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Totalitarian Dynamics, Colonial History, and Modernity: the US South After the Civil War

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Totalitarian Dynamics, Colonial History, and Modernity: the US South After the Civil War ADVERTIMENT. Lʼaccés als continguts dʼaquesta tesi doctoral i la seva utilització ha de respectar els drets de la persona autora. Pot ser utilitzada per a consulta o estudi personal, així com en activitats o materials dʼinvestigació i docència en els termes establerts a lʼart. 32 del Text Refós de la Llei de Propietat Intel·lectual (RDL 1/1996). Per altres utilitzacions es requereix lʼautorització prèvia i expressa de la persona autora. En qualsevol cas, en la utilització dels seus continguts caldrà indicar de forma clara el nom i cognoms de la persona autora i el títol de la tesi doctoral. No sʼautoritza la seva reproducció o altres formes dʼexplotació efectuades amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva comunicació pública des dʼun lloc aliè al servei TDX. Tampoc sʼautoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX (framing). 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Esta reserva de derechos afecta tanto al contenido de la tesis como a sus resúmenes e índices. WARNING. The access to the contents of this doctoral thesis and its use must respect the rights of the author. It can be used for reference or private study, as well as research and learning activities or materials in the terms established by the 32nd article of the Spanish Consolidated Copyright Act (RDL 1/1996). Express and previous authorization of the author is required for any other uses. In any case, when using its content, full name of the author and title of the thesis must be clearly indicated. Reproduction or other forms of for profit use or public communication from outside TDX service is not allowed. Presentation of its content in a window or frame external to TDX (framing) is not authorized either. These rights affect both the content of the thesis and its abstracts and indexes. 1 Totalitarian Dynamics, Colonial History, and Modernity: The US South After the Civil War Doctoral Thesis in Comparative, Political, and Social History by Lee Herrmann Director: Dr. Francisco José Morente Valero Department of Modern and Early Modern History Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Date of Deposit: June 20, 2018 2 "In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky—her grand old woods—her fertile fields—her beautiful rivers— her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slaveholding, robbery and wrong,— when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing..." -- Frederick Douglass1 "Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history." -- Abraham Lincoln2 1 https://glc.yale.edu/letter-william-lloyd-garrison-january-1-1846 accessed 15/06/18 2 Quoted in Eric Foner. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: Norton, 2011, pg. xiii. 3 Table of Contents Introduction 4 Part One: Reconstruction in the US South: Racialized Capitalism 18 Chapter One: Reconstruction and Economic Coercion 19 Chapter Two: Reconstruction and Racialized Political Control 56 Chapter Three: Jim Crow and the Structural Spread of Racialized Power Relations 95 Part Two: Totalitarianism, Racialized Colonial Power, and Modernity: 135 Emergently True Teleologies Part Three: Soviet and United States Forced Prisoner Labor 186 Chapter One: A Historical Conjuncture and Violent Coercion for Progress 187 Chapter Two: Practical Parallels in the Structure of Coercion 222 Chapter Three: The Organization of Terror 253 Part Four: The Science of Racialized Capitalism, The Model of Modern Development, 286 the Discourse of Dysgenic Apocalypse, and National Socialism Chapter One: Science, Racialized Power, and Modern Development 287 Chapter Two: Exterminationsim, "Hybridity," and 333 Apocalyptic Fantasies in Racist Discourse Chapter Three: Discursive Parallels in Popular Culture 361 and Political Constructions of History Chapter Four: The Structural Continuity of Racialized Capitalism 382 in National Socialist Theory and Practice Conclusions 414 Works Cited 424 Appendix One: Timeline 448 4 Introduction The following comparative examination of certain features shared by the USSR, National Socialist Germany, and the United States will be sufficiently unorthodox that a discussion of methods benefits from identifying a point of departure. Introducing a recent collection of essays discussing twentieth-century European politics of violence, from the genocidal attacks on Armenians, to the Holocaust, and beyond, the historian Javier Rodrigo suggests, by way of identifying fruitful approaches to understanding, that perhaps it is a question of critical inquiry into a certain kind of power. This is the heart of the matter, but such a critique must also be multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, and thus seems very likely to diverge into abstractions. Historical events, large and small -- that is, the sources that attest to them -- offer a sufficiently empirical basis for academic discussion of this question, and that factual grounding in turn lends itself to the basic activity of identification. What is this certain kind of power? How can it be recognized and known? Is it an ever-present curse of humankind, or is it a particularly historical phenomenon? How this power acts, what it does, and how it is represented by historical actors, including historians, is the subject of this essay. This subject must be narrowed further, so inquiry will focus on the acknowledged leaders in twentieth-century European violence: the USSR and its forced labor institutions and National Socialist Germany and its genocidal racism. These regimes have been linked as the great Totalitarianisms, although the term is of disputed value, but their status as the iconic enemies of pop-culture protagonists also attests to their outstanding cultural impact and interlinked quality as existential enemies of freedom and prosperity, the latter being particularly marked in anglophone academic and cultural production since the war. Both self-identified "socialist" states also passed through similar periods of historical unrest, variations of a conflict common across central Europe, 5 before developing into highly regimented societies under charismatic rule. The hypothesis of this dissertation is that the nature of violent coercion, of power, exercised in the context of building Communism in Stalin's Russia and the racialized national community in Hitler's Germany, showed certain historically-determined qualities in these two cases, and that this particular form of power showed those qualities in the US South after the Civil War, as it was exercised against the freedmen and their allies. Much of the second part of this dissertation is an essentially historiographic look at work that is directly relevant to the hypothesis at hand, but which does not really offer an overview of the scholarship. A detailed discussion of certain specific historiographical trends can be found there. Since even an overview in the subject areas under discussion would try the patience of the most historiographically-inclined reader, here one will only remark the works whose influence on the text has been important and which are not critically engaged later in the text. Scholarship has addressed and is addressing congruences in these systems, as a rubric of individual and national wills in conflict moves to a more nuanced consideration of multiple relationships in play during certain historical conjunctures. Robert Gerwarth has contextualized the German interwar experience as part of European history more broadly, recently comparing the countries of Central Europe after the Great war in The Vanquished (2016). This volume read alongside Stanley Payne's History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (1995) helps situate the push for dynamic dictatorships (Kershaw's phrase) in a certain early high-modern historical conjuncture across Central Europe. German anarchist refugee Rudolph Rocker's Nationalism and Culture (1978 (1947)) consciously rejects the racialized model as a framework for discussion and offers an implicitly post-nationalist construction of historical causality. In a sense Kershaw moves in this direction with To Hell and Back, Europe 1914-1949 (2015) as international and supra-national pressures and relationships receive the focus. 6 James Whitman's new study Hitler's American Model (2017) details the connections between US and Nazi race law (but was published too recently to be incorporated into this dissertation). Alejandro Andreassi Cieri's work on the "biologization" of German politics, El Compromiso Fáustico (2015), intersects at many points with the discussion in part 4 of this dissertation from the European side. Another point of reference is Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (1994). Klaus Fischer's Hitler and America (2011) discusses the role of the USA in Hitler's worldview, as he imagined America. Carroll Kakel has described how specifically the US West served as a metaphor of colonial conquest for the Nazi elites in The American West and the Nazi East (2011).
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