies regarding the health, wellbeing, and environment of the people living in the region. Pacific islands now stand at the frontline in the battle against climate change, with rising sea levels threatening local livelihoods and the very existence of islanders’ communities. Despite having low emissions, the countries in the region have developed ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement to be fully renewable in terms of energy by 2030. Elected in January 2020, the current president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, David Kabua, has declared that combating climate change, negotiating with the US regarding the extension of the COFA that expires in 2023, and addressing the issue of the Runit Dome stocking radioactive debris as the top priorities of his presidency. Meanwhile, China has become an important and welcome source of loans, infrastructure and aid for the sovereign states in the region, triggering a commitment by the US and its allies to devote more resources and diplomatic engagement to Pacific island countries. While it doesn’t address these pressing geopolitical issues, Radiation Sounds documents the struggle of Marshallese men and women to keep their memories of ancestral homelands and cultural values alive, voicing their sense of identity amid the deafening silence that follows nuclear explosions.

Black Disabled Lives Matter

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Black Disability Politics, Sami Schalk, Duke University Press, 2022. 

Black Disability Politics

“This is a book written for Black people, especially Black disabled people.” Faced with this strong message in the introduction, the reader cannot help but ask questions. Who wrote this book, and for what purposes? Who shall read it, and to what ends? The author’s answer to the first question is straightforward: Sami Schalk identifies herself as “a fat Black queer disabled woman,” or “a Black person who seeks to avenge the suffering of my ancestors and to earn the respect of future generations.” Her goal is to understand how Black people have addressed disability as a political concern, and to develop Black disability politics as a tool and as a weapon in the fight for recognition and justice. She turns to history “because it benefits us as Black people to know and learn from what our ancestors did, to understand and honor them, and to continue their legacy of finding liberation.” Regarding the second question, the answer is even more blunt: Black readers are welcome. This book was written for them, especially for Black disabled people. As for non-Black persons, they are asked not to intrude into the conversation, for this book is not for or about them. The author makes an exception for “disabled people of color, disabled queer people, and disabled queer people of color”: even if they are not Black, the combination of traits that marginalizes them at multiple levels gives them a seat in the conversation about disability justice and collective liberation. But beware: white disabled persons should not confiscate the conversation, for their advocacy of disability rights has often led to the exclusion of people of color, queer people, or otherwise marginalized persons. Especially if you are white, living with disability does not give you the privilege to speak on behalf of other disabled persons.

A conversation about disability and Blackness

Black Disability Politics starts from the premise that “disability, as an identity, an experience, and a political category, has been conceptualized and approached differently by Black activists and intellectuals than by white activists and intellectuals.” There is something in Black disability that makes it different from disability without qualifier. Black disability has to be understood within the context of white supremacy. Even in the legal and medical sense, Black disabled persons are not equivalent to white disabled ones. Disabilities more common in rich white families are more likely to receive legal and medical recognition, while the types of disability more common in poor and racialized communities may not fit into legal and medical definitions of disability. In addition, “we cannot understand Black disability politics without engaging histories of anti-Black violence, scientific and medical racism, health disparities, health activism and environmental racism.” This makes the fight against ableism align with denunciations of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and fatfobia. The author points out “the whiteness and racism of the disability rights movement and disability studies as a field,” which often excludes or alienates Black disabled people. She defines the key principles around which Black disability politics is built: it has to be “intersectional but race centered” (race trumps other factors as it combines with them); not necessarily based on disability identity (unlike the white-dominated disability rights movement); contextualized and historicized (the book presents itself as a first step into that direction); centered on those most impacted by discrimination and injustice (i.e. multiply marginalized disabled people); holistic (the author believes in the “bodymind” literature); and action oriented (“I do not believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge”). The reason Black disability politics, or the combination of critical race studies and disability studies, didn’t appear sooner as a discipline and as a social movement is because the few voices that have connected disability justice and Black liberation have been consistently ignored, overlooked, or other wise silenced by a white-dominated disability rights’ paradigm.

The book explores how Black people have engaged with disability as a social and political concern through delving into the history of two institutions: the Black Panther Party, or BPP, and the National Black Women’s Health Project, of NBWHP. To many, the Black Panther Party conjures up a hypermasculine image of Black men in leather coats and berets carrying shotguns. Yet for the bulk of its existence, and especially after 1972, the BPP had a majority of women in its membership, and many women featured prominently in its leadership. The BPP had a stated policy of gender equality from its outset, in stark contrast with many leftist groups at the time. While the role of women in the BPP and the Black struggle more broadly has been highlighted by recent scholarship, the same isn’t true of people with disabilities. The same prejudice that identifies Black Panthers with hyper macho men applies to its alleged ableism and neglect of disability rights. Surely a group that advocated armed self-defense and class struggle couldn’t open its ranks broadly to persons impaired in their ability to fight and to parade. Sami Schalk wants to correct this misperception and testify that disabled persons, and disability justice, indeed had a place in the concerns of the Black Panther movement. Exhibit #1 in this rehabilitation trial is a cover story of the weekly newspaper of the BPP dated May 7, 1977, and titled “HANDICAPPED WIN DEMANDS – END H.E.W. OCCUPATION.” The story that unfolds tells the involvement of the BPP in the “504 seat-in,” a nationwide protest in which people with disabilities and their supporters occupied federal buildings in order to push the issuance of long-delayed regulations regarding Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Based in Oakland, California, the BPP apparently provided support to the San Francisco seat-in in the form of free meals for the 150 people involved and, as the magazine title testifies, a press release. In addition, two BPP members, one of them in a wheelchair, participated in the occupation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) in San Francisco and appeared on the article’s photo illustration.

Exhibits and posters

Exhibit #2 advanced by Sami Schalk to support the Panthers’ Black disability politics is the Panther-supported Oakland Community School’s stated policy of openness and inclusion “regardless of ability, ethnicity, or geographic location” (although the author couldn’t find any evidence that children with disabilities actually attended the school.) Another argument in the defense of the long-neglected disability politics of the Black Panther Party is the fight against the “medical and psychiatric industrial complexes” that made psychiatric abuse in mental and carceral institutions a pressing racial concern. Here again, exhibit #3 is composed of “numerous” press articles (thirteen in total) from the Black Panther weekly magazine that raised issues like forced pharmaceutical treatment, unpaid labor inside mental institutions, physical abuse in nursing homes, and involuntary commitment to state institutions. Another set of newspaper clips (exhibit #4) documents the use of psychiatric drugs in prisons as a means of control, while exhibit #5 consists of denunciations of the return of psychosurgery as a way to mitigate aggression and violence. A trial-within-the-trial, presented as a “praxis interlude,” takes issue with the ableist language and tropes used in some of the Black Panther magazine articles, such as the word vegetable to describe the potential result of psychosurgery and forced pharmaceutical treatment, or the presentation of disability and chronic illness as tragedies in need of prevention and eradication. Here the Black Panther activists are found guilty (“vegetable is used in a clearly ableist way”), but with extenuating circumstances (the term has to be placed “in its historical, medical, and linguistic context”) and they are released on parole provided they will use more proper language (alternative rhetoric and anti-ableist approaches are given.)

The author then turns to the National Black Women’s Health Project, a Black feminist health activist organization started in the early 1980s. Here, the tone is not judicial but celebratory: unlike the mock trial destined to rehabilitate the Black Panther Party’s disability politics from ignorance and neglect, the two chapters devoted to the NBWHP is an exhibition of Black women’s “empowerment through wellness.” Poster #1 in this celebratory exhibition analyzes Black feminist health activism as another prime example of Black disability politics, assessing how disability was explicitly and implicitly included within this collective’s holistic approach to health and wellness. Here the author is faced with a conundrum: she could find very few references to disability (and to the word “feminism”) in publications and internal documents of the NBWHP. But she sees this relative absence as a confirmation that Black disability politics is “intersectional but race centered, not based in disability identity.” Race and gender trump (dis)ability in the affirmation of a collective identity. The NBWHP insisted on the political nature of health and took a holistic approach that included disability in its definition of health and well-being. The self-help groups it organized were neither based in disability identity nor segregated by disability or health status (although they were segregated by race and gender: only Black women could attend.) Its publications addressed a wide variety of health and wellness problems, refusing to stigmatize or shame Black women for their health and promoting wellness for all (in a country where the majority of people don’t have social security.) It insisted on the emotional aspects of wellness and disease, and acknowledged the role of spirituality, faith, and religion in the lives of Black women (Amen to that!). For Sami Schalk, “the NBWHP was not a disability rights organization but a health organization that frequently acted in solidarity with disabled people in much of its work and included disabled people in leadership positions” (like many other health NGOs.)

HIV/AIDS is a disability

Poster #2 gets a little bit more specific on how the NBWHP provided support for people living with disability and chronic disease. The author performs a close analysis of the organization’s work on HIV/AIDS as a disability condition. The organization contributed to awareness and prevention through educational publications and campaigns taking into acount “the reality of Black women’s sexual lives.” It also provided material and emotional support for Black women living with HIV/AIDS (in the form of magazine articles and focus group discussions.) Here Sami Schalk is faced with a similar dilemma as in Poster #1: the programs focused on HIV/AIDS make no mention of disability at all. She nonetheless considers them a valid example of Black disability politics, and for three reasons. A chronic disease like HIV/AIDS is a disability condition, and is recognized as such under the American Disability Act (ADA). Even if a person doesn’t self-identify as disabled, she may be objectively included in the category. The distance or denial taken by some Black communities toward disability (the “Black disability consciousness gap”) can be explained by structural racism and the history of systemic oppression on the part of whites. Even so, the NBWHP is not without blame for keeping silent on HIV/AIDS as a disability issue and for failing to inform AIDS patients that they were eligible for support under the ADA. Again, in this mini-trial, NBWHP is deemed to have benefited from extenuating circumstances (there are “important historical and cultural reasons for that avoidance”) and is left with a prescription to encourage people to openly identify as disabled (even if they don’t have “a piece of paper to prove that”). To show that the lessons of the past are directly connected to the work of the present, Sami Schalk concludes Black Disability Politics by summarizing her interviews with eleven Black disabled activists and cultural workers whom she made provide feedback on the last chapter of her book (they were paid for their time), and four examples of contemporary instantiations of Black disability politics (a website, a book, another website, and another book.)

I feel uncomfortable in commenting this book. As a non-Black, non-disabled, non-academic, non-American, non-native speaker, I have the feeling I am intruding in a place where I don’t belong, and taking part in a conversation without a full understanding of its terms and stakes. And yet, Black Disability Politics is not a community blog or a restricted-access newsletter. It is published in an academic publishing house with an international distribution, its author presents herself as a scholar, and she wants a wide readership as she offers free access to the book through her webpage. I am therefore authorized to offer my five-cents comments for all it’s worth: if someone or something is intruding, it is this book that is trespassing into my favorite academic press series, not me. My first remark is that each time Sami Schalk uses the word Black (and she uses that word a lot), she should specify: Black American. Or maybe African American, or any other term that emphasizes geographical context. The USA is a country where, at any point in time, more than two million people find themselves behind bars; where most people don’t have social insurance; where life expectancy for men is inferior to Iran’s; and where there are more homicides in a day than in Japan during a whole year. African Americans are disproportionately represented in these categories (incarcerated, non-insured, premature deaths, authors or victims of violent crimes.) This situation should inspire shame and a modicum of modesty to all Americans, regardless of race or political persuasion. Viewed from outside, the United States increasingly appears as a country you don’t want to deal with, and definitely not as a country that should give lessons to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, what happens in the US doesn’t stay in the US. The United States influences conversations globally, especially academic conversations or discussions that find their origins on American campuses. What goes around comes around: China’s propaganda apparatus has seemingly become an active supporter of the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement – mostly in the form of lambasting the US government and system. In France, conservative forces dismiss any discussion on racial justice or equal opportunity by invoking “wokeness” and the excesses of political correctness observed in the US. As much as Sami Schalk wants to restrict participation in the conversation she is establishing with Black activists and scholars in the United States, I don’t want Black Disability Politics to be part of the conversation about race, disability, and politics in France.

Activism as a vocation

My second remark is that Sami Schalk should take sides more clearly: does she write as a scholar or as an activist? Does she take science or politics as a vocation? The material she presents (what I called exhibits and posters) may be fit for a trial or an exhibition, but cannot pass any academic test in the social sciences. The author recognizes it herself: “Black disability politics refuses to be disciplined,” and breaks away “from the typical disciplinary academic monograph mode.” Mining the past and the present to find heroic ancestors and comrades-in-arms does not a history book make: legacy is not history, and the intention to “exalt,” “honor,” or “avenge” past figures is usually a bad start for writing history books. I personally think African Americans deserve a genuine historical narrative of their relationship with disability, not an hagiography that takes no account of the rules of the discipline. The role of the historian should not be to “draw lessons from the past” but study it as it was. He or she should refrain from two major sins: presentism, or the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past; and taking the role of the judge, for history is not a courthouse or a trial. She should try to exploit a vast array of sources, including oral testimonies, community documents, and national archives, but she should also apply critical lenses to appreciate the veracity of the sources and not take testimonies at face value. When doing survey research, the important thing is not to obtain a waiver from an institutional review board, but to apply the tools and methods of the social sciences regarding sample selection, baseline or control group, questionnaire design, and textual analysis of responses. If the scholar wants to take the position of the political militant or the social activist (and she is perfectly free to do so), she should specify in each of her interventions in which capacity she is speaking. Readers may find such literature inspiring or uplifting, or they may prefer to turn to other narratives as a source of inspiration. Personally, I still find relief in the statements of Martin Luther King and in his “dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”