Carol, before you waste bandwidth here again, you might want to do a little research beforehand.
"A little research"? Like looking for some unsubstantiated claim on Wikipedia?
You're good at dismissing people and ideas but not so good at addressing them. If you didn't like this article, fine. I found it to be very interesting, about the hopelessness of the mindset of racialist politics.
You didn't address why you run this email list as a public forum.
On the topic of bandwidth, I did "a little research":
In Web hosting service, the term bandwidth is often incorrectly used to describe the amount of data transferred to or from the website or server within a prescribed period of time, for example bandwidth consumption accumulated over a month measured in gigabytes
per month.[citation needed] The more accurate phrase used for this meaning of a maximum amount of data transfer each month or given period is monthly data transfer.
From: marxmail@groups.io <marxmail@groups.io> on behalf of Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2020 9:09 AM To: marxmail@groups.io <marxmail@groups.io> Subject: Re: [marxmail] Modertor's note
On 9/16/20 9:24 AM, Carol Stokes wrote:
You got your information about RealClearPolitics from Wikipedia. That's sad.
The author of this shitty article that "Max Powers" sent to this mailing list and you defend was written by John Murawski, a long-time right-wing journalist. Here's another item from his Real Clear Investigations oeuvre:
A growing body of scientific evidence – discussed at length in political scientist Charles Murray’s new book, “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class” – suggests that the gender imbalance is at least partially explained
by innate differences between the sexes. And if that’s the case, trying to correct the gender disparity may be akin to tinkering with human nature, or largely futile.
The moderators have accurately noted the right-wing (and alt-right wing if such a thing exists) character of the news feeds at real clear politics. I go to real clear politics everything single day for their polling. They list all the major polling organizations and their results for the upcoming elections. Naturally, most or all of them show Biden trouncing Trump, even now as the date closes in on election day. They list these polls totally without comment. So on the one hand, the fascinating results of the polling for the upcoming capitalist democratic elections are shown along with a news feed that expounds on every conspiracy theory about Biden one has ever heard about.
Álvaro Cunhal, right holding a white flower, led Portugal's Communist Party for half a century and became a national hero after the overthrow of the country's dictatorship. Here, he is embraced by supporters during a rally amidst Portugal 1974 'Carnation Revolution.' Cunhal, who spent nearly 35 years underground or in jail for his role in building the Communists into the only well-organized opposition to the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar and then Marcelo Caetano, was secretly an author of fiction. One of his novels, 'Five Days, Five Nights,' written under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago, has just been published in English for the first time by International Publishers. | Acacio Franco / AP
Álvaro Cunhal had a little secret. It was a good thing that he did. Living under the fascist Salazar dictatorship of mid-20th-century Portugal for the first half of his life, Cunhal needed secrecy. After all, for decades he was a leader and ultimately the Secretary General of the Portuguese Communist Party, which waged a life-and-death struggle against the fascist regime.
So, Álvaro Cunhal was forced to go underground into hiding. After he was caught, he was imprisoned for 11 years, eight of them in solitary confinement. He was routinely tortured and starved. After his daring 1960 escape from Forte de Peniche Prison, this revolutionary was driven into exile from his native land, where he served the cause from abroad. He returned in 1974 after the revolution that finally, after almost half a century, overturned fascism, and that immediately led to the independence of the Portuguese colonies.
Once again he became politically active in his native country, a public figure never to be ignored or forgotten. When he died at 91 in 2005, half a million people crowded the streets of Lisbon to celebrate his life.
An illustration in Manuel Tiago’s ‘Five Days, Five Nights.’ | Illustration by Ilse Gordon / Courtesy of International Publishers
Most of those celebrants could probably tell you something of his daring adventures, of how he devoted his life to the service of the Portuguese people. But very few knew Cunhal’s secret—Manuel Tiago!
It turned out that Cunhal had used his prison time, and later his exile time and still later his freedom back home, quite well. Aside from his political writings, he had become an accomplished artist, a translator of Shakespeare and, under the pen name of Manuel Tiago, the author of nine books of fiction, one of which (the present book under review) was later adapted to film and another into a popular TV series. The authorship of Cunhal’s books was known only to Party leadership until much later in his life.
Clearly, a Communist who gave his life to the cause must have had a higher purpose in leaving the world such a body of fiction. Now, readers of English have their first opportunity to find out.
Thanks to the adept translation of Eric Gordon, cultural editor of People’s World, we now have Manuel Tiago’s Five Days, Five Nights. This novella had been preserved, left in the archives of Peniche Prison when Cunhal escaped. After the 1974 Revolution, the military officers who ran the prison handed the manuscript back to Cunhal, and it was published the following year.
Five Days, Five Nights is the fictional story of 19-year-old André and his attempt to flee to Spain from oppression in Portugal. To cross the border he enlists the help of the shady, dangerous, older criminal Lambaça. They must cross the rough border terrain, passing through villages and encountering a few peasants along their way.
Cunhal etches his characters sparsely, but as sharply as the rugged landscape. André’s youthful optimism, high sense of morality and energy contrast with Lambaça’s evasive, secretive manners, perhaps cultivated as a response to the corrupt, fascist order. Their relationship is of constant mistrust, occasionally violently flaring to the surface. The plot is driven by this conflict which threatens the outcome of André’s flight from the country. Through such dramatic tension, we see the struggle of the old order against the promise of a new progressive age.
Five Days, Five Nights is available from International Publishers.
Yet Cunhal is a shrewd teller of his tale. If André is an impatient youth, is he perhaps too naïve and impetuous for his own good? And if Lambaça is so crude and immoral, why does he trouble to take this young rebel over the border at such risk?
“André…spoke of the importance of the crossing, of responsibilities, cooperation. Now he spoke with a calm, persuasive voice, and leaning forward, attempted to discern in Lambaça some expression or gesture.
“In the dark of the night, Lambaça, still as a stone, did not react. Only when André had finished did he say, his words drawling with contempt, ‘I’ve known all that for more than twenty years.’”
The neo-realist noir novella takes pains to detail aspects of the modest lives along the border. Hardscrabble border-runners, vulnerable prostitutes, herders and villagers comprise the repressed underclass of fascist Portugal. Cunhal purposely doesn’t set his characters in too specific a place or time. But clearly the border represents hope and the possibility of change.
Álvaro Cunhal, by Henrique Matos, 2009. | Creative Commons
Gordon, the translator, has done an admirable job bringing to life Cunhal’s words describing the border flight which now defines the status of more and more of the world’s at-risk population. The publication benefits immensely from the accompanying series of illustrations by the artist Ilse Gordon (the translator’s sister), whose drawings round out our impressions of the principals, lending them humanity while placing them firmly in the context of rural hinterlands.
The book also features an informative foreword, author, translator and illustrator biographies, a map of Portugal, and an unusual feature at the end, “Some Questions to Ponder and Discuss,” obviously meant to spur the reader’s inquiry into the deeper meanings of the story.
International Publishers has begun with Five Days, Five Nights, and further “Manuel Tiago” books are reportedly coming. This will be a progressively staged publishing event I, for one, will be most interested in following.
A vote of gratitude is owed to the Gordons for their success in realizing and broadcasting Álvaro Cunhal’s secret, the description of the struggle for change against an oppressive order—lessons hard learned and well expressed.
Five Days, Five Nights by Manuel Tiago (Álvaro Cunhal) New York: International Publishers, 2020 72 pp., $15.99 ISBN: 9780717807895
[Michael Berkowitz, a veteran of the civil rights and anti-war movements, has worked on Wisconsin recalls, Occupy and other local movements that give promise of social change. He has been Land Use Planning Consultant to the government of China for the last 18 years. After studying at Yale and Stanford, he taught Chinese and American History at the college level, worked with Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Org. with miners, and was an officer of SEIU. He has served as a supernumerary with the San Francisco Opera for years without getting to sing a single note on stage!]
Last year we published a three part story about The Intercept by Tim Shorrock that goes far deeper than the Times would ever dare regarding Omidyar’s links with USAID and the intelligence community. The Times jaw-droppingly “forgot” to mention Matthew Cole previously got John Kiriakou jailed for whistleblowing as well
After having
reviewed well over a dozen narrative and documentary films over
the years making the case for gay, lesbian and transgender
rights, none has moved me as much as “For They Know Not What
They Do” (Jesus’s words at his crucifixion) that opened
yesterday on iTunes, Amazon andvirtual cinema. The documentary tells the story of
four young people growing up in strict Christian households, who
face both opposition from their families and society as a whole.
They say that the key to a successful documentary is choosing
subjects that an audience can relate to. That being the
criterion, director Daniel Karslake, a gay man, is a pure
genius.
Thank you very much for the feedback on the article, your comments are very useful for me to clarify the arguments and work on some of the definitions.
I agree that binary categories are not sufficient to account for uneven development, or uneven and combined development and the traits that these acquire today. This binarism is, of course, the greatest problem that John Smith's aproach has. I consider that his work is very important for pointing out the importance of the centrality acquired by the "peripheral" workforce as a result of internationalization of production, but this is an important shortcoming.
With the discussion and criticism of Harvey I seek to take the certain elements of Harvey’s theorizing that I find useful with the aim of avoiding falling into such binary categories, while at the same time specifying the real scope and limits that has the “reversal of the draining of wealth” that Harvey proposes.
Undoubtedly, it is important to distinguish the different status or positions acquired by countries that do not belong to the core of the imperialist powers or to the “global North”. Some kind of “intermediate” notion, such as that of “semiperiphery” proposed by Wallerstein and other authors, may be useful in this regard. I also agree that, as a result of changes in the division of labor and the growing export of capital carried out by countries of this “semi-periphery”, they participate in some way in the “drain of wealth”, to continue in the terms of Harvey. I introduce this latter definition in the article, although perhaps without enough emphasis, judging by what you put forward in your comment.
The point that you introduce, and that I do not share, although it will be the subject of a deeper discussion in a future article I plant to write, is that the category of sub-imperialism is useful to make this panorama more complex and give a more articulated vision of the global hierarchy. Of course, I am familiar with Marini's arguments, and I have also read some of the works that you have been publishing with contributions from different authors on the BRICS and sub-imperialism, as well as your intervention in the Harvey and John Smith controversy.
I have the opinion that the category of sub-imperialism complicates more than it helps.
There are aspects of content that the concept seeks to account for, as I interpret it, with which I think we can agree. That some of the non-imperialist countries become increasingly involved in the expansion of imperialist relations as their capitalist development increases, exporting capital and competing with the capitalist companies themselves (but “cooperating” in the reinforcement of the global rules of submission ), that this expansion is closely associated with the development of the capacity of these countries to influence beyond their borders, at least regionally to their neighboring countries but sometimes also beyond those boundaries; that they appropriate part of the surplus of other countries, although without ceasing to generate surplus for the capitals of the imperialist countries, all these are important aspect that have developed in the last decades and need to be accounted for. But I think that these complexities or “combinations” can be explained and introduced without the need to attribute to some countries a “partial” imperialist condition, limited by the prefix “sub”. I think that an additional problem for the use of the category is that many of the countries that receive the attribution of sub-imperialists find themselves in extremely heterogeneous realities. Looking at the BRICS, for example, the geopolitical capacity of China or Russia - the latter for military and diplomatic reasons above all- is not comparable to that of Brazil, India or South Africa. I believe that including these countries in the same sub-imperialist status blurs the clearly differentiated trajectories that they exhibit, and the specific weight that each one has in the global economy and politics. I consider that we agree on this heterogeneity, but it seems important to me as a limit to encompass the different countries in the same sub-imperial condition.
These are some first reflections on the question. In any case, I recognize that the theory of sub-imperialism seeks to elaborate theoretically an important problem, which is how to account for countries that are located in an “intermediate” condition in their projection of economic and political power, but I think that perhaps more “particular” answers that seek to respond to the status of each country within a global system where the imperialist powers continue to be at the center of global oppression, by doing a kind of “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” of the role of each country, may be more appropriate..
On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 5:30 AM Patrick Bond <pbond@...> wrote:
On 9/13/2020 5:56 PM, Esteban
Mercatante wrote:
The
last few decades have been characterized by weak economic
growth in the developed countries, which contrasts with the
dynamism shown by China and other countries on the periphery.
What does this tell us about the relations that characterize
the world capitalist system?
In this article I engage with the ideas of David Harvey
about imperialism.
This is much appreciated. But if you want some semi-critical
feedback (with the disclosure-proviso that I did my PhD under
Harvey's supervision, on uneven development in Zimbabwe), I don't
think the binary categories you seem to rely upon are sufficiently
nuanced to address uneven development, especially uneven and
combined development. There is a critical missing category,
"sub-imperialism," which is a concept Ruy Mauro Marini developed
in the 1960s-70s to explain Brazil's location as deputy sheriff to
Washington not only in geopolitical terms, but also with respect
to the local trajectory of capital accumulation. Harvey advanced
the concept a bit in the early 2000s, in The New Imperialism.
I think he was mistaken by not invoking it in the debate with
John Smith a couple of years ago, especially in the Review of
African Political Economy. (My critique is here.)
You correctly say:
Harvey’s
statement about a partial reversal in the drainage of historical
wealth could be considered valid: the fact that this “periphery”
has become a receptacle for capital on a larger scale, hand in
hand with an increase in investment by local capitalists (and in
China, above all, by public enterprises), and at the same time
these countries have increased their weight in the generation of
capital exported to other countries... some
economies grow and accumulate at the expense of others, and
that those that are showing the most dynamic growth in GDP,
manufacturing exports, or foreign investment are not at the
center but are a rather limited sector of the periphery.
That "rather limited sector" includes the
Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa bloc, which helps explain
why they line up tightly with imperialism when it comes to
amplifying the damage done by multinational corporations, the IMF
and World Bank, the WTO, the UNFCCC and even FIFA (recall who
nurtured Sepp Blatter in 2010, 2014 and 2018). My co-editor of the
book BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique, Ana Garcia from
Rio, discuss this here.
If we
consider as a bloc all the dependent countries (typically
characterized by the multilateral agencies as “emerging” and
“developing” countries, or “middle income” and “poor” countries,
etc.), they have continued to “drain” wealth towards the rich
countries during the last decades.
But these are not "a bloc", they are very distinct in terms of
the emerging global division of labour, in which the West has
ceded a great deal of its primary role in extracting surpluses
from the periphery to semi-peripheral corporations, especially
from the BRICS. There are two new books that deal with this: BRICS
and Resistance in Africa(which I co-edited) and BRICS
and the New American Imperialism (free for download here).
I based
this on a 2015 study that reconstructs the net results of
global licit and illicit financial flows — including
“development aid,” wage remittances, net trade balances,
debt services, new loans, foreign direct investment (FDI),
portfolio investment, and other flows.
Actually, that particular methodology massively underestimates
the damage done within the broader wealth drain from South to
North, because it ignores what's termed unequal ecological
exchange, which in my definition would highlight the drain of
depleted non-renewable natural resources. In Africa these are
typically $150 bn/year worth of additional South-to-North
wealth reduction. The
World Bank even admits this scale of unequal exchange by
factoring in uncompensated resource depletion. so progressives
shouldn't be so far behind the curve. Samir Amin pointed out
this problem starting in 1972, and it's been one of the core
insights of ecological economics, especially advanced by Herman
Daly.
... in the last 20 years the relative
weight of the rich (imperialist) countries and the rest of the
world has changed in terms of foreign direct investment from
these countries (destined to productive enterprises, either by
starting them up from scratch or by acquiring some
participation in local companies) and, to a lesser extent, in
the return flow from these countries to other countries.
Today, many “emerging” and “developing” countries also export
capital — that is, their residents make foreign direct
investments. Most of these are in other “emerging” and
“developing” countries, but some make their way to the develop
economies
This is where it becomes vital to recognise parts of the "Global
North" that are located in sit of sub-imperialist accumulation
such as where I've mainly been based the last 30 years:
Johannesburg, South Africa. This is not just a branch-plant city
but one where voracious extractive industries have been located
since the 1880s when half the world's gold was discovered
underground, sometimes 4km deep. And the accumulation of capital
that occurred here was not just in the circuit of JP Morgan
(co-founder of Anglo American) but also entailed a white
patriotic bourgeoisie that - until early 1990 when Nelson
Mandela was released from jail - was perfectly happy to use
Joburg as its hq base. In 1999, there was a massive flight of
Anglo, De Beers and many others of the top
The critical question is
whether the semi-periphery (not periphery) is exporting
capital (and returning dividends), and whether this is due to
countries in this category, led by China, experiencing crises of
overaccumulation in their own economies. Where I live, South
Africa, this
problem has been acute (though of variable intensity over
time) since the 1980s and has led to repeated drives to offshore
capital. The most formidable example was exactly a year ago when
the African continent's largest firm (by far), Naspers, suddenly
began relocating most of its wealth (a 31% investment in the
Chinese IT firm Tencent) to Amsterdam, in view of the firm's
inability to recirculate capital profitably in South Africa.
That overaccumulation and
capital export, in turn, means the rate at which local capital
draws in dividends from abroad, compared to foreign capital
drawing in dividends from South Africa, has been relatively high
at around 60% - though nowhere the level of imperialist
economies like the U.S. which hit 215% in 2015-17. A chart (from
this
book) gives you a sense of the ratios, as imperialist,
sub-imperialist and peripheral economies' have differential
abilities to retain or attract surpluses:
Profit
flows,
2015-17 (average dividend receipts as percent of dividend
payments)
The
fragmentation of production processes and the international
dispersion of tasks and activities within them has led to
the emergence of production systems without borders — which
can be sequential chains or complex networks, and which can
be global, regional, or involve only two countries. These
systems are commonly referred to as global value chains.
These chains are, fortunately, in retreat - as part of a general
deglobalisation of productive capital including trade/GDP,
FDI/GDP and cross-border-finance/GDP ratios. In 2007 the global
value chains peaked at over 28% of productive capital's output,
but by 2018 were down to 22%. Much more localisation is now
underway. I have some brief rough-draft lectures on the
processes here:
"A six-word California fire ecology primer: The state is in the hole.
A
seventy-word primer: We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel
imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate
that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere
close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has
made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been
forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.
Megafires,
like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so
far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled
fuels. No way around that.
When
I reached Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest
Service who is based in Mammoth, California, and asked if there was any
meaningful scientific dissent to the idea that we need to do more
controlled burning, he said, “None that I know of.”
How
did we get here? Culture, greed, liability laws and good intentions
gone awry. There are just so many reasons not to pick up the drip torch
and start a prescribed burn even though it’s the safe, smart thing to
do.
The
overarching reason is culture. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was
created with a military mindset. Not long after, renowned American
philosopher William James wrote in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of
War” that Americans should redirect their combative impulses away from
their fellow humans and onto “Nature.” The war-on-fire mentality found
especially fertile ground in California, a state that had emerged from
the genocide and cultural destruction of tribes who understood fire and
relied on its benefits to tend their land. That state then repopulated
itself in the Gold Rush with extraction enthusiasts, and a little more
than half a century later, it suffered a truly devastating fire.
Three-thousand people died, and hundreds of thousands were left
homeless, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and attendant fires.
The overwhelming majority of the destruction came from the flames, not
the quake. Small wonder California’s fire ethos has much more in common
with a field surgeon wielding a bone saw than a preventive medicine
specialist with a tray full of vaccines."
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: September 16, 2020 at 1:40:17 PM EDT To: h-review@... Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Subject:H-Net Review [H-SHGAPE]: Smith Cox on Domby, 'The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory' Reply-To: h-review@...
Adam H. Domby. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory. Charlottesville University of Virginia Press, 2020. 272 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8139-4376-3.
Reviewed by Shae Smith Cox (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) Published on H-SHGAPE (September, 2020) Commissioned by William S. Cossen
Adam Domby's _The False Cause_ "details how white supremacy, fraud, and fabricated memories have fundamentally shaped how Americans, especially white southerners, recalled the past." In this narrative Domby explains how white southerners generally, but, specifically in this case, North Carolinians, used the "lies and falsehoods" they were taught about the Lost Cause to "justify segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial discrimination" (p. 3). A point worth appreciating up front is the time Domby takes to convey the reasoning behind his choice to use the words "lie," "falsehood," and "fabrication": as he notes, "a less provocative term than _lie_ might obscure the purposeful creation and use of these constructions, and thereby render them innocuous" (p. 9). Throughout the work he argues that the falsehoods and fabrications are lies created to serve a contemporary purpose.
Chapters 1 and 2 examine the rewriting and invention of an expansive web of lies that white politicians and elites fabricated to serve their purpose and further white supremacy. In chapter 1, Domby engages with Jim Crow politics when discussing the motivations behind constructing monuments, stating that "monuments frequently have multiple overlapping meanings," but even the most innocuous concept of creating Confederate monuments to honor soldiers served as a method of celebrating the intentions and efforts of white supremacy (pp. 20-21). Domby acknowledges that transitioning monuments from the cemetery to a prominent public space such as a courthouse lawn altered the purpose of the monuments "as they increasingly served as celebratory markers instead of sober memorials," because doing so allowed white southerners to proclaim a moral victory and uphold systemic racism (p. 23). Chapter 2 deals specifically with the creation of ideal Confederates, discussing everything from exaggerating personal war records to conjuring "soldiers out of thin air" as an attempt to justify white southern rule (p. 47). Domby explains that during the height of monument creation, southerners understood that monuments were excellent tools that assisted people in remembering "historical figures as heroes, and heroes were part of a process that ensured a specific memory of the war was passed on to future generations" (p. 46).
Chapters 3 and 4 are compelling and demonstrate the power of the pension as a prop for the Lost Cause narrative. In chapter 3, Domby reminds historians of the importance of money in crafting the Lost Cause narrative because money talked and said the things necessary to retroactively form a solid South. He explains that "pensions helped buttress a southern racial hierarchy through both the erasure of dissent and by presenting pensioners as white heroes to celebrate," even if they had deserted the Confederacy when it counted (p. 77). Additionally, Domby states that "widows' pensions could also help erase the dissent from the historical record while providing women with both monetary and social capital" (p. 87). While he provides a few examples, the extent of the social capital in relation to women is a fascinating point that deserves a deeper discussion in this context. In his opening example of Eli Williamson, Domby demonstrates the power of the pension even further when he explains North Carolina's 1927 policy of accepting applications from African Americans who served as body servants or laborers (not soldiers) during the war for "Class B" pensions. He argues that "pensions for people of color forced to work for the Confederacy have been used since their issuance to buttress the Lost Cause and ideologies of white supremacy" because applications for Class B pensions "for former slaves and free people of color began to be cited as proof that there were 'black Confederate' soldiers serving alongside their masters" (p. 107).
In chapter 5, Domby artfully demonstrates how the concept of the loyal slave became the myth of the "black Confederate." By looking at reunions attended by "black Confederates" and not closely examining those who garnered pensions, people can and do misconstrue these examples, as Domby shows, as false physical "proof" that Confederates were not "racist," further providing hope for neo-Confederates that their heritage was a much cleaner version of history than claimed. He argues that "the racial hierarchy that Julian Carr and other former Confederates desired was not undermined but rather reinforced by the attendance and limited participation of a few former slaves" (pp. 149-150).
_The False Cause_ is full of thoroughly entertaining stories that grab readers' attention and make them think about the lies of the Lost Cause and how pervasive that narrative has been throughout US history. Domby concludes this work by calling on his fellow historians to carefully and thoughtfully engage with the public with the hope of curtailing these dangerous fabrications, because we "have the ability to call attention to how the past has been used and manipulated" (p. 168). Judging by his Twitter feed, Domby is leading by example.
Citation: Shae Smith Cox. Review of Domby, Adam H., _The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory_. H-SHGAPE, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55345
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Does anyone on this list know what the popular texts teaching dialectics were at UCLA in the early half of the Sixties? I am writing an essay on Francis Ford Coppola. Please CC any responses to my email HASC.warrior.stew@..., I admittedly am unable to consistently check responses from the Marxmail digest that I receive daily.
So it turns out that JD Bernal was just as much
of an eco-modernist as Leon Trotsky, even though he had much
better grasp of the ecological dimension in general. From
Foster's "Return of Nature":
The approach to environmental issues adopted in
"The Social Function of Science" and, later (but to a lesser
extent), in "Science in History" thus displayed at times the
modernizing (and ecomodernizing) vision almost universal at the
time, the age of mega-projects in the United States, the Soviet
Union, and elsewhere. Here, problems of overpopulation were seen
as solved through the development of new hybrid crops and new
technological methods, including greater irrigation that
required big dams and diversion of rivers. In a more grating and
shortsighted observation from today's perspective, Bernal in
1939 in "The Social Function of Science" pointed to the
possibility of planned climate change, based on Soviet attempts
to tame the Arctic. As he put it, in terms that cannot but
strike today's reader, some eighty years later, as naïve (the
dialectics of unintended consequences seems to have failed him
here): "By an intelligent diversion of warm ocean-currents
together with some means of colouring snow so that the sun could
melt it, it might be possible to keep the Arctic ice-free for
one summer, and that one year might tip the balance and
permanently change the climate of the northern hemisphere."
You know what "non-partisan" means, dont you? You seem to think it means something like "objective." It just means that it's not formally connected to either party.
On Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 9:30 AM Carol Stokes <carolstokes36@...> wrote:
"The company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears, The Daily Beast has learned."
You got your information about RealClearPolitics from Wikipedia. That's sad.
What's sadder is that you copied out an unsubstantiated accusation from the most unreliable source you could find, The Daily Beast.
You ignored the passages where both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal referred to RealClearPolitics as "non-partisan".
What is the purpose of this email group? If this is just a friends group, why make it public?
You got your information about RealClearPolitics from
Wikipedia. That's sad.
The author of this shitty article that "Max
Powers" sent to this mailing list and you defend was written by
John Murawski, a long-time right-wing journalist. Here's another
item from his Real Clear Investigations oeuvre:
A growing body of scientific evidence –
discussed at length in political scientist Charles Murray’s
new book, “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and
Class” – suggests that the gender imbalance is at least
partially explained by innate differences between the sexes.
And if that’s the case, trying to correct the gender disparity
may be akin to tinkering with human nature, or largely futile.
More than 40% of all reported coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) deaths in the United States have occurred in nursing homes. As a result, health care worker access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and infection control policies in nursing homes have received increased attention. However, it is not known if the presence of health care worker unions in nursing homes is associated with COVID-19 mortality rates. Therefore, we used cross-sectional regression analysis to examine the association between the presence of health care worker unions and COVID-19 mortality rates in 355 nursing homes in New York State. Health care worker unions were associated with a 1.29 percentage point mortality reduction, which represents a 30% relative decrease in the COVID-19 mortality rate compared to facilities without health care worker unions. Unions were also associated with greater access to PPE, one mechanism that may link unions to lower COVID-19 mortality rates. [Editor’s Note: This Fast Track Ahead Of Print article is the accepted version of the peer-reviewed manuscript. The final edited version will appear in an upcoming issue of Health Affairs.]
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: September 16, 2020 at 8:23:54 AM EDT To: h-review@... Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Subject:H-Net Review [H-LatAm]: Hagler on Murray and Tsuchiya, 'Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World' Reply-To: h-review@...
N. Michelle Murray, Akiko Tsuchiya, eds. Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World. SUNY Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture. Albany State University of New York Press, 2019. 302 pp. $32.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-4384-7647-6; $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4384-7645-2.
Reviewed by Anderson Hagler (Duke University) Published on H-LatAm (September, 2020) Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz
In their introduction, N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya note that _Unsettling Colonialism_ probes the "entanglements of gender and race" as they relate to Spanish imperialism in the Iberian world, which has, heretofore, received scant attention from scholars of feminist postcolonial studies (p. 1). The contributors to this volume examine the ways European men and women exploited, used, and justified Spain's colonial enterprises in far-flung places, such as Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines. Several of the essays show how women were directly engaged in Spain's colonizing mission and complicit in sustaining imperialist ideologies. These authors demonstrate how colonial discourses elevated whiteness and championed racial purity amid metropolitan fears of miscegenation. Several of the authors consider the role of women in both the domestic and public spheres as Spain fretted about its dwindling hold on overseas territories in the nineteenth century.
The volume is divided into three thematic sections. Part 1, "Colonialism and Women's Migrations," considers how women personified Spain's imperial schemes either as exploited laborers or as knowledge producers who sustained colonization. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya opens the book with her chapter, "The Colonial Politics of Meteorology: The West African Expedition of the Urquiola Sisters." Vizcaya underscores the silencing and reappropriation of Manuela and Isabel Urquiola's scientific efforts as Spain expanded its hold in Equatorial Guinea. Unfortunately for the Urquiola sisters, Manuel Iradier Bulfy, the famous explorer, personally benefited from the meteorological data gathered by Manuela and Isabel, allowing him to tour the country as a hero and lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in Madrid. Although Vizcaya reveals that European men and women joined forces to sustain imperialism, she also notes that the recovery of women, such as the Urquiola sisters, foregrounds white/Iberian forms of knowledge production over indigenous epistemologies. The efforts of locals who guided explorers, missionaries, and other Iberians in their homelands remain obscured.
In chapter 2, Lisa Surwillo illuminates how travel narratives contributed to the ideology of Hispanism and its cultural neoimperialism in Cuba. In "Eva Canel and the Gender of Hispanism," Surwillo examines Canel's _Lo que vi en Cuba, a través de la isla_ (1916), which claimed to convey Cubans' feelings toward Spain following independence. Canel interpreted the warm welcome that she personally received as a metonymical acceptance of Spain itself. Canel thus projected her fantasy of a unified empire onto the newly independent island nation.
Surwillo delves into the contradictory nature of Canel who, despite her presence in the public sphere, championed traditional gender roles for women as wives and mothers. Surwillo also highlights Canel's idealistic, perhaps naïve, approach to race, noting that Canel believed Hispanism was not racist as it provided women of color "a sentimental and aesthetic framework with which to articulate their place in society" (p. 71). Ultimately, Canel hoped her writings would revitalize Cubans' identification with the motherland and prevent emigrants from becoming Americanized. Yet, as Surwillo shows, Canel's equivocal place in Spain's canon stems from the fact that "neither side of the Atlantic has claimed her" (p. 77).
Tsuchiya's contribution in chapter 3, "Gender, Race, and Spain's Colonial Legacy in the Americas: Representations of White Slavery in Eugenio Flores's _Trata de blancas_ and Eduardo López Bago's _Carne importada_," highlights sex trafficking in the late nineteenth century as the Spanish nation lost a significant sector of its population from the impoverished regions of Galicia, Asturias, and Cantabria. Mass migrations to the Americas sparked fears among metropolitan elites about racial degeneration and gender roles, making women and their bodies the focus of medical interventions and social surveillance. The literary works examined in this chapter reveal that metropolitan men fetishized the sexual exploitation and violence of women for the "purpose of social critique and political denunciation" (p. 95). These male writers' denunciations of sexual commerce reduced the figure of the prostitute to a trope of otherness while critiquing capitalism and fretting about the loss of empire.
Part 2, "Race, Performance, and Colonial Ideologies," considers how fin-de-siècle literature constructed race. In chapter 4, "A Black Woman Called _Blanca la extranjera_ in Faustina Sáez de Melgar's _Los miserables_ (1862-63)," Ana Mateos explores how the body relates to women and slavery through Melgar's protagonist Alejandrina, a woman who uses blackface to disguise herself while she investigates her parents' murder. Despite Alejandrina's empathy toward the enslaved, Mateos shows that _Los miserables_'s proto-feminist and abolitionist stance actually conformed to patriarchal social norms. Although Alejandrina employed philanthropy to improve the living conditions of Madrid's poor, her status as a noblewoman validates, rather than undermines, the colonization of the Americas. Mateos illuminates how Alejandrina perpetuated contemporary notions of female respectability and maintained a sociopolitical hierarchy that elevated whites above peoples of color.
In chapter 5, Mar Soria analyzes the comical staging of blackface through the genre known as _género chico_--mass produced one-and two-act plays--which reified Spain's cultural superiority over its colonies. Consequently, "Colonial Imaginings on the Stage: Blackface, Gender, and the Economics of Empire in Spanish and Catalan Popular Theater" brings to light how blackface mocked nonwhite peoples. The racial demographics of Cuba so worried metropolitans precisely because the island was an important source of wealth. Soria makes a significant intervention by demonstrating the role that Catalan merchants and playwrights had in perpetuating the transatlantic slave trade. Soria notes that the comedy _Las Carolinas _(1886) written by Antoni Ferrer i Codina--one of the first authors to bring _género chico_ to Catalan--echoed Spanish conservative opinions, "which considered antislavery supporters unpatriotic and at the service of foreign interests" (p. 142). Spanish playwrights thus employed _género chico_ to justify colonization, reinforcing their sense of self, nationhood, and imperial pride.
The four essays that comprise part 3, "Gender and Colonialism in Literary and Political Debates," further explore the gender dynamics of imperial and colonial discourses. In chapter 6, "Becoming Useless: Masculinity, Able-Bodiedness, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Spain," Julia Chang considers how Spanish soldiers functioned as an extension of imperial power. The discursive side of military recruitment shaped notions of masculine utility and beauty. Building on feminist and queer scholarship, as well as Michel Foucault's theories of biopower and disciplinary bodies, Chang illuminates how the Spanish military produced both the oppressor and the oppressed as the overriding concern for military conscription was to enlist beautiful, able-bodied men. Indeed, Chang breaks new ground in Iberian studies by juxtaposing _útil_ with _inútil_, destabilizing the corporeal fixity of Spanish colonizers.
Chapter 7, "From Imperial Boots to Naked Feet: Clarín's Views on Cuban Freedom and Female Independence in _La Regenta_," written by Nuria Godón, examines the discourses of colonialism and domination in Leopoldo Alas's _La Regenta_ (1884-85). Alas, also known as Clarín, did not wish for an entirely independent Cuba. Instead, Clarín favored autonomy from Spain similar to that already established in Galicia and Catalonia. Godón emphasizes Clarín's moderate, rather than revolutionary, stance on Cuban women. Although Clarín defended women's autonomy and their right to marry for love, he rejected the total emancipation of women. By connecting familial honor to the nation, Clarín reinforced a common patriarchal paradigm that linked honor to political and sexual conquest.
Joyce Tolliver's fascinating essay in chapter 8, "_Dalagas_ and _Ilustrados_: Gender, Language, and Indigeneity in the Philippine Colonies," examines a tense period of transition in the Philippines as the nation gained independence from Spain only to be dominated by another foreign power--the United States. Tolliver combines her analysis of José Rizal's letter, "Message to the Young Women of Malolos" (1889) with that of Pedro Paterno's tale, "La dalaga virtuosa" (1910), to show how idealized notions of indigeneity and sexual purity excluded Filipina women from the public sphere. In December 1888, a group of twenty young women from the city of Malolos petitioned the governor general to establish a Spanish-language school for women in their town. By petitioning the governor general directly, these women bypassed the friar curates who, until then, had maintained "iron control over the colonized peoples of the Philippines" (p. 233). In response to this petition, José Rizal (1861-96), the polyglot physician and martyred national hero, wrote an open letter in Tagalog to the women, attaching their pleas for education to his own cause. Tolliver shows that the decision to write in Tagalog rather than Spanish placed Rizal in the same position of authority as the friars, transforming these Filipinas into passive recipients of Rizal's wisdom. Similarly, Paterno wrote morality tales that emphasized the need to control women's sexuality. In "La dalaga virtuosa," a beautiful maiden is rewarded for renouncing her sexual desire, implying that all Filipinas should follow her example. Because he dedicated his collection to schools in Manila, Paterno presented himself as a benevolent source of moral guidance. In sum, Tolliver compares the Philippine national hero with the nation's antihero, demonstrating that both icons didactically constructed foundational fictions of female purity.
In chapter 9, "The Spanish Carceral Archipelago: Concepción Arenal against Penitentiary Colonization," Aurélie Vialette illuminates how penal colonies were intended to save the Spanish Empire from complete dissolution. Building on Foucault's theory of biopower and Giorgio Agamben's spaces of exception, Vialette argues that overseas penal colonies merely created the illusion of rehabilitation. The metropole never intended for these convicts-cum-citizens to return to Iberia. Vialette's inclusion of Concepción Arenal, a Galician lawyer and anthropologist who railed against the establishment of penal colonies, reveals "how a woman could participate in the legal debates connecting prison reform and neocolonial movements to keep the Spanish empire alive" (p. 258). The role of redemption was of utmost importance because the rehabilitation that, supposedly, occurred in the penal colony facilitated the rebirth of Spain's colonial power. That Arenal's critique was taken seriously by her contemporaries shows how a woman, in a field otherwise dominated by men, participated in legal debates regarding prison reform and the state of the Spanish Empire.
The delightful contributions that comprise _Unsettling Colonialism_ reveal the complex gender and racial dynamics of Spain's overseas enterprises as the nation faced staggering imperial losses. The authors' analyses of women and colonized subjects in literary, historical, and cultural narratives unsettles colonialism by exposing how marginalized individuals identified potential spaces of resistance within the prevailing discourses of imperial expansion. Readers of this engaging anthology will benefit from a greater awareness of the legacies of the Spanish Empire within the nineteenth-century Hispanic world.
Citation: Anderson Hagler. Review of Murray, N. Michelle; Tsuchiya, Akiko, eds., _Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World_. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55400
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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