Abstract
Artist and anti-apartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach has described his forebodings about the direction in which South Africa has been moving recently. In a nutshell, these stem from his fear that having concentrated their efforts on racial oppression radicals may now be unable or unwilling to combat the dangers of a centralised nation state. Breytenbach believes that the fight against apartheid and the hierarchical division of peoples on the basis of race and ethnicity in some ways allowed the notion of the state to go uncontested. The end of capturing the state from the National Party led anti-apartheid forces to overlook the negatives associated with the state itself. For Breytenbach it has become necessary ‘to put in my plea for doubt and questioning, diversity, the maintenance of our “Ho Chi Minh trail” of underground tunnels of memory and resistance, tolerance, mixing, blending, crankiness, existentialism, humanism, anarchism … To avoid like the plague the tyranny of “being on the side of the angels. ” ’ 1 Living in a moment of ‘historical acceleration’, as Breytenbach calls the present in South Africa, still requires that power and those who wield it continue to be opposed.
The author has benefited from the advice and encouragement of numerous people among whom Antoinette Burton, Lee Cassanelli, Alan Dawley, Robert Engs, Gary Gerstle, Andy Gregg, Rick Halpern, Madhavi Kale, Ken Kusmer, David Ludden, Jonathan Morris, Carl Nightingale, Gyan Prakash, Dan Rodgers, Tom Sugrue, and Mike Zuckerman have been most helpful. Antoinette Burton deserves special thanks for her insightful comments on an earlier draft and for essential references. Many of the arguments in this paper have developed over the years from conversations with Madhavi Kale and are, in some instances, founded on her research on inden tured labour in the British Empire. My debt to her is great indeed. Finally, I am grateful for the questions and comments I received from the Commonwealth Fund Conference participants, particularly those of Shula Marks, Hilary Sapire, Ronald Mendel, and Peter Alexander.
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Notes
Breyten Breytenbach, ‘Dog’s Bone’, New York Review of Books, 26 May 1995, 4–5.
Stanley Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development: Comparative Perspectives (New Haven, 1981), as the title suggests, analyses the role of the state in South African society. The main focus, however, is on the role of different social groups — mining and commercial capitalists, large farmers, and white labourers — in the creation of the apartheid state. It may be difficult to infer from this analysis how these different groups will act once apartheid is eradicated in a state that is perhaps even more centralised than before. See Michael Burawoy, ‘State and Social Revolution in South Africa: Reflections on the Comparative Perspectives of Greenberg and Skocpol’, Kapitalistate, 9 (1981), 93–122. Marxist historians, meanwhile, have argued that race has been manipulated primarily by capitalists who have retained their control over the state, and that race and class relations have merged. As such, they have used class analysis to understand the extreme racial divisions in South Africa. Whether or not their instrumentalist interpretation of the state is correct is beyond the scope of this paper, but questions remain about how different social groups have acted in the downfall of apartheid, whether these suggest different roles than were described by Marxist revisionists in the past, and so on. For Marxist revisionists, see (among others) H.J. and R.E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Harmondsworth, 1969); Martin Legassick, ‘South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence’, Economy and Society, 3 (1974), 255–80; Frederick Johnstone, Class, Race, and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa (London, 1976); Duncan Innes, Anglo American and the Rise of Modern South Africa (New York, 1984); and Robert H. Davies, ‘Mining Capital, the State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901–1913’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 3(1976), 41–69; and Capital, State and White Labour in South Africa, 1900–1960 (Brighton, 1977). See also B.S. Kantor and H.F. Kenny, ‘The Poverty of Neo-Marxism: the case of South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 3 (1976), 20–40, and Harold Wolpe’s response: ‘A Comment on “The Poverty of Neo-Marxism”’ Journal of Southern African Studies (19771) 240–56.
See Chris Lowe, ‘Buthelezi, Inkatha, and the Problem of Ethnic Nationalism in South Africa’, in Joshua Brown et al., History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Philadelphia, 1991), 195–208.
See Colin Bundy, ‘An Image of Its Own Past? Towards a Comparison of American and South African Historiography’, Radical History Review, 46/7 (1990) for a discussion of historiographical shifts in both the United States and South Africa, as well as some discussion of future developments among radical historians of South Africa. National boundaries are not questioned in this article in the ways proposed here. Ibid., 82–104. For shifts in the historiography of Reconstruction in America, see Bernard Weisberger, ‘The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography’, Journal of Southern History. 25 (1959). 427–47.
William Finnegan, ‘The Election Mandela Lost’, New York Review of Books, 20 October 1994, 33–34.
Ibid., 33.
Hermann Giliomee and Jannie Gagiano, eds, The Elusive Search for Peace: South Africa, Israel and Northern Ireland (Cape Town, 1990);
Donald Hannan Akinson, God’s People: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Ithaca, 1992). See also
George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1985), 319.
Giliomee stands at the forefront of such reinterpretation. See, for example, ‘“Survival in Justice”: An Afrikaner Debate over Apartheid’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36:3 (July 1994), 527–48;
‘Democratization in South Africa’, Political Science Quarterly, 110:1 (1995), 83–104. Unlike other authors, however, Giliomee is pessimistic about the potential for the emergence of a liberal democracy in South Africa. More optimistic authors are: F. van Zyl Slabbert, The Quest for Democracy: South Africa in Transition (Johannesburg, 1992); Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, The Opening of the Apartheid Mind: Options for the New South Africa (Berkeley, 1993).
Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York, 1989);
Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, 1993), 3–23;
Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994). Nicholas Lemann’s widely acclaimed The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (New York, 1991) revives the Frazier-Elkins-Moynihan thesis about the weak black family through his sharecropper thesis.
Alan Brinkley, ‘For Their Own Good’ New York Review of Books (26 May 1994), 43.
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), esp. 381–87.
Rob Gregg, ‘The More Things Change…’, Chartist (November–December 1992).
The main book-length comparative studies of the United States and South Africa are: John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York, 1982);
George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981);
Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds, The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981); and, Stanley Greenberg, Raceand State in Capitalist Development. Debates between Edna Bonacich and Michael Burawoy over divided and split labour markets, while not explicitly comparative, extend to both countries and have comparative implications: Burawoy, ‘The Capitalist State in South Africa: Marxist and Sociological Perspectives on Race and Class’ Political Power and Social Theory, 2 (1981); Bonacich, ‘Capitalism and Race in South Africa: A Split Market View’, ibid. Similarly, William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago, 1978), is implicitly comparative, founded in large measure on Pierre van den Berghe’s typology in Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York, 1967).
George Fredrickson, for example, argues that the differences between Jim Crow in the South and ‘native segregation’ in South Africa ‘are of such a degree as to cast doubt on the value of a detailed comparison of the unequal treatment of southern blacks during the Jim Crow era and the lot of Africans under segregation or apartheid since 1910’. White Supremacy, 241. Fredrickson nevertheless proceeds to make just such a ‘detailed comparison’ and finds differences between the two systems of segregation are ‘too great, in terms of both underlying structures and patterns of historical development, to sustain comparison based on analogy’. Ibid. 250. While John Cell was able to build a book on this analogy, it is true that he too found substantial differences between the two countries’ systems.
Ian Tyrell, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’, American Historical Review, 96:4 (October 1991), 1031–55.
Tyrell, ‘American Exceptionalism’, 1035–36. Greg Cuthbertson, ‘Racial Attraction: Tracing the Historiographical Alliances between South Africa and the United States’, Journal of American History, 81:3 (December 1994), 1132.
Fredrickson, ‘Comparative History’, in Michael Kanunen, ed., The Past Before Us (Ithaca, 1986). Fredrickson attempts to move beyond this national focus in The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, 1988), but his Weberian typology of different societies, fulfils the same goal. Peter Kolchin, in ‘Comparing American History’, in Kutler and Katz, eds, The Promise of American History (Baltimore, 1982), 65, asserts that ‘most historical judgments are implicitly comparative’ and that ‘comparative history constitutes the effort to do explicitly what most historians do most of the time’. He does not, however, question the national orientation of most historical judgements and his own comparative work, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge MA,1987) fits this model; see also, ‘Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective’, Journal of American History, 70:3 (Dec. 1983). Other works on slavery typical of this focus are: Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959); Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (New York, 1967); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971); Richard R. Beeman, ‘Labor Forces and Race Relations: A Comparative View of the Colonization of Brazil and Virginia’, Political Science Quarterly, LXXXVI:4 (Dec. 1971); and Richard S. Dunn, ‘A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799 to 1828’, William and Mary Quarterly, XXXIV (January 1977). Ira Katznelson, Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900–30, and Britain, 1948–68 (New York, 1973) reaches for national conclusions about race when a study of New York City and London might have different imperial stories to tell. In City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago, 1981), he shows his affinity for the idea of American exceptionalism. Comparing the American city to the European he neglects to consider the possibility that while London, Paris and Stockholm may look different from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, other cities like Bombay, Johannesburg and Manila may be structured very similarly to them. Eric Foner, in Nothing But Freedom (Baton Rouge, 1983), 2–3, endeavours to use comparative analysis ‘to move beyond “American exceptionalism” to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the problem of emancipation and its aftermath’. And yet he arrives at a conclusion that ‘sympathetic local and state governments during Reconstruction afforded American freedmen a form of political and economic leverage unmatched by their counterparts in other societies’. Generalising from South Carolinian experiences, and informed by the movement towards a ‘Second Reconstruction’, Foner’s comparative study, too, falls foul of the nationalist tendency.
An interesting exception to this rule is the institution of slavery itself, which had to be considered ‘peculiar’ in order for it to be comfortably incorporated into the notion of ‘American’. For further discussion of the intersectedness of histories, see Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, American Historical Review, 99:5 (December 1994), 1486. Sport which has been tied to colonialism and imperialism, and which has transnational histories has received insufficient attention from comparativists. For a compelling exception to this rule, see Ian Tyrell, ‘The Emergence of Modern American Baseball c.1850–80’, in Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan, eds, Sport in History (Queensland, 1979).
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991), 65–92.
Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, eds, Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986), makes no mention of slavery, abolitionism or emnires generally.
E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York, 1978), 245–301. In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London, 1994), 27–33, David Roediger argues (contra Sean Wilentz) that the existence of slavery and the prominence of race in the United States makes American labour exceptional when compared to European societies. Wilentz, ‘Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement’, International Labor and Working Class History, 26 (1984), 1–36.
Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988). See also,
Gregg, ‘Group Portrait with Lady’, Reviews in American History, 20 (1992).
C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (New York, 1989). For attempts to theorise empire in American studies, see William Appelman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York, 1980); Amy Kaplan, ‘Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture’, in Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds, Cultures of US Imperialism (Durham, 1993).
Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 15. This important conceptualisation for British history has been further developed by Linda Colley in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992). See also,
Antoinette Burton, ‘Rules of Thumb: British History and “Imperial Culture” in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, Women’s History Review, 3:4 (1994); and
Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley, 1975). While being careful to see the imperial considerations in the political incorporation of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, we need also to be aware of the ways in which others besides Anglo-Saxons and Celts were incorporated into the imperial model. Moreover it is important to be aware that just because empire is significant this does not mean that only the history of the metropole is important, while histories of the peripheries should remain just that. This is an assumption that has been present to some extent in Eric Hobsbawm’s work. As Tony Judt notes in his review of The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, Eric Hobsbawm is ‘unashamedly Eurocentric’. Building on this unashamedly eurocentric foundation, Judt notes: ‘Any history of the world in our century is of necessity a history in large measure of the things Europeans (and North Americans) did to themselves and to others, and of how non-Europeans reacted to them and were (usually adversely) affected. That, after all, is what is wrong with the twentieth century, seen from a “third world” perspective, and to criticize Hobsbawm, as some reviewers have done, for understanding this and writing accordingly, seems to me incoherent.’ ‘Downhill all the Way’, The New York Review of Books (25 May 1995), 21. Understanding that an imperial meridian exists should lead towards ‘coherence’ founded on the realisation that what non-Europeans did was in fact as important as, and in some cases more important than the actions of Europeans. An imperial perspective allows one to see how the actions of a Toussaint L’Ouverture in Saint Domingue could have an impact from Savannah to Moscow, a John Chilembwe in Nyasaland could affect people from South Africa to Edinburgh. The agency of all — white working classes, white elites, and non-Europeans alike — was limited by the imperial terrain, but that terrain was shaped by all, sometimes with minimal regard to the power relations within it. See Ranajit Guha, ‘Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography’, in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies VI (Delhi, 1992), in which he critiques the ‘Cambridge approach’ to South Asian history for ‘writing up Indian history as a “portion of the British History”’, 305. For the significance of Toussaint on Jefferson and Napoleon, see Michael Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Obliaue Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley, 1993).
Judith R. Walkowitz, for example, tells of the almost orientalist vision of East London when compared to West London; City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 19, 193. See also
Ruth H. Lindborg, ‘The “Asiatic” and the Boundaries of Victorian Englishness’, Victorian Studies (Spring 1994);
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993);
Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York, 1992).
See Henry Jones Ford, The Scotch-Irish in America (Princeton, 1915).
This number is used by Salman Rushdie in both Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London, 1991) and The Satanic Verses (New York, 1988). It also appears in the movie Masala (Canada, 1993), by director Srinivas Krishna.
Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York, 1994), 1, 5. Another attempt to make transnational linkages can be found in George M. Fredrickson, ‘Resistance to White Supremacy: Nonviolence in the US South and South Africa’, Dissent (Winter 1995), 61–70, which draws on the Gandhian influences in both American and South African resistance. The reliance on a national comparison is evident, and this leads to the rather predictable comparison being made between South African political violence and black-on-black violence in the United States. Since this comparison ends in the claim that ‘in the short run, the need for more and better policing has become evident to many blacks’ this national bias must certainly be considered a shortcoming; Fredrickson, ‘Resistance’, 70.
Mtesa, the Kabuka of Buganda, made the initial appeal for missionaries, which Stanley reported in November 1875. He added, according to Thomas Pakenham, that ‘here was the most promising field for a mission in all the pagan world’; The Scramble for Africa (New York. 1991), 28.
Cell, The Highest Stage, 33–45. For an excellent book-length study of African Methodists in South Africa, see James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York. 1995).
For Turner’s attitudes towards the freedpeople, see Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1980), 458; for Coppin’s views of Southerners, see
Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia’s African Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890–1940 (Philadelphia, 1993), 94–95, 196; see also,
Levi J. Coppin, Observations of Persons and Things in South Africa, 1900–1904 (Philadelphia, 1905); and,
Adelaide Cromwell Hill and Martin Kilson, eds, Apropos of Africa: Sentiments of Negro American Leaders on Africa from the 1800s to the 1950s (London. 1969). 44–47.
George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh, 1958).
Brian Wilan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, 1876–1932 (Berkeley, 1984), 259–81. For additional connections between African-Americans and Africans, see Robin D.G. Kelley, ‘Introduction’ in C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Chicago, 1995). 1–33.
Tim Couzens, ‘“Moralizing Leisure Time”: The Transatlantic Connection and Black Johannesburg, 1918–1936’, in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, eds, Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (Harlow, 1982).
Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York, 1992), 5, 21.
Gregg, ‘Beyond Boundaries, Beyond the Whale’, American Quarterly, 45:4 (December 1993), 631–38.
Dennis C. Dickerson, The Land of the Southern Cross: John A. Gregg and South Africa (New Orleans, 1990);
Levi J. Coppin, Unwritten History (New York, 1968);
Robert R. Wright, Jr, Eighty-Seven Years Behind the Black Curtain (Philadelphia, 1968);
William Henry Heard, From Slavery to the Bishopric (Philadelphia, 1924);
Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot (New York, 1967);
Wilson J. Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York, 1989) 179–95; Appiah, In My Father’s House, 10–23 (Crummell) and 28–46 (Du Bois).
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993), 1–40. See Madhavi Kale, Review of Black Atlantic, in Social History (forthcoming).
Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London, 1993); Gregg, Sparks;
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989). For an example of assumptions about division within the African diaspora, see Clarence E. Walker’s unfounded assertion that Americans could not have supported Marcus Garvey in the numbers some have claimed simply because he was Jamaican. Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville, 1991), 34–55.
Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia (Victoria, 1986), 105–13.
Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914, vol. 1, New Babylon (Harlow, 1982), 108.
For one compelling example of Americans in South Africa and prospecting migrants, see Mary and Richard Bradford, eds, An American Family on the African Frontier (Colorado, 1993).
C.W. De Kiewiet, A History of South Africa (Oxford, 1978). James Campbell notes that more than half the mines on the Witwatersrand were managed by Americans (‘one frustrated Rhodesian mining engineer complained that it was impossible to get a job without an American accent’); Songs of Zion, 126–7. Moreover, these transients did not merely stick to mining. Once the Australian gold rush ended, Pacific islands like Fiji were inundated with speculators looking for more gold and mineral deposits. When their efforts to locate such deposits failed, and other opportunities appeared, they turned to a wide range of capitalist endeavours. The emergence of the sugar plantation system in Fiji, for example, which drew on the Indian indentured labour (a system established in the British Caribbean after emancipation), was just one such development. No doubt others played important roles in the coming of sugar and Chinese indentured labourers to Hawaii. I am indebted to John D. Kelly for this information.
The antecedents to such labour practices were not, as might be expected, the wage labouring systems of North America, but rather the indentured labour systems developed by Anglo-American capitalists in the years after the end of slavery. For an explanation of the process by which this occurred, see Madhavi Kale, Casting Labor: Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to the British Caribbean (forthcoming); ‘Projecting Identities: Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana, 1836–1885’, in Peter van der Veer, ed., Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora (Philadelphia, 1995), 73–92; ‘Opening Salvo: Making a Colonial Labor Shortage in Post-Abolition British Guiana and Trinidad, 1834–45’, unpublished paper presented to the Eleventh International Economic History Congress, Milan, September 1994; and ‘Casting Labor in the Imperial Mold: Indian Indentured Migration to the British Caribbean, 1837–45’, unpublished paper presented to the International Conference on Challenge and Change: The Indian Diaspora in its Historical and Contemporary Contexts, Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, August 1995.
For a full description of the methods used to deprive the Chinese of access to gold mines and then exclude them from the United States, see Connie Young Yu, ‘The Chinese in American Courts’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 4:3 (1972); and
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971). De Kiewiet, A History of South Africa, 166. There was also, in South Africa, an exclusion of Chinese indentured labourers (‘celestials’) in 1906; Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (New York, 1988), 47–53.
George J. Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (Montclair, NJ, 1969), 336.
White, quoted in Philippa Levine, ‘Rough Usage: Prostitution, Law and the Social Historian’, in Adrian Wilson, ed., Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and its Interpretation (Manchester, 1993), 276.
Ruth Rosen, Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore, 1982).
The ‘French Madam’, Matilda Hermann, for example, paid about $5000 each year to the police. W.T. Stead, Satan’s Invisible World Displayed (New York. 1974. orig. pub. 1898). 127.
Other terms used by women were housekeeper, milliner, musician and florist. Van Onselen, New Babylon, 119–23. Philippa Levine, ‘Women and Prostitution: Metaphor, Reality, History’, Canadian Journal of History, XXVIII (December 1993), 484.
Veena Talwar Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash, eds, Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (Delhi. 1991). 23–61.
Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (New York, 1980); and,
City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 21–22. Levine, ‘Women and Prostitution’, 482; ‘Rough Usage’, 266–92; and ‘Consistent Contradictions: Prostitution and Protective Labour Legislation in Nineteenthcentury England’, Social History, 19 (January 1994), 17–35.
See, for example, the experiences of Chinese and Japanese prostitutes described by Lucie Cheng, ‘Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-century America’, in Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds, Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the US before World War II (Berkeley, 1984);
Yuji Ichioka, ‘Ameyuki-san: Japanese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America’, Amerasia, 4:1 (1977) 1–21, and
The Issei (New York, 1988).
Robin D.G. Kelley, ‘We are Not What We Seem’, Journal of American History, 80:1 (June 1993), 75–112; and
‘An Archaeology of Resistance’, American Quarterly, 44 (June 1992), 292–98. For a critique of Scott’s work along these lines, see Haynes and Prakash, ‘Introduction: The Entanglement of Power and Resistance’, in Contesting Power, 2–4, 9–11; and Timothy Mitchell, ‘Everyday Metaphors of Power’, Theory and Society, 19 (1990).
Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (Boston, 1990), 123;
Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994), 174–78.
Du Bois in Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984), 61. See also,
Dan Czitrom, ‘Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913’, Journal of American History, 78:3 (1991), 548;
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976), 96–98. Howe devotes only two pages to prostitution, and claims that, along with crime, ‘it was never at the center of Jewish immigrant life’, 101. This claim perhaps shows the success Jewish leaders had struggling to disassociate their ethnic group from the taint of ‘crime’. Defining ‘the center’ of immigrant life is problematic and is generally undertaken only when it is deemed important to push to the imagined periphery of one’s own group behaviour considered common to other people.
Lisa Lowe, ‘Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1 (Spring 1991).
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, in Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia, 1986), 114, makes no mention of prostitution, and yet the manner in which many Japanese-American men resisted women’s efforts to join the paid labour force (even under the direst economic conditions) provide examples of how men felt the behaviour of their spouses reflected badly on them and Japanese-Americans as a whole.
Kale, ‘Casting Labor in the Imperial Mold’. The other side of this nationalism coin, of course, is the anxiety whites in the United States and British Empire had that ‘their women’ might have been ‘violated’ by blacks and Indians respectively. Thus, any lynching and all the horrors perpetrated by the British in 1857 could be justified by claims (most often spurious) that white women had been in some way dishonoured. See Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal (London, 1926), 38; and Gregg and Kale, ‘The Empire and Mr. Thompson: The Making of Indian Princes and the English Working Class’ (forthcoming).
Japanese nationalists and government officials, however, were far more successful in controlling access to prostitutes in America than were the Chinese. Cheng, ‘Free, Indentured, Enslaved’; Ichioka, ‘Ameyuiki-Sen’, 16–17. In Bombay in 1911, the Turkish Consul, upset by the association between prostitution and ‘Arabs’, persuaded the Government of India to repatriate one brothel-keeper and many women to Baghdad. It is unknown whether the Japanese intervened on behalf of the many Japanese prostitutes: S.M. Edwardes, Crime in India (London, 1924), 87.
This is based on a cursory study of several texts and syllabi. The texts include: Joseph R. Conlin, The American Past: A Survey of American History (New York, 1993);
George Brown Tindall, America: A Narrative History (New York, 1988);
James A. Henretta et al., America’s History (New York, 1993);
John M. Blum et al., The National Experience: A History of the United States (New York, 1993);
Morison et al., A Concise History of the American Republic (New York, 1977); and
John A. Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States (New York, 1979).
Nell Painter’s, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York, 1987) devotes one page to American Indians, though this is not included in an analysis of westward expansion but in a chapter on ‘The White Man’s Burden — Imperialism’. Even Alan Trachtenberg’s Incorporation of America uses this layout, though for Trachtenberg the dichotomy established on the frontier between ‘civilization’ and ‘savage’ becomes central to the meaning of ‘America’ itself; 25–37.
John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, 1931);
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955);
James Turner, ‘Understanding the Populists’, Journal of American History, 67:2 (1980), 354–73;
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt inAmerica (New York, 1978);
Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America (Cambridge, 1976); and,
Robert C. McMath, Jr, American Populism: A Social History (New York. 1993).
Throughout the period of the populist movement Indians saw their territory reduced from 138 million to 78 million acres. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 163. Moreover, this was a period of the commercialisation of the romanticised Wild West, both in dime novels and in Wild West shows. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 22–25, and Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (New York, 1990), 321–47.
This is not merely a condition for the mid-western and western states. Ward Churchill writes: ‘No area within what are now the 48 contiguous states of the United States is exempt from having produced its own historical variant of the Sand Creek phenomenon. The very existence of the United States in its modern territorial and demographic configuration is contingent upon this fact. Racially-oriented invasion, conquest, genocide and subsequent denial are integral, constantly recurring and thus defining features of the Euroamerican make-up from the instant the first boatload of self-ordained colonists set foot in the New World.’ Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (Monroe, ME, 1992), 119.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920).
Joseph Howard, Strange Empire: Louis Riel and the Metis People (Toronto, 1974), 136–37.
Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column (Cambridge, 1960); for the description of Stanley, see 209–309. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 66; A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London, 1978), 229–32. Morton notes that Theodor Hertzka, in Freeland (published in the same year as Donnelly’s work), also located a Utopia in East Africa. According to Morton, ‘Both books… were written in the very years in which the British East Africa Co. was preparing the way for the formal annexation of the whole region’, 232. Donnelly did not pick Uganda at random; he must have followed events in Africa closely.
Kenneth P. Vickery, in ‘“Herrenvolk” Democracy and Egalitarianism in South Africa and the US South’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (1974), 309–28, makes a similar comparison to that made here between Populists and Voortrekkers, though his argument is confined to the US South during slavery and Reconstruction.
Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds, A History of South Africa to 1870 (London, 1982), 407. Fredrickson employs three ‘crucial variables’ — demography, geography and the role of imperial power in South Africa; White Supremacy, xxi.
Turner, ‘Understanding Populists’, 368. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages (New York, 1979), 253.
Thus, if we are to join Alan Brinkley in seeing continuities in republican political tradition from the populists to the followers of Father Coughlin and Huey Long in the 1930s, we must do so bearing in mind both the critique of capitalism and the status anxiety inherited from the days of frontier expansion. Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York, 1983), 143–68.
Prakash, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Indian Historiography Is Good to Think’, in Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, 1992), 353–88.
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Gregg, R. (1997). Apropos Exceptionalism: Imperial Location and Comparative Histories of South Africa and the United States. In: Halpern, R., Morris, J. (eds) American Exceptionalism?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25584-9_12
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