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Subject: H-Net Review [H-Poland]: Cieślak on Zysiak and Śmiechowski and Piskała and Marzec and Kaźmierska and Burski, 'From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź - Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897-1994'
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Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Kamil Piskała, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja
Kaźmierska, Jacek Burski. From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź -
Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897-1994.
Krakow Jagiellonian University Press, 2019. 308 pp. $60.00
(paper), ISBN 978-83-233-4488-9.
Reviewed by Marta Cieślak (University of Arkansas at Little Rock)
Published on H-Poland (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Anna Muller
_From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź - Industrial City and Discourses of
Asynchronous Modernity, 1897-1994_ by Agata Zysiak, Kamil
Śmiechowski, Kamil Piskała, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska, and
Jacek Burski is an important book for one major reason: it offers
English-language readers an opportunity to grapple with the history
of one of the most fascinating but globally less-known Polish cities.
This is not to say that literature on Łódź in English does not
exist. Articles touching on different aspects of Łódź's history as
well as issues pertinent to the city's present have been widely
published in the last three decades. Book-length publications,
however, are much scarcer. Some comparative studies place Łódź in
the context of other European cities (_A Comparative Study of Łódź
and Manchester: Geographies of European Cities in Transition _edited
by Stanisław Liszewski and Craig Young [1997] and _Lviv and Łódź
at the Turn of 20th Century: Historical Outline and Natural
Environment_ edited by Mykola Habrel and Elżbieta Kobojek [2013]).
English-language monographs and pedagogically invaluable collections
of primary documents on Jewish Łódź remain some of the most
important sources on the city's history for international readers
(for example, _The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944_ edited by
Lucjan Dobroszycki [1987], _Ghettostad: Łódź and the Making of a
Nazi City_ by Gordon Horwitz [2010], _Jews in Łódź, 1820-1939_
edited by Antony Polonsky [2004], _Life in Transit: Jews in Postwar
Lodz, 1945-1950_ by Shimon Redlich [2010], and _Łódź Ghetto: A
History_ edited and translated by Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk and Isaiah
Trunk [2006]). _From Cotton and Smoke_ thus joins the still limited
English-language scholarship on a city that is not as known to global
audiences as Warsaw or Cracow but the history of which encapsulates
the history of Poland. Once culturally diverse and brimming with
opportunities to be a heart of Europe, Łódź has strikingly
embodied the ups and downs of recurrent crises and transitions in
Polish history. At the same time, it has always struggled with
ambitions to become more visible, more important, and more modern (as
the authors of _From Cotton and Smoke _argue), regardless of what
that meant at different points of history.
The premise of the authors, whose backgrounds range from sociology
and historical sociology to history and anthropology, is that Łódź
is (or more precisely, historically was) a site of "asynchronous
modernity," where narratives, visions, and desires of progress and
advancement clashed with the fluctuating fortunes of
industrialization and urbanization. In the case of Łódź during the
period under investigation (1897-1994, albeit with gaps), the latter
more often than not implied nonexistent or flawed urban
infrastructure, labor unrest, and insufficient welfare provisions
rather than a polished modern metropolis. According to Zysiak,
Śmiechowski, Piskała, Marzec, Kaźmierska, and Burski, Łódź
repeatedly "found itself a city on the edge of tomorrow, a vanguard
and a victim of progress. Its history," the authors note, "is a
series of struggles to become modern, to be 'just on time.'"
Modernity in Łódź, they argue, "triggered a constant will to
become modern without asynchronous distortions, to achieve the
harmony of a city that would finally meet the demands of the day" (p.
20). In short, Łódź was always "behind" but was also aware of its
provincial or even backward status and thus strove to shake it off
and join the club of truly modern cities. What that implied is to a
large extent the central question of the book.
The authors mine local newspapers in search for debates over what
Łódź was and what it could or should have been. The newspapers,
they argue, became a platform for the creation of local discourses
that responded to the global promises of modernity and in which an
ideal of urban modernity constantly clashed with less-than-ideal
reality. The methodology is effective, particularly because the
authors enrich their newspaper discourse analysis--the book's
analytical foundation--with ample use of secondary literature, which
allows them to analyze contemporary press debates against the
background of what was really going on in the city. Zysiak,
Śmiechowski, Piskała, Marzec, Kaźmierska, and Burski see the
newspaper debates representing different political spectra and
proposing various solutions to commonly identified urban-industrial
problems as "modernity projects" that not only mirrored the views of
local journalists, activists, and politicians but also tell us
something important about the readers, or urban residents invested in
the victories and failures of their city (pp. 26-27).
_From Cotton and Smoke _consists of four main chapters, in addition
to an introduction and conclusions, each written by different authors
and focused on a different historical period. Chapter 1, by Marzec,
Śmiechowski, and Zysiak, discusses Łódź's transition into an
industrial hub of the Russian Empire, highlighting the years
1897-1914, which the authors see as the key period for the creation
of a new modernized vision of "Polish Manchester" (the starting date
of this period marks the emergence of two major daily newspapers,
_Rozwój_ and _Goniec Łódzki_). Chapter 2, by Piskała, focuses on
the years 1918-23 and paints a picture of a city that was trying to
determine its own national, social, and political identity.
Consequently, it serves as a voice in a national quest for identity
taking place at the time in newly independent Poland. Chapter 3, by
Zysiak and Piskała, examines the unique place of Łódź in the
years 1945-49, when Łódź appeared to be on the way to fulfill the
promises of modernity and for a split second became "the most
important city" in new Poland (p. 168). Chapter 4, by Śmiechowski
and Burski, deals with the years 1989-94, which produced the exact
opposite experience for Łódź. While the immediate postwar period
abounded with hope, the post-1989 years exposed the city 's greatest
vulnerabilities and made its path to capitalism particularly
debilitating.
While central research questions and methodology connect all
chapters, each constitutes a separate unit. Chapter 1 (1897-1914)
offers a multifaceted discussion of Łódź's arrival onto the urban
map of Russian Poland. The city's growth from a small town as late as
1860 to an industrial hub by 1913 took many by surprise. But, as
Marzec, Śmiechowski, and Zysiak compellingly show, the same
impressive growth produced a city that local and national observers
repeatedly claimed to be a failure of urbanization. Lacking or
nonexistent infrastructure, extreme economic disparities embodied in
palace-like residences surrounded by slums, or no plan that would
promote further growth all found their place on the list of problems
that local press fervently debated. Simultaneously, the
Polish-language press and other commentators suggested that the
problems were a (by)product of the city's diverse population. This
diagnosis emerged out of a debate that mirrored increasingly ethnic
Polish nationalism developing at a national level. That led some to
suggest that the predatory capitalism in Łódź was an outcome of
the city's social composition, where "foreign elements" (most notably
German and Jewish but also Russian) were to blame for the city's
failures. At the same time, the local Polish-language press strove to
propose a vision of an urban polity that needed to transcend ethnic,
religious, and linguistic differences to make Łódź the modern city
that it deserved to be. Marzec, Śmiechowski, and Zysiak demonstrate
how the Polish-language press navigated an ethnically nationalist
concept of citizenship in the city's multireligious and multilingual
landscape. A vision of Łódź where modernization implied
Polonization coexisted with a recognition of the city's multicultural
reality. The aim of the latter was to "self-assert" a sense of local
identity (p. 87). The analysis of the tension between ethnic
nationalist trends and the local experience of remarkable diversity
is among the chapter's most interesting contributions.
The authors offer a wide-spanning discussion and achieve a goal of
creating order out of often self-contradictory and inconsistent press
debates. In a way, Marzec, Śmiechowski, and Zysiak make sense out of
Łódź that appeared confusing even to its contemporary observers.
However, the authors' at times imprecise approach to history writing
leads to the chapter's unforced weaknesses. For example, on pages
39-40, while discussing nineteenth-century Łódź as "an industrial
hub" that "lacked all the attributes of an urban lifestyle"
recognized by Europeans, the authors insert a comment "albeit quite
typically absent [that is, the attributes] in colonial worlds, like
India or the area dubbed the 'Wild West.'" To suggest that colonial
India, infrastructural heir to the Mughal Empire, whose cities were
envy of Europeans, and home to British urbanization projects (with
New Delhi and Kolkata as two classic examples) was a colonial
province with cities that functioned merely as industrial hubs is
simply wrong. The use of "Wild West" illustrates a different issue.
It is not enough for historians today to place this obsolete term in
quotation marks. Its use represents the same settler colonial
perspective that led to genocidal policies, which eradicated entire
civilizations from those territories in the first place. Finally, the
abundant use of passive voice weakens the chapter's otherwise
interesting conclusions. The authors too often do not hold themselves
accountable to determine agents of historical processes that they
discuss. This, as it usually does, leads to vague statements that beg
for precision. Sentences like "The typical citizen of Łódź was
certainly not viewed as Polish, or even German. He [sic!] was
rather..."; "It was feared that the new capitalist order would change
people's mindsets"; and "the vision of Polish national capitalism was
more grounded in a quite literal ethnic Polonization" are only three
(among many more) examples that all signal important processes yet
all deny the reader agents behind them (pp. 85, 89, 92). Who viewed?
Who feared? Who grounded? Authors? Editors? Urban reformers? Readers?
A particular segment of Łódź's residents? Given the centrality of
the tension between ethnic nationalism and multiethnic urban polity
in the chapter as well as the authors' methodological claim that
discourses in local press contained multiple actors these are
critical determinations. The passive voice provides a convenient
hiding space where the authors can avoid to make them.
Chapter 2 (1918-23) highlights the urban challenges of national
independence. Already during World War I, the proximity of Łódź to
the Russian-German border turned it into a site of fierce imperial
competition. At the beginning of 1917, the German-occupied city
witnessed its first election to the city council. Piskała notes that
this decision was as much a gesture of good will from the new
occupying power as a way to divide "the responsibility for the
population's deteriorating material situation" (p. 104). More
interestingly, the author argues that this turn to democratic
politics, absent during the Russian rule, positioned debates on
Łódź's modern status in relation to a municipal government
"appointed and supervised by the citizens" (p. 106). After the war
ended, the Polish-language press no longer represented an elusively
defined "Polish nation" fighting for their own voice in the city that
was purportedly overtaken by "foreign elements." Now, newspapers
officially and unofficially represented political factions that
themselves were a product of polarizations. Proposals of reforms were
steeped in the competition over power and thus over who was
responsible for the city's transformations. Unsurprisingly,
left-leaning newspapers had very different visions of modern Łódź
than their right-leaning counterparts. "Municipal socialism" of the
left competed with "national capitalism" of the right. While both
narratives reflected the recognition of the same urban problems
(lacking infrastructure, poverty, economic disparities, etc.), they
pointed to different culprits. For the left, in the center of
Łódź's misfortunes was class warfare. The immediate postwar
municipal government dominated by socialists and its supporters in
the press emphasized it was time for the working class to mobilize
politically and gain control over the city that was always theirs.
Conversely, the right-wing press determined the culprit to be
(obviously) the socialist municipal government as well as the city's
Jewish population, a discursive offender that comes as no surprise to
the students of Poland's interwar history. Piskała's compelling
reading of anti-Semitism in the right-wing press exemplifies how
anti-Semitism, while certainly not new in Polish-language press in
the city, took a powerful role of "a vehicle of modernity" (p. 141).
In short, Łódź was not as modern as it could have been, such
newspapers as _Kurier Łódzki_ or _Rozwój_ claimed, because of the
mythically unlimited power that "Jews" held over the city.
Piskała's clear and focused analysis of political polarizations
reveals some of the most tragic outcomes of the post-World War I
victory of ethnic nationalism. In the reality where subsequent local
elections shifted power from left-wing parties to a nationalist
right-wing coalition and back, despite the city's diverse political
landscape, ideological wars replaced specific plans or even a
discussion that would aim to advance Łódź. As Piskała writes,
"the modern promise of order and prosperity" in the city was now
linked to the belief that "the triumph of one of the parties in the
ideological war" would be enough to get Łódź out of the postwar
crisis. As the two political camps applied similar rhetorical
strategies of "binary oppositions" and the language of threat and
confrontation, the victim of this ideological war was first and
foremost Łódź (p. 126).
One inconsistency of the chapter is its premise, which undermines
some of the arguments proposed in chapter 1 and thus the book's
coherence. Piskała's starting point is the notion of "the decline of
the 'Polish Manchester'" built on the assumption that the post-World
War I years no longer supported "the positive image of the city, as
one of success and continuous prosperity." While the author notes
that the perception of the city as the embodiment of "chaos and the
fall of morality" existed too and, in fact, competed with "positive
stereotype[s]," he concludes, "it is hard to say which one clearly
dominated before 1914" (p. 101). That would have been more convincing
if chapter 1 did not suggest repeatedly that "success and continuous
prosperity" were dreams rather than perception present among
Łódź's residents and observers.
Chapter 3 (1945-49), the most multilayered in the book, best
illustrates the book's underlying argument. Immediately after World
War II, Łódź became "postwar Cinderella," ready to take the role
of _the_ leading metropolis in once again restructured Poland (p.
165). The industrial and working-class identity of the city coupled
with the fact that, unlike Warsaw, it was relatively spared by war
damages made Łódź an ideal leader of the new and now
socialist-communist vision of urban modernity. Furthermore, the city
finally gained a long-desired status of an intellectual hub. By 1946,
five institutions of higher educations were established and in 1948
the renowned film school opened. However, in a bitter twist of irony,
this short-lived triumph soon turned Łódź into a city whose needs
were not as urgent as the needs of the cities destroyed by the war,
most notably Warsaw. Zysiak and Piskała note, "Łódź once again
fell outside the core of urban change in Poland" (p. 170).
Simultaneously, a changing path of Polish communism shaped the press
that, on the one hand, reached unprecedented numbers of readers and
immediately after the war became a site of a still pluralistic
discussion and, on the other, after 1948 turned to "totalitarian
newspeak" (p. 174).
The chapter's carefully developed narrative highlights rhetorical
somersaults that the press applied to project hope and promise of the
new regime while acknowledging the city's challenging post-World War
II predicament. The avoidance of topics that would imply negativity
or trigger postwar trauma, including virtual silence about what had
happened to the city's Jewish population, allowed the press to
promote a sense of optimism. Its building block was a juxtaposition
of the capitalist past, "dreadful" because steeped in "social
injustice, political dictatorship, economic instability and the
proceeding degradation of Łódź," with a new socialist model of
modernization led by the same workers who had resisted the Nazi
occupation (p. 186). Interestingly, Zysiak and Piskała demonstrate
that the press revered the working class "as torchbearers of progress
and democracy" but did not encourage their direct engagement (p.
188). Any political, not to mention revolutionary, action of the
workers was allegedly unnecessary. The life of and in Łódź after
the war was to be, in an almost mysterious way, apolitical because it
focused on improvements in infrastructure. Those improvements would
ensure dignified jobs, access to education, health care, recreational
facilities, etc. In short, postwar socialist modernity signified a
path toward "normal" or "decent" life in a city that was to be
finally orderly, functional, and well planned (p. 192). The authors
call this short-lived trend "modest modernization." By 1948, it was
replaced by the Stalinist vision of "spectacular, gigantic and even
pompous plans and investments" (p. 215).
The chapter's particular strength lies in how it weaves local press
discussions into the postwar history of adjusting to and inventing
new political and rhetorical regimes. There is something tragic in
the short moment of Łódź's history that the authors outline, when
a vision of modernity strove to be hopeful yet seemingly realistic
(thus "modest" given the scarcity of resources). The silence around
the Holocaust only emphasizes a sense of tragedy as this absence
paradoxically reveals the very real trauma that Łódź lived through
yet that the postwar press refused to acknowledge. Zysiak and
Piskała's chapter is also an important contribution to the
scholarship that unveils the complexity of Polish
socialism/communism, which, as the authors show, in the postwar years
not only did not fit the clear-cut Soviet/Stalinist model but also
developed local varieties that attempted to echo local concerns.
Chapter 4 (1989-94) documents Łódź's newly gained status of "the
post-industrial orphan." Śmiechowski and Burski focus on another
crisis in Łódź's chronicles, when with the near death of textile
industry, the city became "a residue of a bygone order, a backward
textile colossus with feet of clay" (p. 218). Even in the overall
landscape of Polish towns and cities hit hard by the post-1989
transition, Łódź stands out as a particularly injured victim of
"the shock of transformation" (p. 230). With no support from the
state, in stark contrast to regions whose economies run on heavy
industries (for example, coalmining), Łódź's once again
restructured press put its trust in foreign capital and complete
privatization. The city's poor image pushed local journalists to
create a counternarrative that would convince the rest of the country
as much as many local residents that Łódź was more than ready to
forge a new capitalist identity. The great industrialists of the
pre-World War I era, who embodied predatory capitalism during the
socialist rule, became now the spirits of the city, its "capitalist
forefathers," who presumably proved Łódź was the historical hub of
entrepreneurial invention (p. 252). Simultaneously, all the very real
issues, including high unemployment, poverty, and no apparent plan to
shake off the city's working-class identity, which was now a
liability, were "framed as the unavoidable costs of modernization"
(p. 253). Presenting the decline and underdevelopment as components
of modernity was perhaps a more honest vision of modernity than those
proposed in the three earlier periods. However, the narrative of
trust in capitalism allowed the press to make sure that while
evidence of the current predicament was irrefutable, it was also only
a transitionary path to a better future. The press aspired to turn
"the city of female textile workers" into "the city of great
businessmen" (p. 252).
This takes us to the book's most glaring absence. For a history of a
city that was once the hub of textile industry, the lack of a serious
analysis of the place of women and gender is an unfortunate shortage.
When a more substantial discussion on women finally appears in
chapter 4, it is problematic to say the least. In the 1970s, the
authors note, a debate on future challenges that Łódź could face
became linked to an overreliance on textiles, which, among other
problems, created a labor force with low wages, "limited professional
skills," and particularly low levels of education. The authors cite
an expert, who suggested that the development of "the
electro-mechanical industry" would "neutralize the over-employment of
women" (p. 220). However, they ignore the inherent gendered nature of
low wages and poor access to education that the 1970s commentator
determined. Building on Małgorzata Mazurek's work on female textile
workers, Śmiechowski and Burski expand their discussion on Łódź
as "the city of women" where "87% of the city's female work force was
employed in local factories." They argue that "this situation"
enabled local authorities to "neglect the needs of the city but also
triggered negative social consequences such as a low fertility rate"
(p. 222). They do not explain what they mean by "a low fertility
rate." Neither do they elaborate on why that would be a "negative
social consequence," particularly in a country where rural and urban
working-class women bore disproportionately large numbers of children
during their lifetimes all the way into the twentieth century. Do the
authors suggest that it would have been a "positive" development if
instead of working in factories the women of Łódź had more
children? While this remains ambiguous, they certainly disregard the
question of reproductive rights and access to birth control, which
must have been at least part of the story behind the lower birth
rates.
As Śmiechowski and Burski continue their debate on how the large
numbers of women in the workforce were somehow linked to the city's
decline or at least its stunted growth, they conclude, "The negative
coincidence of the city's economic, gender and social situations
slowly turned in Łódź into a real time bomb" (p. 222). If the
authors had considered gender to be a critical tool of analysis, they
would have had to conclude that there was nothing "coincidental"
about it. Neither would they have been surprised that the planned
increased price of meat triggered a 1971 women-led strike, or in the
words of the authors, "the 1971 unrest was _actually_ composed of
striking women" (emphasis added). They continue, "For them [the
striking women], appalling living and working conditions and
ever-deepening poverty were much more important than the explicitly
political aspects" (p. 222; see also further discussion on pp.
226-27). The question that immediately emerges here is in what ways
opposing higher prices of food is _not_ political? Especially if
those who strike are also the ones who are paid low wages and forced
to make sure their families are fed? By labeling a protest led by
women workers as of "an economic character without a political
impact," the authors take on the perspective of the communist
authorities that, they note, did not quite know how to negotiate with
women workers whom they labeled "hysterical" (pp. 226, 223).
Śmiechowski and Burski leave this comment unanalyzed although we can
only assume that their mention of the term suggests their awareness
of how gendered it is. Finally, the authors conclude that the strike,
which at one point brought together fifty-five thousand workers and
ended with the government backing off, "was _actually_ the greatest
working-class success in challenging the state authorities in postwar
Poland prior to 1980" (p. 223, emphasis added). If this is the case,
do the authors still maintain that the striking women of Łódź in
the early 1970s were not "explicitly political"? When poverty,
insufficient wages, and appalling conditions are ever _not_
political? Should we really take "the system" (the communist regime)
at their word when it claimed the women's actions were not political
if the same "system" succumbed to their demands (p. 227)? Isn't the
government's capitulation the first piece of evidence for the
political power of the women-led Łódź protests?
As Śmiechowski and Burski move on to a discussion on the post-unrest
years, they write, "Łódź's local politicians, still reeling from
the 1971 strike, wanted to minimize the chance of further _female
contention_" (p. 224, emphasis added). To refer to what the authors
themselves note was the most successful labor unrest in Poland before
1980 as "female contention" demonstrates no understanding of gender
as a category of analysis. Would the authors refer to men-led strikes
as "male contention" or do they imply that when men protest it is
political, but when women oppose a decision of an authoritarian
government it is presumably a demonstration of apolitical "female
contention"? And what about the phrase "feminized working class" (pp.
222, 226)? Should we conclude that there is _the_ working class
consisting of politically motivated men and then there is a
"feminized working class" whose protests were "parochial" because
they focused on food supplies? This kind of language not only reveals
the authors' limited fluency in gender and women's history but also
seems especially troubling in a historical analysis that focuses on
discourse and that, as a result, provides an excellent opportunity to
reexamine the earlier narratives of the women-led protests in
Łódź.
_From Cotton and Smoke _is a noteworthy, even if uneven, book that
introduces Łódź at four critical junctions of its history. The
work's potential rests in its ambitious and mostly successful goal to
show that the local, the national, and the global are never
disconnected and play out in the same spaces. The book's biggest
weakness, however, is the premise of "asynchronous modernity." First,
it is not clear what the authors mean by modernity. Particularly in
the introduction, they use the terms "modernity" and "modernism" as
if they were interchangeable. Confusion only increases when terms
"modern," "modernization," and "modernist" appear in the discussion.
As the authors reflect on what modernity is, what it meant in
Łódź's press, and how it "happen[ed] in the world" they never
explain what modernity is for them (p. 21). Not only do they use
sources on modernism to support their claims on modernity (perhaps
justifiable but that would need further clarification), but they also
replace one term with another (for example, discussion around a quote
from Harsha Ram's book on p. 23; a similar turn on p. 209). Because
"modernity" and "modern" are different from "modernism" and
"modernist" (a similar distinction exists in the Polish language,
where _nowoczesność_ is not the same as _modernizm_), the question
of how the authors see a connection between the two if they suggest
otherwise remains unanswered. A diverse body of cited scholarship
(especially in the introduction) only contributes to the confusion.
An interdisciplinary variety can be powerful but as works
representing history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, literary
studies, and cultural studies populate the footnotes of _From Cotton
and Smoke_, the authors remain on their surfaces. This superficial
use of theories and tools proposed by representatives of different
disciplines is evident in the absence of a coherent theoretical
proposal. If the authors suggest, as they seem to, an equation of
modernity with modernism, this requires an explanation for those
readers for whom a sharp distinction between "modernity" and
"modernism" is uncontentious and taken for granted.
This leads us to "asynchronous." The authors ask, "Where did
modernity take shape day to day?" Their answer ("as paradoxical as it
may seem"): "it was happening elsewhere" (p. 21). The statement might
be rhetorically catchy but historians have reached much more specific
answers to the same question. The authors of _From Cotton and Smoke_
allude to some of them, only to gloss over their findings, presumably
because Zysiak, Śmiechowski, Piskała, Marzec, Kaźmierska, and
Burski appear to operate from within the discourses of modernity
rather than from within the history of modernity. Understandably,
modernity is for the authors connected to urbanization. Yet, as they
themselves point out, "a growing awareness of global entanglements"
signaled departure from metropoles and showed at some point "that
metropolitan modernity has an evil twin in the seemingly backwater of
slave-holding plantations" (p. 22). Herein lies the answer to the
question "Where did modernity take shape day to day?" It was not, as
the authors suggest, "happening elsewhere." As cohorts of scholars of
slavery, modern imperialism, and capitalism have shown time and again
(including Paul Gilroy, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, or Robin
Blackburn, to mention only those cited in _From Cotton and Smoke_),
modernity "was happening" simultaneously (or synchronously) in all
the spaces of "the global entanglements." Already in 1944, Eric
Williams famously argued that there was no British industrial and
political imperial power without slavery in Britain's Caribbean
colonies (_Capitalism and Slavery_). In other words, there is no
modern metropolis (in the sense of a city but also in the sense of an
empire) without the wealth produced at "slave-holding plantations,"
which in the form in which they existed in the Americas were
themselves the powerful mark of modernity (as Blackburn, among
others, demonstrated). The Braudelian-Wallersteinian language of
centers and peripheries (or margins), which the authors of _From
Cotton and Smoke _embrace, have turned out useful in conceptualizing
modernity as inseparable from capitalism and emerging long before
full-blown industrialization. However, as the authors themselves
point out, scholars have demonstrated that what we often see as
peripheries or margins have been absolutely central. The authors of
_From Cotton and Smoke _note, "all those entangled places [also
"slave-holding plantations"], peripheral, but globally connected
industrial centers among them, reveal more about global modernity
than the centers of popular imagination such as London, Paris, or New
York. They _were_ the global history" (p. 22). And here is a problem
with "asynchronous modernity." If that is the case, if conventionally
"peripheral" places reveal so much about modernity, why do we need
"asynchronous" modernity at all? Isn't the unequal development driven
by some historical actors in some places exploiting other historical
actors in the same or other places the essential feature of
modernity, impossible to disconnect from capitalism? Isn't thus slow,
uneven, or even lack of development in one place inescapably
connected with growth in others? In other words, isn't
"asynchronicity" the defining feature of modernity? If in the case of
Łódź, "asynchronous modernity" is a concept that describes a clash
between an idealized vision of a modern metropolis created by and in
discourses and a much less ideal reality, isn't that simply a clear
demonstration of how modernity works? "Asynchronous modernity" as a
term appears simply redundant because modernity has historically
implied a promise of progress that is by definition "asynchronous"
and paradoxically means the absence of what we conventionally think
of as progress for some across geographical locations. To put it
simply, the early squalor, industrial failures, or post-socialist
chaos of Łódź are the building blocks of modernity because the
modernity of even or consistent progress was never more than a
discourse, as the authors' own reflections on "a harmonious
modernity" as a "forever ... unfulfilled promise" confirm (p. 31).
To be sure, while the authors do not present a compelling argument
that "asynchronous modernity" is a concept we need, they largely
succeed at showing the inherent conflicts of modernity. It is an
important contribution in the context of the city like Łódź,
which, as this book illustrates, never lived up to expectations
imposed on it by the local press, residents, and national observers.
Even in the midst of rapid industrial development, as the authors
show, ordinary lower-class city residents were hardly beneficiaries
of progress. The book is at its weakest when it alludes to and
combines yet does not engage with various theoretical approaches
coming from different disciplines, which at times leads to a
superficial discussion of concepts and phenomena that have been more
clearly and empirically explained before or sound catchy but
introduce nothing new to our understanding of modernity (in addition
to "asynchronous modernity," for example, "exceptional normality" on
page 24 or "translocal modernity" on page 21). Conversely, _From
Cotton and Smoke _is the strongest when it is specific, when it
engages with its fascinating primary sources and paints a picture of
a troubled city that longs to fulfill the modern promise that _From
Cotton and Smoke _has at its foundations. I do not know what personal
connections the authors have to the city but something tells me that
they love Łódź as much as the multitude of its fiercest admirers
and defenders, including my father, for whom the ugly-beautiful urban
spaces reflecting both the fulfilled and broken promises of modernity
are what makes Łódź a never-ending but always special and
much-loved work in progress.
Citation: Marta Cieślak. Review of Zysiak, Agata; Śmiechowski,
Kamil; Piskała, Kamil; Marzec, Wiktor; Kaźmierska, Kaja; Burski,
Jacek, _From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź - Industrial City and
Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897-1994_. H-Poland, H-Net
Reviews. September, 2020.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55006
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
